Winter World (The Long Winter #1)(83)

“I don’t know. I just hope they don’t declare war. And keep us as hostages.”





Chapter 42





James





The run-up to the meeting with Caspia—that’s what we’re now calling the Caspian Treaty nations, as well as the land that now holds them—is a rushed, frantic affair. I had expected more time to prepare. Upon contacting the Caspians and requesting a meeting three weeks from now, they replied and said we had to come now or not at all. Maybe the Caspians think that forcing us to come on their schedule will throw us off balance.

One thing is certain: they’re extremely paranoid. They’re permitting only Fowler, me, and a team of six experts and scientists to make the trip—only the people we need to make our presentation. No military. No diplomats. No security detail. Their message is clear: they want the facts, and they’re very suspicious of us. The Atlantic Union’s ramped-up military activities don’t exactly inspire trust.

They probably also suspect we’re about to have the same conversation with the Pac Alliance, and they want to get the information first.

We leave at night and fly east in a convoy of two helicopters. They’re the stealth variety, and I’m amazed at how quiet they are.

I was confident in my abilities on the Pax, directing our strategy in space. I’m out of my element here. Political intrigue is just not something I understand. And I know very little about the people we’re going to meet.

Caspia, like the Atlantic Union, comprises dozens of nations. In the AU, there are perhaps half a dozen with any real power (their leaders sit on the AU’s Executive Council). In Caspia, two nations hold a plurality of the power: Russia and India. But that’s about all I know about their internal structure. Perhaps that’s because the Atlantic Union doesn’t know much more; or perhaps it’s because they didn’t think that information was pertinent to share with me.

The rest of what I know about Caspia is strictly geographic. The state lies in what used to be southeastern Iran. The capital, Caspiagrad, is located in the Lut Desert. It’s one of the hottest, driest deserts in the world. The surface temperature has been measured at 159 degrees Fahrenheit. Of course, that was before the Long Winter. The desert lies in a basin, with mountains around it, like a bowl carved into the Earth.

Once we enter the Lut, the ground below is only rock, sand, and salt. The dunes are beautiful. They seem endless, like waves of sand, a brown sea reaching to the horizon. Here and there, punctuating the ripples, a few dunes rise high in the sky, almost a thousand feet.

Some of the geography reminds me of the American Southwest, and some of what I see, I don’t understand. I point to a scattering of what looks like the hulls of shipwrecks, and I ask Fowler over the radio, “What are those?”

“Yardangs.”

“What did you call me?”

He laughs. “The wind carves them out of bedrock over very long periods of time.”

“How do you know that?”

“Lifetime of geekhood.”

I smile. I like Fowler more and more. I really hope the Caspians don’t kill us.

The Persian name for the Lut region translates to “Emptiness Plain,” but it’s anything but empty now. A city glitters ahead.

Where the Atlantic Union’s Camp Seven looks like a nomadic settlement, Caspiagrad looks as if it’s here to stay. Skyscrapers rise out of the desert, with high walls ringing them. Helicopters circle in the air, a patrol likely launched as a show of strength for our arrival; they would’ve picked us up on radar a long time ago, and they probably have hidden base stations throughout this expansive desert.

But there’s no formal welcome ceremony, only a handful of mid-level diplomats who introduce themselves before escorting us into a building near the helo pad. Security checks us out thoroughly, then remands us to the diplomats, who offer us water or coffee and ask if we need to use the restroom (we do).

Finally, they lead us into an auditorium. The room is packed. There are far more people than in the gymnasium where Fowler and I gave our presentation to the Atlantic Union.

There are no introductions, no preamble. We are simply instructed to “Say what you came here to say.”

When we finish, the questions are much the same as those we received from the Atlantic Union. The Caspians have brought in experts, and those experts question us at length. Fowler knows some of them. They’re his counterparts from Roscosmos and the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). That helps our cause. We share all our information on tablets—none of it could be transmitted ahead of time—and they’re reviewing it on the fly.

Through a translator, a Russian scientist asks the question I would ask in his position. “Dr. Sinclair, what do you think is out there? On the mission you’re proposing, what do you expect to find?”

“Our working theory,” I say carefully, “is that there’s an entity or device here in our solar system that is creating the solar cells.”

“Where?”

“From the locations of the cells we’ve found and their vector, there really is only one place that it could be. The asteroid belt.”

“Because it would need raw materials to build the cells.”

“That’s our thinking. The asteroid belt is the most easily accessible source of raw materials in the system. It’s in a good location, just beyond Mars. The harvester, as we have named this potential device, could conceivably come to our solar system, attach to asteroids, manufacture the solar cells it needs, and dispatch them to the Sun to form a solar array that would harvest the Sun’s output.”