Winter World (The Long Winter #1)(94)

She turns on her light.

“Hey. What if we’re wrong about what’s out there?”

“What do you mean?”

“We’re assuming there’s a harvester in the belt creating all the solar cells to build a solar array to harvest our Sun. What if it’s something completely different? What if there is no harvester on Ceres? What if there’s a mother ship out there? What if there are a hundred ships, ready to do war? Or what if there’s nothing out there to find? What if the solar cells are like locusts, traveling from system to system, simply flying in and grabbing the solar energy over millions or billions of years, before returning to some central repository, unloading, and going somewhere else?”

She’s asked the questions that have haunted me for weeks now. The same ones running through my mind right now as I second guess myself. In truth, I don’t know what we’ll do if I’m wrong about what’s out there. I can tell her we’ll adapt, but she’s too smart for that. If the harvester isn’t there, or even if it’s harvesting farther out than Ceres—perhaps on one of the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, or Uranus—we simply won’t be able to reach it. The mission will fail.

I tell Emma what I’ve told myself, and NASA, and our allies. “Ceres is the logical choice. It’s close to the Sun, but not close enough for us to monitor it closely. It has to be Ceres.”

I hope I’m right. It’s a guess that will determine humanity’s fate.





The days and hours before launch are frantic. We check everything, and we check it again. There’s no room for error now. If this launch isn’t successful, we don’t get a do-over. We live or die with this mission.

And it’s a complex mission. The journey to Ceres in the asteroid belt will be the longest manned spaceflight in history. The ships are the largest we’ve ever built and easily the most advanced.

The three-way alliance chose me to lead the mission. I suspect it’s because I have experience with the solar cells, but I also wonder if I owe the honor to the videos the Pax crew sent back with Emma and me. The voices of their countrymen inspired the Caspians and Pac Alliance to put their trust in me. To me, that trust is like a debt I must repay.





At NASA headquarters, Emma, Oscar, and I sit in the front row, along with Heinrich, Terrance, and Zoe. I don’t know about the others, but I hold my breath as I watch the modules soar into the air. They reach low Earth orbit and hang there, drifting. But the entity makes no reaction.

I have a sense of déjà vu from the first contact mission, when I sat in a similar auditorium at NASA headquarters in Florida and watched the modules soar into the air and wait in space to be assembled. Or attacked. It’s colder in this room. The world is different now. And I hope this mission ends differently.

I try not to think about the crew we lost up there. I’m starting to understand what Emma must have gone through after the ISS. Losing people in the line of work is a hurt that never really goes away. It’s always there, lingering, emerging when life reminds you.

About halfway through the launches, they usher us from the room and suit us up and we load onto a helicopter and fly toward the sea. As we approach the ocean, my eyes pan left and right and finally spot the launch pad. Sparta One towers there, our last hope of survival. This launch will be the main body of the ship, which is far larger than any of the other components. A bigger target.

Inside the ship, Emma, Oscar, and I are assigned to different sections for the launch. The reasoning is that if the ship is damaged or if the entity attacks, one or more of the sections could survive. Separating us increases the mission’s chance of survival. Still, I wish Emma and I were together. I wish I could hold her hand while this massive ship lifts us into the air. Instead, I’m alone in a white padded cylinder, my helmet on, listening to the countdown, a small porthole window looking out on the snow-covered land and blue water.

The rumbling begins. The ship shakes. Mission control speaks non-stop, like a stream of consciousness narration of everything happening.

Emma’s voice breaks on my line.

“James?”

“I’m here.”

“I’ll see you up there.”





When we reach low Earth orbit, I unstrap myself, remove my helmet, and float through the modules.

We’re supposed to wait a few hours. I can’t. Apparently, neither can she. Emma is already on the bridge, watching the passageway that connects to my module.

She raises her eyebrows.

“So far so good.”

I smile.

Behind that smile is a worry like I’ve never felt before. Seeing Emma floating there, in a NASA space suit, reminds me of when I first met her, here in orbit, her freezing, unconscious, near death. Space made her sick. Nearly killed her. She can’t take it out here for very long. If I’m going to save her, and anyone else down there, I have to get this right. There’ll be no second chances.





To my surprise, the entity makes no reaction to the launches of the Spartan space crafts. There are nine ships in the fleet, all hanging in low Earth orbit, waiting.

Twenty-four hours after launch, the ships begin commanding the modules to dock. When the fleet is fully assembled, we set out for Ceres.





A week into our journey, Sparta One launches its first fleet of drones. Their mission is simple: reconnaissance. Mainly, I want to find the Midway fleet and rendezvous with them. I need to see what else they found.