Winter World (The Long Winter #1)(95)

I’m in my sleep station, somewhere between consciousness and sleep, when a buzzing alarm goes off. Oscar’s voice comes on the comm.

“Sir, please come to the bridge immediately.”

I bound out and push through the modules. I meet Emma coming out of the drone lab. She should’ve been asleep too. She’s working too much. We’ll take that up after the emergency.

“What is it?” I ask as soon as I reach the bridge.

“One of the drones found something,” Oscar says placidly.

“What kind of something?” Emma asks.

“A ship.”





Chapter 49





Emma





The drone captured the image of the ship at an extreme distance. It’s grainy and blurry. But I would know that ship anywhere. It’s the Pax.

For several seconds, James and I float in the bridge, staring at the image on the screen. Oscar says nothing. He doesn’t prompt us, only gives us our time to process this. In my experience, Oscar rarely shows emotion. I’ve come to believe that his emotional range is very limited, but he seems to understand people on a very basic level and he knows James and me very well—and he knows what that ship and the people aboard it mean to us. He knows we want closure. Need closure.

I try to wrap my head around what the Pax is doing out here. It’s so far from where it encountered the solar cell. Why? How did it get here, so close to Earth? The ship may be adrift. It likely is.

Heinrich, Sparta One’s German navigator, floats into the bridge.

“Impossible,” he says when he sees the image of the Pax.

The rest of the crew joins us on the bridge, no one able to resist the mystery and focus on their own work.

“Alter course to intercept,” James says, never tearing his eyes away from the screen.

Heinrich shakes his head. “Recovering the Pax is not our mission. It drains our fuel and time.”

“You have your orders,” James says softly, not in a confrontational way or with any aggression. His eyes are still fixed on the screen.

I expect a fight. I expect the crew to dig in their heels and try to convince him and me to not go after the Pax. But they must sense defeat. There is no dissent or further argument. The course change is made. Comm drones are dispatched to the rest of the Spartan fleet, instructing them not to alter their own course, but to proceed to Ceres and with the mission as planned.

In the lab, I float over to James and hug him. Seeing the Pax has unleashed a flood of emotion in me. I know it has in him as well. We hold each other a long time, floating in zero-g.

“They could be alive,” I whisper.

“They would have run out of food a long time ago.”

“What if they… rationed or found a way somehow.”

“We can’t get our hopes up, Emma.”

“I know. I can’t help it.”

“Me either.”





There are things I miss from Earth. My family. My friends. Gravity. But most of all, I miss the habitat I shared with James and Oscar, and in particular, our bed, where we read, and talked, and slept every night, even when it was almost unbearably cold.

Up here, we’re separated at night by necessity. I feel farther away from him. And he is different up here. On Earth, he was laser focused on his work during the day, and different at home at night after we’d finished working for the day. He was more carefree. Happier. I think that was a learned skill for him. I think disconnecting at home helped. Here, he’s always focused. Always working. Always thinking. He’s like an engine that’s redlining, never able to turn off. It’s worrying me. He puts so much pressure on himself. Since seeing the Pax, he’s also been putting pressure on the rest of the crew. For me, that means building a high-speed drone to make contact with them.

I’m in the drone lab putting the finishing touches on the control board when he floats in.

“How’s it coming?”

“Almost done.”

“Good. We need to hurry.”

In those words, I know that he, like me, is holding out hope that the Pax crew might have survived and that we can save them. If we can, we have to. They saved us. Their sacrifice might have saved the whole human race. And more than that, they’re our crew, the crew we lost. They’re our family.

Everyone gathers on the bridge to watch the screens as the high-speed drone launches. With luck, it will make contact in a few days and return within a week.





Every night, I record a video. It’s mission protocol—to comment on all the data we saw during the day and all the work we’ve done. The idea is that comm bricks will be sent back to Earth just before engaging the harvester on Ceres. The hope is that there might be something in the commentary that someone could use in the future, in the event we’re unsuccessful.

But data doesn’t tell the entire story. To understand what goes on during a mission like this, you have to know what the people aboard are thinking—why they made certain decisions, what they might have seen that they didn’t include in the data, even the things they thought weren’t important. Because sometimes they turn out to be very important.

After my official report, I always record a message to Madison. I’m fully aware that these videos could be the last time they ever see me.