Winter World (The Long Winter #1)
A.G. Riddle
For my mother, who departed this world far too soon, but left it better than she found it.
Chapter 1
Emma
For the past five months, I have watched the world die.
Glaciers have advanced across Canada, England, Russia, and Scandinavia, trampling everything in their path. They show no signs of stopping. The data says they won’t.
Within three months, ice will cover the Earth, and life as we know it will end.
My job is to find out why.
And to stop it.
The alarm wakes me. I struggle out of my sleeping bag and pull open the privacy door to my sleeping station.
I haven’t slept well since coming to the International Space Station. Especially not since the Winter Experiments began. I toss and turn every night, wondering what the probes will find and if the data will reveal a way to save us.
I drift out into the Harmony module and tap the panel on the wall, trying to identify the source of the blaring alarm. The solar array’s radiators are overheating. I watch as the temperature climbs. Why? I have to stop it—
Sergei’s voice crackles in my earpiece, his Russian accent thick. “‘Is the solar array, Commander.”
I look into the camera above me. “Explain.”
Silence.
“Sergei, answer me. Is it debris? Why are we getting heat buildup?”
There are a million ways to die on the ISS. Losing the solar array is a sure one. And there are a lot of ways to lose the array. It operates similarly to photovoltaic solar cells on Earth: solar radiation is converted to direct current electricity. The process generates a lot of excess heat. That heat is dissipated via radiators that face away from the sunlight, into the dark of space. If those radiators are overheating, the heat has nowhere to go but inside the station. That’s bad for life here.
We need to figure this out, and quickly.
Sergei sounds distracted, maybe annoyed. “‘Is not debris, Commander. I explain when I know. Please get sleep.”
The door to the sleep station next to me slides open. Dr. Andrew Bergin stares out with puffy, sleepy eyes.
“Hey, Emma. What’s up?”
“Solar array.”
“We okay?”
“Not sure yet.”
“Sergei, what do you think it is?”
“I think it is solar output. Too high,” Sergei says over the comm.
“A solar flare?”
“Yes. Has to be. Is not isolated radiator malfunction—they all overheated.”
“Shut down the array. Go to battery power.”
“Commander…”
“Do it, Sergei. Right now.”
The panel shows the eight solar array wings and their thirty-three thousand solar cells. I watch as they go offline. The temperature readings in the radiators begin ticking down.
We can run on battery power for a while. We do it fifteen times each day when the solar array is in the darkness of Earth’s shadow.
Bergin asks the question on my mind. “Any data from the probes yet?”
I’m already checking.
A month ago, an international consortium sent probes into space to measure solar radiation and look for any anomalies. The probes are part of the Winter Experiments—the largest scientific endeavor ever undertaken. The experiments’ sole goal is to understand why the Earth is cooling. We know that solar output is falling—but it shouldn’t be. Earth should be getting warmer.
Data from the probes will reach the ISS first. But there’s nothing yet. That data could be what saves humanity. Or simply tells us how much time we have left.
I should go back to sleep. But once I’m up, I’m up.
And I can’t wait to see the first data from the probes. I have family back on Earth. I want to know what’s going to happen to them. And there’s an unspoken question among the six astronauts and cosmonauts on the ISS: what becomes of us? If the world is dying—if there’s no world to go back to—will they leave us up here? Three of us are due to return home in a month, the other three in four months. But will our nations expend the resources to bring us home? They’re already dealing with a refugee crisis of unprecedented proportions.
Around the world, governments are struggling to evacuate billions of their citizens to the world’s last habitable zones. And facing a hard decision: what to do with those they can’t evacuate. How much will they invest to bring six people home from space?
Getting home isn’t a walk in the park. The ISS doesn’t have escape pods per se, we have two Soyuz capsules that brought us here. Each holds a maximum of three passengers. We could use them to evacuate the station, but we’d need coordination from the ground, and someone to pick us up when we land.
Once we return, we’ll need even more help. Rehab, for example. In space, our bones lose density. It’s the lack of gravity. The load-bearing bones lose the most density—the pelvis, spine, and legs. The bones literally disintegrate, similar to osteoporosis. The calcium that leaches into the body causes kidney stones—and space is not a place you want to have kidney stones. Some of the first astronauts who visited the ISS lost as much as two percent of their bone density per month. We’ve got that figure down, thanks to exercise. But I’ll still have to go through rehab when I get back. I won’t know what shape I’m in until my feet hit solid ground (or ice, depending).