A half-hour later they were beyond the gates, into the vast target zone. Marinakis was in the second CATV of the convoy. The interior had four jumpseats, a place for the gunner to stand, and a driving wheel. Sergeant Brent had the first leg. McAiden, the RTO, was manning the radios. Up top, operating the machine gun, was Elliot Remington, a new kid from Alabama. Marinakis didn’t know him well. Forward Observer Gabe Watts and his sharp-eyed team took the front vehicle, naturally. The third was filled with whoever they could find from the company.
Grand Forks was a conflagration. The heat from the nuclear blasts had set ablaze all that was flammable. Towers of black smoke created an ever-shifting ceiling. When the smoke thinned, she could see a brilliant full moon, the white lunar light rendered red as it diffracted through the particulates.
“LT, it’s snowing,” Remington called through their helmet comm system.
Brent looked up at the sky, bumping his helmet against the windshield. Marinakis did as well. White flakes were descending. Not snow; burnt and irradiated debris hurled into the stratosphere and now falling back, carrying fragments of radioactive isotopes.
“Button up everyone,” Brent ordered, “it’s fallout.” They donned gas masks.
Northward they powered, angling slightly east to miss Winnipeg. Traversing the open ground would be hard enough. The city was presumably a mess. As they drove they hung to the side of the roads. The highways were jammed with abandoned cars. Bands of people wandered aimlessly, some towards Grand Forks, some away, some out into the low brush.
Outside the city the smoke thinned, revealing the mess that had been made of the skies. Balls of fire fell; new waves of intercontinental missiles descending to finish off what their brothers had not. Explosions across the horizon briefly illuminated mushroom clouds, sentinels at the end of the world, watching the human wreckage scrambling under their summits.
It was hard to talk. They curved around burned and battered bodies, unable to help. Marinakis looked away from the outstretched hands in the highway ditches, the naive few who expected the flag on the sides of the CATVs to provide relief from their flash burns. Instead, she tried to picture the white hemispherical radome waiting at the end of her journey.
A swarm of loitering munitions crossed overhead.
“Radiation hardened,” it seemed to McAiden.
“Locust and scorpions,” added Brent.
The last night of the old world carried on. The Canadian border came and went. The fires of Winnipeg moved to their left and then to their rear.
In the early morning she took her shift on the gun, climbing up into the increasingly frigid Canadian breeze. Looking to the sky, she no longer saw white flakes.
“We can get the masks off,” she sent.
The CATV trundled on at forty miles per hour. It rocked over the flattening ground, and patches of snow slid by. Soon they’d be on the ice.
Then there were flashes in the dark ahead.
“Stop, stop, stop,” she called.
“Contact?” Brent asked.
“No, I…” The flashes were actually in the sky. They were close to the horizon, arcing southward. At first they were pinpoints, but as they approached she saw that they were misshapen chunks of light, not like the missiles. And different colors. They spun and twirled, shooting off pink, blue, orange, and green sparks.
Marinakis dropped down into the cabin. “The fuck?”
“Space debris,” McAiden guessed. “Remember those rockets that kept blowing up a few years ago? That’s what they looked like. Must be fighting up there. Polar orbits have lots of recon satellites in them.”
“They’re fighting in space?”
“Why not?”
She popped her head back up. More debris emerged out of the black. All that high inclination hardware was either getting annihilated or doing the annihilation. Tracking a slow star, she watched it split into a constellation of little dots which then brightened and shot forwards. Suddenly, they bloomed into blue halos. A bright flash lit in the middle of the pattern and faded away.
Whatever the satellite had done, it seemed to have killed its target. The heavens were no longer immutable. War had come to them. A strange feeling fell over her; a displaced dread, a foreboding not localized in her body.
“Let’s get moving,” she ordered.
Through the developing morning Marinakis watched the orbital fight, trying to guess which weapon systems the stars represented as they sped towards each other, either vanishing or exploding. Unconstrained by air pressure, the debris left circular patches in the deteriorating skies.
As the morning broke on the horizon, she looked down and saw that they were traveling on snow and ice. No more greenery. Up ahead was a flat, pure expanse, leading to a bloody sunrise. Clean Arctic minimalism.
It was brilliant. The atomic fusilade had thrown great clouds of dust and debris into the air, and each of those particles refracted their own share of light, bending and polarizing the traveling waves into every rainbow color.
Marinakis leaned her head into the cabin and asked, “You guys ever seen green in a sunrise?” She smiled despite herself when they shook their heads. When she stood again she stretched her arms. Then her world went red.
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