Another day on the road, another night. With darkness came the broken nocturnal sky, debris from the previous night’s space battle still in polar orbit, glimmering as it began its long descent back to the planet. Spheres of gas remained, still slowly dissipating, turning the firmament into a patchwork of faded blues punctuated by the light of distant stars, many of which, Marinakis hoped, were living their lives in peace, gently burning through their hydrogen fuels to warm and light whatever was in their gravitational influence.
When day broke the sunrise was even more brilliant. The colors were hypersaturated, bordering on psychedelic, great swathes of light in shades that had never existed in nature. The bombs had opened the sky, and now the photons were free to appear as they wished.
The sun was a lot brighter, more than could be accounted for by the rarefied northern environment. McAiden thought that the ozone layer had started to degrade, letting more and more of the sun’s radiation down to the surface. That sounded right to Marinakis, but she told him not to tell anybody else. Whatever the UV light was doing to them, the side effects of the bombs had already done. McAiden thought so too, and she caught him checking his pulse when he thought she wasn’t looking. Everyone was tired; everybody had sunken eyes. But at least they weren’t being actively targeted.
The CATVs trundled on.
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