Alex Guerrero wouldn’t admit it, but he was cold. Working outside for more than four hours in blizzard conditions had chilled him to the bone.
Not having the right equipment didn’t help. They hadn’t come prepared for this kind of weather. He was wearing a light jacket and thin Kevlar gloves, with a towel wrapped around his head and face, leaving a narrow slit so he could see. But he had endured far worse conditions on other deployments.
And he finished the job. It would never occur to him that there might be another option.
“Close that door!” Culpepper shouted. “What, were you raised in a barn?”
Guerrero closed the door and shook the last of the snow from his jacket and gloves. “Ahhh. Nothing like a light workout and a little fresh air to get your day started on the right foot.”
Steadman, who had already started taking off his own snow-covered outer garments, gave Guerrero a warning glare. Commander Chris Steadman was Alex’s commanding officer and the other Navy SEAL assigned to the team for force protection. Most of the rest, like Culpepper, were scientists.
Teri Culpepper huddled her athletic frame in front of the heater vent, still trying to get warm after her own short effort. The rest of the team sat on chairs or beds arrayed around the perimeter of the room.
The medical lab had become their de facto gathering place. The two crew quarters buildings were partitioned in a way that didn’t facilitate having everyone in the same room. The storage building was packed full of supplies and kept cold to preserve the food they had put away to get them through winter. The science lab was home to too much active research to accommodate interlopers.
“Status?” asked Decker, the mission commander. He was career navy, the last five years as the captain of a reconnaissance submarine.
“I just finished reviewing the latest satellite data from Mabel,” said Swenson, the team’s civilian engineer. “The storm has passed, and we’re covered in snow. In case anyone didn’t already know that. It does look like we shouldn’t have any more big storms, at least for the next few days.”
Culpepper shivered.
Steadman glanced at her and shook his head. “The greenhouse is gone,” he said. “Everything we can find has been collected and stored. Unfortunately, that’s not much. More than half of the wood used for framing is not much better than firewood now. What plastic sheeting didn’t blow away is shredded in pieces too small to be useful. We collected what plants we could and put them in the portal where they can be kept warm. Dr. Culpepper will have to assess the damage there.”
Decker looked at Culpepper. “Doctor?”
Over the course of the three months they had been stranded here together much of the formality in their relationships had fallen aside. Dr. Culpepper was the lone exception. She still insisted on being addressed by her title.
She turned around to face the rest of the team, sitting on the floor in front of the vent—and blocking its warmth from everyone else. “It’s a total loss. I might be able to nurse a few plants back to health, but any hope of them producing useful quantities of food during the next few months is gone. We’re in for a rough winter.”
“Grace?”
Dr. Grace Tornquist, the team’s medical doctor, looked around the room at the others. “It’s not good, but we’ll survive. We have enough in stores that the next few weeks won’t be a problem. There’s still plenty of wild game in the area to provide protein and fat. We’ll run out of carbohydrates, but we should be able to compensate with an increased protein intake. Vitamins are the big problem. General health will begin to deteriorate once our supply of fruits and vegetables runs out. We’ll be more susceptible to illness, less able to recover from injury or exertion.”
“Rationing?” Decker asked.
Tornquist shook her head. “I still have work to do to finish updating the plan, but what I just laid out already assumes optimal stretching of our remaining reserves. I should also point out that this assumes a lot of things we don’t know. We have two months of supplies at minimally acceptable nutritional intake levels. We guess that we still have three months of winter, and then at least a couple of months after that before spring produces enough of the right vegetation to fill those gaps. Dr. Culpepper thinks it could take much longer before some of the fruits we need produce.”
Decker looked around at his team. “Options?”
“I’m continuing to work through the backlog of nutritional analyses,” Culpepper said. “There’s nothing left out there that we’d normally think of as food, but we might get lucky. It’s a longshot.”
Guerrero looked around the room. Eight people huddled in a box trying to keep out the cold. This wasn’t the plan. His job was to keep everyone safe, to make sure they all made it home alive. They had been ten; now they were eight. That was on him. This was on him. Setting all the positive attitude aside, not everyone would survive the winter ahead if they stayed on this path. There had to be another way.
He looked at Culpepper. “What about the southern hemisphere?”
( Story copyright by Steve Swaringen. Photo by Fabrizio Conti on Unsplash )
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