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He checked his tablet again. “Two minutes!” he called out.
“All ships: Condition Red,” Stratt radioed. “Repeat: Condition Red.”
He turned back to me. “So here I am. Environmental activist. Climatologist. Antiwar crusader.” He looked out to sea. “And I’m ordering a nuclear strike on Antarctica. Two hundred and forty-one nuclear weapons, courtesy of the United States, buried fifty meters deep along a fissure at three-kilometer intervals. All going off at the same time.”
I nodded slowly.
“They tell me the radiation will be minimal,” he said.
“Yeah. If it’s any consolation, they’re fusion bombs.” I pulled my jacket tighter. “There’s a small fission reaction with uranium and stuff that sets off the much larger fusion reaction. And the big explosion is just hydrogen and helium. No radiation from that.”
“Well, that’s something.”
“And this was the only option?” I asked. “Why can’t we have factories mass-produce sulfur hexafluoride, or some other greenhouse gas?”
He shook his head. “We’d need thousands of times the production that we could possibly do. Remember, it took us a century of burning coal and oil on a global scale to even notice it was affecting the climate at all.”
He checked his tablet. “The shelf will cleave at the line of explosions and slowly work its way into the sea and melt. Sea levels will rise about a centimeter over the next month, the ocean temperature will drop a degree—which is a disaster of its own but never mind that for now. Enormous quantities of methane will be released into the atmosphere. And now, methane is our friend. Methane is ourbestfriend. And not just because it’ll keep us warm for a while.”
“Oh?”
“Methane breaks down in the atmosphere after ten years. We can knock chunks of Antarctica into the sea every few years to moderate the methane levels. And ifHail Maryfinds a solution, we just have to wait ten years for the methane to go away. You can’t do that with carbon dioxide.”
Stratt approached us. “Time?”
“Sixty seconds,” he said.
She nodded.
“So this solves everything?” I asked. “Can we just keep poking Antarctica for more methane to keep Earth’s temperature right?”
“No,” he said. “It’s a stopgap at best. Dumping this crap into our atmosphere will keep the warmth in the air, but the disruption to our ecosystem will still be massive. We’ll still have horrific and unpredictable weather, crop failures, and biome annihilation. But maybe, just maybe, it won’t be quite as bad as it would have been without the methane.”
I looked at Stratt and Leclerc standing side by side. Never in human history had so much raw authority and power been invested into so few people. These two people—just these two—were going to literally change the face of the world.
“I’m curious,” I say to Stratt. “Once we launchHail Mary. What will you do then?”
“Me?” she said. “Doesn’t matter. Once theHail Marylaunches, my authority ends. I’ll probably be put on trial by a bunch of pissed-off governments for abuse of power. Might spend the rest of my life in jail.”
“I’ll be in the cell next to you,” said Leclerc.
“Are you at all concerned about that?”
She shrugged. “We all have to make sacrifices. If I have to be the world’s whipping boy to secure our salvation, then that’s my sacrifice to make.”
“You have a strange logic to you,” I said.
“Not really. When the alternative is death to your entire species, things are very easy. No moral dilemmas, no weighing what’s best for whom. Just a single-minded focus on getting this project working.”
“That’s what I tell myself,” Leclerc said. “Three…two…one…detonation.”
Nothing happened. The coastline remained as it was. No explosion. No flash. Not even a pop.
He looked at his tablet. “The nukes have detonated. The shockwave should be here in ten minutes or so. It’ll just sound like distant thunder, though.”
He looked down at the carrier deck.
Stratt put her hand on his shoulder. “You did what you had to do. We’re all doing what we have to do.”
