Jove struggled to fall asleep right away. The ambient sounds of the facility were so different from the city noise of his apartment, a constant low mixture of hisses and hums that made the space feel unnatural.
He did eventually drift off into the first level of sleep, only to be broken out of it an indeterminate amount of time later by the opposite problem. The ambient noise had cut off completely. The silence was eerie, borderline deafening, and his own breathing sounded loud as he slowly sat up.
"Andromeda?" he whispered.
There was no response. Jove found his phone, which had been charging by the bed. It was at a hundred percent but no longer drawing power from the plug. His sleepy brain took a couple of seconds to connect the dots.
"Is anybody awake?" He climbed out of bed and palmed his hands across the door, searching for the handhold to slide it open in the dark. "Mom? Aunt Aster?"
He expected more darkness as he started to open the door to the hallway, but was instead greeted by a ghostly red glow, just enough to see by. Eve's door was also sliding open, and he could hear footsteps from elsewhere within the facility.
His sister looked at him, her expression inscrutable in the shadowy red light. "No power?"
"No power," he said.
A couple of silent seconds passed.
"Are you okay?" asked Eve.
"Fine. Why wouldn't I be?"
"You slept with a nightlight until you were twelve," said Eve. "You've never done all that great in the dark."
Jove felt his face flush but couldn't help but smile. He'd forgotten about that.
"And I am now twenty-five," he said. "I've come a long way since then."
"You have," she said. "But I'm still your big sister even if you think I'm a bitch."
More silence. In truth, he now found the complete lack of sound more unnerving than the lack of light.
"Why didn't you tell me Andre grabbed your ass?" he asked.
"Because the two of you were best buds," she said, dryly. "It was actually around that same time period when you were twelve or thirteen. You didn't exactly have a ton of friends back then."
"I still would have wanted to know."
"It's nice to want things."
His anger flared more at her tone than her words. "You're just incapable of apologizing for anything, aren't you?"
"We aren't talking about Andre grabbing my ass anymore, are we?"
"I still have to deal with the fallout of having a criminal record to this day," he said. "Do you know how hard that makes it to do anything, Eve? Of course you don't."
"I didn't make that bad decision for you, little brother!" Eve suddenly stepped into his face, jabbing a finger into his chest. "You think I haven't had struggles of my own?"
"Oh, yes, go ahead. Tell me all about your poor little knee, and how close you were to going to the Olympics and getting a major sponsorship." Jove pushed forward, encroaching on her personal space, almost bumping chest to chest.
"It makes you burn, doesn't it?" said Eve, in a dark voice. "I make more teaching weekend workshops in the month of December at unimaginably nice ski resorts than you do in an entire year."
"First time I've ever seen someone self-sustain on their own ego."
"Still preferable to self-sustaining on self-pity."
"You were right before. You are a bitch."
"Go fuck yourself," hissed Eve. "You're probably used to doing that already, aren't you?"
Jove's blood was pounding against his ears, but he still heard another door sliding open and forced himself to breathe and take a step back. Aster groaned tiredly as she came over to the two of them.
"What the heck is going on?" She was still wearing her white cotton robe. It hung open at the fold, and even in the wane red light, Jove could see the valley of her full cleavage. "Why did the ambience get so creepy?"
"I think the power might have gone out, Aunt Aster," said Eve. "If I had to guess, I'd say these are the backup lights."
Aster yawned and arched her back in an all too interesting way. "Can we just go back to bed and worry about this tomorrow?"
"We should check with Mom first," said Jove. "This could be serious. No power means no climate control. No heat, essentially. It could start getting real cold in here, real fast."
They didn't have to wait long. Kira's footsteps echoed through the base as she approached. She had a flashlight with her and Jove had to put a hand up to keep from being blinded.
"Something has happened," said Kira. "I need the three of you to get dressed. You'll want to put your outer layers on, too."
"What's going on?" asked Eve.
"I'll explain as much as I can in a few minutes," said Kira. "For now, please. Just do what I say."
Jove exchanged a look with Aster before nodding. They all went back to their rooms to change. He pulled on his winter clothing, shivering once as he zipped up his jacket, despite it not being all that cold yet.
Kira led the group into the command center with her flashlight. One of the computers and a couple of the wall screens still had power, giving off a white glow that, while still harsh, was far easier on the eyes than the dim red.
"There's clearly an emergency power system, right?" said Jove. "How many of the base's systems does it keep on?"
"Not many," said Kira. "Most of them are devoted to keeping the biodiversity vault at temperature so the specimens don't spoil. One of the main computers, some basic lighting, and Andromeda should still be on."
"I tried calling out to Andromeda before and she didn't respond," said Jove.
His mother nodded in a slow, unnerving manner. "As I said. Something has happened. I don't want to panic any of you, so I'm going to start with the problems which I think we have the best chance of addressing immediately."
"Fair enough," said Eve.
"Kira," said Aster, in an irritated tone. "How about you tell us everything and let us react for ourselves?"
"Ryan still hasn't arrived back to Termina," said Kira, ignoring her sister. "In all likelihood, I think he continued on to Port Sirius when the weather picked up. The storm came from the southeast, so heading north might have kept him out of the whiteout. There is a chance, however, that he made it back to Termina in the time after the power went out, in which case the doors wouldn't have opened for him."
"The doors aren't on the emergency power circuit?" said Jove.
"The exterior controls have to be heated in order to work in these temperatures, and those aren't, which amounts to the same thing. They'll still open from inside with enough persuasion. Our second objective will need to be restoring the power to the base, which will involve clearing snow off the solar panels and resetting the circuit."
"So we can still get out. Awesome." Eve pulled her dark hair out from the neckline of her jacket and started putting it into a ponytail with a hair tie. "How about I throw on my skis and take a look around for Ryan?"
"The conditions outside are still awful," said Kira. "It's not quite an outright blizzard, but you'll barely be able to see more than ten feet in any direction. And… there's still more that I need to explain."
"We're listening," said Aster.
"Andromeda woke me up a few seconds before the power outage," said Kira. "She sounded… unlike her usual self. I suspect her programming may have been off, or affected by intermittent power interruptions, or… something. Because what she said to me, quite frankly, stretches the limits of what's believable."
"Mom," said Jove. "What did she say?"
Kira glanced at each of them for a moment and then spoke with her gaze turned back to the wall screen, which showed the near whiteout conditions outside.
"She told me that a largescale conflict, a war, has broken out," she said, slowly. "She told me that several monitoring stations have detected evidence of radionuclides, radioactive isotopes, in the atmosphere on multiple continents. Tritium, strontium-90, americium-241…"
"What does that mean?" asked Aster.
"It means cities are being nuked." Eve let out a dark chuckle. "I'm going to agree with your gut reaction to take the AI's doomsday proclamation with a grain of salt. No fucking way."
Jove felt an odd lump forming in his throat. "Can we verify this somehow?"
"As soon as we have the main power back on we can simply call Port Sirius, or basically anywhere with a phone or computer for confirmation." Kira let out a long, tense breath. "I wish we could wait for the weather to improve before troubleshooting the power system, but it's simply not an option. The backup systems have always been finicky and I wouldn't trust them to last long enough, not to mention the danger Ryan might be in."
"I'm used to the cold, Mother," said Eve. "I can do it."
"I'll go, too," said Jove. He bristled at the idea of letting Eve save the day by herself, as much out of pride as out of his grudging concern for his older sister.
"I need all three of you out there," said Kira, looking at Aster, too. "I'll handle what needs to be done on the computer. We can still use short range communication using our phones, assuming you're all connected to the local network and stay within range. I have some Bluetooth headsets that you can use and we'll just keep the call running."
"Is that really necessary?" asked Aster.
Kira looked at her sister blankly. "If you knew Antarctica as well as I do, you wouldn't ask that."