“Jesus Christ,” Tom said. “Jesus Christ.”
Anika snapped her fingers to get him to look at her instead of back at the ship. “Hey. Stay calm. Zip up your survival suit. And grab the controls.”
He fumbled at his suit with one hand and held the joystick loosely with the other. She left him to hold their course and raced back down the cabin.
She kicked a large plastic chest open with one booted foot and pulled out an old Diemaco C11 assault rifle packed inside. She slapped a clip in it, shouldered it, and stood up in front of the rear window.
Some small part of her wanted to join Tom’s mantra of “Jesus Christ,” over and over again, but she knew that was the sort of useless shit that got you killed. You needed to take action.
She flicked the safety off.
They’d pulled clear of the ship by several hundred feet. The two men had moved to this side of the bridge, and one of them got the RPG launcher up onto his shoulder and was aiming at the Plover.
Anika’s heart raced as she yanked the rear window down. She could hardly focus as she aimed and fired a burst from the Diemaco, hoping she was in time. The ear-bursting chatter shocked her. It drowned out the engines.
A flare of light burst on the Kosatka’s bridge as the RPG launched and flew right at her. Anika scrunched low and winced. This was it.
The entire airbag over the cabin shivered, but didn’t explode.
“Did they hit us?” Tom shouted back at her.
“I think it punched through the bag but didn’t explode. It just kept going. Check the bag’s pressure.”
“We’re losing gas and lift,” Tom yelled.
Anika propped the Diemaco up on the windowsill and tried to get a better shot at the men on the ship, forcing them to take cover in the bridge with their launcher. Waste-dumping bastards. An RPG? This was the Northwest Passage. They were just north of Canada, not in some war zone.
The Plover slipped slowly out of the sky as the Kosatka churned on past.
Up front, Tom got on the radio. Over her quick bursts of fire, Anika could hear him calling for assistance, his voice suddenly sounding pilot-calm as he followed a routine. “Nanisivik Base, Nanisivik Base, Base this is Plover, we’ve been hit by an RPG. We’re under fire. Repeat, under fire. We need assistance by anything in the area.”
Anika kept the men pinned inside the bridge with her rifle. But now another man with a launcher appeared down on a lower deck. Anika swiveled to shoot at him, but he fired first.
She kept firing just ahead of that flash of fire, trying to intercept the insanely fast blur of the rocket leaping at her airship.
The rocket struck the bag and this one exploded as it hit a structural spar inside. Melting fabric rained down around the cabin. Alarms whooped from up front in the cockpit. “We’re going down!” Tom screamed.
Anika could feel it: her stomach lifted toward her chest. The Plover dropped out of the last fifty feet of air in a dignified, fluttering spiral that gave Anika enough time to make sure her survival suit was zipped and to make sure that she had braced herself against the corner of the cabin.
Outside, the waves became choppier and more defined with each split second as they rose to meet the airship.
The Plover smacked into the Arctic Ocean with an explosion of spray and flaming debris as the burning gasbag overhead collapsed and draped itself over them with a fluttering sigh.
3
The world darkened. Electronics sparked and fizzed, then blew out for good. Painfully cold water slapped Anika’s face as it poured through the shattered windows, shocking her.
The Arctic might be ice free, but it was still damn cold.
“Tom? Can you hear me?” Ruined equipment and a buckled ceiling blocked her way forward. “Tom?”
“Anika? I can get out, are you okay?”
“I can get out through a window. Get clear of the debris, I’ll swim around to you. Okay?”
He paused for a moment. “Yeah. See you on the other side.”
He sounded relieved.
The cabin’s natural displacement had kept the wreckage floating somewhat, but she knew it was starting to settle and would soon get to sinking. Anika didn’t have much time.
She swam clumsily along to the back window and took a deep breath. There was helium in the gasbag, that was why the first rocket had gone clean through without igniting a massive explosion.
But she didn’t want to take a big gulp of helium while swimming through the remains of the gasbag and end up passed out, facedown in the cold water.
She ducked briefly underwater and swam free of the cabin.
But there was nowhere to surface. The heavy fabric of the gasbag sat on the water.
Lungs bursting already, Anika kept moving along, looking for light.
There.
She burst free and up out of the water. The wind stung her face, but she’d never been so glad to see the gray clouds overhead.
Shivering, almost convulsing despite the survival suit, she pulled herself on top of the floating debris and looked around.
“Tom!”
She pulled herself up over a large spar attached to a pocket of fabric, still filled with helium and listlessly floating just above the surface, hoping to spot Tom and orient herself.
Instead, she found herself staring at the bow of the Kosatka. It had turned around and was now bearing down on the remains of the Plover. A massive bow wave piled up in front of the Kosatka, rippling through the debris of the fallen airship and scattering it even further.
Water surged through the mess, soaking Anika.
The ship shoved its way through like an old icebreaker, leaving a mess of even smaller pieces of airship behind it. The mounds of cloth, broken spars, and helium and air pockets underneath that kept the mangled wreck still afloat, slapped up against the side of the Kosatka, screeching against the old, barnacled hull.
Anika watched its bubbled and rust-pitted bulk sweep past her, a giant moving wall of metal. After it pushed its way through the worst of the debris, the engines coughed back to life, thrumming so powerfully her chest ached. They’d coasted through with them off to protect the propellers.
The churning water threw Anika around, doused her, and then just as abruptly, the water calmed a bit, broken by the ship’s passing. Anika floated in the quiet, listening to the fizz of disturbed air bubbling around her.
It was so damn cold, it was almost all she could think about.
After a moment she fumbled around inside her suit and pulled out the EPIRB. It was the size of a small flare in the palm of her gloved hand. She broke the seal on it and then put it back inside a zippered pocket.
The tiny radio beacon inside the device activated, and it began to pip audibly to let her know the distress signal was going out. She lay back, still shivering, and yanked the suit’s inflation strings.
The survival suit filled with air and bobbed on the surface.
Anika yanked the hood as tight around her face as possible, pulled her legs up to her chest as best she could, then wrapped her arms around her chest and waited for rescue.
So damn cold.
4
A ferry skidded on hydrofoils over the dark ocean, floating almost magically on the air above the waves. When it slowed, the foils sank deeper into the sea, unable to hold it up. The ferry’s hull slowly settled down into the water, until it looked just like any other ship.
High above the ferry a parafoil hung in the wind. The taught cables beneath it vibrated and sang as the kite-sail began to dance a figure-eight pattern overhead, allowing the ferry to slow down enough to meander through the debris.
Anika tried to sit up, forgetting for a second where she was. The movement sank her, and cold water washed over her face and dribbled down the sides of her cheeks. It even got inside the suit a bit, down her neck and onto her shoulders.
As the ferry picked its way through the debris of Plover, Anika waved weakly at it. “Over here!”
Someone on the deck
spotted her and the ferry changed course.
An orange life preserver hit the water a few feet away. Anika clumsily paddled over to it, then pulled it on underneath her arms.
Three burly men in plaid shirts and blue coveralls hauled her out of the water and over the railing, grunting as they helped her onto the deck.
The contrast of sudden heat from the ferry cabin and the cold water she’d been pulled out of started her shivering again, her teeth pressed against each other so hard they felt like they would shatter. Her muscles spasmed, like she was having a seizure.
One of the men threw a first aid kit on the dirty metal floor in front of her.
“Come on, we gotta get this off you,” said another man behind her, yanking at the strings she’d pulled so tight.
They stripped the survival suit off her, and then someone grabbed a pair of scissors and cut her wet uniform away. Someone else wrapped a dry thermal blanket around her.
The warm air between her skin and the survival suit disappeared, and that sent her into another round of deep, bone-shaking shivering.
“Tom,” she told them, teeth chattering. “Tom.” She wasn’t sure if they could understand, and she kept repeating it as best she could.
“We’re looking for him,” someone said into her ear as they rubbed her arms.
A thermometer beeped, and Anika felt pressure against her ear release. “The shivering’s okay,” the voice behind her said. “Means you’re alive. Your temp’s a bit low, but you’re fine. Keep shivering and moving and rubbing your arms.”
Anika took an offered cup of warm water.
“Sip it,” they told her. “No gulping.”
She almost dropped the cup, but with focus and determination, she managed to bring it shakily up to her lips and sip. She hunched in place on the floor, listening to the thermal blanket crinkle and crunch every time she shifted.
“Got him!” someone shouted.
A few minutes later they dragged Tom in, dripping water, and the whole routine repeated itself. Only Tom didn’t look so good. His uniform was sopping wet; the survival suit hadn’t gotten zipped quite properly.
His lips were blue, Anika saw. Tom was almost translucent, a pale man almost tailor-built for living in this polar world. But it didn’t matter to the cold water.
A redheaded man with a long beard held up a satphone as they wrapped Tom in a thermal blanket. “UNPG’s five minutes out by helicopter. Jen? They want you to drop the parafoil.”
A short, wind-burned woman in her late fifties with a ruddy face and straw blond hair walked out into the cabin. “Five minutes? Shit. Hey! Everyone on deck, we’re pulling in the sail!”
The redhead remained bent over Tom, checking his temperature. When he sat back and glanced at Anika he didn’t have to say anything. It was in the posture. Anika saw. Tom was in bad shape.
A minute later a large amount of parachute-like material dropped to the flat back deck where the crew of the ferry grabbed it and rolled it up.
As the parafoil was being packed away, she could hear the thwap of rotor blades approaching.
Two UNPG search-and-rescue men dropped out of the sky on ropes and hit the deck. They conferred with the redhead, shouting over the noise of the hovering helicopter.
Then, consensus reached, they hauled Tom out on deck, fastened him to a basket, and all disappeared back up in the air.
“They’re low on fuel. They said they’ve been in the air since your mayday call, all the way from Nanisivik. They’ll send another helicopter for you,” the redhead said, appearing in the door.
Anika leaned back against the steel bulkhead behind her. “I understand. Does anyone have a satphone that they can lend me?”
Jen, who Anika took to be the ferry’s captain, had a thick, plastic-covered phone with a whip antenna: all functional and weatherized. The logo GAIA and a smaller TELECOMMUNICATIONS was stamped into the side in raised letters with a globe in the background. Anika slowly punched the numbers in to dial Nanisivik Base.
“Claude here,” replied a smooth, but slightly tired-sounding Québécois voice on the other side.
“Commander, it’s Anika Duncan,” she said through jaws still clenched from the cold.
“Anika! A second chopper’s about fifteen minutes out from you,” Commander Michel Claude said quickly. “Are you okay? They said you were okay. They said Tom needed to be flown back right away.”
“Yes, yes, I’m doing fine,” Anika reassured him. “They were right to leave me if they were low on fuel.” She didn’t want to be responsible for her rescuers getting themselves in danger as well due to something as simple as running out of fuel.
She could hear Michel let out a deep breath. “We have two cutters headed out at top speed for the area. We’ve put out an alert for the Kosatka. Five airplanes, two airships, and the Canadian Navy and U.S. have been updated. We’re looking over a recent satellite scan of the area. We will find and catch up to these assholes.”
“Thank you, sir. If you hear anything more about Tom, please call this number back.”
She handed the satphone back over, and Jen exchanged it for some faded blue jeans, a garish neon yellow t-shirt, and a thick, beige Carhartt jacket. “You’re about five eleven?” Jen asked.
Anika nodded. “Five ten…”
“Those’ll fit you well enough.” She shook her head. “You’re damn lucky we were out here.”
Anika pulled them on, loving the feel of warm cloth against her skin. They’d almost died. Then almost been rammed. Then frozen. She felt numb, not just physically, but mentally.
And exhausted.
But she had enough energy now to remember to ask for her uniform. She unzipped the shoulder pocket and found the backup from the scatter camera. She slipped it into her new jeans.
The ferry was on its way to Thule’s floating assemblage of old tankers, barges, and laced-together ice islands at the Pole. There they’d offload goods in the hold and workers for Gaia, Inc., a multinational company with interests in carbon mitigation. For now, though, they’d remain in place until help could get to Anika.
Fifteen minutes later she was out in the whipping cold of the rotor wash of another helicopter, into the rescue basket, and then being winched up.
As one of the chopper crew busied himself getting an IV in her arm, Anika stared out at the gray sea and the bright evening sky to the west of them.
That’s where the Kosatka was, somewhere out there over the curve of the horizon.
Another chapter of her life had just slammed shut, Anika realized, as anger gelled inside of her. A chapter of routine, calm, and knowing what each day would hold. A peaceful chapter. A good chapter.
But that was over.
5
Tom’s wife, Jenny, leapt up from a padded bench near a nurse’s station at the Nanisivik Hospital and grabbed Anika in a fierce hug. Her small hands gripped the back of Anika’s jacket. “Oh my God,” she said. “They said you were okay. I kept thinking, if Tom’s spent the same amount of time in the water as you, maybe they weren’t telling me everything.”
Anika squeezed her back. Having Jenny as a friend was like having a hyperactive, overly eager-to-please, little white sister. But it was okay. Jenny and Tom were the closest things Anika had to family out here in the Polar Circle. Anika was slow to make friends, a casualty of the last ten years spent hiring her services out as a pilot. She kept to herself and kept others at a distance, as she was going to leave anyone she met in a few months when she hopped off to a different job. And maybe a part of the fact that being distant came so naturally to her was due to the violent early years before she earned her first chances to pilot. Back when she’d always had to carry a gun. “I think his suit got water in it. I got off easier.”
“I’m so glad you’re okay.”
They hugged again. Anika got a mouthful of Jenny’s blond curls. Then she pulled back and looked Jenny in the eye. “And Tom?”
“He’s peeing into a jug right now, made me leav
e the room,” she said.
“He’s awake? He’s okay?” Anika felt the hundred pounds of anxiousness that had been clinging to her drop away.
Relief prickled at her.
Jenny nodded. “He’s really tired. But he’s talking.” Her translucent green eyes teared, and she wiped at them with a sleeve. “I’m sorry.”
Anika shook her head. “Sorry? You have nothing to apologize for.”
Jenny rubbed her upper arms nervously, her sweater sleeves flopping about. “I don’t understand how you can be so calm. Anika: they shot you down.”
“Calm?” Anika thought about it. She wasn’t calm. She was still running on adrenaline and shock, that’s all. None of this had penetrated that outer wall, a pilot’s levelheaded ability to run through a checklist while something was going wrong.
Anika had been through some tight spots. She knew the shakes came later. She wasn’t sure what was going to happen once she wrapped her head around everything that had just occurred.
Jenny knocked on the door. “Are you done in there?”
“Yeah,” a familiar voice said. A husky, scratchy, and frail-sounding Tom.
“Okay, we’re coming in then,” Jenny said cheerfully.
Anika followed her, wrinkling her nose again at the smell of hospitals. She didn’t like them. She associated them with dying relatives. There was nothing worse as a child than being forced to go visit and make small talk to family members whom she only occasionally saw. They were always hurting, tired, and scared in hospitals, and that put her off.
But this was Tom, and she felt angry at herself for those childish memories.
He looked pale. And tired. He was wrapped in warming blankets, with a slightly bent container of urine hanging off the side of a bed rail.
“I guess I owe you a case of beer,” he said when he saw Anika step around the curtain with Jenny.
Anika smiled. “I’ll let it go. Just this once.”
He reached a hand out, and she took it, shook it firmly, and then he pulled back into the blankets, shivering. “Christ, it’s like I can’t ever get warm anymore.”
Arctic Rising Page 2
