Arctic Rising

by Tobias S. Buckell

  “No,” Anika said. After getting Anika disguised they’d abandoned the room to head straight over to the helicopter.

  Lars had his head in the fridge. He slammed the door shut, shaking the wall. “We have been fucked.” He had a pair of beers in his hand, he threw one at Bish, who snagged it out of the air with ease and popped the top.

  Both men, Anika realized, had been drinking heavily before she’d arrived. Lars had bloodshot eyes.

  A heavy thunk, and a steady shaking rumbled through the floor.

  “Shit, they’re opening the hold doors.” Bish’s head snapped around, facing the direction of the decks.

  Lars dropped his beer on the floor. “Get the backup cameras. I want everything on!”

  Bish grabbed Chandra’s shoulders. “I’ll need to join you guys on the trip out. Lars, too. But first, you’ll want to see what’s going down here, man.”

  Lars thudded out of the kitchen, and Bish followed close behind. “Six months ago the Hinum was a thousand-foot-long floating offshore factory owned by a Chinese corporation, further up the Arctic Circle, all in strictly multinational waters. They were closer to the oil and were using it to make plastic toys. I guess it helped the margins to be right by the source, and then they could be shipped right to Alaska, or Northern Europe.”

  “It was anchored near Thule,” Lars said, leading them down a set of stairs and through a quiet and empty common area.

  “I’ve seen the floating factories,” Anika said. As it got harder and harder to find nations without protective labor laws, corporations got more creative.

  “The company went bankrupt,” Bish said, ducking another low bulkhead. “The creditors were fighting over who owned the factory and who could get it towed to Chittagong and have it scrapped. Meanwhile, there’s this whole multinational workforce quartered on the ship. I’m getting e-mails and pictures from a friend who’s in the middle of writing a story about the floating factory. I mean, no regulations, labor laws, or oversight. Sounds like hell? But since they’re all trapped aboard, after a few really crazy protests and a few overzealous overseers go missing overboard, they’d built a life here.”

  “They had greenhouses.” Lars led them into a small room with a single bare bunk and a gray blanket. Work boots lay scattered under the bunk, heavy coats on the hook behind the door. The desk had four cases stacked on it. Lars opened one of them to reveal padded foam and a two fist-sized cameras. He moved with practiced, precise haste as he opened another case and pulled out a tripod. “You wouldn’t believe the things they grew on the decks.”

  “They had everything set up,” Bish said. “Hospitals, greenhouses on deck for fresh veggies, even a small pen with chickens for fresh eggs. These workers from Thailand, Vietnam, Russia, China, they’d built a whole world on this ship. Lars and I wanted to film it before it was all ripped out and scrapped. We flew out, and my story got even fucking better.”

  Lars opened another case and pulled out a shoulder-stabilized camera rig.

  Bish shut the cases for Lars, but he was waving his hands around as he got more animated. An inner intensity tumbled out with his words. “So these guys revolted when one of the creditors finally got a tug boat out here to commandeer the factory. They tooled up to build weapons and held everyone off, and they declared that the ship was owned by them. Turned it into a worker-owned and -run business. Everyone had a share. They started production up again.”

  “They lasted two months.” Lars pointed them out of the cabin, and everyone backed out. “Then Gaia purchased the company’s debt.”

  “So get this: Lars has cameras all over the place streaming back to our box at home, and I’m interviewing everyone I can get my hands on, when fucking paratroopers literally drop out of the fucking sky.” Bish paused for dramatic effect.

  “For hire?” Anika asked.

  “Edgewater, yah.” Lars was leading them down the corridor again, trotting along. The rumbling grew louder now as they got closer to the decks. “Everyone is thinking: hey, Gaia purchases the debt. They are the biggest green company in the world. They are nice people, yeah? Turns out, not so nice after all.”

  “It’s a whole standoff,” Bish said as they started climbing stairs again. “Gaia’s founders, Paige Greer and Ivan Cohen, make an offer: we could all accept a like/kind exchange of Gaia shares and a free ferry ticket anywhere in the Circle, or … get arrested. There we are, weapons aimed at us, gunships circling the ship. I was scared shitless.”

  “They took the deal,” Roo said from behind Anika. “I remember all those workers showed up on the docks at Thule.”

  “Then it got hairy when they found out I had recorded it all. I was like, you have to let me get out of here. They wanted the footage before they’d release me. I told them I had rights. They said I was in international waters, and I’d been filming on their property. I had no rights.”

  “So they bargain with us,” Lars said, panting and out of breath. They’d gone up three flights, and now he walked over to a large observation window. “They promise us the story of the century if we agree to never release the footage of Gaia-paid goons pointing guns at factory workers. We met with lawyers for two days. We agreed to stay on board for six months. It was just us, Gaia had these ships switched over to their automated systems with an occasional weekly fly-in by engineers to check on the systems. After the manufacturing stuff was done, all the workers left.”

  He set the tripod down in front of the window, and they all walked up to it.

  Bish looked out over the decks. “But after all that, they still fucked us.”

  “Fucked us hard.” Lars set up one camera to look down at the decks. Anika looked out. The deck’s floodlights revealed the source of the loud rumbling: several massive steel hatches slowly rolled themselves open. Fifteen-foot cracks of dark had appeared. They were going to be looking down into the holds soon, if the hatches kept trundling back. “You should show them a close-up,” Lars told Bish. “It doesn’t matter anymore. Might as well break the story to someone.”

  Bish smiled sadly. “I was supposed to break the news about how Gaia, Inc., was going to save the world. But that news broke this morning while you guys were getting out here. At least I get some exclusive documentary footage.”

  He shrugged, then turned back for the stairs and waved them along.

  “Where are we going?” Anika asked.

  “Down to the holds. Trust me, I’m about to blow your minds,” Bish said, grinning.

  23

  “The mist boats were going to be Gaia’s big silver bullet,” Bish said, leading Roo and Anika down the stairs. “Cohen and Greer had been holding press conferences about how bad shit was getting out there. Glaciers disappearing, storms ripping through the Atlantic coast, Caribbean. Typhoons getting worse. The Arctic melting.”

  Bish led them through a long corridor away from the bridge superstructure, deep inside the hull.

  “Gaia doesn’t have a formal position about whether the warming trends were human caused or not,” Roo said.

  “That’s just PR to protect them from conservatives and religious Midwesterners in the U.S. during their start-up phase. Greer and Cohen figured that if they could build what we needed and let businesses solve the issue, they could route around that shit. But the political will for Western nations to get big serious faded, man.”

  “Westerners get all the benefits,” Anika said. More land in Canada, Russia, and Northern Europe. Greenland opened up. Iceland became even more comfortable. New England and Britain are suffering cold snaps now that the Gulf Stream is being forced lower by the billions of tons of Arctic fresh water dumped into the North Atlantic, but they were the minority.

  The Midwest and Siberia did just fine.

  Anika looked at Roo. “All those people in the equators without water, suffering heavy weather and drought and less arable land? It’s not happening in their backyard, it’s not their problem. That is what the politicians say.”

  Bish stopped in fron
t of a door. “So the mist boats help clouds form and bounce sunlight back into space. But Gaia is blocked by governments who maintain that it’s an attempt at radical geoengineering, and that we can’t model the unanticipated side effects.”

  Roo folded his arms. “They banned them in the Caribbean. It rained saltwater. It’s not good for the plants, yeah?”

  “So then the question is,” Bish said, opening the doors behind him slowly, “if you’re the leaders of a multitrillion-dollar corporation, how do you reverse a global trend, when many people don’t want you to even try? When many who believe there is a problem have thrown up their hands at the enormity of it? When many believe there is no problem?”

  The doors clanged open, showing only the utter darkness of the ship’s holds ahead.

  “You have to become … slightly mad.” Bish moved toward a control panel. “There are futurists and space nuts who talk about ‘terraforming’ another planet: making an uninhabitable planet habitable for humans. Like Mars. Drop some comets on it, add atmosphere. Put a giant mirror in orbit to heat it up a bit. Big idea stuff. So Ivan Cohen and Paige Greer decided that they would motherfucking terraform Earth to stop it from turning into Venus. So when they took over this factory ship, they started making something new, and filling holds all over the Arctic with these things.”

  He tapped a code on the panel, and the lights came on.

  For a long moment Anika couldn’t grasp what she was looking at—until she focused her eyes on the smallest unit in front of her.

  She walked forward, and out of a solid wall of shiny metal globules, plucked out a transparent ball the size of her fist.

  “I’ve seen one of these before,” she whispered.

  “For six months Gaia has been churning these things out,” Bish said. He looked morose. “I was supposed to get an exclusive, in exchange for silence, but this morning the story broke. Someone working in a factory finally leaked video of the things. Now everyone’s figuring out what they’re for.”

  Roo, the information gatherer, held a sphere up, looking into the shiny insides. There was a mirror inside, gimbaled and motorized so it could adjust itself to face any direction it wanted. “What do they do?”

  Bish looked at the two of them as if they were stupid. “It’s a lot more effective than a fucking mist cloud, right? And it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than trying to build a giant mirror in space to deflect some of the sun’s heat. Millions of these things, floating around. Mini-blimps. They’re programmable, little chips inside that cost no more than a penny. You can direct the motored mirrors to face any direction, so in a cloud of them you can use heat to let them rise up or fall, so they can use wind and weather patterns to move around as a unit. They’re shiftable into one giant clump of a mirror, able to focus heat or deflect it where needed. Gaia created their silver bullet, man.”

  He held his hands out and walked into the silvered, jostling mass of floating balls. The tinkling sound of hundreds of floating spheres moved with him as he was enveloped by them.

  Overhead, the hatch ground to a halt.

  The sound of rattling, hundreds of tiny balls slapping against the walls and each other, filled the hold.

  “They initially planned to release them a hold at a time,” shouted Bish from inside the now slowly rising mass of spheres escaping the bonds of the hold. “So they could inject them into the upper atmosphere over the Arctic slowly so as not to alarm satellites and radar systems.”

  “Or get caught,” Roo muttered.

  “Now they’ll be releasing them as fast as they can,” Bish said.

  The spheres were thinning out as they rose into the air. Anika could see through gaps to the sky and the edges of the hatch far over her head. Thousands bumped along the sides of the massive funnels, and then they merged into the streams of mist.

  Anika was standing beside a moment in history, she thought. This was amazing. Stunning. This company had been laboring in secret to build something vast right here in the Arctic Circle.

  Something that would change the world.

  For a moment, her head craned back looking at this exodus of tiny machines into the sky, she wasn’t wondering about radiation, revenge, or the cold. She just stared at the metal, glinting cloud in wonder as it rose to reach the dark clouds far overhead.

  Roo grabbed her arm. He didn’t look awed. He looked scared. “We have to get off this ship right fast,” he hissed.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Those navy ships? They reacting to this. We don’t want to be on none of these ships. No telling how they thinking to react.”

  Bish walked across the empty hold floor, sending several straggling spheres that couldn’t quite rise into the air wobbling her way. “You think they’d fire on us?”

  “I can’t believe they’d do that,” Anika said.

  “I don’t know.” Bish rubbed his forehead. “But why risk it? Take us with you to Pleasure Island. I don’t have anything left here. I’ve lost six months, we have the sphere launch video now. It’s all I need if I’m not getting an exclusive.”

  “What about crew? Is there anyone else on board?” Anika asked.

  “Like I said, automated and on autopilot,” Bish said.

  Roo had his new phone already up to his ear. “Chandra? Spin up, we leaving now.”

  24

  Rotor wash whipped Anika’s hair about as she climbed the steps back onto the helicopter pad. Lars joined a second later, staggering up with five cases in his hands and a duffel bag over a shoulder. His jacket flapped wildly as he leaned into the gust.

  Anika helped him get the cases in, and once they were all inside, Chandra grabbed Roo and yelled, “Are you sure all of those things are out of the air?”

  Bish leaned forward. “Should be, there’s no reason for them to wait anymore.”

  “Anyone else on board?” Chandra asked.

  “It’s on autopilot, just us.”

  Chandra looked out around the entire helicopter, hunting to see if more of the spheres were around, then, satisfied, lifted off the helipad and pitched them toward the open sea.

  “Stay as low as you dare,” Roo reminded him.

  Chandra nodded. He was still glancing around, looking for threats. Anika looked out the windows as well. They were skimming along just over the tips of the waves, spray even slapping the windward side of the helicopter.

  It looked like the helicopter’s skids could kiss the waves at any second. Anika really had to admire the piloting. This was old school, fly by wire, brain and muscle and twitch reflexes all working together.

  Chandra was something else.

  “You really think they will do something to the mist boats?” Lars asked Roo and Bish. He reached into his duffel bag and pulled out another beer.

  “Four years ago the U.S. Army got ready to launch a test orbital mirror,” Roo shouted. “They were thinking it would allow them to focus solar energy down on a solar engine. They could power an army, no need for oil, with a beam of concentrated solar light anywhere in the world. China got all threatened, said that beam could be directed anywhere. Flash vaporize an army, see? They said it weaponizing space, and was a treaty violation. Said they would attack it with anything they had. Everyone backed down. So now Gaia’s weaponizing the upper atmosphere. There’ll be consequences.…”

  Chandra slammed the helicopter sideways, throwing around everyone inside it. Anika slapped into the side of the door, feeling it shake as her shoulder smashed against the handle.

  Lars and Bish smacked into her ribs, dizzying her with the familiar pain.

  And with her face smashed against the glass, Anika saw the long, dark shape of a cruise missile gliding mysteriously toward them just over the wave caps. It dodged, violently arcing around them with a quick burst of several adjusting jets.

  They were not its target.

  Anika sat up to look out the other side of the helicopter just in time to see the cruise missile silently fly into the side of the ship, a mi
le behind them. A split second later a fireball gushed out of the side, then broke out of the holds, sending the massive steel hatches spinning up into the air.

  Secondary explosions visibly rippled the hull, vomiting debris and surviving clouds of spheres that rose above the conflagration in slow motion.

  As they stared the funnels toppled over, striking the heaving seas and breaking apart.

  More explosions ripped through and, slowly, the mist boat began to settle deeper into the water.

  “Jesus,” Bish muttered.

  Lars didn’t say anything; he had one of his cameras held tight in his hand and was filming. A trickle of blood ran down his temple, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  The cabin reeked of spilled beer.

  Anika flinched as the other two mist boats in the distance exploded.

  “Were the other two ships fully automated?” Roo asked.

  “There was a maintenance crew,” Bish said. “They cycled between the Arctic mist boats. They might have been aboard … I don’t know.”

  Chandra circled around looking for survivors as the ships burned and slowly sank.

  “Roo…” Anika pointed out another gliding missile in the distance, curving through a roiling column of smoke. Another metallic shark, hunting for something.

  Light abruptly split the sky as tens of thousands of mirrors scattered in the air turned their attention to one single point in space. But the missile easily danced away. The beam of light boiled water on the surface of the ocean for a moment, then faded away, leaving nothing but a wisp of steam to show it ever existed.

  “Jesus.” Roo shook his head. “That’s just one hold’s worth of those floating things. It’s not quick enough to fry a missile, but whoever controls it was trying.”

  Finding no more targets, the cruise missile splashed down into the ocean and sank. The floating mirrors rose above the clouds, and they were left alone circling the destruction.

  Oil coated the frothy sea, as did tens of thousands of now-dead spheres. They had to keep upwind; Chandra couldn’t risk any low-floating spheres hitting his blades or getting sucked into the motor.