Arctic Rising

by Tobias S. Buckell

  But no bright red suits waved for help, and no emergency boats had been launched. No rafts. Nothing.

  For fifteen minutes they whirled around the mess, until Chandra shouted, “We’ll run out of fuel before Paradise Island if we don’t leave now!”

  “Let’s go,” Roo told him, barely audible.

  Chandra banked away, and slowly the burning ships disappeared behind the waves and horizon.

  Lars turned his camera off and packed it back away. They all sat quietly, lost in their own thoughts, sobered by the sight.

  25

  Pleasure Island was the fourth in an arc of oil platforms on the edge of the western side of the Northwest Passage.

  Brock and Borden islands perched on the western edge of the Sverdrup Basin. There was more wealth out in the basin’s oil field than in any area in Western Canada. And all of it had been left alone by the twentieth century due to an inability to cope with the choking Arctic ice.

  With the oil now accessible, rigs popping up every couple weeks, people poured in from around the world to work in the industry. And all the people in that cloud of an ecosystem that served the drilling, the manufacturing, the shipping, and activity of the Sverdrup Basin needed somewhere to cut loose.

  Baffin was too far. Prudhoe Bay was too far.

  So Pleasure Island accreted around the remains of a shut down offshore platform: the rights to set up its bars, casinos, and other venues leased from TransOceanic, the owner of the platform.

  The rig had started out looking like a small industrial city sitting on top of the usual assortment of tubular metal legs that stuck out of the water. That original city had been built up on, so that it now looked dangerously top-heavy, brimming with extensions to the sides and buildings that drooped off the rim.

  They landed on a floating airstrip anchored off the back of the rig, Chandra swearing for the last four minutes of the flight, terrified that they were going to run out of fuel and have to ditch. But the helicopter coughed its way on its last fumes to the helicopter pad on the barge and Chandra leaned over his controls and kissed his instruments when they landed softly.

  Roo sat with him in the cockpit, transferring money around via phone through emergency, secret, and according to him, quite shielded accounts he had access to thanks to his part-time Caribbean spy contacts, and then he shook Chandra’s hand and wished him luck.

  Chandra looked somewhat relieved to be seeing the last of them, Anika thought.

  Seven other helicopters were tied down around them on the pad, including one ancient and quite massive sixty-passenger Russian Mi-26 with its sagging eight-bladed rotors.

  They silently walked along under the helicopter blades, and then past the sheltered docks filled with bouncing boats of all shapes and sizes. People filtered up the docks with them.

  From the airstrip’s barge, a large gangplank led them to scaffolding stairs built along the side of the rig. They walked on up, the cold Arctic wind tugging at them.

  Anika paused a moment as they crested the final steps. The center of the artificial island, a whole city block, was packed with drunk people. Neon flashed from every crevice of every walkway. Bulbs had been hung up, glittering from rails and pipes.

  They’d turned an oil rig into Las Vegas, Anika thought. Everything blinked, or had been repainted garishly. Every nook and cranny along the outer edge of the platform had been turned into a bar, or strip club, or dance club, or store. Everywhere she turned, something was being sold.

  On the third floor of what had once been an observation tower, three women yanked their tops down and threw beads out into the masses below.

  As the beads struck the ground they snapped open into little squares, advertising one of the platform’s clubs with a hologram.

  Roo led them through an epileptic’s worst nightmare of throbbing music from ten different sources, flashing lights, gaudy colors, and nearly naked men and women dancing in doorways with come-hither glances despite the cold air.

  After the shock of the attack on the mist boats, it was a complete assault on the senses.

  “It’s noon, right?” Bish asked her, somewhat stunned.

  Anika looked around. “I think so.”

  A burly woman with ripped forearms stumbled to her knees and retched as someone shouted, “Gina, Gina, Gina,” at her.

  Roo stopped as they reached a large entryway on the other side of the rig.

  Anika looked up at the giant neon sign overhead. Two large thighs spread out on either side of the door. And the letters, in glowing pink.

  “Pussy Galore’s,” Anika read out loud. “Roo?”

  He didn’t say anything. He walked in ahead of her, his face still tight and serious. Two large, hairy men who looked like they would be at home riding Harleys stepped in front of him. Despite the cold, they wore nothing but leather thongs and leather face masks, zippers up the back, and dog collars. No leashes though, Anika noticed. She guessed she could see where that would get in the way of a bouncer’s duties.

  “Hello, Moneypenny,” Roo said to the two men. “We’re here for Violet.”

  “You.” The man pointed at Anika. “And you.” His voice was muffled behind the mask as he then pointed at Roo.

  “The other two aren’t on the list,” said the other bouncer, his voice also muffled.

  “Guys,” Roo said. “You can’t run a strip club if you don’t let customers in.”

  The two burly men did not budge. “No customers right now. Just expected guests.”

  Roo started to argue, but Bish tapped his shoulder. “It’s okay, man. We need to find pipe to upload what just happened and decide what to do next. And drink. I lived with the guys on those boats for months. I’m ready to stir up some serious shit. Thank you for flying us out.”

  Lars nodded. He still looked dazed and hadn’t spoken since the explosions. But he shook Anika’s hand, and Roo’s, and then followed Bish back off into the crowd. A crowd which didn’t seem to give a damn that something was happening beyond the confines of the neon of Pleasure Island.

  It would affect them soon, though, Anika thought. If Gaia was effective in its attempt to “terraform” Earth, the gold rush to the Arctic Circle would slow down as the oil and other resources were buried back under ice.

  The economies of the Arctic Tigers would slow down. Denmark, Finland, Norway, Greenland, Iceland, Russia, Canada, Alaska, would fall back into pre-warming levels of expansion.

  No shipping would crisscross the Arctic.

  Thule would whither away.

  There would be no reason for the bustle of humanity to be up here.

  And those were the local effects. Global oil production was mostly focused on making plastics, not burning it. If plastics rose in price, bioplastics would go up as well. There wouldn’t just be oil shocks, but manufacturing shocks, and then down the line, food shocks as bioplastics tried to fill in the gap. Companies would fail, fortunes would be destroyed, economies would falter.

  The entire world would feel the ripple from this.

  26

  The gloomy inside of Pussy Galore’s faced the ocean with giant balconies of enclosed glass. On a bright day, they’d let the sun in. But today gray light cloaked the dark sea.

  Anika stared at the seventy-year-old posters of bikinied women with retro hairstyles. A tiny silver gun rested in a display case. A scale model of an Aston Martin hung from a corner of the ceiling near a pole.

  Roo noticed her looking around. “Someone with a 3-D fab machine printed a lot of these out for them. But the posters are originals from the movies.”

  A short middle-aged women with a fitness trainer’s body broke away from a huddle of fifteen other women, most of them topless, at a large round table near the balconies and the brass poles. “Hey Roo,” she said. “Caught us at a bad time. We’re shut down right now.”

  She wore a too-tight shirt that said MILF-QUEEN, cropped to leave her very noticeable, very cut abs exposed.

  “Hey Kerrie. What’s up? And
why the posse?” Roo jerked his head at the table.

  “Miss Estonia here was caught giving a client a blow job in the VIP room,” Kerrie muttered. A tired-looking Eastern European girl was sitting a table over, drinking out of a tumbler. She’d tossed a blond wig on the table’s surface by the drink. “We’re casting a vote.”

  “A vote?” Anika looked over. Sure enough, someone was passing around a cheap wooden box with a slit cut out of the top, and they were all dropping pieces of paper in.

  “Galore’s is a worker-owned co-op,” Kerrie said. “On policy violations, we have to decide what to do with the offender. In the case of Adriana over there, it’s her second time pulling this shit. We’re entertainers, not hookers. We want a safe environment, and she’s jeopardizing it. I called the referendum: time to vote the bitch off the island.”

  Anika thought about Bish’s story of the factory workers’ revolt. “There are a lot of communists out here,” she observed.

  Kerrie pointed at her. “What the fuck? This isn’t some socialist strip club. That’s from each according to their ability, to each their needs. None of that shit here. It’s a worker-owned small business. We all have shares. Don’t let serf-acquiring corporations bullshit you into their feudalistic mind-sets. The harder we work, the more fucking money we make because we’re each part owners of the company, and part of the profit-making mechanism. We’re not working our asses off to profit some distant fucking middle manager or stockholder. We’re the owners, the management, and the talent. And we’re all about the earnings, got it?”

  Anika held her hands up. “Sorry.”

  “Sorry my ass. People living in a democratic world go all floozy for corporations run like the most asshat evil empires ever seen. Get all wet when some corporate ruler shits all over the environment, cuts costs by laying people off, but handed over a nice quarter according to the nerds in accounting. The sort of shit they’d scream about if it were dressed up as politics, they just shrug when it happens under a corporate byline. Fuck that, we got democracy, baby, and it’s profitable. Roo, you’re in room fifteen. That cool?”

  Roo was grinning at the whole dressing down. “Yeah.” He nodded at Anika. “You good by yourself? I’ve got calls to make and favors to call in.”

  “You can dock your boat underneath if you need,” Kerrie said.

  Roo took a deep breath. “It … didn’t make it. We flew.”

  Kerrie raised her eyebrows. “Okay. I’ll take care of…”

  “Anika.” Anika held out a hand, and Kerrie took it and smiled.

  “Nice to meet you, Anika. You must be someone very special if Violet’s letting you into her little hideaway here.”

  Anika felt her cheeks flush a bit, and she looked away. “Vy’s been … very helpful in a difficult situation. When will she get here?”

  “Tomorrow morning. Let me take you to Vy’s room. And we’ll find you some clean clothes.”

  “Thank you.” Anika glanced down at the MILF-QUEEN shirt.

  Kerrie held a hand up to her chest. “These are work clothes, sweetie, we’ll get you something respectable.”

  Again, Anika felt the heat rise to her face. “I’m sorry.…”

  Kerrie smiled and grabbed her elbow and led her down a corridor to an elevator. “It’s okay,” Kerrie reassured her. “Don’t worry. You’re among friends.”

  The club, Anika realized, hung over the edge of the platform, and dropped several floors down toward the water, using one of the pylons as a main support. Vy’s room was three floors underneath the main dancing floor.

  * * *

  Anika wasn’t sure if she should be offended that she was being put in Vy’s own room. Did Vy have some expectations?

  Well, she would cross that bridge when Vy arrived tomorrow, she decided. Not now.

  The room was surprisingly modest, though the padded carpet felt comfortable underfoot after she’d kicked her shoes off. Similar to a hotel suite, there was a small antechamber with a couch, coffee table, computer equipment on a desk and executive chair, and an entertainment cabinet built into the wall. The door out led into a larger room with a king-sized bed and eight overstuffed pillows.

  A vase of fresh flowers was centered on a dresser. There were pictures set up on it that Anika didn’t get close enough to look at, and the walls were oddly bare.

  An empty walk-in closet led into a bathroom with a large built-in tub and a glass-enclosed shower.

  Kerrie got her some oversized, fluffy bath towels and a robe, and then disappeared to find clothes.

  Alone, Anika locked the bathroom door, then stripped. She looked at the bruises turning purple on her arms, her chest, her ribs, her thighs, and in the mirror, her left eye.

  Who was this looking back at her? Purple-haired, dreadlocked, a quarter of her face turned green, some of that smudged off from hitting the side of the helicopter.

  The new Anika. The vengeful Anika. Anika on a mission.

  She leaned forward and scrubbed the green from her skin. And in the mirror, there she was again. Anika.

  The shower, it turned out, had serious water pressure. The showerhead kicked and spat a nearly solid stream of water.

  Anika grinned.

  She disappeared under a haze of heat, just focusing on the slap of water against her body ripping away an outer layer of skin.

  For fifteen minutes, time stopped.

  * * *

  Roo knocked, and Anika let him in. Kerrie hadn’t returned, but Anika had the bathrobe tied on and a towel wrapped around her hair.

  He had a laptop, and balanced on it, a large platter with two plates. “Is mostly bar food up there,” he apologized. “But good bar food.”

  Anika’s mouth watered as he set the food on the coffee table. She didn’t wait for permission to start scarfing.

  “Sorry to come down,” Roo said. “But I wanted to show you something.”

  He opened the laptop with greasy fingers, burger in one hand, and rotated it toward her.

  The picture on the screen was fuzzy, but Anika recognized the man’s face anyway. She wasn’t going to forget anytime soon. “I recognize him. The Canadian Coast Guard ship. Gabriel.”

  Roo nodded. “Garret Dubuque is his real name, but he had gone by Gabriel in the community for a serious while back then. And the thing about him is, the man been retired a decade.”

  Anika looked up from the picture. “What do you mean by retired?”

  “That man don’t work for no one anymore. Certainly no Canadians. Everyone I talk to say he’s out.”

  “Roo, that is impossible,” Anika protested. “He flew out to that ship. He had us picked up. They imprisoned us for him!”

  “He ain’t no state actor. He must have pulled favors and paid people off to make that happen. I also bet no one knows we were picked up. We were never officially on that ship. We never officially got away from it. No one knew.”

  Anika put down the remains of her burger, her appetite lost. “Jesus. Roo. Jesus. What would have happened after we docked? What is happening to us?”

  “These globes trickling up to the air. U.S., China, Russia, India, Europe, Turkey, all working together to try and find and stop these things.” Roo shook his head in a sort of puzzled wonder. “Gaia launch vehicles getting destroyed. But still these globes are being launched from new places no one knew Gaia owned every few hours, and the globes are gathering in the Arctic air here, over international waters. I’m reading that everyone’s on red alert. Politicians trying to decide whether to launch World War Three up against a company. Today a ‘Friends of the World’ ship rammed a Chinese destroyer trying to board a mist boat, and the Chinese opened fire. Sunk it. And no one knows what to think.”

  “And then there’s the nuke,” Anika said. “It was on a Gaia-chartered ship, I assume, as they had those globes inside it. What are they planning with it?”

  “Can’t be nothing good,” Roo said. “Nothing good at all.”

  They finished dinner in thoughtful silenc
e.

  27

  Kerrie knocked on the door, and Anika opened it to find that she was standing there with an armful of clothes.

  “Thank you.” Anika briefly peeked at the black jeans and plain black tee, oversized wool sweater, socks, and Windbreaker.

  “No problem, hon. Sleep well.”

  Anika retreated with the clothes back into the bedroom. She put them on top of the dresser and paused to look at the photos. They were in cheap fake-wooden frames, painted black. There was a picture of Vy as a teenager, grinning wildly, on a beach with an American skyline behind her. Chicago? Vy on a boat, beautiful bright blue water sparkling behind her.

  Behind those two was a picture of a large gate, snow packed along the bottom. A line of footsteps in the snow led away from a small access door beside the gate. Barbed wire rolled along the top of the gate’s metal spikes, and a grim-looking man in a thick fur hat, rifle slung on his shoulder, stood on the other side of the gate looking blankly toward the camera.

  The pixelated quality meant it had probably been snatched from an old camera phone and printed.

  Anika looked at the fourth photo and came across Vy kissing a cute girl with green eyes, limp hair, and glossy lips.

  Who was this?

  She stared at it for a long time, and then finally reached up and faced it down on the dresser, gently.

  No. This wasn’t her stuff to meddle with, Anika thought. She was a guest. She set the photo back up.

  That was the right thing to do, wasn’t it?

  Right or not, Anika changed her mind, and faced the photo back down.

  Not while she was staying the night, alone.

  She turned away, slid the bathrobe off, and crawled into the large bed. She arranged the overstuffed pillows in a circle around herself, as if she were making a nest.

  Propped up, the large comforter pulled up to her neck, Anika found a remote to the wall-mounted screen. News programs were now, she saw, covering the “Crisis in the Arctic.”