Arctic Rising

by Tobias S. Buckell

  Outside again, shivering slightly as the wind ripped over the flat miles of polar ice, they trooped along with a few die-hard visitors.

  “Normally it’s packed,” said Wynter. “People fly out from all over the world to visit. But since the navy blockade everyone’s been leaving. Commercial flights are unwilling to land. Locals are more worried about the nuke, or trying to leave. It’s a ghost town.”

  They walked along the snowy roads inside the complex, hiking up until they stopped at a lip. On the other side of the fence, a hundred feet below them, were miles of winding bergs, blue water, and a cluster of harp seals sunning themselves.

  “Think about this,” Wynter said, as the wind ruffled the white fur around her neck and stirred her blond hair. “Instead of assuming that the nuclear device was smuggled in to create a terrorist incident, assume that both major events that have happened here are connected. A nuclear device, capable of emitting an electromagnetic pulse and frying all the electronics in Thule, will also be able to fry the electronics of those millions of little floating balls overhead.”

  They all looked up at the silver sheen of the gathering artificial clouds miles overhead.

  “If it’s meant to kill the Gaia cloud, then why was it on a Gaia ship?” Anika asked.

  “Protective camouflage?” Roo guessed.

  “Or a monumental fuck up on the part our contracted delivery services,” said one of a pair of tourists standing nearby. They’d previously been looking out across the sanctuary.

  “And an even bigger screw up on the part of our security people,” said the other.

  Behind them, a cable car moved along over the frigid landscape. According to a plaque near the fence, this is how you could pass over the last of the polar bear’s territory, all four hundred of them. This demesne, run by conservationists, was not for people to live in.

  The pair of tourists pulled back their thick hoods, and Anika recognized them.

  Ivan Cohen and Paige Greer. The founders of Gaia.

  In the distance several loud cracks sounded. Like ice snapping, Anika thought. But it continued to thud and spray. Wynter turned around. “That’s my call,” she said.

  “What’s happening?” Anika asked.

  The pale dictator looked over her shoulder. “In light of the blockade, and the realization that there’s a nuclear device somewhere in Thule, several demesnes are separating from Thule. That sound was dynamite taking out bridgework, connecting streets, what have you.”

  A cloud of steam rose off the buildings in the distance near the harbor.

  “Sort of literalizes the phrase ‘breakaway republics,’ I think,” Vy muttered.

  Wynter pulled her coat tighter around herself. “This is good-bye,” she said. “I hope you all can help each other out. But I need to go supervise what comes next for Pytheas.”

  She walked off down the snowy ramp as the detonations continued, this time from another sector, closer to the edge of the harbor docks.

  Thule was literally ripping itself apart.

  33

  Anika took a step back. Then she jutted her jaw forward and stepped right back into place. “My name is Anika Duncan. Several days ago I worked for the UNPG, and I approached the Kosatka, a ship chartered by your corporation. Can you explain why that ship fired rocket-propelled grenades at us, killing my copilot?”

  Ivan Cohen, on the right, was clean shaven. He had small eyes, a tall forehead, his grayed hair thinning slightly. But he had an athletic build, and an intensity to his movements as he held his hands up in a conciliatory gesture. “We were not responsible for that,” he said, his voice shaking with controlled anger. “We did charter that ship, but someone infiltrated it. It was supposed to join five other freighters that would release their cargo into the air tomorrow morning. We were just as stunned to find out a UNPG spotter airship had been shot down by it, and that it had released its cargo early.”

  Paige Greer put an arm on his elbow, calming him. She smiled at Anika. It was a disarmingly effective smile. Anika found herself relaxing.

  “Ms. Duncan, is it okay if I call you Anika?” Paige asked. She left Ivan’s personal space and slipped right into Anika’s. It felt like they were suddenly having a private conversation. Between friends.

  “Yes.” Anika looked down at the shorter, older, almost motherly woman with silvering hair.

  “We talked to Anton, an investigator with the UNPG, about the incident. You know him, I think. He told us a lot about you.”

  “Yes, I know Anton,” Anika admitted.

  “He’s a good man. We were trying to find out who the crew was that the U.S. Navy picked up, but by last night, they’d disappeared. No one could say where. But one thing we know, thanks to Anton’s help and some pictures he took at the interrogation, is that they were not the crew originally on the ship that we chartered.”

  “Then who where they?” Anika asked.

  Paige put an arm around the small of Anika’s back. “Whoever it was,” she said softly. “You managed to destroy their plans. We have to assume it was someone who wants to destroy the solar shield. And they were hoping to fire the nuke off from sea, on a ship known to be chartered by Gaia. No doubt it would make us look insane, reckless, and divided amongst ourselves. Instead, if they do fire it, it is now clear Gaia didn’t do it. We owe you, Anika, for forcing them to change their plans, forcing them to load the missile into a submarine and bring it here.”

  “You owe Tom,” Anika said, looking across at Paige. “And his family. Not me.”

  Paige had steered her to the rail on the edge of the ice bluff. “Ivan and I have already made arrangements for his family,” she told Anika. “They should no longer pay a price for our mistakes. But that matter aside, I still believe we also owe you, Anika. And you’ve come all the way out here for a reason. To see this through, am I right?”

  Anika nodded. Paige let go of her and grabbed the rail with one hand, and made a sweeping gesture with the other. “We have a common enemy. I’d like to give you the resources, and the satisfaction, of going after them with us. And stopping them from destroying something I’ve spent most of my life trying to save.”

  “The whole world?” Anika asked, slightly cynically.

  Paige smiled sadly, a slight twinge of disappointment in the corners of her mouth. “Yes, Anika. The world.”

  * * *

  Anika expected Gaia HQ to be The Green Monster, the repurposed aircraft carrier so heavily advertised on their Web site. Instead Ivan and Paige led them to an unmarked building near the edge of the polar preserve.

  Humorless security guards let them pass a desk to a bank of glass elevators, but only after they relieved them of their weapons. Anika made a face and let a female guard pat her down to check to make sure she’d handed everything over.

  Once that was done, Paige pressed her thumb to the control panel of the elevator they piled into, and the party of five descended down a deep ice tunnel.

  After four stories, the ice gave way to a series of massive caverns. They dropped through the ceiling of an underground complex, bustling with activity.

  At the ground floor, Paige and Ivan passed them through more security: Uzi-wielding private contractors with throat mics and high-tech glasses reflecting a stream of live information against their eyeballs.

  On their left was a series of pools of water. Submarines rested, tied up against concrete pilings. Many of them were being offloaded by workers in green overalls with Gaia logos.

  “We anticipated being locked out of many countries. Between The Green Monster and our facilities here in Thule, the company can continue regular operations even under the current conditions,” Ivan said. There was grim satisfaction in his voice.

  They passed through a twenty-foot-tall airlock set into a bulkhead in the complex. Once inside this, three-inch-thick metal hatches swung open to reveal a conference room with plastic windows, fifteen feet tall, looking out through the clear blue water. Above their heads floated icebergs, th
e same ones Anika had seen looking down from the edge far above where she’d met Paige and Ivan.

  A seal splashed into the water and drifted down in front of the windows, then darted away.

  The conference room had two private offices, doors leading off to suites with windows of their own on each side of the conference room. Twenty high-backed leather chairs surrounded a C-shaped table made of a highly polished Brazilian wood, a high contrast to the functional, clean metal arches overhead.

  Touch-pad screens lay on the desk in front of each chair.

  “We started Gaia in college making world-class simulation software for governmental agencies,” Ivan said, looking out through the windows. “We were gaming scenarios like what would happen if the oceans rose by so many inches, or what if the temperature rose by a certain percent. What we saw was what the scientists saw: dramatic chaos as borders changed, arable land moved north, resources opened up. The Arctic Tigers coming to ascendance. Our clients were mainly military; they had some of the best foresight studies regarding the loss of Arctic ice and global temperature change. They were paying us obscene amounts of money to help them create better simulators.”

  Paige tapped a table, and the Gaia logo appeared. “I challenged him to figure out how to make money off the simulations. They were long bets. We never expected them to begin paying off so soon, and paying big. Our plays turned us into the largest energy and water company in the world as everything kept accelerating. Just the massive tundra land purchases we made when we were twenty were enough to make us obscenely rich: they turned into prime real estate within twenty-five years. When those investments began to mature, Ivan started the new phase of Gaia.”

  Ivan turned his back to the windows and faced them through the logo that hung in the air like ghost. “I didn’t want to be that right.”

  Paige leaned against the table. “Ivan and I believe the reduction of pollution and carbon dumping requires structural changes that the world’s communities refuse to make.”

  “It’s like when you see a country with starving people in it that has enough arable land and resources to feed everyone. What you have is a systems problem,” Ivan said.

  “The problem is improperly adjusted externalities,” Paige said. “When you purchase a product, the factory put out some small part of pollution into the world. But when you buy that product, you don’t pay for that in the object’s price. The pollution goes into the world, and then a government gets involved. A government has to clean it up, and they use Superfund cleanup money. So who pays for that? Taxpayers. It comes out of your check, one way or another. But by hiding it as a tax cost, and letting the government clean it up, you’re unaware of the real cost of the object in your hand. The pollution also causes medical costs: lung disease, cancer. That comes out of your medical bill, and often the government gets involved there, but you as a human don’t perceive the cost of cancer as being a portion of the cost of your new laptop. The company also releases carbon every time a new laptop is made, and when it’s transported to you. But no one ever pays for that up front. We keep punting the question of what that is doing to the atmosphere to the next generation. We’re doing it again. It’s warmed up enough that we’re experiencing all the benefits of global warming: increased land for northern countries, the release of the Arctic’s resources, and a whole new shipping lane and ocean to exploit. But now there’s a precipice we’re perched on. Who goes over it? Not our problem, right? The cost of the problem isn’t paid anywhere. The market fails to price properly because you can time-shift a portion of the cost, creating an unbalanced market.”

  Ivan smiled. “As Paige keeps testifying to politician after politician, until you pay the true cost of the object, you will never make the right consumer choices, nor will the market properly adjust. Until you have a structural situation where one company offers you a widget for less because it pollutes less, destroys other companies’ democracies less, and doesn’t dump carbon into the air to move an object to you, then you actually don’t have a true, market-based economy. A truly market economy is one that properly maintains the environs it needs to exist in because it adds the price of damaging that environ into the bill of its goods. What we have now is a distorted market that rewards anti-conservation, and hides the real cost of the object in your taxes and elsewhere. Ultimately, it’s just really, really bad accounting. They keep passing laws and trying to ‘educate’ people to make better choices. People don’t make better choices, and free people don’t like being forced to do things. But if you simply price the cost of your object properly, they’ll always make the right choice.”

  Paige jumped in again. “We’ve been hammering through a lot of power brokers and other corporate groups. No one country wants to jump first, because when you force your prices higher, you give the others an edge. But I think, given time, we might make some progress. Even if you don’t believe global warming is real, we hammer the pollution side of this. We hammer energy independence, not having to rely on a foreign country’s oil. We hammer the idea that the best use of oil isn’t to vaporize it through combustion and then never have access to it again, but to use it in plastics, which are recyclable. Our civilization can’t exist without that. Save the plastic, burn something else. And what the politicians keep asking for is time.”

  “So we’re giving them time,” Ivan said. “The solar shield can mitigate the planetary warming trend. Whether you believe warming is manmade or not, the trend is on record. From the moment the Northwest Passage became passable by actual overseas ship traffic for the first time in human history at the turn of the century, it’s been undeniable that the polar region has warmed. Even the strongest denialist is in the position of saying, sure it’s warmed up, but it’s not humanity’s fault. That’s when they talk about cycles or the sun or some bullshit like that. When glaciers are something you read about in picture books but can’t see anymore, no one is arguing whether it’s a real phenomenon or not, they’re just trying to assign blame. The cloud can cool the planet again, to give us the time to get to a solution. Help us get that time.”

  “What is you want out of us?” Roo asked.

  “You three captured someone who knows about the nuke, maybe even about where it is, right?” Ivan asked. “Can you give him to us.”

  “No.” Roo shook his head, locks swinging. “Not ours to move around anymore. We gave him to the fleet.”

  Ivan’s lips tightened. “Them? You gave him to them,” he spat. “Fuck. Fuck. Once the shield is fully initialized, we become a voice at the world table. A serious voice. Because then, we’re a superpower. The Earth will have a voice. It will be Gaia. They don’t want that. They’re the ones behind the fucking nuke. Unbelievable.”

  He turned and walked out, lip curled in disgust, the entire cloak of careful geniality dropped.

  Paige watched him go, eyes narrowing. “I’m sorry,” she said as the doors closed behind him. “He’s under an extraordinary amount of stress. The board of directors, they weren’t forewarned. They’re pushing hard to have us turn over the command of the cloud to the UN.”

  Anika cocked her head. “That is a good idea. The blockade would stop. We could focus on finding the nuke, yes?”

  Paige looked down. “It’s hard to trust that they will make the right choices when they’ve made so many bad ones. And as Ivan points out, it’s very probable that they were the ones that put the nuke here to stop the cloud.”

  “You playing a dangerous game of chicken,” Roo observed.

  “If it comes to innocent lives or the cloud, I know what Ivan will choose,” Paige muttered. “But we couldn’t live with ourselves unless we tried. You understand that? We have a chance to turn the world around. Who lets that go without a fight? I’m not going to. Ivan is headed off to keep talking to the Polar Fleet’s commanders to buy us some time. We should use it to find the device. Are you still interested in finishing what you came here for, Anika?”

  She wasn’t so sure now. A lot of that righteou
s anger had leached out of her. She’d gone off to slay a dragon, in revenge, and now she felt like she was standing in the shadow of something even larger, that blotted out the sun overhead. Huge, implacable, and monstrous.

  But Gabriel’s assured words, telling her to go home, to stay out of the way, kept floating around the back of her head.

  She wasn’t going anywhere.

  “We’ll help any way we can,” she said. “But what do you want from us now that we can’t give you Gabriel? You have to have more resources than we do.”

  “You’d think that,” Paige said. “But Ivan pulled Gaia Security off the hunt. A needle in a haystack isn’t worth hunting. He wants GS ready in case there are any other surprises the G-35 have in Thule for us. We know there was a lot of traffic into Thule via military transport, not just you three.”

  “He gave up the hunt for the nuke?” Anika couldn’t believe it.

  Paige nodded. And it didn’t look like she agreed with the decision. “There’s a lot of data that Thule citizens have generated and are generating. We put out a bounty, and pictures of the men, and all the information we have. We’re trying to crowd-source the hunt. Our corporate data services are even paying people to look through Thule’s public-archived video feeds to hunt them. I need someone here to sift through all that. I know who you work for, Roo, and that you’re good at this.”

  Roo shrugged. “If your security forces are elsewhere, what happens if we find something?”

  “I’d talked Ivan into getting upstairs to meet you all when Wynter called. When he thought you could give us a good lead, he was willing to commit resources. That changed. If things change again, he will do what’s necessary.”

  Violet had been watching Paige very intently since Ivan stormed out. “For a cofounder, you seem a bit cut out of the loop, Paige.”

  Paige bit a lip. “This is Ivan’s baby. He sees this as his last change to give his grandchildren a better world.”