Arctic Rising

by Tobias S. Buckell

  “It’s not a bad world, right now. It needs fixing, but we’re not dressed up in hand-me-down football uniforms under armor and driving dune buggies. Most people live blissful, comfortable lives in the cities of their choosing,” Violet said. “Is he going to be this twitchy? This is a big fucking standoff. We don’t need twitchy here, you know that? How much do you trust that man?”

  Paige looked Vy straight on. “I’ve known him most of my life. I trust him with it, as well. Understand?”

  Vy nodded.

  Paige walked around the tables to the doors. “I will send someone in with food, drinks, whatever you need. Please feel free to use the bathroom in my office here on the left.”

  * * *

  In minutes, Roo had all the touch screens lying on the table propped up and displaying information, and instead of the Gaia logo hovering in the air in the empty space the table curved around, he projected a map of Thule.

  A few minutes later he chuckled. “We have unlimited access to Gaia’s crowd-sourcing initiative. Paige just sent me the passwords and an unlimited bank account. We have ten thousand people across the world using good old-fashioned eyeball 1.0 to look at millions of photos and video from all around Thule for us. Anything they tag as looking like the guys who unloaded that big box in the Pytheas sub harbor gets forwarded to us. We cross-match that to locations that I’ll put up on the main projector here. I’m cross-referencing possible hits to nearby buildings that would be good launch points.”

  Anika pointed at the large chunks of ice artificially calving themselves free of the periphery of Thule, as well as the barges and portions of the harbor drifting away. “What if it’s on one of those?”

  “They’ll have come in deep into the ice,” Roo said. “They won’t risk being out on the edges near the demesnes that are breaking away.”

  “Why is that?”

  “If it’s really a G-35 spy group doing this,” he explained, “they’ll want it to look like it was launched from Thule. Being on a piece of land getting towed out near the blockade doesn’t quite fit that bill.”

  But that didn’t make Anika feel better. “Roo, you work for those people. Why are you still here, really?”

  Roo stopped typing and looked at her. “Anegada.”

  Vy looked at him. “What?”

  Anika thought about his home, lying under the raised water. For her, the rants about global changes seemed far off. To Roo, it was personal. This hit his family, his people. Everything.

  They settled in with the screens, scanning results thrown up in a hierarchy of decision-making algorithms and forwarded by teams of anonymous people, scattered all over the globe, tapped by Gaia to work on looking for faces in the crowds and other patterns that might betray their quarry.

  Time stretched out, pulled apart, the streams of information broken by bathroom breaks and coffee. Anika was having trouble engaging, she kept slipping off somewhere else.

  There was something she had to do, and she wasn’t going to be able to truly focus on the waterfall of results until she did it.

  “Can I borrow your phone, Roo?” she asked. “I need to call someone.”

  34

  Anika got out of the elevator and checked with the security guards to make sure she could get back in, then slipped outside into the cold.

  She took a deep breath, then pulled out Roo’s phone.

  The numbers came to her fingers quickly enough. She’d tapped them into her phone often enough. Except for the last one.

  Her finger always remained poised over the last number, though, unable to commit. Unable to push past the resistance of years of silence and habit.

  This time she finished the sequence with a slight shudder, a release of some tension inside of her that she hadn’t realized was there. It had ridden alongside her for so long it had become a part of her world.

  There was a ring, and then a second, and on the third the connection clicked, and a tired voice said, “Hello?”

  “Hello, Mother?” Anika asked, her voice betraying her with a slight tremor. “It’s me, it’s Anika.”

  There was no response, only a faint scratchiness that sounded like static.

  “Hello?” Anika said.

  It wasn’t static, but sniffling. “I’m sorry,” came a gulp in that old, precise English accent that Anika associated with a large, busy, dusty house and comfort and safety, and then heartbreak and confusion and anger. The one she sometimes heard her father listening to, when he would watch her movies late at night when he thought Anika was asleep. “I’m sorry. I never thought I’d hear your voice again.”

  “All you had to do was call,” Anika said.

  “After what I had done, I figured you have the right to be left alone,” her mother replied. “But when Abazu called to say you had crashed your airship, I was terrified. I started trying to call you, but your phone is cut off. When I called, he said he hadn’t heard from you in two days!”

  “I’m okay.” Shit. She needed to call her father. He would be a mess. “Mother, where is your ship right now?”

  She’d retired to a convalescent cruise ship. Somewhere some accountant had realized that the cost of a retirement home in the Western world wasn’t too far different from that of the daily cost for a cruise tour. Setting it up on a ship allowed the companies to attract not just the elderly with the promise of seeing the world in their twilight years, but offering the same carrot to young doctors and caretakers.

  Ever since her mother’s retirement cruise ship hit the polar waters, her dad had been pressuring her to go see her mother.

  “My friends and I had dinner at the captain’s table last night, and he said we were somewhere north of Ellesmere Island.”

  Anika relaxed. A bit. “That’s good. Have you turned around yet?”

  “Well, the captain has been waiting for this whole blockade thing to blow over, to see if we can still visit Thule. I’m rather excited, I’ve never been to the North Pole, you know.”

  “It’s not going to blow over, Mother. It’s only going to get worse. Are you able to get out? Maybe fly somewhere to visit family, or a friend?”

  “You know I can’t, Anika. I signed over my house and my retirement account to the ship in order to retire here. They own everything, and the only travel I can do is with the ship.”

  Anika sighed heavily into the phone. “Maybe I can…” But she couldn’t. Her accounts would be frozen. She couldn’t do anything.

  “Anika, what’s wrong?” her mother asked. “Where are you? Are you in trouble?”

  “I’m in Thule,” she said. “Tell your captain things are getting worse. Tell him Thule is breaking apart, demesnes are fleeing. It’s bad here. Warn him away. Be safe.”

  “Anika!”

  She cut the phone connection off. She stared off at the sky and heard distant thuds and clanging. More activity. She should call her dad, and while she was reassuring him she was okay, see if he could pay for a helicopter ride for her mother off the ship and to Greenland.

  Vy tapped her shoulder, startling her. “Hi, sweetness!” She had a pack of cigarettes in her hand.

  “What are you doing up here, smoking?”

  Vy shook her head, put an arm around Anika, and led her even further away from the building. “Told ’em I was out for a smoke. Wanted to see if you were okay.”

  They walked back up to the overlook, then Vy glanced around.

  “What’s wrong?” Anika asked.

  Vy pocketed the cigarettes. “So, do you think everyone at any software company headquarters in Silicon Valley walks around with submachine guns?”

  “It’s like a military base down there,” Anika agreed. “But most software companies don’t have half the world’s navies circling around like angry sharks. You think they don’t want to find the nuke?”

  “No,” Vy said. “They want to find it. But we still need to be careful, okay? People with guns have a habit of using them.”

  “And we’re going to need their help, and
protection,” Anika said.

  Vy looked over at her. “Thinking that far ahead?”

  “If we secure and disable the nuke, then whoever put it out here is going to be angry with us. And who is that? Some sort of intelligence agency. We will be criminals.”

  “Roo will be safe, he has the connections,” Vy said.

  “And do you trust him still? He’s really taking to the whole Gaia song and dance down there. That stuff hits him hard, because of his home.”

  Vy shrugged. “I trust him as much as I can trust anyone I’ve known for several years. But yes. He’s good people. He’ll be okay. As for me, this won’t change things too much. I’m already a minor criminal. Grass is legal, but you know I dabble in moving other products. You’re the one who’s hit the major career change.”

  Yes. She was right. Anika looked down. Her quiet, stable, life: ripped up and torn apart. Everything she’d slowly worked toward. Gone.

  Vy moved closer and turned her around. “You have a place, with me. If you want it.”

  “What’ll I do?” Anika asked, looking into Vy’s pale eyes. The wind tugged at her hair.

  “Shit, are you kidding me? I’ll keep you in a style you’re not accustomed to: living under an alternate identity in some non-extradition country! Don’t tell me you didn’t grow up dreaming someone would sweep you off your feet and tell you that.”

  Anika laughed, and pulled her closer. “Okay,” she said. “I guess I’m stuck with you for a while, then, Vy.”

  They kissed, a faint brush of the lips. And then a deeper kiss, pulling each other closer together so that they existed in a tiny world of warmth in the cold.

  Their breath steamed the air between their faces when they pulled apart.

  “You’re a pilot,” Vy said. “If you come with me, there will always be work for you.”

  “Not flying airships, though,” Anika said, a tiny note of sadness creeping in.

  “That could be a problem. But never say never.” Vy smiled.

  “It was a childhood wish anyway,” Anika admitted. “And I got to live that dream for a while, anyway. I have no regrets.”

  “That’s the spirit,” Vy said. Then she pointed. “Look!”

  A shaggy, beige polar bear ambled its way along a floe, then jumped into the water. It paddled its way to the ice shelf underneath their vantage point, then clambered on.

  It sat down and looked up at them.

  The two of them stared back, quiet, only the sound of snapping ice in the distance.

  Then Vy’s phone rang.

  The moment broke, and the bear began to paw the air. “He’s hoping for a ham sandwich,” Vy said sadly. “The tourists probably toss him food from here.”

  She turned back away and answered the phone. “It’s Roo. He says he thinks he’s found a good lead. He’s on his way up, and Gaia Security is coming with him.”

  35

  Paige Greer arrived at the surface and waved them over. “We’re scrambling men,” she said breathlessly as they raced down the sloping road with her.

  “Where’s Roo?” Anika asked.

  “Up ahead.”

  Three armored cars braked to a stop at the entrance to the polar preserve and Gaia’s underground facility. Roo opened one of the doors and waved them in.

  “How’d you find them? That was quick, wasn’t it?”

  “I’m that good,” Roo grinned. “It was lead.”

  “For shielding?” Anika asked.

  “They didn’t want another scatter camera to hunt them down, so they purchased sheets of lead. Gabriel mentioned that they would be shielded and hard to find. So far most of the hunt has been for the radiation. But I went hunting for lead. Once I found the lead, I found four possible locations. This is as close as we can get this quick.”

  “We’ll get teams out to each building,” Paige said. “See if we can secure local help to check them out. See if anything turns up.”

  “They won’t give up easily,” Anika said, thinking of Gabriel.

  “I know,” Paige said.

  * * *

  They stopped a block away from the target, near a cluster of dome-shaped silvered buildings jacked up on piston stilts.

  “This is the Peary demesne,” Paige said. “We secured the right to place our men around the building, but volunteer community police are insisting they accompany us.”

  More Gaia flatbed trucks ripped up ice as they braked to a halt.

  “Not a dictatorship here, then?” Anika asked.

  Paige brushed hair out of her eyes. “Peary’s modeled after Brazilian participatory budget and radical municipal democracy, with a few variants. People committee-vote on all municipal budget matters and draw up the budgets and where tax money goes; municipal employees serve as expert consultants, but have no say in the budget or projects list, they are contractors that execute what the voters decide every quarter needs done. Stops backscratching and corruption. These guys take it a step further: there are no municipal employees, municipal spots are volunteer positions. If you can’t find the time, then you can pay to have a subcontractor do your duty. But it means you’re stuck with waiting for damn amateurs to run out here.”

  Several Peary citizens were indeed showing up, pulling on bright red-and-blue vests over their bulky cold weather gear and waving at them.

  “Location two is clear,” one of the security detail reported.

  One of the Peary volunteers walked over and introduced himself as the on-duty sergeant. He wore large goggles, and Anika could see information was scrolling across his field of vision. Probably some sort of software package that let the volunteer police link up with each other.

  “We have a hundred community protectors moving in,” he said. “Thirty are in full riot gear. Nonlethal instruments. I have four snipers that should be in position within twenty minutes. Twenty of my regulars are armed with low-caliber pistols. If you need more manpower, we can call in other Thule citizens from neighboring demesnes.”

  Paige nodded. “Okay. My force will go in strong, are you okay with hanging back? We want you to catch anyone who bolts.”

  The volunteer nodded. “How hard are you going in?”

  “They’re possibly sitting on a nuke, how hard do you want us to go in?” Paige looked carefully at the sergeant.

  He grimaced, and looked upward, accessing some piece of information from his goggles. “We’re in a hard spot,” he said. “Because my fellow police want to remind you, legally, that you have not proven without a doubt the people you’re hunting are the ones inside this building. You could be going in full force…”

  He never finished his sentence—the sound of gunfire erupted from the building in question.

  “We found them!” someone shouted, unnecessarily.

  Everyone ducked behind one of the large pylons holding up the nearest building.

  “They’re shooting up the block,” someone shouted.

  Roo shook his head. “We should have gone in without asking the demesne for help,” he chided Paige. “All they needed to do was grab a volunteer policeman and hold him hostage, let him tell them when any alerts came for him to assemble…”

  Paige opened her mouth, then closed it. “Shit.”

  “We should have done a person-to-person communications-are-compromised routine,” the sergeant muttered. Then he whispered into the palm of his hand, “Snipers: fire when targets present.”

  “Sergeant, they’re going to be in there trying to arm that thing,” Roo shouted. “Time is not on our side.”

  “We’re going to rush the building with you,” the sergeant told Paige. “We’re all in.”

  “Glad to hear it.” Paige tapped an earpiece. “The Peary volunteers are following you in. Give them five minutes to assemble, then break down the doors.”

  “Paige, I can use a weapon,” Anika said. She’d given hers up to get into Gaia headquarters, but not retrieved it.

  Paige put a finger up to her lip and shook her head. “You’ve come fa
r enough, Anika.”

  The gunfire slowed, and Anika watched Peary volunteers in a wide assortment of winter jackets keeping low, advancing over the snow, dodging around the metallic forest of pylons underneath everything.

  Three and a half minutes passed in what felt like a handful of held breaths in between pauses in the gunfire, and then the attack began. Anika left the cover of the pylons to watch.

  Gaia Security used clear bulletproof riot shields to protect themselves as they stormed up stairs. Door rams were deployed, and after three swings, the doors crumpled back.

  Men and women poured inside, and the sound of gunfire increased. A full-on fusillade of distant firecracker pops of varying tones and frequencies, shouts, and more door cracking.

  And much like popcorn, after a while, it slowed down. An occasional shot sounded, randomly. Then quiet.

  Roo started walking toward the building.

  “Mr. Jones,” Paige said sharply.

  But he ignored her and kept walking. Anika stood up and jogged after him, and Vy joined them.

  “They didn’t have a chance to fire it,” Anika said. “Right?” She hadn’t seen anything. She’d been looking for that flash of smoke, the contrail of a missile, or a rocket, or whatever it was.

  But all there had been was gunfire.

  “Right?” she repeated.

  36

  They ran up the stairs, boots clanging on metal, and rounded the doors. A body lay at the foot of steps that led up to the next level, blood continuing to expand out in a steaming dark pool.

  In the corridor that ran past the steps, three men sat against the wall as one of the Gaia men checked their wounds.

  “Up,” Roo said.

  They stepped carefully over the dead man and ran up, with Paige not far behind.

  Two flights of stairs, three more bodies, including one Peary volunteer being carried down the stairs in a stretcher, a raggedy-doll-like hand flopping over the edge.

  Had the price been worth it? Or had more people died in vain?

  The top floor was dominated by a skylight and ruined walls. They’d been knocked out by sledgehammer. A hastily boarded up gap covered in a blue tarp in the side of one major wall allowed chilled air into the entire upper floor.