Arctic Rising

by Tobias S. Buckell

  The other houses with Gaia people in them weren’t being vaporized, but they were being heated. People were throwing their hands up, then retreating inside. Smoke was curling off the outsides, but that was it.

  But it was enough. The SEALs had the house surrounded, and all they had to focus on were the stairs in front of them. Four SEALs were at the main entrance, waiting for Gallo.

  He nodded and gave the signal to go in.

  Grenades were tossed inside, and the SEALs went in through the door, rifles covering every angle, firing.

  “Clear.”

  From the other side of the first floor came another series of shots. “Clear.”

  Anika had the Diemaco trained up the stairs, but there was already a SEAL covering them. The third team went up the stairs, a fluid concerted movement that resulted in more brief bursts of fire, then the calm call of “clear.”

  “Third floor’s clear,” they called a few seconds later.

  When she got up there Anika saw why. The snipers had already taken care of any threats on that floor by getting positions that let them fire down in through the skylights. Five Gaia men lay in pools of their own blood around the missile.

  One of the SEALs saw her looking at them and nodded. “Hooyah, ma’am.”

  “Dee: get on the windows for the counterattack,” Gallo growled.

  “Sir.”

  Two SEALs ripped the tarp off the side of the wall and kicked out the rough timber frame that held the tarp in place, while down below one of the pickup trucks pulled into position, the paint on the top of the cab blistered from the quick drive through the heat. One of the snipers hopped out and waved.

  The long timbers that made the crude crane, tackle still on the end, were quickly hammered back into place by five SEALs so that they stuck out of the side of the house. Roo pitched in.

  They slid the missile down out of the cradle onto the floor. Then, using plain brute force, muscled it onto a wooden sled.

  Gallo used wax from a kit to lube up the floor, and they shoved the sled out onto a crude rope sling hanging from the crane. As they were doing that, the curtain of light surrounding the house snapped off.

  Anika called Paige. “What’s going on?”

  “He’s figured it out,” Paige said. “Get out of there. There’s not much I can do…”

  A massive blast of light struck a nearby house. They could feel the heat wash across the street as the house slumped into a pile of fused rubble.

  “Get on top,” Gallo snapped, shoving Anika and Roo onto the missile. He handed her the cables and laptops and gear, all shoved into a large duffel bag. “Gabriel’s in the pickup. Go!”

  Figures flitted around the pylons of nearby buildings. But just as quickly as Anika noticed them, short gunfire sent them scurrying back for cover.

  She held the rope as they were lowered, looking up at Gallo and his men slowly easing the missile down.

  At fourteen feet long, six feet of the missile still hung out over the edge of the bed. As the missile slowly settled in, the pickup truck’s springs groaning, Anika and Roo grabbed spare straps to secure the tip.

  Every slip seemed to be a catastrophic mistake, and every second stretched into an eternity Anika didn’t feel she had.

  “Get the truck clear!” Gallo shouted from overhead as he leaned out over the side of the house on the crane.

  The truck lurched into gear, tracks clattering and slipping in the water and slush underneath. Anika crouched down and grabbed ahold of the lip of the bed. They’d gotten halfway across the street, when the light struck the house.

  Anika covered her face with the crook of her elbow as heat washed over her. She could barely breathe, or think, and when it snapped off, she gasped and started coughing.

  As her eyesight slowly returned, she stared at the gaping, bubbling pit where the house had once stood.

  “Jesus,” she whispered.

  Someone was screaming, and she realized it wasn’t her: it was the SEAL driving the truck. He was punching the dashboard and swearing, but keeping them on the road as they trundled farther and farther away from the glowing hot debris behind them.

  Shadowy figures ran along the pylons, trying to keep up with the truck as it sped up. Some of them started opening fire, but both Roo and Anika braced their backs against the cab and started firing bursts at any movement.

  Three blocks later, and the attacks stopped.

  Anika’s phone buzzed.

  “Paige?”

  “You’re alive. And you have the missile?” Paige’s voice sounded even fainter, more papery, with a faint gurgle.

  “Yes.” Anika decided to spare her the casualty details.

  “They’re cutting through the door with a torch of some kind,” Paige said. Anika heard several shallow breaths. “So, I want you to remember something really important. Do you have a pen?”

  Anika patted herself down. “Roo! Pen?”

  He shrugged.

  “Forty-five, sixteen, seventy-nine, twelve,” Paige said over a loud crackling and spitting sound in the background.

  “What? What’s that for?” Anika asked.

  “Forty-five, sixteen, seventy-nine, twelve,” Paige repeated. A loud crack sounded. “They’re coming through.”

  Forty-five, sixteen, seventy-nine, twelve, Anika said to herself. Then again. She rapped on the glass window, and when Gabriel slid it open for her, she leaned through and grabbed a pen off the seat, where Gallo had left it.

  She rolled her left sleeve back and wrote the numbers down on her forearm.

  “Good luck,” Paige said.

  The sound of a single gunshot made Anika jump.

  On the other end, someone picked the phone up. “We’re hunting you. And when we find you, we will quite literally smite you,” Ivan Cohen said, then cut the connection.

  For a stunned, long moment, Anika sat with the phone in her hands, staring at it.

  They passed a streetlight, and Anika looked at the tiny camera mounted at the top. She raised a fist and flipped it off as they passed underneath.

  42

  They’d ducked the truck under some buildings for cover, hoping that Ivan’s ability to ferret out their location wouldn’t be as rapid as Roo’s.

  Roo ducked his head into the back window. “Gabriel, how are we going to launch this thing?”

  “The more important question is where,” Gabriel replied slowly. “Anika said Ivan is hunting for us via public cameras. The moment he figures out where we are he’ll use the shield against us. Mainly what we need is a pit. We can slide the missile into it and get it pointed. The four of us can do that from the truck.”

  “We have a ship,” Roo said. “Can we get it aboard Paige’s ship and launch it from there?”

  “We need to be quick,” Gabriel said. “And we don’t have time to build a cradle for the missile on a ship.”

  Anika had been thinking about this since she flipped off the traffic camera. It was highly unlikely Ivan had seen that, or if he did, he was probably just now collating the footage to try to retrace their footsteps. “Was all of the Pytheas demesne ripped apart from Thule, or are there any pieces left? There won’t be cameras there. We can set the missile up in the open.”

  Gabriel tapped the surviving SEAL, he’d told them his name was Weirs, on the shoulder. Weirs put the truck back into gear and they clattered along again, leaving the perceived safety of their hiding spot.

  * * *

  The gaping ruin of tangled metal and ice where the core of Pytheas had ripped itself away from Thule stretched for a mile, looking out onto the open sea.

  Sewer lines dribbled brown water. Bridges drooped, half their span severed, leading out into midair. Jagged road edges just stopped before the ocean.

  In the distance, beams of light coalesced from the cloud to stab at the ocean over the horizon. Each blazing, eye-dazzling explosion meant another ship had been attacked. As she watched, the beam slowly moved from point to point.

  And in t
he distance, near the cloud’s edge, a steady stream of explosions. It looked like someone was testing regular munitions out on the cloud.

  The war had truly begun.

  Walking as close to the brink as she dared, Anika looked down thirty feet to the water below. Clumps of ice bobbed and smacked against the cleaved-off edge. A mile away, Anika could see Thule’s harbor. The hospital was near there. Vy would be as well.

  A few hundred feet away, a large chunk of ice creaked, groaned, and then slipped off the jagged fringe of Pytheas and into the water.

  Not a good idea to stand here, she thought, and turned back for the truck.

  Gabriel and Roo had found a raised walkway in front of a set of five-story apartments and driven the truck up onto it, then turned the truck and backed it up until the rear tires were on the edge of the walkway.

  From there they’d all used the spare ropes to slowly, carefully, lower the missile down to the ice road seven feet below.

  The missile sat on its fins pointing straight up into the air, with several pieces of rope around its midsection to brace it.

  All they needed to do was cut the ropes as it launched. Low-tech, but hopefully workable.

  Roo handed her his phone as she approached. “Violet.”

  Anika pointed at the cables leading away from the missile toward the cab of the truck. “How far away are we?”

  “Gabriel says we have telemetry. Power is good. We’re getting close.”

  Anika nodded and answered the phone. “Vy? How are you doing?”

  “They came in by helicopter and took them both away. They told me I should leave with them, because they were going to start the invasion. I refused.” Vy sounded tired. “The airborne attack will begin shortly.”

  Anika didn’t know what to say. She was still processing that bright, burning flash.

  One moment those men had been there, fighting alongside her. Fighting because of something she’d set in motion.

  And then, in a flash, they had been edited out of the universe.

  “Roo said you were on the edge of Pytheas. Do you want me to come out there?” Vy asked.

  “No,” Anika insisted. “Roo says we’re almost ready to launch. I think it would be better if you could get to Paige’s boat, get it started and ready?”

  “I’m already working on it,” Vy said. “I’ll see you soon.”

  “It…” won’t be long, she was going to say, but Anika noticed a furtive movement in the distance. Someone ducked behind a building. “I have to go, Vy. I will see you at the boat.”

  She cut the connection and reslung the Diemaco from her back down to across her front. “Roo.”

  He turned around from leaning into the cab and caught the phone as she tossed it back to him.

  “I think someone’s at the end of the street,” she said.

  Roo stepped up onto the edge of the door panel and looked over the top of the cab. “I don’t see anything,” he said, looking back down at here. “Where?”

  The window of the cab exploded and Roo dropped to the ground, swearing. Gabriel calmly slouched deeper into the seat, still looking at the laptop balanced between his stomach and the wheel of the truck. “I really was hoping they wouldn’t find us so quick,” Roo said, moving to the back of the pickup and grabbing a rifle and pocketing several grenades.

  Weir joined them, walking in a crouch. “They’re coming from the other side as well.”

  They had their backs to the open sea, the truck facing the apartment complex, and Gaia now moving in from either side. Gaia’s forces would be calling back the coordinates to Ivan Cohen any second now.

  “Shit,” Anika said. “Roo, how long do you think it takes for the shield to reposition the mirrors and attack?”

  “Minutes? It can’t be a quick process,” he said, looking up into the sky.

  Anika ignored the impulse. When the flash came for her, she didn’t want to be looking up.

  Gunfire rattled out, smacking into the ground around them. This attack was coming from their unprotected side. Weir returned fire and moved behind a concrete balustrade that decorated a set of apartments.

  “Vy said the invasion began. If that’s true, we may have longer, if Ivan is trying to shock and awe them into not continuing.” She stabbed a finger at the horizon where light danced and cracked.

  Roo shrugged and smiled sadly. “Gabriel?”

  He raised a hand. “Just hold them off while I start the launch sequence.” He looked at Anika. He’d been avoiding looking at her, visibly tensing whenever he saw her. Now those old, cold eyes narrowed. “I wonder, have you thought about the lives we could have avoided wasting had you not remained so focused on your quest for revenge?”

  Anika bit her lip. Fuck him. Now it was her turn to tense and hold something back. He was here. That was more than she would have done. And right now, they needed him to finish what he’d started. “I have.”

  Roo grabbed her and pulled her back along the bed. “Keep fire on them,” he said. “You have you back covered by Weir.”

  “Where are you going?”

  He pointed at the road the missile sat on. “If I was them, I’d be crawling along the lip or under this walkway. Now, keep an eye on the apartments. They’ll be getting up into those windows up there to get a good shot down at us.”

  Anika glanced upward. Now the dark windows looked shadowy and menacing.

  “Shit,” she muttered.

  “Seen,” Roo agreed, and then sprinted for the edge of the walkway and jumped down onto the road below.

  The pop of gunfire started.

  For the next few minutes Anika fired off quick bursts at any movement up the street while she used the apartment building’s concrete stair banisters for cover, just like Weir. She wasn’t sure half of the movement she shot at wasn’t shadows, but if it moved, she pulled the trigger, pausing only to slip out a new clip from her waistband and slap it into place.

  If this worked, she half imagined she was going to die protecting the missile.

  If it didn’t, either the people attacking would shoot her, or the sky would flare up and vaporize her at Ivan Cohen’s direction.

  At least vaporization would be instantaneous, she thought.

  She was on her last clip when Gabriel threw the laptop out of the car after yanking the cables out that led to the missile. “Weir: get ready to cut the ropes.”

  “Is it ready?” Anika asked.

  “I started the launch sequence. In two minutes it’ll fire. You don’t want to be standing here,” Gabriel said. “Give me your gun.”

  “Why?”

  Weir jogged their way, pulling out a large hunting knife.

  “I’m going to shoot that laptop so that if they rush us, they can’t plug back in and stop the launch. And I’m going to hold them back from damaging the missile.”

  A foot away, Weir jerked as a hail of gunfire slapped the vehicle’s far side, the ground near them, and the rails near the missile.

  For a second, Weir looked like he was taking cover with Anika and Gabriel, who got down. Anika fired back over the top of the truck bed. But Weir didn’t stop running—he clumsily spun to his left and staggered sideways, out into the open, and collapsed.

  “Weir?” Anika shouted, horrified. Another life on her hands?

  Gabriel shook his head.

  Weir was sprawled out, looking up at the sky, a red mess of brain and blood leaking out of the side of his head onto his jacket. He was dead.

  The burst of fire faded. Part of the natural rhythm of the firefight.

  “Anika? The Diemaco?”

  Anika handed Gabriel the Diemaco and, zombie-like, pulled out the pistol from the back of her jeans. He looked down at it. “You still don’t trust me, Ms. Duncan?”

  She shook her head. She was still numbed. “No.”

  “Why?”

  The death of yet another man just a few feet away chewed through her like an acid, and the words that tumbled out were bitter, and not even aimed at G
abriel but at the messed-up situation. “Men like you use words like ‘preemptive’ and ‘just’ and chew through lives. You even destroy countries. You run around, playing your games, imagining you are gods moving the little people around on boards like game pieces. And you are right, you are not human, you are something else. But it is not gods. I flew enough of your kind into conflict zones to know the type. You know why natural resources are the curse of a developing nation? Because the rebel army meets someone like you, who parachutes into the jungle, and they say when they get control of the resources, they’ll cut you a deal. And so you give them arms, or a loan, because maybe you don’t like the current government. And the brutal flip-flopping of overthrow, violence, and overthrow continues. I know you, Gabriel. You’re the kind of man who thinks it makes any sense to smuggle a nuclear missile around the world to kill an engineering project.”

  Gabriel shifted the Diemaco. “You ignore the very simple fact that I was right, though. What exactly is wrong with you that you can’t just accept that?”

  “A broken clock is correct twice a day,” Anika said. “You are correct now. But you will always be doing things like this around the clock. That is how you are. Regular people, we are reactive. Hit us, we hit back. But you walk around looking for people to hit ahead of time. You see?”

  “You would just let Ivan Cohen dominate you all, then?” Gabriel sighted down the rifle and fired off a full burst at the laptop. Pieces of plastic and circuit board flew off into the air as it was destroyed.

  “No,” Anika said. “Your people and him, they are the same. They dictate from on high. They are always convinced that they, and only they, have all the answers. They have to force the issue. The ends justify the means. Get rid of your masters and him, the rest of us get on with living. But since we’re stuck with each other, we have this mess. Right?”

  She looked at him. She’d gotten a reaction of some kind, but she wasn’t sure.

  Gabriel spotted movement and used the rifle to quickly force someone back into cover.