Arctic Rising

by Tobias S. Buckell

  When he crouched back down, Anika grabbed his shoulders. “Who do you work for, Gabriel? Because the military types who picked you up, they all kept hearing back that you were retired. So who are you contracting out to?”

  “I work for a group whose interests are harmed by the ice returning,” Gabriel said. “And that is all you need to know.”

  “I’m about to die helping you,” Anika spat. “The least you can do is give me this satisfaction.” The satisfaction of knowing more about the forces that had turned her life upside down and led to her crouching here, wondering how many more minutes she had left.

  “You’re wrong,” Gabriel said. He reversed the rifle. “About a lot of things. In particular—”

  “What?”

  He smacked her in the face with the butt of the rifle. Anika’s vision went dark, and she staggered backward. She had the pistol up, but as she opened her eyes, she realized he had the Diemaco trained on her. She wasn’t going to be able to shoot him. “Gabriel? What are you doing?” She was thinking about double betrayals. Wondering if he’d really set the missile to launch.

  Gabriel smiled sadly. “No one’s going to miss an old spy who did horrible things no one wants dredged back up,” he told her. “But you have someone waiting for you. So you’re wrong: you’re not going to die. I’m going to hold them off, so that they don’t shoot the missile, or damage it. You, on the other hand, have about two minutes to run for safety. Do it, or I’ll shoot you.”

  “Really?” She wasn’t buying it, and besides, she was still wearing her bulletproof vest. She took a step forward. He tightened his stance, grinned slightly, and shot her in the upper left shoulder, just clear of the vest.

  Stuffing flew out of her jacket and hung in the air while the impact of the bullet smacked half of her body backward. Anika staggered another step back, clutching the top of her arm as blood seeped out. “You fucker,” she spat, the pain trickling down through her.

  The bullet had hit shoulder flesh and exited. Gabriel had damn good aim. Her eyes narrowed and his smile faded. “Run,” he repeated, and shifted his aim at her temple.

  “Where?” she responded. “We’re cut off. There’s no ‘away,’ Gabriel.”

  “Take two more steps backward, and look over your shoulder.” He gestured with his rifle.

  Anika took the steps and glanced. At first, she saw nothing but the ruined edge of ice, road, structure, and the ocean out past it. Then she saw it. A small antenna, rocking back and forth, hard to spot when the angle made it look like part of the jumbled mess the demesne had left behind when tearing itself away from Thule.

  She turned back to Gabriel and threw him the pistol. “You’ll need that more than I will.”

  “Ah, now you trust me,” he said sadly.

  After one last look, Anika sprinted for the railing.

  The movement prompted more gunfire, and she could hear the slap of bullets against the walkway as she slid off the raised section and dropped to the road below. She was standing right next to the base of the missile.

  “Roo!” she shouted, looking around at the wall the raised walkway created on this side of the road. There were a few bodies in Gaia Security uniforms, but no Roo. “Roo!”

  “Ras, woman, keep quiet. Over here.” He was slumped on the ground near the lip of a half-destroyed bridge on the other side of the road. All she could see was a hand waving her over.

  Anika ran across the street, drawing fire again, and hunkered down behind a twisted steel beam. Roo’d been shot in the leg. He had ripped up an undershirt to create a makeshift compress, and tied that on tight with a piece of electric wire.

  “This it,” he said to her. “Can’t hold them back much longer. I think, hearing them talk about what Ivan wants, they will kill us even if the missile goes off and they realize they lost.”

  “He said he would smite us,” Anika said. “Gabriel’s holding them off, the missile’s going to launch any second. Roo, do you trust me?”

  He glanced over. “We come this far and you asking me that?”

  From his position in the cover of the ruins of half a bridge, they couldn’t see the sea next to the ragged edge. “We have to jump,” Anika said. “I think Vy’s here.”

  Roo leaned around her and looked at the water. “You think?”

  “Someone’s here. I saw them, they’re right up against the edge. We’re going to jump.”

  “In water this cold, without survival suits, we’ll live for minutes,” Roo shouted.

  On the road across from them, the missile began to hiss and vent.

  It was going to take off any second now.

  “Death by water or death by Gaia?”

  Anika got Roo up on his good leg, and they hopped awkwardly along the remains of the bridge. Out over the cold water, the bridge groaned and shifted from the extra weight, protesting the indignities forced on it.

  The missile fired, a hot roar of exploding gases and a deep thrum of motive power. Anika shoved Roo harder, and at the very edge he glanced over at her.

  “Jump,” she said, and shoved him over first as she jumped back away from the bridge.

  The last thing she saw, just before the bridge flashed in front of her, were the ropes springing off from the missile as Gabriel cut them away.

  43

  Anika hit the water. For a moment the cold and shock narrowed the world to a faint pinprick, then her vision returned, and she was looking up at the surface of the water. It looked like a mirror over the world, out of reach far over her head.

  She kicked off her shoes, shed her bulky jacket, and kicked for the surface.

  It was so cold, it felt like the water burned her skin and face. Already she’d started shivering violently, and when she broke the surface and gasped air, it also burned her lungs and throat.

  She floundered in place for a second, looking for the ship and Vy, but stopped when she saw the missile.

  It rose, vomiting smoke and fire behind it, speeding up faster and faster as she and Roo watched, breath steaming the air. “It’s off,” Roo said, a note of wonder in his strained voice.

  At the edge of the road, Gabriel limped to a stop, looking up at the missile.

  “Jump!” Anika shouted, though it hurt to shout and seemed to take almost all of her energy. “Jump!”

  Gabriel raised a hand, as if to wave, and then the sky flashed and a pillar of pure light smacked the road. There was no Gabriel, no apartments, no nothing. Anika’s eyesight was washed out by the sudden attack from the sky.

  But it hadn’t gotten the missile; she could still hear its roar in the background, even as the crackle and explosions of the heat ray destroyed the entire block she’d just been standing on.

  It was okay, she thought, that the cold had sapped so much heat from her body that she was starting to feel warm, at least they’d gotten the missile off.

  But instead of slowing down and slumping into the water, she was feeling strong. Warm and strong.

  Roo grabbed her shoulder. “Swim for the colder water,” he hissed. “We’re too close here, it’s warming up.”

  She wasn’t dying. The solar shield’s beam wasn’t just chewing up the block, but the waste heat, bubbling out from the destruction, was also warming up the nearby water.

  Roo was right: without their sight, they’d have to swim for colder water. It was the only way to know they were swimming away from Thule.

  “This way!” he shouted.

  She followed his voice out into the bitter chill, but someone else shouted from behind them. “No, this way!”

  It was Vy.

  Anika swam toward the voice as the ocean began to scald her. Then Vy grabbed her hand and hauled her onto a swim platform, with Roo hauling himself up right behind her.

  Anika’s vision began to return as she blinked and looked around to see that she stood on the back of a very luxurious forty-foot motor yacht. She shielded her eyes and looked back toward Thule as best she could. They floated just a few hundred feet awa
y from the ripped up, and now mostly slagged remains of it. They were just far enough away that she could feel the heat on her skin. Had they delayed by just half a minute, they would have been cooked in their skin, she realized with a shudder.

  Vy left them to run up to the enclosed cockpit above the main cabin. The water started to boil as Vy gunned the engines all the way up into a full howl and got the large boat up to speed, headed back into the cold Arctic Ocean.

  Anika crawled up onto the bridge with a limping Roo.

  Vy looked back at them. “I heard the gunshots,” she said. “I was already near the boat when you called, when I heard the gunshots I knew you’d been found, so I took the boat out.”

  Anika grabbed her in a big full-of-warm-sea-water hug, and Vy reached up to hold her hand, while still keeping them on course.

  “How long?” she asked Roo.

  “Anything we can hit up ahead?”

  “No.”

  “Then close your eyes,” he said.

  The motor yacht surged on ahead. Anika closed her eyes and held on to Vy as the deck shifted under their feet.

  Then the backs of her eyelids briefly lit up.

  At the same instant, the engines died, the electronics burned out by the electromagnetic pulse far overhead. They surfed to a slow stop on the waves.

  “Okay,” Roo said softly. “Let’s see it.”

  They walked outside and looked up at the troubled sky. Far overhead, a glowing, multihued fireball of apocalypse continued expanding, punching its way through the silver cloud that dominated overhead.

  “Holy fuck,” Anika said, squeezing Vy’s hand.

  “Yes.” Vy nodded her head. “What the hell did we just do?”

  * * *

  Punctured silver spheres dropped out of the sky like a strangely light hail as they floated, dead in the water. Vy asked Roo about the risk of radiation, but he shrugged. “They said it was ‘clean,’ yeah. We should be okay as long as it doesn’t rain. Most of the spheres that drop will fall because of the pulse.” Then he left them to hopped his down into the palatial main cabin, looking for tools that might help repair the EMP damage. Anika and Vy remained outside the cockpit near the railing, watching the skies.

  “I’m done,” Anika said, leaning against Vy. “I don’t have anything left. I don’t care who Gabriel worked for, I don’t care about Ivan Cohen or who caused the people on that ship to shoot me down. I just want a life again. And I don’t need to worry about my standing in the UNPG anymore because of being with you, because I’ll be on the run now. Will you come with me?” She wanted to visit her mother, then see her father again. In person. And then after that, she and Vy would find somewhere where Anika could pilot for money. They could make a life.

  Vy laughed. “I’m broke, they took all my money. I’ll go anywhere you go, as long as it’s warm and has a proper day and night cycle.”

  They kissed again, and with no interruptions or worries Anika could just close her eyes and feel Vy, warm against her still soggy clothes.

  Anika looked up at the large gas ball in the sky. “I thought nuclear explosions looked like mushroom clouds,” she murmured.

  “I think it has to be near the ground for that,” Vy said.

  “Do you think we did the right thing?” Anika asked, running a hand over Vy’s cheek.

  Vy flinched slightly. “We have to hope.”

  Roo limped up to them and held up a sphere he’d swiped off the deck. “I think we did the right thing. You were right; we’ll do it better the next time around. We can reverse engineer these things, given time. It’ll happen. Listen…” Roo started to say, but Vy cut him off.

  “What are you going to do, Roo? After all this?”

  “Go back to my old life. Right now, I think, once I get a new phone and some equipment back, I’m going to see if I can get these seceded parts of Thule to consider coming down to the Caribbean. Tourism died off due to the overactive hurricane seasons these last decades, but we strong still. We have sea walls, solar and wind to stay energy independent. But we still need factories and greenhouses, yes? Get them down to the Caribbean where it isn’t the Wild West like up here. If I can get some seed money rounded up, and a new boat, I’ll be going from floating demesne to demesne to convince them to get towed down south. Once they build up on barges instead of ice, right.”

  Anika smiled. “It sounds good. Messy, democratic, and good.”

  Roo shook himself back to the present. “Look, while I was down there I peeked at the engines. They’re shot, but I went up to the forecastle. There’s a parasail packed and ready for deploy. I imagine Paige used it to cut fuel costs. It’s not very big, but it will be enough for us to sail on out. We don’t have to be dead in the water long.”

  “That’s great news, Roo,” Vy said. “But what about the blockade?”

  Roo smiled. “Oh, I’m sure I can pull a few strings to let us through without problems. After everything we’ve been involved in, they’re going to want us to disappear just as badly as we want to.”

  “I don’t think I’ll rest easy until we’re well clear of it,” Vy said.

  “I understand. Hey, there’s something else you two should see downstairs, though,” Roo said.

  “What?”

  “Come look. You’ll want to see this.”

  * * *

  The main stateroom of the lower cabin was dominated by what looked like a custom-installed bank vault. It had been squeezed in, and was not part of the original build at all. The legs had been bolted and then welded to the back bulkhead, and the grim, bulky, square metal surface matched none of the silvered and modern curves of the interior decor of the yacht.

  “Did Paige tell you anything about this?” Roo asked.

  Anika shook her head. “No.”

  “It’s a very particular safe,” Roo said. “I’ve seen a few of these models in the intelligence community. If it is what I think it is, it’s rigged.”

  “Rigged?” Vy had a curious smile. “As in: explosives?”

  “Yeah. That thing would take this whole ship down with it if someone without the code tried to force their way in. And if Paige has some sort of time-delay check-in code for it, it may yet go off with us on board.”

  “Wait,” Anika said, straightening and walking forward to the giant safe. She had a feeling she knew what this was about. And then at the same time, she sighed. She’d jumped in the water. Had the ink held? “It won’t do that. She gave me the numbers.”

  “Numbers?”

  Anika rolled the sleeve of her shirt back up her arm and looked down. The ink had mostly run. It was all an illegible stain of blue smudges on her brown skin.

  They all stared at the blue ink for a moment.

  Anika reached up and grabbed the large dial. “Forty-five, sixteen, seventy-nine, twelve,” she said as she rotated it through the numbers.

  With a loud thunk the thick safe door swung open, and the three of them stared inside.

  “Well now,” said Anika, as the extra reflected light from inside the safe dappled her face, “that changes … everything.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I have two people to initially thank in a big way for encouraging me to create Arctic Rising: Karl Schroeder and Paolo Bacigalupi. Karl and I collaborated on a short story back in 2007 called “Mitigation” about a mostly ice-free Arctic. It appeared in the anthology Fast Forward 2, edited by Lou Anders, and was also reprinted in one of the Year’s Best anthologies shortly after. The idea to do something like this book has been stuck in the back of my head ever since spending that weekend in Toronto with Karl brainstorming the geopolitical intrigues of a new, seventh ocean. Both Karl and I lamented the lack of fiction in this sort of setting, and we wished to write more near-future explorations ourselves.

  I had also come to know Paolo well through shared time at the novel workshop Blue Heaven. His infectious enthusiasm for probing all manner of around-the-corner ecological futures and similar milieus (to amazing success and acclai
m, as we were all to soon find out) also lit a fire under me to do more of this when I met him, leading to my writing a novella and another short story in this vein.

  In 2008, when my editor, Paul Stevens, asked if I would do something different for my next book after Sly Mongoose, I already came prepared with a rough idea for Arctic Rising thanks to conversations with Paolo and Karl.

  Due to a genetic heart defect that took me out of the game for a while in late 2008 and early 2009, getting a full draft took a lot longer than expected. In a way, it’s been quite a marathon for me, but one I’m glad to have finished, even if it was mostly by walking. My thanks go out to the folks at Tor, particularly my editor, Paul, again, for being patient as I put my life back together. I also have to thank Eddie Schneider and Joshua Bilmes, my agents, for being patient as I limped my way back into finishing this project.

  Another round of thanks goes to the crew of Blue Heaven 2009, who read and critiqued the first fifty pages. Big thanks go to Greg van Eekhout and Paolo Bacigalupi, who helped me brainstorm pieces of the last third of the book.

  More big thanks go to the various branches of the military that release publicly funded studies and foresight materials online where greedy little authorial minds like mine can hunt them down for future idea mining. Most of the ideas and scenarios in this book came from reading about what those dudes are worried about. The amount of time they spend worried about peak oil and how to run armies on solar power, you’d think the armed forces were a bunch of hippies who wanted to run their Humvees on fry oil. Certainly, one thing I came to find is that there is a massive disconnect between people who study the future, whether it be scientists, weather experts, or military strategists and brass, and politicians and talking heads who seem to think there aren’t some challenges around the corner. When I started writing this novel in 2008, the navy reports I was using in regards to Arctic ice didn’t include ice-free scenarios in the possibility charts; by the time I was done with a draft it was on the worst-case plot, and now it looks like ice-free summers are a given very soon. I hope this book comes out before my “science-fictional” plot idea of a generally ice-free Arctic isn’t quite so shocking.