Arctic Rising

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 silence.