Arctic Rising

39

Thule harbor had become a ghost town. Even the massive wind turbines, skyscrapers in and of themselves, had frozen in place, as if the wind had decided to flee with everyone else.

Large parts of the harbor had ripped free: docks attached to floating barges towed out to sea, only their debris left behind. Around the harbor, bridges had been severed, and large chunks of the superstructure cut by high-powered welding torches or detonated in order to free demesenes.

Anika could see, here in a conference room in one of the harbor’s taller buildings, that huge chunks of ice had been dynamited free. Large chunks of Thule, calving off and headed for the open sea, much like the free ice had once done twenty years ago. Headed for the Northwest Passage.

Whole cities out floating around the polar sea, keeping a nervous eye on their refrigeration cables.

Turning around in the large conference room, she could look out one of the corner windows, where she could still spot a few buildings on ice slipping away to open sea under the silver-gray sky.

“Ms. Duncan?”

Anika turned around. A young man in U.S. Navy uniform stood at the door. It was a wet uniform, and the young man was still shivering. The U.S. polar navy-wear was supposed to be some high-tech clothing that sealed the cuffs and trapped body heat and kept water out, not all that different from a dry suit used by scuba divers, but apparently even that still hadn’t kept him toasty. “Yes?”

Three more navy types walked through the door, with Roo following. And behind him, Gabriel in handcuffs, his usually carefully brushed hair disheveled, a glassy look in his eyes. He didn’t seem sure where he was.

Anika stared at him for a long beat, and he looked past her, out the windows.

He seemed drugged. “Roo, what’s wrong with him?”

The man standing to Gabriel’s right answered her. “He’s mildly sedated right now. He’s claustrophobic; the submarine ride over was stressful.”

She looked at him, and he finally met her eyes. “It has been a long few days, Ms. Duncan,” Gabriel said, his voice scratchy from a deep weariness that made Anika twinge. His mouth tightened. “Please, let’s hurry this up.”

“Commander Alexandra Forsythe,” said a no-nonsense officer with a shaved head, as she shook Anika’s hand, introducing herself. She pulled Anika over to a window. “The U.S. military has had plans for an orbiting solar mirror array for over forty years. The army in particular wanted to be able to concentrate solar light to solar stills and panels from orbit, in order to allow for better mobility. If there’s one organization on this planet that is aware of the mobilization limitations having to ship fuel around creates, it’s people who are faced with having to mobilize hundreds of thousands and keep them moving and using their equipment. However, other than demonstration tests, it was determined that anything bigger would be a default weaponization of space and a treaty violation. Whoever did it first would trigger a rapid arms race over our very heads. So now we’re in the middle of that very real mess and, guess what? Most of our response plans are completely inadequate for this scenario because they all assumed actual orbit, not high altitude floating bubbles controlled by an actual U.S. corporation instead of some foreign country.”

“So are you going to help us?” Anika asked.

“Some old Brit colleague from a war-gaming conference I attended five years ago calls me up and says I have to talk to Prudence Jones, like right now. And suddenly I’m finding out about nuclear bombs being in place at the site. So here’s the problem: my superiors are dealing with politicians losing their minds. The solution to this problem, an ordered attack, will cost the lives of a lot of my people, and a lot of people who’re left on Thule. So yes, Ms. Duncan, I’m going to help you set off a nuclear bomb. I shouldn’t be helping you, I’m not under orders to do so. But it’s clearly the right fucking decision, and it’s going to be a hell of a lot easier to ask forgiveness than permission here.”

Anika sagged from relief. “Thank you.”

Commander Forsythe leaned in close. “But Ms. Duncan, the reason I’m up here is this: we’re going to be ghosts, you understand? I’m not here, you’re not here, and the SEALs I’m lending you, they’ve all volunteered and will swear they were never here. We would have tried to get a special operations group from the CIA, but that requires presidential approval, and time to fly them out. With that cloud overhead, we don’t really have that, so we’re making do the best we can.” Forsythe held out a pad.

Anika looked down at it again. “What’s this?”

“A very tight, very dangerously written nondisclosure agreement that swears you to silence, quite literally on pain of death. And please take it seriously. You fuck up, and I’m spending the rest of my life in jail as well.”

“More paperwork,” Anika said.

“I take it you haven’t spent that much time in the military?” Forsythe asked.

“I’m not shocked,” Anika said. “UN Polar Guard was not any different. I’m just … never mind.”

After she pressed her thumb on the pad, Forsythe slid it away. “Good. I’m assured by experts who’ve looked this plan over on the way here that the fallout will be minimal here on the ground. The citizens here are in no more danger than observers at many bomb sites last century, and most of the cloud is over the water, and not Thule. So I had Mister Prudence Jones sign this earlier, and Violet Skaegard signed it in the hallway. Time is not on our side, so let’s get started.”

Within the hour Forsythe was shaking hands with clean-cut men in off-duty wear standing on the dock. Some of them were still pulling on newly purchased Thule cold weather gear as they stuffed their old gear into plastic buckets that were then tossed back into the small dinghy tied up to the dock.

Any personal effects that made the men identifiable were also sent home.

“Forsythe said these were volunteers,” Roo commented, looking on as the SEALs checked over their weapons. “But this is a full SEAL platoon. I doubt any of these sixteen were capable of saying ‘no’ when asked.”

“Isn’t a platoon larger than sixteen men?” Anika asked.

“Not these guys, no,” Roo said. “Sixteen should be enough against Gaia Security. Any more: we lose the element of surprise.”

“Okay. I see.”

“Maybe.” Roo turned back to a small case full of weaponry he’d wrangled. They were all snugged nicely away against foam inserts. Anika figured that meant Roo was going to be joining this attack. “You should go talk to Vy.”

Anika took a deep breath, ready to harass him for telling her what to do. Then she realized she didn’t even know where Vy was, and had been caught up in mentally preparing herself. “Where is she?”

“Inside that pickup.” He pointed. Roo had hunted down three winterized Indian Tata pickup trucks converted into ice plow trucks. They’d lined the doors and bed with extra bulletproof vests, and the three trucks would be their lightly armored, rapid transportation in.

“Thank you.”

She found Vy sitting in the passenger’s side of the indicated truck cab. She had wrapped her arms around her knees and was staring out of the windshield at nothing in particular.

“You know what I fucking hate about the polar circle?” she asked, shivering from the gust of cold air as Anika crawled in next to her and shut the door.

“What?”

“That.” She waved her hand at the windshield.

Anika looked out through the frost rimming it at the buildings. “What are you pointing at, Vy?”

“The light. Always the light. It feels like I’ve been up for three months, and never got to go to bed. And when the winter comes, it’ll feel like I’m living in a twilight dream. It eats away your insides and leaves you wondering if it’s seeping into your decisions. I’m sick of it.”

Anika leaned against her, snuggling in closer. “I don’t like it either. It feels unnatural. But then again, who am I to say what is unnatural. I can’t even wrap my head around seasons. Whenever I was outside Africa, away from the equator, the idea that the world could grow cold felt … alien. Like I’d flown to another planet and was out of my place.”

Vy leaned her head on Anika’s shoulder. “Between that and the cold, that was why I bought into The Greenhouse. Baffin’s little piece of tropical paradise in the middle of the grim. I know it can be beautiful out here: the blue water; clean, stark ice; the purifying wind. Jim Kusugak told me he spent some time in New York and couldn’t stand it. No open vistas, too warm, too fetid, he said. I think some people just imprint on where they grow up, and I’m one of them. It’s not the cold, it’s the light. The constant, fucking light. And it doesn’t needle at me until I get stressed, and then it’s always there, burrowing back behind my eyeballs.”

Anika hugged her closer. “Someone should find that boat Paige told us about and get it ready. We’re going to have to leave really quickly once we set the missile to fire. And we want to disappear after this. We should disappear somewhere that isn’t the North. Ask Roo for help—maybe he can help us escape to the Caribbean?”

“Or a nice, mid-sized little city somewhere on the California coast? With its own municipal nuclear power station and a water desalinizer. Normal day and night cycles, and t-shirt weather all year round,” Vy sighed. “I’d been saving up for that.”

“It sounds beautiful,” Anika said wistfully.

Vy grabbed her cheek to turn Anika to face her. “There’s no fucking way I’m sitting on that ice queen’s boat and waiting for you and Roo to risk your damn lives without me. Don’t disappear on me again.”

“Okay,” Anika said. They pressed their foreheads together. “I promise. I promise I won’t ask why either.” It was time to just accept that Vy was there. That she wanted to be there. Anika didn’t need to sabotage this by second-guessing. She didn’t need to wonder why Vy wanted this, or what it was she had to offer.

She’d pushed enough people away with that before. Excuses about the job. Believing that she couldn’t possibly be everything someone else thought she was.

But for now, Vy was the second leg that helped her stand up that much straighter. It felt good. Like here in this small cab, they were a team, with the outside world something they faced together.

And she liked that.

Someone knocked on the window and Vy looked up. “The very nice Marine outside looks like he’d like to talk to us,” she said.

“SEAL,” Anika said.

“Whatever.”

It was time to go over the plans with Commander Tyrone Gallo one more time. If there was anything Anika was learning about the SEALs over the last half day, it was that they believed in preparation.

Meanwhile, reports trickled in of two more ships destroyed by the mirror swarm for pushing too close to Thule. The G-35 navies were standing clear, but a standoff like this wasn’t going to last forever.