Arctic Rising

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 away 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.”