Arctic Rising (25 page)

“So we’re giving them time,” Ivan said. “The solar shield can mitigate the planetary warming trend. Whether you believe warming is manmade or not, the trend is on record. From the moment the Northwest Passage became passable by actual overseas ship traffic for the first time in human history at the turn of the century, it’s been undeniable that the polar region has warmed. Even the strongest denialist is in the position of saying, sure it’s warmed up, but it’s not
humanity’s
fault. That’s when they talk about cycles or the sun or some bullshit like that. When glaciers are something you read about in picture books but can’t see anymore, no one is arguing whether it’s a real phenomenon or not, they’re just trying to assign blame. The cloud can cool the planet again, to give us the time to get to a solution. Help us get that time.”

“What is you want out of us?” Roo asked.

“You three captured someone who knows about the nuke, maybe even about where it is, right?” Ivan asked. “Can you give him to us.”

“No.” Roo shook his head, locks swinging. “Not ours to move around anymore. We gave him to the fleet.”

Ivan’s lips tightened. “
Them
? You gave him to them,” he spat. “Fuck. Fuck. Once the shield is fully initialized, we become a voice at the world table. A serious voice. Because then, we’re a superpower. The Earth will have a voice. It will be Gaia. They don’t want that. They’re the ones
behind
the fucking nuke. Unbelievable.”

He turned and walked out, lip curled in disgust, the entire cloak of careful geniality dropped.

Paige watched him go, eyes narrowing. “I’m sorry,” she said as the doors closed behind him. “He’s under an extraordinary amount of stress. The board of directors, they weren’t forewarned. They’re pushing hard to have us turn over the command of the cloud to the UN.”

Anika cocked her head. “That is a good idea. The blockade would stop. We could focus on finding the nuke, yes?”

Paige looked down. “It’s hard to trust that they will make the right choices when they’ve made so many bad ones. And as Ivan points out, it’s very probable that they were the ones that put the nuke here to stop the cloud.”

“You playing a dangerous game of chicken,” Roo observed.

“If it comes to innocent lives or the cloud, I know what Ivan will choose,” Paige muttered. “But we couldn’t live with ourselves unless we tried. You understand that? We have a chance to turn the world around. Who lets that go without a fight? I’m not going to. Ivan is headed off to keep talking to the Polar Fleet’s commanders to buy us some time. We should use it to find the device. Are you still interested in finishing what you came here for, Anika?”

She wasn’t so sure now. A lot of that righteous anger had leached out of her. She’d gone off to slay a dragon, in revenge, and now she felt like she was standing in the shadow of something even larger, that blotted out the sun overhead. Huge, implacable, and monstrous.

But Gabriel’s assured words, telling her to go home, to stay out of the way, kept floating around the back of her head.

She wasn’t going anywhere.

“We’ll help any way we can,” she said. “But what do you want from us now that we can’t give you Gabriel? You have to have more resources than we do.”

“You’d think that,” Paige said. “But Ivan pulled Gaia Security off the hunt. A needle in a haystack isn’t worth hunting. He wants GS ready in case there are any other surprises the G-35 have in Thule for us. We know there was a lot of traffic into Thule via military transport, not just you three.”

“He gave up the hunt for the nuke?” Anika couldn’t believe it.

Paige nodded. And it didn’t look like she agreed with the decision. “There’s a lot of data that Thule citizens have generated and are generating. We put out a bounty, and pictures of the men, and all the information we have. We’re trying to crowd-source the hunt. Our corporate data services are even paying people to look through Thule’s public-archived video feeds to hunt them. I need someone here to sift through all that. I know who you work for, Roo, and that you’re good at this.”

Roo shrugged. “If your security forces are elsewhere, what happens if we find something?”

“I’d talked Ivan into getting upstairs to meet you all when Wynter called. When he thought you could give us a good lead, he was willing to commit resources. That changed. If things change again, he will do what’s necessary.”

Violet had been watching Paige very intently since Ivan stormed out. “For a cofounder, you seem a bit cut out of the loop, Paige.”

Paige bit a lip. “This is Ivan’s baby. He sees this as his last change to give his grandchildren a better world.”

“It’s not a bad world, right now. It needs fixing, but we’re not dressed up in hand-me-down football uniforms under armor and driving dune buggies. Most people live blissful, comfortable lives in the cities of their choosing,” Violet said. “Is he going to be this twitchy? This is a big fucking standoff. We don’t need twitchy here, you know that? How much do you trust that man?”

Paige looked Vy straight on. “I’ve known him most of my life. I trust him with it, as well. Understand?”

Vy nodded.

Paige walked around the tables to the doors. “I will send someone in with food, drinks, whatever you need. Please feel free to use the bathroom in my office here on the left.”

*   *   *

In minutes, Roo had all the touch screens lying on the table propped up and displaying information, and instead of the Gaia logo hovering in the air in the empty space the table curved around, he projected a map of Thule.

A few minutes later he chuckled. “We have unlimited access to Gaia’s crowd-sourcing initiative. Paige just sent me the passwords and an unlimited bank account. We have ten thousand people across the world using good old-fashioned eyeball 1.0 to look at millions of photos and video from all around Thule for us. Anything they tag as looking like the guys who unloaded that big box in the Pytheas sub harbor gets forwarded to us. We cross-match that to locations that I’ll put up on the main projector here. I’m cross-referencing possible hits to nearby buildings that would be good launch points.”

Anika pointed at the large chunks of ice artificially calving themselves free of the periphery of Thule, as well as the barges and portions of the harbor drifting away. “What if it’s on one of those?”

“They’ll have come in deep into the ice,” Roo said. “They won’t risk being out on the edges near the demesnes that are breaking away.”

“Why is that?”

“If it’s really a G-35 spy group doing this,” he explained, “they’ll want it to look like it was launched from Thule. Being on a piece of land getting towed out near the blockade doesn’t quite fit that bill.”

But that didn’t make Anika feel better. “Roo, you work for those people. Why are you still here, really?”

Roo stopped typing and looked at her. “Anegada.”

Vy looked at him. “What?”

Anika thought about his home, lying under the raised water. For her, the rants about global changes seemed far off. To Roo, it was personal. This hit his family, his people. Everything.

They settled in with the screens, scanning results thrown up in a hierarchy of decision-making algorithms and forwarded by teams of anonymous people, scattered all over the globe, tapped by Gaia to work on looking for faces in the crowds and other patterns that might betray their quarry.

Time stretched out, pulled apart, the streams of information broken by bathroom breaks and coffee. Anika was having trouble engaging, she kept slipping off somewhere else.

There was something she had to do, and she wasn’t going to be able to truly focus on the waterfall of results until she did it.

“Can I borrow your phone, Roo?” she asked. “I need to call someone.”

34

Anika got out of the elevator and checked with the security guards to make sure she could get back in, then slipped outside into the cold.

She took a deep breath, then pulled out Roo’s phone.

The numbers came to her fingers quickly enough. She’d tapped them into her phone often enough. Except for the last one.

Her finger always remained poised over the last number, though, unable to commit. Unable to push past the resistance of years of silence and habit.

This time she finished the sequence with a slight shudder, a release of some tension inside of her that she hadn’t realized was there. It had ridden alongside her for so long it had become a part of her world.

There was a ring, and then a second, and on the third the connection clicked, and a tired voice said, “Hello?”

“Hello, Mother?” Anika asked, her voice betraying her with a slight tremor. “It’s me, it’s Anika.”

There was no response, only a faint scratchiness that sounded like static.

“Hello?” Anika said.

It wasn’t static, but sniffling. “I’m sorry,” came a gulp in that old, precise English accent that Anika associated with a large, busy, dusty house and comfort and safety, and then heartbreak and confusion and anger. The one she sometimes heard her father listening to, when he would watch her movies late at night when he thought Anika was asleep. “I’m sorry. I never thought I’d hear your voice again.”

“All you had to do was call,” Anika said.

“After what I had done, I figured you have the right to be left alone,” her mother replied. “But when Abazu called to say you had crashed your airship, I was terrified. I started trying to call you, but your phone is cut off. When I called, he said he hadn’t heard from you in two days!”

“I’m okay.” Shit. She needed to call her father. He would be a mess. “Mother, where is your ship right now?”

She’d retired to a convalescent cruise ship. Somewhere some accountant had realized that the cost of a retirement home in the Western world wasn’t too far different from that of the daily cost for a cruise tour. Setting it up on a ship allowed the companies to attract not just the elderly with the promise of seeing the world in their twilight years, but offering the same carrot to young doctors and caretakers.

Ever since her mother’s retirement cruise ship hit the polar waters, her dad had been pressuring her to go see her mother.

“My friends and I had dinner at the captain’s table last night, and he said we were somewhere north of Ellesmere Island.”

Anika relaxed. A bit. “That’s good. Have you turned around yet?”

“Well, the captain has been waiting for this whole blockade thing to blow over, to see if we can still visit Thule. I’m rather excited, I’ve never been to the North Pole, you know.”

“It’s not going to blow over, Mother. It’s only going to get worse. Are you able to get out? Maybe fly somewhere to visit family, or a friend?”

“You know I can’t, Anika. I signed over my house and my retirement account to the ship in order to retire here. They own everything, and the only travel I can do is with the ship.”

Anika sighed heavily into the phone. “Maybe I can…” But she couldn’t. Her accounts would be frozen. She couldn’t do anything.

“Anika, what’s wrong?” her mother asked. “Where
are
you? Are you in trouble?”

“I’m in Thule,” she said. “Tell your captain things are getting worse. Tell him Thule is breaking apart, demesnes are fleeing. It’s bad here. Warn him away. Be safe.”

“Anika!”

She cut the phone connection off. She stared off at the sky and heard distant thuds and clanging. More activity. She should call her dad, and while she was reassuring him she was okay, see if he could pay for a helicopter ride for her mother off the ship and to Greenland.

Vy tapped her shoulder, startling her. “Hi, sweetness!” She had a pack of cigarettes in her hand.

“What are you doing up here, smoking?”

Vy shook her head, put an arm around Anika, and led her even further away from the building. “Told ’em I was out for a smoke. Wanted to see if you were okay.”

They walked back up to the overlook, then Vy glanced around.

“What’s wrong?” Anika asked.

Vy pocketed the cigarettes. “So, do you think everyone at any software company headquarters in Silicon Valley walks around with submachine guns?”

“It’s like a military base down there,” Anika agreed. “But most software companies don’t have half the world’s navies circling around like angry sharks. You think they don’t want to find the nuke?”

“No,” Vy said. “They want to find it. But we still need to be careful, okay? People with guns have a habit of using them.”

“And we’re going to need their help, and protection,” Anika said.

Vy looked over at her. “Thinking that far ahead?”

“If we secure and disable the nuke, then whoever put it out here is going to be angry with us. And who is that? Some sort of intelligence agency. We will be criminals.”

“Roo will be safe, he has the connections,” Vy said.

“And do you trust him still? He’s really taking to the whole Gaia song and dance down there. That stuff hits him hard, because of his home.”

Vy shrugged. “I trust him as much as I can trust anyone I’ve known for several years. But yes. He’s good people. He’ll be okay. As for me, this won’t change things too much. I’m already a minor criminal. Grass is legal, but you know I dabble in moving other products. You’re the one who’s hit the major career change.”

Yes. She was right. Anika looked down. Her quiet, stable, life: ripped up and torn apart. Everything she’d slowly worked toward. Gone.

Vy moved closer and turned her around. “You have a place, with me. If you want it.”

“What’ll I do?” Anika asked, looking into Vy’s pale eyes. The wind tugged at her hair.

“Shit, are you kidding me? I’ll keep you in a style you’re not accustomed to: living under an alternate identity in some non-extradition country! Don’t tell me you didn’t grow up dreaming someone would sweep you off your feet and tell you that.”

Anika laughed, and pulled her closer. “Okay,” she said. “I guess I’m stuck with you for a while, then, Vy.”

They kissed, a faint brush of the lips. And then a deeper kiss, pulling each other closer together so that they existed in a tiny world of warmth in the cold.

Their breath steamed the air between their faces when they pulled apart.