Arctic Rising (26 page)

“You’re a pilot,” Vy said. “If you come with me, there will always be work for you.”

“Not flying airships, though,” Anika said, a tiny note of sadness creeping in.

“That could be a problem. But never say never.” Vy smiled.

“It was a childhood wish anyway,” Anika admitted. “And I got to live that dream for a while, anyway. I have no regrets.”

“That’s the spirit,” Vy said. Then she pointed. “Look!”

A shaggy, beige polar bear ambled its way along a floe, then jumped into the water. It paddled its way to the ice shelf underneath their vantage point, then clambered on.

It sat down and looked up at them.

The two of them stared back, quiet, only the sound of snapping ice in the distance.

Then Vy’s phone rang.

The moment broke, and the bear began to paw the air. “He’s hoping for a ham sandwich,” Vy said sadly. “The tourists probably toss him food from here.”

She turned back away and answered the phone. “It’s Roo. He says he thinks he’s found a good lead. He’s on his way up, and Gaia Security is coming with him.”

35

Paige Greer arrived at the surface and waved them over. “We’re scrambling men,” she said breathlessly as they raced down the sloping road with her.

“Where’s Roo?” Anika asked.

“Up ahead.”

Three armored cars braked to a stop at the entrance to the polar preserve and Gaia’s underground facility. Roo opened one of the doors and waved them in.

“How’d you find them? That was quick, wasn’t it?”

“I’m that good,” Roo grinned. “It was lead.”

“For shielding?” Anika asked.

“They didn’t want another scatter camera to hunt them down, so they purchased sheets of lead. Gabriel mentioned that they would be shielded and hard to find. So far most of the hunt has been for the radiation. But I went hunting for lead. Once I found the lead, I found four possible locations. This is as close as we can get this quick.”

“We’ll get teams out to each building,” Paige said. “See if we can secure local help to check them out. See if anything turns up.”

“They won’t give up easily,” Anika said, thinking of Gabriel.

“I know,” Paige said.

*   *   *

They stopped a block away from the target, near a cluster of dome-shaped silvered buildings jacked up on piston stilts.

“This is the Peary demesne,” Paige said. “We secured the right to place our men around the building, but volunteer community police are insisting they accompany us.”

More Gaia flatbed trucks ripped up ice as they braked to a halt.

“Not a dictatorship here, then?” Anika asked.

Paige brushed hair out of her eyes. “Peary’s modeled after Brazilian participatory budget and radical municipal democracy, with a few variants. People committee-vote on all municipal budget matters and draw up the budgets and where tax money goes; municipal employees serve as expert consultants, but have no say in the budget or projects list, they are contractors that execute what the voters decide every quarter needs done. Stops backscratching and corruption. These guys take it a step further: there are no municipal employees, municipal spots are volunteer positions. If you can’t find the time, then you can pay to have a subcontractor do your duty. But it means you’re stuck with waiting for damn amateurs to run out here.”

Several Peary citizens were indeed showing up, pulling on bright red-and-blue vests over their bulky cold weather gear and waving at them.

“Location two is clear,” one of the security detail reported.

One of the Peary volunteers walked over and introduced himself as the on-duty sergeant. He wore large goggles, and Anika could see information was scrolling across his field of vision. Probably some sort of software package that let the volunteer police link up with each other.

“We have a hundred community protectors moving in,” he said. “Thirty are in full riot gear. Nonlethal instruments. I have four snipers that should be in position within twenty minutes. Twenty of my regulars are armed with low-caliber pistols. If you need more manpower, we can call in other Thule citizens from neighboring demesnes.”

Paige nodded. “Okay. My force will go in strong, are you okay with hanging back? We want you to catch anyone who bolts.”

The volunteer nodded. “How hard are you going in?”

“They’re possibly sitting on a nuke, how hard do you want us to go in?” Paige looked carefully at the sergeant.

He grimaced, and looked upward, accessing some piece of information from his goggles. “We’re in a hard spot,” he said. “Because my fellow police want to remind you, legally, that you have not proven without a doubt the people you’re hunting are the ones inside this building. You could be going in full force…”

He never finished his sentence—the sound of gunfire erupted from the building in question.

“We found them!” someone shouted, unnecessarily.

Everyone ducked behind one of the large pylons holding up the nearest building.

“They’re shooting up the block,” someone shouted.

Roo shook his head. “We should have gone in without asking the demesne for help,” he chided Paige. “All they needed to do was grab a volunteer policeman and hold him hostage, let him tell them when any alerts came for him to assemble…”

Paige opened her mouth, then closed it. “Shit.”

“We should have done a person-to-person communications-are-compromised routine,” the sergeant muttered. Then he whispered into the palm of his hand, “Snipers: fire when targets present.”

“Sergeant, they’re going to be in there trying to arm that thing,” Roo shouted. “Time is
not
on our side.”

“We’re going to rush the building with you,” the sergeant told Paige. “We’re all in.”

“Glad to hear it.” Paige tapped an earpiece. “The Peary volunteers are following you in. Give them five minutes to assemble, then break down the doors.”

“Paige, I can use a weapon,” Anika said. She’d given hers up to get into Gaia headquarters, but not retrieved it.

Paige put a finger up to her lip and shook her head. “You’ve come far enough, Anika.”

The gunfire slowed, and Anika watched Peary volunteers in a wide assortment of winter jackets keeping low, advancing over the snow, dodging around the metallic forest of pylons underneath everything.

Three and a half minutes passed in what felt like a handful of held breaths in between pauses in the gunfire, and then the attack began. Anika left the cover of the pylons to watch.

Gaia Security used clear bulletproof riot shields to protect themselves as they stormed up stairs. Door rams were deployed, and after three swings, the doors crumpled back.

Men and women poured inside, and the sound of gunfire increased. A full-on fusillade of distant firecracker pops of varying tones and frequencies, shouts, and more door cracking.

And much like popcorn, after a while, it slowed down. An occasional shot sounded, randomly. Then quiet.

Roo started walking toward the building.

“Mr. Jones,” Paige said sharply.

But he ignored her and kept walking. Anika stood up and jogged after him, and Vy joined them.

“They didn’t have a chance to fire it,” Anika said. “Right?” She hadn’t seen anything. She’d been looking for that flash of smoke, the contrail of a missile, or a rocket, or whatever it was.

But all there had been was gunfire.

“Right?” she repeated.

36

They ran up the stairs, boots clanging on metal, and rounded the doors. A body lay at the foot of steps that led up to the next level, blood continuing to expand out in a steaming dark pool.

In the corridor that ran past the steps, three men sat against the wall as one of the Gaia men checked their wounds.

“Up,” Roo said.

They stepped carefully over the dead man and ran up, with Paige not far behind.

Two flights of stairs, three more bodies, including one Peary volunteer being carried down the stairs in a stretcher, a raggedy-doll-like hand flopping over the edge.

Had the price been worth it? Or had more people died in vain?

The top floor was dominated by a skylight and ruined walls. They’d been knocked out by sledgehammer. A hastily boarded up gap covered in a blue tarp in the side of one major wall allowed chilled air into the entire upper floor.

In the center of the mess, Anika saw more dead men from both sides sprawled around. But it was the center of the room that drew her attention. There was a muddy white missile, with a fat, red-tipped nose, pointed skyward in the middle of the room. The tip of the missile was just a foot away from the glass of the skylight, fifteen feet above the overly open-spaced third floor. It sat in a hastily constructed cradle of two-by-four timbers that raised it up into launch position. A crude wooden crane had been constructed out of more wooden planks to pull the missile up into position.

A glance out through a small hole in the tarp showed that no one had noticed the missile being cranked up because this side of the house was hemmed in by a large water tower and several more industrial-looking buildings, most likely automated small-scale factories.

Anika turned around.

So here it was.

A fucking, honest-to-goodness, nuclear missile.

They all gathered around it, like mystics around some obelisk.

“Did it get armed, is it going to launch?” Paige asked a grizzled-looking man sitting near a laptop and table filled cables leading back to the missile.

“
Nyet
,” he said emphatically. “Prelaunch system check only. And yes, it was aimed at the solar shield. It takes off to detonate, it is not for the ground.”

Paige turned back to look up at the missile. “It’s not really that big, is it?” she said, wonderingly.

“All it had to do was knock out the shield with the electromagnetic pulse,” Roo said. “It didn’t need to be.”

“We’re safe for now,” Paige said, visible relief on her face. “We stopped them.”

Anika felt her legs weaken a bit. It was from relief, as well. She’d been carrying tension since she stepped foot in Thule, imagining that, at any second, a flash would be the last thing she saw before some detonation just above her.

That was ridiculous, they now knew for sure. This missile looked like it would climb fairly high. Its job was to get above the shield and then detonate. It wasn’t a terrorist’s device, intended to destroy people and civilians on the Arctic ground.

Vy had grabbed her gloved hand and squeezed it really hard. “Jesus, Anika. It’s over. We got it.”

“You’re damn right we got it,” Paige said. “Come on. Yuri’s a Russian military ordnance specialist, he’ll work with some contractors by phone to make sure it’s turned off properly. We’re going to head back to HQ. I want to talk to Ivan about what we do next, but I also want to make sure we take care of you guys for helping us out.”

“I need tickets. Anika and I need to get out of the area,” Vy said.

*   *   *

There was a weary satisfaction in the air on the drive back. Paige, in particular, leaned back against the seat with a private smile on her face.

“Now we only have one big problem to face,” she said.

“The blockade.” That was still a massive problem, Anika thought. And she didn’t want to be in Thule as all that continued to play out. The retreating demesnes probably had the right idea.

“Yes.”

Back at the top of the elevator they were waved through security. Anika noticed Roo frown. “What?” she asked him in a quick whisper.

“Look at the submachine guns,” he whispered back.

The men had them slung over their shoulders, at the ready, even though they were standing behind the desk.

“They weren’t doing that earlier, the guns were out of sight.”

Roo nodded, and Anika really wished she’d slipped something past security. A knife would do.

Down the elevators, back into the Gaia complex’s heart, then across to the conference room, where an ebullient Ivan Cohen waited with a twenty-person retinue of dark-suited, older men from a variety of countries.

Something didn’t quite feel right, though. They looked nervous. Eyes on the ground, shuffling. They did not look like the normal boardroom of a trillion-dollar corporation.

Then again, what did Anika know about what these sorts of people
should
act like.

Certainly, she felt it shouldn’t be like nervous servants, waiting for their employer to find something wrong with their work.

There was champagne on the tables. Ivan passed a glass over to Paige. “We’ve stopped them from destroying the most important public engineering project of this century,” he said. His eyes were wide, almost dilated. Flushed with success, Anika thought. “Congratulations.”

Paige set the slender glass down on the table. “Ivan, we still have a problem.…”

Ivan shook his head. “I took care of it.”

Feet shuffled throughout the room. They were like nervous birds, feathers ruffling as they were disturbed.

Anika was getting a bad feeling.

“Ivan, what do you mean by that?” Paige asked slowly and calmly, as if he were a child.

He waved at all the board members. “They all finally grew a pair—collectively, that is. They came down here to demand you and I step down as CEOs so they could negotiate a surrender with the blockade. They’re worried about the impending invasion. Can you believe that? Step down. Now? Here we are, on the brink of quite literally saving the world, and they’re going to try and pull some bullshit procedure and give up.”

“They’re scared,” Paige said. “It’s understandable. We didn’t think there would be such a strong military reaction. Or nukes. Or any of this. Look, if anyone here wants to leave, they should get out now. It hasn’t been the first time I’ve encouraged you.”

One of the suits next to her fumbled with his hands. “We can’t leave now. Ivan gave an ultimatum.”

Paige looked confused. “A what?”

Roo glanced over at Anika and pointed at the door. Get out, he mouthed. But as they turned to leave Gaia Security stepped forward blocked the door.

Vy grabbed her arm. “I don’t like this.”