Tobias Buckell - Arctic Rising

Nothing she took for granted as stable in her life even existed anymore. The bike: mangled. Tom: dead. Jenny: broken. Michel: maybe involved in trying to kill her.

In a short few days, everything had just been yanked away from her. The entire life she had built. Like it didn’t even matter.

And for what?

Some goddamned nuclear waste?

Now that she wasn’t distracted by fighting for her life she started shaking from delayed fear. She leaned over a boulder and threw up. Bright fruit juice and rum splattered against gray rock.

She’d never drink a Belladonna again, she thought, wiping her mouth with the sleeve of the torn-up jacket.

Leaning against another rock to steady herself, she considered dialing emergency services, then decided to call Karl and apologize for the bike.

It was something she had to do, she felt.

“Karl? Karl, it’s Anika.”

There was a long silence on the other side. She guessed he was waking up, slow to understand what was going on. It was three in the morning, after all.

But then Karl exploded. “Jesus, Anika, Jesus, there are people over at your place ripping it apart.”

Anika slid down into a crouch against the boulder. “What?” she whispered. “Tom?”

“They say they’re UNPG MPs and that you’re in some sort of trouble,” Karl said. “Please, let me hear you say it’s bullshit.”

“It’s bullshit,” she repeated numbly.

“I figured. They’re being tight-lipped and following orders from somewhere else. I don’t know the details. The commander wants to talk to you. They got here fifteen minutes ago. Where the hell are you anyway? I didn’t tell them you were on my bike. Probably not smart, but, shit.”

“The bike,” she said, looking across the ground at it. “Karl, I’m really sorry about the bike. Someone just tried to run me over.”

“Run you over? Forget it,” he said. “We can fix it later. Where are you?”

Anika pulled the phone away and looked at it. Was it too paranoid to assume they were being listened to? Or just paranoid enough? She put the phone back to her ear.

“That rope braid on your keychain?” Anika said.

“Yeah?”

“It saved my life. Thank you.” She ended the call. If her commander was caught up in this, or someone in the UNPG was out for her, going back to her place or reporting in for duty was off the list of options.

She groaned as she stood up, steadied herself, and then staggered toward the BMW. The driver’s side door was still open, light spilling out onto the highway. The key fob dangled from the parking brake between the front seats.

A car passed, then slowed down and pulled over ahead of her and the BMW.

A heavyset woman leaned out the window and looked back. “Hey, was there an accident? Are you okay? Do you need me to call for help?”

Anika coiled up the rope, with the stone still on the end, and tossed it onto the smooth leather passenger’s seat. “Yes, the man in this car tried to run me over,” she called back to the concerned woman.

She was thinking about the time she had ejected over some Cameroon rain forest during a training flight. Akinjide, her copilot, had broken a leg landing three miles south of her. She’d lashed him to a travois and dragged him through a hundred and fifty miles of muddy jungle until they’d stumbled across a logging camp with a working radio.

That had been a test of her will. Every day, dragging Akinjide’s useless weight along behind her. Not daring to eat anything she didn’t recognize, fearing it would poison them. Drinking muddy water.

She wasn’t about to be broken. No, the Arctic hadn’t thrown her yet.

But she was thinking that maybe, just maybe, she should have listened to her dad and tried to get a job flying sightseeing tourists around New York. They have airships there, he’d said. Why go to the cold?

Why?

Anika slid gingerly into the driver’s seat of the BMW and adjusted the chair forward.

“Are you stealing that car?” the woman asked. She had gotten out of her car and was standing on the side of the road.

Anika found the window controls and rolled the passenger side window down. “Yes. You should call emergency services,” she shouted, and pulled out onto the highway, leaving a very confused-looking good Samaritan alone on the road.

She had a destination firmly in mind: Commander Michel Claude’s home.

Commander Michel Claude looked exhausted as he entered the door of his little base cottage along with a gust of cold air.

He hung his coat up and ditched his gloves in a bin on a stand near the door. Removed his holster and gun, car keys, and a wallet, and set them in a large terra-cotta dish on the stand, and then he made his way to the small kitchen.

The fridge light filled the cottage with an eerie glow as he grabbed a soda, popped it open, and then moved to the couch.

He sighed and began unlacing his boots with one hand, pausing only for an occasional sip.

Until the faint sound of Anika cocking his own gun made him freeze.

“Commander,” Anika said softly. “I don’t want to use this. I’m really sorry, but…” she dropped the paracord, now minus the bloody rock on the end, over his shoulder.

“What do you want me to do with this?” he asked.

“Please tie yourself up.”

They faced each other over his coffee table, the gun dangling off her hand in her lap, resting on the shredded leathers.

“You stepped over a line,” he said softly, holding his bound hands up to point at her. “There’s no going back. Pointing a gun at a superior officer is not something you get to undo! You understand that?”

“Someone ran me off the road and tried to kill me. Before that, someone tried to shoot me out of the sky. I don’t care about my job, or going to jail, right now, Commander. I want to know who got my copilot killed. And I want to know who is trying to kill me right now because I have that scatter camera data.” As she said that she carefully set his business card down on the table.

He looked down at it and frowned. “What’s that?”

“Your business card.” Anika tapped it for emphasis.

“Yes. But why are you putting it on the table?”

“It was on the guy who tried to kill me.”

Anika raised her eyes up from the table and met the commander’s. She didn’t blink or look away until he frowned and looked back down at the card. When he slowly blinked and looked up at her, she wondered what he saw on her face. Sincerity? Or could he not see past his situation? Did he think he was looking at the face of someone who’d snapped?

Or was he surprised to see the face of someone he thought would be dead by now?

She couldn’t help but assume he wasn’t involved. He was the damned commander, after all.

“Do you understand what I am asking you?” she asked, crisp and steady, enunciating each word like her old English teacher.

“All you had to do was come to us. If you truly think people are trying to kill you, all you had to do was come to me. We’d protect you.”

Anika sighed. She was beaten up, bruised, and exhausted from exposure and lack of sleep. “Commander, whoever is doing this is inside the Polar Guard.”

He glanced back down at the card. “It’s not me. Anyone could get my card.”

She gingerly pulled her legs onto the couch. She felt like she could just sink right on into the soft material and keep on sinking. A deep, hungry gulf of tiredness threatened to drown her in sleep. It was all she could do to remain alert, his gun in her hand. Stabbing pain, from the road rash, from bruises in the fall, where the assassin had punched her and slammed her against the boulder, from the chafed palms of her hands where she’d clung to the rope, all of it built up into a crescendo of hurt that left her shaking.