Tobias Buckell - Arctic Rising

This was bad, Anika thought. Probably worse than Nairobi.

Definitely worse than Nairobi.

“Is that what I think it is?” Tom shouted at her over the roar of the engines.

“RPG.” Anika yanked her survival suit up over her shoulders and zipped it up.

“Jesus Christ,” Tom said. “Jesus Christ.”

Anika snapped her fingers to get him to look at her instead of back at the ship. “Hey. Stay calm. Zip up your survival suit. And grab the controls.”

He fumbled at his suit with one hand and held the joystick loosely with the other. She left him to hold their course and raced back down the cabin.

She kicked a large plastic chest open with one booted foot and pulled out an old Diemaco C11 assault rifle packed inside. She slapped a clip in it, shouldered it, and stood up in front of the rear window.

Some small part of her wanted to join Tom’s mantra of “Jesus Christ,” over and over again, but she knew that was the sort of useless shit that got you killed. You needed to take action.

She flicked the safety off.

They’d pulled clear of the ship by several hundred feet. The two men had moved to this side of the bridge, and one of them got the RPG launcher up onto his shoulder and was aiming at the Plover .

Anika’s heart raced as she yanked the rear window down. She could hardly focus as she aimed and fired a burst from the Diemaco, hoping she was in time. The ear-bursting chatter shocked her. It drowned out the engines.

A flare of light burst on the Kosatka ’s bridge as the RPG launched and flew right at her. Anika scrunched low and winced. This was it.

The entire airbag over the cabin shivered, but didn’t explode.

“Did they hit us?” Tom shouted back at her.

“I think it punched through the bag but didn’t explode. It just kept going. Check the bag’s pressure.”

“We’re losing gas and lift,” Tom yelled.

Anika propped the Diemaco up on the windowsill and tried to get a better shot at the men on the ship, forcing them to take cover in the bridge with their launcher. Waste-dumping bastards . An RPG? This was the Northwest Passage. They were just north of Canada, not in some war zone.

The Plover slipped slowly out of the sky as the Kosatka churned on past.

Up front, Tom got on the radio. Over her quick bursts of fire, Anika could hear him calling for assistance, his voice suddenly sounding pilot-calm as he followed a routine. “Nanisivik Base, Nanisivik Base, Base this is Plover, we’ve been hit by an RPG. We’re under fire. Repeat, under fire. We need assistance by anything in the area.”

Anika kept the men pinned inside the bridge with her rifle. But now another man with a launcher appeared down on a lower deck. Anika swiveled to shoot at him, but he fired first.

She kept firing just ahead of that flash of fire, trying to intercept the insanely fast blur of the rocket leaping at her airship.

The rocket struck the bag and this one exploded as it hit a structural spar inside. Melting fabric rained down around the cabin. Alarms whooped from up front in the cockpit. “We’re going down!” Tom screamed.

Anika could feel it: her stomach lifted toward her chest. The Plover dropped out of the last fifty feet of air in a dignified, fluttering spiral that gave Anika enough time to make sure her survival suit was zipped and to make sure that she had braced herself against the corner of the cabin.

Outside, the waves became choppier and more defined with each split second as they rose to meet the airship.

The Plover smacked into the Arctic Ocean with an explosion of spray and flaming debris as the burning gasbag overhead collapsed and draped itself over them with a fluttering sigh.

The world darkened. Electronics sparked and fizzed, then blew out for good. Painfully cold water slapped Anika’s face as it poured through the shattered windows, shocking her.

The Arctic might be ice free, but it was still damn cold.

“Tom? Can you hear me?” Ruined equipment and a buckled ceiling blocked her way forward. “Tom?”

“Anika? I can get out, are you okay?”

“I can get out through a window. Get clear of the debris, I’ll swim around to you. Okay?”

He paused for a moment. “Yeah. See you on the other side.”

He sounded relieved.

The cabin’s natural displacement had kept the wreckage floating somewhat, but she knew it was starting to settle and would soon get to sinking. Anika didn’t have much time.

She swam clumsily along to the back window and took a deep breath. There was helium in the gasbag, that was why the first rocket had gone clean through without igniting a massive explosion.

But she didn’t want to take a big gulp of helium while swimming through the remains of the gasbag and end up passed out, facedown in the cold water.

She ducked briefly underwater and swam free of the cabin.

But there was nowhere to surface. The heavy fabric of the gasbag sat on the water.

Lungs bursting already, Anika kept moving along, looking for light.

There.

She burst free and up out of the water. The wind stung her face, but she’d never been so glad to see the gray clouds overhead.

Shivering, almost convulsing despite the survival suit, she pulled herself on top of the floating debris and looked around.

“Tom!”

She pulled herself up over a large spar attached to a pocket of fabric, still filled with helium and listlessly floating just above the surface, hoping to spot Tom and orient herself.

Instead, she found herself staring at the bow of the Kosatka . It had turned around and was now bearing down on the remains of the Plover . A massive bow wave piled up in front of the Kosatka, rippling through the debris of the fallen airship and scattering it even further.

Water surged through the mess, soaking Anika.

The ship shoved its way through like an old icebreaker, leaving a mess of even smaller pieces of airship behind it. The mounds of cloth, broken spars, and helium and air pockets underneath that kept the mangled wreck still afloat, slapped up against the side of the Kosatka, screeching against the old, barnacled hull.

Anika watched its bubbled and rust-pitted bulk sweep past her, a giant moving wall of metal. After it pushed its way through the worst of the debris, the engines coughed back to life, thrumming so powerfully her chest ached. They’d coasted through with them off to protect the propellers.

The churning water threw Anika around, doused her, and then just as abruptly, the water calmed a bit, broken by the ship’s passing. Anika floated in the quiet, listening to the fizz of disturbed air bubbling around her.

It was so damn cold, it was almost all she could think about.

After a moment she fumbled around inside her suit and pulled out the EPIRB. It was the size of a small flare in the palm of her gloved hand. She broke the seal on it and then put it back inside a zippered pocket.

The tiny radio beacon inside the device activated, and it began to pip audibly to let her know the distress signal was going out. She lay back, still shivering, and yanked the suit’s inflation strings.

The survival suit filled with air and bobbed on the surface.

Anika yanked the hood as tight around her face as possible, pulled her legs up to her chest as best she could, then wrapped her arms around her chest and waited for rescue.

So damn cold.

4

A ferry skidded on hydrofoils over the dark ocean, floating almost magically on the air above the waves. When it slowed, the foils sank deeper into the sea, unable to hold it up. The ferry’s hull slowly settled down into the water, until it looked just like any other ship.