Tobias Buckell - Arctic Rising

Paige launched herself at Ivan, trying to shove him away from the keyboard. Neither of them said anything but, for a moment, just grunted and scrabbled.

Then Ivan reached down.

“Gun!” Roo warned.

Instead of moving to help, the men in suits shoved each other to get back out of the way as Anika, Vy, and Roo ran toward the table, no longer worrying about trying to escape.

Ivan kicked Paige back and then pulled the gun free and shot her, point blank, in the stomach.

Blood splattered all over the clear polished shine of the table and Paige dropped to the floor clutching her side.

Ivan stood over her, gun raised but not pointed at her anymore. The trembling had turned into a sort of horror. “What did you make me do?” he asked. “What did you make me do?”

Paige stared up at him, pain and anger fighting their way through, and then finally pain winning as she gasped and look down at her bloody hands.

“What did you make me do?” Ivan demanded again, and seeing Anika, Roo, and Vy close in, pointed the gun at them. “Don’t.”

Roo raised his hands. “We just want to help her, man.”

“We need to get her help, now,” Anika said forcefully, getting Ivan to look at her instead of Roo, giving him another chance to edge even closer. “How long has she been your friend, your ally? You can’t leave her bleeding to death on the floor !”

“She’s…” Ivan half turned back to Roo. “Stop!”

“Ivan!” Anika shouted, clapping her hands. His eyes flicked toward the sound, gun moving back in her direction.

Roo took advantage of the offered distraction and struck smoothly, grabbing the gun, twisting it up, snaking a hand around, and spinning behind the CEO. Vy dropped to the ground beside Paige.

“The guards,” Anika snapped at Roo. Two men armed with submachine guns pushed through the door, guns up at shoulder height.

“I see them,” Roo muttered.

“Release Mr. Cohen,” the man on the right shouted.

“And then what?” Roo asked.

Three golf-ball-sized metal balls struck the ground and rolled in from outside the door. Roo threw his hands over his face as the world exploded in light and smoke. Anika’s ears rang, and she staggered around, blind to the world around her. Flash-bangs. With a touch of tear gas.

When her sight returned she saw Ivan on his hands and knees being dragged across the room by several board members as three more members of Gaia Security in gas masks spilled into the room.

She dropped to the floor as Roo shot the three guards. Her eyes were tearing up, and she could feel the camera-fooling makeup clumping and streaking on her face.

From on the floor, she could see that the first two guards lay dead just a few feet away from her.

“My office,” Paige gasped at them as scared board members fled out the door, jamming it up to the frustration of the security detail outside. “You’ll all die out here.”

“Go,” Roo shouted.

Anika rolled over and grabbed a submachine from the nearest dead guard, then helped Vy pull a screaming Paige across the floor into her own office.

Roo slammed the door as the last board member cleared the room. Anika heard the loud thunk and looked at him. “That sounded like metal.”

Paige scrabbled and got her back against a wall with Anika’s help. “Inch-thick steel,” she said. “The boardroom and offices are as much bunker as usable space. Ivan and I have been worried about attacks for a long time. What we do has been controversial, ever since the mist boats.”

Anika looked around the office. A lot of wood paneling. A pseudo-nautical theme dominated, including a giant, faded wooden ship’s wheel mounted to the back wall. The wall was dominated by pictures of Paige and Ivan shaking hands with presidents and politicians.

Vy stood up and stretched. “On a scale of kinda fucked to pretty fucked, how fucked are we?”

“Very, very fucked,” Roo said as he locked the door with a large, old-fashioned bolt system that clicked heavily into place.

Paige laughed, then groaned. “It’s not that grim, Mr. Jones,” she said, and pointed at the large ship’s wheel. “It’s not a good idea to build a bunker with only one way in.”

“They’ll be moving someone to cover the exit,” Roo said.

“No they won’t,” Paige said. “It doesn’t go to the surface. It’s my own moon pool, and my own submarine. Vy, please, my upper right pocket, there’s a keychain.”

Vy leaned over and fished out a black plastic oval with a rectangular microchip key hanging from it.

Paige grabbed Vy’s hand. “That allows you control of the sub, and of my personal yacht, Tellus . It’s docked in Section A-B of the Gaia docks in Thule’s harbor. I promised you transportation. This is me delivering it, okay?”

“Okay,” Vy said. “Thank you.”

“No,” Paige sighed. “I’m sorry I have gotten the three of you into this mess. I should have seen this coming. Ivan and I have been running plans and scenarios for so long. He’s focused on all the bad things that have happened, all the deaths from ecological collapse, for so long. All the failures of politicians to do anything. All the denials. The money spent by oil companies to deny anything was happening. All his life he’s fought and fought. And now he has a tool that he thinks will let him achieve his life’s goals. Who could turn away from that?”

“You did,” Anika said.

“Did I? I wanted to use it to bring nations to the negotiating table. The only difference between Ivan and me is a degree.”

Roo squatted next to her. “You don’t sound like you coming with us,” he said.

Paige looked up at him and brushed aside stray hair. “No, Roo. I helped Ivan develop the solar shield. I have access to its guidance system. Help me up into my chair, and from here, I can do my best to degrade the performance of the shield if he tries attacking more ships. I want to see this through. To be honest, I think we need the shield. We’ve let the genie out. But I refuse to let him stain his gift to the world with more blood. I can’t have that on my conscience.”

Anika shook her head. Paige still believed in Ivan, deep down. She still was trying to help him, after she’d been shot by him. That was a friendship born of a lifetime of understanding each other on a level Anika wasn’t sure she’d ever seen.

“Let me look at this thing first,” Roo asked, pointing at Paige’s bloody hand, still pressed hard against her stomach. “I have first-aid experience.”

“No, Roo, you’re wasting time,” she said, in the same sort of tone of voice a teacher scolded a misbehaving student with. “Get me up to my chair. Hurry.”

She grunted in pain as he got an arm under her and pulled her up. Anika got the other side, and they set Paige on the oversized executive chair in front of the desk.

Anika saw more blood spill from between her fingers as they moved her. She wiped Paige’s paling face free of sweat with the corner of her jacket.

“A lifetime of being ignored,” Paige said. “A lifetime of knowing that everything we worked for would always be able to be subverted by millions pumped into whisper campaigns that said doing nothing was safer, easier. He thinks the only way to balance the field is by playing the same game they are: use force. He wants to use the same language. Please, don’t think him evil. He was twisted into this by larger forces. Forces that refuse to back down or negotiate. You understand, right?”

Anika wiped Paige’s forehead free of sweat again. She didn’t really understand, and she wasn’t going to tell Paige she was wasting her life on a man who’d snapped and was a danger to everything around them. But then she thought about her father’s tales of “big men.” Men who inspired people to follow them as they outlined great visions and pulled power to themselves. They were always seductive, her father said. Bold visions, powerful statements. Here was someone who stirred your spirit. And after they swept into power, that animal charisma was still there. And long after absolute power corroded, people still believed that vision. Wanted to believe. It was hard to think that a person could change from the person you believed in to something more horrible. “How do we pilot the sub?”