Tobias Buckell - Arctic Rising

Anika squeezed her back. Having Jenny as a friend was like having a hyperactive, overly eager-to-please, little white sister. But it was okay. Jenny and Tom were the closest things Anika had to family out here in the Polar Circle. Anika was slow to make friends, a casualty of the last ten years spent hiring her services out as a pilot. She kept to herself and kept others at a distance, as she was going to leave anyone she met in a few months when she hopped off to a different job. And maybe a part of the fact that being distant came so naturally to her was due to the violent early years before she earned her first chances to pilot. Back when she’d always had to carry a gun. “I think his suit got water in it. I got off easier.”

“I’m so glad you’re okay.”

They hugged again. Anika got a mouthful of Jenny’s blond curls. Then she pulled back and looked Jenny in the eye. “And Tom?”

“He’s peeing into a jug right now, made me leave the room,” she said.

“He’s awake? He’s okay?” Anika felt the hundred pounds of anxiousness that had been clinging to her drop away.

Relief prickled at her.

Jenny nodded. “He’s really tired. But he’s talking.” Her translucent green eyes teared, and she wiped at them with a sleeve. “I’m sorry.”

Anika shook her head. “Sorry? You have nothing to apologize for.”

Jenny rubbed her upper arms nervously, her sweater sleeves flopping about. “I don’t understand how you can be so calm. Anika: they shot you down.”

“Calm?” Anika thought about it. She wasn’t calm. She was still running on adrenaline and shock, that’s all. None of this had penetrated that outer wall, a pilot’s levelheaded ability to run through a checklist while something was going wrong.

Anika had been through some tight spots. She knew the shakes came later. She wasn’t sure what was going to happen once she wrapped her head around everything that had just occurred.

Jenny knocked on the door. “Are you done in there?”

“Yeah,” a familiar voice said. A husky, scratchy, and frail-sounding Tom.

“Okay, we’re coming in then,” Jenny said cheerfully.

Anika followed her, wrinkling her nose again at the smell of hospitals. She didn’t like them. She associated them with dying relatives. There was nothing worse as a child than being forced to go visit and make small talk to family members whom she only occasionally saw. They were always hurting, tired, and scared in hospitals, and that put her off.

But this was Tom, and she felt angry at herself for those childish memories.

He looked pale. And tired. He was wrapped in warming blankets, with a slightly bent container of urine hanging off the side of a bed rail.

“I guess I owe you a case of beer,” he said when he saw Anika step around the curtain with Jenny.

Anika smiled. “I’ll let it go. Just this once.”

He reached a hand out, and she took it, shook it firmly, and then he pulled back into the blankets, shivering. “Christ, it’s like I can’t ever get warm anymore.”

“Worse than Polar Bear Camp…” Anika agreed.

They both nodded. Every new UNPG pilot who arrived on base got initiated by being taken to “camp.” In reality, it was a large icy lake near some dramatic foothills not too far from Nanisivik.

You had to jump into the ice-cold water and swim a single lap. If you refused, they’d toss you in.

But afterward they’d gone to the hot tubs along a wooden platform near the road to the lake and drank.

That had ended well, Anika thought. This hadn’t.

Tom looked up at her, apparently coming to the same conclusion. His smile had faded. “They fucking shot us out of the fucking sky, Anika.” There was wounded outrage written across his face now.

Anika felt the same thing. “I know. I don’t…” Actually, she wasn’t sure what she wanted to say next. She hunted around for words. “I can’t figure it out. They have to know they’re being hunted. Where can they go?”

“Guess we’ll find out soon enough,” Tom muttered.

Half an hour later, Anika stood outside the hospital, blinking up at the bright Arctic night. They’d had it darkened inside.

From outside, the hospital looked like the world’s largest Quonset hut. A giant aircraft hanger. Arctic architecture chic, according to some Montreal designer who’d stamped his mark on what seemed like every public building out here. The hospital itself was basically a smaller building inside the giant hanger, which let them keep small gardens and trees in the lobby year round.

The buildings in the deep Sahara Anika had lived in when she’d worked for the DESERTEC project used the same principle: create a large space of protected air in a dome, then build a small piece of the world you’d come from inside of it.

They were like space stations, she thought, but sitting on the pieces of Earth’s land that were too alien for anyone to survive in.

Her Toyota ran out of power three miles up the gravel road from base housing. She walked the rest of the way, jacket pulled tight, hugging herself, her breath billowing out into the air and then being yanked away by the wind. She’d go back for the car in the morning, push it the last flat miles, and hook it up to the charger.

Inside her square prefab, one of the hundreds all splayed out across the Arctic gravel in spiral patterns, she turned the heat up even further and shucked off the stranger’s clothes.

She considered a bath. The appeal of soaking in warm water until she’d chased every last chill from her bones was strong. But she was tired enough that she feared she would fall asleep in the tub.

Instead she took a shower so hot it felt like it would burn the top layer of her skin away.

Then she crawled into the thick sheets and comforter under the gaudy poster of an airship advertising an old Nollywood movie.

For once, the beams of light from around the corners of the shades didn’t bother her. She fell asleep the moment her head hit the pillows.

And what felt like seconds later, she sat up.

The house phone rang again, and she rolled over and picked up the old headset.

“Nika!” said the scratchy voice. “Is that you?”

She hadn’t even gotten in a fuzzy hello. Her father sounded scared, hopeful, nervous, and angry, all at the same time.

“Father…” She blinked against the light streaming in around the darkening blinds. Hearing his voice, even if transported from so far away, made her feel better.

“I cannot believe you did not call me. Here we are, hearing this news that says an airship was blown out of the sky near Baffin Island, and you have not even called us to let us know you are okay, or even sent us a message? I called your phone over and over and over again. Then your aunt says to me that she has another number for you and that’s how I finally reached you. I almost died from the worry.”

Anika braced herself against the headboard from the onslaught of clipped, angry words from her father as he lectured her. “I fell asleep,” she said, rubbing at her eyes. “And yes, it was me they shot at.”

“I … what did you say?” Her father lost his train of thought.

“They shot me down. Me and the other pilot.”

A long silence dripped from the other side of the phone. Then finally her father collected himself. No more yelling now. “Are you okay, Anika?”

Anika slumped forward around the phone. “I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it all yet. I am just … still thinking over what happened. And trying to figure out why.”

“But you’re not hurt?”

“No.” Suddenly she now wanted to hear him drone on about her cousins, and who was pregnant, and what was coming into season in the markets. She wanted to hear about the air conditioner that kept breaking down in the window of his Lagos apartment and hear him complain about the heat. All those mundane details of life back home, that she usually wanted him to skip on past, now sounded like delicious nuggets of familiarity and normalcy.