Tobias Buckell - Arctic Rising

Gallo looked at the phone. “How much time will we have?”

Anika met his eyes. “As much as she can give us.”

Gallo tapped the butt of his gun against the trampled snow underfoot and thought about it for a second. “Let’s do it,” he said, and took a deep breath.

“We’re all on board,” Anika told Paige. “We’re ready when you are.”

“Then here we go,” Paige said, and Anika heard a click.

The world exploded in light.

The silvered cloud split, and a focused beam of light struck the street in a twenty-foot-wide swath of fury. It swept southward, mines detonating and throwing their debris into the already violent explosion of steam.

Anika, Roo, and Commander Gallo huddled against the pillar as the hot steam blew past them.

The white-hot beam of light faded, and a strange, creaking silence settled in.

“Okay, I’ll give you ten seconds, and then I hit the houses,” Paige said, her voice so hoarse Anika had to strain to hear it.

“Ten seconds,” she shouted to Gallo.

“Ten,” he repeated. “Go!”

It took five seconds to run through the pylons. Anika was counting down under her breath. She hit four as she slipped and slid out onto the road. The heat had boiled off a strip of the street, turning it instantly to steam. The rest it had merely warmed, leaving them a slippery river to cross.

She spotted scared Gaia Security forces running away underneath other nearby houses out of the corner of her eye.

But at the count of three, bullets started slapping the standing water around her. At two, her legs were soaking wet with still uncomfortably hot water. At one, the world lit up again: a curtain of light that surrounded the three-story house with the missile in it.

The other houses with Gaia people in them weren’t being vaporized, but they were being heated. People were throwing their hands up, then retreating inside. Smoke was curling off the outsides, but that was it.

But it was enough. The SEALs had the house surrounded, and all they had to focus on were the stairs in front of them. Four SEALs were at the main entrance, waiting for Gallo.

He nodded and gave the signal to go in.

Grenades were tossed inside, and the SEALs went in through the door, rifles covering every angle, firing.

“Clear.”

From the other side of the first floor came another series of shots. “Clear.”

Anika had the Diemaco trained up the stairs, but there was already a SEAL covering them. The third team went up the stairs, a fluid concerted movement that resulted in more brief bursts of fire, then the calm call of “clear.”

“Third floor’s clear,” they called a few seconds later.

When she got up there Anika saw why. The snipers had already taken care of any threats on that floor by getting positions that let them fire down in through the skylights. Five Gaia men lay in pools of their own blood around the missile.

One of the SEALs saw her looking at them and nodded. “Hooyah, ma’am.”

“Dee: get on the windows for the counterattack,” Gallo growled.

“Sir.”

Two SEALs ripped the tarp off the side of the wall and kicked out the rough timber frame that held the tarp in place, while down below one of the pickup trucks pulled into position, the paint on the top of the cab blistered from the quick drive through the heat. One of the snipers hopped out and waved.

The long timbers that made the crude crane, tackle still on the end, were quickly hammered back into place by five SEALs so that they stuck out of the side of the house. Roo pitched in.

They slid the missile down out of the cradle onto the floor. Then, using plain brute force, muscled it onto a wooden sled.

Gallo used wax from a kit to lube up the floor, and they shoved the sled out onto a crude rope sling hanging from the crane. As they were doing that, the curtain of light surrounding the house snapped off.

Anika called Paige. “What’s going on?”

“He’s figured it out,” Paige said. “Get out of there. There’s not much I can do…”

A massive blast of light struck a nearby house. They could feel the heat wash across the street as the house slumped into a pile of fused rubble.

“Get on top,” Gallo snapped, shoving Anika and Roo onto the missile. He handed her the cables and laptops and gear, all shoved into a large duffel bag. “Gabriel’s in the pickup. Go!”

Figures flitted around the pylons of nearby buildings. But just as quickly as Anika noticed them, short gunfire sent them scurrying back for cover.

She held the rope as they were lowered, looking up at Gallo and his men slowly easing the missile down.

At fourteen feet long, six feet of the missile still hung out over the edge of the bed. As the missile slowly settled in, the pickup truck’s springs groaning, Anika and Roo grabbed spare straps to secure the tip.

Every slip seemed to be a catastrophic mistake, and every second stretched into an eternity Anika didn’t feel she had.

“Get the truck clear!” Gallo shouted from overhead as he leaned out over the side of the house on the crane.

The truck lurched into gear, tracks clattering and slipping in the water and slush underneath. Anika crouched down and grabbed ahold of the lip of the bed. They’d gotten halfway across the street, when the light struck the house.

Anika covered her face with the crook of her elbow as heat washed over her. She could barely breathe, or think, and when it snapped off, she gasped and started coughing.

As her eyesight slowly returned, she stared at the gaping, bubbling pit where the house had once stood.

“Jesus,” she whispered.

Someone was screaming, and she realized it wasn’t her: it was the SEAL driving the truck. He was punching the dashboard and swearing, but keeping them on the road as they trundled farther and farther away from the glowing hot debris behind them.

Shadowy figures ran along the pylons, trying to keep up with the truck as it sped up. Some of them started opening fire, but both Roo and Anika braced their backs against the cab and started firing bursts at any movement.

Three blocks later, and the attacks stopped.

Anika’s phone buzzed.

“Paige?”

“You’re alive. And you have the missile?” Paige’s voice sounded even fainter, more papery, with a faint gurgle.

“Yes.” Anika decided to spare her the casualty details.

“They’re cutting through the door with a torch of some kind,” Paige said. Anika heard several shallow breaths. “So, I want you to remember something really important. Do you have a pen?”

Anika patted herself down. “Roo! Pen?”

He shrugged.

“Forty-five, sixteen, seventy-nine, twelve,” Paige said over a loud crackling and spitting sound in the background.

“What? What’s that for?” Anika asked.

“Forty-five, sixteen, seventy-nine, twelve,” Paige repeated. A loud crack sounded. “They’re coming through.”

Forty-five, sixteen, seventy-nine, twelve, Anika said to herself. Then again. She rapped on the glass window, and when Gabriel slid it open for her, she leaned through and grabbed a pen off the seat, where Gallo had left it.

She rolled her left sleeve back and wrote the numbers down on her forearm.

“Good luck,” Paige said.

The sound of a single gunshot made Anika jump.

On the other end, someone picked the phone up. “We’re hunting you. And when we find you, we will quite literally smite you,” Ivan Cohen said, then cut the connection.

For a stunned, long moment, Anika sat with the phone in her hands, staring at it.

They passed a streetlight, and Anika looked at the tiny camera mounted at the top. She raised a fist and flipped it off as they passed underneath.