Tobias Buckell - Arctic Rising

If this worked, she half imagined she was going to die protecting the missile.

If it didn’t, either the people attacking would shoot her, or the sky would flare up and vaporize her at Ivan Cohen’s direction.

At least vaporization would be instantaneous, she thought.

She was on her last clip when Gabriel threw the laptop out of the car after yanking the cables out that led to the missile. “Weir: get ready to cut the ropes.”

“Is it ready?” Anika asked.

“I started the launch sequence. In two minutes it’ll fire. You don’t want to be standing here,” Gabriel said. “Give me your gun.”

“Why?”

Weir jogged their way, pulling out a large hunting knife.

“I’m going to shoot that laptop so that if they rush us, they can’t plug back in and stop the launch. And I’m going to hold them back from damaging the missile.”

A foot away, Weir jerked as a hail of gunfire slapped the vehicle’s far side, the ground near them, and the rails near the missile.

For a second, Weir looked like he was taking cover with Anika and Gabriel, who got down. Anika fired back over the top of the truck bed. But Weir didn’t stop running—he clumsily spun to his left and staggered sideways, out into the open, and collapsed.

“Weir?” Anika shouted, horrified. Another life on her hands?

Gabriel shook his head.

Weir was sprawled out, looking up at the sky, a red mess of brain and blood leaking out of the side of his head onto his jacket. He was dead.

The burst of fire faded. Part of the natural rhythm of the firefight.

“Anika? The Diemaco?”

Anika handed Gabriel the Diemaco and, zombie-like, pulled out the pistol from the back of her jeans. He looked down at it. “You still don’t trust me, Ms. Duncan?”

She shook her head. She was still numbed. “No.”

“Why?”

The death of yet another man just a few feet away chewed through her like an acid, and the words that tumbled out were bitter, and not even aimed at Gabriel but at the messed-up situation. “Men like you use words like ‘preemptive’ and ‘just’ and chew through lives. You even destroy countries. You run around, playing your games, imagining you are gods moving the little people around on boards like game pieces. And you are right, you are not human, you are something else. But it is not gods. I flew enough of your kind into conflict zones to know the type. You know why natural resources are the curse of a developing nation? Because the rebel army meets someone like you, who parachutes into the jungle, and they say when they get control of the resources, they’ll cut you a deal. And so you give them arms, or a loan, because maybe you don’t like the current government. And the brutal flip-flopping of overthrow, violence, and overthrow continues. I know you, Gabriel. You’re the kind of man who thinks it makes any sense to smuggle a nuclear missile around the world to kill an engineering project.”

Gabriel shifted the Diemaco. “You ignore the very simple fact that I was right, though. What exactly is wrong with you that you can’t just accept that?”

“A broken clock is correct twice a day,” Anika said. “You are correct now. But you will always be doing things like this around the clock. That is how you are. Regular people, we are reactive. Hit us, we hit back. But you walk around looking for people to hit ahead of time. You see?”

“You would just let Ivan Cohen dominate you all, then?” Gabriel sighted down the rifle and fired off a full burst at the laptop. Pieces of plastic and circuit board flew off into the air as it was destroyed.

“No,” Anika said. “Your people and him, they are the same. They dictate from on high. They are always convinced that they, and only they, have all the answers. They have to force the issue. The ends justify the means. Get rid of your masters and him, the rest of us get on with living. But since we’re stuck with each other, we have this mess. Right?”

She looked at him. She’d gotten a reaction of some kind, but she wasn’t sure.

Gabriel spotted movement and used the rifle to quickly force someone back into cover.

When he crouched back down, Anika grabbed his shoulders. “Who do you work for, Gabriel? Because the military types who picked you up, they all kept hearing back that you were retired. So who are you contracting out to?”

“I work for a group whose interests are harmed by the ice returning,” Gabriel said. “And that is all you need to know.”

“I’m about to die helping you,” Anika spat. “The least you can do is give me this satisfaction.” The satisfaction of knowing more about the forces that had turned her life upside down and led to her crouching here, wondering how many more minutes she had left.

“You’re wrong,” Gabriel said. He reversed the rifle. “About a lot of things. In particular—”

“What?”

He smacked her in the face with the butt of the rifle. Anika’s vision went dark, and she staggered backward. She had the pistol up, but as she opened her eyes, she realized he had the Diemaco trained on her. She wasn’t going to be able to shoot him. “Gabriel? What are you doing?” She was thinking about double betrayals. Wondering if he’d really set the missile to launch.

Gabriel smiled sadly. “No one’s going to miss an old spy who did horrible things no one wants dredged back up,” he told her. “But you have someone waiting for you. So you’re wrong: you’re not going to die. I’m going to hold them off, so that they don’t shoot the missile, or damage it. You, on the other hand, have about two minutes to run for safety. Do it, or I’ll shoot you.”

“Really?” She wasn’t buying it, and besides, she was still wearing her bulletproof vest. She took a step forward. He tightened his stance, grinned slightly, and shot her in the upper left shoulder, just clear of the vest.

Stuffing flew out of her jacket and hung in the air while the impact of the bullet smacked half of her body backward. Anika staggered another step back, clutching the top of her arm as blood seeped out. “You fucker, ” she spat, the pain trickling down through her.

The bullet had hit shoulder flesh and exited. Gabriel had damn good aim. Her eyes narrowed and his smile faded. “Run,” he repeated, and shifted his aim at her temple.

“Where?” she responded. “We’re cut off. There’s no ‘away,’ Gabriel.”

“Take two more steps backward, and look over your shoulder.” He gestured with his rifle.

Anika took the steps and glanced. At first, she saw nothing but the ruined edge of ice, road, structure, and the ocean out past it. Then she saw it. A small antenna, rocking back and forth, hard to spot when the angle made it look like part of the jumbled mess the demesne had left behind when tearing itself away from Thule.

She turned back to Gabriel and threw him the pistol. “You’ll need that more than I will.”

“Ah, now you trust me,” he said sadly.

After one last look, Anika sprinted for the railing.

The movement prompted more gunfire, and she could hear the slap of bullets against the walkway as she slid off the raised section and dropped to the road below. She was standing right next to the base of the missile.

“Roo!” she shouted, looking around at the wall the raised walkway created on this side of the road. There were a few bodies in Gaia Security uniforms, but no Roo. “Roo!”

“ Ras , woman, keep quiet. Over here.” He was slumped on the ground near the lip of a half-destroyed bridge on the other side of the road. All she could see was a hand waving her over.

Anika ran across the street, drawing fire again, and hunkered down behind a twisted steel beam. Roo’d been shot in the leg. He had ripped up an undershirt to create a makeshift compress, and tied that on tight with a piece of electric wire.