Tobias Buckell - Arctic Rising

Anika felt slightly guilty. “I’m sorry, Yves. It is a hard thing to stop thinking about.”

He shrugged. “Come. The rest of your life, it is waiting.”

She watched him climb into the jet.

The rest of his life, she thought, hadn’t fired a rocket at him lately. “Yves?”

He looked back down at her. “Yes?”

“When that boy fired the RPG at me, I reached for the rifle and returned fire. I did not even think about it. Do you know where I got those instincts from?”

“Not training for UNPG?” Yves guessed.

“I used to be one of those kids with a gun you talked about. I ran away from Lagos. I dreamed I would pilot an airship, like the adventurers in the movies. But before anyone would let me fly, I sat in an open door of a gondola with a very large chain gun. I was fifteen. My job for two years was to make sure bush fighters were scared of us. I made sure of it. I don’t run away from a fight, Yves.”

Yves spread his hands. “We already won the fight.”

No. This was just a small battle of a larger war; Anika felt it in her gut. Something was going on. And maybe it was stupid to pursue it. But she felt slighted. She’d walked away from the rough life of a security contractor. She’d been little more than a mercenary pilot for so long, and the UNPG had been a chance to head in a new direction. And this violence snapping at her, it offended her. She wanted to turn around and kill it until she was sure it was never going to reach into the orderly world she’d made for herself here.

Or, she wondered, maybe there was nowhere in the world you got to have that life, where you knew you were safe every morning when you woke up, and knew exactly what to expect. She’d lived that in Lagos, growing up. Then ran away from it all for excitement. And after a decade of excitement, she treasured her life here.

Maybe, just maybe, mulling over all this kept her from having to think about Tom. Or his wife.

She was going to have to go see Jenny at some point.

Anika wasn’t sure she could face her.

Not without feeling guilty that she was still alive, still talking to her loved ones.

Anika slipped the phone back in her pocket.

This was far from over.

It was midnight when she got home and changed out of her uniform blues. For a moment she stood in her underwear, considering her next move.

Go comfort Jenny?

No. She couldn’t face Jenny. Anika felt like she’d let her down. She couldn’t face that and keep herself held together right now.

Anika pulled on weathered jeans and a purple turtleneck, an old leather jacket, some gloves from the wicker basket near the door, and found her Oakleys.

She pulled the data backup out of the other jeans and slid it into her pocket. Now that she knew it was the only copy, she wasn’t letting it out of sight until she handed it over to Commander Claude.

She was still thinking about the fact that the Kosatka ’s crew had claimed to be drug runners. It didn’t make sense, and it gnawed away at her. And, she thought, she did know someone who could help answer a few questions about drug running. She let her hair out of a tight bun. It sprung loose, a halo of comfortable brown kinks she was happy to see again.

It went against her nature to go ask someone for help. But she was sort of looking forward to this trip, she had to secretly admit.

If she could arrange transportation.

She walked next door and banged on the screen door. “Karl!”

She banged again, until Karl’s blond curls appeared at the window, and then at the crack of the door as it opened. He was wearing a towel around his waist, tufts of coarse, dark hair running up from his belly to his chest, covering a fairly fit physique. “Jesus, Anika, what?”

“I need to borrow your bike, if it is charged.”

Karl rubbed his eyes and looked up the road. “Oh, come on, Anika. You ran your damn car down again ?”

Anika didn’t answer that, but cocked her head. Karl sighed and reached over to the hooks screwed into the wall by the door, then handed her the keys. The key fob was made of paracord, six feet of it woven into a five-inch decorative plait. Useful. She kept telling herself she needed one. The bike’s “key” was actually just an RFID chip in a decorative logo casing that didn’t need to be inserted into the bike. As long as Anika had the keys within ten feet of the bike it would start up with a press of a button. “Make sure you plug it back in when you’re done,” he growled.

“Thank you, Karl.”

“Fuck off. It’s late,” he grumped. “I’m going back to bed.”

“It’s not like I’ll get any sleep with you having a visitor over. These thin walls. Is it still Chief Evisham?”

He closed the door. They had a good-natured sort of blackmail arrangement. She borrowed his bike and kept shut about fraternization.

Though Anika was pretty sure he’d let her borrow the bike anyway.

The bike’s rear tire spat gravel as Anika wobbled her way out of the drive, and then she got her balance as the bike sped up. The wind snapped at her loose hair.

Out past base housing she turned onto the paved Nanisivik highway. The bike’s motor whined as she gunned it, sucking juice for a sudden burst of speed that left a long strip of rubber down the fresh asphalt.

At seventy miles an hour she eased back, letting the rhythm of the bike and the road’s dips canter underneath her. The whine fell away, leaving her with the just the sound of the constant hurricane of wind ripping at her.

This felt good. She was releasing something buried deep inside.

Now that she was off the gravel and on pavement her Oakleys finally connected wirelessly to her phone. A map appeared in her field of vision, showing her location and turn-by-turn directions.

It was an hour’s ride, and a fun one. She wound her way around the bases of the peaks overlooking Nanisivik. She crossed over the valleys carved out by now-extinct glaciers in the mountainous hump of the semi-peninsular Nanisivik.

A dip into a valley again, then slowly back up, and she was coming down toward an icy shoreline. Houses began to appear again, dotting the hills overlooking the sea.

It was a spare landscape. Rock. Snow. Moss. What little green there was struggled to live in the cold, constant wind. It was as much a desert as any she’d seen in Africa.

And it was all changing.

Baffin Island was some eight hundred miles long. North of Quebec. West of Greenland. And eight hundred miles farther south on Baffin Island the older folks shook their heads when they talked about how things were. They had vegetable gardens, now. And farms! They only remembered ice.

Greenland was growing more and more of its own food. And Canada’s grain lands, once in a thin band of land just above the border with America, now extended ever farther north, while First Nations villages relocated farther south as the ice their villages once sat on disappeared into an ever-warming Arctic Ocean.

She gunned the bike along toward the core of Arctic Bay, where the neon lights flashed along with the dim, distant Northern Lights, barely visible in the ever-constant twilight.

The Oakleys guided her through downtown and back to where the neon flashed the most garish. Now Anika knew she could take the glasses off, because all she had to do was follow the brightest lights and the noise to her destination.

The Greenhouse was jumping tonight. Superbikes and fast cars cluttered the street, and the bike racks were packed and looking like brightly colored metal shrubs.

People spilled out onto the sidewalk, their breath puffing out in the cold air. Bright colored jackets, leathers, and look-at-me hairstyles. Someone inside had the bass jumping, and even on the street people were unconsciously tapping out beats with their toes or nodding their heads.