Arctic Rising

27

Kerrie knocked on the door, and Anika opened it to find that she was standing there with an armful of clothes.

“Thank you.” Anika briefly peeked at the black jeans and plain black tee, oversized wool sweater, socks, and Windbreaker.

“No problem, hon. Sleep well.”

Anika retreated with the clothes back into the bedroom. She put them on top of the dresser and paused to look at the photos. They were in cheap fake-wooden frames, painted black. There was a picture of Vy as a teenager, grinning wildly, on a beach with an American skyline behind her. Chicago? Vy on a boat, beautiful bright blue water sparkling behind her.

Behind those two was a picture of a large gate, snow packed along the bottom. A line of footsteps in the snow led away from a small access door beside the gate. Barbed wire rolled along the top of the gate’s metal spikes, and a grim-looking man in a thick fur hat, rifle slung on his shoulder, stood on the other side of the gate looking blankly toward the camera.

The pixelated quality meant it had probably been snatched from an old camera phone and printed.

Anika looked at the fourth photo and came across Vy kissing a cute girl with green eyes, limp hair, and glossy lips.

Who was this?

She stared at it for a long time, and then finally reached up and faced it down on the dresser, gently.

No. This wasn’t her stuff to meddle with, Anika thought. She was a guest. She set the photo back up.

That was the right thing to do, wasn’t it?

Right or not, Anika changed her mind, and faced the photo back down.

Not while she was staying the night, alone.

She turned away, slid the bathrobe off, and crawled into the large bed. She arranged the overstuffed pillows in a circle around herself, as if she were making a nest.

Propped up, the large comforter pulled up to her neck, Anika found a remote to the wall-mounted screen. News programs were now, she saw, covering the “Crisis in the Arctic.”

She’d been hunkered down, away from her phone or any connections. Focused on her own problems. She felt like she was coming up for media air and looking around, now.

This morning the news had broken about the spheres, just as Bish said. Grainy green-hued footage of crates of spheres being packed away as they rolled off assembly lines had leaked to the world at large.

Now came zooming maps of the world, with existing launch points highlighted. And the Arctic Circle bloomed with little red dots.

Navy ships steamed northward at high speed in shaky videos taken by passing ships. And then Anika watched mist boats vomiting spheres, and teams of international peacekeeping forces storming them to put a stop to it.

And then … video of the mist boats blowing up. Anika recognized the jerky movement and perspective right away, and realized this was Bish’s doing. He’d gotten his video uploaded. Somewhere, she was willing to bet, video of the holds opening and releasing spheres was floating around as well.

Now Lars’s video from the helicopter, jerked around, trying to focus on the destruction.

“This was not an American attack,” a fully uniformed admiral told an interviewer as the screen split. “Our policy for this crisis has been to capture store-holds of Gaia’s devices and prevent further launches.”

Again Anika focused on Lars’s video, and her eyes widened. There she was, for the briefest second, glimpsed out of the corner of the video, leaning against the door and wincing. Green makeup and purple hair and all.

Her own mother wouldn’t have recognized her.

Then Lars was back to the burning ships.

Anika changed to a different news show.

“No one knows what a large mirror could do,” an expert was interviewed as saying. “You can’t just start moving massive amounts of heat around the atmosphere willy-nilly and not expect catastrophic results! What Gaia is doing is dangerous to us all. We can’t have maverick geo-engineering projects.”

Another guest yelled, “Companies have been moving heat around ‘willy-nilly’ for centuries, and when people complained they were told we couldn’t say anything negative about industry or growth. That’s a complete double standard. Dumping heat and carbon is why we’re in trouble now. That was the geo-engineering project.”

Anika turned it all off.

She wondered where Vy was, and what she was doing. Then she hoped that Bish had found a place to stay, and wasn’t wandering Pleasure Island alone after all he’d been through.

Halfway through the night she thought she felt someone slide into the bed behind her, breasts pushing softly against her back.

But as she half-flailed awake, picked up empty comforters and shoved pillows aside, she realized it was a half-awake fantasy. The cold truth was that she was alone and sore and very, very tired.

She slumped back asleep.

Someone shook her gently awake. Anika bolted upright, and the person jumped back away from her.

It was Kerrie. Dressed in a top hat and a full black tuxedo with tails. “Sorry sweetie, you weren’t answering the door. Roo was worried.”

Anika sat up and rubbed her eyes with one hand while holding the comforter over her chest with the other. “Thanks.”

“No problem.”

Kerrie walked out of the room, the tails gently slapping the backs of her knees.

Once she was dressed she hunted around for a comb that would work halfway decently on her hair, then realized she had dreadlocks now and wouldn’t be combing them.

Roo waited outside in the corridor. “I was worried for you,” he said. “And they ready with breakfast.”

“You’re safe to come in, Roo. I won’t bite you.”

“Alright.”

They strolled down the corridor. “Why is this Vy’s retreat?” Anika asked. “What is her connection to this place?”

“Back in the day Violet used to work here. After Siberia. Gave her a fresh start, right? Two years ago the old owner made a move to evict all of them, so Violet ran a deal to buy him out. A favor to her past.”

“Siberia?” Anika asked.

Roo looked over. “That’ll be her story to tell, not mine.”

They took the small elevator up. Roo leaned over. “Just ask her about the tattoos.”

“Okay,” Anika replied, while wondering what tattoos Vy had. She’d never noticed any. At least, not on any of Vy’s skin exposed in the club.

She looked at Roo with a stab of sudden suspicion. He saw it, and laughed. “No, Anika. I know some of Violet’s past, that’s all. Is good business to know such things.”

Fair enough.

But Anika was realizing she really didn’t know much about Vy, did she? Why was she putting so much at risk? Why turn her life upside down just to help Anika?

Did Vy expect some sort of debt to be paid? Was that why she’d been put in Vy’s room?

And, Anika wondered, was that even a bad thing in and of itself?

Breakfast was ready, buffet style, in the commercial kitchen gleaming with stainless steel tables and equipment. The club wasn’t open yet. “Waiting for Violet,” Kerrie told her as she slid bacon onto her plate with a spatula. “A courtesy.”

The women were all dressed differently, and Anika enjoyed the spectacle. From bikinis to suits to jeans and a loose shirt, it looked like a parade in the kitchen.

Kerrie noticed her looking around as they filed out into the top floor dance area booths to eat. “Men don’t like particular women so much as archetypes. Objectification is a tool in this business. They’re coming in here looking for specific looks to fill fantasies.”

“And what’s your look?” Anika asked.

Kerrie reached into a pocket and pulled out square, black-rimmed glasses. She pulled her hair back into a bun and clipped it in place. “Hot teacher or secretary.”

They sat down, and as everyone filed out from the kitchen, Kerrie kept the commentary going. “That’s Alicia. Tattoos and dark eyes and all black clothes, piercings, she gave you her clothes there. She works the programmers and engineers. Truth is, she’s a soccer nut and gym-rat and pretty bubbly. Tempo, over there, she’s our blonde. All dyed, she complains about the upkeep. Toya is our ample-breasted and curvy dancer, very Marilyn Monroe-ish, but also works as our resident redhead and bush-queen, as the ginger-lovers want to see the red down there to reassure themselves it’s real. All archetypes.”

Anika nodded and watched the fifteen dancers all group around different tables, trying to guess which identity they were playing to. She didn’t see Adriana anywhere.

The vote must have been against her staying.

“When is Vy getting here?” she asked.

“Another hour.”

Anika’s stomach knotted slightly.

To keep herself busy she borrowed a phone to look up information about Gaia while sitting off by herself at one of the booths in the corner of the floor.

There wasn’t much she could find that wasn’t already common knowledge. Gaia was another garage-launched green company from just after the turn of the century. Back when that wasn’t big business.

When Ivan Cohen and Paige Greer teamed up, they began a ten-year spree of gobbling up anyone playing with alternative energy and batteries. At first, everyone assumed they were battery geeks obsessed with making gadgets last longer between recharging.

But then Gaia began using its capital and money leverage to roll out the bigger projects: wind farms or small nuclear reactors for small towns.

They began trying to acquire power companies, carbon sequestration companies, water filtration technology, anything that assumed global warming would get worse and these technologies would be needed.

And now they were. And Cohen and Greer were the ones to go to if you wanted to kick oil dependency. Or turn ocean water into fresh for your coastal cities.

Corporate headquarters was now a former Russian aircraft carrier called The Green Monster after the public’s not-so-affectionate nickname for Gaia, Inc. Gaia’s home page showed video of it anchored off New York City. The mobile headquarters had left after a G-35 summit where Cohen and Greer had tried to force a controversial—and doomed in the public and politicians’ eyes—measure to ban internal combustion engines and coal-fired plants throughout the G-35. U.S. officials had walked out. The country had a two-hundred-year supply of coal; it would not be doing any such thing.

Where was The Green Monster headed next?

Anika bit her lips. It was already here in the Circle. It was supposed to dock at Thule three days ago.

Now that, she thought, was interesting.

The door cracked open, making her wince and blink as she looked up from the phone’s screen. Vy stood at the door. Anika smiled at her, and almost stood. But then froze when she realized Vy wasn’t smiling back.

As Anika’s eyes adjusted she saw the seven men wearing gray suits who stood grimly behind Vy. Out of place here on Pleasure Island, where most people were hard workers. Functional clothing reigned in these parts, not thousand-dollar brands.

They’d walked right past the masked bouncers outside, too. What did that mean? That Vy had allowed them past, or that the bouncers, realizing these men were more dangerous, had let them through rather than start a firefight? Then, as the doors opened further, Anika saw that two suited men stood outside with the bouncers, guns aimed at them.

Anika shivered, but not from the blast of cold air that had swept through from the doors.

A thin, leathery-faced Gabriel stepped out from behind Vy and her escorts. He looked around Pussy Galore’s, a twinge of disgust quirking his lips.

“You were hard to track. Fooling facial scanners. Quite clever. So I had to intercept Violet’s ship and get her to … help us reintroduce each other.” He shook his head slightly, as if disappointed. “You should have stayed put.”

The ladies of Pussy Galore’s melted out of the room without a word, slipping into the kitchen or back down the corridor toward their rooms, leaving Anika very much alone.