Arctic Rising

32

A six-foot-tall woman with startling blue eyes and pale hair waited for them inside the warm and bright airport terminal. She wore large, white fox furs and grinned with diamond-crusted teeth—which sort-of ruined her otherworldly, almost elfin look, Anika thought. She had a jet-black cane held in one hand, with what looked like an impossibly large diamond on the top.

The flow of people moving to leave Thule passed around her: a stream flowing around a white rock. If Thule was as open as the customs agent indicated, and Anika imagined it was, then everyone knew there was trouble, and the packed mob crushing every inch of the airport terminal was part of a rush to get out of here before things got worse—human rats leaping from a sinking ship.

“Wynter: the dictator of Pytheas,” Roo said to Anika. “And that’s ‘Winter’ spelled with a ‘y.’ I used to know her as Beverly Smithwyck, back when she was a vice president of a mobile factory business. What worries me is … why she’s here personally.”

“Why?” Anika asked. But now Wynter was close enough to overhear them, and she got no answer.

Anika moved to shake the woman’s hand, but Wynter made no such move. “You are all posing a rather annoying dilemma for me,” she said. “Come.”

Four men in cream suits waited outside by a chrome-accented all-white limousine with triangular snow treads instead of wheels.

Once everyone climbed in, Wynter tapped the glass partition with her cane, and the limo rattled into motion.

“My problem is that you’re asking me to give up people who’ve used the submarine docks to enter Thule,” Wynter said, her teeth sparkling in the rope lighting of the limo’s interior. “My people are going to cry bloody murder. The demesne I run has utter privacy as rule of law. Violet, you understand. You’ve used the docks before.”

“There’s a nuclear bomb somewhere in Thule, doesn’t that trump everything?” Anika interrupted.

Wynter craned her head to the side and stared at Anika. “Those who give up liberty for security deserve neither,” she said. “What else will the Pytheas demesne hand over in order to find this nuclear device? Shall I have you all search house by house? Will my demesne even exist after this?”

“It won’t exist if a nuke goes off,” Anika pointed out, amazed.

Wynter shook her head. “But we cease to exist if we drastically change the nature of what makes us … us. If I do this, the demesne falls apart as I’m accused of turning against the core principles that founded the demesne. My citizenry believes they should not be tracked. Looking at the makeup on your faces; Anika I must ask, surely you understand the inherent value of privacy?”

“And the bomb?” Vy asked.

“There’s always some threat that asks us to sacrifice freedoms to combat it. The only truly safe environ is a one-hundred-percent-controlled one. Not a free one.” Wynter leaned back against her seat and sighed. “It is a great, modern dilemma.”

“I thought you were the dictator of Pytheas, right?” Anika asked. “How are you the dictator if you can’t even do this small thing to help us?”

“I’m a benevolent dictator,” Wynter smiled. “Anyone can lease land from Thule, and that covers maintenance of the snowpack and some minor infrastructure. Everything else is up to the demesne, and anyone can leave: right of movement is the one thing you sign up for. So if what I offer as dictator of Pytheas pales compared to other demesnes, I can’t compete. The effectiveness of my policies determines my demesne’s viability. And that is why I have a dilemma: people will walk away if I do what you’re asking. A lot of people.”

They continued on in silence, through a streetscape of wide plowed sidewalks and buildings that sat on pylons. Anika was missing having sunglasses; she could use a heads-up display right about now. They’d be popping up little tags telling her what the street was, what demesne they were in, and help her feel a lot less lost.

The leather seats crinkled as Roo leaned forward. “Your citizens understand that business and travel are evaporating if this bomb goes off, right?”

“My subjects voluntarily live under a dictatorship,” Wynter said. “They’ve ceded the worrying about that to me. They don’t like hearing about this. All they want to know is that Wynter’s got it under control.”

“But you don’t,” said Vy. “No one in the whole Circle’s got this under control.”

“That’s why it’s a called a dilemma, Violet,” Wynter snapped. “There are people in Pytheas actually begging me to kick down every door I can and backtrack your UNPG man’s movements so we can ask about the bomb, privacy be damned. I also have the responsibility of fifty thousand loyal subjects’ lives, and they absolutely will not understand or appreciate my selling them out, regardless of how much more annoyed they’d be if a bomb actually does go off. I also have to wonder if the bomb threat is real, which is why I’m here to meet your new friend, Roo, before I decide to do anything.”

Anika stared into the clear blue eyes, and realized that they were artificially colored. She could see faint green rings around the edges. “What do you want from me?”

Wynter wrapped her hands around the top of her cane. “So far we have a lot of paper trail bullshit. It could be the same intelligence agencies working for the blockade messing with our heads. I don’t want to make a mistake over a ghost, you understand? I want to look right at you and ask: What did you really see, Anika, up there in your little UNPG blimp?”

Anika leaned forward. “The scatter camera got a solid hit. Something radioactive was on board Kosatka. Something they worked hard to protect by shooting me down. I wouldn’t be here, on Thule, if I thought it was just some barrels of waste they were dumping.”

They stared at each other, then Wynter grimaced. “I doubt it’s dumping, either, from what I’m seeing.” She uncovered the tip of her cane, and a small projector buried in the tip lit up the dark mirror that separated them from the driver.

The picture the cane transmitted was of an older white man with graying hair. He stood near a concrete pier, inside a large ice cavern. The sub harbor, Anika presumed. Somewhere under the ice, under the Pytheas demesne.

“You have public cameras, after all that about privacy?” Roo smirked.

“I’m the dictator of this demesne, might I remind you? The rules don’t apply to me, and I like to know who comes and goes in my territory. That information has never been shared, other than my using it to keep things quiet and orderly. But … being a good dictator means knowing when to toss the rules out. I hope. What you have here is one Mr. Peter Braithwaite,” Wynter muttered. “Meeting him is someone I don’t recognize. May I add, if anyone finds out I handed these men over to you, I will take it very, fucking, personally.”

“Heard.” Roo sucked his teeth. He looked back at the frozen scene projected against the window and tapped one of the figures. “We know who this one is.”

Wynter raised an eyebrow.

Anika was staring, because she knew that figure, too: it was Gabriel. He stood just on the edge of the image, reaching out to shake Braithwaite’s hand.

“This was taken the morning you were shot down,” Wynter said. “Those are the sub docks. A lot of this demesne’s more interesting characters come through there. That’s why I like to keep an eye on it.” Braithwaite’s image faded away. The next frozen image was a closer still of Gabriel.

Five men surrounded a fifteen-foot-long wooden case, moving it into place aboard the back of a flatbed truck with the help of several small jack stands and ramps. It looked like it was going to stick out of the end a bit, but just barely fit anyway.

There it was, Anika thought, her mouth drying. That was the thing that had caused all this trouble.

“His name is Gabriel. Where did he go after this was taken?” Anika asked. That could lead them to where the bomb was hidden.

“This is all I can show you.” Wynter tapped the cane, and the image faded away.

“Damn it,” Anika said. “This almost killed me. It killed my copilot. It’s hurt people I value.”

“I can’t give it to you because I don’t have it. I have a secret camera on some of the docks. There are some voluntarily public cameras on the edges of Pytheas, looking out at other demesnes, but we’re pretty dark.”

“So Gabriel’s people could be anywhere in your demesne, or could have left for anywhere in Thule,” Anika said. “The nuclear device could be anywhere.”

“If they’ve left my demesne, I doubt they can hide for long. There’s an ad hoc group of concerned citizens parsing the few public camera archives looking for the vehicle they used to see if it left Pytheas and where it was going. You can look them up, search for ‘concerned citizens Thule and nuclear’ and they’ll pop up. So far it hasn’t been found. But thirty vehicles large enough to conceal the device were rented and moved in and out of Pytheas during the time frame we’re looking at. I’m reasonably sure they’re not currently in Pytheas, but they used the vehicles to cover their movements.”

“They knew you were privacy-obsessed; they used that as a cover.” Roo looked out the window. “We’re not even close to Pytheas, Wynter, we’re ten miles the other direction. What are you doing out of your demesne?”

They’d slowed down and the buildings had petered out. Four large structures dominated the area, though; they looked like giant igloos, but multiplied in size many times so that they would have engulfed an aircraft hanger. A few people walked around them and streamed out onto the road, headed toward a large wrought-iron gate.

“You’re right. This is the North Polar Conservation Demesne, or the North Pole Arctic Preserve to others. Most of us call it the zoo, or the tourist trap.” Ten-foot-tall ice walls curved off into the distance. Wynter opened a door as they came to a stop with all the other visitors. “I’ve arranged for you to meet a powerful ally here on neutral ground.”

Outside again, shivering slightly as the wind ripped over the flat miles of polar ice, they trooped along with a few die-hard visitors.

“Normally it’s packed,” said Wynter. “People fly out from all over the world to visit. But since the navy blockade everyone’s been leaving. Commercial flights are unwilling to land. Locals are more worried about the nuke, or trying to leave. It’s a ghost town.”

They walked along the snowy roads inside the complex, hiking up until they stopped at a lip. On the other side of the fence, a hundred feet below them, were miles of winding bergs, blue water, and a cluster of harp seals sunning themselves.

“Think about this,” Wynter said, as the wind ruffled the white fur around her neck and stirred her blond hair. “Instead of assuming that the nuclear device was smuggled in to create a terrorist incident, assume that both major events that have happened here are connected. A nuclear device, capable of emitting an electromagnetic pulse and frying all the electronics in Thule, will also be able to fry the electronics of those millions of little floating balls overhead.”

They all looked up at the silver sheen of the gathering artificial clouds miles overhead.

“If it’s meant to kill the Gaia cloud, then why was it on a Gaia ship?” Anika asked.

“Protective camouflage?” Roo guessed.

“Or a monumental fuck up on the part our contracted delivery services,” said one of a pair of tourists standing nearby. They’d previously been looking out across the sanctuary.

“And an even bigger screw up on the part of our security people,” said the other.

Behind them, a cable car moved along over the frigid landscape. According to a plaque near the fence, this is how you could pass over the last of the polar bear’s territory, all four hundred of them. This demesne, run by conservationists, was not for people to live in.

The pair of tourists pulled back their thick hoods, and Anika recognized them.

Ivan Cohen and Paige Greer. The founders of Gaia.

In the distance several loud cracks sounded. Like ice snapping, Anika thought. But it continued to thud and spray. Wynter turned around. “That’s my call,” she said.

“What’s happening?” Anika asked.

The pale dictator looked over her shoulder. “In light of the blockade, and the realization that there’s a nuclear device somewhere in Thule, several demesnes are separating from Thule. That sound was dynamite taking out bridgework, connecting streets, what have you.”

A cloud of steam rose off the buildings in the distance near the harbor.

“Sort of literalizes the phrase ‘breakaway republics,’ I think,” Vy muttered.

Wynter pulled her coat tighter around herself. “This is good-bye,” she said. “I hope you all can help each other out. But I need to go supervise what comes next for Pytheas.”

She walked off down the snowy ramp as the detonations continued, this time from another sector, closer to the edge of the harbor docks.

Thule was literally ripping itself apart.