Arctic Rising

another. But by hiding it as a tax cost, and letting the government clean it up, you’re unaware of the real cost of the object in your hand. The pollution also causes medical costs: lung disease, cancer. That comes out of your medical bill, and often the government gets involved there, but you as a human don’t perceive the cost of cancer as being a portion of the cost of your new laptop. The company also releases carbon every time a new laptop is made, and when it’s transported to you. But no one ever pays for that up front. We keep punting the question of what that is doing to the atmosphere to the next generation. We’re doing it again. It’s warmed up enough that we’re experiencing all the benefits of global warming: increased land for northern countries, the release of the Arctic’s resources, and a whole new shipping lane and ocean to exploit. But now there’s a precipice we’re perched on. Who goes over it? Not our problem, right? The cost of the problem isn’t paid anywhere. The market fails to price properly because you can time-shift a portion of the cost, creating an unbalanced market.”

Ivan smiled. “As Paige keeps testifying to politician after politician, until you pay the true cost of the object, you will never make the right consumer choices, nor will the market properly adjust. Until you have a structural situation where one company offers you a widget for less because it pollutes less, destroys other companies’ democracies less, and doesn’t dump carbon into the air to move an object to you, then you actually don’t have a true, market-based economy. A truly market economy is one that properly maintains the environs it needs to exist in because it adds the price of damaging that environ into the bill of its goods. What we have now is a distorted market that rewards anti-conservation, and hides the real cost of the object in your taxes and elsewhere. Ultimately, it’s just really, really bad accounting. They keep passing laws and trying to ‘educate’ people to make better choices. People don’t make better choices, and free people don’t like being forced to do things. But if you simply price the cost of your object properly, they’ll always make the right choice.”

Paige jumped in again. “We’ve been hammering through a lot of power brokers and other corporate groups. No one country wants to jump first, because when you force your prices higher, you give the others an edge. But I think, given time, we might make some progress. Even if you don’t believe global warming is real, we hammer the pollution side of this. We hammer energy independence, not having to rely on a foreign country’s oil. We hammer the idea that the best use of oil isn’t to vaporize it through combustion and then never have access to it again, but to use it in plastics, which are recyclable. Our civilization can’t exist without that. Save the plastic, burn something else. And what the politicians keep asking for is time.”

“So we’re giving them time,” Ivan said. “The solar shield can mitigate the planetary warming trend. Whether you believe warming is manmade or not, the trend is on record. From the moment the Northwest Passage became passable by actual overseas ship traffic for the first time in human history at the turn of the century, it’s been undeniable that the polar region has warmed. Even the strongest denialist is in the position of saying, sure it’s warmed up, but it’s not humanity’s fault. That’s when they talk about cycles or the sun or some bullshit like that. When glaciers are something you read about in picture books but can’t see anymore, no one is arguing whether it’s a real phenomenon or not, they’re just trying to assign blame. The cloud can cool the planet again, to give us the time to get to a solution. Help us get that time.”

“What is you want out of us?” Roo asked.

“You three captured someone who knows about the nuke, maybe even about where it is, right?” Ivan asked. “Can you give him to us.”

“No.” Roo shook his head, locks swinging. “Not ours to move around anymore. We gave him to the fleet.”

Ivan’s lips tightened. “Them? You gave him to them,” he spat. “Fuck. Fuck. Once the shield is fully initialized, we become a voice at the world table. A serious voice. Because then, we’re a superpower. The Earth will have a voice. It will be Gaia. They don’t want that. They’re the ones behind the fucking nuke. Unbelievable.”

He turned and walked out, lip curled in disgust, the entire cloak of careful geniality dropped.

Paige watched him go, eyes narrowing. “I’m sorry,” she said as the doors closed behind him. “He’s under an extraordinary amount of stress. The board of directors, they weren’t forewarned. They’re pushing hard to have us turn over the command of the cloud to the UN.”

Anika cocked her head. “That is a good idea. The blockade would stop. We could focus on finding the nuke, yes?”

Paige looked down. “It’s hard to trust that they will make the right choices when they’ve made so many bad ones. And as Ivan points out, it’s very probable that they were the ones that put the nuke here to stop the cloud.”

“You playing a dangerous game of chicken,” Roo observed.

“If it comes to innocent lives or the cloud, I know what Ivan will choose,” Paige muttered. “But we couldn’t live with ourselves unless we tried. You understand that? We have a chance to turn the world around. Who lets that go without a fight? I’m not going to. Ivan is headed off to keep talking to the Polar Fleet’s commanders to buy us some time. We should use it to find the device. Are you still interested in finishing what you came here for, Anika?”

She wasn’t so sure now. A lot of that righteous anger had leached out of her. She’d gone off to slay a dragon, in revenge, and now she felt like she was standing in the shadow of something even larger, that blotted out the sun overhead. Huge, implacable, and monstrous.

But Gabriel’s assured words, telling her to go home, to stay out of the way, kept floating around the back of her head.

She wasn’t going anywhere.

“We’ll help any way we can,” she said. “But what do you want from us now that we can’t give you Gabriel? You have to have more resources than we do.”

“You’d think that,” Paige said. “But Ivan pulled Gaia Security off the hunt. A needle in a haystack isn’t worth hunting. He wants GS ready in case there are any other surprises the G-35 have in Thule for us. We know there was a lot of traffic into Thule via military transport, not just you three.”

“He gave up the hunt for the nuke?” Anika couldn’t believe it.

Paige nodded. And it didn’t look like she agreed with the decision. “There’s a lot of data that Thule citizens have generated and are generating. We put out a bounty, and pictures of the men, and all the information we have. We’re trying to crowd-source the hunt. Our corporate data services are even paying people to look through Thule’s public-archived video feeds to hunt them. I need someone here to sift through all that. I know who you work for, Roo, and that you’re good at this.”

Roo shrugged. “If your security forces are elsewhere, what happens if we find something?”

“I’d talked Ivan into getting upstairs to meet you all when Wynter called. When he thought you could give us a good lead, he was willing to commit resources. That changed. If things change again, he will do what’s necessary.”

Violet had been watching Paige very intently since Ivan stormed out. “For a cofounder, you seem a bit cut out of the loop, Paige.”

Paige bit a lip. “This is Ivan’s baby. He sees this as his last change to give his grandchildren a better world.”

“It’s not a bad world, right now. It needs fixing, but we’re not dressed up in hand-me-down football uniforms under armor and driving dune buggies. Most people live blissful, comfortable lives in the cities of their choosing,” Violet said. “Is he going to be this twitchy? This is a big fucking standoff. We don’t need twitchy here, you know that? How much do you trust that man?”

Paige looked Vy straight on. “I’ve known him most of my life. I trust him with it, as well. Understand?”

Vy nodded.

Paige walked around the tables to the doors. “I will send someone in with food, drinks, whatever you need. Please feel free to use the bathroom in my office here on the left.”

* * *

In minutes, Roo had all the touch screens lying on the table propped up and displaying information, and instead of the Gaia logo hovering in the air in the empty space the table curved around, he projected a map of Thule.

A few minutes later he chuckled. “We have unlimited access to Gaia’s crowd-sourcing initiative. Paige just sent me the passwords and an unlimited bank account. We have ten thousand people across the world using good