Thule?”
Roo held up a palm. “You crazy,” he said.
But Anika pressed him. “We can save lives, Roo. And you know it. You have the contacts. Who else besides us can make this happen, right now?”
“We need the nuclear missile. And we’d need the military to turn Gabriel back over to us. Even harder: we need to convince Gabriel to help us. And I’m thinking, after what the three of us did back there, he won’t be interested in that, yeah?”
“He’ll help,” Anika said forcefully. He needed to set that missile off, even if meant working with the three of them.
“We’ll need to convince people to risk an attack on the missile, when Ivan all but owns the sky,” Roo continued.
“And when we attack,” Vy added, “Ivan will try to evaporate us.”
Anika hadn’t thought about that. She swallowed and looked forward. “I’ll go alone,” she said. “Give me Gabriel, other military volunteers. I can’t ask you two to do this, just to help me get ready.”
“Oh bullshit!” Vy said. “I don’t like this idea. I think we’re going to get ourselves killed. But damnit, Anika, I’m coming with you. There’s no way you’re doing this by yourself. Roo?”
Roo let out a deep breath that hung in the air between them all. “You asking a lot, Vy. Joining you two on a suicide mission…”
The silver cloud overhead flashed, light rippling through it, bouncing around, getting redirected, and a beam stabbed out of the sky into the distant ocean.
Anika flinched, and she saw Roo do the same.
“There are people dying, Roo. Right now. Out there over the curve of the horizon.”
The beam of light abruptly sputtered, split into several different beams that wandered aimlessly around, then fizzled.
“Paige is trying to blunt him,” she said. “But it’s only going to get worse.”
Roo was shielding his eyes with a hand and looking up at the silver sky.
“Fuck,” he said. “Fuck y’all. Fuck duty.” His shoulders slumped and Vy started chuckling.
“Who ever thought we’d be working together helping those guys,” Vy said, pointing out toward the blockade.
“You a Southern girl. Always had that flag-waving thing in you,” Roo said as he pulled a phone out of his jacket and pointed at Anika. “We see what we can assemble. We reach out to whoever running the blockade, coordinate with them. We do this correct and official, right?”
“Correct and official,” Anika agreed, as the lightning danced around the artificial clouds overhead.
39
Thule harbor had become a ghost town. Even the massive wind turbines, skyscrapers in and of themselves, had frozen in place, as if the wind had decided to flee with everyone else.
Large parts of the harbor had ripped free: docks attached to floating barges towed out to sea, only their debris left behind. Around the harbor, bridges had been severed, and large chunks of the superstructure cut by high-powered welding torches or detonated in order to free demesenes.
Anika could see, here in a conference room in one of the harbor’s taller buildings, that huge chunks of ice had been dynamited free. Large chunks of Thule, calving off and headed for the open sea, much like the free ice had once done twenty years ago. Headed for the Northwest Passage.
Whole cities out floating around the polar sea, keeping a nervous eye on their refrigeration cables.
Turning around in the large conference room, she could look out one of the corner windows, where she could still spot a few buildings on ice slipping away to open sea under the silver-gray sky.
“Ms. Duncan?”
Anika turned around. A young man in U.S. Navy uniform stood at the door. It was a wet uniform, and the young man was still shivering. The U.S. polar navy-wear was supposed to be some high-tech clothing that sealed the cuffs and trapped body heat and kept water out, not all that different from a dry suit used by scuba divers, but apparently even that still hadn’t kept him toasty. “Yes?”
Three more navy types walked through the door, with Roo following. And behind him, Gabriel in handcuffs, his usually carefully brushed hair disheveled, a glassy look in his eyes. He didn’t seem sure where he was.
Anika stared at him for a long beat, and he looked past her, out the windows.
He seemed drugged. “Roo, what’s wrong with him?”
The man standing to Gabriel’s right answered her. “He’s mildly sedated right now. He’s claustrophobic; the submarine ride over was stressful.”
She looked at him, and he finally met her eyes. “It has been a long few days, Ms. Duncan,” Gabriel said, his voice scratchy from a deep weariness that made Anika twinge. His mouth tightened. “Please, let’s hurry this up.”
“Commander Alexandra Forsythe,” said a no-nonsense officer with a shaved head, as she shook Anika’s hand, introducing herself. She pulled Anika over to a window. “The U.S. military has had plans for an orbiting solar mirror array for over forty years. The army in particular wanted to be able to concentrate solar light to solar stills and panels from orbit, in order to allow for better mobility. If there’s one organization on this planet that is aware of the mobilization limitations having to ship fuel around creates, it’s people who are faced with having to mobilize hundreds of thousands and keep them moving and using their equipment. However, other than demonstration tests, it was determined that anything bigger would be a default weaponization of space and a treaty violation. Whoever did it first would trigger a rapid arms race over our very heads. So now we’re in the middle of that very real mess and, guess what? Most of our response plans are completely inadequate for this scenario because they all assumed actual orbit, not high altitude floating bubbles controlled by an actual U.S. corporation instead of some foreign country.”
“So are you going to help us?” Anika asked.
“Some old Brit colleague from a war-gaming conference I attended five years ago calls me up and says I have to talk to Prudence Jones, like right now. And suddenly I’m finding out about nuclear bombs being in place at the site. So here’s the problem: my superiors are dealing with politicians losing their minds. The solution to this problem, an ordered attack, will cost the lives of a lot of my people, and a lot of people who’re left on Thule. So yes, Ms. Duncan, I’m going to help you set off a nuclear bomb. I shouldn’t be helping you, I’m not under orders to do so. But it’s clearly the right fucking decision, and it’s going to be a hell of a lot easier to ask forgiveness than permission here.”
Anika sagged from relief. “Thank you.”
Commander Forsythe leaned in close. “But Ms. Duncan, the reason I’m up here is this: we’re going to be ghosts, you understand? I’m not here, you’re not here, and the SEALs I’m lending you, they’ve all volunteered and will swear they were never here. We would have tried to get a special operations group from the CIA, but that requires presidential approval, and time to fly them out. With that cloud overhead, we don’t really have that, so we’re making do the best we can.” Forsythe held out a pad.
Anika looked down at it again. “What’s this?”
“A very tight, very dangerously written nondisclosure agreement that swears you to silence, quite literally on pain of death. And please take it seriously. You fuck up, and I’m spending the rest of my life in jail as well.”
“More paperwork,” Anika said.
“I take it you haven’t spent that much time in the military?” Forsythe asked.
“I’m not shocked,” Anika said. “UN Polar Guard was not any different. I’m just … never mind.”
After she pressed her thumb on the pad, Forsythe slid it away. “Good. I’m assured by experts who’ve looked this plan over on the way here that the fallout will be minimal here on the ground. The citizens here are in no more danger than observers at many bomb sites last century, and most of the cloud is over the water, and not Thule. So I had Mister Prudence Jones sign this earlier, and Violet Skaegard signed it in the hallway. Time is not on our side, so let’s get started.”
