Maksim looked annoyed. “If I wanted her dead, I wouldn't have called you.” He pointed out the grimy windows. A wind-blown, ruddy-cheeked woman wrapped in a large 'hands around the world' parka stood at the rail. She was reading something off the screen of her phone.
“That's the scientist? Here?”
“Yes. That is River Balleny. Was big into genetic archeology. She made a big find a couple years ago and patented the DNA for some of big agri-corporation for exotic livestock. Now she mainly verifies viability, authenticity, and then couriers the samples to Svalbard for various government missions out here.”
“And she's just looking for a good security type, in case some other company wants to hijack a sample of what she's couriering? Which is why she came out to this rusted out office of yours?”
Maksim grinned over his screens. “Right.”
Chauncie looked back at the walkway outside the bridge. River looked back, and then glanced away. She looked out of place, a moon-faced little girl who should be in a lab, sequencing bits and pieces sandwiched between slides. Certainly she shouldn't be standing in the biting wind on the deck of thousands of tons of scrap metal. “So I steal what she'll be couriering? Is that the big pay day?”
“No.” Maksim looked back down and tapped the desk. Another puppet somewhere in the world danced to his string pulls. “She'll be given some seeds we could care less about. What we care about is the fact that she can get you into the Svalbard seed vault.”
“And in there?”
Maksim reached under his desk and gently set a small briefcase on the table. “This is portable sequencer. Millions of research and development spent so that a genetic archeologist in the field could immediately do out on the open plains what used to take a lab team weeks or months to do. Couple it with a fat storage system, and we can digitize nature's bounty in a few seconds.”
Chauncie stared down at the case. “What...”
“We want you to get into the seed vault and sequence as many rare and precious seeds as you can. They have security equipment all over the outside, but inside, it's just storage area. No weapons, just move quick to gather the seeds and control the scientist while you gather the seeds. The more paleo-seeds the better. When you leave, with or without her, you get outside. You pull out the antenna, and you transmit everything. You leave Svalbard however you wish, charter a plane to be waiting for you, or the boat you get there with. We do not care. Once we have the information, we pay you. You leave Arctic, find a warm place to settle down. Buy a nice house, and a nice woman. Enjoy this new life. Okay, we never see each other again. I'll be sad, true, but maybe I'll retire too, and neither of us cares. You understand?”
Chauncie did. This was exactly the score he'd been looking for.
He looked at the windblown geneticist and thought about what Maksim might not be telling him. Then he shook his head. “You know me, Max, this is too big. Way out of my comfort level. I'll become internationally wanted. I'm not in that league.”
“No, no.” Maksim slapped the table. “You are big league now, Chauncie. You'll do this. I know you'll do this.”
Chauncie laughed and leaned back in the chair. “Why?”
“Because if you don't,” Maksim also leaned back. “If you don't, you will never forgive yourself when military contractors occupy Svalbard in two weeks, taking over the seed vault and blackmailing world with it.”
“You've got to be joking.” The idea that someone might trash Svalbard was ridiculous. "That would be like bombing the Vatican." Svalbard was the holiest of green holies, a bank for the world's wealth of seeds, stored away in case of apocalypse.
"These are Russian mercenaries, my friend. Russia is dying. They never were cutting edge with biotech, ever since Lysenkoism in the Soviet days. The plague strains that ripped through their wheat fields last year killed their stock, and Western companies had patented most varieties of wheat germ. They feel they have no choice but to raid the seed bank in order to reestablish some unique strains that won't get them sued in the world market for copyright infringement. This year's whole crop of wheat, rye, and rice depends on this. And in the process, they will keep control of the bank, along with all the unique paleo-genetic crap they keep stored there.”
"So it's the Russians behind the mercenaries? And no one knows about this.”
“No one. No one but us.” Maksim laughed. “You will be hero to many, but more importantly, rich.”
Chauncie sucked air through his teeth and mulled it all over. But he and Maksim already knew the answer.
“What about travel expenses?”
Maksim laughed. “You're friends with those Indians...”
“First Nations peoples...”
“...whatever, just get permission to use one of their trawlers. The company she's couriering for is pretty good about security. They drop in by helicopter when you're in transit to hand over the seeds. They'll call with a location and time at the last minute, as long as you tell them what your course will be. A good faith payment is...” Maksim tapped a screen. “...now in your account. You can afford to hire them. Happy Birthday.”
“It's not my birthday.”
“Well, with this job, it is. And Chauncie?”
“Yes, Max?”
“You fuck it up, you won't see another birthday.”
Chauncie wanted to say something in return, but it was no use. For one, it was true. For another, Maksim had turned his attention back to his screens.
For a moment, he considered turning Maksim down, still. Then he glanced out the windows, at a sea that would never be the right color--that would never cradle his body and ease the sorrow of his losses.
He hefted the briefcase and stepped outside to introduce himself to River Balleny.
***
The trawler beat through heavy seas, making for Svalbard. The sun rolled slowly around a sky drained of all but pastel colors, where towering clouds of dove gray and mauve hinted at a dusk that never came. You covered your porthole to make night for yourself, and stepped out of your stateroom seemingly into the same moment you had left. After years up here Chauncie could tell himself he was as used to the midnight sun as he was to heavy seas; but the new passenger, who was much on his mind, stayed in her cabin while the seas heaved.
After two days the swells subsided and, for a while, the ocean became calm as glass. Chauncie woke to a distant crackle from the radio room, and as he buttoned his shirt Kulitak pounded on his door. “I heard, I heard.”
“It's not just the helicopter,” Kulitak hissed. “Tuktoyaktuk Elders just contacted me over single sideband radio. We think Maksim's dead.”
“Think?” Chauncie looked down the tight corridor between the trawler's cabins. The floorboards creaked under their feet as the ship twisted itself over large waves.
“Several tons of sulfur particulates, arc welded into a solid lump, dropped from the stratosphere by a malfunctioning blimp. So they say. There's nothing left of Maksim's barge. It's all pieces.”
“Pieces...” Chauncie instinctively looked up toward the deck, as if expecting something similar to destroy them on the spot.
“I told you, you don't get involved with that man. You're out here, playing a game that will get you killed. Get out now.”
Chauncie braced himself in the tiny space as the trawler lurched. “It's too late now. They don't let you back out this late in the game.” He thought about private a army moving out there somewhere, getting ready to take over the vault. All at the bequest of another nation, assuming it could just snatch that which belonged to all.
They still had time.
“Come on, let's get that package for her, she'll fall overboard if we don't help her out.”
They stepped out on deck to find River Balleny already there. She was staring up at the dragonfly shape of an approaching helicopter, which was framed by rose-tinted puffballs in the pale, drawn, sky. She said nothing, but turned to grin excitedly at the two men as the helicopter's shuddering voice rose to
a deafening crescendo.
The wash from its blades scoured the deck. Kulitak, clothes flapping, stepped into the center of the deck and raised his hands. Dangling at the bottom of a hundred feet of nylon rope, a small plastic drum wrapped in fluorescent green duct tape swung dangerously past his head, twirled, and came back. On the third pass he grabbed it and somebody cut the rope in the helicopter. The snaking fall of the line nearly pulled the drum out of Kulitak's hands; by the time he'd wrestled his package loose from it the helicopter was a receding dot. River walked out to help him and, after a moment's hesitation, Chauncie followed.
“'the fuck is this?” The empty drum at his feet, Kulitak was holding a small plastic bag up to the sunlight. River reached up to take it from him.
“It's your past,” she said. “And our future.” She took the package inside without another glance at the men.
Kulitak peered after her. “I say we drop her off and go back to sinking johnnies.”
Surprised, Chauncie shook his head. “Your elders agreed to let us take the trip.”
“Yes, but they don't exactly know all the details, do they?”
“All they need to know is how much we're going to make from this, and we told them the truth about that. I don't see your problem.” Chauncie walked away before Kulitak could reply to that; but they'd both seen the look of glee on River's face when she saw those seeds. He wasn't about to admit that a little pang of guilt had shot through him seeing it.
She was sitting at the cleaver-hacked table in the galley, peering at the bag. “Those seem to mean a lot to you,” he said cautiously as he slid in opposite her.
Opening the bag carefully, River rolled a couple of tiny orange seeds onto the tabletop. “Paleo-seeds,” she mused. “It looks like mountain aven, but according to the manifest,” she tapped a sheet of paper that had been tightly wadded and stuffed into the bag, “it's at least thirty thousand years old.”
Chauncie picked one up gingerly between his fingertips. “And that makes it different?”
She nodded. “Maybe not. But it's best to err on the side of caution. Have you ever been to the seed vault?” He shook his head.
“When I was a girl I had a model of Noah's ark in my bedroom,” she said. “You could pop the roof open and see little giraffes and lions and stuff. Later I thought that was the dumbest story in the Bible--but the seed vault at Svalbard really is the ark. Only for plants, not animals.”
“Where'd you grow up?”
“Valley, Nebraska,” she said. “Before the water table collapsed. You?”
“British Virgin Islands: Anegada.”
She sucked in a breath. "It's gone. Oh, that must have been terrible for you to experience."
He shrugged. "It was a slow death. It took long enough for me to make my peace with it, but my wife..." How to compress those agonizing years into some statement that would make sense to this woman, yet not do an injustice to the complexity of it all? All he could think of to say was, "It killed her." He looked down.
River surprised him by simply nodding, as if she really did understand. She put her hand out, palm up, and he laid the seed in it. “We all seem to end up here,” she mused, “when our lands go away. Nebraska's a dust bowl now. Anegada's under the waves. We come up here to make sure nobody else has to experience that.”
He nodded; actually, he'd come to the arctic for the money, but you didn't say things like that.
“Of course it's a disaster,” she went on, “losing the arctic ice cap, having the tundra melt and outgas all that methane and stuff. But every now and then there's these little rays of hope, like when somebody finds ancient seeds that have been frozen since the last glaciation.” She sealed the baggie. “Part of our genetic heritage, maybe the basis for new crops or cancer drugs or who knows? A little lifeboat--once it's safely at Svalbard.”
“Must be quite the place,” he said, “if they only give the keys to a few people.”
“It's the Fortress of Solitude,” she said seriously. “You'll see what I mean when we get there.”
***
Svalbard was a tumble of dolls-houses at the foot of a giant's mountain. Even in the permanent day of summer, snow lingered on the tops of the distant peaks, and the panorama of ocean behind the docked trawler was wreathed in fog as Chauncie and River stepped down the gangplank. Both wore fleeces against the cutting wind.
A thriving tourist industry had grown up around the town and its famed fortress. Thriving by northern standards, that is--the local tourist office had three electric cars they rented out for day trips up to the site. Two were out; Chauncie rented the third. He'd stood there counting out bills when his satphone vibrated. He handed River the cash and stepped across the street to answer.
“Chauncie,” said a familiar Croatian voice. “You know who it is, don't answer, we must be careful, the phones have ears, if you know what I mean. Listen, after my office had that unfortunate incident I've been staying with... a friend. But I'm okay.
“That big event, that happens soon by your current location, I regret to say we think it has been moved up. They know about our little plan. We don't know when they attack, so hurry up. We still expect your transmission, and for you to complete your side of the arrangement. Our agreement concerning success... and failure, that still stands.
“Good luck little dreadlocked buddy.”
Chauncie jumped a little at the dialtone. River waited next to the little car for him, and in a daze Chauncie put the briefcase behind his seat, took control, and they followed the signs along a winding road by the sea.
River was animated, pointing out local landmarks and chattering away happily. Chauncie did his best to act cheerful, but he hadn't slept well the night before, and his stomach was churning now. He kept seeing camouflaged killers lurking in every shadow.
“There it is!” She pointed. It took him a moment to see it, maybe because the word fortress had primed him for a particular kind of sight. What Chauncie saw was just a grim mountainside of scree and loose rock, patched in places with lines of reddish grass; jutting eighty or so feet out of this was a knife-blade of concrete, twenty-five feet tall but narrow, perhaps no more than ten feet wide. There was a parking lot in front of it where several cars were parked, but that, like Svalbard itself, seemed absurd next to the scale of the mountain and the grim darkness of the landscape. The cars were all parked together, as though huddling for protection.
Chauncie pulled up next to them and climbed out into absolute silence. From here you could see the bay and distant islands, capped with white, floating just above the gray mist.
“Magnificent, isn't it?” River's voice made him jump. He scowled, then hid that with a smile as he turned to her.
“Beautiful.” It was, in a bleak and intimidating way--he just wasn't in the mood to appreciate that sort of sentiment right now.
The entrance to the global seed vault was a metal door at the tip of the concrete blade. River was sauntering unconcernedly up to it; Chauncie followed nervously, glancing about for signs of surveillance. Sure enough, he spotted cameras and other, subtler sensor boxes here and there. Maksim had warned him about those.
The door itself was unguarded; River's voice echoed back as she called “hallooo.” He hurried in after her.
The inside of the blade was unadorned concrete lit by sodium lamps. There was only one way to go, in, and after about eighty feet the concrete gave over to a rough tunnel, sheathed in spray-on cement and painted white. The chill in here was terrible, but he supposed that was the point; the vault was impervious to global warming, and was intended to survive the fall of human civilization. That was why it was empty of anything worth stealing--except its genetic treasure--and was situated literally at the last place on Earth any normal human would choose to go.
Six tourists wearing bright parkas were chatting with a staff member next to a set of rooms leading off the right-hand side of the tunnel. The construction choice here was unpainted cinderblock, but the tourists seemed exci
ted to be here. River politely interrupted and showed her credentials to the guide, who nodded. She waved Chauncie to follow her.
“We're special,” she said, and actually took his arm as they continued on down the bleak, too-brightly lit passage. “Normally nobody gets beyond that.” About twenty feet further on, the tunnel was roped off. Past it, a T-intersection could be seen where only one light glowed. No one commented on the briefcase.
These were the airlocks. And strangely, the doors were just under five feet high. Chauncie and River had to duck to step inside the right one.
The outer door shut with a clang. He was in. He'd made it.
When the inner door opened it was into a cavern some 150 feet long. Shelves lined the interior like an industrial wholesale store, filled with wooden boxes stamped with black numbers.
It was a polar library of life.
Chauncie pulled a small, super-spring loaded chock out of his pocket. He surreptitiously dropped it in front of the door and kicked it firmly underneath. It had a five second count after his fingerprint activated it.
After the count the door creaked as it was wedged firmly shut. It was a preventative mechanism to keep River in more than anyone out.
River slipped her packet out. Foil, it sat in the palm of her hand. “They're amazing, seeds. All that information in that one tiny package, tough, durable, no degradation for almost a century in most cases. Just add water...”
She led them to a row at the very back of the vault, reading off some sort of Dewey Decimal System for stored genetic material that Chauncie couldn't ascertain.
Here they were.
With a slight air of reverence in her careful, deliberate movements, she slid the long box off the shelf. She set it carefully on the ground and opened the lid.
Inside, hundreds of glittering packets. Treasure, Chauncie thought, and the idea must have hovered in the air, because she said it as well. “It's a treasure, you know, because it's rarity that makes something valuable. There used to be hundreds of species of just plain apples in the US. Farmers standardized down to just a dozen... somewhere in here are thousands more, if we ever choose to need them.”
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