As she crouched and started flipping through foil packets Chauncie retreated down the rows. He turned a corner out of her sight and pulled out the sheet of paper with Maksim's list of the rarest seeds.
Matching the code next to the list with where to find the seeds was slightly awkward, he wasn't familiar with it like River was. But by wandering around he found his first box, and opened it to find the appropriate packet with three seeds inside.
He flipped the briefcase open to reveal a screen, pad, and a small funnel in the right hand side. All he had to do was dump a couple seeds in the funnel and press a button. The tiny grinder reduced the seeds to pulp and extracted the DNA.
After it whirred and spat dust out the side of the briefcase a long dump of text scrolled down the screen, with small models of DNA chains popping up in the corners. Not much more than pretty rotating screensavers for Chauncie.
All he cared was that it seemed to be working.
But he was going to have to pick up the pace. That had taken several minutes. He cradled the briefcase, leaving the box on the floor as he strode along looking for the next item on the list.
There. This time the foil packet only had a single seed. Chauncie sat in the palm of his hand and stared at it. Like River's paleo-seed, this was the only existing seed of its kind.
Suppose the machine wasn't working?
He shook his head and dropped the single seed in and listened to the grinding. More text scrolled down the screen. Success, a full sequence.
Chauncie blew out his held breath; it steamed in the freezing air.
“Just what the hell are you doing?” River asked. Her voice sounded so shocked it had modulated itself down into almost baritone.
There was another foil packet with two seeds in it nearby. It matched the list. Chauncie had hit a box full of rare and unique paleo-seeds stored here by a smaller government prospecting in the Arctic, or maybe a large and paranoid corporation. He dumped the seeds in and the briefcase whirred.
“Jesus Christ,” River looked around him at the briefcase. “That's a sequencer. Chauncie, those seeds are one of a kind.”
He had what looked like an inhaler in his pocket. One forcibly administered dose and he could knock her out for twenty four hours. But he didn't want to leave River passed out among the boxes for the nearing mercenaries to find. Who knew what a bunch of ex-military types kicked out of some Russian province when funding evaporated, and who'd probably served with multinational forces in some hotspot where they could traffic humans, drugs, and weapons, would do to her. He was not that kind of person. He didn't want to find out.
“Listen,” River stayed oddly calm, her breath clouding the air over his head as he crouched over the sequencer. “That might be a good sequencer, but even the best ones have an error rate. You're going to be losing some data. This is criminal, you have to stop, or I'm going to get someone in here to stop you.”
“Go get someone.” The chock would keep her occupied for a while.
She ran off, and Chauncie finished the box. He ticked the samples off his list, then started hunting for the next one along the shelves. It was taking too long.
There. He cracked open the new box and dumped the seeds in. River had caught back up to him, though, giving up on the door faster than he'd anticipated.
“Listen, you can't do this,” she said. “I'm going to stop you.”
He glanced over his shoulder to see that she'd pulled pepper spray out the ridiculous little pouch she kept strapped to her waist in lieu of a purse.
Knocking her out would leave her a victim. He really couldn't live with that. River, a relatively naïve and noble refugee, caught up in a vicious world of international fits over genetic heritage and ecological policy. He was not going to leave her for the sharks. “Look, River, a private army-for-hire is about to land on Svalberd and take the whole seed vault hostage.”
She hesitated, the pepper spray wavering. “What?”
“Over engineered agri-stock and plague. I'm told the Russians are pretty damn hellbent on regaining control of uncopyrighted genetic variability for robustness. And to reboot their whole agricultural sector. They've hired a private army to come here, it gives them some plausible deniability on the world stage. I've been sent to get what I can out of the vault before they get here in within the next couple hours.”
River paused. “Who are you working for?”
Chauncie bit his lip. He hated lying. In this situation, she might as well hear the truth, he didn't have time to lay down anything believable anyway. “The Russian mafia, they're connected enough to have gotten a heads up. They think they can get some serious coin selling these sequences to companies across the world.”
She stared at him. “You swear?”
“Why the hell would I make this up?”
He watched as she opened the zipper on the hip pouch and pocketed the pepper spray. She grabbed her forehead and leaned against the nearest shelf. “I can't fucking believe this. I need to think.”
“It's a crazy world,” Chauncie mumbled, and tipped a new pouch of seeds into the sequencer as she massaged her scalp and swore to herself.
The sequence returned good, and he stood up, looking for the next box. “What are you doing?”
“Looking for the next item on the list.”
She walked over, and Chauncie tensed. But all she did was snatch it from him. “There are a few missing that he should have,” she said.
“Like?”
“Like the damn seed I just brought here.” River looked up at the shelves. “Look, you're wandering around like a lost kid in here. Let me help you.”
He took the sheet of paper back from her. “And why would you do that?”
“Because until five minutes ago, I thought the vault was the best bank box, and seeds the best storage mechanism. You just blew that out of the water, Chauncie. As a scientist, I have to go with the best solution available to me at the time. If these mercenaries are going to invade and hold the seeds, then we need to get that genetic diversity backed up, copied, and kicked out across the world. Selling it to various companies and keeping copies in a criminal organization is not the best case scenario I dreamed of, but we have to mitigate the potential damage of a small militarized force holding this for itself, and then of another army seeking to knock them back out of the bank. Other countries are not going to stand for this. But that all will risk the bank.
“I mean, this is one of the big reasons for creating Svalberd. Vaults in countries with civil wars were being destroyed.” River sighed. “It's a damned mess.”
He'd expected her to ask for a cut of the profit. Instead, she was offering to help out of some scientific rationanlism. “Okay,” he said, slowly. “Okay. But the list stays here, and you bring back the foil packets, sealed, to me.”
“So that you can see that I'm not bringing back the wrong seeds, and so I don't rip up your list.”
Chauncie smiled. “Exactly.”
Plinking Carbon Johnnies was a lot more fun. And a hell of a lot easier. He felt ragged and frayed. Screw retirement, he just wanted out of this incredibly cold, eerie environment and the constant weight of expecting armed men to kick in the airlock door and shoot him.
But things moved quicker now. River ranged ahead, snagging the foil packets he needed and those he didn't even knew he needed. For the next forty minutes he made a small mountain of pulped seed around him as the briefcase processed sample after sample, resembling more a small portable mill than an advanced piece of technology.
His satphone beeped, an alarm he'd set back on the boat.
Chauncie closed the briefcase, and River walked around a shelf corner with a foil packet. “What?”
“It's time to go,” Chauncie said. “We don't have much time.”
“But...” Like any other treasure hunter, she looked around the cavern. So many more precious samples that hadn't been snagged.
But Chauncie had a suspicion that what River valued was not necessarily what t
he market valued. They had what they needed, best not push it any further. “Come on. We do not want to be standing here when the these people arrive.”
Chauncie bent over and rolled his fingerprint on the chock, and it slowly cranked itself down into thinness again. He placed it back in his pocket, and they cycled through the airlocks, again ducking under the unusually low entranceways.
They walked up the slight slope of the tunnel, the entrance looking small and brightly lit in the distance. As they passed the offices on their left one of the guards looked up and smiled. “All good? You were in there a long while. Should I search you?”
Chauncie tensed and got ready to run.
But River smiled. “Everything was fine, just, enjoyed standing in there. It's like a library, you know?”
The guard nodded. “Well, the next time you're authorized to come, don't stay so long. I logged it in the computer as a deviation, but don't worry, you're not the only one we gets carried away by it all.”
River nodded, and they passed onto the other side of the guard. Chauncie's mood lifted.
“Hey,” the guard said. “If you're in town, get a good look at that fleet of ten or so small warboats out there. They're doing some serious exercises, wargaming some sorta Arctic defense scenario for the oil companies or other. They're all around Svalberd. Just amazing to see all those ships.”
Chauncie's mood died.
They entered the mouth of the tunnel, shielding their eyes from the sun.
***
Chauncie opened the briefcase on the roof of the car and punched the on button on the sat phone inside. The little screen lit up and said hunting... “Damn it, come on,” he muttered.
“Uh, Chauncie?”
“Just wait, wait! It'll just take a second--” But she'd grabbed his arm and was pointing. Straight up.
He craned his neck, and finally spotted the tiny dot way up at the zenith. The sat-phone said hunting.... hunting... hunting... and then, No Signal.
“You've been jammed,” River said, quite unnecessarily.
Chauncie cursed and slammed the briefcase. “And there!” She grabbed his arm again. Way out in the sky over the bay, six corpse-gray military blimps were drifting toward them with casual grace.
“We're out of time.” No way they'd outrun those in a bright yellow electric car. Chauncie looked around desperately. Hole up in the vault? Fortress of Solitude it might be, but it wouldn't keep the Russians out for more than a minute. Run along the road? They'd be seen as surely as if they were in the car.
He popped up the hatch of the car and rummaged around in the back. As he'd hoped, there was a cardboard box there crammed with survival gear--a package of survival blankets, flares, and heat packs standard for any far-northern vehicle. He grabbed some of the gear and slammed the hatch. “Run up the hill,” he said. “Look for an area of loose scree behind some boulders. We're going to dig in and hide.”
“That's not a very good plan.”
“It's not the whole plan.” He pulled Maksim's list out and rummaged in the car's glove compartment. “Damn, no pen.”
“Here.” She fished one out of her pocket.
“Ah, scientists.” Quickly, he wrote the words scanned and uploaded at the top of the first page, above and to the right of the list. He underlined them. Then he made two columns of checkmarks down the page, one under each of these column headings. “Okay, come on.”
They ran back to the vault. Chauncie threw the list down just inside the door, then they started climbing the slope beside the blade. The oncoming blimps were on the other side; if there were men watching, it would look like Chauncie and River had gone back into the vault. He hoped they were too confident to be that attentive. After all, the vault was supposedly unguarded.
“Over there!” River dragged him away from the blade, toward a flat shelf fronted by a low wall of black rocks. The slope rose at about thirty degrees, a loose tumble of dark gravel and fist-sized stone where a few hardy grasses clung.
“Okay, get down.” She hunkered down and he wrapped her in a silvery survival blanket, then began clawing at the scree with his bare hands, heaping it up around her. The act was a kind of horrible parody of the many times he'd buried his sister in the sand back home.
Awkwardly, he made a second pile around himself, until he and River were two gravel cones partially shielded by rock. “You picked a good spot,” he commented; they had a great view of the parking lot and the ground just in front of the entrance. He'd wedged the briefcase under the shielding stones; his eyes kept returning to it as the mercenary force came into view over the flat roof of the vault.
The blare of the blimps' turboprops shattered the vault's deathly silence. They swiveled into position just below the parking lot, lowered down, touched, and men in combat fatigues began pouring out. Chauncie and River ducked as they scanned the hillside with binoculars and heat-sensing equipment.
“I'm cold,” said River.
“Just wait. If this doesn't work we'll give up.”
After a few minutes Chauncie raised his head so he could peer between two stones. The Russians seemed satisfied with their perimeter, and now a man in a greatcoat strode up the hillside. The coat flew out behind him in black wings as one of the soldiers ran up holding something small and white. “Jackpot!” muttered Chauncie. It was Maksim's list.
“What's happening?”
“Moment of truth.” He watched as the commander flipped through the list. Chauncie could see the man's mouth working: cursing, no doubt. He threw down the list and pulled a sat phone out of his coat.
“He thinks we got the data out,” said Chauncie. “That should be all it...” The commander put away the sat phone and waved to his men. Shaking his head in disgust, he walked away from the vault. The bewildered soldiers followed, knotting up into little groups to mutter amongst themselves.
“I don't believe it. It worked.”
“I can't see anything!”
“They think Maksim's got the data on the unique seeds. It's pretty obvious that we destroyed those in processing them. So these guys have exactly nothing now, and they know it. If they stay here they'll just get rounded up by the U.N. or the Norwegian navy.”
“So you've won?” The blimps were taking off.
“We win.”
“It's still plunder, Chauncie.” Stones rattled as River shook them off. “Theft of something that belongs to all of us.”
He stood up, joints aching, to find his toes and ears were numb. Little rockfalls tumbled down the slope below him. “Listen,” River continued, “I don't think you ever wanted to do this in the first place. The closer we got to Svalbard the unhappier you looked. You know it was wrong to steal this stuff to begin with. And look at the firepower even this small army sent after it had! It's a hot potato and you'd best be rid of it.”
“How?” He shook his head, scowling. “We've already scanned the damned things. Maksim...”
“Maksim will know the mercenaries got here while we were here. We just tell him they got here before us. That they got the material.”
“And this?” He picked up the briefcase.
“It goes back where it belongs. Back into the vault.”
He thought about it as they trudged down the hillside. Truth to tell, he had no idea what he'd do if he retired now anyway. Probably buy a boat and come back to plink CarbonJohnnies. He wanted the emerald sea, he wanted those waters back. But now they were battered with hurricanes, the islands themselves depopulated and poor now that tourism had left, and the beaches been destroyed by rising tides and storms.
From behind him she said, “It's an honorable solution, Chauncie, and you know it.” They reached the level of the parking lot and she stopped, holding out her hand. “Here. I'll take it in. Now that the Russians have tried this they'll put real security on this place. Keep it safe for everybody. The way it was meant to be.”
He thought about the money, about Maksim's wrath; but he was tired, and damn it, when during this whole fi
asco had he been free to make his own choice on anything? If not now...
He handed her the briefcase. “Just be quick. The whole Svalbard police force is going to descend on this place now--all five or six of them.”
She laughed, and disappeared into the dark fortress with the treasure of millenia in her hand.
***
Night was falling in the arctic at last. Chauncie stood on the trawler's deck watching the last sliver of sun disappear. Vast purple wings of cloud rolled up and away, like brushes painting the sky in delicate pastel hues of mauve, pale peach, silver. There were no primary colors in the arctic, and he had to admit that after all this time, he'd fallen in love with that visual delicacy.
The stars began to come out, but he remained at the railing. The trawler's lights slanted out, fans of yellow from doorways crossing the deck, the mist of radiance from portholes silhouetting the vessel's shape. The air was fresh and smelled clean--scrubbed free of humanity.
He wondered if River Balleny was watching the fall's first sunset from where ever she was. They had parted ways in Svalbard--not exactly on friendly terms, he'd thought, but not enemies either. He figured she was satisfied that he'd done the right thing, but disappointed that he'd gotten them into the situation in the first place. Fair enough; but he wished he'd had a chance to make it up to her in some way. He'd probably never see her again.
Kulitak's voice cut through his reverie. “Sat phone for you!” Chauncie shot one last look at the fading colors then went inside.
“St. Christie here.”
“Chauncie, my old friend.” It was Maksim. Well, he'd been expecting this call.
“I can't believe you sent us into that meat-grinder,” Chauncie began. He'd rehearsed his version of events and decided to act the injured party, having barely escaped with his life when the mercenaries came down on the vault just as he was arriving. “I'm lucky to be here to talk to you at--”
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