Ice: The Climate Fiction Saga

by Wendeberg, A.

  ‘It’s coming, don’t worry. Say, dad, will you finally tell me what happened to your old mentor, Cacho?’

  ‘Say, daughter, will you finally tell me how your mother is doing?’ he retorts.

  ‘She has the life she deserves.’

  He barks a laugh at that. ‘So you suddenly know who deserves what. Fascinating. You sound like me.’

  I scratch my neck and he doesn’t even follow the movement of my arm. His eyes are stuck to my face. He couldn’t have installed it in my head. I would have been aware of a fresh cut. Or would I?

  ‘I have another question: Now that I’m here and you are…there, and we have a ton of time and no one will disturb us: why spread that silly story?’

  ‘Beg your pardon?’

  ‘The Bearer of Good Tidings,’ I say, trying to hide my impatience.

  ‘What’s with him?’ His expression is that of sincere innocence.

  I want to punch the monitor. What a pointless conversation.

  ‘Forget I asked.’ I stick the tape back on the camera and begin to undress.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Katvar signs, and tries to roll onto his side. The little colour drains from his cheeks.

  I look down at my trembling fingers and back at Katvar. ‘Erik implanted a tracker. He knew I was coming here.’ My hands speak for me, so Erik doesn’t hear what I’m saying.

  Katvar frowns. ‘And he only sent five men?’

  ‘He sent Sequencers to amuse himself and to make sure I’m cut off from them completely. I killed those men and others probably watched and are still watching.’ I point up at the ceiling. ‘To them, I’m a traitor and a murderer. The revenge party must be on the way already.’ I show a tilted, compressed smile. ‘Erik does not need to send his men to kill me.’

  Katvar blinks.

  ‘Whenever the BSA allow their prisoners to walk free, they first rig them with explosives,’ I sign.

  His chest heaves and his eyes grow wide. He holds out his hand to me, beckoning. I’m a bomb and yet he wants me close.

  My feet are rooted to the spot.

  ‘The Vault is dug deep into the mountain and has lead and steel enforced walls. He can push his button as often as he likes, he won’t set off the bomb as long as I’m in here.’ I might be telling this to myself as much as I sign it to Katvar.

  ‘We can’t get out?’ he signs.

  ‘It takes twelve days for the global satellite network to be completely destroyed. I don’t know which satellite he’s using to track and control my implant, so I have to wait until all of them are shot down.’

  I can’t help but look at the dogs. Three dogs. Twelve days. We could kill them now and freeze them in the Seed Vault for later.

  I drop to my knees and reach for the canteen. ‘Here, drink. You lost a lot of blood.’

  He drinks, then offers me the water.

  Water, we don’t have enough of that. In a day or two, Katvar might be able to walk and fetch snow for us. But without me, the retinal scanner won’t let him back in. Besides, if we eat the dogs, we might never get anywhere.

  I take a swig and stand. ‘You’ll have to help me. Check my back for implants, if you can lift your arms.’

  Stark naked and shaking with cold, I scoot close to him and offer him my back. He probes the skin with weak fingers, while I examine my front. Every shrapnel scar on my side is pushed and pinched.

  A tap on my shoulder. I turn around and he signs, ‘How big is it?’

  ‘It might be any size between a wheat berry and my thumb nail.’

  He keeps probing, while I check my leg. ‘Fuck,’ slips from my mouth when I find a tiny grain in my skin. Most of the shrapnel hit my right side. Except one stray piece that grazed the skin on the inside of my left thigh — just above the femoral artery. The amount of explosive needed here to punch a hole into the major blood vessel would be minuscule. I would watch myself bleed to death.

  Katvar raps his knuckles against my arm. I look up and see him stare at the monitors. Erik is gone.

  I shrug. ‘No time for his shit,’ I mutter and run the ultrasound scanner over the small scar. The implant doesn’t show. ‘There might be more than one,’ I tell Katvar. ‘Lie back down and rest, while I get rid of this one.’

  There’s a scalpel in the MedKit, forceps, lidocaine, morphine, bandages, disinfectant, and more. I get to work.

  It’s a nasty piece of shit, splinter-like, about a centimetre long with a small bulb on its one end and needle-like, flexible extension on the other. That will be the antenna, the bulb must be the reservoir for the explosive. Probably a gel. The thing is stuck to my flesh with tiny barbs so it stays right there.

  I extract it and wipe the blood off its white surface, wondering what it’s made of.

  ‘Keep an eye on the monitor. I want to know what they are doing. Don’t make any noise,’ I sign to Katvar and tape the implant to an arrowhead. I put on my clothes, leave the control room, run through the Seed Vault and into the long corridor.

  When I reach the door, I stop. Okay, Micka. One attempt is all you get.

  I draw a deep breath, step forward, punch the red door button, and immediately retreat. As I pull the bow string, the heavy steel door opens. My tracker must be visible now, but the data transfer will take a moment or two. Ten paces away from the door, I kneel and aim at the night sky in the upper right corner of the door frame. Then I let the tracker fly.

  I wish I could have taped it to a bullet and shot the thing a thousand metres away from here. I’m a crappy shot with bow and arrow. The thing plops unceremoniously into the snow a mere hundred metres from me. Nothing happens. I wait.

  Behind me, one of the dogs barks and quickly shuts up. Katvar must have signalled him to be quiet.

  And then the snow erupts. A dull fomp! and snow is blown into the air. The wind carries it away. The amount of explosive would have been enough to take off my leg.

  Quivering, I stand and take a step forward. And another. Then, I run.

  My legs don’t want to obey. My whole body tells me to stop this insanity.

  I fling myself out into the snow, eyes squeezed shut, anticipating noise or pain or any sign of that last moment before consciousness is wiped from my brain.

  It doesn’t come.

  Gradually, I unfurl my body and roll onto my back.

  The night is crisp. Stars shoot across the milky way. A grin spreads on my face. These are no stars. I punch the cold air and shout, ‘Jeremiah!’ and then I laugh and cry and finally, I whisper, ‘You had a daughter.’

  A falling satellite stretches its burning tail across the sky. One short moment and it’s gone. It’s time for us to be gone, too.

  I knock the snow off my clothes and walk back into the Seed Vault.

  Before I enter the control room, I spot Katvar holding his hand up, signalling me to be quiet. There’s a commotion. I can hear Erik shouting commands. He will have noticed his satellites are coming down. Satisfaction spreads a warm feeling in my chest just before the transmission is shut off.

  Softly, I walk up to Katvar, wrap my arms around his neck, and whisper into his ear, ‘Would you like to watch falling stars with me?’

  He turns his head and touches his lips to mine.

  ‘You have something else in mind?’ I ask.

  He smiles weakly. ‘Not tonight, babe. I have a headache.’

  I grin. ‘How do you feel?’

  He just nods, the corners of his mouth twitching a little. As if he receives shots to his head on a regular basis.

  ‘Cocky,’ I mutter and signal to him that I have one more thing to do.

  I walk to the computers, eject the small drive, slip it back on the leather string around my neck, and log off the station. Erik can come here to blow up Svalbard and still won’t stop the process.

  ‘We have to hurry,’ I tell Katvar.

  I help him to the sled and he lies down. I strap him in, snap the lines to the dogs’ harnesses and give the go signal. I push, they pull, and the sk
ids screech across the concrete floor and set my teeth on edge.

  We reach the security gate and I punch the open button.

  The dogs sniff the cold, fresh air and pull hard. They seem to hate this bunker just as much as I do. Halfway out the door, I slap my head and explain to Katvar that I forgot something important.

  I race all the way back into the monitor room, grab the ultrasonic scanner from the floor, and the MIT FireScope, the SatPad, and the defibrillator from the hole in the wall. The MedKit is already in the sled bags.

  ‘We might be able to trade these,’ I tell Katvar. That I also got the FireScope to analyse his genome, I don’t mention. Not now.

  Once the steel door hisses its goodbye to us, I run the tip of my knife over the retinal scanner. Two sharp screeches. No one will be able to get in here without a good load of explosives.

  And suddenly, I’m deeply exhausted. I kneel at Katvar’s side, take his hands in mine and press his knuckles to my forehead, wishing I could just lie down next to him on the sled, close my eyes for a few minutes and rest.

  He touches my hair and I look up. ‘We should leave,’ he signs.

  ‘I know,’ I answer and stand. The northern lights swish across the sky, a satellite follows, bright and clear. My vision begins to swim. My throat constricts. I clear it with a gruff noise.

  ‘There’s an aircraft,’ I say.

  He blinks.

  We didn’t plan to survive this.

  ‘And there are five bodies in the snow. The dogs need to eat.’

  His gaze holds mine and I’m not sure what I read in his brown eyes. It’s not repulsion, but not hope, either.

  I don’t wait for his consent.

  When I return a long moment later and chuck pieces of meat in front of each dog, and wipe my hands and knife in the snow, Katvar’s jaws are clenched. I don’t know if it’s because I fed human to his dogs or because he might have got me pregnant and has no idea how to deal with it.

  ‘I did not plan for this, Katvar. But I will not sit here and wait to die.’

  I tap the whip to Balto’s neck and we race to where I left the remainder of the body in the snow. I load it onto the sled, just next to Katvar’s boots, cover it with reindeer skin, and we make our way down to the airstrip. Halfway to the machine, I check the perimeter and the cockpit with my scope, but can’t see anyone. They might be hiding.

  There are no footprints leading away from the aircraft other than those of the five men I shot. Still, my pistol and rifle are ready.

  The hatch to the aircraft’s belly is open, the wind has had time to blow snow into the cavity. No footprints there, either. I point my weapon in all corners and don’t find a living soul. But there’s a lot of good stuff. Provisions, ammo, a radio. I hesitate, wondering if I should tell them what really happened. But for what? I can’t convince the Sequencers that Erik manipulated them and their satellite controls. They’d also want to know why I fed one of their men to the dogs and why I took his leftovers with me. He was the one who had a .357 calibre rifle very similar to my own. I took all his ammo before I cut him up.

  I don’t feel sorry I took these five lives. No one will ever threaten my family without paying for it.

  I help Katvar climb on board, then I strap him down. I stow our things plus the partial corpse in the back and hoist the sled in, too. It’s cramped, but at least the dogs are happy that they can sit so close to their chief.

  I lock the door and wonder if I should tell him I can’t really fly this thing, that I crashed an aircraft of the same make in the Carpathian Mountains and that, maybe, he doesn’t need to worry about me being pregnant with a malformed child. But I don’t even know where to start explaining.

  I gift him a apologetic smile and get to work.

  I check all the controls. One reads: “Battery Power: 21%.” Well, shit.

  To get off the ground I need eight to ten percent, depending on our weight; to stay up in the air and reach the Nenets, I’ll need much more than that. The sun rises in six hours and…some minutes. No recharging until then, no idea how long it will take the Sequencers to get here and find me, or how long the BSA needs to get to their satellite control centre and make an attempt at saving what’s unsavable.

  Groaning, I press my forehead to the cold yoke. It bends away from me and I stumble forward. Before me stretches a white expanse. Snow. Sea ice. The island behind me. We could go anywhere.

  Greenland is approximately, what, seven hundred, eight hundred kilometres away? Much closer than where we came from. The Norwegian mainland, if I remember correctly, is about the same distance. More or less. But there are only two hundred and a bit kilometres of ice between Svalbard and Bear Island — maybe there’d be game to hunt. And then another four hundred kilometres to the Norwegian mainland, with its countless moose and reindeer. There would be no need for Katvar and me to eat the Sequencer stashed away in the back.

  Well, that decides it, I guess. I start the machine and the dogs begin to howl. Yeah, this thing is going to be much worse than a train, buddies.

  We skid along the airstrip and I manage to pull the machine up and farther up. At two thousand metres, I bring its nose level with the horizon.

  Twelve percent battery power remaining. I wish the northern lights would feed the solar paint on the wings. Below us, the ice slips past. The headwind eats away at our power supply.

  I remember the GPS and try it — it still works. I check our location and program the autopilot to get us to the Norwegian mainland on a slightly indirect line crossing over Bear Island. The thing is tiny. Just a rock in the sea. I doubt there’s anything larger than a gnat populating the place.

  I check on Katvar who now looks like death itself — his knuckles are white, the fingers of his one hand claw at the sled, his other hand holds on to Balto. His eyes are wide open, his face a chalky grey.

  Something bleeps. The controls tell me the battery is at five percent and the autopilot is about to initiate the emergency landing. “Override” or “Approve,” the computer asks me. I tap “Override.” The bleeping grows louder.

  At two percent battery power, Bear Island appears on the horizon below me. I initiate the landing procedure. This is my first. No mountain side to crash into. Just flat ice and a small rock.

  The machine begins to wobble and I hold on to the yoke just because I don’t know what else to do. The automatic landing is engaged and I keep it that way, because I’m sure as hell I’d fuck it up.

  A faint stutter, more bleeping. One percent battery power. The propellers slow to a lazy flopping. The ice approaches fast. I can’t believe the autopilot has switched off the motors! What the fuck?

  A large, red “Override” keeps flashing at me and I don’t have the faintest idea what should be overridden. I scan the other monitor and there it is: “Passive Emergency Landing Procedure.”

  Well, I guess…this makes sense. I keep my fingers off the override command.

  The machine is eerily quiet. Just a swooshing sound of wings cutting through wind. The small black rock that’s Bear Island is now looking pretty big. And it’s getting bigger, shockingly fast.

  My mind stutters useless, panicky things. Will the ice hold? Will the aircraft hold?

  As I turn back to check if Katvar is safely strapped in, I’m torn away from my seat with one mighty groan. My head hurts. My ears are so noisy. The lights switch off. I try to hold on to something, but my arms won’t lift. Someone howls among the screeching and groaning. And then, all falls silent.

  Katvar’s face is above me. I touch it. There’s a bandage around his head. I wonder why.

  ‘What happened?’ I croak.

  He waves with his hands and flicks his fingers.

  ‘What?’

  My eyes seem stuck, I can barely focus on what he’s trying to tell me.

  He tries a second and a third time and then I get it: ‘You hit your head, Micka.’

  I look down at my chest. Blood drips from my nose. ‘Forgot to buckle up.
How does my face look?’

  ‘You are always beautiful.’ He smiles at me broadly, then grows sober. ‘Blood and bruises.’ He indicates my forehead, cheek, and nose. He dips his fingertip to my lower lip. Ouch.

  My tongue darts around in my mouth, probing for broken teeth, and finds a chipped incisor. I show it to him. ‘Do I look like a pirate now?’

  ‘What’s a pirate?’

  ‘It’s a… I’ll tell you the story tonight. Let’s get out of here.’

  We are pathetic — two invalids staggering out of a broken aircraft, trying to get a sled, provisions and supplies on the ice and in order, then chucking three quarters of a frozen corpse out of the machine, chopping pieces off it and feeding them to the dogs, and then plopping exhausted onto the sled, not knowing what to do with plastic-wrapped things called “Energizer Bar.”

  I fetch the SatPad to see if it’s functional. When I bark a laugh, Katvar looks at me as if I’ve lost my mind. ‘It’s the one Erik gave me. It doesn’t work. It can’t connect to satellites. Well, not anymore anyway I guess. But this one…it’s much better: it’s a library.’

  I type in “Energizer Bar” into the search field and find it in an encyclopaedia.

  ‘It’s food. Lots of sugar, berries, nuts, and whatnot,’ I tell Katvar and rip open all ten of them.

  We’ll keep the wrappers. They are shiny and colourful and we might be able to trade them for food.

  The Energizer Bars glue our teeth together and the taste is much too sweet. I might get sick, but I don’t care, really. I’m starving.

  Katvar holds one of the wrappers in front of his nose, frowns, and signs, ‘We are screwed.’

  He holds it out to me and taps at the red capital letters. “Fat-free.”

  We giggle until my eyes are leaking.

  ‘That stuff's made me thirsty,’ I say and he smacks his lips.

  I refill my burner with the oil I found in the aircraft, then light it and melt snow. Comfortably, we sit on the sled, leaning against the narrow backrest, legs stretched out and covered with the bear skin.

  Holding on to my steaming mug, I clear my throat and look at Katvar. ‘We didn’t prevent it, you know.’