“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 dollhouses 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 was counting out bills when his sat phone 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.”
Chauncie jumped a little at the dial tone. River waited next to the little car, 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, 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?” said River. 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.
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, 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 excited to be here. River politely interrupted and showed her credentials to the guide, who nodded them on. Nobody looked at his briefcase; he supposed they would check it on the way out, not on the way in.
“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 farther on, the tunnel was roped off. Past it, a T-intersection could be seen where only one light glowed.
These were the airlocks. 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 filled with wooden boxes lined the interior like an industrial wholesale store. The boxes were stenciled 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 brought out her foil packet. It nestled, very small, 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 a long box off the shelf. She set it carefully on the ground and opened the lid.
Inside were 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 U.S. Farmers standardized down to just a dozen. . . . Somewhere in here are thousands more, if we ever choose to need them.”
She seemed fascinated. 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, a 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 with it in the palm of his hand and stared at it. It was even more precious than River’s paleo-seeds, because this was the only one of its kind in existence.
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 v
oice 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 nodded and kept working. “Listen.” River stayed oddly calm, her breath clouding the air over his head. “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 of the ridiculous little pouch she kept strapped to her waist in lieu of a purse.
Chauncie slid one hand into a pocket. He had what looked like an inhaler in there; one forcibly administered dose from it 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 mercenaries to find. And if he left without her, he’d have to deal with the security guards as well.
He really couldn’t live with victimizing any of them. River was 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 Svalbard and do exactly what I’m doing—only not as carefully.”
She hesitated, the pepper spray wavering. “What?”
“Overengineered agristock and plague. I’m told the Russians are pretty damn hell-bent on regaining control of un-copyrighted 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. But here’s the thing: plausible deniability also means cutting up the DNA data into individual genes—scrambling it—so nobody can tell where they got them later on. All they want is the genes for splicing experiments, so they may preserve the data at the gene level, but they’re going to destroy the record of the whole plant so they can’t be traced. I’ve been sent to get what I can out of the vault before they get here.”
River paused. “And 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 the complete 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 the list from him. “There are a few missing they 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 . . . an awful solution, but we have to mitigate the potential damage. We have to make sure the seeds can be re-created later on.”
He’d expected her to ask for a cut of the profit. Instead, she was offering to help out of some scientific rationalism. “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 CarbonJohnnies 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 expectation that armed men would 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 know 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 sat phone 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 the market valued. They had what they needed—best not push it any further. “Come on. We do not want to be standing here when 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. The tourists were gone. 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. Sir, may I inspect your briefcase?”
Chauncie let him open it on a metal table while the other man carefully checked his coat lining and patted them both down. The briefcase contained nothing but empty foil packets; he’d left the sequencer under a shelf in the vault.
“What’s this?” The guard drew out the sequencer’s Exabyte data chip from Chauncie’s pocket. He tensed.
But River smiled. “Wedding photos. Would you like to see them?”
The guard shook his head. “That’s okay, ma’am.” These guys probably didn’t know DNA sequencers had shrunk to briefcase size. They’d been trained to think their job was to make sure no seeds left the vault; Chauncie was pretty sure the idea of them being digitized hadn’t been in the course.
River shrugged with a smile, and they passed on. Chauncie breathed out heavily.
“Hey,” the guard said. “If you’re in town, take a few shots of that fleet of little boats out there. They’re doing some serious exercises, wargaming some sorta Arctic defense scenario for the oil companies or other. They’re all around Svalbard. Just amazing to see all those ships.”
Chauncie’s mood died.
&
nbsp; They entered the mouth of the tunnel, shielding their eyes from the sun.
Chauncie took a high-throughput satellite antenna out of the car’s trunk and put it on the roof. He plugged his sat phone into it, then the Exabyte core into that. The sat phone’s 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 mercenaries 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, next to each of the seeds on the list. “Okay, come on.”
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