The Ice War

by Anders Blixt

  After a few years, we raised the stakes to risking our lives by smuggling a shipload of Jews to the Netherlands in foul weather. When disembarking, the parents thanked us for having saved their children from the ultras back home. That experience made me realize what it entailed to be an adult rather than a teenager, that is, to do what had to be done in the face of mortal danger. Life would never be the same again.

  And then the republican rebellion erupted in the German countries and spread to Sweden. I was one of those who built cobble-stone barricades in the streets of Gothenburg and fought the police with improvised clubs and stolen shotguns. We dreamed of freedom during a brief summer, but in the autumn the tsar’s Cossacks crossed the Baltic Sea “to restore order”. Their knouts whirled in Sweden’s shantytowns while the Okhrana hauled off real or imagined rebels to Siberia. So I, too, fled to the Netherlands to carry on the struggle in other ways.

  Chapter 2

  Fredriksborg’s air is so polluted that its inhabitants only see the most luminous stars at night. But out on the ice sheet you see the full splendour of the night sky. My back rested against the railing that enclosed the observation deck of the juggernaut Lady Margaret while I admired the Milky Way’s river of glittering dust. It was easy to identify our brilliant planetary neighbours Mars and Venus. Both Jupiter and Sirius were below the horizon at this hour, so the third strongest celestial sparkle ought to be Canopus. I had a hard time puzzling together the unfamiliar constellations of the southern hemisphere, but after a while I figured out which stars formed the Southern Cross and the adjacent Centaur.

  Acrid smoke billowed from the Lady Margaret’s funnel and covered a section of the sky where the sparks of smouldering coal fragments replaced the stars. Her steel-studded wheels rumbled incessantly and a cargo trailer clattered behind the stern. The din had kept me awake. After spending one hour with Franke’s handbook in my bunk, I had decided to get some fresh air. On the way to the top deck I had walked through the canteen that occupied most of the upper deck of the passenger section. There I saw others who had hard time sleeping. A few people played cards and the bartender was doing brisk business. But I had not seen Linda. Most likely she was in her cabin, but I had no idea whether she was able to sleep – though as a mechanic she ought to be used to all this noise.

  When Linda and I had met at Fredriksborg’s railway station for the first stage of our journey, she had shown me a detailed travel plan. A steam train took us along a track winding up Acheron’s shallow slope through a fertile farming area where ursines and humans worked side by side in the fields. We travelled around the base of the dead volcano Hephaestus Mons. The air got thinner and colder with increasing altitude. Soon the train master activated the hot water radiators in the railcars and his men made sure that all windows were closed and sealed.

  Hours later we had arrived at the Christianshus terminal, a building complex where passengers and cargo changed between the railroad and the juggernauts that travelled across the ice plains. Bunkers dotted the surrounding hills. Three tall military juggernauts had stood at the ice rim, angular armoured vehicles with many wheels and gun turrets. After all, this settlement was vital for Fredriksborg’s communications with Alba outside Acheron, where the ice plains are as important as the seas in Europe.

  The sun had just set with pink light still touching the volcano’s snow-covered summit, when we disembarked the train to start the second stage of our journey, heading south via the mining towns of New Bristol and Novgorod.

  A strong gust of wind suddenly chilled my face and shattered my reverie. Time for another attempt to fall asleep, I thought. Maybe a nightcap will help.

  Weak light bulbs illuminated the canteen. I approached the bar, where the female bartender greeted me: “Guten Abend, mein Herr.”

  “Guten Abend,” I said. “A vodka on the rocks, please.”

  While the bartender prepared the drink, I checked what other people were here. Four well-dressed men played cards at a big round table while having beer. They spoke German and from what I heard they knew each other well. I guessed that they were businessmen going to New Bristol.

  A woman and a man conversed quietly at a bulkhead table with a pot of coffee between them. Both were in their thirties with similar robust clothes and crew-cut hairstyles. The tall man had a northern European hue, while the woman appeared to have both European and Oriental ancestry. Their composed and alert manner made me think of police and military officers. Their gestures indicated a level of intimacy, probably a married couple.

  A forty-something European man in a white suit sat alone at another bulkhead with a drink in front of him. His face looked morose. Someone else who cannot sleep, I thought.

  I selected an empty table at a porthole. The reflections of the light bulbs in the triple glass panes prevented me from seeing anything of the outside, provided that there had been anything to watch apart from ice and snow.

  “Excuse me, sir.” The man in the white suit approached me.

  “Yes?” I said.

  “You appear to be as bored as I am. May I join you for a chat?” He spoke educated English.

  “Please do.” Cloud travellers are used to tedious journey and one has to use whatever means available to keep oneself entertained.

  “Peter Lee,” he said and extended his hand.

  “Johnny Bornewald.”

  “You’re not from Alba, are you?” Lee asked.

  “Why do you think so?” I said.

  “Your clothing.” Peter Lee’s breath smelled of alcohol and his face had the reddish hue of drunkenness. The drink he carried in his right hand was obviously not his first one this evening.

  I reviewed Lee’s mimics and speech and suspected that he, too, did not originate from Alba, but I kept quiet about my conclusion. “That’s right.”

  I worried that he would start talking about what he thought was my native land, but instead he changed subject. “During daytime you can occasionally spot the leviathan hunters’ ice-buggies. If we’re lucky we might see one of those beasts. Have you seen them?” When speaking he seemed less inebriated than I had feared.

  “Well, only in photos.” A leviathan looks like a mix of an enormous snail and a whale. Franke’s handbook had explained that it subsists on pseudo-algae that grow as patches of green slime on the ice.

  “You won’t believe your eyes when you see one. Fifty-sixty yards long and ten yards tall. One of them would shatter Lady Margaret without noticing.” He emptied his glass. “Do you know that people say that the leviathan hunters make a powerful aphrodisiac from a gland?”

  A tall tale? Franke doesn’t mention it, I thought. “No, I haven’t heard that.”

  “The ursines hunt those beasts with muzzled-loaded cannons and it is easy to destroy that gland.” Peter Lee started to ramble about the leviathans’ role in the polar fauna.

  I paid attention to his words, because I have learned the hard way that small facts every once in a while turn out to be vital. The more he spoke, the more I was convinced that he was from West Europe. He was a knowledgeable zoologist, but why this Alban specialisation? I had no idea, but I refrained from asking to avoid unwanted questions in return.

  After half an hour I felt so tired that I decided to make another try at falling asleep. Peter Lee had ordered a new drink and seemed to be able to talk till dawn. When I left the canteen, he remained at the table, looking out into the darkness.

  Chapter 3

  “Calling Alpha One. This is Alpha Two. We’re at Location Lambda. Over.” Short-wave radiotelephony has its drawbacks, for instance unpredictable sound quality, but it is the most flexible method available if you want to avoid public monopolies with telephone lines of questionable quality. My radio was reliable, though quite a burden with its heavy lead batteries.

  Leclerc grunted in response. It sounded as if I had woken him. “Alpha One here. I read you, Alpha Two. Over.”

  “The journey is uneventful so far.” I phrased my messages with care because
I had no idea who might be eavesdropping. “We plan to proceed to Location Sigma presently. Over.”

  “Understood. Let me know when you have more precise plans. Alpha One out.”

  New Bristol is situated in a flat area so the Lady Margaret left the ice sheet and drove along a straight ice road to its juggernaut terminal. The place had been colonized because of its plentiful high-quality iron ore.

  Alba’s towns look the same to an uninitiated visitor: shabby pioneer settlements with houses of grey stone or black wood. But when you take a closer look, you see that each possesses distinctive characteristics: the width of the alleys, the colour schemes indoors, the inhabitants’ dress code and way of moving in public spaces, and so on. New Bristol seemed a bit wealthier than Fredriksborg with less crowded alleys and more spacious shops. It also had something that I had not seen in Fredriksborg: a metal radio tower with a cluster of antennas reached for the sky next to the terminal.

  Linda had told me that leviathan hunters frequently visited New Bristol because of its convenient location at the ice sheet. When we had approached the coast just after dawn, I had waited at a porthole in Lady Margaret’s canteen with the hope of seeing their ice-buggies, but unfortunately in vain.

  Hotel Victoria consisted of three parallel corridors, joined by the reception area and other common facilities. Our two rooms were tiny, but the beds were comfortable and the staff accommodating and that is what weary travellers need.

  In the evening I sat at my desk writing in my diary about our days in the Lady Margaret. I had listened to Peter Lee’s ramblings at several occasions. When sober, he was less self-centred and had plenty to tell about Alba’s flora and fauna. However, I avoided appearing too curious because I did not want to attract attention to me and Linda. The couple with the crew-cuts, Elsa and Leonard Schnittke, had alerted my suspicious mind. I had talked to them briefly once or twice and then they had claimed to be geologists heading for a mine. I did not believe them because of their military auras – their journey might instead be related to the simmering political crisis. Linda had preferred the solitude of her cabin, though we had shared several meals in the canteen. At those occasions, she had spoken much about Alba, but not a word about herself. On the other hand, I had not said much about my background. Rebels like anonymity.

  A double knock on the door interrupted my writing and I responded: “Come in, please.”

  Linda entered and grabbed a chair. “I’ve spent some hours in the bazaar listening for local news,” she said. “Someone said that a flier has reported an approaching squadron of ursine ice-buggies. They’re expected to arrive just after dawn tomorrow. But nobody knew what clan they belong to, so I can’t say whether these are people I’d want to talk to. Anyhow, let’s watch that from the observation deck in the radio tower, shall we?”

  “Good idea,” I said.

  The wide windows of the observation deck provided an all-around panorama. To the east the glittering ice sheet reached to the horizon. To the west a huge open-pit mine made me think of a pernicious lesion in the rolling snow-covered ground. Everywhere, at least so it seemed, smoke pillars rose from smelting furnaces and iron mills.

  A group of third-graders in blue school coats swarmed around us under the watchful eyes of two teachers. I scanned the ice sheet through my binocular. The rising sun cast orange-yellow light cascades across the snow.

  Linda’s elbow touched me. “There!” She lowered her old-fashioned prism field-glass and pointed.

  I reoriented my binocular while its whirring mechanisms adjusted for contrast and luminosity. Seven gaudy ice-buggies raced toward New Bristol’s landing area. Each scrawny vehicle had a distinctive paintwork and fuselage layout with an enclosed crew cabin, long runners and spike-studded drive-wheels.

  “The six striped ones belong to the Kirin clan, while the speckled one is from the Tairen,” Linda said in German, probably to ensure that the kids would not understand. “An unexpected alliance.”

  “How come?” I said in the same language.

  “The Kirin are dark-furred and usually do not travel with pale-furs like the Tairen. The Kirin territory is nearby, whereas the Tairen live further south and rarely turn up here,” she said.

  “Are they enemies?” I asked.

  “No, but the Tairen craft must have come here for some particular reason,” she said.

  I scanned the land closer to the observation tower. A narrow promontory extended about four hundred yards into the ice just north of the place where Lady Margaret had rolled off the ice sheet. Its surface was uneven with occasional black bushes growing out of the snow. I noticed a movement near its tip and adjusted the magnification of the binocular. Its gyros started whirring to keep it steady during zooming. A human in white wilderness clothing, facing away from me, crouched near the ice beach in a location that could not be observed from the west. However, the observation deck was so high above the ground that neither cliffs nor shrubberies obstructed my line of sight.

  That person must have walked from New Bristol so I started searching for tracks in the snow. I found none, but I noticed two other humans in white advancing out on the promontory. Currently they were about three hundred yards from the crouching individual but they should not be able to see him from their current position.

  I zoomed out. The six Kirin ice-buggies drove past the promontory and followed its southern edge toward the landing, whereas the Tairen vessel rushed for the tip. The roof of its crew cabin flipped open, revealing two drivers and two riflemen to my enhanced gaze. It veered twenty yards from land and skidded to a halt with ice dust spraying from the runners. The waiting human dashed toward it, but stumbled after a few steps and fell head over heels on the ice. I quickly checked the other humans. They crouched with rifles in firing positions among ice boulders on the north side of the promontory, about two hundred yards from the Tairen ice-buggy.

  One rifleman in that vehicle opened fire and a cloud of black-powder smoke billowed from his repeater. The other one got down on the ice and lifted the fallen human aboard. Meanwhile the six Kirin ice-buggies swerved left in tight formation and hit the south edge of the promontory. The two snipers must have heard them, because they started to retreat using whatever cover they could find.

  As soon as the wounded human was inside the Tairen buggy, it bolted for the open ice sheet with ice fragments flying from its drive wheels. Its two riflemen held their fire, probably because they risked hitting the Kirin ursines who had jumped out of their vehicles and now stormed the promontory in a military manner.

  The two snipers withdrew skilfully among rocks, ice boulders and bushes. I was sure that I was watching Mr and Mrs Schnittke in action. They had the advantage of firing smokeless ammunition, while their adversaries used black-powder rounds. They soon knocked out one ursine and while the others hit the ground, they disengaged using smoke grenades to obscure their movements.

  They are rushed, otherwise they would not have open fire so close to a town, I thought. Why?

  When the couple got off the promontory, they headed north and I lost them behind a cluster of black shrubberies. After two minutes the ursines trotted back to their ice-buggies, carrying their wounded comrade, and the squadron departed at high speed. The gunshots had not been audible in the observation chamber and the event had been so far away that nobody without binoculars would have been able to figure out what really had happened. The school children had not understood anything, but the teachers talked to one another about what they thought they had seen.

  Linda, putting the field-glass in her backpack, said: “Let’s leave now, before the police get into action.”

  I nodded and followed her to the tower’s elevator.

  Chapter 4

  “According to news bulletins from Europe, republican and imperial forces are engaged in a major battle in northern Hungary. The Imperial Ministry of War in Vienna has announced that this is a part of an offensive to secure vital railway lines. The reports of the two adversaries are contr
adictory: both claim that the enemy is facing an imminent defeat.

  “Eduard Beneš, president of Bohemia, said in a speech broadcast yesterday to the Central European republics that he expects no quick end to the battle for liberty, but that the superior morale and technology of the republican alliance will ensure that its success. He also called for more volunteers, saying: ‘So far we have been spared the disgrace of mandatory conscription.’

  “As for the shooting incident this morning near the ice landing, the police have so far failed to identify who were involved, apart from the presence of unknown Kirin clansmen. The police see no connections to local criminal activities.

  “A week ago Juliusburg’s leader Eric Terboven said in a speech commemorating the seventh anniversary of the establishment of that settlement that his corporation had no territorial claims vis-à-vis Novgorod, but that the current dispute concerning the exploitation of coal deposits in the Montalban range must be settled in a manner that fully respects the rights of Juliusburg.

  “The transport bureau has purchased two new cargo juggernauts for…”

  I switched off the radio. A republican defeat in Hungary would have serious consequences for the rebellion’s heartlands in Bohemia, Saxony and Hessen. Beneš was a sensible leader and I interpreted his message as a warning to the citizens of the republics: matters were about to get worse.

  “What do you think of that Terboven?” I said.

  “A despotic director in the Rhodes Conglomerate. I know that his henchmen have slaughtered ursines that refused to ‘resettle’ at the corporate latifundios. But so far, he hasn’t attacked other human settlements,” said Linda.