His repaired wrist ached from the strain of tapping the tablet. He pushed through the soreness to record the details of his betrayal. First, communications with his contacts dried up. Next, he followed the news chan stories of the disappearance of the North American Interior Minister. Gore sniggered when her body was discovered at a museum dedicated to the outlawed oil industry. The pundits blamed reactionary terrorist groups who never adjusted to the Carbon Acts, but Gore guessed that his fellow conspirators had decided to plug a hole in their leaky enterprise.
Gore knew it was only a matter of time before the rest of the ring was rolled up, and he lay low. He believed Extinction was too valuable for the true leaders of the ring to give it up, but his hopes were dashed when the first depth charges and hunter-killer torpedoes entered the waters above him. His countermeasures were as good as the world’s best navies, but he was running out of time and resources.
Gore finished the entry, archived a copy in the boat’s digital storage, and sent a third copy to a device attached to Extinction’s outer hull. Another concussion rocked the submarine’s pressure hull, and Gore wondered for the first time if escape was worth it. With an international naval force circling above him like vultures, he would be caught and dissed. Or perhaps “accidentally” killed in a firefight. He had loved his life as a corsair, free from every authority, save his own. Death on his own terms was preferable. One emotion dogged him: loss. Micah Panang had gone through the second course of DNA tattoo treatments days before the BES inspector shot her through the eye. Micah promised to become his mate, sacrificing much of her humanity for him. Life had been less interesting for Gore since her death.
The master of Extinction armed the device. He touched the key that released it, and the panel glowed green, signaling success. Once it broke the surface, it would transmit the vengeance log in all com frequencies, telling everyone on earth about his work. He growled with satisfaction at the irony: As the device floated upward, depth charges and torpedoes sped down to meet Extinction. No one heard his laughter when the pressure hull collapsed.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
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THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR reading Carbon Run. I sincerely hope you enjoyed it. Writing is a challenging and rewarding experience, and I’d like to hear your feedback. Please take a moment to review my book on Amazon, Goodreads, or your favorite book review site. You can follow me on Facebook (@AuthorJGFollansbee), Twitter (@Joe_Follansbee), and Instagram (@jgfollansbee). You can also follow me on my personal blog. Tell your friends!
Carbon Run is the first full-length novel in my dystopian thriller series, Tales From A Warming Planet. Watch for the second and third full-length novels, City of Ice and Dreams, and Restoration. You’ll also enjoy the novelette The Mother Earth Insurgency, published in 2017. I will also publish a collection of stories under the title The Mother Earth Insurgency in 2018.
Thank you!
– Joe Follansbee, Summer 2017
PREVIEW CHAPTER 1 OF CITY OF ICE AND DREAMS
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TWENTY-THREE MONTHS SINCE I LAST knew my name. Twenty-three months since I could say where I’m from. I’m a nothing, but these people expect me to tell them whether they’ll live or die.
The repetitive shriek of the klaxon frightened the inmigrantes crowding the ship’s passageway. Sento had no answer to their questions, even if she allowed herself to speak to them. I don’t know why the warning sounded. Hundreds of hands, black, brown, and white, old and young, brushed her as she trod the Kildare’s decks. The pleas implicit in their touches tensed her powerful shoulders and arms. In her flak jacket and pistol, she was a symbol of order in the chaos, despite the fact she was there to protect the ship, not them. Like them, however, she was scared, but she couldn’t show it for fear of stoking their worries.
Except for the boy. He said his name was Koi something. Nahim. His touch was different. It distracted her from her isolation.
Sento paused a few seconds under an air vent. The cold Antarctic air dispersed the thick smell of unwashed bodies choking the passageway. Stray tawny hairs drifted in front of her eyes as she avoided arms and legs jamming every corner. A misstep in her trail boots, the soles almost worn through, would be painful for the stepped-on victim. She flicked the hairs behind her right ear. Someone once said she had the face of Aphrodite but the jaw of Hercules. Who said that to me? I wish I could remember.
The inmigrante questions were alike in English, Spanish, or Portuguese. “Have we arrived early?” “¿Por qué nos detenemos?” “Será que estamos afundando”? She kept silent, pretending to ignore the immigrants while watching them. The ship had stopped, but she saw no point in stating the obvious. Though her instincts called on her to offer a word of reassurance or share a food pack, her job required wariness toward the families huddled into tight balls of fear. In Punta Arenas, the shipowner admired her buff upper arms and shoulders, and when she rejected an offer to sponsor her in the local blood sport, he hired her as security for the trip to Nordenskjöld.
It was a convenient way for her to follow a dream.
Her boots clicked on the deck plates, the sound muffled by the prone refugees passing along rumors and rumors of rumors about the trouble with the ship.
“The engines have failed.”
“The Chilean Coast Guard ordered us to stop. Everyone will be arrested.”
“We’re lost.”
Booms and groans rumbled through the vessel’s belly, as if it had a painful case of indigestion. In Punta Arenas, Sento overheard stories of mothballed derelicts purchased by criminals, refurbished just enough to get their engines working, and sent off to Antarctica overloaded with passengers. No water. No food. No safety gear. Many of the ships came back for another load. Many disappeared without a trace. Sento convinced herself that her ship’s owner had more scruples. He offered her cash on the spot. It’s safe, he said, like rowing across a pond.
She halted in front of an unraveled middle-aged woman huddled alone under a companionway. She was familiar, but not in the way a friend or colleague is familiar. She was a disidentified. Like ghosts, the disidentified inhabited a place between society’s light and dark. They were living husks, legal non-entities, socially dead, without names, with all data about their existence expunged from every database and document that might have stored facts and figures about their lives. Sento’s eyes lingered on the tulip-shaped welt on the woman’s forehead. The law required indifference to her, but Sento did not feel bound by this rule. As if absently attacking an itch, Sento raised her fingers to her hairline, expecting to find a similar welt of disidentification. Nothing was there, but the younger woman shared something with the dissed woman she couldn’t explain. Whenever she encountered a non-person, she gave in to the connection, instead of fighting it.
“Are you okay?” Sento whispered, sitting on a locker stenciled with “100 chalecos salvavidas.”
“Go away.” The voice was muffled behind a gauzy cloth.
Sento nodded, but she removed a food pack and lay it near the woman’s bare, calloused foot.
The ragged woman’s shiny eyes stared at the food pack. “They’ll report you. They’ll put you in jail.”
Local authorities didn’t always look the other way from illegal acts of compassion, but Sento wasn’t worried. “I don’t think there’s any bessies on this rust bucket. We’re fifteen hundred kilometers from the nearest police station.” Sento readied to leave the dissed woman.
“A little water, maybe?”
Sento handed the woman a sealed pouch of fresh water. She carried plenty. She wanted to ask, What crime did you commit? The tulip signaled an environmental crime of the worst kind, but the woman wouldn’t know the answer to Sento’s unspoken question. Dissing not only erased all official traces of life, it permanently damaged parts of the brain that held memory important to identity. The woman probably didn’t know her real name.
Sento felt a kinship with the dissed, because she remembered nothing about her lif
e prior to the day she woke up in Valparaíso. Twenty-three months, one week, five days ago. Sometimes, she thought she’d been dissed, but the lack of a welt argued for another explanation for her amnesia. No other explanation presented itself.
The dissed woman tore open the water pouch with hands that belonged to a skeleton. “Do you know why the ship has stopped?”
“No.” The three-man crew had barely spoken to her since their departure from Punta Arenas. They kept to themselves behind a heavy gate Sento was not allowed to pass. Her job, though, was clear: Keep the inmigrantes away.
“ Iso.” Koi Nahim, the migrant, 11 or 12 years old, dropped to his haunches near Sento and the woman, his mop of black, curly hair in need in a comb. “ Isorropia.”
“Go away, boy,” the dissed woman croaked.
“I’ve heard that word before,” Sento said. She dreamed it before she heard it spoken by refugees on the road south. It was a lodestone, a myth, an abstract concept, all equaling salvation for them. Maybe for me.
“At least he pronounces it correctly,” the woman said. Sento wondered if she was once a teacher. In the dissed, accents or mannerisms from a prior life often persisted. “Idiots say ‘I so.’” She dropped the gauze cloth, which hid sores on her lips, to bite into the food pack. “Isn’t that right, boy? It’s the way moronic dreamers talk about Isorropia.” She said the first syllable like the “e” in “equal.”
“ Isorropia,” Sento repeated with the correct pronunciation.
“Roll the ‘r’ if you want to impress your betters,” the woman said.
“Iso.” Saying the word, Koi regarded Sento with curiosity, as if evaluating her.
Uneasy with Koi’s gaze, Sento focused on the dissed woman. “What do you think it means?”
“It’s a place that doesn’t exist.” The woman relished the chewy food. “Think Shangri-La or Eden or similar nonsense.”
“ Iso.” The youth nodded to add emphasis.
“Why does he keep saying it?”
Koi reached out to touch the creamy skin of Sento’s cheek. The corners of his mouth turned up. If he were anyone else, Sento would’ve have pushed his delicate fingers away, but his touch was like a warm breath.
“He thinks he’s going there.” The woman addressed Koi. “Child, Isorropia is about as real as the million euros in my hip pocket.” She rasped and dismissed Koi. “Go back to your rat hole and dream your dreams.”
The youth lifted his head in defiance and marched off.
I believe in Isorropia too.
“Harmless little son.” The dissed woman sighed.
Sento studied the wretched woman. “You’re dreaming about something. That’s why you’re here.”
“Everyone wants a new life, sooner or later. That’s Antarctica’s promise, now that the West Antarctica Ice Sheet is practically gone.”
Immigrants gave Sento a dark look as they shuffled past, their pace impatient. “Everyone’s restless.” Sento stretched and rose.
“Don’t... I mean...” The woman stopped herself from reaching out. Touching a non-dissed made the recipient a law-breaker. “Thank you for your kindness.”
Sento shrugged, safe in her knowledge that Kildare was out of reach of the law. “I’ll check on you later.”
Sento stepped over and around packs and bags and bundles. The passengers cursed the cargo ship’s cranky wireless network, which went dark as soon as the engines spun down. Without a tie to the global net, they felt cut off. In Sento’s case, her minds-eye apparatus hadn’t worked since they day she woke up in Valparaiso. Isolation was her world. She didn’t share the same dream as the inmigrantes. They sought escape; she sought home. All she knew for certain, however, was that it had a name: Isorropia.
To escape the stale air and reek of desperation rising from the inmigrantes, Sento stepped out of doors. The dawn was red like cayenne pepper. The sun trudged on its low-angled climb to its solstice peak barely more than the breadth of both Sento’s muscled hands from thumb to pinky. A cranky, demanding Arf! Arf! reached her. Sea lions had gathered on the nearby shore, below a sheer rock cliff that knifed into the Weddell Sea. Behind the cliff rose mountains crowned with glaciers. The lions’ yap brought her up short, and a spike of anxiety ran up her spine, signaling another unpleasant crumb of memory. Like a submarine’s periscope, the feeling meant something dreadful lay below the surface of her consciousness.
She dismissed the fear with a shake of her head. Refreshed by the bracing breeze, she encountered a tall man with skin the color of milk chocolate, wearing a tattered parka. Sento marked him as a leader. Given-name Hosea, like the Jewish prophet. When he spoke with others, they nodded in agreement or affirmation as he spoke. A possible threat. His wild-eyed wife was pregnant. Awilda. A strange name. When Sento first met him, a day out of Punta Arenas, he was with two children, his own, Sento guessed. All were inmigrantes.
Sento nodded to him in thanks as he held open the door.
“Do you know where we are?” Hosea said.
A tinge of frustration bothered Sento. “No, I’m in the dark, just like you.”
“Some of us believe we’re close to Nordenskjöld.”
The town was a dot on the east coast of the 1,300-kilometer Antarctic Peninsula, as scoured by inlets and fjords as the country of its Norwegian explorer namesake. Sento and the inmigrantes boarded Kildare 10 days earlier, enduring the passage across the Southern Ocean to Nordenskjöld. Another 20 kilometers south and they’d cross the Antarctic Circle.
A commotion broke out on deck. People poured out of the cargo and passenger spaces, chattering like birds, excitement in their steps. The desperation of the immigrants swam beneath the surface of their dirty faces and worn-out clothes. Sento knew these people, as a group, if not individually. Fear and sorrow turned to hope and back again as she hiked beside them on the road from Valparaiso. Some had traveled more than a year, walking or hitching rides across half the globe to escape political chaos, police persecution, thousand-year droughts, or crop failure after crop failure as the Warming’s effects accelerated. Sento shared one thing with them, the drive to go south.
She was different, however. Sento was outside their mass, like a tiny moon that traveled with an eccentric asteroid in space. Unlike the dreamers, the seekers for a new life, she obeyed the constant pressure in her heart to push south. Whether Isorropia was a myth or not didn’t matter. Only moving relieved the pressure. Once, when she and thousands of other refugees were stopped at a border crossing for weeks, she fell ill. When the border was finally opened, she was as strong as ever within days. Sometimes, she substituted the simpler concept of “south” for the internal obsession that drove her like a pack animal, but south ended at the Pole, and the answer to her identity—as well as Isorropia—was somewhere between here and there. Would I know it if I saw it?
The deck plate hummed as the electric engines spun the propellers. The crowd on the main deck cheered as Kildare crawled around a headland, but Sento spotted the whitecaps. Kildare emerged from the lee of the headland, which blocked the winds coming from the other side. The breeze was strong enough to take the top off one or two of the waves in the bay beyond. Kildare rocked a few degrees as the wind struck it. Sento, keeping an eye on the crowd, saw parka hoods go over heads as wind-chill cut the temperature. Many had endured mountain blizzards during their journey. Sento’s gut churned, though, and not from the boat’s movement.
They entered the bay. The wind lessened by degrees, but waves crashed on the stony beach below the town, which clung to a rocky shelf. Like the immigrants, like Hosea beside her, she felt the pull of the land, but the voice of the waves on the cobbles said home to her, not hope for a better future. What home?
Sento did not expect the other settlement. To the south, about two kilometers distant from the town, a collection of tents, shacks, and lean-tos sprawled on a narrow expanse of sand. It had a semi-permanent look, unlike the frame and stone structures of the town. A refugee camp.
“I like
you,” the shipowner said to Sento, back in Punta Arenas. “Let me give you some advice. Come back to P-A and work for me. There’s nothing on that beach or in that whole continent. It’s an empty waste, and it kills you by surprise. No human was meant to live there, and the ones that do will slit your throats in your sleep.”
Sento believed the owner, but the pull of Antarctica was far more powerful.
ALSO IN THE TALES FROM A WARMING PLANET SERIES
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The Mother Earth Insurgency: A Novelette
City of Ice and Dreams (Winter 2017)
Restoration (Spring 2018)
The Mother Earth Insurgency: A Collection of Tales from a Warming Planet (Spring 2018) To get early information about release dates, visit my personal blog, http://joefollansbee.com, and sign up for my reader newsletter.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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J.G. FOLLANSBEE IS AN AWARD-WINNING writer of thrillers and science fiction stories with climate change themes. An author of maritime history and travel guides, he has published articles in newspapers, regional and national magazines, and regional and national radio networks, including National Public Radio. He’s also worked in the high-tech world. He lives in Seattle.
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