Arctic Rising Read Online Free Page A

shot you down.”
    “Calm?” Anika thought about it. She wasn’t calm. She was still running on adrenaline and shock, that’s all. None of this had penetrated that outer wall, a pilot’s levelheaded ability to run through a checklist while something was going wrong.
    Anika had been through some tight spots. She knew the shakes came later. She wasn’t sure what was going to happen once she wrapped her head around everything that had just occurred.
    Jenny knocked on the door. “Are you done in there?”
    “Yeah,” a familiar voice said. A husky, scratchy, and frail-sounding Tom.
    “Okay, we’re coming in then,” Jenny said cheerfully.
    Anika followed her, wrinkling her nose again at the smell of hospitals. She didn’t like them. She associated them with dying relatives. There was nothing worse as a child than being forced to go visit and make small talk to family members whom she only occasionally saw. They were always hurting, tired, and scared in hospitals, and that put her off.
    But this was Tom, and she felt angry at herself for those childish memories.
    He looked pale. And tired. He was wrapped in warming blankets, with a slightly bent container of urine hanging off the side of a bed rail.
    “I guess I owe you a case of beer,” he said when he saw Anika step around the curtain with Jenny.
    Anika smiled. “I’ll let it go. Just this once.”
    He reached a hand out, and she took it, shook it firmly, and then he pulled back into the blankets, shivering. “Christ, it’s like I can’t ever get warm anymore.”
    “Worse than Polar Bear Camp…” Anika agreed.
    They both nodded. Every new UNPG pilot who arrived on base got initiated by being taken to “camp.” In reality, it was a large icy lake near some dramatic foothills not too far from Nanisivik.
    You had to jump into the ice-cold water and swim a single lap. If you refused, they’d toss you in.
    But afterward they’d gone to the hot tubs along a wooden platform near the road to the lake and drank.
    That had ended well, Anika thought. This hadn’t.
    Tom looked up at her, apparently coming to the same conclusion. His smile had faded. “They fucking shot us out of the fucking sky, Anika.” There was wounded outrage written across his face now.
    Anika felt the same thing. “I know. I don’t…” Actually, she wasn’t sure what she wanted to say next. She hunted around for words. “I can’t figure it out. They have to know they’re being hunted. Where can they go?”
    “Guess we’ll find out soon enough,” Tom muttered.
    Half an hour later, Anika stood outside the hospital, blinking up at the bright Arctic night. They’d had it darkened inside.
    From outside, the hospital looked like the world’s largest Quonset hut. A giant aircraft hanger. Arctic architecture chic, according to some Montreal designer who’d stamped his mark on what seemed like every public building out here. The hospital itself was basically a smaller building inside the giant hanger, which let them keep small gardens and trees in the lobby year round.
    The buildings in the deep Sahara Anika had lived in when she’d worked for the DESERTEC project used the same principle: create a large space of protected air in a dome, then build a small piece of the world you’d come from inside of it.
    They were like space stations, she thought, but sitting on the pieces of Earth’s land that were too alien for anyone to survive in.
    *   *   *
    Her Toyota ran out of power three miles up the gravel road from base housing. She walked the rest of the way, jacket pulled tight, hugging herself, her breath billowing out into the air and then being yanked away by the wind. She’d go back for the car in the morning, push it the last flat miles, and hook it up to the charger.
    Inside her square prefab, one of the hundreds all splayed out across the Arctic gravel in spiral patterns, she turned the heat up even further and shucked off the stranger’s clothes.
    She considered a bath.