Chauncie St. Christie squinted in the weak 3 a.m. sunlight. No, two degrees higher. He adjusted the elevation, stepped back in satisfaction, and pulled on a lime green nylon cord. The mortar burped loudly, and seconds later, a fountain of water shot up ten feet from his target.

His sat phone vibrated on his belt and he half reached for it, causing the gyroscope-stabilized platform to wobble slightly. “Damn it.” That must be Maksim on the phone. The damn Croat would be calling about the offer again. Chauncie ignored the reminder and reset the mortar. “How close are they?”

His friend Kulitak stood on the rail of the trawler and scanned the horizon with a set of overpowered binoculars. “Those eco response ships are throwing out oil containment booms. Canuck gunboats’re all on the far side of the spill.”

“As long as they’re busy.” Chauncie adjusted the mortar and dropped another shell into it. This shot hit dead-on, and the CarbonJohnny^TM blew apart in a cloud of Styrofoam, cheap solar panel fragments, and chicken wire.

Kulitak lowered his binoculars. “Nice one.”

“One down, a million to go,” muttered Chauncie. The little drift of debris was already sinking, the flotsam joining the ever-present scrim of trash that peppered all ocean surfaces. Hundreds more CarbonJohnnies dotted the sea all the way to the horizon, each one a moronically simple mechanism. A few bottom-of-the-barrel cheap solar panels sent a weak current into a slowly unreeling sheet of chicken wire that hung in the water. This electrolyzed calcium carbonate out of the water. As the chicken wire turned to concrete, sections of it tore off and sank into the depths of the Makarov Basin. These big reels looked a bit like toilet paper and unraveled the same way, a few sheets at a time: hence the name CarbonJohnny. Sequestors International (NASDAQ symbol: SQI) churned them out by the shipload with the noble purpose of sequestering carbon and making a quick buck from the carbon credits.

Chauncie and his friends blew them up and sank them almost as quickly.

“This is lame,” Kulitak said. “We’re not going to make any money today.”

“Let’s pack up, find somewhere less involved.”

Chauncie grunted irritably; he’d have to pay for an updated satellite mosaic and look for another UN inspection blind spot. Kulitak had picked this field of CarbonJohnnies because overhead, somewhere high in the stratosphere, a pregnant blimp staggered through the pale air dumping sulfur particulates into a too-clean atmosphere to help block the warming sun. But in the process it also helpfully obscured some of the finer details of what Chauncie and Kulitak were up to. Unfortunately, the pesky ecological catastrophe unfolding off the port bow was wreaking havoc with their schedule.

A day earlier, somebody had blown up an automated U.S. Pure Waters, Inc. tug towing a half cubic kilometer of iceberg. Kulitak thought it was the Emerald Institute who’d done it, but they were just one of dozens of ecoterrorist groups who might have been responsible. Everybody was protesting the large-scale “strip mining” of the Arctic’s natural habitat, and now and then somebody did something about it.

The berg had turned out to be unstable. As Chauncie’d been motoring out to this spot he’d heard the distant thunder as it flipped over. He hadn’t heard the impact of the passing supertanker with its underwater spur three hours later; but he could sure smell it when he woke up. The news said three or four thousand tonnes of oil had leaked out into the water, and the immediate area was turning into a circus of cleanup crews. Media, Greenpeace, oil company ships, UN, government officials—they would all descend soon enough.

“There’s money in cleanup,” Chauncie commented; he smiled at Kulitak’s grimace.

“Money,” said Kulitak. “And forms. And treaties you gotta watch out for; and politics like rat traps. Let’s find another Johnny.” The Inuit radicals who had hired them were dumping their own version of the CarbonJohnny into these waters. Blowing up SQI’s Johnnies was not, Chauncie’s employer had claimed, actually piracy; it was merely a diversion of the carbon credits that would otherwise have gone to SQI—and at $100 per tonne sequestered, it added up fast.

He shrugged at Kulitak’s impatient look, and bent to stow the mortar. Broken Styrofoam, twirling beer cans, and plush toys from a container-ship accident drifted in the trawler’s wake; farther out, the Johnnies bobbed in their thousands, a marine forest through which dozens of larger vessels had to pick their way. On the horizon, a converted tanker was spraying a fine mist of iron powder into the air—fertilizing the Arctic Ocean for another carbon sequestration company, just as the blimps overhead were smearing the sky with reflective smog to cut down global warming in another way. Helicopters crammed with biologists and carbon-market auditors zigged and zagged over the waters, and yellow autosubs cruised under them, all measuring the effect.

Mile-long oil supertankers cruised obliviously through it all. Now that the world’s trees were worth more as carbon sinks than building material, the plastics industry had taken off. Oil as fuel was on its way out; oil for the housing industry was in high demand.

And in the middle of it all, Chauncie’s little trawler. It didn’t actually fish. There were fish enough—the effect of pumping iron powder into the ocean was to accelerate the Arctic’s already large biodiversity to previously unseen levels. Plankton boomed, and the cycle of life in the deep had exploded. The ocean’s fisheries no longer struggled, and boats covered the oceans with nets and still couldn’t make a dent. Chauncie’s fishing nets were camouflage. Who would notice one more trawler picking its way toward a less-packed quadrant of CarbonJohnnies?

Out in relatively clearer ocean Chauncie sat on the deck as the Inuit crew hustled around, pulling in the purposefully holed nets so that the trawler could speed up.

In this light the ocean was gunmetal blue; he let his eyes rest on it, unaware of how long he stood there until Kulitak said, “Thinking of taking a dip?”

“What? Oh, heh—no.” He turned away. There was no diving into these waters for a refreshing swim. Chauncie hadn’t known how precious such a simple act could be until he’d lost it.

Kulitak grunted but said nothing more; Chauncie knew he understood that long stare, the moments of silent remembrance. These men he worked with cultivated an anger similar to his own: their Arctic was long gone, but their deepest instincts still expected it to be here, he was sure, the same way he expected the ocean to be a glitter of warm emeralds he could cup in his hand.

Losing his childhood home, the island of Anegada, to the global climate disaster had been devastating, but sometimes Chauncie wondered whether Kulitak’s people hadn’t gotten the worse end of the disaster. As the seven seas became the eight seas and their land literally melted away, the Inuit faced an indignity that even Chauncie did not have to suffer: seeing companies, governments, and people flood in to claim what had once been theirs alone.

He found it delicious fun to make money plinking at CarbonJohnnies for the Inuit. But it wasn’t big money—and he needed the big score.

He needed to be able to cup those emeralds in his hands again. On rare occasions he’d wonder whether he was going to spend the rest of his life up here. If somebody told him that was his fate, he was pretty sure he’d take a last dive right there and then. He couldn’t go on like this forever.

“Satellite data came back,” said Kulitak after a while. “The sulfur clouds are clearing up.” Chauncie glanced up and nodded. They couldn’t hide the trawler from satellite inspection right now. It was time to head back to port. As the ship got under way, Chauncie checked the sat phone.

Maksim had indeed called. Five times.

Kulitak saw his frown. “The Croat?”

Chauncie clipped the sat phone back to his waistband. “You said it was a slow day; we’re not making much. And with the spill, it’s going to be a zoo. We could use a break.”

His friend grimaced. “You don’t want to work with him. There’s money, but it’s not worth it. You come in the powerboat with me, the satellites can’t see our faces, we hit more CarbonJohnnies. I’ll bring sandwiches.”

There was no way Chauncie was going to motor his way around the Arctic in a glorified rowboat. They’d get run over. By a trawler, a tanker, or any other ship ripping its way through the wide-open lanes of the Arctic Ocean. There was just too much traffic.

“I’ll think about it,” Chauncie said as the sat phone vibrated yet again.

 

Late the next evening, Chauncie entered the bridge of a rusted-out container ship that listed slightly to port. Long shadows leaned across the docks and cranes of Tuktoyaktuk, their promise of night destined to be unfulfilled.

“Hey Max,” he said, and sat down hard on the armchair in the middle of the bridge. Chauncie rubbed his eyes. He hadn’t stopped to sleep yet. An easy error in the daylong sunlight. Insomnia snuck up on you, as your body kept thinking it was day. Run all-out for forty-eight hours and forget about your daily cycle, and you’d crash hard on day three. And the listing bridge made him feel even more off-balance and weary.

“Took you damn long enough. I should get someone else, just to spite you.” Maksim muttered his reply from behind a large, ostentatious, and extraordinarily expensive real wooden desk. He was almost hidden behind the nine screens perched on it.

Maksim was a slave to continuous partial attention: his eyes flicked from screen to screen, and he constantly tapped at the surface of the desk or flicked his hands at the screens. In response, people were being paid, currencies traded, stocks bought or sold.

And that was the legitimate trade. Chauncie didn’t know much about Maksim’s other hobbies, but he could guess from the occasional exposed tattoo that Maksim was Russian Mafia.

“Well, I’m here.”

Maksim glanced up. “Yes. Yes you are. Good. Chauncie, you know why I give you so much business?”

Chauncie sighed. He wasn’t sure he wanted to play this game. “No, why?”

Maksim sipped at a sweaty glass of iced tea with a large wedge of lemon stuck on the rim. “Because even though you’re here for dirty jobs, you like the ones that let you poke back at the big guys. It means I understand you. It makes you a predictable asset. So I have a good one for you. You ready for the big one, Chauncie, the payday that lets you leave to do whatever it is you really want, rather than sitting around with little popguns and Styrofoam targets?”

Chauncie felt a weird kick in his stomach. “What kind of big, Max?”

Maksim had a small smile as he put the iced tea down. “Big.” He slowly turned a screen around to face Chauncie. There were a lot of zeros in that sum. Chauncie’s lips suddenly felt dry, and he nervously licked them.

“That’s big.” He could retire. “What horrible thing will I have to do for that?”

“It begins with you playing bodyguard for a scientist.”

Uh-oh. As a rule, scientists and Russian Mafia didn’t mix well. “I’m really just guarding her, right?”

Maksim looked annoyed. “If I wanted her dead, I wouldn’t have called you.” He pointed out the grimy windows. A windblown, ruddy-cheeked woman wrapped in a large “Hands around the World” parka stood at the rail. She was reading something off the screen of her phone.

“That’s the scientist? Here?”

“Yes. That is River Balleny. Was big into genetic archeology. She made a big find a couple years ago and patented the DNA for some big agricorporation for exotic livestock. Now she mainly verifies viability, authenticity, and then couriers the samples to Svalbard for various government missions out here.”

“And she’s just looking for a good security type, in case some other company wants to hijack a sample of what she’s couriering? Which is why she came out to this rusted-out office of yours?”

Maksim grinned over his screens. “Right.”

Chauncie looked back at the walkway outside the bridge. River looked back, and then glanced away. She looked out of place, a moonfaced little girl who should be in a lab, sequencing bits and pieces sandwiched between slides. Certainly she shouldn’t be standing in the biting wind on the deck of thousands of tons of scrap metal. “So I steal what she’ll be couriering? Is that the big payday?”

“No.” Maksim looked back down and tapped the desk. Another puppet somewhere in the world danced to his string pulls. “She’ll be given some seeds we could care less about. What we care about is the fact that she can get you into the Svalbard seed vault.”

“And in there?”

Maksim reached under his desk and gently set a small briefcase on the table. “This is a portable sequencer. Millions of research and development spent so that a genetic archeologist in the field could immediately do out on the open plains what used to take a lab team weeks or months to do. Couple it with a fat storage system, and we can digitize nature’s bounty in a few seconds.”

Chauncie stared down at the case. “You can’t tell me those seeds haven’t already been sequenced. Aren’t they just there for insurance, in case civilization collapses totally?”

“There are unique seeds at Svalbard,” said Maksim, shaking his head. “One-of-a-kind from extinct tropical plants; paleo-seeds. Sequencing them destroys the seed, and lots of green groups ganged up about ten years ago in a big court case to stop the unique ones being touched. Bad karma if the sequencing isn’t perfect, you know; you’d lose the entire species. Sequencing is almost foolproof now, but the legislation is…hard to reverse.

“We want you to get into the seed vault and sequence as many of those rare and precious seeds as you can. They have security equipment all over the outside, but inside, it’s just storage area. No weapons, just move quick to gather the seeds and control the scientist while you gather the seeds. The more paleo-seeds the better. When you leave, with or without her, you get outside. You pull out the antenna, and you transmit everything. You leave Svalbard however you wish—charter a plane to be waiting for you, or the boat you get there with. We do not care. Once we have the information, we pay you. You leave the Arctic, find a warm place to settle down. Buy a nice house, and a nice woman. Enjoy this new life. Okay, we never see each other again. I’ll be sad, true, but maybe I’ll retire too, and neither of us cares. You understand?”

Chauncie did. This was exactly the score he’d been looking for.

He looked at the windblown geneticist and thought about what Maksim might not be telling him. Then he shook his head. “You know me, Max, this is too big. Way out of my comfort level. I’ll become internationally wanted. I’m not in that league.”

“No, no.” Maksim slapped the table. “You are big-league now, Chauncie. You’ll do this. I know you’ll do this.”

Chauncie laughed and leaned back in the chair. “Why?”

“Because if you don’t”—Maksim also leaned back—“if you don’t, you will never forgive yourself when military contractors occupy Svalbard in two weeks, taking over the seed vault and blackmailing the world with it.”

“You’ve got to be joking.” The idea that someone might trash Svalbard was ridiculous. Svalbard was the holiest of green holies, a bank for the world’s wealth of seeds, stored away in case of apocalypse. “That would be like bombing the Vatican.”

“These are Russian mercenaries, my friend. Russia is dying. They never were cutting edge with biotech, ever since Lysenkoism in the Soviet days. The plague strains that ripped through their wheat fields last year killed their stock, and Western companies have patented nearly everything that grows. Russian farms are hostage to Monsanto patents, so they have no choice but to raid the seed bank. They can either sequence the unique strains themselves, in hopes of making hybrids that won’t get them sued for patent infringement in the world market, or they may threaten to destroy those unique seeds unless some key patents are annulled. I don’t know which exactly—but either way, the rare plants are doomed. They’ll sequence the DNA, discard everything but the unique genes…or burn the seed to put pressure on West. Either way—no more plant.”

“Whereas if we do it…”

“We take whole DNA of plant. Let them buy it from us; in twenty years we give whole DNA back to Svalbard when it’s no longer worth anything. It’s win-win—for us and plant.”

“It’s the Russians behind the mercenaries? And no one knows about this.”

“No one. No one but us.” Maksim laughed. “You will be hero to many, but more importantly, rich.”

Chauncie sucked air through his teeth and mulled it all over. But he and Maksim already knew the answer.

“What about travel expenses?”

Maksim laughed. “You’re friends with those Indians—”

“First Nations peoples—”

“Whatever. Just get permission to use one of their trawlers. The company she’s couriering for is pretty good about security. They drop in by helicopter when you’re in transit to hand over the seeds. They’ll call with a location and time at the last minute, as long as you tell them what your course will be. A good faith payment is…” Maksim tapped a screen. “…now in your account. You can afford to hire them. Happy birthday.”

“It’s not my birthday.”

“Well, with this job, it is. And Chauncie?”

“Yes, Max?”

“You fuck it up, you won’t see another.”

Chauncie wanted to say something in return, but it was no use. He knew Maksim wasn’t kidding. Anyway, Maksim had already turned his attention back to his screens. Chauncie was already taken care of, in his mind.

For a moment, Chauncie considered turning Maksim down, still. Then he glanced out the windows, at a sea that would never be the right color—that would never cradle his body and ease the sorrow of his losses.

He hefted the briefcase and stepped outside to introduce himself to River Balleny.

 

The trawler beat through heavy seas, making for Svalbard. The sun rolled slowly around a sky drained of all but pastel colors, where towering clouds of dove gray and mauve hinted at a dusk that never came. You covered your porthole to make night for yourself, and stepped out of your stateroom seemingly into the same moment you had left. After years up here Chauncie could tell himself he was as used to the midnight sun as he was to heavy seas; but the new passenger, who was much on his mind, stayed in her cabin while the seas heaved.

After two days the swells subsided, and for a while the ocean became calm as glass. Chauncie woke to a distant crackle from the radio room, and as he buttoned his shirt Kulitak pounded on his door. “I heard, I heard.”

“It’s not just the helicopter,” Kulitak hissed. “The elders just contacted me over single sideband radio. We think Maksim’s dead.”

“Think?” Chauncie looked down the tight corridor between the trawler’s cabins. The floorboards creaked under their feet as the ship twisted itself over large waves.

“Several tons of sulfur particulates, arc welded into a solid lump, dropped from the stratosphere by a malfunctioning blimp. So they say. There’s nothing left of Maksim’s barge. It’s all pieces.”

“Pieces…” Chauncie instinctively looked up toward the deck, as if expecting something similar to destroy them on the spot.

“I told you, you don’t get involved with that man. You’re out here playing a game that will get you killed. Get out now.”

Chauncie braced himself in the tiny space as the trawler lurched. “It’s too late now. They don’t let you back out this late in the game.” He thought about the private army moving out there somewhere, getting ready to take over the vault. All at the behest of another nation assuming it could just snatch that which belonged to all.

They still had time.

“Come on, let’s get that package. She’ll fall overboard if we don’t help her out.”

They stepped on deck to find River Balleny already there. She was staring up at the dragonfly shape of an approaching helicopter, which was framed by rose-tinted puffballs in the pale, drawn sky. She said nothing, but turned to grin excitedly at the two men as the helicopter’s shuddering voice rose to a crescendo.

The wash from its blades scoured the deck. Kulitak, clothes flapping, stepped into the center of the deck and raised his hands. Dangling at the bottom of a hundred feet of nylon rope, a small plastic drum wrapped in fluorescent green duct tape swung dangerously past his head, twirled, and came back. On the third pass he grabbed it and somebody cut the rope in the helicopter. The snaking fall of the line nearly pulled the drum out of Kulitak’s hands; by the time he’d wrestled his package loose the helicopter was a receding dot. River walked out to help him, and after a moment’s hesitation, Chauncie followed.

“The fuck is this?” The empty drum at his feet, Kulitak was holding a small plastic bag up to the sunlight. River reached up to take it from him.

“It’s your past,” she said. “And our future.” She took the package inside without another glance at the men.

They found her sitting at the cleaver-hacked table in the galley, peering at the bag. “Those seem to mean a lot to you,” he said as he slid in opposite her.

Opening the bag carefully, River rolled a couple of tiny orange seeds onto the tabletop. “Paleo-seeds,” she mused. “It looks like mountain aven, but according to the manifest”—she tapped a sheet of paper that had been tightly wadded and stuffed into the bag—“it’s at least thirty thousand years old.”

Chauncie picked one up gingerly between his fingertips. “And that makes it different?”

She nodded. “Maybe not. But it’s best to err on the side of caution. Have you ever been to the seed vault?” He shook his head.

“When I was a girl I had a model of Noah’s ark in my bedroom,” she said. “You could pop the roof open and see little giraffes and lions and stuff. Later I thought that was the dumbest story in the Bible—but the seed vault at Svalbard really is the ark. Only for plants, not animals.”

“Where’d you grow up?”

“Valley, Nebraska,” she said. “Before the water table collapsed. You?”

“British Virgin Islands: Anegada.”

She sucked in a breath. “It’s gone. Oh, that must have been terrible for you.”

He shrugged. “It was a slow death. It took long enough for the sea to rise and sink the island that I was able to make my peace with it; but my wife…” How to compress those agonizing years into some statement that would make sense to this woman, yet not do an injustice to the complexity of it all? All he could think of to say was, “It killed her.” He looked down.

River surprised him by simply nodding, as if she really did understand. She put her hand out, palm up, and he laid the seed in it. “We all seem to end up here,” she mused, “when our lands go away. Nebraska’s a dust bowl now. Anegada’s under the waves. We come up here to make sure nobody else has to experience that.”

He nodded; if anybody asked him flat out, Chauncie would say that Anegada hadn’t mattered, that he’d come to the Arctic for the money. Somehow he didn’t think River would buy that line.

“Of course it’s a disaster,” she went on, “losing the Arctic ice cap, having the tundra melt and outgas all that methane and stuff. But every now and then there’s these little rays of hope, like when somebody finds ancient seeds that have been frozen since the last glaciation.” She sealed the baggie. “Part of our genetic heritage, maybe the basis for new crops or cancer drugs or who knows? A little lifeboat—once it’s safely at Svalbard.”

“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 voice 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 Svalberd 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 Svalberd. Just amazing to see all those ships.”

Chauncie’s mood died.

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.”

They ran back to the vault. Chauncie threw the list down just outside the door; then they started climbing the slope beside the blade. The oncoming blimps were on the other side; if there were men watching, it would look like Chauncie and River had gone back into the vault. He hoped they were too confident to be that attentive. After all, the vault was supposedly unguarded.

“Over there!” River dragged him away from the concrete blade, toward a flat shelf fronted by a low pile of black rocks. The slope rose above it at about thirty degrees, a loose tumble of dark gravel and fist-sized stone where a few hardy grasses clung.

“Okay, get down.” She hunkered down, and he wrapped her in a silvery survival blanket, then began clawing at the scree with his bare hands, heaping it up around her. The act was a kind of horrible parody of the many times he’d buried his sister in the sand back home.

Awkwardly, he made a second pile around himself, until he and River were two gravel cones partially shielded by rock. “You picked a good spot,” he commented; they had a great view of the parking lot and the ground just in front of the entrance. He’d wedged the briefcase under the shielding stones; his eyes kept returning to it as the mercenary force came into view over the flat roof of the vault.

The blare of the blimps’ turboprops shattered the valley’s serene silence. They swiveled into position just below the parking lot, lowered down, touched, and men in combat fatigues began pouring out. Chauncie and River ducked as they scanned the hillside with binoculars and heat-sensing equipment.

“I’m cold,” said River.

“Just wait. If this doesn’t work we’ll give up.”

After a few minutes Chauncie raised his head so he could peer between two stones. The mercenaries had pulled the security guards out of the vault and had them on their knees. Someone was talking to them. The rest of them seemed satisfied with their perimeter, and now a man in a greatcoat strode up the hillside. The coat flew out behind him in black wings as one of the soldiers ran up holding something small and white. “Jackpot!” muttered Chauncie. It was Maksim’s list.

“What’s happening?”

“Moment of truth.” He watched as the commander flipped through the list. Then he went to talk to the security guards, who looked terrified. The commander looked skeptical and kept shaking his head as they spoke. It wasn’t working!

Then there was a shout from the doorway. Two soldiers came down to the commander, one carrying Chauncie’s sequencer, the other a double handful of open foil packets.

Chauncie could see the commander’s mouth working: cursing, no doubt. He threw down the list and pulled a sat phone out of his coat.

“He thinks we got the data out,” said Chauncie. “There’s nothing left for them to steal.” The commander put away the sat phone and waved to his men. Shaking his head in disgust, he walked away from the vault. The bewildered soldiers followed, knotting up into little groups to mutter amongst themselves.

“I don’t believe it. It worked.”

“I can’t see anything!”

“They think Maksim’s got the data on the unique seeds. It’s pretty obvious that we destroyed those in processing them. So these guys have exactly nothing now, and they know it. If they stay here they’ll just get rounded up by the UN or the Norwegian navy.”

“So you’ve won?”

“We win.” The blimps were taking off. One of the guards was climbing into a car as the other ran back into the vault. Doubtless the airwaves were still jammed, and would be for an hour or so; the only way to alert the army camp at Svalbard would be to drive there.

“It’s still plunder, Chauncie.” Stones rattled as River shook them off. “Theft of something that belongs to all of us. Besides, there’s one big problem you hadn’t thought of.”

He frowned at her. “What?”

“It’s just that those guys are now Maksim’s best customers. And the deal they’ll be looking for is still the same: the unique gene sequences, not the whole plant DNA. Plausible deniability, remember? And Maksim would be a fool to keep the whole set after he’s sold the genes. It would be incriminating.”

He stood up, joints aching, to find his toes and ears were numb. Little rockfalls tumbled down the slope below him. “Listen,” River continued, “I don’t think you ever wanted to do this in the first place. The closer we got to Svalbard the unhappier you looked. You know it was wrong to steal this stuff to begin with. And look at the firepower they sent to get it! It was always a bad deal, and it’s a hot potato and you’d best be rid of it.”

“How?” He shook his head, scowling. “We’ve already scanned the damned things. Maksim…”

“Maksim will know the mercenaries got here while we were here. We just tell him they got here before us. That they got the material.”

“And this?” He hefted the Exabyte storage block.

“We give it to that last guard; hey, he’ll be a hero, he might as well get something for his trouble. So the DNA goes back into the vault—virtually, at least, after they back it up to a dozen or so off-site locations.”

He thought about it as they trudged down the hillside. Truth to tell, he had no idea what he’d do if he retired now anyway. Probably buy a boat and come back to plink CarbonJohnnies. He wanted the emerald sea; he wanted those waters back. But now they were battered with hurricanes, the islands themselves depopulated and poor now that tourism had left, and the beaches had been destroyed by rising tides and storms.

From behind him she said, “It’s an honorable solution, Chauncie, and you know it.” They reached the level of the parking lot and she stopped, holding out her hand. “Here. I’ll take it in. I’ve got my pepper spray if he tries to keep me there. And you know, now that the Russians have tried this they’ll put real security on this place. Keep it safe for everybody. The way it was meant to be.”

He thought about the money, about Maksim’s wrath; but he was tired, and damn it, when during this whole fiasco had he been free to make his own choice on anything? If not now…

He handed her the data block. “Just be quick. The whole Norwegian navy is going to descend on this place in about an hour.”

She laughed, and disappeared into the dark fortress with the treasure of millennia in her hand.

 

Night was falling at last. Chauncie stood on the trawler’s deck watching the last sliver of sun disappear. Vast purple wings of cloud rolled up and away, like brushes painting the sky in delicate hues of mauve, pale peach, silver. There were no primary colors in the Arctic, and he had to admit that after all this time, he’d fallen in love with that visual delicacy.

The stars began to come out, but he remained at the railing. The trawler’s lights slanted out, fans of yellow crossing the deck, the mist of radiance from portholes silhouetting the vessel’s shape. The air was fresh and smelled clean—scrubbed free of humanity.

He wondered if River Balleny was watching the fall’s first sunset from wherever she was. They had parted ways in Svalbard—not exactly on friendly terms, he’d thought, but not enemies either. He figured she was satisfied that he’d done the right thing, but disappointed that he’d gotten them into the situation in the first place. Fair enough; but he wished he’d had a chance to make it up to her in some way. He’d probably never see her again.

Kulitak’s voice cut through his reverie. “Sat phone for you!” Chauncie shot one last look at the fading colors, then went inside.

“St. Christie here.”

“Chauncie, my old friend.” It was Maksim. Well, he’d been expecting this call.

“I can’t believe you sent us into that meat grinder,” Chauncie began. He’d rehearsed his version of events and decided to act the injured party, having barely escaped with his life when the mercenaries came down on the vault just as he was arriving. “I’m lucky to be here to talk to you at—”

“Oh, such sour grapes from a conquering hero!” That was odd. Maksim actually sounded pleased.

“Conquering? They—”

“Have conceded defeat. You uploaded the finest material, Chauncie; our pet scientists are in ecstasy. So, as I’m a man of my word, I’ve wired the rest of your payment to the new account number you requested.”

“New acc—” Chauncie stopped himself just in time. “Ah. Uh, well thank you, Maksim. It was good, uh, doing—”

“Business, yes! You see how business turns out well in the end, my friend? If you have a little faith and a little courage? Certainly I had faith in you, and justly so! I’d like to say we must do it again someday, but I know you’ll vanish back to your beloved Caribbean now to lounge in the sunlight—and I’d even join you if I didn’t love my work so much.” Maksim prattled happily on for a minute or two, then rang off to deal with some of his other hundreds of distractions. Chauncie laid down the sat phone and collapsed heavily onto the bench beside the galley table.

“Something wrong?” Kulitak was staring at him in concern.

“Nothing, nothing.” Kulitak shot him a skeptical look and Chauncie said, “Go on. Go find us some CarbonJohnnies to bomb or something. I need a moment.”

After Kulitak had left, Chauncie went to his cabin and woke up his laptop. An email waited from one of the online payment services he’d tied to his Polar Consulting Services Web site.

Twenty-five thousand dollars had just been transferred to him, according to the email, from an email address he didn’t recognize—a tiny fraction of the number Maksim had promised him. Chauncie had no doubt that it was a tiny fraction of the amount Maksim had actually paid out.

His inbox pinged. A strange sense of fated certainty settled on Chauncie as he opened the mail program and saw a videogram waiting. He clicked on it.

River Balleny’s windburnt face appeared on the screen. Behind her was bright sunlight, a sky not touched in pastels. She was wearing a T-shirt, and appeared relaxed and happy.

“Hi, Chauncie,” she said. “I swore to myself I wouldn’t contact you—in case they got to you somehow—but it just seemed wrong to leave you in the lurch. I had to do something. So…well, check your email. A little gift from me to you.

“You know…I really wasn’t lying when I told you I think the seed data belongs to all of mankind. I walked back into the vault seriously intending to leave it there. But then I realized that it wouldn’t solve anything. We’d still have all our eggs in one basket, so to speak. As long as the seed data was in one place, stored in only one medium—whether it was as seeds or bits on a data chip—it would be scarce. And anything that’s scarce can be bought, and sold, and hoarded, and killed for.

“The guard wasn’t around; he’d run down to the vault. So I just put the data core in an inner pocket and hung around for a minute. After we parted, I uploaded the data to Maksim; it wasn’t hard to get an ftp address from the guy who’d introduced me to him in the first place. And, yeah, I gave Maksim my own bank account number.” She chuckled. “Sorry—but I was never the naïve farmgirl you and Kulitak seemed to think I was.”

Chauncie swore under his breath—but he couldn’t help smiling too.

“As long as the genetic code of those seeds was kept in one place, it remained scarce,” she said again. “That gave it value but also made it vulnerable. Now Maksim has it; but so do I. I made copies. I backed it up. And someday—when Maksim and the Russians have gotten what they want out of it and it’s ceasing to be scarce anyway—someday I’ll upload it all onto the net. For everyone to use.

“We all have to make hard choices these days, Chauncie—about what can be saved, and what we have to leave behind. Svalbard will always be there, but its rarest treasure is out now, and with luck, it won’t be rare for long. So everybody wins this time.

“As to me personally, I’m retiring—and no, I’m not going to tell you where. And I’ve left you enough for a really good vacation. Enjoy it on me. Maybe we’ll meet again someday.”

She smiled, and there was that naïve farmgirl look, for just a second. “Good-bye, Chauncie. I hope you don’t think less of me for taking the money.”

The clip ended. Chauncie sat back, shaking his head and grinning. He walked out onto the deck of the trawler and looked out over the sea. The sun had just slightly dipped below the horizon, bringing a sort of short twilight. It would reemerge soon, bringing back the perpetual glare of the long days.

Stars twinkled far overhead.

No, not stars, Chauncie realized. There were far too many to be stars, and the density of them increased. Far overhead a heavy blimp was dumping tiny bits of chaff glued to little balloons. Judging by the haze, they’d dumped the cloud into a vast patch of sulfur particulates. Both parties would be in court soon to fight over who would get the credit for blocking the sun’s rays as it climbed back over the horizon.

The sulfur haze had caused the remaining sun’s rays to flare in a full hue of purples and shimmering reds, and the chaff glittered and sparkled overhead.

It was so beautiful.