Fog (34 page)

Katvar pokes me in the ribs with his elbow — an oddly trusting gesture. He nods at me, signalling that he believes all will be okay.
 

The man is pretty naive.

When only Kioshi, Sari, Katvar, Birket, and I are left in the hut, the chief says one word to me. ‘How?’

‘I will manipulate satellites,’ I answer.

‘You can do that?’

I shrug. ‘Yeah. Erik taught me well.’ Which might not be quite correct. Erik taught me a ton about satellite control but I never trusted him enough to believe he would allow me to develop the skills to cause much damage to his empire. But he doesn’t know his second-in-command gave me the power to do so.

‘Where?’

‘Svalbard.’

‘Where’s that?’ Kioshi asks.

‘Arctic.’

Birket huffs and rubs his forehead. ‘That
is
far.’

‘More than five thousand kilometres from here,’ I add.

‘Did you plan to steal our dogs and a sled?’ Kioshi asks, quite amused. ‘Yes? The dogs would have starved to death and you would have died. I doubt you would have gotten farther than one thousand kilometres. That’s not even a fifth of the journey.’

Heat rises to my cheeks. I had indeed considered stealing a dog team and a sled. ‘I spent a lot of time watching Earth from above. Most of my plan is based on memory. I don’t have maps…’

Sari stands, tells us to wait, and leaves. A moment later, she returns with a handful of maps and unfolds them on the ground. They are a bit tattered, with holes where the folds are, and the outlines of the continents a bit faded. Birket lights an oil lamp and moves it close, revealing names of cities, rivers, and mountains.

With my index finger I draw a path over the wrinkled paper. ‘I’ll go straight up north, leaving the blown nuclear power plants of Khmelnitski, Rovno, and Chernobyl far to my right. At the border between Lithuania and Belarus, I’ll move northeast until I reach Novgorod. Might get a bit hairy there and I’ll have to make sure my navigation is accurate, because I need to squeeze right between the Kalinin and the Leningrad nukes. Each had five active reactors when they went into meltdown. They are three hundred kilometres apart and I’ll have to walk right through the intersecting safety zones. There are more areas that are radioactively contaminated, mostly from the wars, but I won’t get close to any of them.
 

‘After that, it’s easy. I’ll either travel through the tundra or along the coast until I reach the Pechora Sea, then I’ll cross to Yuzhny Island, get to its northern tip and cross the sea ice to Spitsbergen. That’s a total of five thousand kilometres and then some. The crossing between Yuzhny and Spitsbergen is a thousand kilometres. The frozen sea is the main problem. It has been ice-free for decades with only a few exceptions when the winters were extremely cold. Under normal conditions I could have paid a fisherman to get me across, but now…it will be hard. This winter is exceptionally harsh — the ice will be a metre or two thick and it probably won’t melt until April or May. I have three months to get there. If the sea ice doesn’t buckle like crazy, it’ll be a smooth journey across. I’ll do my thing and then come back and return your sled and your dogs.’

Katvar squints at the map. Birket seems amused.
 

After they mull over my plan, Katvar taps his finger at the lowlands between our location at the northern edge of the Carpathian Mountains and trails it all the way to Lake Onega north of Leningrad. ‘Dangerous,’ he signs.

‘Yes. One-thousand seven hundred kilometres of fuck. No people, lots of wild dogs, wolves, and bears. Within a radius of two hundred kilometres of the nukes, all game is radioactively contaminated. But I’m good. I survived the BSA. No problem.’

I hope I sound convincing enough that they’ll let me leave with a sled, dogs, and provisions.

‘Have you seen anyone — settlements, hunting parties —from…above?’ Katvar’s hand freezes in midair. The concept of satellites zipping around Earth and taking images is something he can’t seem to wrap his head around. I used to have problems with that high-tech stuff too. Now they are nothing but a dangerous nuisance.

‘I’ve seen several hunting parties in the tundra. There’s a city at the Dvina River, about a hundred kilometres from the White Sea. In case I break the sled, or need anything, I’m sure I can barter there.’

He cocks his head and signs something I don’t understand. Sari translates for me, ‘What exactly will you do in Svalbard?’

‘Destroy the BSA’s most important communication hub.’

He swallows, lowers his head, and signs, ‘I’ll help you.’

‘I am the Chief. I have the last word in this.’

Katvar’s fingers go back up in the air, flying and spitting out words in Birket’s direction. Sari turns them into sentences for me. ‘We need two sleds with twelve dogs each. Eight to ten can pull. The others are reserves. We need snow shoes, snow goggles, a tent, furs — lots of them. We need items we can trade — pots, pans, knives, longbows. It will take two to three months to cover five thousand kilometres. Does the ice reach all the way from Svalbard to the mainland?’

‘The sea ice has been solid for more than six weeks now. I’ve seen it.’ I wave up at the starry sky. ‘I will go alone.’

‘No. Too dangerous,’ Katvar signs.

‘Sorry to break the news, but you are not a warrior. I’ll be walking straight into what the BSA considers of highest value. If I take you with me, I might as well put a bullet in your head right now. Same difference.’ I cross my arms over my chest.

He smirks, crosses his arms over his chest, too, but has to uncross them to retort with both hands and an angry face, ‘Go ahead and walk. You might reach the coast in six months, maybe seven. Then you can swim the remaining one thousand kilometres. Fine with me.’

‘Katvar, my friend, you are getting ahead of yourself,’ Birket says and places a hand on his shoulder. ‘As are you, Mickaela. Tonight, we’ll move you to a hunting shed a three days’ walk from here. You can reach it by morning on sled. Sari, go and get her things. Kioshi, you make sure she has provisions for three days. Katvar, pack your stuff, get a sled and a dog team ready. You will take her there. Teach her how to handle dogs. We’ll pretend Micka took Katvar against his will, stole a sled and the dogs. After all, you stole an aircraft from the BSA, so this should be believable even to Javier.’

‘How do you know I stole an aircraft?’

‘You told Katvar you fell from the sky. The fabric you used to bandage your ankle looked like it came from a parachute. We might seem a primitive people and we are often underestimated because of it.’ He grins and bends down to whisper in my ear, ‘I jumped from a helicopter once.’

The man is positively beaming, as if falling from great heights is the best thing one could possibly do.

‘Time to leave,’ he says, and punctuates his statement with a rap of staff to floor.

Only moments later, I’m strapped to a sled, with Katvar behind me and eleven dogs in front of me. He’s a wizard with these animals. They are bursting with energy and joy, they seem to love to run, and yet, they know to keep quiet. Ten seconds and we are out of the village, sixty seconds and we are in the woods. Katvar is racing them and I can hear from his huffs that he loves this, too.

What a turn of events. Before I know it, I’m already on my way to shove humanity back into the Iron Age.

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EXTRAS

(Click on the links to learn more)

Future wars and civil violence will often arise from scarcities of resources such as water, forests, fish…

Thomas Homer-Dixon, 1991,
On the Threshold: Environmental Changes as Causes of Acute Conflict

Rising global temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, climbing sea levels and more extreme weather events will intensify the challenges of global instability, hunger, poverty and conflict.
 

US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, 2014.

Human security will be progressively threatened as the climate changes (robust evidence, high agreement).

IPCC, Climate Change 2014:
Impacts, Adaptations, and Vulnerability

There is no doubt that impoverishment and human insecurity may arise as a result of climate change, if preventive measures are not undertaken. However, there is missing evidence that global warming directly increases conflict. (…) The causes of conflict are primarily political and economic, not climatic. Warlords — who foster conflict — may exploit draught, flooding, starvation, agricultural or natural disasters in their strategies, like they did in Somalia and Darfur. But what will drive their fight is not the rain, the temperature, or the sea level — they will always fight for the same goals of power, territory, money, revenge, etc.

Dr. Vesselin Popovski,
United Nations University

Acknowledgements

Magnus & Sabrina, for their invaluable help in making this story better. Rita, for her most hilarious AAAAAAHHHHs and NOOOOOOOOOs and the DON’T YOU DARE KILL MY MAN (I can’t give you a reply to this last one yet, though). Don Sander, for pointing out typos and logical nits; and Michael Bunker and Matthew H., for providing home-brewed profanity.

And, finally, Janis McDermott and Thomas Welch, for proof reading.

If there’s anything wrong with this book — it’s all my fault. I might have been drunk writing and editing it. Except the profanity, that’s all Michael’s and Matthew’s fault.