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won’t be able to stay in the air for more than a few minutes. So we need to go after it. We need to reach it as soon as we can after it goes down—but with three wounded soldiers, two prisoners, and an oil-drilling platform that still needs to be inspected, it’s going to be some time before we can leave.
    “Fadul, I know you’re hurting, but I need you to help Escamilla get Julian to the platform.”
    “Shelley,” she points out, “we don’t control the platform.”
    “We will by the time you get there.”
    •  •  •  •
    Prisoners are a burden and now we’ve got two.
    Logan has got them stripped of their gear. Tossed alongside their neatly folded exoskeletons is a collection of pistols, knives, Tasers, communications gear, and night vision goggles. They’re kneeling on the ice, still wearing their white parkas. Their thermal hoods, like ours, hide their faces. One’s a big man, his skin black behind the frost collected on his lips and eyelashes. The other has a slight build; the skin around his eyes is pale.
    I turn the anonymous dark shield of my visor on them and ask, “Who’s left aboard Sigil ?”
    “Just the civilians,” the big guy says. He’s so cold, his teeth are actually chattering. “We were hired to protect the civilians. But Glover ran out on us! Took Morris and Chan with him. Left us here to die.”
    Working off of voice and biometrics, the battle AI tags him with an identity: Darian Wilcox, 26, former US Army.
    “What were the civilians up to, Wilcox?”
    He cocks his head, eyeing me for a few seconds, like he thinks I should already know this. “Lab work, sir. That’s all I know. Important enough to bring us in. Important enough for someone to hire you.”
    “How many civilians?”
    “Twelve.”
    The number confirms our background intelligence.
    Wilcox adds, “None of them are going to put up a fight, sir. You can take what you need. No need to hurt anyone.”
    “Nice and friendly?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Wilcox, did your friends booby trap the place for us?”
    His answer is an emphatic “ Fuck, no! We’re a business. We’re not suicide fanatics.”
    “Dumping you was a business decision?”
    He glares up at me, his breath steaming. He’s reading a lot into my words. “You don’t need to kill us, sir. We don’t know who you are. We haven’t seen your faces.”
    “I’ll keep that in mind. But right now I don’t know what Glover left for us, so I’m going to let you go in first—just in case.”
    •  •  •  •
    No one with any knowledge has argued there isn’t an ocean of oil at the bottom of the Arctic Sea, or that it can’t be extracted, but there has been a decades-long debate on whether it makes sense to try. The petroleum industry hasa bigger R&D budget than the gross national product of most countries, but even for them, the cost of infrastructure for offshore oil production is staggering. A failed well could bankrupt a company—but the risk isn’t limited to capital investment. It’s certain that along the way, there will be wellhead blowouts along with oil tanker wrecks, and of course there will be more carbon poured into the atmosphere to accelerate the chaos of heat and storm and polar melt that’s been fucking over the globe in worse ways every year.
    And still, there’s a shitload of money on the table. The developmental phase alone provides an opportunity for subcontracting companies to bleed their senior partners for billions in support, supplies, communication, and construction. It’s hard for any government to say no to that.
    •  •  •  •
    Only five hundred meters of smooth ice separate us from the platform. I want to cross that distance quickly, but our prisoners are clumsy without their dead sisters. They slip on the ice and they slow us down. But our slow pace lets Fadul and Escamilla keep up as they drag Julian across the ice, wrapped up in an inflated emergency cocoon.
    As we advance, I keep a close watch