I crawled through the crunching snow on my belly, each handhold careful, each movement furtive. I might as well have stood up and played an entire one-woman brass band: the calving was in full swing mere meters away and the roars and grumbles of the herd covered a multitude of sins, from my errant feet and odd curse to the thud-and-clunk of the rustlers setting up their gear not a stone’s-throw from me. A stone thrown prone, from the ground.
Really I was more than near enough. Might as well just let them finish doing my job for me. The mechanism clicked, their sapper stood and ducked, the ice shook, and all other noises were erased by the calving of a fresh bergie bit, peeled from the flank of my glacier like smoked meat from a rib rack. A neat job, very tidy, very clear. Maybe they’d been a professional before.
In the ringing silence that followed, I stood clear up and pointed – one hand at my badge, one hand with my reelgun – and coughed politely.
“Antipolar Berg Marshall Everard. You’re under arrest.”
And that was the simple part done.
***
The second-simplest part happened when one of them tried to run. The sapper and the skipper – laden down with their gear and apparatuses – didn’t try it, but the climber made a dash for the freshly-calved cliff face. I put the reelshot through their parka and let them dangle from the glacier while I disarmed the other two rustlers. A large-bore for the big seals and some iceblades used as much as pitons as for weaponry; either these were real professionals or real amateurs to wander around so lightly armed. The attempted escape suggested the latter, the careful timing of the bergrustle (just as the main herd was being calved and tagged on the other side of the bay) suggested the former. Maybe they were just stupid and lucky.
“Now what?” asked the sapper. He was a younger one by his voice, all awkward and hesitant and half the age of his tools. They were in good shape, mind – he knew his trade at least.
“You brought these idiots into this without letting them know the consequences?” I asked the skipper.
She didn’t even look at me, eyes on the waves and the skies and the ice. I wasn’t her job.
“We’re going to float this stolen ice of yours across the bay, to the rest of the harvest-ground,” I told the sapper. “And then you folks are going to the jail, and then to a jury of your berg-harvesting peers, and then when you’re found guilty of bergrustling – which you will be, thanks to this armful of evidence – you will be sentenced. And the sentence is being granted this berg you’ve chiseled and set adrift on it. Without a steering apparatus. Or weapons. Or food.”
The sapper’s face fell a little bit farther with every word I spoke.
“Now you two get over to your pal’s tether and hoist him up here. I don’t want him to slip free of my line and land in the water before he faces justice.”
The skipper did as she was told. The sapper stood around like a tool until I jiggled my reelgun at him meaningfully. The climber wasn’t in much shape to do anything but shiver once she was pulled up, clothes wet from the wave-slapped face of the berg. Her face was a mass of icescarring and when she rearranged her scarf I saw the tip of her nose had been lost to a frost snap.
“So,” I asked as the skipper set up the bergdrive, “what brings a couple of old hands like you to this idiot pastime?”
The skipper didn’t flinch. The sapper was one big flinch already. But the climber glared at me, and ah, that was a crack. Half this job is about spotting the cracks. “You’re not novices; this setup was pretty cleanly executed, from summit to even the calving, really. You’re not overloaded on weaponry, so you planned to avoid a fight and knew you wouldn’t steer this thing into a big seal or a teeth whale. But your actual criminal bona fides? Absolute shit. I spotted your sadass excuse for a camouflage sheet across the damned bay without binoculars, and that’s AFTER I saw you setting it up in your boat, which you hid very nicely until you actually docked it. I’m sure it was very well hidden from the ground, but from the glacierside? Where the people you’re hiding from are standing? Not very good. I had to win a game of rock-paper-scissors to be the one to arrest you all, you know that? A tournament game.”
“It’s not their-” began the sapper.
“Shut up,” said the climber through her teeth.
“But it was my –”
“Yes, and them learning it won’t help, so shut up. Don’t give the Marshalls more than they already have. Ever.”
The bergie bit started rolling, not with the usual mule-kick force but a quiet slide into motion. A proper skipper then, with some professional pride. “Yeah,” I added. “Don’t give me more details, kid. Like what you must have paid these two idiots with to get them to sign onto your little project. What was left for profit after you bribed them into this? Five bits and a chunk? I’d hope they wouldn’t settle for less, not for boosting a nice fat bergie from under the nose of the official Antipolar calving grounds, in the prime of the season.”
“It’s not about the money,” insisted the sapper.
“Shut UP, damnit!”
“No, no! Maybe if she hears she’ll come around to-”
“Marshalls don’t care about anything but the bottom line, that’s how they are-”
“No, no, no,” I waved a hand, “we care about a good joke too. This sounds funny. You shut up yourself; I want to hear what the kid has to say. Going to be a long trip too, the way captain cautious here is steering us. Put some pepper in that old flank-steak of an engine, skipper!”
“Aye,” said the skipper – the first words or any sound at all I’d had out of her, and sounding torn and ragged. Maybe a knife to the throat had been part of her career, but it gave me pause before the sapper honest-to-god cleared his throat.
“So,” he began, “we actually weren’t going to sell this berg.”
“What, were you planning on donating it?”
“Well, kind of, we were going to give it out as directed by our organization, yes, that’s right. Right. Right – could you stop laughing? I’m trying to tell you something you asked about.”
“Sorry, sorry,” I snorted. “It’s just…giving away. Giving away antipolar ice. You got any idea how much this is worth?”
“Less than a nice green golf course and an overwatered crop of emerald onions and a rack of grain-fed large beef ribs? This one bergie will meet essential water needs for half a city, and once we show them that, they’ll realize what they’re being robbed of, every time they see those icebergs towed into the harbour.”
“Ah,” I said. And snorted. “Environmentalists. Really. You’re an environmentalist? And you talked two lifelong berg-tenders into your idiot crusade? Did you use up all your persuasion on them or was someone else doing the talking to get them onboard?”
“I barely had t-”
“SHUT UP!”
“Well anyways, that isn’t the point. The point. The point is… the point is that there’s not going to be any ice left. Just a littlebit is left now, but soon? Nothing.”
I shrugged. “Plenty for now.”
“There was plenty of groundwater back in The Stuuk too, but that was fifty years ago and we ran dry just before I was born. How long before this runs dry too? What’s next?”
“Desalinzation. And if my job’s still around by then – patrolling salt pans and running intruders off the water rigs sounds like a thing – I bet yours will be too, so quit worrying.”
“And the expense of that? The water shortages? The toll in mining, land repurposing, the destruction of coastal fisheries to feed more water in?”
“Oh please. It won’t all be bad, just some of it. The water’ll get to those who need it.”
“Like this bergie will, right?”
“Right.”
“Do you really believe a single bit of water from this ice will go anywhere near a person in actual need?”
“As long as they have the money, sure.”
“And if they don’t? What’s left – left for them then?”
“Hey, there’s always room for more coworkers.”
“Right. If they pass the background checks.”
“Tough luck, some of us didn’t shoplift in high school.”
“Some of us had no choice if we wanted lunch! You can’t afford to plan that far ahead if-”
“For the love of all things that live and breathe SHUT UP,” the climber yelled in the sapper’s face, over the roar of the engine. “SHUT YOUR BOUGIE LITTLE ASS UP OR I”LL BITE IT OFF AND PUT MY LEG THROUGH IT SIDEWAYS! She’s PLAYING with you, you self-important little turd!”
“Not… not right. Not right! I was just trying to-”
The climber punched him, which was underselling that haymaker. A big, slow, stupid roundhouse blow, the clumsiest explosion of rage I’d ever seen launch itself out of someone’s shoulder and into someone else’s stomach. But it slammed into the boy’s brisket with a clang and sent him skittering across the ice towards the rear of the bergie, and damnit, damnit, damnit, there’s no bounty for bringing back a corpse for trial, not since that one pontiff had his predecessor dug up and shoved into the stand, so I grabbed him with one hand and levelled my reelgun at the climber with the other and with my mouth I said “no fighting. Any head gets busted here, it’s my doing.”
The climber said something, but I couldn’t hear it over the screaming engine.
“Speak up!”
“GET DOWN,” yelled the sapper in my ear, and instead of doing that I looked up, up, up at the Garhorss Glacier, the calving grounds for the finest high-quality antipolar ice, which we were heading towards at such a pell-mell pace that there was an honest to god bow wave athwart our bows.
Dead ahead was a small chasm, the kind I’d seen a lot of in my training. The kind that went way farther than you knew, and that if you disturbed, tended to shatter. And I was so busy staring that that would’ve been that and then some if the skipper hadn’t thrown out her elbow as she slid past me and knocked me flat out on my ass by way of my chin, making something in my jaw pop and crack and my mouth yowl and the first bits of frozen shrapnel whiz over my head instead of through it. That woman’s bones were solid diamond, I swear, and she grabbed me one-handed and dragged me down into the lea of the bergie and threw me into the back of the boat (climber and sapper already present, my long-absent tactical awareness helpfully reported). The boat was a pile of garbage but she sang into action like a racehorse and as we sped away I could just make out – through the spray and the crash and the tears – the storage warehouse for the entire stock of calving tools for the Garhorss Glacier sailing away into the ocean like a fleck of sea-spray in a whitecap. A tiny crumb beside it could have been the headquarters of the Antipolar Berg Marshalls, or maybe not. I blinked before I was sure, and they weren’t there anymore.
“Nice aim,” said the sapper two noisy, frightening miles later.
“Good directions,” said the skipper from the depths of her throat.
“Too many directions,” said the climber snidely from safely belowdeck, rattling amongst tins and cans. “All those rights and lefts and god damnit just say go one way and then change your mind once it needs changing.”
“We needed a very hard right.”
“Mass murderers,” I attempted to say, instead saying ‘maaa mardaurrur’ and hurting my mouth very badly.
The sapper dug around inside his parka and pulled loose a plastic buoyancy-liner with a perfect knuckle-imprint in it, wincing as he inspected it. “No, no. I was watching over your shoulder, and they saw us coming well before you caught on. Most of them should have gotten out, and forgive me if few will mourn the passing of anyone with business inside the Antipolar Justice Tribunal. A lot of orphans and widows and widowers will sleep soft tonight.”
“uck uuu.”
“If you’d looked anywhere but at us when I started that fight you’d have had plenty of time to stop us,” said the climber peevishly, “so don’t go pointing the finger of blame at anyone else on the boat. Maybe you know how to look for cracks, but you’re not the only one. Speaking of looking…skipper? Rightwards if you please. I think I see a bergie bit. Not the BEST, of course, but we put that one to good use and I believe that this is an acceptable second place.”