Chapter 0: Soldier of Fortune
Earth Year: 2035
Martian Year: 1
Aiden O’Connor thought it looked like a portal to another world, and in a way he was right. The entrance — like a tall, thin pyramid tipped on its side — protruded conspicuously from the snow-covered slope. Green lights decorating its face matched those fluttering in the sky and stood out against the polar night. Though the middle of the afternoon, it had been dark for weeks.
But although merely the absence of visible light, sometimes there were legitimate reasons to be afraid of the dark.
One hundred meters past the door, carved deep into the sandstone mountain, was humanity’s ultimate insurance plan. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault and adjacent Arctic World Archive held millions of seed samples and trillions of bytes of data. The doomsday vault’s location in this remote arctic archipelago was designed to protect it from rising temperatures and sea levels, and its contents could allegedly survive for thousands of years without electricity. But few had envisioned the need to protect it from an outright and sophisticated assault. Who would do such a thing?
The Gaian Renaissance, that’s who, thought Aiden with a smirk behind his black tactical mask. He didn’t love the name and had advocated to instead call it the Human Annihilation Front but was told it was bad marketing. Nonoptimal for fundraising. Whatever, he was the muscle behind the operation, not the brains. Aiden was a soldier, and soldiers did their job without complaining.
The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement and anti-natalists were too meek, the anarcho-nihilists too disorganized. Coordinated, aggressive action was needed to ensure that when catastrophe inevitably struck Homo sapiens, the ecocidal species could not reboot itself and again attain the means to destroy Mother Earth and her children. He regretted the loss of the seeds, but in one form or another, nature would survive. Just as the species was more robust than the individual, life itself was hardier than any one species, especially humans.
And Aiden was no speciesist.
“We’re in position,” he radioed to mission control, triple-checking his weapons were ready. Their firepower was probably overkill; the guards’ primary concern was the polar bears — the largest living land carnivores — prowling these islands year-round, desperate for food. But there was a chance someone inside the vault would manage to send for help before they were forever silenced. This was not supposed to be a suicide mission. Not yet, anyway. He knew he’d have to fall on his sword eventually. Such were the perils of fighting for such a cause instead of money. So many strategies rely on the assumption your adversary wants to live. What an advantage to not be bound by such a constraint.
“Copy that. Standby,” came the voice in his ear. He waited for their other teams to be in position at the world’s other primary seed and data vaults — the ones for which Svalbard was a backup. Taking them out simultaneously before additional security measures could be put in place was paramount. The Gaian Renaissance may have been the fringe of the fringe, but it was astounding what a hundred well-motivated and well-funded people could do. Change the damn world.
Worlds, maybe.
Aiden inhaled and exhaled deeply, calming himself amidst his amphetamine high. He watched his breath materialize in front of him, something he hadn’t seen in years. The dull pain of the cold felt good, and he smiled as he remembered skiing with his dad as a kid before his local resort went bankrupt, before things changed so perceptibly. Boy, would pops be proud if he saw him now. Aiden wondered how much longer winter sports would remain a viable enterprise, even here, deep in the Arctic Circle and the farthest north you can fly commercial. ‘Permafrost’ was a premature term.
A single word came over the radio: “Go.”
Four of Aiden’s team split off towards the structure where a handful of poor souls lived while he, the new guy, and two others approached the vault entrance. He barely heard silenced gunshots behind him over their boots crunching on the packed snow.
With the electronic defenses disabled they only needed to worry about the physical ones. It took less than a minute to cut through the thick door. Its green lights and the red laser almost resembled a Christmas display. Fitting given the season. Then they were in and running down the tunnel. Their footsteps were heavy and loud, but time was of the essence now.
Two people in puffy coats came around a corner in front of them, but before they could understand what the commotion was about their red blood and stained down feathers were sprayed onto the blank canvas of the frost-covered walls, like an abstract painting. Aiden briefly took note and tossed a few charges into the control room and refrigeration units as he kept up his pace.
At the end of the hall the two teams split up. The normally airlocked security doors were open, giving them easy access to the vaults. The rooms were filled with tall shelves stacked with boxes of seeds from the far corners of the world, many the last of their kind. Aiden let himself marvel for a moment before he began laying charges. Then he heard the bang of an unsilenced gunshot ring out and cursed. He readied his assault rifle and moved to where his partner had been, this time stealthily.
He stalked around a corner and saw a figure duck behind a stack of crates, presumably armed. He didn’t have time for this shit. Fortunately he was prepared, and uninhibited by a concern for damaging the facility.
Ha! That was just why he was here.
The grenade exploded, sending an indecipherable mix of the crates’ contents and human body parts down the corridor. Moments later Aiden was at his partner’s side. He’d been shot near the armpit through a gap in his vest but it missed his heart. Damn, that must hurt in the cold — glad it’s not me. All that physical training rendered useless by a bullet on the first mission for his new team. The young man could survive with prompt medical attention but couldn’t walk, it was over one hundred meters to the exit, and the grenade had blown whatever element of surprise remained. No way — this wasn’t the marines. Those days were long behind him, and they planned to leave every man behind eventually. Oh well, you can only do so much. The two locked eyes, and although Aiden thought he saw fear, there was no wavering. A true believer, just like him.
Then they curtly nodded, exchanged a firm grip, and Aiden put two in his head. One fewer human.
He grabbed the dead man’s remaining explosives and finished placing them around the seed vaults. He met the other team returning from the tunnel to the data archive and perfunctorily shook his head once to signal he was now alone. Soon he was back outside, but no longer felt the cold. In the distance he saw the black outlines of the silently approaching getaway drones against the twinkling yellow stars, shimmering green curtains, and full moon. At this latitude and time of year it never set, circling the sky day by day.
Aiden was a kilometer in the air when the charges detonated. The irreparable loss of a library greater than Timbuktu, Alexandria, or Congress was surprisingly anticlimactic from the outside. He chalked it up to some combination of imagination and the performance-enhancing drugs coursing through his veins, but he could swear that when the mountainside gently shuddered, it flashed blue.
This is an excerpt from Mind Painter. You can now get the full book on Amazon here.
