The deal: One story, written by me, about Canada and the Arctic and pirates. Published here in installments of a length and frequency yet to be determined. (If history is any guide, short and seldom.) Licensed under nothing at all. It would make me unhappy to see someone else say they were responsible for something I was responsible for, assuming it was any good. But that is fantastically unlikely. In return for this embarrassment of literary riches, I ask only for your pity. This is first draft stuff, typed directly into this here Blogger window. No quality control! No editing! Pure enjoyment! UNSTOPPABLE FURY AND RAGE PLEASURE ATTACK #1!!

Untitled Canadian Sovereignty/Pirate Project, part 1

The sun was at its lowest, drifting over the western horizon like a boxer refusing to go down, when Natar parachuted into the hills overlooking the Russian camp. The plane had barely left the tarmac at Sachs Harbour before he was out and in the air, drifting across the rugged terrain, the backpack-mounted engine making a quiet whirring that he could only feel through his skin over the roar of the wind pushing against the taut canvas. His wraparound specs had polarized, and he blinked out the code to opaque them completely, then called up a satellite overlay.

Banks Island stretched out beneath him, dark topographical lines on a light green background, bunched up in all directions, spreading out now as he passed over a low narrow lake. In the distance the Russian camp was flagged, blinking. Natar raised his head slightly and the map pulled back, showing him the camp resting on the northern coast of the island. He focused on it and the map zoomed in, another set of eyeblinks and the display switched to photos grabbed on a sat flyover four hours ago. On the beach sat a fat white cylinder, probably a roll-out inflatable pier. Their main structure was set back into a valley, about a hundred meters away. Short and squat, painfully rectangular against the meandering hillsides on either side of it. Amateurs.

This late in the summer the ice fell back to the pole like a disgraced army, leaving free and open water in its wake. It was the mother of all ammaniq, an opening in the sea-ice. This one laid bare the whole of Northern Canada like a too-short skirt. After fifty years of being the prefered flight path for warhead-heavy bombers and a haven for beleagured Soviet subs looking to outdistance their more numerous American counterparts come the final showdown, prospects in the Arctic Circle dried up, and it began to look like the whole area was destined to be written off and allowed to sink back into the slow march of glacial time. But it got hotter, and the glaciers reversed their course and hussled back up their mountain sides, and the polar ice cap grew smaller every summer. And suddenly the Arctic had discovered a new set of lucrative opportunities, shipping oil and grain, timber, and industrial products of all kinds along the abandoned paths marked out for B-52s and ICBMs. Tagging along with these legal shipments were whole fleets of unlicensed smugglers, taking advantage of the wide-open and lightly patrolled Arctic vistas to slip just about anything from Eurasia to North America and back; guns, cash, refugees, bioweapons. A popular run involved black market oil, but Natar had seen almost everything, including a shipment of those little Russian nested dolls packed full of marijuana. Natar had tried to explain the futility of bringing hash into Canada to a crew of frightened-looking Chechens, who swore in broken English that they had no idea the stuff was even in there, and they were just trying to save on shipping costs, and it was so hard to get permits from the Canadian government to move through the Northwest Passage. It turned out the dolls were stolen anyway.

The problem of being a major stopping point on the global black market had been incredibly strange and novel to Canadians, and many a politician had been gently removed from office due to an inability to come to grips with it. The sum of Canadian national security concerns had been to not get blown up by the Soviets and, lacking Soviets, people were much more content to worry about things like rising ocean levels and dwindling fish stocks, and warily keeping an eye on their neighbors to the south, and being polite. Canadian Forces didn't have the ships or the manpower to patrol huge expanses of once-frozen territory. It was a wide open and lawless frontier, like the Yukon a hundred and fifty years earlier, only with pirated pop music and suicide bombers. To bridge that gap, Canada had called on its first and heretofore only line of Arctic defence, the Canadian Rangers. Once little more than trusted tribal elders equipped by Ottawa with a rifle and a radio, the Rangers had evolved in these hectic modern times into an elite special forces unit, a match for the British SAS or American SEALS, and in their native environment they were without equal. While the navy undertook a massively bootstrapped shipbuilding effort, the Rangers roamed the Northwest Territories and Nunavut alone or in tiny groups of two or three, showing the flag, making arrests, scuttling the occasional ship and engaging in the occasional shootout. Even so, it was an easy place to hide.

But not so easy, Natar thought, as to negate the need for camoflauge. He bet that if he switched to a thermal view he'd see heat leaking out all over the place. Often the best time to find these little hideouts and illicit warehouses was to till wait until winter, when the ice came back and the more ambitious prepared to wait out the season, safe from prying eyes in their home countries. The cheap prefab buildings that were so popular bled heat out of every crack and corner, making them easy to spot.

Natar blinked out another quick sequence and his specs cleared, except for the outline of the camp. He was close now, and positioned himself to come down behind a ridge, hidden from the view of anyone there. He came down in a thick patch of orange lichen gone crazy in bloom, its growth cycle thrown all askew. He quickly detached himself from his chute and its engine, carrying the lightweight propeller down to a bare patch of earth where he covered it with the folded chute, the colours on its top side a perfect match for the rocky ground, and then scattered a few stones over it. Natar checked his rifle and the rest of the gear strapped to various parts of his body; flares, restraints, tiny Galileo transmitters, and so on. He shouldered his rifle and tapped out a command on the keyboard at his thigh, querying for satellite coverage. CSA had blanketed the sky with cheap spy sats in circumpolar orbits with an eye towards having a realtime view of anything in the Arctic, whenever necessary. Sometimes the system worked better than others, but his heads up display showed a string of satellites stretching beyond the Eurasian side of the horizon, more than enough to keep the camp in view while he planned to be there.