Chapter 37
Ilsa
A week later, I got to see Project Athena for the first time.
Nothing in Sicily or Rouen had prepared me for the scale of it.
The journey itself felt like moving off the map: private flights, secure transfers, sealed corridors, men with holstered weapons and a kind of blank, dominant competence that seemed designed to demonstrate the importance of complete secrecy.
Then, at last, the Arctic, seen through the windows of a caterpillar-treaded vehicle that lumbered across frozen tundra. White above, white below, and in between a facility so large and so blended into the snowscape that at first my mind refused to read it as an identifiable place at all.
Inside, though, the whiteness gave way to steel, climate-controlled warmth and humidity, massive doors, polished concrete, machine noise, and a sense of buried immensity.
Everything about Project Athena seemed designed to make any imaginable apocalypse manageable.
It was a sanctuary, a fortress, a laboratory, and something else besides: a place from which a remnant of humanity meant to launch itself literally away from earth if it had to.
Henrik held my hand as we walked, just behind Sven and Mary, through an observation corridor whose glass looked down into one of the principal construction hangars.
I stopped, my jaw slackening, hardly aware of my body despite the embarrassing nudity to which our masters had enforced our return in the vestibule just inside the entrance to the complex.
The thing below us rose in sections under cranes and lattices of scaffolding, made of sleek curves and black-white skin and open compartments where teams in bright work rigs moved like insects.
Floodlights made the metal gleam. Gantries crossed the void around it.
The entire hangar swallowed noise and gave it back as a vast industrial murmur.
“Athena Station,” Henrik said.
I had no answer. The archaeologist in me, absurdly enough, found the nearest available analogy not in modern aerospace but in the old cavern under Capo Zafferano.
A vessel under stone. A people preparing for catastrophe by means of quasi-mystical transport.
Only here the timbers had become alloys and carbon composites, the rowing benches engines and life support and radiation shielding, and the cave a climate-controlled cathedral of engineering under the Arctic ice.
“It’s overwhelming,” I said at last.
Henrik’s mouth twitched. “In scale?”
“In ambition.”
“Yes,” he said. “That too.”
I stood there staring until he touched the small of my back and guided me on, to catch up with Sven and Mary.
I looked over my shoulder several times like a child leaving a fair.
The impression remained: humanity, terrified and grandiose and entirely sincere, building itself a modern ark in the polar night.
The domestic side of the project lay in another section, separated from the men’s rooms, workshops, conference areas, and the more private spaces where I felt sure masters and mistresses enjoyed their submissive sexual servants.
Project Athena, for all its technological sophistication, still obeyed an old logic.
Men planned, built, guarded, and used. Women nurtured, gestated, submitted, and, if they were of the right sort, saw visions and dreamed dreams. In the family wing, women even had the privilege of wearing clothes.
I met Camille, Erik’s bed thrall, and Lorna, Aksel’s—and prime minister of Jagland—there the next day.
Mary led me into a sort of common room, furnished with dining tables at one end and couches at the other.
I saw a dark-haired woman rising from a low chair with one hand braced at the base of her enormous belly, I understood at once that Camille possessed a wholly different kind of force.
She looked less like a concubine than like a revolutionary who happened to be heavily pregnant.
Her short dark hair made her sharp face look sharper still.
Her eyes traveled over me with frank appraisal.
“So you’re Ilsa,” she said, in a French accent made drier by fatigue. “The brilliant new v?lva.” She put out her hand as if we were meeting at a conference. “Camille Dubois.”
I took it. “I’m not sure I deserve that title.”
She snorted. “None of us deserve any of them. They still give them to us.”
The man behind her, blond and broad and carrying his authority with less theatricality than Sven or Henrik, inclined his head to me. Erik, Sven’s second, Camille’s master.
Near them stood another woman I recognized from pictures: Lorna.
She was beautifully put together in the understated way of someone born to politics or old money, ash-blonde hair smooth, her features severely elegant.
One of her hands rested almost unconsciously on the slight swell just beginning to show low on her belly, beneath her sweater.
Beside her stood Aksel, whose severe intelligence somehow looked even more at home here among machines and sealed doors than it had in the Viking sanctuary.
Introductions happened quickly. The men were already being drawn away toward a conference room in the operational section.
Matthew Apollis, Leo Marmareus as Mary called him, arrived with Giovanna not long after to summon the Sons of Odin; he had the same compact battlefield stillness I remembered seeing in his fellow leo in Palermo.
Giovanna, of course, looked stunning. Project Athena belonged to the Pretorian Guard first and foremost, and the leo and the bellatrix looked fittingly proprietary.
The men excused themselves to their meeting, and we women were left together in the family wing under the eye of matrons, the m?er of the Sons of Odin and the matres of the Order of Ostia.
One of the m?er, Mother Helga, showed me around: a nursery for the infants, playrooms for the toddlers, little bedrooms, storage, sterilizers, a kitchen.
Camille lowered herself back into her chair with the care of a woman carrying a great deal of baby and no intention of pretending otherwise. “I’m due in a few weeks,” she said, following my glance to her belly. “A boy.”
I looked at her. “You know?”
She rolled her eyes a little, but there was tenderness under it.
“The same way you know what’s going on in your own body now, I imagine.
V?lva nonsense. Hormones. Magic. Pattern recognition.
Choose your framework.” Her hand spread over the taut curve of her abdomen.
“He’s a son. He feels different from how my daughter did. ”
Lorna gave a small, rueful smile. “Aksel says I ought to phrase it more carefully in front of the wrong people, but yes. A girl.” Her fingers moved over her barely there bump. “I know it with the sort of certainty that would have terrified me six months ago.”
“It still terrifies me,” Camille said. “It’s just that it keeps being true.”
My own hand went, involuntarily, to my flat stomach.
There was nothing to see yet. Only the knowledge.
The tiny hidden fact that had changed the meaning of time’s passage inside me.
I felt at once included and abashed beside them: one woman rounded almost to term, another just beginning to show, and me still in that invisible stage where pregnancy felt more like a secret.
Mary noticed. She gave me a quick, warm look. She knew, of course. She knew because of the bed, the tree, the strange way our lives had become legible to one another in these matters.
“Come on,” she said. “I want you to meet the little ones before the men start moving us around like pieces on a game board.”
The nursery stood at the end of a quiet corridor. It was the gentlest room I had yet seen in the whole facility. Soft colors. Warm light. Shelves of toys. Small cots. Picture books. Tiny socks folded with military precision. It smelled faintly of milk and clean laundry and baby soap.
Mary’s son—red-haired, solemn at first and then suddenly delighted when he recognized his mother—came toddling toward her with the concentrated speed peculiar to very small children.
She scooped him up with the practiced strength of a girl who still looked almost too young to have a toddler hanging on her, and something moved painfully in my chest at the sight.
Camille’s daughter, a sturdy little creature with dark curls and an expression of grave suspicion until Camille kissed the top of her head, peered at me from behind a matron’s skirt before deciding I was acceptable.
Lorna stood watching them all with an expression I could not immediately read.
Longing, perhaps. Apprehension. The first real anticipation of motherhood going from theory to this room full of evidence.
The matrons handled the children with the calm authority of women who had seen every possible configuration of maternal awkwardness and exhaustion. Between the m?er and the matres they made a small, efficient republic of female care under the ice.
For a little while, absurdly, it felt almost ordinary.
We sat. We talked. Camille corrected her daughter in French and English by turns.
Mary let her son clutch at the braid over her shoulder.
Lorna accepted tea she clearly did not want but which a matron had decided she required.
I found myself telling them, at their insistence, about my first sight of Athena Station in the hangar, and Camille laughed at my impressionability, when I admitted how dramatic an impression the sight had made on me.
Then the summons came.
A matron in charcoal gray appeared in the doorway with the expression of someone delivering an order from an unquestioned superior power. “The masters are ready for the girls.”
No one argued. That, more than anything, seemed to define our lives now: not constant coercion, but the steady existence of a framework within which our compliance had already become built in. We rose. We kissed children, handed them back, smoothed our clothes.