Ragnarok (12 page)

The board was uncertain how to proceed. It could be a ruse by the YUP to lure them into lowering their defenses, though in truth they had none. It could be a mislaid file in Zaibatsu HQ that let the situation dissolve. It could be any number of things, and all that the owners of Yamasa could agree on was that they wanted no part of what was to come. They had to sell it all while they still had it to sell.

The Ukiyo ferry service went first and for the most—sixteen ships and the rights to every port and route to the biggest floating city in the Nihonkai. Various other assets sold over the course of the week. Some sold to Zaibatsu, though peacefully and with no sign of the Yuppie's infamous armed hostile takeover tactics. Others sold to companies in GAUNE, some of the ships to private citizens from all over the globe. Everything found its place in the great material continuum. Except for Hashima. Nobody on Earth wanted Hashima.

It was a ruin that over the last couple hundred years had attracted a few photographers, documentarians, and larpers. It was a solid source of revenue for Yamasa until the mid-2100s, when enough of the world had modern ruins to make travel to the obscure island not cost-effective. With no buyers on the respectable markets, it went for sale on the Nikkei. No offers. Even then, weeks before the Nikkei crashed, it looked like Hashima would stay the only holding of Yamasa-Kaiun, as the executives fled for private islands and the employees followed the ships or hunted for new work.

And then it got an offer. Indeed nobody on Earth wanted the place, but someone on Venus did. An anonymous bidder. His bid wasn't much, but it was the only bid. So passed Hashima into the hands of Wulfgar Kray. As it happened he was already on his way to Earth. Wulfgar's shuttle set down on a broken concrete plain. Its thrusters blew debris in all directions, off the seawall into the ocean. The landing skids cracked the ancient concrete further. The airlock opened, and a pair of handlike feet walked on the Earth for the first time.

Crews from other shuttles ran from their transportation to search the island for unwelcome guests. They found it calm and abandoned. They headed into the dead buildings, sifting through splinters and rocks, and over the seawall to scan the water. As they secured his new abode, Wulfgar activated his new link and looked around. The net was not as he'd left it. It changed every hour, and after a year it was a whole new species of net. He ran a quick search for the Orange Gang. It turned up in historical cyclopedias and little else. He ran his own name, even less.

He had something of a blank slate. He had some resources, funds, manpower. He had a new toy that kept him very happy. And he had plans. Two distinct plans. First, revenge on Violet MacRae and her family of Valkyries. He knew where they lived and had some firsthand, though severely outdated, intel on the place. Second, he wanted to rule the world. Or at least most of it. Violet and her team had disassembled his gang in weeks because, despite its influence, it was fairly small. The greatest gang in history was, in the end, small potatoes compared to any average conglomerate. So the first step was to take over any average conglomerate. The first move to the first step was a company.

He'd arrived too late to buy up most of Yamasa. He could have made something out of the Ukiyo ferry services. With a monopoly on a commercial sector's traffic, he could own the commercial sector. With a commercial sector, he'd have access to every company and prospect within. But KeiJu had beaten him to it. Even if they hadn't, the price for the Ukiyo lanes was beyond his capabilities. He'd exhausted every cent from the sale of Iwo Donatsu in buying, then moving, home. He brushed off his feet and pulled his short boots on. Men were already unloading his desk and boxes.

“All the way down,” he reminded them. “The very bottom.” He had moved from one mine to another. One floated high over the acid land of Venus, and one was carved deep into the earth beneath the Higashi Shina Kai. Mines had advantages in every field but good looks. Security was one of his favorites. The office from which he ran the Orange Gang was in a common København skyscraper. If the police had ever found it, they might have leveled the building. If someone wanted him out of Hashima, they'd have to dig for years. With all the fortifications he planned, it would be an impenetrable underground lair.

But to afford it all, he needed the Ukiyo lanes. To any legitimate businessman, the fact someone else owned them would have been a problem. To Wulfgar, the legality was only a short barrier to be leaped past. After he woke from his first night asleep under the earth, he ordered his men onto the boats. There were two boats left on Hashima, included in the deal. All it usually took to bring tourists to and fro. On them his men mounted guns. One microwave battery each, the only two they had. If Wulfgar lost his first skirmish, it would be weeks before he could find new tools and men to try again. The ships headed for Ukiyo's port in Tottori. Ukiyo had already left for the year, but there would still be a string of cargo vessels bringing the floating city any new food and supplies it needed. A thin string. A weak string.

In one day, Wulfgar had seized five of its ships. Their crews were bribed or executed and replaced with his own. There was no break at all in the cargo, nor anything unusual in the reports and logs. Wulfgar's hackers deleted any hint left online that the monetary implants signing for each package weren't correct. In two days they had all sixteen ships of the Tottori Ukiyo port and the port and the receiving personnel of Ukiyo. They were mostly the same people, just paid a bit more.

Despite their new pay, they complained bitterly to the shipping company about not having enough. Since they had bought Yamasa's shipping rights, KeiJu found the whole thing nothing but trouble. The ships cost too much to maintain, the port cost too much to handle, and the crews were demanding more money. They began looking for a buyer. Wulfgar was spending what little fluid value he had on bribes and Hashima, so he couldn't buy yet. All he could do was see that nobody else did.

His hackers wrecked KeiJu's credit with every net attack they could. They made certain the news heard of the impossibility of making a profit off Ukiyo shipping, stories which greatly amused the Yamasa executives as they reclined on the sunny beaches of Novo Yugoslavia. One day KeiJu's sole owner, Hideo Duplantier, was visited by his banker. He didn't know his real banker had been murdered. He had never met the man in person. The new banker gave him some documents to sign, ones he said would relieve the stress of the Ukiyo lanes by diversifying this and amalgamating that. He didn't care just what. He was at his wit's end. He didn't notice that one of the documents was a will or that another effectively declared bankruptcy.
He was quite surprised the next day when WGUSMW, a medical company, came to repossess his lungs. He explained to them that he'd never bought lungs from them. He begged them to let him keep the lungs for one more day as he sorted out the problem. But in the end he simply gave up, his life was in ruins and his business defunct. He went under the knife and died hoping someone else might breathe easier with them.

Wulfgar suddenly found himself inheriting all of Ukiyo's shipping contracts and equipment. It all transferred as per the will to a net avatar known only as “Little Boots at Hashima,” real identity unknown. He was able to make the systems run far better than his predecessor, mostly because he didn't have himself sabotaging the whole scheme. With Ukiyo's shipping in his arsenal, Ukiyo itself began to fall. The mayor of the city began to sense things were amiss one day when the ships began delivering recording devices and cameras he hadn't approved. The captain explained brusquely that they came free with the food, and that if one stopped coming the other would follow. It took a few meetings of that sort before the mayor was completely in Wulfgar's pocket, but with the threat of blockade from their own lifelines, he and his crews began installing the spycams themselves. From then on, Ukiyo and its shipping worked flawlessly. Solid businesses under the leadership of one of the finest leaders of his time. Though nobody knew who that was.

Wulfgar sat back as his feeds and money flowed in. He spent his time online watching the Ukiyo markets. The crimes were petty, the businesses mostly legitimate. There was nothing to hold on to, no real prospects. As his grasp on Ukiyo became hard as iron, he began to realize that he had caught little more than air. And then, one day, he found he'd struck gold. Quite unexpectedly, the Nikkei collapsed. Literally, under the weight of a giant crab. The loss of the semi-legitimate Nikkei, its illegitimate Undernet, and the ultimate in depravity—the Black Crag—hit the underworld hard. Tens of thousands of criminals needed new places to deal, and many were distrustful of the nets.

More and more of them began to meet in the real world. Still in yen zones, still in secluded rings, but now in the void of the ocean instead of the net. That arrangement was especially happy for Pelamus Pluturus. He kept an entire fleet in the Nihonkai to ensure his meetings with the Yakuza went well. They'd won the contract for Mars, but he didn't trust them. He was about to spend most of his YUP plunder on them. Meetings at Ukiyo went on and on as the Yakuza and Pelamus representatives argued over budgeting. They argued with raised voices. Raised voices shouting extremely high prices.

Wulfgar knew he had found his next mark but couldn't quite figure out what the mark was. He knew it was on Mars, so he started spending his Ukiyo earnings on a return to space. He knew something heavy was coming back to Earth, so he looked into stealing the Solar Division of FedEx or PortuCorreio. And he knew the Yakuza already had the contract, so he began assembling an army.

 

 

“Y
OU
CRASHED
the entire Asian stock market!” Cato shouted. “Into a mountain!”

“It was actually a—”

“Silence, Veikko! You have lost the right to talk in this ravine! If your memories had shown one second of contact with that, that
thing
, you'd have lost the right to
breathe
!”

C team had utterly devoured their memories. Cato took Violet's and picked them apart violently, quickly he said to be certain they hadn't brought back any cragware. But she knew he delighted in the pain caused by an in-brain memory sweep of that depth.

“Do you have any idea the gravity of what you've done?” he continued to rant. “How deeply you've violated the treaty? And don't tell me it was only a black market. You know damn well the black markets hold more sway than the proper. I've seen some fucked-up shit in my time here, Valknut, but this is by far the most fucked-up shit that Valkyries have ever fucked!”

“Then where are the Geki?” whispered Vibeke.

“Do! Not! Speak!” he raged. “If the Geki came into my office and burnt you all to cinders, I would thank them and light a cigar on your flaming corpses! I would take up smoking to
want
a cigar to buy to light on your smoldering flesh! You want to know where the Geki are? I don't know where they are. They never came here because they have nothing to ask, and if they have nothing to ask, it's because they know who hired Yoshi already. They know all about you lot. You want to know what they're up to? Look at this mess!”

He forced a graphic into their visual cortices. Burn victim remains. Badly burned, utterly destroyed. Chunks of fat still boiling.

“Look and don't damn forget! Amarillo, Texas. Bill Ulster. The Geki seem to blame the Crag more than its inciting idiots. But Alopex already killed the man's brain. The Geki burnt his body as a message. A message to you, V team. To you and Greta Klein.”

He dredged up a picture of a frightened sixteen-year-old girl. Red hair and freckles, a skinny kid with round cheeks.

“She's alive, don't ask me how, but she—”

“Sorry,” interrupted Varg, “who is Greta Kline?”

“Yoshi. Your damn friend Yoshi. Her link won't work again, and the kid's scared shitless, but the Crag didn't kill her. But she has been warned. As have you! And if I so much as guess that your team is doing anything that could endanger Valhalla again, I will summon the Geki myself and have them burn the eyes from your damn miserable fucking skulls! Am I understood?”

“No,” stated Veikko. “Your accent's just atrocious. It's
‘understood,' not ‘ahnda stewed.'”

Cato froze. He stared at Veikko for an instant, then spoke again calmly.

“You will not search for Mishka again. If we get intel on her, W will scout it out.” He leaned toward Vibeke. “You will never, not ever, set your eyes on her. And from this day on, your team won't run a mission, won't leave the ravine, won't make your bladder gladder without running every drop by us.”

Veikko giggled.

“If you laugh again, boy, Dr. Niide will spend the night making you new teeth. Now get the bloody hell out of my office.”

Violet stood up to leave with the rest when Cato put his hand on her shoulder.

“You stay here, sheila. We've something to discuss.”

Violet stopped. She was suddenly overcome with happiness. She was happy because she knew, not hoped, but knew without a doubt that once the others had left, she was going to reach into Cato's ugly olive drab armor and rip his balls off. She'd savor his screams and howls as she twisted them away, breaking the cremaster muscles and skin, then hold the orbs before his eyes, kick him to the floor, and stuff them down his throat. She was considering how best to finally spit on his face when he spoke again.

“Sorry about all that, all for show, you know? You did a damn fine job down there.”

She hated him all the more. She had no clue what shit he was pulling, but he only had a second left of it before she implemented plan T.

“I want to talk to you about something you saw on the Undernet. A meeting you peeked in on. I'm not your enemy on this one. If you listen to what I have to say…. I know you loathe me, but listen for just one minute. I'm gonna make you lot the heroes of the ravine again. Tell me, Violet, how would you like to save all humankind?”