Ragnarok (14 page)

“Nothing like the sun with all that fuel,” Valfar stated confidently. “It would only annihilate the Earth, likely the moon but no more.”

“Oh thank goodness,” sighed Veikko. “So what can we do?”

“Fission will destroy the water. The orbits of each hydrogen atom are so distant that the electron is already past the Coulomb barrier. It makes for very weak fissile material. It just falls apart.”

“So we need to get an A-Bomb to Mars?”

“That's the only thing that would do it.”

“But this is all speculation. We don't know yet that the fat water is involved. All we know is that someone is bringing something heavy back from Mars. Your first task is to learn what. If our fears prove correct, your first priority is mere prevention of its return. There are still some hopes of using the device and making Mars another habitable planet. I'm sure you know how dismal attempts have been so far. The Qahira project is the most successful attempt to date, and it only managed to thicken the air with minimal oxygenation. If the Ares water leaves Mars, we'll consider the atomic solution, but bear in mind the state of earthly politics.

“Some in UNEGA blame GAUNE for the Nikkei collapse, given that a Texan destroyed it. GAUNE is still complaining about the Blackwing and rumors of wave bombs. Consider what a nuclear explosion on Mars might trigger. We must consider that a last resort. Or penultimate. Even if the fluid makes it to Earth, it's useless without our little ash tree. We need only stay where we are. If the Ares is completed and ready to do its worst, we have a rampart to seal it off and Alopex to keep it unplugged.”

“And if all that fails,” said Veikko, “the Earth gets flooded and the Fish take over.”

“Destruction of the Ares fluid is still an option, Veikko. We already have a nuclear weapon on Mars, or at least the PRA does. But this is all conjecture. For now, your mission is to track down the Yakuza involved and learn why they're going to Mars. If they're going to excavate a Martian rock for display as a sculpture in some company office building, we can leave well enough alone.”

“So we're Yak tracking today?”

“We are.”

It was a clever but simple process to attract them, one Veikko had designed for Project Nepenthe in a stroke of subtle genius. Find someone to kill, make them step on Yakuza toes, follow whoever they send to execute the unfortunate.

“Is there anyone we want dead?”

“Only you, V team,” linked Cassandra.

Kabar rang in next. “Arms dealer in Empresargentina. But it has to look like an accident.”

“We need a bombing,” sounded Necrosis. “I guess you could kill someone, but we can't let the Yaks take credit.”

“We've got one,” called Wart. “Yaks would be perfect. The Keres in Karpathos had us doing surveillance a week ago on Omar Sedaris, guy in Barcelona who was planning to bomb a Zaibatsu office. They took him down and moved on, was only a small part of their Barcelona clean out. But Zuhoor Sedaris is pissed as hell and she's gonna pull something, we think, on Tuesday. We were gonna hand her to the police, but she's a nasty, nasty critter.”

“Zaibatsu would want her dead naturally. The Yaks would make perfect sense. We're certain they don't know about her, though. He never registered any of his kids.”

“Does she have a link?”

“Yes, sending provider listings now.” It appeared in V team's heads, “MÁSmóvil, easy hack. You want us on it?”

“If you want to stay.”

“Fo sho,” linked Veikko. “Go ahead and plant a claim on Zaibatsu's transportation grids, ultraheavy cargo from Mars. Let the Yaks see it and any replies but not Zuhoor. I don't want her receiving congratulatory e-mails and wondering why. We'll head out today. Just link us her—What does she live in?”

“Omar's mansion. Beautiful treehouse grown from a massive modified Eucalyptus. Address on its way.”

“Nice,” lauded Varg. “My parents almost moved into an Oak, but decided it was unnatural and got an apartment.”

“Alright, we'll hang in the branches and—”

“They might see us.”

“Figure of speech, we'll ‘surveil the premises' and wait for the Yaks to come knocking. If the Yaks still work the same way, they'll be from a detachment of the Mars crew. We'll follow them. If they go to meet for Mars details, we follow. If they head for a Yak stronghold, we'll try brain hacks.”

“And if they're unrelated? Not Mars personnel?”

“W, you go ahead and stay on their netside communications. Hack them in Espana and see who they inform of the completion. Put a burr on that, and we'll see which Yaks get it in their hair. But I think they'll head to the Mars crew directly. That's how they did it when we were on project Nepenthe.”

“Alf, thoughts?” asked Vibs.

“Sounds sound. You may be heading off planet again, and in a hurry. See that Eric loads you up for space, and get backups made.”

They nodded. Backups were always an ominous precaution. And not much of one, as if they died, the backups would be of little consolation to the deceased. V team headed to med bay. They'd done it before. Any time a team headed off planet on a mission, it was standard to have their memories backed up on the med bay computer. The lipid polarity drives could store several brains apiece, but it was only raw data, memories like so much video. If they were to die permanently on Earth, Valkyries would generally try to recover what they could of the brain and keep the memories on file. In space losses, bodies were rarely recoverable so they backed people up in advance.

Skadi ambushed them on the way to the med bay. She jumped out and hugged Veikko full force, and one of their usual matches ensued. Skadi always won. She was simply stronger, and Veikko would have to tap out before breaking a rib. She snuck in a kiss as he squirmed.

“Getting backed up?” she asked.

“Everything but you, I'd rather forget,” he coughed.

Violet walked on, having heard their flirtations before. Skadi kissed him again.

“You can try,” she said, squeezing him tighter. He couldn't speak. Finally a snap resounded through the air. Skadi let go.

“Damn it, Skadi,” he wheezed.

She just laughed. “Well, you're going to med bay.”

She sauntered off.

“God, I love that woman,” he said genuinely, though clearly in pain.

Niide fixed his ribs—she'd broken three—with only a two-minute delay, having had his scans prepared from the last time she did the same. He quickly turned to the backups.

“Over to mmmm, Basher,” mumbled Dr. Niide. Violet thought it was peculiar to name the medical backup drives Bonecrusher and Basher or why three drives had two names. Vibeke could read the text labels on the machines but didn't get the names Bones, Crusher, and Bashir either. In any case they hooked into the third drive and started uploading. It only took a few minutes but always carried an unpleasant flicker of the old images, more often than not ones that they didn't consciously remember seeing. A disorienting feeling.

Once finished they headed out to the pogo pads. Their uniforms turned black, standard for unknown territory. With their memories safely stored away behind them, they and their brains headed out to Espana, well aware at how much couldn't be transferred. A person's mind is a great deal more than the raw data that could be uploaded, more than memory alone. Their thoughts, feelings, consciousness, whatever made them who they were couldn't be logged on lipid chains. The transfer always reminded Violet of that, always made the mission to come feel like it would be the one on which she'd lose them.

 

 

S
HIKA
SAID
nothing for the entire ride. She found small talk
unbecoming of assassins. For the two years she'd worked for the Yakuza, she'd conducted herself with the utmost respect and professionalism. Usagi on the other hand was running out of fingers. There were soldiers, and there were fools. Shika was a soldier. Shika hated working with fools. She wouldn't give Usagi the chance to blow a mission. She made it clear; Usagi was the pilot and nothing else. Shika would do the job.

Shika did the job. Ten seconds landing. The target saw them but didn't flee. Shika played it calm. Scanned for detectors, none. Touched the door, let it go clear, introduced herself. Confirmed the target, are you Suhoor? Sorry, Zuhoor. No, I didn't know it meant rose, that's very sweet. What was that? I can't hear you with the door closed, ah, thanks! One shot to the link, one to the forehead, one to the heart. Quick local scan, no detectors, no police links. Departure, back to the pogo. Job complete, send confirmation. Code Seikou. Take us back. We don't want to miss the meeting.

Wunjo Team intercepted the confirmation link. Common Yakuza coding to the Zaibatsu hub. Yakuza cryptography was simple enough for Alopex and carried no internal detective algorithms. Nobody working for Zaibatsu ever paid for that extravagance. Widget stuck a burr onto the provider log and let it go to work. It passed five rerouters in the Zaibatsu mainframe, then passed on to their I/O port. The I/O port had caught one of their burrs a few months prior, so they had Alopex time some cloaking code to activate at just the right time. The burr deleted itself as it entered the port. The port sent it out. The burr recovered itself immediately and followed the last transit protocol: Ukiyo City delivery daemon.

V team tracked the Yakuza pogo without moving from their hiding place in the alley. Veikko had spent nearly an hour adorning their own pogo with garbage from the finest dumpsters in Barcelona. It took the Yakuza nearly a day to get off their butts and wipe out the
competition, which concerned W team as Zuhoor's last bomb
components would arrive later that day. Still, all worked out, and the pogo had some truly revolting trash to disguise it beyond the normal goldtop chromatophores. Like their uniforms the chromatophores could assume any color and even some patterns, but nothing beat the rotting banana
peel and crumpled Rockdelux with which Veikko had lovingly
endowed the windshield.

Sadly, all things come to an end, as when the Yakuza pogo neared the edge of tracking range. They had to lift off and let the garbage fall by the wayside. After a quick hack to silence the litter detectors, Varg hit the accelerator and followed the Yaks northwest. Walter saw their course and nudged Wart, who linked to Veikko.

“Do you want us to head to Ukiyo?” asked Wart. “Looks like your mark's going the wrong way.”

“Affirmative, my fungal friend. Head on over and see if Ukiyo's having a Yak convention.”

Walter and Widget linked simultaneously, “You got it, Veeks.”

W headed for a pogo in Valhalla. V followed their mark toward the Golfo Vizcaya. They kept a wide twenty-kilometer distance from the Yaks, the maximum with which they could safely keep the thing in their sights. Yakuza were notoriously brutal to anyone they suspected of following them. Dr. Niide had, in total since beginning his work in the ravine, reattached twenty-nine Valkyrie heads due to Yakuza swordplay. They'd never lost a head from a Yak fight, but the second man named Borknagar, from one of Balder's early teams, was killed permanently by a slash high up on his neck that severed his brain stem in just the wrong place.

The Yak pogo made a sharp turn at the coast and headed due west toward GAUNE. Over land a twenty-kilometer distance is filled with other craft. It's nearly impossible to see someone tracking you. Over the ocean, twenty kilometers means nothing. If one pogo follows you and the rest follow shipping lanes, you've caught them. Valhalla used the trick often. The Yakuza too valued the technique. But unlike the Yakuza's, Valkyrie pogos were fortified for extended undersea travel. They hit the water as soon as they reached it and continued to follow the Yaks.

As soon as they were deep enough to hide their wake, they could see the red lights of the Euskaldunak Cetacean colony below. At that depth, at dusk, they could only make out the shapeless glow, but Veikko explained, “It's shaped like two crosses, lauburu crosses. One of the better-armed colonies, they had a fight with the SI before it was banned. I got in trouble for laughing about it in school once. Honestly a bloody fight between Fish and Loyolists was all good news to me. Still had to come here on a field trip from Itämeri. You'd be amazed at the language barriers down there.”

The Yaks made another course change, an about-face toward Asia. Vibeke calculated their course—Straight for Ukiyo. Varg brought the craft to a halt. Veikko linked back to W team.

“All roads lead to Rome. We'll stay here until they're well out of range, then head over. What's your ETA?”

“We should get there about nine hours before your Yaks,” said Weather. “Directions?”

“Wait for us on the city. Don't spend all your money on porn.”

“Confirmed, half on porn, half on drugs.”

W linked out. The craft slowly sank toward the colony. Violet sat back and watched a fish swim by the side window. They'd only need fifteen minutes before the Yaks would be long gone, but those brief pauses always hit her the hardest. It was too short to do anything but too long to hold still. She'd mastered holding still while getting stung by flies at Achnacarry. She could lie motionless for more than a day if detectors were looking for her. But there, in a pogo with no threat at all, time acted strangely.

Violet was always aware of being useless to a mission. She wasn't often a fifth wheel, but in thinking back on the Nikkei disaster, she realized she hadn't actually done a single thing but run away. Not that any of them had done any good, but the Spanish mission hadn't even seen her outside of the pogo. She'd resigned herself long ago to an idea of the team with Vibeke as the brain, Varg as the muscle, and Veikko as the master of the craft. It left no question who would do what but seemed in recent projects to leave Violet as “that other girl.” Why else had she been picked to steal the Blackwing herself. Everyone else had specific roles to play. Another abysmal line of thought she was getting herself into. She looked out the portal for a distraction and found an obvious one.