Ragnarok (2 page)

The instant Violet's inertial negation field had activated, the Blackwing's alarms sounded. Keith watched her connect, climb toward his cockpit and step clumsily on a vent cap. He smelled the thermite burning through his oxygen mask. When the canopy disappeared and he saw the figure outside, he already had his sidearm ready.

Violet wouldn't have lasted long if she weren't expecting exactly that. She watched him level his microwave at her, looking down her leg like the sight on a rifle, poised to kick. She let loose, and her boot knocked the microwave from his hand. The sticky suit held onto it, and she grabbed the weapon from her heel. The bolts of electricity around Keith's head doubled in quantity as he began to send alerts and warnings to Skunkworks. Violet couldn't allow that, so she used his microwave to fire a dull magnetic beam into the brain interface, dulling and warping the signals. He lost control of the craft, and it began to spiral and fall out of control. The magnetic wave also interfered again with Violet's inertia field. A jolt of motion seeped in like a hard slap on the back.

She let the force push her into the cockpit. Keith punched her in the face so hard that the field spasm felt like nothing. The microwave fell to the earth. She punched him right back, but he blocked. Violet wasn't easy to block. She realized she was up against one tough pilot. Her surprise lasted only an instant, replaced quickly by the worse surprise of getting slugged so hard in the ribs that she fell out of the cockpit and into the ramjet intake.

Her fingers barely snagged the intake vents and saved her from vaporization. Violet's annoyance was burning hotter than the fuel behind her. Her fingers stuck to panel after diamond panel, and she crawled forward to face the skilled, dangerous man who had just bested her. A man who now knew how she fought and knew she was coming. It was time for extreme measures.

Keith could see her escape the intake, but she disappeared as she crawled up the Blackwing's diamond skin toward him. He awaited the sticky devil, calculating her most likely attack. She could come from behind and drop in above him. As she would expect another punch, he would deny her that. Then, as she struck, he'd pull her in to break her in half. If she came from either side, she would be at the same angle he saw before. He could see the field generator on the back of her neck, so if he could hit it squarely, he could turn inertia against her, and she'd splatter like flies around him. Keith didn't expect her to appear in front of him, jumping from the nose of his jet.

Having climbed under the craft all the way to its exceptionally sharp front edge, Violet dimmed her field by 5 percent and leaped toward her enemy with the force of the jet's motion behind her. The Blackwing's inertia field was hit with an inverse Boolean effect and dropped to match. Violet was forced in at more than 100 kph. She aimed her foot at Keith's face with horrific force. His reflexes were superhuman, thanks to the superhuman reflexology project he completed in the academy. He managed to move his head and replace it with his survival knife just as her foot connected.

First Violet felt the pain of her leg breaking against the headrest, then the pain of a twelve-centimeter blade sticking through her foot. She didn't grow any angrier at the pain because, though he had performed an impressive move, it had left Keith bent over to his side and without the benefit of his seat's protection. She unsheathed the blade from her foot and cut his belts in a split second. Keith managed two good punches in that half second, but they weren't enough to push her off him, not with acceleration affecting her at 5 percent—she weighed 250 kilograms.

And it was acceleration, not wind that she was feeling now. The craft was still out of control and speeding up in awkward bursts. They were going into a barrel roll and losing altitude rapidly. Whoever won would have a dangerous few seconds to right the craft and stop it from crashing.

Violet had to act fast. She linked her field back on full and grabbed his oxygen mask, tightly strapped to his head. She yanked the apparatus hard enough that it would snap his neck, or if he was smart, checkmate him and force him to follow the direction. He was smart, but he had lost. The move gave Violet enough leverage to shove him out of the Blackwing's field and he flew from the cockpit, hit by the air and speed.

As he fell to the ground with his personal inertia fields up and his parachute field ready to deploy, he was filled with admiration for the hijacker who evicted him despite a dagger in her foot. Then came the lamentation that if he ever got out of the desert alive, his salary would be docked until he could pay off the craft he had lost: 220,000,000,000 euros on pilot's wages.

Violet had worse problems. The Blackwing was in an
uncontrolled barrel roll and losing altitude faster and faster. So fast, she calculated, that if she kept calculating, it would hit the ground before she finished. She sat back in the seat and let the electric bolts feel out her head. The interface loaded at once to inform her that she was not its pilot and that the ship would self-destruct in five seconds. She began the system hack, which back in Valhalla she had proven capable of performing in only seven seconds.

Skunkworks had included self-destruct mechanisms in all its craft for ages in case of theft. V team's research prior to the mission showed they had never sold a single craft without it since 2104. They had,
however, lost the prototype for a boat back in 2193 that showed up for
sale in 2194. Though the thieves in that case were all killed by
Skunkforce, it did strongly suggest that prototypes intended solely for testing were not granted their suicidal charges. Certainly one so expensive as the Blackwing wouldn't be an exception.

Seven seconds later, Violet had control of the Blackwing, despite the craft's solemn belief that it had blown itself to smithereens two seconds prior. In ten seconds she had restarted the computers and piloted the Blackwing out of its barrel roll. In twenty seconds she had taken the emergency auto-lattice polymer can and sprayed out a new canopy. In twenty-one seconds the Blackwing crashed full-force into the solid salty ground.

Despite every measure onboard, she felt it. From Mach 6 to 700 kph in an instant. As the concrete-solid salt split around the unbreakable diamond shields, she was pitched forward in a sickening explosive jolt. The thin new canopy cracked to the point that she couldn't see through it, but the craft's design did its job and directed the force away from the broken cockpit. The Blackwing held, and Violet managed to pull up out of the salt and back into fresh toxic air. She took inventory of the events and state of things. All were as favorable as could be expected. She welcomed a complex bolt of lightning into her head and told the vessel to set course eastward. North would have to wait until its tracking systems were disabled.

“Sloppy, Vi,” chimed a voice in her head. She pulled off the sticky suit's face mask, leaving only her Thaco oxygen prongs.

“Vibs is right, that was a ‘rocky' start,” said Veikko.

Varg linked last. “I can't think of any salt jokes. But hey, knock knock.”

“Who's there?”

“Skunkforce! Five wave hoppers on your
Arsch
, laser armament, unmanned. I'm shooting at the six that aren't there yet.”

Microwave drones could be a real problem on most missions. They'd managed to spoil one of O team's attacks on an organ smuggling ring, they'd successfully assassinated Luka Carcass before R could reach him, and only a week prior, they'd shot down Luzie's experimental reconnaissance saucer. On the theft of any common aircraft, they could foil V team in a dozen ways, from recording telemetry all the way back to the North or simply cutting the wings off with their damn vibrating lasers.

Violet saw the red dots all over the Blackwing. Useless, thankfully, against its armor, they couldn't even make the slightest scratch in the black diamond. They could tear open the makeshift canopy and cut her to ribbons, but short of fifty more of the things appearing right in front of her, she could keep the canopy aimed away from them.

Eighty-nine more wave hoppers erupted from the ground immediately before Violet's position. Skunkworks wasn't going to let the master work go, and they'd committed their entire drone fleet to stopping it. The hoppers burst upward from their salt hangars and flew ahead of the Blackwing, accelerating toward its future position. They were far enough ahead that they could cut her off and cut her up. A turn away from them would only reduce her speed on the bank and let them catch up elsewhere. There was no way around it; she was about to be covered in them.

She had only one chance. Hoppers were piloted by programs. Good programs, programs that know how humans fly. All Violet would have to do was fly in so inhuman a fashion that the drones would lose her or crash. Crash appealed to her more than loss. The first drones were about to land on the canopy. She had only seconds.

Empty skyscrapers began to flash by her sides just as the last drones came into view. They followed her motion for motion as she dodged the towers and decayed factories. She wasted no time and made several hectic course changes that defied the laws of structural integrity and common sense. They continued to follow the craft as closely as possible without crashing, making meticulous course adjustments based not only on speed and direction, but on the programmed assumptions that the craft they followed would try to escape them while also trying not to crash. The latter assumption was incorrect and would prove their
undoing as Violet flew directly through the side of an old office
building, ripping it from its foundations and spinning it in the air 140 degrees. Most of the hoppers crashed right behind her, and the few that had
made it to the Blackwing were sheared off as it passed through
concrete.

The force cracked the makeshift canopy further and chips fell away. Chunks of wave hopper and office building poured in through the inertia field and cluttered the cockpit. The Blackwing wouldn't be able to take another hit until they found its proper canopy, but the mission seemed over for the time being.

With Skunkworks' external tracking gone, she quickly hacked into the Blackwing's tracking nodes and silenced them, then finally headed north.

As soon as Veikko linked in from the shuttle to tell her she was in the clear, the adrenaline died and she felt a stabbing pain in her foot. That reminded her she had been stabbed in the foot. The broken leg began to complain right after. She took some platelet packs and a quicksplint from the back of her suit and applied them to her foot and leg. She shot an analgesic syrette into her thigh, and it cleared the pain but not the uncomfortable position she had to sit in with her leg splinted.

Violet looked around at the debris collected from the hoppers and office building, all that fell into the cockpit gently after being struck at Mach whatever. Robotic parts, bricks, dust, two pencils from the office building, and half a wall poster of a cat hanging from a tree. She shoveled out the bits and pieces that shook most noisily in the insistent breeze. The half canopy took whatever air passed the triple field and focused it right on Violet's cheek. The little nuisances always seemed amplified after the bulk of a mission was over. She couldn't hit the fastest thrusters and be home in seconds, or she'd be spotted again. She had to wait for the slug-slow Mach 20 ramjets to get her up north.

It took half an hour to arrive in the seas north of Kalaallit Nunaat, where she splashed down and roughly slammed the Blackwing into some underwater rock. That concealed half of it and shattered the last of the makeshift canopy. She left the cockpit outside of the rock face so that she could make her exit. Water was pouring in through the fields and making them crackle badly. She hacked into the shutdown procedures and checked for any coded traps, all the typical thievery, before turning the primary power source off. That cut off the fields and the water flooded in instantly. Damn cold water.

She surfaced to see the old P-Zero shuttle hovering over her. It set down ungently on the water, and she climbed onto its flat chrome wing. A door opened on the slanted side and let her into the same smelly cargo hold she had leaped from hours before. Veikko rolled a scan jamming cylinder down the wing and into the water, then stepped out to toss several Ice-10 crystals in after. They quickly froze a few meters of the sea into a hangar around the exposed parts of the Blackwing.

So ended Project Bentley at 1640 hours on January 3, 2232. Calling it “Bentley” still felt strange. Even after Project Abruptum, Violet couldn't get used to having made a full spin around the alphabet. She might have been more sensitive to meaningless sentimentality on that day at that time because her parents had died exactly two years prior. She took no notice of the goings-on in her subconscious. She buckled into the cargo hold walls with Veikko for the ride north.

Varg chimed in via link, “Highly recommend we abort lift off, ditch this old junker and fly the Burp back home instead.”

“Blackwing, Varg. Please don't call it the Burp,” rang Vibs.

“Our shuttle is obsolete. We have a new space-worthy craft.”

“One we can't show off. Not yet.”

Veikko interjected, “Practically speaking, the Bur—the Blackwing has only one seat and no cargo.”

“Okay,” reasoned Varg, “you three take the P-Zero shuttle, and I'll take the Belch.”

“Gaseous regurgitation,” laughed Veikko. “Technically it may be a flatu—”

The sound of a light backhand resounded from the hold.

“Thanks, Vi,” linked Vibeke.

Silence prevailed for twenty seconds before Varg spoke up. “If they didn't want us to call it a Burp, they shouldn't have named it B-I-R-P. Besides, it won't be a ‘black' wing once we gilt it up.”

“We won't,” answered Vibs. “The flex-diamond hull is better than gold, TK chrome, even natural diamond. It will stay a Blackwing.”