Ragnarok (47 page)

“That's what I thought.”

Vibeke had to set her straight but couldn't speak. She felt herself blush.

Violet knew she had admitted too much, shown her weakness. The last thing a Valkyrie would do. But then, she wasn't a Valkyrie anymore. She bit down hard on her teeth. She had to move on.

“I wanted you since before I met you, you know. I wanted a girl like you, exactly like you in every way. I hunted for her online and wished I'd run into her on the streets. But I knew deep down she didn't exist. Nobody so perfect could. And when I met you… it….” Violet tried to breathe straight. “I'm sorry I wasted you too. You deserve so much better than I ever knew how to give. But maybe, just maybe after this mission, we can put all the pain and all the broken stuff, all the… just everything behind us. Can't we just…?”

“Start over?”

Vibeke wanted to so badly, but she knew the score. Valkyries don't forgive.

“Maybe in another life,” she answered.

And that was her revenge. For all Violet had done, Vibeke had her revenge, and finally they could move on. With that stab Vibeke knew there was a chance they could last forever, a chance they could grow past their mutual harm and be truly happy. She'd never tell Violet. She'd insist until they were in their hundreds it had to be a cheap fling and nothing more.

Violet was stabbed through the chest. After days of self-loathing, the real depth of what she'd done hit her full force. Not any worse than what she'd already felt, but coldly, logically clear. She finally understood how much she'd given up, how wrong she'd been. In that second she grew up, finally, and knew what a responsibility love was.

And Vibeke knew that if she ever lost Violet now, she would lose her own soul.

 

 

V
ARG
FOUND
Valhalla's airspace devoid of any invading force. There was one submarine in the water but scans showed nobody aboard. He hovered the Blackwing over the water and opened the canopy. With one last bolt, he signaled it to close up and sink, with sensors to rise and open again only on Valkyrie contact. It sank. He jumped. Varg walked to the drawbridge and set his suit to match the photonics. He immersed himself in the rock and stepped through, then entered the golden hall, now lit in red by a gore-enveloped power system. The Ares had survived like Veikko had said, writhing and sinewy from the remains of Wulfgar's men. Shining deep red where it once shone gold.

He thought he'd seen the Ares nuked. But there was no question that was it, on Earth and intact. He thought back to Mars, to the mystery of the inactive Wolves and knew they must have done something, found some way of smuggling it back under their noses.

Varg drew his microwave in one hand, Tikari sword in the other, prepared for a fight. He tried to link into Alopex to no avail. The computer was set 100 percent on the Ares. The AI was nowhere to be found. Varg implemented the critical protocols to shut down the drawbridge in case of Alopex deactivation. The system was back to Leo, the simple Ares AI.

There was nobody to fight. No Cetaceans, no Wolves, no teams or Valhalla civilians. But the architecture wasn't in shambles; the hall was fine. The Ares undulated and throbbed overhead, horribly grotesque, mixed in with the innards of the Martian tourists. And thankfully without any water to infect. With the rampart up, the world was safe. But the rampart was up so someone must be inside. He looked around at the top of his guard.

The only motion he could detect was a walrus pod trapped along the edge of the ravine. He walked up the spiral walkway and observed the area. Motion nearby, and not from Umberto. There was someone in the communications tower. Hanging like a stalactite from the ravine's top, it was the highest structure in Valhalla. It was covered in antennae and protected by a heavy magnetic shield to clarify any signals. And there was something yellow inside it.

Varg approached with great stealth, and as he entered, he caught Pelamus off guard. But he did not attack. Pelamus had armor that could defy any sword and any microwave beam. It also made him nearly deaf. Varg planned as he stepped silently into the room. He wanted to take Pelamus without a fight, without ever letting the Fish know he was there. The idiot was alone. Varg didn't care why he was alone, and he didn't care why he hadn't set off the Ares yet. None of it would matter if he could just kill Pluturus where he stood. He needed a weapon that could get through that armor. What did the com tower offer? The place had no tactical benefits except that mag shield.

Varg had a stroke of true genius when he thought of that shield. In that instant he thought back to Balder, who had hidden the Mjölnir somewhere in Valhalla, somewhere so well hidden that nobody could find its magnetic signature. An obvious magnetic signature that only a huge magnetic shield could hide. It was in that com tower, it had to be. Somewhere in that very room was a generator designed to crush anything in metal armor, armor like Pelamus's. The cannons wouldn't be there, but his Tikari could channel a charge if he could just find and power the generator. And then he found it. How had he never noticed in a hundred times in that room that the bench in the middle was shaped like a horseshoe? The thing wasn't even disguised, merely painted. And Pelamus was reclining on it.

The only question was if the thing would still work. The com tower field wasn't only strong enough to hide a magnetic signature. It was enough to render most magnets useless. He calculated quickly. Checked his partitions for field strength and frequency of both the tower and the Mjölnir. Every calculation came out at 50 percent likelihood of functionality. It would happen or not. He'd deal with not if it happened.

Varg became the essence of stealth. He approached with no sound, barely a displacement of air that could have given him away. He saw every reflective surface and denied Pelamus sight of his reflection. He made it to the generator and with ease hooked his Tikari into its negative port. His suit could channel the positive without harm to himself. He was ready. He only had to charge the generator, which would make sound but perhaps he could distract the fish, who would have no clue why the bench was making noise. He only needed a few seconds.

“Hey, Fish, where's the school?”

Pelamus turned around, and bless the idiot, he gave a monologue.

“Fish, you call me! Cetaceans are not fish any more than you are an insect. We are men, young human, men. And we will have the same rights as men, the right to live. And to that end, I, Pelamus Pluturus, have taken this ravine and its intended experiment! Now, we have the power to end your civilization, as for a century you have threatened—”

Crunch. Varg's suit froze in place with the magnetic field. When he could move again, the armored suit before him was utterly collapsed in on itself. So passed Pelamus Pluturus, who stood seconds from conquering the globe but died because he couldn't shut up and kill the man before him. Or could he—Varg felt something in his shoulder. Then he felt the room shudder. There was a dart in his shoulder. The Mjölnir had shaken the com tower from its metal fittings. Pelamus had shot him with a tiny dart as he was talking—damn it, he wasn't talking to boast; he was distracting Varg from his own attack. The com tower was shaking. It was going to collapse.

With Pelamus crushed to the size of a pebble and the room breaking up around him, Varg knew to get to the catwalk. Within three steps, he knew that the dart must have been poisoned. In three steps more, he felt it overtaking him. The nearest med kit was one junction away. If he could only make it there, he could at least delay the effects before losing consciousness. But in another three steps, he fell to the floor, paralyzed.

Soon after he felt the tower supports give way. The room was falling from Valhalla's overhangs. Varg's nervous system was failing. He would be dead before he hit the ground.

In his last lucid instant, he felt something he had never felt before, a feeling that might have been death itself and might have been something else. He had never known fear in his life. But now he was afraid, filled with trepidation, the sense of something approaching, something dangerous and final. Varg passed out, terrified, fear upon fear like he'd never imagined could exist. The room fell to the jagged floor of the pit and was crushed with its contents into unsalvageable ruin.

 

 

T
HE
MONITORING
guild authorized the escalation to “red.” The world was at the brink of war. Much of it had already fallen over that edge. Zaibatsu was no more. The Yakuza and Unspeakable Darkness had reduced it to such rubble that UNEGA dissolved the company. What was left of it didn't want to be dissolved and threatened to march on the offices that destroyed it. The greedy vultures that coveted its assets had already fired on the rallies or seized assets prematurely by force. UNEGA tried to legislate what would go where, but by the time the bureaucracy got around to locating it, it had already been stolen.

Blame went in every possible direction. Amorphis accused OMC of hijacking the entire Zaibatsu Pacific shipping fleet. OMC insisted it was taken by the TOT. TOT didn't even exist anymore, having been entirely absorbed by Fyntr Oil in the confusion. Silentium, meanwhile, launched a hostile takeover of Asda subsidiary, ND, which kicked 7,000 Asda supervisors out of the job. They immediately flooded
UNEGA's relocation sector and plugged the cash flow to the
Jourgensen Ministry, which seized the loose Nigerian assets of Zaibatsu to keep its payroll running in an attack for which they hired the Whiplash Militia, leaving DHG undefended. DHG was devoured by Nork, which stood by for its Nigerian offices to be overrun when the Militia returned.

GAUNE meanwhile pushed the limits of legality and decency by appropriating Ireland and Kalaallit Nunaat, and to the latter act Danmark couldn't respond to as it was busy preventing the secession of the more lucrative Faroe Companies. UNEGA vowed retaliation, which, of course, it couldn't do in the least. Unless, said GAUNE, they intended to use illegal force like that nuke they showed off in Presov only days before.

D team had their hands full at first, and overflowing before long. Dani attended to COF's merger and prevented it from turning violent by convincing the Bydo Empire not to illegally seize and liquidate the numerous type R funds it had its eyes on. Death came swiftly to EnsiFerum and freed their kidnapped CEO, thus keeping Ensign and Ferum on track to absorb Green Carnation Pogo Emporium's contract with Sam I-L. Deva and DeMurtas traveled eastward to prevent Xerox from stabbing westward into Shaw's snowy territory.

E team, by contrast, abandoned the business world for assassinations, killing any GAUNE CEOs bent on using conglomerate armies to delve into Zaibatsu's remains with illegal weaponry that would see UNEGA declaring war within the hour. J and L teams found themselves on Luna, trying to convince Tycho Under not to use the confusion to secede from UNEGA. Mars was a complete write-off, having been under direct Zaibatsu control. The PRA rejoiced, now the only ruling body on Mars. Niana considered her nuke well spent.

But no team was present to prevent the sale of Verizon to Uniquity XL. It wasn't even on Valhalla's radar. It would have been had Alf lived to monitor it, but alas, with his death the company fell, and liquidation of its assets began immediately. That meant the link went down in much of northern Europe for almost seventeen seconds.

The results were catastrophic. Euronext went offline for the first time in seventy-nine years. That alone would have been enough to cause mass panic and financial ruin, but when Euronext went down, MATIF and the ÜberBörse went wild trying to take over the sum total of Euronext company traffic, including Uniquity XL, which as a result, shut down its net link later that day, including the recent acquisitions. All of Europe went offline. Most of Africa and Asia, including UNEGA's Headquarters in Tokyo, 404'd, and GAUNE took notice.

Canada was now poised to take over the entire net and charge UNEGA to use it. New York was placed on alert. NASDAQ and NYSE militaries were put on call for the first time in history to shuttle over to the former Verizon territories and bring them online under GAUNE aegis.

All in all, UNEGA was in shambles, and GAUNE was prepared to take over 60 percent of it with military force. Despite the net outages, UNEGA was very aware of this and began massing its own troops for war.

The only saving grace to the degeneration was that neither side appeared to want to go nuclear. There was no benefit in it, no reason to do it. And despite what GAUNE perceived as a show of nuclear force, they armed no ICBMs, scrambled no bombers, activated no satellites, and this conspicuous absence of escalation was intentionally reciprocated by UNEGA. Nobody wanted a nuclear war. Except, of course, for Veikko, who in death had no means to recall his sisters, who he'd consigned to oblivion along with the rest of the globe.

 

 

T
HE
GET
slowed down and pulled alongside the Husavik station. Vibeke watched the landscape grind to a standstill out the berth window and nudged Violet.

“We're here.”

Violet didn't move. Vibeke shoved her.

“Get up, time to nuke our home for the last two years.”

“I'll nuke it later,” said Violet as she hugged her pillow.

In time Violet arose, and they pulled on their suits to face the mission. An odd mission to Violet, but she couldn't quite place why it seemed odd. Neither could Vibeke. But Violet felt unnaturally certain they were doing the right thing. She couldn't fathom how she was so opposed to it when Veikko first asked. At the same time, she couldn't think through the logic of it. She was certain but unsure why she was certain.

Valhalla taught all its recruits to recognize a bore inception. Veikko deleted that training when he was in, knowing from his own training where to find it in the human brain. His hack, if such things were studied, would have gone down in history as one of the most subtle and flawless direct-brain codings of all time. A computer hack is simple and straightforward, a 1 or a 0—it's either done or it's not. Brain recoding is more an art than a craft, and Veikko was a grand master of the art. Violet kept her mind on the job and ignored the odd jingles and tweets of cognitive dissonance, just as Veikko programmed her to.