Gudsriki (50 page)

“Risto! What do I do,” Pytten said desperately, “what do I do?”

“You can do nothing for me. I have but a short time to live. My back is shot through.”

“Sir!” Pytten wept. Risto struggled to speak.

“Pytten… you have to take over—”

Pytten was shocked. “The
Proteus
, sir?” It was impossible. Pytten was a lieutenant again and had never taken any kind of instruction in commanding such a vessel. Risto couldn't mean it. “Or command here?” Also unthinkable. Pytten panicked.

“—take over care of Willie from Lieutenant Korvaaminen for me.”

“Yes, sir!” Pytten wept. Risto sighed in pain. Pytten nodded at the admiral. “He'll be the happiest, fattest salamander in the seven seas.”

Risto nodded. He looked into Pytten's eyes.

“You'll take care of more than that, someday Pytten. Someday you
will
take command of the
Proteus
.”

“But, sir, I can't command a ship, not anymore. I can't be a skipper now. I barely avoided the stockade, and once they find out about me stowing away—”

“There are… allowances, Pytten. For the Admiral of the Fleet. It's a matter of record I wanted you on board. You won't be punished. When this is over, you'll be transferred to serve directly under Captain Katla. It's been planned for weeks now.”

Pytten tried to breathe calmly.

“Adversity…,” Risto sighed, “adversity cannot defeat you. You know that there is nothing you can't overcome. You survived my wrath. You survived the push to the dome. You survived the assembly themselves. Audacity will lose ground, sometimes, lose a rank. But it never lost you my respect.”

Pytten held him tightly as he faded away. Kätyri's words echoed around Pytten's brain: “You're not gonna be a captain if you don't even know how you'll be addressed.”

“I'll make it, Admiral. I'll never give up,” Pytten added, “but command—with ‘sir' and ‘ma'am' out of the running, what will they even call me?”

Risto took his last breath.

“‘Captain,' Pytten. They'll call you ‘Captain.'”

Risto died. The last Valkyries and armored Valkohai moved into the tunnel to kill his brother. Pytten took Risto's body and headed back toward the subs, toward safety and a salamander.

Vibeke passed the mourning Cetacean without a second glance. She took one last look out of the drill hole before she entered to meet her fate with Veikko. As she looked, she saw a three-legged tank on the horizon.

 

 

V
ARG
HAD
set the Blackwing to open only on Valkyrie contact. Nel approached it. She remembered how to fly it; Violet had trained thoroughly. Her brain would be compatible with its interface. But she wasn't a Valkyrie.

“And you never will be. Valkyries take what they want. You know you want to be with me, but you can't admit it to yourself. You're worse than Violet. At least she
tried
to rape Vibs. You could have a hundred times, but empathy stayed your hand, and I had to hear it. Had to listen to your pathetic conscience deny you pleasure.”

She touched the bottom of the craft, wondering how to open it. She climbed up on top.

“It won't open. Not for you, never for you.”

She approached the hatch and sent out a low level pulse signal with her working link for it to open. Nothing happened.

“Because you're not one of us.”

She tried again.

“Because you're pathetic.”

And again.

“Insufficient.”

Again.

“Nothing.”

And she realized that if her new body wasn't a Valkyrie, her old one had been part of one. Nel wasn't the Valkyrie present. Nelson, the Tikari, the insect was. From the center of her broken chest she accessed the Tikari link and sent out the same pulse.

The Blackwing opened its canopy. She could feel the surprise and anger from Veikko's mind spill into her own.

“How the fuck—”

She got in and closed the canopy and drained the cockpit. Then sent a thoughtwave up into the system. The Blackwing started up.

“No!”

Nel lifted off and took the Blackwing into the sky. She set a course for Luna. The vessel could make it there in minutes. She didn't look forward to a new life on the moon, not without Vibeke, but she had nowhere else to go.

“If you leave me, Nel, I'll never forgive you. If you leave now you have nothing on this earth to come back to.”

He was right about that. There was nothing left for her on Earth. No reason to ever return. She hit the engines and headed toward the edge of the atmosphere.

“Then it's done. Good-bye to you, Nel, and all that could have been.”

She felt the lie from his mind. He didn't mean good-bye. She didn't care; she meant it.

She used the vessel's superior sensor grid to monitor the war from afar. Battles were forming in the sky. Ulver, the UKI and the Cetaceans. All destroying each other. The fleets came together like curtains beneath her as she headed toward space, closing upon her former planet and sending her away into the future.

 

 

M
ISHKA
WAS
still there. In her tank. Vibeke was standing only meters from Alf's.

She ran to it, blood quickly coming to a boil. Fury transmuting her sorrow, her morose regret, all her pain into focus. Her wish for death was absent from her mind. Murder had taken over, rewritten her consciousness into one goal. To kill Mishka. To end her permanently, unquestionably, forever.

She climbed into the tank and started up the manual controls. Readouts flickered. Barrels rotated, missiles loaded. She gunned it. She spotted Mishka's tank again and adjusted course. She was only a kilometer away and Kvitøya was a small island. The air battle was raining down debris and sensors suggested some sort of land force was coming ashore from the north. Inconsequential. Mishka was heading south fast. Vibeke was coming up behind her even faster. Three legs versus eight. No contest.

Mishka finally saw the blip behind her. She knew who it was. She turned her cockpit backward and opened fire.

Microwave and projectile bursts started hitting the tank. They had little effect at such range. Vibeke tried to return fire but again hit the mental block. She tried to convince herself she was shooting to injure, not to kill. Still unable. She tried to imagine it was someone else in the tank firing at her. Nothing.

The incoming fire was beginning to rattle the canopy. She had to think fast. Not her strong suit just then. She ran the old Valkyrie software, the antihacking routines. As expected Mishka knew how to circumvent them. They could pinpoint the exact location of the hack on a gyrus on her cerebral cortex but couldn't do anything about it. Mishka was far too good for that. Or was she?

“
Other people are sloppy
,” Veikko had told her. “
Their hacks are so focused in a single cortical column you can spot 'em with Valhalla software, remove 'em with a DBI
.”

She didn't have a direct brain interface. She didn't have time to find the Blackwing's. She could find the hack on the surface of her brain but couldn't zap it out.

She was however completely insane and far from caring about anything but how to kill the woman. She could die seconds later if only she could kill Mishka first. She ejected her Tikari, grasped it firmly, and stabbed as hard as she could into her skull over the hacked gyrus. She wrenched the blade around to crudely remove a small chunk of gray matter. Her vision flickered. Her head erupted in horrific pain. A chunk of her skull and meninges fell to her side along with the fragment of her brain. She tore open the tank's med kit and grabbed an emergency clot and stuffed it in the hole. Bob crawled back into her chest.

She tried out the effects of her ad-lib lobotomy and pulled the triggers. She laughed out loud when the Gatling array spewed metal at the other tank. It did little harm at that range, but Vibeke's ability to fire shocked Mishka into making a mistake. With her attention stretched, she let her tank on autopilot avoid a cliff that she could have jumped. Her tank was going around the drop off. Vibeke knew the terrain and knew what Alf's tank could do. When Mishka's tank made the corner, Vibeke jumped right down and closed the gap.

She let loose every projectile the tank had. Mishka did the same. Fire erupted between them, the air itself destroyed by the barrage of beams and rounds, missiles and more. They were close enough to feel it, like a hailstorm around them, cracking their canopies further and further, denting legs and breaking off barrels as both tanks ended their ammo supply. Soon Vibeke was close enough to ram her.

So she rammed her. The tank's legs briefly entangled and slowed both vehicles. Mishka was knocked meters off course. She was desperate now and rammed back, damaging her own tank further but sending Vibs on course into a wall of rock. Vibeke pulled hard upward and forced the tank to jump. It leapt over Mishka's and landed on her other side, then rammed it toward the same wall.

It was too late to shift course. Mishka had to escape. She increased speed and moved ahead of Alf's tank. She activated the Geki fire. It burned into Vibeke's shield, melting its outer surface and leaving only the conventional glass. Mishka heaved flame again, point-blank into the shield, cracking it into tiny fragments held together only by shape. Then she ran from her cockpit and jumped. She flew toward Vibeke; her feet crashed through the broken windshield and into Vibeke's seat, missing her by millimeters.

Vibeke's skin was torn up badly by the shattering clear shield. She kicked full force into Mishka's side, tearing through her skin and muscle. It broke her foot, she knew it, but before the pain could report, she was pulling herself back toward Mishka, ready to launch an assault.

She relaunched her Tikari at the same moment Mishka launched her eye. The two flying bodies fought and crashed in the snow, locked together in combat. Mishka tried to use the Geki flame again and again, but Vibeke wrenched her arm away every time. Then they both went deaf as a bomb hit just ahead of them. The blast bashed their eardrums in and the world turned silent. And they kept fighting. Mishka used the blast's effect and managed to push Vibs off of her for a moment, but she came right back. They grappled on the cockpit's burning remains until Mishka looked up, forward, and Vibs did the same. They saw where the tank was heading.

In seconds the tank would be directly in between the fighting armies. They were headed straight into the thickest fire from both sides. Mishka was ready to jump off the tank. Vibs didn't let her. Mishka was on top, so Vibeke held her by her shoulders and pushed her higher, but didn't let her go. Mishka was about to get hit by every beam and bullet in the air. So she pulled Vibs up with her.

For a moment they knelt together in bitter embrace, holding each other up for the barrage. And the barrage hit. Beams burned skin off half of Mishka's face and set Vibeke's garb on fire, rounds tore through their skin and muscles and ribs and organs. By the time an explosive round knocked them off the tank and sent them to the ground, both had been hit several dozen times. Mishka's lungs were in poor shape, one round had broken both of Vibeke's clavicles, and they came to a stop on the ground riddled with holes and minus several organs.

But they didn't need spleens to keep fighting. The muscles kept going, even the broken ones in their shot arms. Bones broke themselves to move again but they moved, and they fought. Vibeke kept punching when her arms were nearly gelatin. Mishka fell and kept kicking with the leg she had left. Vibeke fell upon her. She grabbed the Geki implant and threw it away from Mishka's reach. So Mishka clawed at her with her fingernails, cutting deep into her face.

Mishka's skin was full of holes. Vibeke reached in and tore swathes of her skin off from the inside out. They were both bloody pulp and the pulp just kept going. Epinephrine surged through and poured out of both of them; they both refused to stop, collapsing, breaking but fighting, still fighting, until both were aware they had but one move left before they would be physically incapable of moving ever again.

They picked their last acts to kill. Mishka was broken enough to let Vibs punch through her sternum and into her chest. Vibs was shredded to the point Mishka could do the same through the side of her ribs. They both sent their fists into each other and grabbed each other's hearts, and tore them out simultaneously, ripping busted arteries and weak, torn tissue. That was the end of their fight, and of their lives.

As she killed her great nemesis and felt her own heart torn from her ribs, Vibeke was not thinking of the enemy vanquished, she was not thinking of her own demise. As the blood left her brain she thought only of one thing. She wished she'd never even hunted Mishka. She wished she and Nel had simply headed for Luna or beyond. Killing Mishka wasn't worth losing the poor Tikari. And she'd lost it so terribly.

She wished above all that she could see Nel alive again, even if Nel would never forgive her, even if only for a second. She would trade the world for that moment. But she knew in her last thoughts that it could never come. She collapsed hemorrhaging into the snow and died.

 

 

T
HE
G
EKI
arrived in the battlefield seconds after Mishka was dead. They cautiously made their way to the bodies beneath the crossfire.

Varg tried not to look at Vibeke's mutilated body, but he wasn't completely soulless. He looked at the remains of his teammate, his sister. It was hard to see the mess Mishka had made of her. He took some solace in the torn out heart lying by her palm. She had killed Mishka. Her aspiration for over a year was achieved. In the world that was left, it was merciful for her to die in the moment of her victory, if it could be called that.