Gudsriki (8 page)

Those allies. She thought them through. Karpathos, Udachnaya, Vladivostok, Abu Simbel, Luna, Qosqo. She should be heading for one or another. Dr. Niide might be in one already, the last net whisper of Orkney was weeks ago, and she had only pried a few words out of it before the net went dead for good. Surely Karpathos or some other base was on top of things. Valhalla might be nuked, but the loose allied organization, the nameless amoeba, was still going strong. And hunting her if they knew what happened. The fact she wasn't dead likely meant the others had all been nuked by merit of their proximity to cities, to civilization. The destruction presumably knew no end.
Fuck it,
she thought.

It took only hours to reach Kirkwall at the center of the archipelago. It was something of a shock—it looked like a perfectly normal city. People wandered about in the snow, heading to a nearby bar or market or heading home. She saw families out in the open. It was as if she'd entered an alternate dimension where the war never happened. She linked into her Tikari and confirmed there was still no shortage of radiation in the air and the temperatures were in flux, but the buildings stood, not in ruins. And the people seemed almost happy. One approached her. She remained wary.

“Welcome to Kirkwall, young lady! Have ye come far?”

“From Lairg.”

“My goodness! Ye must be freezin' years off if ye came by sea. Y'care for some beer?”

“Yes, thank you!” she exclaimed, more out of surprise than gratitude. She followed the man back to a small house a few blocks south where he showed her in. There was a fire burning and a small family lounging, reading paper books. Vibs felt like she'd entered one of her dreamscapes. One of the books she saw was
The Devil Drives
. Familiarity that seemed too perfect to be real. She grew somewhat suspicious.

The man introduced her to his wife and her other husband and all three of their children, seven, eight, and ten. He insisted on sharing some of their food. She wanted to respond in kind, but the idea of feeding the family butchered rapist seemed impure, as if it would taint them with the misery of the mainland.

“The peace won't last much longer,” said the man. “There's fighting on Eday and Sanday, not far from here. North Ronaldsay's been taken by force. YUP army.”

“YUP? They're here?”

“Comin' here. UKI's fighting the good fight, but they say the YUP is part of a new clan that's taken all Europe. The nation of Ulver.”

The word sounded familiar to her. “Ulver?”

“Aye. They took the Shetlands last week. Rumor is they left it untouched mostly, except the blondes. Kidnapped all the blondes on the Isles. Insanity, if it's true.”

“Does anyone know why?”

“Rumors about Ulver are wild, lassie. Some say it's run by the old man's child himself, that we're in the end times. Religious tomfoolery's been rampant since the war. Some say it's run by a man with a metal jaw.”

Ulver meant “Wolves.” Vibeke was haunted by the idea it could have something to do with Wulfgar's gang. How much had he made selling the Ares? If he captured Valhalla?

Two of the boys observed Violet's Tikari, which frolicked before them, careful not to cut them with its wings. They took it as being timid. They had no idea how dangerous a piece of equipment they were toying with.

“All we really know,” he continued, “is they fight strong but fight fair. No chemical attacks, no more nukin', they take prisoners when they can avoid killin' and 'on't massacre the towns, so the escapees say.”

“But they take blondes.”

“Rumors abound, lassie. Rumors abound.”

They let her sleep in the children's room, keeping their three boys in their own. Their naiveté was stunning. Tactically unsound. But these weren't people obsessed with tactics. They were altruists, creatures not to be trusted but taken advantage of in the extreme. Vibeke felt like she sullied their house, the things she'd done. The things she'd enjoyed doing. But shelter was not to be abandoned in such times. She got another full night's sleep and woke rested and ready to hunt. She thanked the family profusely, but offered them no supplies nor protection should the war come. She couldn't tie herself down or lose a single syrette. She left in the morning asking only one question.

“Have you heard of a doctor with a red beard coming to the islands?”

He had not. She began the search.

 

 

D
IM
GLIMPSES
of the water flickered before Mishka's eyes. She was coming out of the cryo—if all went well, and she was alive, so it had—a week and a half after Balder's death. Not long enough for the ravine to forget her acts, but long enough they wouldn't be looking for her right under their nose.

She flexed and let the ice inside her muscles break apart and warm. She opened her eyes. A thin gap between the rocks let light in. The dim light of a winter sun, dimmer than she expected.

She began diagnostics. Radiation was higher than normal. Pollutants off the scale. She kicked the tank to dig out of its tomb. It shoved away the heavy rocks and deployed its periscope. She looked over the water. There was nobody to be seen. She assumed that if Valhalla had found her she'd not be alive, so she anticipated no traps. Valkyries didn't trap enemies like her. They killed them. She let the tank surface.

There was nothing around but virgin snow, covering all of Kvitøya. A giant bulge where the rampart was still up. And nothing else but an eerie calm. She set the tank as tall as it could go and still scraped the snow with its belly. She trotted over to the bulge in the snow. She waited. There were no alarms, no discernible links from the HMDLR. No links at all.

The net was gone. She felt around for anything, any sign of link traffic, but found nothing at all. Radiation and pollutants. A nuclear war had been fought as she slept.

And Valhalla wasn't attacking her. She slowly walked around the rampart. Scans showed nothing under the snow but the wreckage from Balder's Ice-CAV and a pogo. No sign of the chromatic drawbridge—it must have been off. But she spotted a depression in the snow. She fired at it with the tank's microwave, melting the area. It was a drill hole in the rampart. Wulfgar's access. She dismounted and walked down in, microwave ready.

The drill was still plugging the hole, but someone had cut through the back of it, offering a cramped but slick trapdoor down onto the edge of the pit. She took it and walked inside.

Mishka entered the ravine to find nothing like it was left. The power system was still glowing, but glowing red. Throbbing, living water stuck to it as if by design. Bloodred water striated with guts, as if Valhalla's heart had come alive, but come alive as an evil, seething core.

There were several walruses, most dead, some dying, some seemingly alive and well and unashamed of necrophagy. The place was overrun. The smell was terrible. She continued down the spiral wall, cautiously and keenly aware of the emptiness of the place. Except for one spot near the core. Something was moving, something clearly not a walrus.

It was a mechanical beast like nothing she had ever seen before. It was alive, that much was certain. It had once been a man. But now it was something else. It had no face, just a bare cross section of its original head. It still had human parts, scattered throughout its heavy mechanical frame. It had clothing distributed in pieces, affixed to what might have been its torso. Thaco armor. The color was familiar.

“Are you alive?” asked Mishka.

Veikko tried to stand up, but he only heard more grinding. He tried to say “help” but heard only his grisly rasp.

“What are you?” she spoke again.

He recognized her voice. “Mishka?”

“Who are you?”

“Veikko,” he grunted.

“Veikko? Valknut team Veikko?”

“No, Veikko Jacobs, inventor of the automatic spatula. Mishka?”

“Well, fancy meeting you here. Or, what's left of you.”

“What's left of me?”

“Not a great deal. Do you… do you know what you… are?”

“More or less.”

“You have some retina left. Let me get you some adaptive lenses from the med bay.”

She left; Veikko was about to tell her to wait, but the promise of sight was too great. He reclined, or at least let his body rest.

He'd spent the last week trying to find some way in which he could move, and not entirely without success. Though 99 percent of his nerves ran into dead ends of grinding and pain, the last percent were like the start of a puzzle box. Each opened nerve led to two more. He was almost able to crawl, though he feared tearing his organic components if he tried too hard. So he stayed cautious and worked slowly.

“This will hurt,” said Mishka.

He felt pain in his eyes, more pain than he was in before. Something burned around them. He tried to blink, but he had no eyelids. Or eyes. But he could see something, shapes, blurry but growing sharper from tunnel vision half-faded to red.

And then he saw Mishka. She smiled at him.

“Good as new!”

She held up a mirror.

Veikko wasn't sure what he was seeing at first. It looked like a Rorschach test but red and raw. Blood encrusted tissue, nasal turbinates, two clear eyes—it was a cross section from a head.

Then he realized it was his own. Horror struck him as if a Geki had jumped into the ravine. It couldn't be him, but it was. He was reduced to a shingle of meat and bone, a grotesque visage like nothing he'd ever seen even among the Unspeakable Darkness. He was a horror.

“That's not the best part,” said Mishka. “Look down.”

He looked down and saw the mass of machinery and meat he'd been trying to master. It looked like a twist of jagged metal and mutilated flesh sinking into a hole in the ground. He was right beside the Ares, the YGDR S/L, his body propping up the heavy power plant and entire ravine atop the curved empty space of the rampart.

“I think you actually have arms and legs, but you're… not put together.”

“Skadi….”

“She's to your left.”

Veikko looked. His eyes were foggy. He had only lenses in front of his retinas but no sclera, no actual eye to keep the stray light out. He had half a sense of vision.

Skadi lay dead on the stone floor. Her chest was a hole, her suit burned up black around it. Veikko felt nothing at the sight. He couldn't even absorb her loss; too much had happened to him.

He was the ultimate victim of the great prank. He got all he wanted, but he got it wrong. He owned the ravine, but it was empty of everything but the Ares, to which he was now bound. The world was at war, but he couldn't rise up and play in it. And all the wrong people had died. Everyone who received his link dump. Everyone on his team. He might have cried if he still had tear ducts.

“Don't kill me,” he said.

“Why would I do that?” asked Mishka.

“I'd kill you if I could.”

“But you can't. You can't do much of anything, can you?”

“No.”

“Poor little thing. How about you tell me where your sister is?”

“Dead.”

“How?”

“I got her killed starting this war.”

“Oh, this is your doing? Why start a war?”

“Was trying to nuke the Ares.”

“The Ares?” She looked up at the throbbing mass. “Is that what this thing is? That's what this was all about? They brought it back from Mars? Ah! And you were the team sent to stop it. Good job, Valknut!”

“Fuck you too.”

“Good thing the rampart's up! I'd hate to see the whole planet end thanks to you. Oh wait.”

“What's it like up there?”

“Radioactive and quiet. Haven't been south yet. So you claim Vibeke is dead? How dead? All dead or only mostly dead?”

“I don't know. I hacked her to launch a nuclear missile. If it didn't land here something went wrong.”

“You know a Valkyrie isn't dead until you see their liquefied brain. And Veikko, really? You hacked your own teammate? We hacked a hundred people a year in M team but not each other, silly fish.”

Veikko might have looked ashamed if he had a face to show it. “Don't call me a fish.”

“Okay, nudibranch. Where did you send my pet?”

“Dimmuborgir.”

The ravine shook. Veikko screamed in pain. Mishka just looked around until it ended.

“What was that?”

“That's why you can't kill me. I'm the only thing keeping the ravine from collapsing. Only thing keeping the Ares from hitting ocean.”

“That's… that's a pretty good reason.”

“Just go away, Mishka.”

“I'll kill your sister soon enough, or worse. Or I won't. If these are the end days, I best forgive her.”

“Don't make me vomit. I don't know where it would come out.”

“Some of us have been waiting, Veikko, waiting for the end. You see, the Bible tells us that—”

“Jesus fucking Christ, Mishka, give it up.”

“Now's not a good time to blaspheme, Veikko. The apocalypse is upon us. This, this is all God's judgment.”

“Spare me your religious bullshit.”

“You're free to walk away.” He ground gears again. “But what was I saying? Ah yes: the Bible predicted all of this, you see. This is the confirmation, the culmination of God's plan. ‘The beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make war against them, and shall overcome them, and kill them.' Good job, Veikko, you started the apocalypse. It's a good thing.”

“You're full of shit.”

“‘And the angel, which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth, lifted up his hand to heaven—'”

“Please just shut the fuck up. I know I'm condemned to eternity in this pit, but you don't have to fucking preach at me through it.”

“I'm just proud of my own role in the prophecy.”