Ragnarok (40 page)

And in the chair was a Geki.

Fear cut through him again like a kick in the face. Veikko cried out despite himself, robbed of breath before the black cloak. But the cloak didn't stir.

The Geki didn't move.

Veikko forced himself to walk forward, to lurch step-by-step with his blade drawn until it pierced the cloak. Just the cloak. His blade went through it into the chair. He realized it was hanging on the chair. He'd been looking at the chair's backside.

“
And said ‘No chains shall sully thee, thou soul of love and bravery
!'”

He stumbled back and fell on the floor, fear of his mistake gaining a foothold into his mind and attacking again. No rage came to him. Nothing he could use. He was trapped within fear again, so close to its source and so helpless he froze.

The chair began to turn, slowly. Creaking as it swiveled to reveal the true face of the uncloaked Geki sitting before him. Pale, eyes sunken, creased, and elderly. Setting down her book with a wrinkled hand and wincing at the sight of him, her cheeks peeling back to reveal her teeth.

“You came into my house.”

Veikko recoiled at her voice, his anger shattered, his mind raped again. The woman stood.

“You damn Valkyries, you never do as you're told.”

Her voice grabbed his heart with an icy hand. He pulled in his arms and legs, shriveled up like a dead bug. The Geki raised her hand.

“You will burn, now.”

And suddenly fear was his ally. His fear of death, his fear of pain, they rose up in him and took him over. A spark began to form in her palm. Veikko felt his arm flex. The spark became a flame. His arm began to swing. The flame became a fire. He swung his Tikari blade.

It severed her arm and sent it flying to the ground, where it set the carpet on fire. The old woman began to raise her other hand, but Veikko acted from pure instinct, from pure fear. He leaped up and stabbed her in the chest.

“Aaauugghhhh!”

Her sickening death cry burst his lungs, stabbed needles into his stomach, shattered his brain. Veikko felt his sanity torn in half. Felt himself snap from the fear, from the horrifying sound, from his own empowering rage, from all the monstrous terror held in the reservoir he'd just cut open.

And then suddenly, he felt nothing.

“
Thy songs were made for the pure and free, they shall never sound in slavery
!”

The record cut off. The room went silent. Veikko had been held in rapturous fear so long, he wasn't certain what was left when it ended. He was in a library. An old woman was dead in front of him, impaled on his Tikari. Her arm lay by her side. It was on fire. She was a Geki. That's what this Geki was. A grotesque old witch casting a spell. And she was dead.

Veikko spent a moment on the floor catching his breath, trying to reset his internal workings. He felt as if he should be gathering his guts and stuffing them back in, but there was nothing to gather. He was fine. It had all been nothing more than fear. He tried to wrap his brain around it but couldn't.

He remembered the implant. He looked to her arm. Burning in the center of its own fire. And the fire was spreading.

Veikko reached into it, catching fire himself. He examined it for a moment before the burning pain finally struck him. He started a vacuum field from his suit and the fire on him went out. The rest he left to burn. He examined the arm, burned and ancient, its skin sloughing off like paper.

He cut open the palm and found a metal prong inside. He grasped it and pulled. The implant slid out from between her radius and ulna. He saw where it replaced some of her wrist bones, where it held its power source and emitter. He wiped it off on the Geki's chair where her body had fallen back.

And the rage returned to him. After that brief numb moment, it wasn't the fear that returned but his anger, the rage he'd developed to combat it. That rage wasn't gone. It was all the more pure and intense.

He grabbed and swung his Tikari and beheaded the old woman, letting her head drop off the back of the chair. He attached her implant to the clingers on his arm and headed for the door. He snapped into Valkyrie mode again, very aware that there had been two Geki and that one would be hunting him very soon, if not already.

He made his way to the door where the cold mountain air caressed him. It was pure air, air so clean he'd never felt anything like it in his lungs, not the refined air of interior Mars nor the ocean air of his former home, not even the comfortable familiar air of Valhalla. Slowly it was tainted by smoke.

He walked out into the beautiful night landscape and out from under the Geki web into the vast mountain range. The Geki web caught fire behind him as he walked away. His geolocator slowly came back on and told him he was in America with a village eighteen kilometers along that black paved road. He set out toward the village.

As he walked, Veikko set his Tikari to the sky to watch for any sign of air distortion. It might give him a fraction of a second's chance against it if the other Geki came. He set his link to half immersion. He didn't tap into Alopex, the anger stuck to him, and he didn't trust his old friends just yet. He wanted to see Valhalla through his own eyes, to check on it on his own terms.

When he'd first arrived in the ravine and learned his first spy tactics, he'd set a few bugs around the place, bugs he never got around to using. Furious and betrayed to the Geki by his home, he logged into the spyware and took a look around, viewing the ravine for the first time as an outsider.

 

 

“D
O
YOU
have any idea who we are or what we're going to do to you?” Vibeke asked. The men seemed unperturbed. They bared their teeth and moved in closer. They all attacked at once.

Violet and Vibeke both set their Tiks to berserker mode and let them orbit. They ran quickly away from each other so as not to harm the other, cutting into the crowd and sending body parts flying.

Violet ran for the exit to the room, to make her way up topside through all the Wolves who crossed her path. But the field of men was incredibly dense. Her Tikari couldn't cut through them all. She had to recall it for a boost from its thruster again and again to stab and slice at those immediately in front of her. She glanced to Vibeke and saw she was making the same slow progress.

There was no way around it. They fought their way out, killing swaths of men, drenching the floor in a decimeter of blood and taking no shortage of blows and microwave bolts themselves. Violet was tired after only a few meters of the mass, and the room was twenty meters across.

She made her way to the wall to take some of the pressure off, but that was hardly a break. The energy was sapped from her by her suit to maintain the antimicrowave field. Bullets hit from time to time, and they took even more. She felt cold, freezing cold before long.

By the time she made it to the wall, she was getting alerts. Frostbite would set in within seconds. Her Tikari would need to recharge soon. She was two meters from the exit. Vibeke was running out before her.

For the briefest moment, she was angered at the sight. Vibs was leaving without her. And why shouldn't she abandon her? After what she'd done, she deserved it. But she wiped the line of thought from her mind. Vibs was running because she knew Violet was right behind her, that she could take it and live just fine. She didn't want to disappoint her.

Violet cut through the last men and turned off her fields just in time to prevent internal freeze damage. Her Tikari rushed back into her chest to avoid getting left behind. She caught up with Vibeke, and the two continued to run through the hall.

Before long they came to the aperture and spiral staircase. Vibeke closed the aperture behind them and welded it shut with her microwave.

“That was a hell of a room,” linked Vibs.

“I got forty-eight.”

“Thirty-seven, guess I got the shallow end.”

Violet laughed silently. She was sitting at the base of the stairs behind Vibeke, nose right by her boot. She knew she was looking at her foot enamored again. Of all the times—she got two seconds of rest after thinking Vibs abandoned her, and already she was thinking about rubbing her feet.

I'm insane
, she thought.
Vibeke was completely right, and I've been too crazy to see it
. In that moment she thought she could push her love for Vibeke away and focus only on teamwork. It would be hard, but she'd done harder things. If she could cut through forty-eight men, she could beat down her libido. And that's all it was, she told herself. It wasn't love. It was sex. And she'd just proven that in spades.

Vibeke stood and began to climb the stairs. Violet followed and succeeded in not staring at her butt. They passed the side rooms with caution and stepped into the shaft leading out.

Mishka sat in an abandoned ruin over the entrance with her cutter rifle ready. This time she wasn't going to bring a building down on them or stop at anything short of two severed brain stems. She prayed, the best way to focus she knew.
Deliver to me my enemies, O Lord
.

Vibeke walked toward the entrance. She saw a black dot fly out through it. She recognized it instantly and fell back.

“Mishka!” she shouted, then ran back.

She bumped into Violet, pushing her back down the shaft. A cutter beam sliced through the air, burning deep into the coal as they fell down the first spiral of stairs. A fire suppressor hit the flames with a vacuum field before the entire mine went up. Violet briefly thanked Wulfgar for following proper safety procedures in setting up his tunnels of horror.

Mishka cursed. She should have risked hitting the eye to kill her. Now she was underground hunting for another exit. She had another chance, though. She didn't know where they'd come out, but she knew where they'd go—she had seen the pogo land. She ran for it.

Violet and Vibeke ran for the first rooms branching off from the stairs. There had to be another way out. Violet ran first and microwaved two Wolves who came across their path. After a couple minutes, they realized there was no other entrance. Impossible, there were too many people there to use a single portal. The new Ares tanks—the drill, far too large for their entry route. There had to be another way.

“Side,” said Vibeke. Violet ran for the steps down to the welded aperture. There had to be a dock of some sort on the side of the island, which was built up on its edges like a battleship. They came to the aperture, and Vibeke drew her microwave just in time to see it burst open from the other side. She switched from cutting beams to killing beams and fired into the pit. But no fire came back.

They cautiously stepped down into the cafeteria hall, and then into the cafeteria ready for another slaughter. The few remaining men who saw them, though, ran for dear life, leaving them standing in an empty room, shin deep in blood and body parts.

“That must have sucked for them. I mean it was their lunch break, wasn't it?”

“Yeah we're… we're not friendly people.”

Mishka came to the pogo and hacked its lock. Not one of Valhalla's standard pogos, it was easily opened. Mishka crawled inside the back. She pulled a Carlin Knife from her ankle band and cut her way through the backseat into the trunk. There she lay in wait, linked into her rifle's scope, keeping it aimed at the driver headrest with only a fraction of a centimeter sticking out of the seat. She had them.

Violet and Vibeke walked calmly through the room and into the next hall, where they found the Ares room and the obscured but large door through which it could exit. They looked and linked around for a door opener, and Vibeke found an open protocol. She linked it open, and it began to rise. She let it open just enough to slip through and rolled out with Violet.

Violet burst into sunlight at the side of the island. There, a platform jutted out of its side to hold several black pogos. She felt the subtle sizzle of the thermoptic field that had hidden the platform from their Tikaris. She recognized one pogo as the vessel that rescued Wulfgar from the island, that flew off into the aurora. She ran for it, and Vibeke followed.

“Oi! You ain't registered on tha—girls?”

Vibeke elbowed the guard Wolf into unconsciousness and took his key box. They leaped into the pogo. Vibeke found the proper key, and Violet started the pogo, then lifted off at top speed.

Out of the windshield, through her scope, Mishka saw the pogo take flight. She knew instantly who it was. She cut her way back out of the seat and threw her rifle aside. She hacked the pogo to start and lifted off.

They were both in conventional pogos. Mishka knew how to catch up. She overrode the safety features on the engine and gunned it almost to the point of failure. She sped toward Violet and Vibs at nearly the speed of sound.

Vibeke saw the pogo chasing them and warned Violet. Violet overcranked the engine and steered out over the sea. But the other pogo was gaining on them. Vibeke crawled into the back and shot out the window with her microwave. The air suddenly left the pogo leaving a near vacuum. Vibs shot out the windshield past Violet, who knew to put up an inertia field to calm the air. They could breathe again.

Vibeke began firing at the pogo behind them, which continued to gain. Then suddenly, a cutter beam appeared, firing past them. Violet began evasive maneuvers, flying wildly from side to side. But Vibeke knew who it was.

“Slow a tenth!”

She wanted her to catch up. To kill her.

Violet should have gone on. But she felt a pang of guilt. She owed Vibeke everything after what had happened. She knew as she thought it that she was wrong to consider it, that it was a mistake caused by romantic thoughts on the teams, exactly as Vibs said. But she did it anyway.

The pogo slowed, and Mishka's sped up to them, almost passing. As it reached them, microwave fire and cutter beams burned the air between them, but with the evasive driving of both, nothing connected.