Ragnarok (45 page)

Alf didn't stop attacking. He jumped down and landed on Wulfgar's stomach. The spear leaped into his hand, and he stabbed Wulfgar again, only his rib breaking protected him from death. Alf kicked him, his leg splitting into two spines as it connected, piercing Wulfgar's side and sending him down to the next branch. He bounced off it and fell down to another, almost five meters below.

Wulfgar was scared shitless. He had at least expected to throw a punch, but he never even—his line of thought ceased as the spear launched itself, rocket ended, into his right arm, nearly severing it. Wulfgar now intended to run, but he couldn't. Alf was on top of him with a double kick, breaking his hip. Suddenly Alf pulled back his thumb like the fore-end of a shotgun and fired. Wulfgar barely moved his head in time to keep it from getting blown off, still the ricocheting pellets bounced back at him from the branch and embedded in the back of his head.

Alf wasted no time. He kicked Wulfgar again, sending him down to the next branch. Wulfgar managed to pull himself up just enough to fall down to another branch, then another. He had enough time from the falls to catch his breath, and then the tarantula landed in front of him and knocked it back out of him. He fell again, hitting a branch with his face, then falling to another below it. Nothing was under him except the rocky ground now. He jumped down the last four meters and broke his shin on the stone.

Alf landed on his feet next to him and kicked, spinning Wulfgar around on his spine. And again, spinning him the other way. The tarantula landed and formed a spear. Alf raised it high into the air and aimed for the center of Wulfgar's skull.

Cato fired his microwave into Alf's back, paralyzing him. He fell to the rock. Cato stowed his microwave and offered Wulfgar a hand, pulling his massive, heavy body up to stand.

“I'd say that's for my team, mate,” he said to Alf, “but I'm content to let them die. Truth is, I planned to sacrifice them to bring back the Ares if Wulfgar here hadn't done it himself. My contract with him required that much. Killing you wasn't part of our deal. You weren't even a subsection. Or how did you phrase it when you took me in?”

Alf didn't try to speak.

“A side letter to Cassandra's induction? You thought I was a by-product? This by-product's your death, mate. This by-product ended you.”

He patted Wulfgar on the back.

“Took you long enough,” muttered Wulfgar.

“Patience is the greatest of all virtues.”

“I never liked Shakespeare.”

“Not Shakespeare, mate. Do it.”

Wulfgar pulled Alf up from the rock and extended his jaw to its maximum length. He activated the teeth, which cycled like a chainsaw. He bit down on Alf's head, destroying his brain in a wide splatter, leaving only his lower jaw. He let the corpse fall back to the rock.

“Now, Cato,” he said, blood spilling down from his mouth, “lower this rampart. And more urgently… get me to a—”

Wulfgar passed out on the rock, beaten and broken from the fight. Cato slowly dragged him to Dr. Niide.

 

 

B
ATTLE
POGOS
appeared on the horizon of Hashima.

They flew over the island and let loose every conventional bomb they had. Buildings were blown off their crumbling foundations. The blasts flooded the air, splitting off the surface of the island and leaving barren waste across it.

Then the Valkyries landed, nine of them with Tikaris orbiting, plunging down into the holes left by the surface assault. They cut the remaining Wolves to shreds. Blood poured down through the tunnels. So much blood issued that the Wolves on the lowest floors drowned before the Valkyries could slaughter them. Each Valkyrie fired twenty scanner bullets.

The scanners imaged the lair and mapped out its tunnels
thoroughly. They sent the telemetry to H team's pogo, the pogo with the Gerðr System. The system took in all the data and prepared a cutting field around the tunnels. The Valkyries inside made their escape and tractored onto the passing battle pogos on their next pass. Once safe, H team activated the system.

The field cut into the rock and held the tunnels in place. Then the field rose up above the ground bringing the internal structure of the mines up onto the surface. The field turned off and the structure began to fall apart. But as soon as the Valkyries were inside, the battle pogos turned around for their final pass. Their guns began to fire. Every projectile they had shattered the tunnels, disgorging the blood and meat within them, breaking Wulfgar's lair into nothingness, leaving Hashima utterly annihilated topside and below, ruined, a bloody stretch of crushed land in the middle of the sea.

 

 

D
R
. N
IIDE
sat back and lamented his oath, the mind-locking oath that forced him not to break it.

After a short time in the medical center, Cato led Wulfgar toward the com tower.

“Alf always suspected, since you were a prisoner,” said Cato, “soon as I kept 'em from tinkering with your Gulliver.”

“Assuming you mean you kept them from reprogramming me to be a tofu merchant, I'm endlessly grateful.”

“As you should be, mate.”

“I believe you had one final duty to me before I make you my general.”

“Ah yes, about that….”

“You wouldn't be trying to avoid your duties, would you, Cato?”

“No, not at all. Just… I never got Valknut's pip frequency. He's harder to find than expected.”

“You will find him, Cato. I have plans for him.”

“If I may ask what plans, perhaps I—”

Wulfgar turned to him and stopped on the walkway.

“You said, Cato, that I died in that box because a walrus crushed me, yes?”

“Yes, Wulfgar.”

“Then my order stands. You'll be my general as soon as you bring me that walrus.”

“Yes, Wulfgar.”

He turned and continued up the walkway, with a hand on Cato's chest to tell him not to follow. In the com tower, he sat down on the bench in the middle and linked into the clean line. He didn't dare link into Alopex. They would have to dismantle the Valhalla broadbrain and restore it to the Ares control system.

From the clean line, he loaded the contact protocol from a partition the Cetaceans had assembled in his mind when he took the contract.

“Valhalla seized, Ares ready to assemble.”

“Good, good!” replied Pelamus. “I'll be there within the hour. I'll transfer ownership of the YUP to you in its entirety, along with the other assets we spoke of. You have done well, Wulfgar, and secured peace for your kind.”

“For my kind?” he asked.

“Of course. If we didn't have the Ares to kill you all, we'd have killed you all one by one. For
our
safety.”

Wulfgar snorted.

 

 

V
EIKKO
'
S
PLAN
was back on track. It was time to deal with the Ares. Ideally, Violet and Vibeke would be willing to hijack a fission warhead and send it straight to Valhalla. Veikko knew from the start that it was unlikely they could successfully break into a nuclear silo and complete the task, and even less likely they'd be willing. He could handle the willing part, but he simply couldn't bank on them succeeding.

As a backup plan, he hacked into UNEGA's security mainframe and piggybacked from there into the DHS. He went straight for the slush pile to deposit his intel. He'd masterfully crafted it in a partition as he flew to Vadsø: proof that the Presov nuclear blast originated from a GAUNE base on UNEGA's own soil, an island called Kvitøya. On this island, GAUNE was constructing a Cobalt Thorium G device. Conventional and fusion attacks would activate the Cobalt and poison half of UNEGA. But a pure fission vaporization warhead would annihilate it. UNEGA would have only one choice—to nuke Valhalla and destroy the Ares. Naturally this intel would be ignored by the bureaucrats.

Until its prophecy came true: that GAUNE intended to break into UNEGA's nuclear base at Dimmuborgir shortly and launch a missile as a black flag operation. Then the ravine would be annihilated at the atomic level. And GAUNE and UNEGA would be in a de facto state of nuclear war. Then at last the world would be warm and on fire. The evacuated Valkyries, as the ultimate force would reign supreme, with Veikko at their helm. He'd need only deal with the final Geki, and with all Valhalla behind him and with the Geki's own weapon, there was no way he could lose. He only had to learn how to use it.

He flew south to Arcolochalsh. Skadi and W team had the plan. They'd both be heading to Arcolochalsh to rendezvous with him and begin the next phase. Start the war. Evacuate Eric and Niide. Take the weapons. Find a new home.

The only real variables were Violet and Vibeke. He simply couldn't be sure, no matter how well he knew them, what their reaction would be. He wasn't even certain how much they knew. He'd have to approach it all in the most discreet, subtle way possible.

“I killed Balder and framed Cato who killed Alf. I don't suppose you two would be up to hijacking a nuclear bomb to destroy the ravine?”

“What?”

“No!”

“That's what I thought. Give me one thing, though, that's all I ask—just think about it and sleep on it. And in the morning, if you don't want to do it, that's that.”

Vibeke and Violet slept in the Fraser's guest room. Violet fell asleep with Vibeke's breath on her cheek, warm and sweet. Her hand stayed on Vibeke's side, where it dipped down under the covers before her hip. Violet's fingers soaked in the heat of her skin and felt merged with it, stuck to it, and part of it.

Veikko used every tactic of silence to open their door and walk in without waking them. He slowly crept up to the sleeping couple and pulled down the sheets with Valkyrie subtlety, not waking them as he exposed their backs. The top of their spines, where they'd never look for marks. There he put the cerebral bores and began the hack.

As the bore mapped their brains, Veikko ejected Sal.

“You up for another, little guy?” he linked.

Sal nodded.

“Your aunts are gonna need help. Okay?”

In the morning, Violet and Vibeke consulted Alf's black book. Violet couldn't even make out the handwriting to have her link read it for her, but Vibeke found the key intel. The nearest active nuclear missile silo. They headed for the GET station on the roof and hacked two tickets to Iceland, reserving a berth for the trip.

Veikko headed for the seventy-sixth floor atrium, which was always empty according to the Frasers. He found it devoid of residents.

He sat down and took the Geki implant from his arm. It looked simple enough. Connections for nerves along what was clearly a power source, body-kinetic like their suits from the looks of it. He produced a bore from one of his armor pockets and removed the shell. He connected each nerve node to one of the bore's intakes and linked in through it.

The instant the implant activated, the other Geki appeared. Veikko had only a fraction of a second to feel like the biggest idiot in the universe for not expecting the device to call it like a dog whistle before the fear hit him and tore into him with a vengeance. He could find no rage. It had been scared out of him. He screamed.

Flames erupted from under its cloak, burning the area around Veikko and supercharging his suit field with its heat. It held against the flames, but the air inside still grew impossibly hot. He ran. Trees burst into flames behind him, rocks cracked from the heat. The fire burned so intense it finally ignited the air inside Veikko's field, and he still caught aflame.

Using a succession of breath stealing vacuum fields to extinguish the flames, Veikko made it to the atrium lagoon and jumped under the water. Hallucinations returned to him, deep in the midst of the oppressive fear. He could barely tell he was in real water at all.

Then the water was gone, boiled in a flash. He kept running. He tried to link into the Geki implant to no avail. Something inside it wouldn't recognize him despite every hack in his partition. Then he saw it—part of the old Geki's ulna. The implant was like a Tikari, embedded with bone from its owner so it couldn't be tricked. He dropped the implant and ducked behind a concrete beach shower.

Flames surrounded the shower and hit Veikko from both sides, burning him badly. His protective field was stronger than ever, using the energy from the flames to stay at maximum strength, but the Geki fire continued to ignite the air within and every vacuum he created weakened him drastically.

For a moment, the fire stopped. Veikko knew it was a trap. The fear told him to run. The instant he moved, the Geki would burn him front on and kill him. But he had no choice. Suddenly the Geki was above him, throwing fire straight down. He was burned again, half his hair singed off, his skin blackened. He ran.

The flames followed him, and fear permeated him. Terror and flame and no escape.

 

 

V
ARG
TURNED
off the thermobaric thruster as he neared land. He searched for Alopex, but there was no Alopex to link into. He searched for Balder, but he wasn't online. He searched for his team. He found Violet and Vibeke over the ocean, and Veikko in Kyle City. He was closest to Kyle so he used the last of his transorbital momentum to reach the place. He had many questions to ask.

As he approached Veikko's location, he found it on fire. Veikko was somewhere on the 76th floor, the source of the flames. Varg flew the Blackwing straight through the wall into the building's atrium. He saw a black cloak hurtling fire. The word Geki flashed through his mind, and he thought he saw Veikko in the flames. He aimed his razor sharp wing at the Geki and flew straight through it, cleaving it in half. Both halves warped away. It happened so fast the fear never even struck him.