Ragnarok (49 page)

The link was erratic, and all the teams across the globe were out of contact. The net was silent, utterly silent. Even attempts to find ads from down south proved ineffective. It seemed very much as if the globe had been shut down or gone insane. In contrast to the conglomerate mayhem on the mainland, Kvitøya was a peaceful ruin.

The remaining Valkyries headed south to join the Keres on Karpathos, or the Zhnyetse in Vladivostok. The events that had taken place were uncertain. Plans were unclear.

 

 

S
AL
REMAINED
silent as Vibeke opened the seal to the first Ehren plate and hardwired in. She scoured the system for its own diagnostics. She found the old glitch that could be tricked into launching. She found the targeting override systems, everything she needed to launch except for the protocols to arm the nuclear warheads. Not only were the diagnostics and protocols missing, but all references to nuclear technology.

“Something's wrong,” linked Vibeke.

“Don't say that when you're working on nuclear missiles,” whispered Violet.

“They're not nuclear missiles.”

Violet looked at her.

“Beg your pardon?” said Sal.

“The controls are all wrong,” she explained. “These have no airburst measures. Whatever they are, they go off on the ground. And there's no yield control, only range and intensity, and ‘temper.'”

“Temper?”

“Temper, settings A and C.”

“What the hell are these?” asked Violet.

Vibeke checked over her partitions. Valhalla didn't have anything in its arsenal for which one would set A or C “tempers.” And there was only one weapon Valhalla would never use. Only one weapon that would have an organic neural programming system to program the projective RNA sequences.

“These are wave bombs,” said Vibeke.

“What?”

“This is an illegal wave bomb silo.”

“Oh snap,” said Sal.

Violet thought only briefly. “We'll report them to the courts later. We need to find fission warheads, or at least fusion warheads we can drain.”

“Alf's map only shows one launch door, this is it. We need to deactivate these and get out.”

“Forget deactivating them. It's not our business, and we have bigger concerns. Let's go.”

“Valhalla never leaves wave bombs intact.”

“We're not in Valhalla anymore. Let's get out of here!”

“We have to boil the warheads. These seven tubes are a hundred times more sadistic than the Ares.”

“If I may?” interrupted Sal.

“What is it?”

“Veikko planned for this contingency. Launching the wave bombs will still result in the destruction of the Ares.”

“Sal, you can't be serious.”

“I am one of Veikko's body parts. Serious isn't in my repertoire. But we can complete the mission.”

“We're not launching wave bombs, Sal!”

“That is exactly what you must do, Vibeke.”

“It's not an argument, Sal. Close down the base. We're deactivating these and finding another.”

“Negative. Time is a factor. Proceed to launch.”

“Not a chance, Sal. Our mission is in another silo.”

The Ehren Plates would still have a fail-safe, a way to deactivate them completely. She looked deeper into the systems. Specific shaped fields. Genetic targeting. Wave dissipation patterning. Fail-safes.

“Stop, Vibeke,” sounded Veikko's voice.

She opened the fail-safes and found a subroutine labeled complete dismantle. That had to be the boiling protocol. But it was inaccessible. It was made only to go into effect if the missiles were about to launch.

“Vibeke, I wouldn't do that if I were you….”

She input a null firing solution into the first Ehren Plate, and only the plate so there was no chance of launch. She activated the solution and began the destruction protocol for the first missile.

 

 

“F
IRING
S
OLUTION
Detected” read the link label.

“Peterson, we have another false on the UNEGA labels.”

For the tenth time that month, the system was reading a launch solution in Dimmuborgir. Since the day GAUNE realized they had a wave bomb installation, Peterson had sat at his post monitoring it for firing solutions on their tubes.

The spybots had been introduced two years prior by an agent disguised as one of their maintenance crew, an agent it took three years to deposit. He'd adeptly placed a remote tap under each Ehren Plate, designed not only to detect a solution but to activate the plate and destroy the missile's capability.

But the bots were susceptible to radio waves. Whenever an UNEGA soldier made an off-link call in the room, Peterson got a false firing solution.

Singh checked it out. It was a simple matter to shunt the bot's power to its radio shielding, and then the signal would go away. He sent a link to the bots to do so. But the detection persisted.

“Still on,” said Peterson.

“I did the thing, did you refresh?”

“Yeah, it's still there.”

“Well, what else could it be?”

“They could be launching wave bombs.”

Singh and Peterson looked at each other. It dawned on them slowly that the system could actually be working. The horror pulled their cheeks downward.

“Get on the damn red link! Now!”

The link flashed in General Glover's office. He accessed it.

“Situation?”

“We have a firing solution detected at Dimmuborgir!”

“I thought we solved that.”

“Rechecked it, sir. This appears legitimate.”

“Are you certain?”

“Yes, sir, we have a solution detected on two missiles.” Peterson checked the label. “Three now, sir.”

The general dimmed the link and hit the emergency line to the CEOs. He sent a link dump of the entire situation on priority into their heads. He could sense the panic that must have reigned in their link silence. Six CEOs of various genders arguing in their boardroom. The link came back.

“Burn Dimmuborgir, now!”

The General had his order. He linked to the satellite command for Iceland and gave the order. The satellite warmed up for a 150,000 Kelvin cutter beam to annihilate the area.

UNEGA wasn't so slow and bureaucratic. The instant the GAUNE satellite warmed up, an automated ground laser system shot it out of the sky. GAUNE recognized the laser signature and fired on its source with a suborbital rail projectile. UNEGA launched a fusion interceptor and vaporized the projectile. GAUNE saw the nuclear explosion and retaliated in kind. It only got worse from there.

 

 

H
ØTHERUS
HAD
previously considered many of his works to be his magnum opus at the time of their creation. When he was only nineteen, he thought he'd never top the complete sequencing (from scratch) of the phospholipid polarity drive. Far superior to neural net computing, it wasn't prone to changing thought patterns or forgetfulness. At the atomic level, it was unlikely any computer would ever top it for memory efficiency, and indeed by the end of his life, nothing had.

At twenty-two he invented the advanced growth field. All that cloning of body parts that took up age progression silos for the last hundred years was finally obsolete. A body part could be grown on demand, from a cell to a limb in hours, not years. He was praised by the medical establishment, lauded as the most important doctor since… ever. And he was young! He had so much more to contribute. He improved net-link wetware by leaps and bounds. He invented a better analgia field. He invented organic living tools that could revolutionize Martian colonization. He created… a few things people didn't talk about.

The medical community was dismayed by his first weapons systems. The living nuclear trigger. The prototype for a guardthing. And his next work to trump his previous works—the rapid mutagenic beam. On a wide focus, it could reduce an enemy army to a mindless mass of agony. Høtherus considered it the ultimate weapon, a deterrent to end all wars. How little he knew of what he'd do next! But the beam was quite enough to get most of his prior research banned. UNEGA and GAUNE both signed the accord stating they'd never develop or use any mutagenic weaponry. They “confiscated” the triggers and beam cannons and forty-seven other patents, those they could freely develop and copy in secret without paying a cent to the man who spent his short life creating them.

That was only a part of his disillusionment with humanity. The real tragedy of the species he discovered in his research. He had dug deeper into the human genome than anyone before him. He saw things that the pure scientists missed. The meaning behind the base pairs, the poetry of them. And he saw how feeble nature had made life—all life on Earth. Høtherus could do better. So he did.

Long deprived of love for his revolting appearance, he first created a bride. She would be the perfect woman, in his opinion: no brain, no eyes, no teeth. Only raw sexual instinct and lust for him. He programmed the most voluptuous figure he could imagine, and whatever his faults, nobody ever claimed Høtherus didn't have an imagination, especially when it came to his fetishes. She resembled something from Hans Bellmer's nightmares, something too obscene to be explained beyond its orifices and protrusions.

His wife was poorly received by the public. She was deeply offensive to the minds of every gender. Words like “abomination” and “thing that should not be” were thrown around. In an illegal seizure, blind to the philosophical dilemma of what could have constituted the first artificially engineered human being, the bride of Høtherus was confiscated and cremated. He was finally banned from all future genetic research and confined to his modest house in Iceland.

He'd have been confined elsewhere if they knew the kind of lab he kept in its subbasement.

The world heard nothing from the imprisoned madman for three years. The world thought it was safe. Laws upon laws were written and signed to prevent anything remotely like the horrors he'd wrought. It seemed the world was free of him and free to use the works of his golden years. The simple organics, the straightforward computer systems. The good things.

Few noticed the people that went missing. None cared about the departure of his supporter, Haring Koeller, from his tenure at the University of Reyjkjavik. He wasn't missed. Not a soul could imagine what they were doing together until the first monster appeared.

It was born Tom Wis. It had a troubled childhood and an aimless adulthood. It went missing in 2202. It reappeared in 2205 as the penultimate masterpiece of Høtherus and Koeller. A beast, put simply,
Tom Wis was the most profane abomination imaginable. A human turned into something like its creator's first wife (he and Koeller had a harem of them now) but geared toward inflicting terror upon the population that had ostracized its maker. And it was only the first of many.

By the end of 2205, no less than seventy monsters wandered Iceland, causing nightmares and insanity in those lucky enough to survive their coming. Those less fortunate they digested alive, their internal mechanisms designed to keep victims alive and awake as they melted into proteins and prions. The armies were called in. The creatures, called “The Agony” on official reports, were all destroyed. Høtherus's labs were incinerated, but the news logs reported he was never found, nor was his comrade Koeller. As the last of the Agony were erased and various lesser monsters rounded up for study, UNEGA admitted publicly that their creator was lost and at large.

He was, of course, not. UNEGA had found and imprisoned him and forced him to work. They weren't about to let the fiasco rob their weapons divisions of his genius.

Koeller went missing too but not before leaving his final legacy: Koeller's Gravy. A fluid composed of RNA coding chambricles, controlled by a liquid neural network, that could be transmitted broadly by use of a superintense omega wave.

Under the most absolute secrecy possible (meaning GAUNE got a spy in on the first day) Høtherus continued his research by designing his final masterpiece: the Wave Bomb.

Targeted mutagenic warfare on a scale that put his original beam to shame. With its radius determined only by the strength of the omega wave, one bomb could be set to mutate a single room or the entire planet. Of course, nobody would ever set it to planetary scale. No less than eighty-six bombs were manufactured by UNEGA to target smaller regions in GAUNE. GAUNE manufactured sixty-eight of the devices, with one notable difference.

GAUNE's bombs were made from their own Koeller's Gravy, not the original substance. That was both a blessing and a curse. GAUNE wave bombs were predictable. They could turn an entire city into quivering sticky masses of pain, but they did nothing else.

An UNEGA bomb, however, was unpredictable. It could reduce a population to slime, or far worse—it could reduce them halfway to slime, leaving just enough of them to perceive their state. Tests on Deimos found they could turn people into what could only be described as zombies. Though alive, the victims were capable only of feeling pain and hate, and tore each other apart, devouring each other's flesh. In some tests they caused nothing but massive suppurating tumors on all they affected. In others it would mutate them into a variety of Høtherian monstrosities. The UNEGA bombs could even fuse individuals into vast conglomerations of flesh or produce new bacteria that caused unspeakable disease. The only thing they never did was nothing at all. They always, always resulted in pain and horror.

Høtherus never explained that the original Koeller's gravy was in fact made with Haring Koeller's brain. He had used nervous technology to liquify the man's cerebrum and grow within it a network of sadistic intent. UNEGA wave bombs were living, thinking organisms. Able to alter their composition, thinking constantly of new horrors to inflict. That was the grand master work of the evil genius—a weapon of mass affliction that even those who commissioned it found too appalling to ever use.