Valkyrie Chronicles 4 & 5 Bundle

by Erik Schubach

  Her eyes flew open when she looked at Inatra and me. She rushed out to both of us, “Well met Valkyrie.” Inatra was scrutinizing the woman. We each bumped forearms with her.

  I prompted, “Your name?”

  She stood tall. “Alessa.” She looked at her crutch and quickly added, “I only need this for a day until my nanites can heal me. I do not heal as a Valkyrie.”

  I chuckled. “There is no shame in it. You have the spirit of a Valkyrie. You showed great valor in protecting the innocents of the galaxy today.”

  She dropped her eyes. “But I do not possess the gift of Valkyrie sight.” Then she brightened. “I want to beseech Freya to allow me to join the Valkfela!”

  Inatra hissed at her with an appreciative smile and said, “You have fire.”

  I looked at the slight woman. This Asgard risked all, and was willing to do more. I had nothing but pride for her, knowing she was of my citadel. I said to her, “I shall petition my aunt to do so. The Valkfela would be lucky to have you Alessa, the Unwavering.”

  Then I smiled and dragged Inatra out the door, leaving Alessa standing stunned behind us that I had gifted her a title. I made a mental note to add that to the database along with Rotark's title. My head buzzed a bit and I looked at my wrist console, my Verr had a message scrolling for me, “Done.” I smiled, they are always helping me.

  Inatra started laughing, a heartfelt laugh that originated in her eyes. I looked up at her. “What sister?”

  She rolled her eyes, then whistled shrilly into the air for one of the Sky, and said, “You! That is what. You are becoming more and more your father as time marches on. You are developing the same showmanship and flair for rewarding the worthy and giving people a sense of pride as him. Your diplomatic skills almost rival Kate's now. You are, how does Kat say... a big softie.”

  Looper came swooping from the sky and hovered over the crowded landing pads as dozens of medical vehicles came and went. She moved down toward us and hovered then just opened the door. We looked at our wrist consoles and grinned at her prompt. “Valkyrie fly to me?”

  Inatra hissed in amusement and we both simultaneously leapt ten feet into the air and into the hovering wind rider. I thumped her bulkhead and chuckled out, “You are as impatient as your mother Loop.” This got me playful flickering of the lights. We all refer to Pegasus as the mother of the other Sky. Then I said, “I imagine you know where we need to go?” In answer, she swung us around and arced high above the other air traffic and pointed us toward the Central Spire as Inatra chuckled at our antics.

  Chapter 7 – The Mysterious Archer

  We reached the Central Spire and sent Looper off to play then made our way to Odin's workshop. As expected, as we strode in, we already saw Tyr, Arina, and Odin were gathered around a tactical console. Loki was in a communication holo beside the main display.

  Inatra and I bumped forearms with them and we exchanged greetings. Then I looked at Tyr and almost whispered, “How bad?”

  He shook his head solemnly and gestured in the air, casualty lists started steaming below the display. He summarized, “Seven hundred Ragnarok dead, and two brave Vanger. Two injured Valkyrie out of commission, one for at least five days, one for approximately three years until her legs can be reconstructed.” I winced at that.

  He took a breath and continued, “One injured Wild One in fighting shape.” Everyone chuckled and he continued. “Six hundred and three injured Ragnarok, including Rotark, Giant's Folly.” He grinned at the title and I caught father trying to suppress a grin of his own. “Three Vanger injured, and...” He paused. “One Asgard, soon to be Valkfela, Alessa, the Unwavering.”

  Father cocked an eyebrow and said, “You seem to be busy handing out titles today daughter.” The smile he was fighting finally broke through with his teasing.

  I waved him off dismissively, “Enough of that you.” Everyone chuckled.

  Then father got more serious, “I do not fault your choices, I will speak with them both directly once the danger is past.” I nodded once in acknowledgment and turned to the visual records streaming at multiple angles.

  Tyr was looking at one in particular, my repeated strikes at the seam of Ymir's armor. “I did not understand your strikes until you let lose the power of Thor and the armor seam was revealed. How did you know it was there? It is almost at the molecular level. It gives the illusion of a flexible armor covering their entire bodies except their heads.” I noted that he thought most of their display of superiority was a ruse as well. My old friend always did have a sharp mind.

  I shrugged, was it that small? “I saw all the seams as bright as day, almost as if the weaknesses were highlighted.” I paused and silently asked my nanites if they knew. The impression I got from them is that they were giving me an overlay of what they had scanned. I chuckled. “It seems the Verr were helpful in that.”

  Odin nodded and changed the timeline to display Rotark's attack with the armor shard through the photon shield, and he spoke, “It seems they have an unexpected weakness in their tech. It cannot defend against itself.” We watched as force measurements were displayed beside Rotark as he struck.

  Tyr whistled softly. “I would have hated to meet Rotark on the battlefield. Those numbers exceed my own and come Krothing close to yours Kara.”

  I nodded in agreement but then paled a little as I watched other displays replaying the battle. The two Frost Giants were sweeping our forces away like tissue paper, including the Valkyrie. I murmured, “Now I know how the Ragnarok must have felt every time they had to face the fury of the Valkyrie. That battle was less than an hour, yet we barely managed to injure either Jotunn.”

  Inatra nodded, my Ragnarok sister had more insight into that feeling than any of us. She simply agreed. “Truly.”

  Tyr growled. “Then the cowards retreated to their ship. If only they didn't have a place to retreat to, this day would have ended differently.” Those words echoed in my head. I knew what I was going to do... what had to be done.

  I shook the thoughts from my head and threw the mysterious arrow and the culling device onto a workbench, which started scanning them immediately. Loki's holo turned to look at them with great curiosity.

  She slapped her hands together and then lifted one above the other and a holographic representation of the insides of the device stretched between her holographic hands. She was lost in a world only she could see as she murmured, “Particle based power flow, organic triggering circuitry. Photon pumped energy projection...”

  I smiled at the wild look in her eyes, bordering on madness. That same madness I could feel buried inside me. But that madness was her brilliance. Not even Arina or Odin was her equal.

  I turned my attention to, in my opinion, the more fascinating item. The arrow. I noted when I threw it on the workbench, the blade had gouged the plasti-steel surface before it healed itself. Father and Arina were huddled around the holographic Loki with the culling device.

  Tyr and Ina joined me with the arrow. I said slowly so they knew what I was saying was true, “I saw this coming in at hypersonic speeds...” I paused. “From the mountain peaks, at least three miles north.”

  Tyr muttered, “Impossible.”

  I hefted the arrow in my hand. “Yet here it is.” I dared them to tell me it wasn't there. Then I continued. “Whoever shot this, not only has the best aim I have ever encountered, but also the technology to give the Frost Giants pause. Ymir had uttered 'Olympians' when he looked at the arrow embedded in his armor. What kind of device could have hurled it with such ferocity?”

  I looked at the scan data. “Odin's beard! The arrowhead is beyond sharp, it goes down to a single molecule of this alloy at the blade's edge. It is... vibrating at an almost subatomic level.” The readouts on the data were declining... at an almost immeasurable rate and the oscillations were decreasing. Like it was... losing power? Did it have an energy reservoir? I activated my nano-lattice as I held the shaft. The vibration frequency immediately increased. I held it
with two fingers and dropped it to the plasticrete floor and it sank effortlessly about four inches into the floor.

  I shook my head in amazement and said, “This is no mere arrow. It is a remarkable piece of technology. It absorbs energy to power itself, which negates the kinetic mirroring of the Jotunn, then to pierce their much tougher armor alloy, it vibrates its way between the armor molecules.”

  I looked around then threw out my conjecture. “It seems that this arrow was devised exclusively to battle the Frost Giants!” All eyes in the room swept to me at that comment. Suddenly, there was great interest in the weapon from the intellectuals who were examining the culling device.

  Father stepped over and pulled the arrow from the floor, then finished my thoughts in his booming voice, “But that would mean a race aware of the Jotunn. A race we have yet to discover. Their tech is inferior to the Frost Giants, but they have devised ways around that.” Then he asked the most important question rattling around in my head. “Does this make them allies? Or another potential enemy?”

  Inatra invoked an old Earth axiom that she was fond of, after hearing Kate say it, “For now... the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

  I nodded, but something was screaming in my head, something familiar but I couldn't place it. Like I should know something about this. I abandoned that thought and concentrated on one fact. “I believe, they mean us no harm. Look at what they targeted, the culling device, they saved us.”

  Tyr pointed out, “But they could have been saving themselves, those Cullers have a three hundred grid kill box.”

  I nodded. “True, but they could have left at any time, they were watching, but to what end?” I made a pulling motion toward the central holo-display and typed on the virtual keypad when it bloomed in the middle of the room. The battle appeared, I moved the time index to when the arrow struck Ymir.

  The readings showed it traveling at well over five thousand feet per second.

  I felt something in my head and turned toward the door with a smile on my face, and a second later Kate came striding in, looking as desirable as ever. She grinned at me and gave a little wink then greeted everyone in the room, stopping to kiss father on the back of his hand. I shot across our link, “Suck up.” She just chuckled, causing Ina to hiss in amusement.

  We caught her up to speed on our findings. She looked at the display and walked around Ymir's image. She squatted and looked through him at the angle he was struck. She rewound a tenth of a second and played it at one one hundredth actual speed.

  I grinned as everyone watched her in rapt fascination. She was in her old, police detective Kate Summers mode. Was it wrong that I found that so... sexy? She shot me a “Hey now, none of that. I'm working.” look. Then ran her finger through the arrow's path. It highlighted then she made a grand motion, spreading her arms wide and the display zoomed out to show the Craggy Rock mountain range.

  A red icon blinked where Ymir stood and a wavy red line ending in the peaks showed the arrow's trajectory. She factored in temperature, winds, gravity, the arrow's mass and speed at the time. The trajectory seemed to stretch and became an almost flat line. My assessment of the accuracy of the shot changed from a heck of a shot to an impossible shot.

  Then Kat spread two fingers at the point of origin. The vetricite deposits were wreaking havoc with the sensor data, only the visual record was clear. Our systems couldn't identify the race of the cloaked individual we saw because of the interference. We couldn't see her face, but knew it was a woman from her delicate hands.

  Kat selected a time index of one minute before the shot and played at twenty five percent normal speed. The woman was crouched between some rocks, her hooded grey cloak blended into the rocks perfectly. She was looking down toward the battle. She must have had some sort of heads up display or telescopic goggles on to see it from that distance.

  She suddenly stood, her speed was incredible as it looked like a person standing normally, but I reminded myself we were at quarter speed here. A couple things happened at once, the first was that I noticed her cloak became white, matching the snow around her, the second... well the second was the speed at which she pulled the bow from her shoulder with one hand as her other hand grabbed an arrow from the quiver slung on her back.

  The arrow was barely raised as she was pulling back on the glowing string when she let it fly. She had barely aimed! I was looking at the force calculations on the pull, it was just interpolated since we couldn't pull enough information through the interference. It was only a three hundred pound pull. How did the arrow have such a great velocity to gain hypersonic speeds? Then I saw it the instant Kat did as she highlighted the interpolated force calculation of the string itself.

  It had some sort of hyper compressed gravity field at the point the arrow would nock. But then I noticed the string seemed to fade away as the woman watched the arrow fly. Was it photon based? I was frustrated with the vetricite interference.

  She watched for a minute until Ymir retreated then the mysterious archer turned and vaulted at least twenty feet down the mountain, landing like a cat and then sprinted off down toward the treeline on the back side of the range. Again I had to remind myself we were watching at a quarter speed. She had the quickness of a Valkyrie as she disappeared into the jungle canopy.

  Kate labeled her record, 'Robin Hood?' I snorted as everyone looked at her in confusion. Oh, of course they wouldn't know Robin Hood. Kat was from Earth and I was trapped there for five thousand years so knew their lore.

  My eyes snapped wide at the word 'lore', that nagging familiarity suddenly crystallized as I blurted out, “The gods of Olympus!” All eyes turned to me and I clarified. “When I was trapped on Earth, at one point, legends of a godlike race from Mount Olympus reached me. They had apparently revealed themselves fifty or so years before word reached me. I immediately thought that perhaps other Asgard were trapped on Earth as well. Or that a rescue party had somehow made it through the veil for me. It took me ten years to get to Olympus, as I was half a world away at that time. But by the time I had arrived, people told me that the time of the gods had ended and that the Olympians had departed.”

  Then I thought back and said, “This... archer... is like the fabled hunter. What was her name? Artemis?” The others were looking at me and Kate was slowly nodding her head in recognition of the myth. We all turned back to the data.

  I looked up as I heard the holographic Loki mumbling as she went back to examining the culling device. “Particles are particles, force is force. But code... code is the weakness. Particles cannot battle force... code can break them all.” Her eyes were glittering. She turned to us and said simply, “The Verr.”

  I squinted at her, I knew her brilliant mind had found another weakness of the Jotunn. It was getting it out of her that would be the difficult part. She seemed to be slipping more into her madness without the Three Embers there to give her focus. Perhaps that will change now with the Bifrost. I asked, “What do you mean Loki?”

  There was the delay of the quantum entanglement communication system then she turned her eyes to me and her face softened. She tilted her head and smiled and said, “The Verr already know. The Uniting approaches. The wheels are turning.” Then she was lost in the dissection of the culling device again. I smiled at the loving look she had given me, but I knew I wouldn't get anything else from her until she felt the need to share or she had a moment of clarity.

  All of our eyes snapped up as an alarm started sounding. Father was at tactical, Tyr and I joined him. The Frost Giant vessel was firing on the planet, in the middle of the continent. The power readings were immense. It was a sustained beam. Odin's fingers were flying as he did calculations and projections.

  He paused and looked up and whispered, “It appears Ymir intends on honoring his threat of destroying the planet. They seem to be tunneling into Folkvangr's mantle. At the current rate, they will breach the mantle in forty eight hours, the core twenty hours later. If they continue feeding energy into the core,
the planet will tear itself apart within five days.”

  We all looked at him, then at the readings. We had nothing that could meet the threat in space. Almost nothing. Then father closed his eyes and whispered, “There is but one thing we can do.” He hit his coms. “Freya? We need to evacuate all of Heildfine into Valhalla within four days, the Jotunn intend to destroy Folkvangr. Our only option is... transition. Use the hover trains to keep everyone protected. Utilize every wind rider to bring as many food supplies for the warehouses as possible. It will be almost nine hundred years that we will need to ration.”

  I inhaled sharply as he called his team to start charging the transition capacitors of the city. He intended to escape to our pocket universe with all the races, it was about to become impossibly crowded in Valhalla. But there wouldn't be enough time to get everyone evacuated to Valhalla, the planet may have but five days, but it would become too unstable within three to four. It would take thirty six hours to spin up the transition systems for a crash translation. Some would be left behind... I shuddered in memory of the feeling of watching Valhalla transition away all those years eons ago, leaving me to my fate. I also knew that it was our only option. Almost our only option.

  Chapter 8 – The Box

  Once the evacuation plans were laid out, father ordered us to our quarters to rest, the next few days may still see the need of the Valkyrie. I called to Samantha and Esa home over our link. They were with Brunie, of course. I... wanted to spend time with them tonight... to let them and Kate know that I loved them.

  I excused myself to the bathroom before they arrived and I closely guarded my mind so that the infernal bleed-through of my thoughts didn't reach my mate as I made a call to Inshak and Intark, then returned to Kat in the great room. She was at the service port, having supper sent for the four of us as our daughters walked in, their entry chimes sounding.

  Kate shared human style hugs with them and they chuckled as they laid the backs of their hands on my cheeks, then hugged me anyway. Krothing Kat has corrupted them. But I couldn't stop the smile on my traitorous lips. In unison, in that uncanny synchronization they share with Brunhilde they said, “Well met mothers.” I can always feel their nanites, in constant contact with each other, more so than the rest of us with evolved nanites. Their Verr showing yet another evolution over my own. I grinned, the Three Embers were quite something.