by Tim Marquitz
“Concentrate. Do not be distracted. We have a job to do.” Ragnhild’s voice sounded tight, clear, although strung with tension. She was new, field promoted from simulators to actual piloting because all other pilots with more experience were either dead or flying next to her. When talking to her, you could see the pressure on her, the tightness around her eyes, the line perma-creased under her bottom lip from her jaw staying clenched.
“Ah, precious Hildy,” she hated when Geir called her that, “if your beauty does not distract us from our task then we will not miss the gods-damned giants because of a conversation.”
Geir did not find Ragnhild beautiful, and she knew it. Geir was a throwback, a prototypical Viking with an immense build and a wide, handsome face. He dated exotic dancers and runway models who’d never yet stepped on a runway, he had no use for Ragnhild’s squarish jawline, the crag of brow that shadowed her eyes, or her broad, meaty shoulders.
“Pagan asshole,” Ragnhild muttered.
Geir’s laugh was big in my ear.
I even smiled.
Then the first frost giant stood up.
She couldn’t see.
She couldn’t tell if the goggles had frosted over or if everything had vanished into an unrelieved field of white. Her gloved fingers scrubbed the glass and she could see them, bright red to match the coat she wore. Everything past the tips of her fingers disappeared.
She tripped over something.
The ground hit hard, stealing the shallow air in her lungs. Her scarf had frozen in front of her mouth from the moisture of her exhalation, spreading with each breath into a wall of slow suffocation.
Suffocation was better than the option she’d ran from.
Pushing herself up, she kicked at the thing that tripped her. The ice cracked around the object and it rolled over. She looked and saw a brown swirl. It took a minute of staring before her mind made sense of what she was looking at.
A dog.
The thin mutt had curled on itself, trying to stay warm when it had been caught in the storm of ice and snow that announced the arrival of the monsters. She stared at it. The frost had perfectly preserved it, flash freezing the animal into a chunk of fur.
Fur and meat.
Her tiny heart surged. She could take this back, present it to her father and mother. They could thaw the poor animal. It would be food she provided. Food to replace that what had been used up a week ago. They could eat this animal and live.
They would love her.
They would spare her.
Her heart sank. They did love her.
They had spared her.
As long as they could.
Another tear rolled down her cheek, joining the ones from earlier along the rubber edge of her brother’s glasses.
This animal wouldn’t last long. Not long enough.
Standing, she began walking again. The cold had crept past her coat and the coveralls beneath. It wouldn’t be long. She didn’t have much strength and it would be sapped soon. Either the cold would take her or one of the monsters would notice her and she would die between its teeth.
Better that than the other at home.
She’d started to shiver when she heard low rumble of three jets tearing through the sky.
I watched Ragnhild drop the first salvo and saw immediately where she fucked up.
The bombs were designated GBU-27 Paveway 3. Almost one thousand kilos of destruction. The Americans we bought them from called them “the Hammer.” Geir loved it. It made him feel like Thor as he flew, appealing to his paganism. Before the frost giants had appeared and thrown the door of myth wide fucking open, his religion had just been lip service, a play act he’d done to separate impressionable young women from their underwear, but now? Now he was a card-carrying thunder-god worshiper for the modern age with a high-explosive hammer to wield.
But Ragnhild dropped first, beating him to the punch.
The bombs fell, guided by invisible lasers to the frost giant’s midsection. It loomed above us, nearly a kilometer tall. Its skin was the color of dull iron and spotted here and there with great chunks of blue-white hoarfrost like a frozen leper. Its mouth, large enough to hanger the jet I was in, hung open, a great black hole in the center of a mountain crag of a face. It was as if all light drained into the creature through its mouth. Two wide eyes, too human and filled with a calculating intelligence, glared at us.
Geir’s voice whooped in my ear, a guttural war cry, as the bombs struck and exploded. The giant roared and staggered as fire boiled in its belly and a storm of steam and shrapnel enveloped Ragnhild’s F-16, making it disappear from sight.
My stomach clenched in a knot as I watched for her to fly through.
The jet sailed out of the cloud, lower than it had gone in. It glistened in the hazy winter sun, shining like it had been polished.
“What in hell is wrong with her plane?” Geir cursed.
I knew. I knew what had happened. The steam had coated Ragnhild’s jet in moisture, moisture that flash-froze the second it hit the clear air, coating the jet in a sheet of ice too thick to de-ice.
Her scream of frustration came through the headset.
“Ragnhild, blow the hatch! Eject!”
The plane fell, nose tilting down with each second it dropped. Ragnhild stopped screaming. Now she groaned, low and animalistic. In my head, I pictured her pulling the controller, trying to right the plane through sheer strength.
“Blow the hatch, you stupid cow!” Geir screamed, his voice loud enough to make the speaker squeak.
A burst of yellow appeared on the top of the falling plane and the canopy flew away, pushed by the detonation of the hatch explosive and the wind shear. A dark object flipped out of the open cockpit.
Ragnhild.
A thrill ran up my spine as the parachute attached to her pilot seat rolled out and opened.
It lasted for almost a full second.
The frost giant stooped, chunks of ice falling from its ruined midsection, and snatched the floating Ragnhild from the air. Her parachute crumpled in its hand and she dangled. The frost giant lifted her to its maw and dropped her in, chair, chute, and all as her abandoned jet crashed into Holmenkollen leaving a black scar on the white, white ice.
Geir screamed a war cry in my ear as the giant crushed our friend between its gnashing stalactite teeth.
The sky above her burst like an egg yolk, reds and oranges and yellows flaring out brighter than the fireworks her parents had taken her to last New Year’s Eve. The ground under her shook with the explosion. The monster roared, and the sound shook the ground again, vibrating her bones, making her insides feel like jelly. She screamed and it was lost in the noise and the clamor. Snow fell, a fine powder of frozen steam, and swirled around her.
One of the planes, the one that dropped the bombs, curled through the air, sparkling like clear water poured in a glass. Faster and faster it fell, flying nose down toward the ground. Something flew out of it. The monster bent, its face looming down, eyes so big and mean they looked like they would burn her into dust. It plucked the thing that came out of the plane from the air and dropped it into its mouth, chewing it like she did gum.
It swallowed and turned its face back to look at her.
She fell to the ground and covered her eyes.
The plane shook around me as I banked hard. Even through the gel pad insulation of my helmet, I could hear the Vulcan Cannon firing, spitting 20mm shells at my target. The rounds strafed across the face of the second giant, cutting across its cheek, the bridge of its nose and into its left eye. It screamed, a high-pitched gale wind that made me fight the control stick to hold my course. I pulled up and from the edge of my canopy saw the giant clutching its face. A dark satisfaction made me clench and bare my teeth and scream out loud, “Take THAT, you icy fucks!”
The jet whistled under me as I looped up and swung around for another pass.
“Watch this, Arne!” Geir cried in my ear “I’m bringing the thunder!”
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His jet swooped behind both the frost giants as they watched me. He whooped over the comms, loud enough to make the electronics crackle, and banked the plane hard. Four dark shapes tumbled off the bottom of his wings, dropping like stones. They struck the giant Ragnhild had injured and fire swirled up from the creature’s back and shoulders. The frost giant dropped to its knees, steam filling the air above it, but Geir had already cleared it.
“That’s for Ragnhild!”
The frost giant he’d bombed slumped back, falling to the ground, its head landing beside the wreckage of Ragnhild’s Viper.
Geir’s plane curved through the air. The second giant, the one crouching and holding its eye, pushed off, rising like a rolling storm cloud into the air. Its arm swung out, tremendous fingers closing around the tail section of Geir’s jet. The giant took an awkward half-step as the jets propulsion yanked it forward, but its sheer mass stopped it. I watched the exhaust blow two of the giant’s fingers apart, the joints separating and falling away in chunks.
But three of the fingers stayed clamped around the plane.
The giant shook the plane like an angry child with a broken toy. The turbine sputtered and stopped. I jerked the control stick, making my Viper sling sideways in as tight a turn as I could force it to make. My finger lay on the trigger for the 20mm guns, and I roared from my fucking guts as I raced toward the giant. I had to get it to drop Geir’s jet so he could eject. If not, the fucking thing would crush him like an empty can.
The giant’s ugly face seemed to swell as I flew at it, becoming larger and larger. All I wanted was to unleash the bombs strapped under me, to drop the hammer on this monstrosity. Only hours of harsh training held my hand, kept me to task. The bombs would do no damage at my altitude, I was too low. I could drop them and maybe make the giant drop Geir, but he would have to fall into the detonation below him. I would kill him.
The machine guns were my only chance.
But they made me get close.
Made me take time.
My headset was silent, Geir making no noise. I didn’t know if he was dead or his comms had been destroyed.
Or I couldn’t hear him over my own screams of rage.
The giant held the jet, looking at it with a red eye the size of a house. The other one was a hole, a cave that dripped something dark that froze into black icicles that jutted from the socket. Its jaw dropped, beard of hoarfrost grinding against itself like mating glaciers so loud it screeched through my rage, silencing me like an arctic monsoon on a fireplace.
Geir still didn’t speak.
I pulled the trigger, praying to Christ I was fucking close enough for it to make a difference.
All was darkness and noise. Thunder and droplets of freezing rain that pelted her coat. She stopped screaming, not enough air filled her tiny lungs around the ice patch in her scarf. She lay in the snow, beneath the raging battle of technology and myth, praying for salvation or death. All the while, the cold crept slowly under her red coat.
The 20mm bullets pounded the broken fist of the frost giant, knocking great chunks of ice from its hand. The turbine must have weakened it, or the jet was too heavy for it to hold, but cracks zipped through the knuckles and knobs and the whole thing crumbled as I pumped all the bullets the Vulcan would let me fire into it. Geir’s jet teetered, tilting slowly over the axis, sliding as it became free. Fingers tumbled away. The giant tried to catch the jet with its other hand but it was clumsy, only batting it into a spin. A flower of yellow bloomed and the canopy twirled away from the body and a dark object jettisoned out.
I prayed Geir was alive as the chute on the object flared open.
I had just turned the jet to chase it when the third giant punched me from the air.
The ground shook under her, harder than it had, enough to bounce her into the air. The ice was hard as stone as she fell back to it. It was wet and slippery. Strange warmth, so long unfelt it had become a weird, otherworldly sensation. Yellow light spilled over her and the heat intensified. A huge fire burned a hundred feet away, shedding light and warmth like a dike that had failed. Her mind made the connection that it was a plane, crashed to the ice. Her eyes turned up, staring into the dimness that the world had become outside the circle cast by the flaming wreckage. The monsters all turned, their backs to the conflagration as they strode away, disappearing into the gloomy winter mix in only one long stride each.
She knelt in the glow, weeping that it had driven the monsters away, and her tears did not freeze to her face.
A swaying shadow fell upon her and it locked her heart in her small chest. She imagined the monsters had turned and one of them reached down to pluck her from the earth as a morsel.
She watched a rectangular shape swing from a parachute and land between her and the fire. Without thinking, she ran toward it.
I didn’t move for a long time, just basking in the warmth that pulsed around the chair behind me. For the first time in long weeks, the chill of winter left my bones. In the few buildings with electricity still, we were on strict rations of fuel so the heat was never higher than enough to prevent freezing. All of us relied on layers and bundles to remain warmer than death, bundled against hypothermia. I hung in my harness on my side and the remains of my jet burned behind me. Finally, I released the lock and dropped to the ice. Thin rivulets of melted snow ran around the pilot seat, chased away from the fire. I sat on the ground and closed my eyes.
They would be here before the wreckage ceased to burn.
I hoped.
If not, I would die.
The heat wrapped me like a lover, firm and insistent, and I settled back into its embrace. The fire became my everything. All I could feel was its warmth. All I could hear was its roar against the cold and the dark.
But it was fleeting. The cold and the dark would remain at bay only as long as the fire raged. When it faltered, when it lost its fury and began to wane, the cold and the dark would overtake it like a rabbit on the plain.
In that one moment of realization, I let go.
Let go the fear of death.
Let go the fear of the pain freezing to death would bring.
I sat on ice turning to slush and embraced the certainty of my own demise. The sure knowledge that I had survived a clash with an enemy greater than I, and that my next conflict with them would most likely be the last thing I ever did on this mortal coil, invaded my heart. It didn’t demoralize me. Instead, it comforted me.
I was at ease. Peaceful.
So peaceful I actually dozed, sleeping without nightmares, until a tiny hand shook me awake.
She thought the man was dead.
He looked dead, leaned back against the seat, but his eyes opened when she touched his face. She had pulled down her scarf and taken off her gloves. For the first time in too long her fingertips didn’t feel frozen. The fire behind the man beat against her coat, warming her to the bones.
He looked at her. “What are you doing, little one?”
“You fell from the sky.”
“I did do that.” He smiled.
“The monsters are gone.”
His smile went away. “They’ll be back.” He looked over her head and pushed himself up. “Put your gloves back on, little one. We have to go.”
She turned to look where he was and saw a large dark shape rolling toward them from the white haze of the night. The ground shook under her feet as she pulled her scarf over her nose.
We should have stayed by the fire longer.
I know why we couldn’t but now the memory of so much warmth was a knife in my belly.
“You did very well, Arne.”
Viseadmiral Yannick had his wool coat buttoned tight, his small, flat ears pinned under a fur cap that looked handmade. We had dispensed with much of the protocol between officers weeks ago when the frost giants had dispensed with most of the army. The dark day of the Onslaught had shattered all of that. The knife dug deeper.
It had been a spring day, the first week of daffo
dils blooming as the sun began to stay in the sky longer and longer. Huk beach was beautiful and calm, the water gently lapping on the shore as couples held hands and friends gathered in small groups to enjoy the mild weather. The slight chill in the air wasn’t enough to stop Isolde from disrobing and teasing me into doing the same. She couldn’t convince me to brave the water but I watched her frolic and splash and made plans for when we returned home. The sun felt good on my skin, and the breeze that nipped across was electric in a way that made me feel alive.
Then the sky turned black, the wind became a howl that bit deep. The water churned, dark gray in the sudden twilight. Chunks of ice like limbless torsos washed in on a sudden tide, driven from somewhere far out beyond sight. I ran for the shore, still naked, trying to reach Isolde as she was flung from wave to wave. I watched her dragged under before I reached the water’s edge.
Then everything froze.
The ocean became a slab of ice moments before my feet touched it. I slipped and fell, tumbling across, the hoarfrost ripping my skin. The ice burned my skin as I drug to a stop on my hands and knees, looking down through the green glass covering over the water.
Isolde hung frozen beneath me, mouth open, eyes wide in terror, hair spun out about her beautiful, horrified face.
Something soft touched my face.
I turned to see the little girl kneeling on the chair next to me, mitten covered hand against my face. Her lip was turned down in a frown.
“Men don’t cry.”
My face was wet. “I will stop soon.”
She nodded gravely.
“What is your name, little one?”
“Nannette.”
“I am Arne.”
Her eyes closed as she repeated it, filing it away.
I looked around. Viseadmiral Yannick had turned his chair away, looking at something on his desk in the dim light of the oil lamp. He didn’t look up as he spoke.