Valhalla

by Ari Bach

  She set the microwave down where she could reach it quickly. She was no doubt expected to collapse and sob, to lean over her family’s bodies and lose all control, but she had no real desire to do so. Instead she stood there with the odd feeling that she had forgotten to do something important. She went over the events. The bad guys were dead. Her parents were dead. Authorities were en route and didn’t need to be called. The air was thick with the smells of ozone and debris and metal and microwaved flesh, but this was no concern.

  Soon a flood of police officers came in through the melted door. More landed on the deck. They all scurried about and took stock of the situation. They told her to sit down. One pulled up a chair. He asked her what had happened, so she told him calmly and clearly, giving every detail she thought might be important. She watched as a parade of medics, coroners, and detectives came and went. They prodded the bodies, scanned her, scanned the room, linking back and forth through their antennae and talking in whispers. She saw neighbors, the Frasers, through the doorway, demanding to come in and see her. As the police explained what happened, Mrs. Fraser broke into tears and held her husband. Violet felt nothing.

  She felt nothing as they loaded her parents’ bodies into body bag pods. She felt nothing as the pods took off and headed for the morgue. As she watched them fly away, there was a fraction of a second where she thought she felt something: a deep stab of fear—at least she thought it was fear—but then it was gone and forgotten, a drop of feeling lost in an ocean of numbness.

  IN THE next few days, Violet learned just how little she knew about her father. She knew he was a cop. She had heard the stories. But now she heard the other stories, stories that fathers don’t tell their daughters. Officer Nelson MacRae was the secret weapon in a war that had gone on for almost thirty years.

  Everyone had thought the late Hrothgar Kray and his twin brother were the heads of the near mythic Orange Gang, raised together in Danmark, where they don’t restructure their problem kids’ brains.

  Nelson was the one who’d discovered that Hrothgar was a mere lackey, in fact the gang’s weakness. Wulfgar Kray was a genius, rarely seen and never vulnerable. Hrothgar was only in the gang because his brother didn’t have the heart to kick him out. Hrothgar liked to nail people to walls and drench his hands with blood. Wulfgar knew that in criminal enterprises such panache was a liability. But it was his twin. He couldn’t tell him to stop.

  “So when the time came,” explained Officer Lochroch, “Nelson volunteered to lure Hrothgar into a trap.”

  “Why my dad? What was the trap?” asked Violet, eager to hear more details.

  “Well, he was very brave, the bravest—”

  “How was it supposed to work?”

  “Well, you see, Violet, he didn’t think Hrothgar would ever find you, his family—”

  “Obviously. What was supposed to happen? Where did it go wrong?”

  “Well, we—Your father was a great—”

  “You told me what he discovered about the gang. You didn’t spare a gory detail, but you won’t tell me what my father did to take them down? Or how they caught him?”

  “It’s classified.”

  “The rest wasn’t? It wasn’t classified that he was a cop. Everyone on our floor knew it. Did one of them blow his cover? And I want to know why he… why we weren’t guarded, how the gang found his home, his family, why he didn’t expect it, why—”

  “Violet,” he interrupted, “all of that is classified. There are good reasons we can’t explain it.”

  She’d thought such treatment would end when she’d passed the maturity tests. She understood that police didn’t give out such information, but she didn’t want to know in order to tell the media or to post it online. She tried to explain herself clearly.

  “I want to know the details because my parents are gone and this is all I have left of them. I want to know because the more I know, the more I might be able to help.”

  She thought it was a good logical plea, one that should push the right buttons. It had the opposite effect. The officer didn’t want or expect cold logic; he expected tears. He and all who heard the girl’s resolute statement were disturbed by her lack of emotion.

  “It’s okay to cry,” said Lochroch, leaning close. He spoke to her as if she were still a child.

  “I don’t need to cry,” she explained. She spoke to him with the same insulting tone. “I need you to stop talking down to me, stop trying to protect me, and tell me what the fuck went wrong.”

  That bit of honest clarity got her a ticket to the police psychiatrist office. They linked her in to post-traumatic programs that tried to bring out the tears, release the emotional pressure, and begin the typical human grieving process. They couldn’t diagnose that in this one oddity of humankind, the process had been over the second her parents died. In such an enlightened era of psychological empathy, nobody recognized what a warrior a thousand years prior would have known and praised as incredible strength of mind.

  Violet didn’t recognize it either. She was vaguely worried that she wasn’t all tears and sobs. She was also at a loss for why, with Wulfgar Kray on the loose, she was not getting rushed into protective custody. That part they were willing to explain.

  “Hrothgar was so fast to… to uncover your father that he didn’t fall into our live trap. He’s useless to us dead. We need a new trap. We think Wulfgar will come to avenge his brother’s death in person. And so we need you, well, see, we need you to—”

  She was amazed at their shortsightedness. They were trying to use her as bait. She spoke quickly so as not to hear another pathetic euphemism. “You’re ignoring the most important thing Dad discovered—Wulfgar is the brains. His brother was the one going out in person. Wulfgar wouldn’t do anything so stupid.”

  As the police coddled her, lied to her, and tried to convince her to play along, she realized her father must have been an anomaly among cops. The rest were idiots.

  They never guessed that Violet had her father’s skills. The deductive abilities and razor-sharp wits that cut into the Orange Gang for her dad were the same that saved her life and the same that let her kill three very dangerous men. She knew more about the gang than the cops had told her, gleaning a multitude of useful knowledge from every scrap they gave her. Violet had always thought so efficiently and had always been hushed by her elders. As a result she didn’t try very hard to explain it. She was unsure she even knew what she knew, and she’d never learned to have faith in her deductive abilities. Instead she learned in the company of officers to keep quiet about important things.

  One thing she couldn’t keep quiet about was the state of her parents’ bodies. Though her mother’s brain had been destroyed, her father had only been shot in the heart. If they’d had enough money, that wouldn’t have ended his life: Within a few hours of death, anyone with a healthy brain could be salvaged by the skills of a good doctor. The police pussyfooted for hours before admitting they couldn’t afford those doctors. Neither could her family accounts.

  The cops left out one fact entirely. They didn’t tell her that even if she somehow collected the millions needed, they still wouldn’t have been able to save him, because her father’s body never made it to the morgue. Nobody even considered telling Violet what the entire local force now believed: that the Orange Gang had hijacked the body to be desecrated. They expected the corpse to show up crucified publicly within the day. They were prepared to hide its discovery from Violet’s eyes. They kept silent and let the horrible notion affirm their cause. “For Nelson,” they said, “we must do anything to bring Wulfgar down! It’s what he would have wanted!”

  So they cast his daughter out as bait. The bait was far smarter than the fishermen, but without a scrap of real meaningful information about herself or the situation, she felt only a brick wall of ignorance. Amid math and science and language and history, students were not taught the difference between intelligence and knowledge. The tests themselves no longer knew the difference. Tho
ugh Violet was smart enough to outwit the thugs and cops, she had no clue that she had any wits at all. Her educational tests came out below average because she couldn’t care less about what company owned what country in what year. They could load information directly into children’s minds but could not make them care. The police didn’t tell her the facts that would have made her as sharp a weapon as her father, so she felt terribly stupid and considered herself useful only as a worm on a hook.

  She knew Wulfgar wouldn’t come for her, certainly not at home. Lacking the confidence to tell the police again, she resigned to let them try. She didn’t really mind being bait. She didn’t fully understand why she didn’t mind it. If she were inclined to introspection, she would have decided that it was not for shock or depression but that old childhood bloodlust. If there was a man out there who wanted her dead, she wanted to confront him herself. She wanted him to come and try. She’d killed the last trio, and she felt deep down against all logic that she could take him too. The cops would have to fight her for the kill.

  But he never came. Wulfgar, in mourning in Danmark, was as patient as Violet expected. He predicted the trap, the police, and Violet’s danger to him. After all, his brother had killed her family, and she would want revenge. Wulfgar knew that if this little girl had killed his brother, then there was more to her than was apparent. Hrothgar had always been quick to the punch. He kept the company of sycophantic friends instead of skilled workers. Now his poor judgment and poor company had gotten him killed. Wulfgar also knew of his brother’s lust for all females young and blonde. He wouldn’t have killed the girl when he should have because—Wulfgar couldn’t finish that thought. Hrothgar was dead, so he didn’t shame his brother’s memory by thinking it.

  Wulfgar was not subject to such obvious hubris and overconfidence. If Wulfgar did have a weakness, it was brotherly love. Hrothgar had been a liability, but he’d given him high rank and power in the Orange Gang. Hrothgar was a rapist, but Wulfgar turned a blind eye. Hrothgar got himself killed, so Wulfgar assumed that meant his own weakness had died as well. With his brother gone, the gang was stronger than ever. Strong enough to indulge in terrible vengeance.

  It didn’t strike Wulfgar that his need for revenge was the last vestige of love for his brother. This revenge couldn’t be a weakness, he thought, because he was going to do it cautiously. He would let the girl find new friends and new parental figures for him to murder as she watched. Then he would keep her where he could hack her mind apart with great safety and solitude, and when her mind was broken, he would destroy her body as painfully as he could. He would do it all correctly, without any possibility of failure, and after so long his prey would taste like the nectar of the gods.

  Violet waited. The cops waited. The Fraser family next door offered her their company and spare room along with an abundance of pity and hugs. Violet saw no reason to leave her own apartment or indulge in common emotional onanism. As an adult she was now sole owner of her family’s quarters and belongings. Same with the money her parents had in the bank, now accessible through the monetary implant in her hand. Her mom had taken Violet to have it installed the day before she was killed. That should make me sad, she thought. I could piss away all they ever earned with one handshake. She tried to think the worst, to dwell on it. It struck her only as bad ideas and useless actions. No tears.

  Before long she gave up trying to get herself to feel bad and cry. It was a waste of time. When she ate at the table by herself, she could stare at the places where the bodies fell, yet she felt only a slight concern that she should probably be feeling more. Soon that concern faded away too, and she found herself living a plain and aimless life.

  Weeks passed. By day she shopped and paid bills, ate and exercised. In lucid sleep she wandered the nets in search of a job. Her inheritance alone would not keep her alive forever. She floated around the search sites, surrounded by the avatars of other job hunters. They came and went, but for hours she remained. Her intelligence scores were too low for the best business work, so again she lamented herself an idiot. Her VVPS scores were too violent for police work, so she lamented her temperament. She wondered where stupid, violent young adults went when they had no life, no ambition, and their only skill was killing people. She ran a search and found her answer.

  Having decided to pursue a military career, she sent her test scores, status, and brain/body scans into the recruiting sites. She informed the police forces watching her, and they were happy with the idea. The trap wasn’t working, and she would be safe. Violet realized shortly after applying that she was hopeful about the prospect of life in the armed forces. Had her parents lived, she’d probably have ended up there anyway.

  Chapter II: Achnacarry

  MILITARY RECRUITERS were a desperate lot. Applications came in by the gig from depressed idiots, drug addicts, deranged maniacs, and trick programs selling dead names. The typical live applicant could be sold to an army for a modest commission, but many a recruiter kept watch with hope that one day they’d find the diamond in the dung heap.

  Wally Akercocke found her: MacRae, Violet T. A seventeen-and- a-half-year-old female in prime physical condition with a solid predilection toward violence and three confirmed legal kills. Good marks in all applicable fields and low marks in all others. She was the best profile to apply in years. Private armies couldn’t afford an applicant like Violet. She wasn’t in their budgets. Only the top company militias, and of course her native governing company (who had right of first refusal) would be able to pay the recruiter for this sort of find. Wally would get to retire.

  Her rights were sold in a preempt to Scotland Military, owned by the company and country of Scotland, owned by UK Inc., owned by the megaconglomerate B&L, owned by GAUNE itself, which owned most of the western hemisphere. Violet was given a ticket to Achnacarry, only fifty kilometers south. She was surprised when the ticket loaded into her head. She had heard of Achnacarry Academy. The name carried a certain prestige. It was the commando factory whose graduates had won GAUNE the Jebel Sahaba Conflict—the last genuine war, over a century ago. She wasn’t just joining the military; she was going to get elite training.

  She left her accounts frozen and the apartment in the care of the Frasers, who walked her to the GET station. She was happy to travel by Highland Public GET. The ground-effect train was more of an amusement ride than transport. It was slower than flying in a pogo and offered the passenger a closer view of the countryside. If someone needed to get somewhere fast, they flew. If someone wanted time to think, or was traveling on the dime of the notoriously thrifty governing company, they got to take the train.

  As she settled in the cushy seat and linked it to recline, the last boarding calls sounded and the train rose slowly up to its track and departed. Violet watched the city fall away, watched the Frasers turn into miniscule dots far behind. She hadn’t traveled by GET for years and looked forward to watching the highlands fly past. But her attention would be elsewhere. Just after the train took off, she got a link from Achnacarry.

  After a brief spoken intro, the signal made a new partition in her brain and began to fill it with rules, regulations, manuals, schedules, and a ton of information she couldn’t unlock until ordered to know it. There was so much information she couldn’t even begin to sort through it. By the time she was able to take stock of the forty-eight new memory sections, the GET had arrived. She regretted very briefly that she hadn’t looked out the windows and enjoyed the trip. She kicked the thought from her head. She was an adult now, a soldier. Soldiers don’t enjoy the scenery.

  “Did you enjoy the scenery on your way in?” asked the gate office receptionist.

  “No, Sir,” she replied. She tried to stand up straight and tall. She was determined to make as good an impression as she could.

  “Save it for the drill sergeants, kid. Okay, have you brought any luggage?”

  “No, the recruiter said—”

  “Not to. Good, you can follow directions. You’d be amaze
d how many can’t. Do you have any implants?”

  “One monetary, one ID, one link—”

  “Not that, I mean unnecessary implants. Fashion mods, hair-color gags, foot fields? We don’t let recruits skate around on foot fields. We march here.”

  “No, nothing like that.”

  It went on as Violet answered several questions she had answered in the application and several questions that seemed beneath an accepted adult. She began to understand what manner of recruit came in and wasn’t surprised to hear that nine out of ten recruits wouldn’t pass basic training. She was sure they told her the stats to scare her, to impress on her the difficulty of the course. She could handle difficult. She could handle a loud, angry drill sergeant. That was nothing compared to a kind, soft talk from her mother.

  Achnacarry was a strange-looking place. Few of the buildings were connected; few had windows. Some appeared to be temporary, like tents. Everything was painted a drab olive-green color. The grounds were almost empty. In Kyle, every open spot of street was covered by a crowd. Here, there were only thirty people she could see, half of them marching in a line and others walking across the turf or cement. Two were riding a noisy contraption with six wheels. Violet followed a sergeant with the other new recruits to a building near the gate.

  She was issued a uniform. It wasn’t a snazzy blue formal uniform like her father’s but a spartan tan coverall. It looked like it would be hot to wear in daytime—no doubt the intent. Soldiers, she imagined, would need to wear armor and therefore get used to wearing clothes in the highland heat. It also had dozens of pockets, latches, and other features. She looked forward to learning the purpose of every one of them. She threw her old shirt and shorts into the provided bin, then peeled off her footpads and threw them in too. Now she had boots: the funniest, bulkiest, biggest footwear she had ever seen. She could probably walk over a pile of nails in them. They were tight and let little air in. Her feet would sweat.