Valhalla

by Ari Bach

  “What’s all this, then?” Violet asked.

  “This is sparring music from the twentieth century,” he answered. Vibeke rolled her eyes; she didn’t like it either.

  “I don’t like band era music,” Violet said as the old music picked up.

  “You will. It’s fun, and the lyrics—”

  “It’s going to have people talking in it? Veikko—”

  “No, no, it’s good. The lyrics are appropriate.”

  Violet paused to listen to the unwelcome vocalizations. She heard a man say something about “smacking his bitch.” Violet gave Veikko the nastiest look she could. Vibs shook her head, having dealt with it before. Veikko just laughed.

  Violet began sparring with a roundhouse kick that sent Veikko to the mats.

  “Oh, you’re right,” she said, “the lyrics are appropriate!”

  She didn’t waste any more time talking. She only mouthed the word “bitch.” Veikko jumped up and fought back, and Violet thwacked him back to the ground just as easily. Vibeke appeared to enjoy the spectacle, and Violet might have admitted that the music was suddenly much more fun than silence. Veikko came back harder and harder. Half of his moves were feints; the other half were trick moves and flips that seemed better suited to a jester than a fighter. Still, the two had a damn good match. Violet thought so at least; she won every scuffle.

  Veikko spoke, out of breath. “Okay, okay. We didn’t all have commando training.”

  Violet retorted, “Should I get Dr. Niide for you? Your ego looks sprained.”

  A sinister grin spread across Veikko’s face. “This room has an analgia generator. Want to see who goes to the doctor first?”

  Violet gave a nod, and Veikko linked the generator on. Violet took up a solid offensive pose, and Veikko directed her to attack with a twitch of his fingers. She did. She fought no differently without pain than she did with it, but Veikko fought more savagely. He didn’t fall away when she delivered a good hit—he just kept coming. That way it took her minutes, not seconds, to pound him to the floor.

  “Training! All army training,” he complained. “Let’s see how you do with something you haven’t trained on.”

  Veikko grabbed some gloves from the wall. Vibeke covered her face in shame.

  “You know how these work?” he asked.

  “No, but I’ll still kick your arse,” Violet said, laughing.

  “Field knuckles.” He put on a pair and ground his fists together. They sparked. “When they hit flesh, they make a small field. Amplifies the power.”

  “Neat.”

  He threw her a pair, and she put them on. He looked her over and grabbed another set of contraptions from the wall—foot fields. There was no interface; she just had to punch or kick. Veikko beckoned her on, and she threw an exploratory jab. Veikko had no need to experiment and hit her right in the chest. It didn’t feel like a punch. It was like getting hit by a cannonball. The force bent her in half, stole her breath, sending her crashing into the wall with terrible speed. There was no pain with the generator on, but she knew it would have been excruciating. She took a second to catch her breath.

  Veikko seemed concerned. “Shit, Vi, you all right?”

  She nodded and stood up again. She breathed in, breathed out, and gave Veikko the same smug signal he’d given her to start. He shook his head in surprise and got ready to fight.

  Her first punch connected and sent him flying, but he was ready and came back with a hit that fractured her arm. Without pain, she didn’t even notice. She hit back and broke his cheekbone, then his shoulder. Vibeke linked to the med bay to get ready for the results of a field fight. The two continued smashing each other with smiles on their faces. It was a new level of sparring, one as rewarding as Violet dreamt it could be. When she hit, it was like conquering an army. When he hit her, it was a taste of blood and agony, agony without pain, and that was all the crazier. It was all fun and games until someone lost an eye. It was Veikko, whose cheek gave way completely and sent his right eye rolling across the mats.

  “Stop, stop. Shit, where’d it go?”

  “It woll—” She couldn’t talk right. Violet was suddenly aware that they might have done more damage than would be prudent. “It wolled ower there,” she said, pointing. Her finger didn’t extend. Uh-oh, she thought.

  Vibeke ran to a corner where the eye had ended up. Nurse Taake, who Violet recognized from the med bay, ran into the room and began prepping the eye for reinsertion. Another nurse she hadn’t seen before followed. The link labeled her as Nurse Kampfar. She began scanning Violet.

  “Good game, Vi,” Veikko called to her.

  “Yaw, it was good. I won,” she mumbled as her tongue continued to swell.

  “Don’t rub it in. I was going eas—Ow!” Taake, perhaps annoyed at their candor, turned off the room’s analgia generator. Veikko grasped at his cheek. “Oh chainsaw gutsfuck, that hurts!”

  It didn’t hit Violet at first, so she thought she must have surely done better. Then the pain flooded in. From her chest, her back, her tongue, all over, it began to creep in. She felt faint for a moment but didn’t come close to passing out. The pain was insistent. It wouldn’t let her lose consciousness. She shouted involuntarily, as if her broken mouth had to yell to stay alive. Mercifully, she had some degree of control over what she said.

  “I cweamed yo ass, Veikko!”

  “Names of Odin, give it up,” he begged.

  Violet let out a horribly painful laugh. “Could do it wit one awm!” She couldn’t stop laughing, as if she were drunk on the pain. Everyone but the nurses got infected. Even Veikko laughed as the frustrated nurse worked on his optic nerve. As Kampfar paralyzed Violet’s mouth, stopping her laughter, she felt every onlooker behind her eyes unlinking. They were all leaving, having seen the match they came to see. But nobody was linking to her to comment. At Achnacarry they had all criticized a match. Here they just vanished.

  They couldn’t have left for disinterest. That had been the most brutal fight Violet had ever fought. She suddenly felt a nausea that had nothing to do with the injuries. She had just screwed up big time. How could she not have known she was going too far? Looking at Veikko’s wounds, it was clear everyone who saw it had left sickened. The new girl had just proven that not only was she too nasty for Achnacarry, she was too nasty for Valhalla. What would they do to her now?

  Violet remembered the years of punishment for the slightest playground scuffles. It wasn’t a question; she was about to be punished more terribly than she ever had before. If Valhalla was so far beyond Achnacarry in every other respect, how would it punish its own? What the hell was she thinking? How could she have been so damn stupid? She was finally somewhere that made sense, and on her second night, she had beaten a man into—she looked at Veikko. He was a mess. And everyone had seen it. Violet felt sick. She had just pulverized the first friend she ever had.

  Luckily, the nurses were complaining to each other, and their words were reassuring, though they weren’t intended to be.

  “Just like everyone in T team, always their first week!”

  “T was nothing, remember P? Pickles and Pustule?”

  “Oh, that was the worst; we never did find all her teeth.”

  “I mean Pustule. I’m the one who had to wake him.” He stared straight at Violet as if to blame her. “They got into the sonic scimitars, and he lost his arms, bled to death on the spot. I put ’em back on and started him up again, and the dumb bastard picked up his sword and went after Pickles again.”

  “What a night, and the next! The next night he died again. The damn fool just didn’t stop. Sparring! You damn kids and your thirty-five VVPS!”

  “Always on the first night, yeah, Vibs,” complained the nurse. “Yeah, I’m lookin’ at you.”

  Violet’s mouth was almost working; she had to ask, “Why—whd yw do?”

  Vibs cringed and looked to Veikko, who was smiling past the pain. “I might have disemboweled him. Just a little.”

&nb
sp; “Yeah,” said Veikko, “but we weren’t even sparring yet.”

  “Well, you heard his damn music.”

  Vibs shrugged. Violet’s eyes watered slightly, and not from pain. It took the medics more than an hour to restore the two to working condition. They begrudgingly gave Violet and Veikko a couple of portable analgia generators to clip to their jumpsuits, and those covered the last bits of healing their bodies had to do on their own. The trio went to dinner and laughed about the horrific brutality customary of a first sparring bout in Valhalla. Violet was far from unique, having required the nurses, and she learned there would be far more to come.

  THE WALRUS that had previously crammed itself into a vent seemed to have escaped its cage and gotten stuck in a civilian’s door. Though the three walrus details on her first day were at the high end of frequency, there had been at least one every day since Violet arrived, and Veikko begrudgingly explained why.

  “It’s Tasha. She set off a sonic charge on the other end of Kvitøya as soon as she heard my team got a third. Sent all the blubber running for the ravine.”

  “Why would she do that?” Violet asked.

  “Why indeed,” said Vibs, staring at Veikko.

  “I might have, uh, well….”

  “The night Veikko learned how to sneak into secure buildings, he snuck into T team’s barracks.”

  “I thought it was S team’s.”

  “He found the first female in the room, thought she was Skadi, and proceeded to—”

  “At least let me tell it. I was trying to get a laugh out of her. Did her hair in an afro.”

  “A two meter afro with keratin resin. It was so big and so solid she couldn’t get out of the room till they cut it off. With a tank-mounted grinding beam.”

  Veikko went on with pride, “That’s why she has short hair now,” and less proudly, “and why we have a walrus a day.”

  “Two today,” reminded Vibs.

  “One today—it was the same walrus twice.”

  “So what other tricks did you try to play on poor Skadi?”

  “Not many. I saved the best for you two.”

  Violet said softly to Vibs, “More and more I like those field knuckles.”

  As they slept, Veikko gave an account of the lengths he had gone to to make Skadi laugh. He had programmed her morning news logs to greet her with the archaic informal, “Whuzzup, Beotch?”; he had set S team’s door image to show an ancient video file of an austere prairie dog, and recited his entire humor memory partition to her in lucid sleep. Then on his second day of her acquaintance, he had taken an enamel buffer from med bay and programmed his teeth to change color as he spoke, reduced her team to giggles with his impression of a drunk Cetacean, programmed Alopex into the likeness of a two hundred kg bald man (without changing her voice), and vowed solemnly to tie his balls to a goat if he had to to make her laugh. He admitted that he had not yet resorted to that last-case scenario, but Violet offered to help him find a good strong goat at any cost. As morning drew closer, the conversation turned serious about the nature of what she would be training on the next day.

  As soon as they woke, Veikko asked, “You said you could fight me with one arm, right? Is that what you tried to say?”

  “Tried—my tongue was apparently disconnected.”

  “Well, you’ll get to try. Today you start injury training.”

  “Injury training?”

  “We can get hurt in this line of work. Badly,” said Vibeke. “They teach you what everything feels like, how to tell a pierced kidney from a flesh wound, how to know how badly damaged you are, and how far you can keep going with every possible disability.”

  “There’s a variety of pain simulations, and some are actually kind of fun,” said Veikko. “They have Dr. Niide remove one of your arms or legs, and you have to fight. They’ll take off fingers and show you how to operate a microwave without them. They’ll also kill you for a few minutes so you know what it’s like and won’t be afraid of it.”

  How stupid, Violet thought. “I’d kind of prefer to fear dying.”

  “No, no, not like that, just the sensation,” explained Vibs. “Dying feels pretty damn weird.”

  “But why should we know the feeling? If we die, we die—there’s nothing to know.”

  “Because we don’t always die by mistake,” Vibs pointed out. “Playing dead’s part of our arsenal of disguise.”

  “You have to know when and where you can die safely, for how long, how to orient yourself once you come back, much more.”

  “Is it safe?”

  “Oh yeah, you won’t be dead long,” Veikko shrugged. “It’s all done in med bay.”

  Violet would have continued her protest on the utter idiocy and uselessness of such a thing, but the fact both had done it before her raised a more intriguing question. “So what’s it like?”

  “I never got the white light, but I hear some people get it.”

  “I got it a little,” said Veikko. “Then it turned red and this big horned red guy threw me in a pit of fire and shit.”

  “Death, Veikko, not the time you tried to cook.”

  “Oh no, nothing there. Just dreamless sleep. The hard part is the drug they use to kill you. It’s not painful. It just lets you control it. It won’t kill you unless you give in, and you won’t want to give in.”

  “You’re right,” Violet snapped. “I don’t want to give in. It’s pointless. Absolutely fucking pointless.”

  Veikko thought for a moment. “Here’s how Alf explained it to me.” Veikko suddenly spoke with Alf’s voice. It was beyond an impression; it was acting on a surprisingly high level. “Two reasons: one, if you’re gonna kill people, it’s only right you know what you’re doing to ’em. Reason two isn’t just moralistic drivel: No matter what fate the Norns spin, dying is the one thing you know absolutely that someday you’ll do. Best to practice.”

  “I disagree about practice,” Violet said. “I don’t like it.”

  “It’s death,” said Vibs. “You’re not supposed to.”

  Violet went to med bay intending to argue it to the last, but as she formulated the arguments, she became less convinced of them. Everyone in the teams had done it, even Vibeke, who Violet had to admit was right about everything else. It was harmless and safe, if dying could be described as safe. But what convinced her most was the fact that she was so adamant not to do it. She was afraid of it, a fear that was likely to cripple her if not dealt with, and here, now, they were going to take that fear away when she was safe with those she trusted most. By the time she walked into med bay with her teammates by her side, she was resolved to die if it was the last thing she did.

  When she lay on the table, she was less determined. In her mind, she wasn’t afraid, but her body told her otherwise, as she was shivering.

  Dr. Niide mumbled, “Don’t worry ’bout shivers…. Everyone does…. Important thing’s your Tikari. It’s safely chested?”

  She nodded.

  “Good. If you die without it, it dies too, or sometimes goes ronin. Ronin Tikari are dangerous, mmm, very dangerous. Won’t be happy with us for, mmm… killing its owner.” He picked up a hypospray. “Here’s the toxin. Painless, completely painless. Like falling asleep. You’ll be tired, but if you don’t let yourself go, you won’t go. You’ll just be tired for… ever….”

  Violet was about to start asking questions. She was suddenly very curious about how the drug worked, what it was made of, who invented it, how the hypospray worked, what grades Dr. Niide had at 133rd in his class. She could have asked questions until she died of old age instead. But Dr. Niide had already given her the toxin. She was suddenly very tired.

  It wasn’t so different from falling asleep, but it had a very final feeling to it. That finality was what she had to overcome. For all time, death had been final. Now it was not. It was much like the first time Violet tried to swim, when she’d had to make herself dunk her head under water. Everything inside her had told her not to do it, but after som
e hesitation, she’d remembered that it was what she was in the water to do. The instinct not to submerge was ferocious, nearly impossible to fight, but she’d mastered it and forced her head under the surface, and she came back up with water in her ears. She did it with ease every time she went swimming after that. She was in med bay to die. She would wake up again. She forced herself to let the drug take over, to let her heart stop, and she fell into nothingness.

  She knew she was dead as soon as she was alive again. She had been dead. She knew that and was therefore not dead anymore. She was in med bay, and for some reason she was relieved that her ears weren’t full of water. She opened her eyes to see Veikko and Vibeke beside her. She was home safe in Valhalla, Hall of the Slain. She laughed to herself. They’d named it exactly what it was. She was happy, a warm giddy sort of happy that she hadn’t felt before. She was happy to be alive again, and though the feeling would never stand out as it did that moment, it never left her completely. For the rest of her life, she had a subconscious sense of value, and a conscious sense of just how nice it was to be alive.

  “The first time is the hardest,” Veikko said.

  “You died again?” Violet asked.

  “No,” he admitted. “But how can it be any worse?”

  Knowing that Veikko and Vibeke had done the same formed a connection deeper than anyone who hasn’t died could understand. It was a bond that ran deeper than family, and in a less personal way, it extended to every other team. Even Balder, who had never died in combat, had done this. The notion that a team’s first death in battle was to be celebrated also began to make sense: there was much to celebrate in coming back from the dead. An hour after her death, Violet began the rest of injury training with the recognition simulation, where a variety of wounds were fed into her brain so she would know what had happened if she felt them. Some wounds were so painful that she wished she were dead again.

  Veikko was elsewhere throughout the simulations. Only Vibeke was by her side. Violet was kind of glad he wasn’t there to crack jokes. She felt what it was like to get microwaved—hot. She felt what it was like to get shot—hard. She felt burns and freezes and blades and hits. She felt the loss of each organ, the puncture of an organ, the breaking of a bone, the resetting of a bone, and a horrible variety of every kind of harm it would do her good to recognize. She even got to feel what it was like to drown in boiling acid, which felt oddly similar to showering with army napalm.