Valhalla

by Ari Bach

  One advantage of all that pain was that she did not undervalue the rest of injury training under analgia. The fact she didn’t have to feel the pain behind a lost limb was heavenly now that she knew just how much it hurt to lose one. She almost felt sorry for Veikko’s eye. Almost. Dr. Niide spent the rest of the day removing parts of her, deactivating parts of her, crippling parts of her. She didn’t get to spar with Veikko at a disadvantage. He was still on another training job. Vibeke fought with great skill and didn’t go easy on her for the loss of her legs or arms. Violet learned how to fight when cut in half. She learned how to think with a sluggish, contused brain. She learned every limit, and beyond the unsettling feelings, she was surprised at just how much she could still do.

  When they turned on the pain again, she was amazed at what she could do despite it. No matter what they took off or broke or removed, she could still fight on. Deprived of limbs, she could bite someone to death. She realized she was damn near invincible, and that pain, though annoying as hell, couldn’t stop her. After a short while, it couldn’t even dissuade her.

  Injury training also included desensitization to things like blood and fire. She learned to run through, stand in, and see through fire. The same three went for blood and gore, all simulated but still terrible to behold. She didn’t question the need for it but hoped she wouldn’t find herself in reality wading through so much viscera.

  The remains of injury training were mostly classroom material. Most of it they link-loaded into her: The range she’d be able to limp, the force she could exert with a broken hand, the rate of blood loss and time to unconsciousness. They simulated link damage and how it could be overcome, as well as how it would affect her Tikari. This angered the Tikari greatly, and it was a bit hesitant to leave her chest for hours after.

  They also cleared up one thing that Violet had never understood. Every child was given skull armor. She thought skull armor would stop anything, microwave or projectile or impact, but in fact, it was mostly there to make people feel good. As skulls develop, the armor had to shift to accommodate the sutures and became weaker. It would lessen impact for an adult, but it was really meant to protect kids’ heads from falls. After that, like most safety features in the world, it didn’t make one safer, it made one feel safer.

  THE DAY after injury training was over, they gave Violet another task that was more appalling than death training.

  “Kill training,” explained Vibeke, “is not about the methods of killing. K team will teach you those. This is a single exercise we go through early because we need to know if you can do it. A good amount of our work puts us in positions where we have to kill people, and if you can’t bring yourself to pull the trigger or raise the blade, you need to quit now before you end up in a place where it might get one of us killed.”

  “I’ve killed three people. Are you really saying I have to murder another just to prove I’m capable?”

  “You killed three people in defense, instinctively. Sometimes, we’re assassins. That’s just how it plays out. You need to know what it’s like to take a life in the field.”

  “I can’t believe they’d have us murder people just to train.”

  “We do. It’s that important. Whoever you kill will die so that—”

  “No no no, don’t justify it like that. I know the greater good crap, and I know it’s wrong, and I know you know it too. Life isn’t worth so little.”

  Veikko chimed in, “Noble but wrong. There used to be millions of people on earth. The biggest village had a couple thousand. If anyone died, a universe was lost. Maybe it still is, but in so many universes…. Being one in a million means there are twenty thousand of you. The only value you have is for people who know you, and even they can find another with a fast net search. But you work for us. Your life isn’t worthless to us. Theirs is. Kill them.”

  “Wrong, wrong, wrong. I will not kill an innocent human being for training. Not ever.”

  “Who said anything about innocent?”

  That changed her outlook. The people Vibs and Veikko killed for training unquestionably needed to die. Veikko killed, painlessly, a pirate who had tortured more than thirty families to death without reason, a sadist who would torture more kids if he went on. Vibeke killed, not painlessly, a serial rapist who targeted girls and boys with his surgically modified drill penis. She cut if off before she killed him, and Violet had to admit that even a cruel death might be warranted sometimes. She quickly understood they didn’t kill for training alone. That was just a simultaneous objective. Valhalla didn’t kill people unless they really needed to die. It was a mission that had to be done.

  “Still,” she admitted, “I wish you had me do it before showing me how it feels to die.”

  “Exactly why we do it in that order.”

  Recruits were spared the crisis of having to choose who to kill. When G team found a new recruit, they immediately began finding people for them to kill. Violet’s psychological and historical profile dictated that she should be assigned to kill Alex Deramus. Alex was one of the Orange Gang’s most horrible henchmen, a close friend of Hrothgar’s who would have joined him for her father’s murder had he not been drugged out of his gourd at the time. He tortured, he murdered, he did just about every nasty thing a man could do to a sizable heap of people, all in the name of Kray.

  While Veikko and Vibeke worked on their own education with Alf, O team escorted Violet to London. When they came upon Alex, he was stalking a stray cat. Violet wished she could have come to him while he prepared to murder a family of three, one just like hers. But she did like cats. Kill training, as they still called it, had to be personal but it also had to be safe. They didn’t send young Valkyries to kill people who had a chance to kill them back. Thus it was a perfect opportunity to use her Tikari, as was tradition.

  All five humans stayed in a distant pogo as Violet put her focus completely into the insect. Her eyes rolled back, and her second link glowed bright, but only to the eyes of anyone with a Valhalla link—no outsiders could see the immersion glow. She flew to the pavement behind Alex’s feet and felt what it was like to hunt. The day before, she’d thought if she had to kill a man, it would be a time of regret and fear. It was instead exhilarating. That worried her. The little moral sense left in humanity told her it was wrong. But it wasn’t wrong. She was going to kill a man who was about to kill, well, a rather scruffy cat, but he was still Alex Deramus, and he still had to die.

  So the little metal bug jumped and took its killing shape and stabbed him through the back of the head, and then he was dead. And Violet felt no regret whatsoever. She thought she must be a monster. She thought about Alex’s parents, how they must feel. She remembered what they’d told her, that he’d killed his parents long ago by stabbing them in the backs of their heads. She tried to think of the pain he must have felt but knew he felt nothing. It was better than he deserved. She said his name to herself again and again. Alex. Alex Deramus. She couldn’t feel a thing for him. She gave up trying to make herself.

  The Tikari returned with blood on its wings. O team flew her home, where they watched the news logs: “A monster was killed today;” “More bodies found in his basement;” “Victims’ families praise the vigilante who did the deed.” Violet didn’t feel pride either that night. No remorse, no pride, nothing. She just felt like she was doing her job.

  Having learned to kill and be killed, Violet was now ready to learn the expansive variety of ways to do it. She met with K team the next morning. Kabar would teach her everything she had to know about her Tikari. He taught her how to use it in knife form, much as Sergeant Cameron had. Kabar’s own Tikari link was broken the day he arrived. Knowing how personal an injury that was, Violet didn’t ask any more about it, nor did she question why he still used the same deceased thing as his knife.

  She learned in depth just what could be done with a Tikari, to do all Veikko had boasted was possible. In knife form she was taught how to throw a blade, and only when she had mastered
the technique was she told that it had a self-balancing gyroscope for throws and could in fact be made far deadlier by deploying rocket thrusters in midthrow, and if necessary, shift its weight to turn corners and return to her hand. It was quite capable of following a target around the globe, killing a person, disabling heavy machinery, reprogramming linked and unlinked computer systems (even having its own web avatar, where it could pass as a human, albeit a quiet one), and she learned that in an emergency the poor animal could be left as a mine to detonate with a blast proportional to its size. She vowed never to use this feature.

  She excelled at its use as a knife, but as much as she loved the gizmo, she was quite ineffective with it in bug form. She could stab a guy in the back of the head, but she couldn’t make it do the amazing things a Tikari was supposed to be capable of. She couldn’t make it do the aerial acrobatics, she couldn’t make it do the precise carving, she couldn’t make it do a thing she wanted.

  “And that’s because you keep trying to make it. Don’t make it. Let it,” said Kabar. “Trust the Tikari. When you pick up a glass, do you force your hand to make the exact movements? No. You just pick up the glass. Now, boomerang your Tikari through this slot and slice the apple in my hand.”

  After med team reattached Kabar’s hand, he let Violet move on for the day. She met with Kalashnikov, who taught her about her microwave.

  “The Valhalla standard microwave is far more complex than the weapon you used on Kray’s men, or even your standard military issue. This microwave can fire a dispersion field, a scattering field, a diamagnetic tractoring wave, a conventional magnetic beam, as well as a heavily variable microwave beam. That beam can be adjusted in intensity to warm gently or melt gold. It can project a beam with a radius of eighty degrees or .0000001 degrees.”

  He showed her meticulously how to do everything he said. He also warned her about what might happen if she did.

  “Any beam will set off a microwave detector. Even the tractoring wave. Now—that tractor. This weapon can lift a five-thousand kilogram weight, but your hand can’t. If you try, you’ll break your wrist. You cannot use a fulcrum with a microwave beam, so you must pay attention to what you’re trying to do with it. Don’t let its range of abilities make you forget your own limitations. Now, let us discuss its use as a grappling hook. First, you turn the flux pin….”

  After he showed her how to pull herself up a cliff, Violet moved on to Katyusha, who began to show her the variety of special weapons in the Valhalla arsenal. She showed Violet a few rocket launchers, excision grenades, razor darts, variable motorized spears, chemicals, derezzers (devices that interrupt the electrical activity in a human brain, knocking one unconscious for a minute or a comatose eternity), explosives, and other weapons. It would take Violet months to get to the most amazing weapons that Vibeke was learning. Humans had invented too many ways to kill each other to be taught all of them in a couple of weeks, and Valhalla had all sorts of strange and amazing devices for that purpose in stock.

  Katana told Violet about the weapons Valhalla did not have. They didn’t stock nuclear weapons, but she taught Violet how to disarm them if she had to. They would never even suggest using a wave bomb but would stop one from going off at all costs. Violet learned how the bombs worked and how to take one apart with her bare hands. They showed her footage of what omega waves did to people, which almost reacquainted her with her breakfast. They did not teach her how to put the bomb back together, as they had with A, H, N, and F bombs. Some things are just too horrible to ever reassemble. In disarming all warheads, she learned which wire to cut, how to recognize that wire in any bomb independently of color code, and how to stop the ubiquitous red timer on every instrument of destruction that had one.

  P team began to teach strategy. She learned to find an opponent in mazes that she herself did not know the layout of. She learned how not to be seen, how to be seen just enough to send them running toward her team, and how to recognize those trying to pull the same trick and to discover who wanted her to see them for all the same reasons. N team showed her vehicles. They taught her to fly a pogo as if it were a tank, and a tank as if it were a skiff, and finally she got to ride on a skiff without breaking any of her own bones. H team taught her Internet basics, defense and offense, and search features she never imagined possible. They also taught her what the Internet lacks.

  “How do you discern what any building in the real world holds?” asked Hellhammer.

  “I look at the link logo and ask; then I know.”

  “But you won’t always have a link, and net logos can lie. How do you know?”

  She didn’t, so they taught her.

  Fehu team taught her so many gadgets and gizmos that she had to put some of the information in her partitioned memory to learn later. She learned uses for familiar tools and weapons that she had not imagined, such as how Valhalla’s hammers could magnetize and demagnetize metals and how goggles could start fires and matches reveal invisible ink. She learned how any link antenna could broadcast jamming fields. She never got around to reading written letters. Some things were just too daunting and too useless to justify the effort.

  Her training grew more specialized. She learned to use her Tikari to spy ahead as she ran; she learned faster methods than uplink to communicate with her partners; and soon the three left the tunnels and villages to chase and sneak around in exotic locales demanding special techniques. She learned how to run on ice with and without her jumpsuit’s cleatable soles. She learned how to scale skyscrapers and wade through magma. She learned that Vibeke was quite skilled at reading text, and that the book on her bed was titled Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah & Meccah but never learned why Vibeke would read such a thing.

  The training teams let her watch all missions in progress and required her to watch quite a few. Slowly Valhalla was revealed in all its unrevealable glory, as were some of its associates. Other bases across the world worked together as needed to be heroes without recognition. There were seven hidden cooperatives with their own hierarchical systems, though it seemed all had the same respect for Alföðr that Valhalla did. Valhalla was in many ways the core of the underground, and its history and politics took several days for Snorri to summarize. But Violet soaked it all up.

  As she learned more and caught up to her mates, the team did more together. Spotting fakes in the caverns gave way to more field tests and even field fights. One night when they chased a target down a flight of stairs, they arrived in the basement to find him with five friends. They attacked and ended up broken in half with faces smashed by boots and skin ripped off by rough cement. The lesson that night, Alföðr explained, was knowing when to retreat. Veikko and Violet reviewed their failure in the med bay’s advanced healing generators, while Vibeke remained mostly silent.

  “You had the fat guy until the thin guy shot you,” said Veikko.

  “That’s not the point. The point is to know when you’re beat, and we didn’t.”

  “You’d think they could just tell us,” he complained. “Not make us learn it the really hard way. I mean, that was my nose. I needed that nose, I used it daily.”

  “The new one looks fine,” Violet reassured him.

  “Yeah, but still….”

  “They’re sadists.”

  “Amen.”

  “I fuckin’ had that fat fucker.”

  “You know, they never taught us point one about escape,” Veikko noted. “I’ve been here longer than either of you. They did all this shit to me in the same order with different people, but they never told us how to escape.”

  “They do tend to teach us things after we fully comprehend the importance of them,” Vibeke explained.

  “There’s something to be said for fair warning.”

  “And for surprise. This isn’t like grade school. It really shouldn’t be.”

  “Easy for you to say. You still have your goddamn nose.”

  “Shut it, Veikko. You didn’t get shot in the back. How did I
leave my back open?”

  “You thought Vibs was covering it.”

  “I was covering it,” she protested dully. “Then I woke up here.”

  Veikko shook his head. “Damn. We really sucked, huh?”

  “Yes,” Vibs confirmed. “Yes we did.”

  But they did not again. That was to be their worst failure in field tests and most teams had far, far worse. Mishka told them one day as they dissected roaming land mines how F team, a couple of Fs ago, had failed to clear a transport vehicle they’d stolen in a training mission and came under fire from non-Valhalla criminals—experienced yakuza who intended to kill them. The detectors knew it, and instructing members came in with force and saved all but one of the team.

  “Fuchi, a tank with the sweet, silly personality of a child, had only been there six months, hadn’t even seen her first arctic winter. That’s the training nightmare they tell us all about.”

  It was uncommon for people to die irreparably in training, but it happened. Cautionary stories like F team’s kept it from happening on the heaviest missions. Violet’s mind wandered. She was less concerned with F-team history than she was with the way Mishka rubbed Vibeke’s back.

  After their failure in the basement, V team learned escape. They learned evasion and the most basic, crude methods of remaining hidden and moving silently. Only when they’d mastered the techniques employed by feudal Nippon and aboriginal America did they receive training in the technology that made those methods obsolete. They didn’t learn camouflage-suit settings until they didn’t need them anymore. They weren’t given auditory dampeners until they could steal them from the storage tower unheard. They learned to wake at any shift in room tone and how to get a full night’s sleep in under half an hour, if required.