Valhalla

by Ari Bach

  “What’s in the red folder?” she asked.

  “Hrothgar Trap Files,” it told her.

  She wasted no time in opening it up and stealing its entire contents. She heard the file names as they transferred.

  “Opening Logs—On Hrothgar Location; On Family Safety; On Plan Failure; On Nelson MacRae Fatality; On Nelson MacRae Cadaver Disappearance; On June MacRae Fatality; On Violet MacRae Survival; On Information Withheld From Violet MacRae; Closure Logs.”

  The penultimate file was a promise of the greatest magnitude, and in her anticipation she forgot the file about her father’s missing body as soon as the link passed it. She was finally going to learn exactly what she’d wanted to know since the day her parents had died. She didn’t forget what she’d learned about stealing files.

  She fled the police net first—no need to wait around there. She had Alopex run all the antitrace programs and virus/trojan protocols that ensured Valhalla couldn’t be traced by any sort of spy program the cops might have kept in their secret files. She did it all correctly and patiently. It took exceptional calm to back it all up in the Alopex mainframe, to label and note what it was and why she’d stolen it. Then, finally, she opened the file and saw exactly what the police didn’t want her to know. She finally understood why they’d kept it from her.

  Her father had known that Hrothgar would only come in person to kill a traitor he truly hated, and perhaps only if he saw some pleasure in it for himself. Nelson had researched the massacres that Hrothgar attended personally and found that the only sure commonality that warranted the man’s attendance was not the degree of betrayal or the stature of the family killed, but that they had a teenage daughter. Of the few officers trusted to entrap Hrothgar, Nelson MacRae had the only one. He volunteered to infiltrate the Orange Gang, to act so sloppily as to get caught, and to trap the man with his own family. Hrothgar was meant to discover who he was and where he lived. He was meant to break in on them that night.

  They suspected Orange Gang rats in the force, so Nelson couldn’t risk setting up emergency detectors to be monitored by the common personnel, nor could he station guards who might have informed Hrothgar of the plan. He couldn’t even warn his family. The Orange Gang’s ears were so wide reaching, and Violet’s father was so cautious. He could only calculate as accurately as possible when Hrothgar would arrive and tell his few loyal trappers to arrive at the same time. It would have worked perfectly if one of Kray’s cronies, Alex Deramus, hadn’t bowed out. Without stopping to pick up a fourth man, Hrothgar arrived seven minutes early.

  Violet should have hated her father for it. She should have felt betrayed, angry that he’d used his own child to catch a villain. But anger never occurred to her. Her father had thought Hrothgar dangerous enough to warrant going all the way, and he didn’t shrink from the best way to do it, not for her, not for his family. It meant risking his wife and daughter as bait to catch this man, and he didn’t pass the responsibility to another cop. He didn’t play it safe and miss his chance. He condemned his family to death or worse because it was the best way to rid the world of Hrothgar Kray. Violet was overwhelmingly proud she had finished it. As for Nelson MacRae, her dad was a heartless bastard, but he was a tough heartless bastard. Violet admired nothing as much as that kind of will. He was her dad, so she’d always loved him, but now she finally understood him. She could finally love him for the man he really was.

  She logged out and found herself alone in the com room. Her first instinct was to remain alone, to absorb what she had learned and come to terms with it all. Her second instinct told her that she wasn’t subject to any such need. She felt concern once again that she wasn’t feeling what she should be. What she had discovered was already sorted into the parts of her brain where it belonged and the emotional barrage it might have provoked didn’t come. Heartless of me, she thought, but she no longer wondered why she was so unfeeling: She got it from her dad.

  So all that was left for her was to head back to the cafeteria, take her seat, and finish her green putty and tan hemispheres. She had been away only seven minutes.

  “Was everything all right, Vi?” asked Vibeke.

  “All was well,” she said. It clearly didn’t satisfy her audience. She thought she was lying when she said it but quickly realized that there was nothing wrong. She had only gained a fuller perception of past events. Ancient history, she thought. She could tell the crowd at the table but saw no real point to it. What she might say could not be unsaid, so it was best not to bring up her findings. Vibeke and Veikko probably knew already; they would have hacked the Kyle police back when it happened. They didn’t tell her because they wanted her to learn it for herself, in her own time. They wouldn’t bring it up unbidden purely out of courtesy. She wouldn’t mention it for the same reason.

  “What did I miss?” she asked.

  “You missed,” recounted Vibeke, “Veikko telling an obscene story that offended the ethnicity and gender of everyone at the table, me stabbing him with a putty spork, and Svetlana explaining the traits of the hole growing in SA7’s wall.”

  “I also blew a bubble in my soup. Fifteen centimeters high,” Veikko bragged.

  “Where’d you go?” asked Snot.

  “Com tower,” she answered honestly. “Some loose ends.”

  Her tone must have told everyone she didn’t want to talk about it, and none pushed. Svetlana went on about the mysterious hole and offered to send all the info to V team’s common dreams. Though they were used to monitoring missions in progress for training, this was an even more appealing offer. The problem was a small one, but it was unsolved, and they were being offered the clues. That night as they slept, they dissected every fragment they were sent, coming to the same conclusions S team had already posted and bumping into the avatars of several other teams studying the same material.

  A sort of contest was emerging between junior teams to see who could crack the riddle first. Violet gave it her fullest attention, she knew, so that she wouldn’t have to think about what she had learned in the com tower. It was resolved, over, she reminded herself. There was a reward to be gleaned from this new mystery and none to be found in dwelling on the bare and uncomplicated past. Staring at chemical scans of the old broken detector and the SA7 hole, she thought she was beginning to see some sign of a pattern, some dim light of significance on the horizon, something that was almost a clue.

  Alopex interrupted the mass viewing of the SA7 files at 0550.

  “Tracking pip has entered alert zone,” she said. Violet and her team wondered for a moment what she was talking about, but then they all remembered they had a mission of their own.

  By the time all three were suited up and out of the barracks, Umberto was already well within the rampart zone. Alopex gave them a map by link that overlaid their vision, showing the tracking pip location as a bright-green dot. Once they walked into the open air of the ravine, they saw his dot right near the southeast edge of the wall. Umberto was still on the surface but was surely coming to his secret passage into the ravine. They hopped onto the power system branches and climbed fast up to the top levels. They defuzzed their feet and walked closer to the dot.

  They saw the dot drop about twenty meters behind the rocks. He had just entered the compound. The only room carved into the rock around them was a storage room, number one, the highest up along the walls and also the least used. They noted and recorded that the landscape outside the room would indeed allow a large animal safe, albeit clumsy, passage to the lower levels of the ravine.

  Veikko opened the door, and the trio entered. Umberto’s dot glowed so large and brightly from the Alopex link that they told her to turn it off. The dot disappeared, and Vibeke linked to her teammates to ask for motion recognition. Alopex sent back a stream of information. “Motion at twelve meters.”

  That was past the back wall. There must have been a tunnel behind it. They approached, and the motion readings continued to grow closer. Ten meters, eight. Their heartbeats grew s
lightly faster. He was coming, but there was no visual or auditory contact. Seven meters, six. Still nothing. It would break through the walls anytime now. Five, four. Impossible, it was reading inside the room. Three meters. They didn’t see it. But there was a sound. Veikko looked up. He saw heavy ceiling damage. Two meters.

  Vibeke sent her Tikari up through a small hole in the ceiling panels. She linked Violet and Veikko in to its eyes. Darkness. One meter. The Tikari saw a great gray shape just before the ceiling gave way. The entire panel seesawed down to let the giant animal roll down into the room. He righted himself and gave a loud snort of recognition. Alopex glanced through their eyes and stated the obvious.

  “Veikko, Violet, Vibeke, Sector 1F. Walrus detail.”

  Vibeke’s Tikari swooped down from the ceiling as Umberto flopped happily off the panel and let it swing back into place. After V team wrangled the giant to his private coach and removed his tracking pip, Alopex sent him back to the surface, and the team returned to the storage room to finish their job.

  Violet tractored the panel with her microwave to swing down and let them up. They set their suits to glow gently and illuminate the cavern over the ceiling. It was big enough for any walrus but too small for artillery or anything beyond personnel to walk through. It sloped up through glacial carved rock to a crevice in the surface, which, though, well hidden, would be quite easy to fall into if one lacked proper fingers. It was a perfect walrus trap to funnel its quarry directly into the hole in the ceiling. A quick Tikari flight confirmed the rampart would seal off the gap when raised.

  They linked their findings to Alf, who expressly forbade them to erect any kind of barrier to prevent the walrus details of future recruits. Vibeke linked back to him a design she had whipped up that could lock the ceiling panel in place in an emergency, which Alf was happy to consider. But there were matters more pressing than their accomplished mission.

  “Come down to special arsenal seven,” he told them. “There’s been a development.”

  THE DEVELOPMENT was a new hole in the arsenal wall—made by explosives. This was no prank by local citizens but an act of war. Skadi stood above the crowd, an easy task as she was roughly two meters tall, and briefed the gathering teams.

  “The breach was made by at least three heavy thermite charges. Most of the detectors in the area have been broken, all by simple bludgeon. Detectors inside were deactivated by the heat from the thermite, but one was far enough away to stay alert. We set the detectors yesterday to give only silent alarms to S team, but the intruder was scared off nonetheless, possibly on recognition of a working detector. They fled before grabbing their intended target.

  “They did manage to steal part of it, thus revealing their intention: Mjölnir, a magnetic weapon system designed for massive incursions into armored bases. Composed of two projector cannons and a magnetic generation core that charges conventional projector cannon ammunition, with enough force to collapse any susceptible materials on impact, turning metallic armor into a crushing force against the armored. Whoever got in stole the cannons and two spares but not the core. The cannons are dangerous in themselves. They are, after all, cannons, but they’re nothing more without that critical generator.”

  Skadi looked over at V team. “We have a lot of work to do, V team. If you’re done chasing pinnipeds, we could use your help.” They were indeed done chasing pinnipeds and were most eager to help. S team was going to find out who did it. T team would find where the stolen weaponry had gone. V team would study exactly how they had gotten away with it. Elder teams would monitor. It was an important and disturbing occurrence but not one that merited their direct attention. Elder teams rarely worked on anything short of, as Veikko put it, “pure fucking Armageddon.” They were quite happy to let the junior teams work on something real.

  Vibeke demanded that they treat the smallest of the allotted tasks, “As if it were the Warren Commission.” Violet and Veikko both linked up to learn what the Warren Commission was, while Vibeke did all the work. That evening they reported their findings to S team.

  Veikko said, “Vibeke learned that Mjölnir was stored in the northwest corner of the special arsenal bay. Protective measures were as follows: the core generator was stored in a special rubber coating within a lead safe within a detector field. There were six detectors, five of which were deactivated or damaged immediately during the incursion. The last went off, starting the alarm, while the intruder disabled two of the five locks on the lead safe. At that point they escaped with only the cannons.

  “The cannons were stored in simple locking mechanisms next to the generator, with individual semidetectors, all of which were disabled by microwave blasts. Each cannon weighed forty kilos, and the generator weighed nearly 300 kg, suggesting that heavy-lifting mechanisms and a transport vehicle must have been present.

  “Flying vehicles are capable of working their way down to the caverns but not inside them, and certainly not to the special arsenals, so the transport would have logically waited at the east tunnel gate. Vibs confirmed that when she found the east tunnel gate torn off the walls. A carriage system was found damaged under the left door; readings confirmed that it was used to haul the cannons and was of a size capable of moving the generator had they taken it. The carriage was painted white, unlike Valhalla’s equipment. When we commandeer such machinery, it’s always stripped of paint and gold plated, so it must have been from outside.

  “While Violet and I were still linking up the Warren Commission, Vibs concluded that at least three people were involved—one to run the vehicle, one to disable the outer alarms, and one to simultaneously begin breaking into the lead safe. They had equipment of their own, including at least one vehicle, one carriage, and extensive incursion tools. They had knowledge of the inner layout and some knowledge of the alarm and detection systems, presumably having broken them previously either in a failed attempt or in research of our reaction to a minor incursion. The intruders now have four projector cannons. The fact that they tried to steal the generator suggests they don’t already have one.”

  S team was impressed. Veikko continued, “Violet and I concluded that Oswald acted alone.”

  Skadi laughed, and for the rest of the night Veikko strutted around the ravine with a sense of accomplishment far greater than if he had discovered the identity of the thieves, hunted them down across the globe, and killed them all using nothing but his pinky finger. Vibeke was quieter about her accomplishments, so as Veikko and Skadi walked the floors hand in hand, Vibeke and Violet went to find Alf in his library, where Vibs detailed her plans for a walrus door they could control.

  “Brilliant work, Vibeke,” he said. “I’ll pass it on to H team to build.”

  “Then V team will install it?”

  “Yes, but we will be leaving the mechanism in the open state.” He smiled with a teacher’s expression. “It’s good to keep young teams busy with such things.”

  “So we’re condemned to it for another eon?” Violet asked dejectedly.

  “Not necessarily,” he said. “Exclusive walrus detail is reserved for teams with three members. You’ll reschedule tomorrow for applicant analysis. They found someone for your fourth bunk.”

  G team discovered him in Bayern. His name was Kristian. He was nineteen years old. He was very tall. He had blond hair and a muscle surplus. His family was alive, but he was distant to them. They were not on speaking terms. He had never killed anyone but had on many occasions defended weaker people at great personal risk. When he saw a child being beaten by her parent at a mall, he beat the parent to the ground and proceeded to lecture him on child abuse until authorities arrived. When a man with whom he argued was needlessly assaulted by one of his own companions, he broke his companion’s arm. Many other similar instances showed him to be a far more philanthropic fellow than was common for Valhalla. His motives were less in the pleasure of violence than the pleasure of justice: an uncommon find in the ravine but not one to be discarded.

  He had been
tailed for nearly two months and received the clean bill of everything from G Team. V contemplated him for a week. They watched him at work, hauling boxes of tofu across sorting floors. They watched him at home, where he ate, slept, and masturbated over five times a night. They watched him online, where he read mythology, watched ancient cinema, and masturbated over five times a day. He was a happy sort, though he had few friends. G team had already dealt with the nitty-gritty of his abilities, so V team’s observations were less about the necessities of Valhalla and more to decide if they liked him on a personal level. Violet liked him because he kept things simple. He didn’t buy tons of decorations. He didn’t need or eat expensive foods and so on, yet he seemed content with what little he had. Veikko admired his strength and good humor, laughing at his sardonic comments to oblivious coworkers. Vibs had no clue why she liked him, but darned if she didn’t look forward to meeting the guy.

  The trio logged in to black avatars and found Kristian in the lobby of a red-net bordello as he left—one does not approach a man with major life changes on his way in—and gave the greeting that Miss Manners suggested for approaching a man in a brothel with unspeakable underground work.

  “What are you, spies?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you good spies or bad spies?”

  “Good, we think.”

  He seemed humorously disappointed.

  “Do I get to see the world, meet new women from exotic locales, and sleep with them in the line of duty?”

  “All three are possible, if not likely.”

  “Are there girl spies?”

  “Yes, about half of us.”

  “Great,” he said, “I’m in.”

  And so he was brought in. R team headed out to Bayern as the trio watched by link. Like Violet’s brief dagger fight, every recruit got their chance to die from the outside world in a manner appropriate to their needs, or if they had no specific needs, their wants. Kristian had shown his greatest appreciation for battle with those who posed a threat to the weak. He was protective and had even enjoyed a good deal of online sexual fantasies involving damsels in distress. Rebecca made first contact, and Kristian seemed to know what was coming before the others arrived.