Valhalla

by Ari Bach

  When they came back to Valhalla, they headed straight for Balder’s office. He and Alf were waiting for them. Violet tried to think of a polite way to ask for a harder assignment, something that might fast-track them to the Orange Gang job. Balder spoke before she could. “I suppose we don’t have to tell you analysis gave you a 100 percent on that one.”

  “We could have done it in our sleep,” said Veikko. “I thought you wanted to challenge us?”

  Violet couldn’t have put it better. It had all gone so well that she felt almost left out. It was as if the Americans had wanted to get caught. She wondered briefly if that might have been their covert intent but admitted there was little chance of it. Sometimes sloppy, simple enemies meant no more than sloppy, simple work. She hadn’t even gotten a chance to do much of anything. She’d just watched her team function like clockwork around her. Had she been slow? Could she have done more? In the short time before Alf spoke, Violet pushed such negative possibilities aside in favor of recognizing a job well done. She would do more when she had more to do.

  “A challenge?” Alf smiled. He whistled for Alopex, who darted into the room and opened up a video graphic for all to see. It was a news log. The news program said, “—Local police forces are at a loss. There are at least twenty rebels armed with microwave rifles. We have confirmed that they have a low-yield wave bomb. We don’t know where they got it, but the omega wave signature has been confirmed by satellite. They have just given us their demands. They say if IBC prisoners are not released immediately, they will detonate the charge. They’ve already killed—”

  Alf broke the transmission off. “IBC was a bit of a joke until today. A rogue company arrested en masse for beryllium theft, illegal mining, trespassing, and the like. It seems the few that weren’t caught have turned terrorist after their fall, the last pathetic grasp of petty thieves made complicated by their possession of a wave bomb. Our own intel suggests they bought it on the Nikkei underground. E team is looking into that side of it. Anyhow, you said you wanted a challenge?”

  “Maybe not that big,” began Veikko. “We just finished the last one. We haven’t had time to—”

  “Rest?” Balder laughed. “Silly boy, you asked for a challenge. If the PRA rose from the ashes and blew up Mars, you’d have the job! Get off your ass and save Canada! I’ll load the background into your heads before you get there.”

  A wave bomb! Violet was surprised that they were about to get a real assignment, an important, dangerous one. And right after their first joke of a job. It was what she wanted. Even Veikko, behind his complaints, wanted it. They would head out at once, right after Violet made sure of one thing: “If we succeed on this,” she said to the elders, “we get the OG next.”

  She meant it to be a question, but it wasn’t a question that left her mouth. It was a deal. She had just spoken as if she were their equal, and the military chunk of her mind told her she was about to do ten thousand push-ups for it. The splinter of pride that had wedged its way in after the success of the last assignment had just expanded beyond its welcome. Balder and Alf looked at one another.

  “If you succeed, you get the OG next,” said Alf. Violet’s deal was legitimate and accepted. The splinter of pride was now infected and swelling rapidly. The team headed for the pogo pad.

  “If you fail, they set off a wave bomb,” Balder shouted after them, “and you get sold to a sideshow!”

  Violet was reasonably sure that if they failed, Dr. Niide would spend the time to make them humanoid again. Still, she was sobered by the idea. They were going up against something major. As they flew over the North Pole, Balder’s transmission dumped news logs, company history, criminal profiles, and tactical building maps into their heads. He also gave them solid analysis of the situation and his recommendations on strategy. At the same time, they felt something else linking in to their heads. There were dozens of new visual requests flooding in. Half the people in Valhalla were going to be watching from V team’s own eyes.

  The team linked to one another on high local crypto so as not to be overheard by their observers. They agreed to follow Balder’s plans to the letter if they could. They didn’t want to show off. They didn’t want to take risks. They wanted to do as they were told and survive. The risk this time wasn’t a sub’s journey away. It was an immediate and truly deplorable threat waiting to turn a neighborhood in British Colombia into the unthinkable. On reviewing the information, Violet had no doubt they could succeed. It was, in theory, not too difficult given their exceptional training. But they had to get it right. They would get it right. When the gravity of the situation seeped into her mind, Violet smiled. This was exactly what she’d always hoped for. She looked over Balder’s intel with the utmost focus.

  They arrived to see a solid perimeter. The cops had done their job and evacuated as many as they could and then made sure that nobody was getting in or out. That included V team. Police across the globe knew as little about Valhalla as Violet’s father had. If they were recognized as the Hall of the Slain, they would be considered a greater threat than the terrorists with the wave bomb. V team had to do its job despite the cops, not with them. And as Alf had warned her, “We never harm the police. Not unless it’s a crooked cop, or a matter of survival, or we feel like it.”

  They landed on a skyscraper just outside the police line. They were unseen. All eyes were on the thirty-sixth floor of the IBC headquarters. The roof of their landing skyscraper was about even with the roof of the IBC building, high above the streets but beneath the midcity walkways and decks. V team left the pogo and looked in on the enemy. They saw twenty men in strategically poor positions around that single floor of the building. Windows were intact and made of beamproof glass. It wasn’t Tikari-proof, but if the terrorists saw knife bugs killing their men, they’d likely set off the bomb. V team would need to disable all the men simultaneously. They had to go in.

  Balder’s analysis showed a reasonably safe route in that the enemies shouldn’t be able to see, roof to roof. They wasted no more time on observation. Varg went first. Using part of an overhead pedestrian overpass as a grappling target, he used his microwave as a tractor and pulled himself up over the IBC building, swung to its roof, and dropped down. The police would definitely see him, but that was no concern. They wouldn’t want someone going in, but they sure as hell wouldn’t do anything to make the terrorists aware of them, including fire on V team. Violet and the others swung over and landed alongside Varg. As she landed, Violet ventured a subtle hack into the police links. They were frantically trying to figure out which police agency was making a move. Given their bureaucracy, it would be thirty minutes before they figured out it wasn’t authorized, let alone not one of their own.

  Vibeke sent her Tikari over the side of the roof to watch the enemies from outside. All twenty were still in place, and nobody was acting as if to suggest they had been seen. Veikko began to cut through the roof with his microwave. He made a sizable hole, and Violet tractored the loose chunk of roof to set it down quietly inside the building. They used it like a step to get down. Violet and Veikko headed for the nearby stairwell. Varg and Vibs took the elevator shaft. For the first time since heading to Udachnaya, Violet felt that uneasy anticipation. This time there would be violence. There was no question about it. They weren’t heading to blindside submarines or knock out idiot cowboys. They would have to disable twenty men together or get wave bombed. The fear of mutagenic omega waves was half that of returning home (hauled by an elder team, inside out) to the disappointment of the ravine. Horrific spontaneous mutation was bad enough; failure was far, far scarier.

  They all took positions behind the doors into the thirty-sixth floor. Vibeke linked the team in to her Tikari’s eyes. The layout of the floor was as Balder’s plans showed—no walls, just a honeycomb of cubicles with short dividers. Vibs sent the Tikari around the windowed exterior. Aside from the spinal columns of the building that housed the stairs and elevator shaft, there were no barriers. When they c
ame in, no enemy would miss the sight of them and no enemy would be hidden from their microwaves. Whatever happened, it would happen fast. Violet knew that was in their favor.

  From the Tikari’s eyes, they could see where the men were positioned. A few stood by the bomb; most stood near the windows. The elevator and stairs were at the northwest and northeast corners. There would be little risk of crossfire. As per Balder’s suggestion, wide stunning beams should knock out the lot of them. Violet and Varg would fire the opening shots, then Veikko and Vibs would be ready for anyone who stayed awake. Violet and Veikko were closest to the bomb, so she would focus on the men most ready to activate it. Veikko would disarm it. The Tikari showed every man standing and in safe stunning range. Every domino was lined up perfectly to fall. It was all going as easily as Inverness.

  Vibeke gave the signal. She and Veikko zapped the doors off their respective positions, and Violet and Varg hit the terrorists with the widest stunning beams they could. They knocked out sixteen men, including all those near the wave bomb. Veikko ran for the bomb to secure it. Violet confined her beam and shot at one of the remaining four men. Varg used his Tikari as a sword to disable two men with ready microwave rifles. Vibeke sautéed the last belligerent’s heart in his chest, and the room was silent. Veikko pulled the guts out of the wave bomb and used his microwave to boil and render harmless the omega-active fluids. Violet and Varg checked every part of the floor for more men, confirming they had stunned or killed them all. Vibs recalled her Tikari.

  The incursion had gone flawlessly—so flawlessly that Violet felt like something had gone wrong. This was supposed to be the tough mission. It wasn’t. Their decision to go by the book had just led to another perfect, uninteresting nothing of a mission. If everything they did was to be so simple, Violet wondered if she would continue to enjoy her new life after all. She pushed the thoughts from her mind and got back to cleanup. Cleanup—she felt like a damn janitor. They pulled steel ribbon from the dispensers built into their Thaco armor and tied up the disarmed enemies. Police links were trying to make out what had happened inside.

  The cops could scan that the omega bomb was neutralized, so they would be coming in quickly. Time for V team to leave. They tractored their way up the elevator shaft and emerged onto the roof. Two police teams were coming up the walls, but too slowly to catch V team. They swung back to their pogo and took off before a police vehicle could make the air. It was over, no mistakes, no undue risks, clean, simple, and successful. So why was Violet so unfulfilled? She wondered if she was so cruel, as those childhood tests had said, that she had to see (more) blood to feel content. She felt something was terribly wrong with how morose she was, more so with the three happy faces around her.

  As they passed the North Pole, Balder linked to them, “News reports the police have taken over, four terrorists escaped. Twenty in custody, omega safe. Well done, V!”

  “Well done?” Veikko bragged. “We said challenge, damn it! Never been so bored in my life!”

  Vibeke chimed in, “What, what? I just woke up. Did we do something?”

  Even Violet wasn’t above pride in another job well done, but she couldn’t think of anything clever to say. She didn’t feel like saying it if she did. She let Varg indulge his immodest streak in her place. “Now what was that you said, Balder? About selling us to the circus sideshow? Was that so we could show off our freakish giant balls? Our mighty and pendulous, gargantuan….” He continued at length.

  Violet ignored him. She had other things on her mind. She wondered why the police couldn’t have done what they just had. Surely they had their own specialty teams, their own methods of disarming something so dangerous as a wave bomb. She knew as she thought about it that the mild curiosity was a sort of intellectual modesty. She couldn’t let herself indulge so hedonistically in another line of thought: the one she wanted to, the one she had begged for and finally earned. It was time for revenge.

  On the flight home, they all began to feel the weight of a long, active day. However disappointed Violet felt, however eager for what would come next, they had all just gone through a solid day’s work, and their bodies were exhausted. Arriving late in the night, V team got to rest at last. They were paid one of Valhalla’s highest compliments from the populace: They were ignored. It was far better than the attention they associated with Udachnaya, even better than it might have been if people had come up to them with words of praise. It was as if they were saying, “Yes, you have done a good job, but it was your job and nothing out of the ordinary. This is what we expect of you.” To Violet, that was oddly bittersweet.

  All four fell asleep easily. As soon as they were out, they called Alopex and told her to get Alf and Balder. After a few more minutes of Varg’s testicular boasts, Alopex arrived to take them into Alf’s dreamscape, an ornate ancient mosque called Hagia Sofia. Violet tried to speak subtly. “We’re ready to do something important.”

  Alf’s tarantula avatar scratched its head. “I am sure, Violet, that the unscrambled brains in Scotland and the unscrambled bodies in Canada are important to the would-be victims.”

  “Sure,” she said, less subtly, “but the cops could have handled that crap.”

  The old splinter that made her deal and not question was stronger now. It had worked before, and she had just justified it in action. Her team had just done all they were asked. She would press for the Orange Gang this time, right after they told her why a Valhalla team, junior though it might be, was doing the work of lowly cops. “You kept the police off it so we could have a go, didn’t you?” she said, almost an accusation. Then something felt wrong. Not her boast, not her demand, but the word “lowly” in her mind. Suddenly her father’s line of work was beneath her. She felt a tinge of regret for thinking it.

  Before she could reroute her train of thought, Balder spoke up. “We might have neglected sending a few bits of intel to delay their response, but we certainly didn’t go out of our way. I was hoping to see your death-defying escape from the police after they mistook you for terrorists. Escaping from police is good practice in nonlethal force.”

  “I think,” Varg hinted, “one of us might be eager for a specific assignment.”

  Vibs chimed in, “The other three of us might want it too.”

  And Veikko: “I could really go for some fresh-squeezed orange juice right now.”

  Her team shared her feelings, and to a girl who lacked friends growing up, that meant everything. Any thought of regret for her unspoken overdose of pride died then and there, and she grinned in her sleep. The big brown tarantula folded four of its arms. “Balder, any objections?”

  “None at all. We haven’t had a team observing them since D left for Siberia. You’re clear to observe.”

  “To observe,” repeated Alf.

  “And if we discover they’re planning an imminent thermonuclear holocaust?” pushed Veikko.

  “We are your elders, Veikko, not your commanders. You don’t need our permission to throw some shoes in the deuterium.”

  There it was. They were not her commanders from Achnacarry. They weren’t even teaching programs from school. They were elders. Experienced men who respected her. She could bargain with them. She was supposed to. She felt slow for not having known it before. She asked with confidence, “What constraints does ‘observation’ involve?” Observation was less than she wanted by far. Gathering intel might be the first step in taking down any gang, but she knew it wouldn’t satiate the bloodlust she was cultivating.

  “Don’t Fuck Shit Up, V. Beyond that—” Balder looked to Alf’s avatar. “—we’re not the sort of elders who ‘constrain’ our own teams. I believe that ‘observation’ to this tarantula once involved blowing up a warship and several yachts.”

  “Ah yes,” he said, “the Nimitz. The great grand-elder Borr wanted me to ‘observe.’ He neglected to say if I should observe it under normal operations or observe what it did whilst exploding. The latter proved more interesting than the former. That said, V,
you know the treaty.” He leaned in toward them. “And you know very well who will enforce it if you go too far.”

  V team withdrew from the elders’ dream and rested in their own. They didn’t begin planning that night. To earn the job was enough for one day. That night they talked about Veikko and Skadi, about Varg and his conquests, about how well they could all do at the once insurmountable På Täppan hill, and about trivialities that were suddenly funny in proximity to the great significance of what was soon to come.

  IT WAS the first mission of the team’s own design and initiative, so it was the first they got to name. Project names, like teams, went by alphabet. This being the team’s first mission, it started with an A, and being their first attempt to name a mission, they came up with the edgy and outlandish name of Alpha. They would be mocked for their lack of creativity for the duration of the project.

  D team had been keeping an eye on the Orange Gang until recently, when they had been dispatched to Udachnaya. The all-female team had not only monitored the gang for action that would need Valhalla’s attention, but they had plotted out the gang’s history and organization to such detail that V wondered what was left for them to do. The teams linked from Alopex to Prokofiev. D team dumped heavy loads of their findings into V team’s brains in new partitions to be studied at their leisure. Then they came to chat more casually.

  “How’s Siberia?” asked Veikko.

  “Dull work, but it’s going fine,” responded Deva. “The flower canopy is back up and morale with it. Udachnaya’s in shambles, to be sure, but we’re putting it back together. Slowly.”

  “Very slowly,” added Dani.

  “So you really want our old job?” asked Death. She never took her time in cutting to the chase. Online she was an imposing dark figure who looked like a Geki with an ankh necklace. In person she was an imposing dark figure with a jet-black Thaco suit and a moth Tikari that, unlike her team’s simple fly knives, turned into a giant scythe. Her namesake might have envied her look, if not her child’s voice.