by Ari Bach
Violet thought for a moment. “Then how can we—”
“In my records,” said Alf. The team followed him to his library, where a tarantula Tikari emerged from his chest and climbed to a high shelf. It pulled out one of the many paper volumes and set it down before them. Its innards were a nightmare to Violet—the exact reason text was such an impossibility. She had all the information she needed to read text loaded into her in school, but there was a difference between loading and learning. As she looked over the list of letters in her memory, none of them resembled the scratchy curly forms in the book. They merged together and formed messes that Violet couldn’t imagine were words. Yet still, Vibeke pointed to one of them and said, “Mishka.”
Alf read on. “One brother named Sasha, family name Suvorov. At least, that’s what it was when Alexandra Suvorova joined us. We lost all record of Sasha shortly after she joined. I believe he got professionally hacked out of net existence.”
“What are the chances she and her brother were there, in Siberia?” asked Violet.
Alf quickly added, “Alopex, closed-line security recognition, apply.”
Alopex spoke on highly localized encryption. “Records show Mishka on assignment under water and out of link at the time. Margin of error 30 percent, probability 60 percent.”
“So it’s likely?” asked Veikko.
“It’s a distinct possibility” said Alf, looking most concerned.
“Vibs,” Varg asked, “would you put it past her?”
“No, no not at all. Who else would have let us live?”
Alföðr nodded gravely. His Tikari nodded with him.
V TEAM now worked for C team. Violet wasn’t happy about that. They worked for C team because Vibeke was in the best position to squeeze Mishka for information. Violet wasn’t happy about that either. She might have killed off her own interests, but that didn’t mean she could stand seeing Vibeke upset or in Mishka’s arms.
Obviously they were not to give any hint to Mishka of what they knew, if they knew anything. Violet’s first impression of Mishka had been vaguely hostile. She didn’t know exactly why, but in the last months, Violet had given up that irrational mood in favor of Mishka as a good friend and a woman she could trust. Now every sinew of friendship that had developed between them was strained, ready to break.
She knew Vibeke harbored feelings far deeper, had known her longer, and faced a more personal betrayal. How personal, Violet still couldn’t stand to ask. But V had an assignment now: observe Mishka, and if the opportunity allowed, find proof of her innocence or guilt. This time when Alföðr said observe, Violet would be content to just observe.
The whole team found great difficulty in watching someone so close by. They would have gladly traveled across the globe to spy on someone they never met in favor of monitoring someone they knew well without their knowledge. It was next to impossible, because they were recognizable and not naturally around Mishka all that often. They volunteered to help M team on every mission, simply because they had no work during the lockdown. So they piloted their pogos and scrubbed their tanks and debugged their avatars but saw nothing of any use. As other intel teams sent back data by the kiloquad, V team alone logged nothing and nothing and nothing again. That meant C team started breathing down their necks, pushing for them to send Vibeke after her ex-girlfriend.
The night Vibeke had first arrived in Valhalla, she’d been in poor shape, having been rescued from a very real prison riot in which they’d faked her death. Ragnar and Ripple had deposited her right into the med bay, where the bones in her feet, legs, and chest were fixed. She woke up in a bed so like that of her childhood that he was convinced she had been brain hacked. With her, Veikko gained the humor and tone that best invited new recruits. He also developed a fatherly composure, himself only months out of the family from hell. But when Vibeke began to train, it was Mishka who taught her the ropes. Mishka taught her Tikari tricks and sparring strategies. Mishka shared her knack for reading on paper. They ate together at every meal and spoke of le Carré and Fleming and Cloutier. In dreams they wandered computer dreamscapes of Nizhni Novgorod and Norge terrain together, pointing out where they’d grown up.
Vibeke told her how she was born Vibeke Dyrsdatter in Stavanger in 2212 to a single mother, whom she’d watched struggle financially and emotionally. She’d been thrown from school to school and net to net, and she’d seen her mother broken by man after man before settling for the worst of them. Vibeke had watched him destroy her mother, sending her into a mental asylum and stealing custody of her daughter. He took Vibeke to Tromsø, where he treated her the same way he’d treated her mom, and for lack of knowing a better way to live, she let him, until the day he went so far she had to stab the man to death, lest she see another friend fall victim to his lusts. She lost the last friends she had anyway when they sent her to jail, and in jail she was thrown to criminals who made her father look meek, and she lived in that hell until the last riot, when Valhalla came for her.
Mishka shared her own childhood stories, siblingless stories about Sundays in the most beautiful of Russian churches, cathedrals made of wood without nails to hold them together, only the flawless workmanship of monks hundreds of years before, where she saw ikons made of enamels and ivories long since extinct. Soon Mishka confided how, in that beautiful world, she’d suffered survivalist parents who’d kept her outside in a cage, who’d never let her get a link or go online or learn anything but weapons and exercise and how to hunt for her dinner. If she hunted badly, she didn’t eat. But she taught herself to read.
Vibeke couldn’t help but love her. And now every tale Mishka told and every aspect of her that had made Vibeke fall in love was an act of betrayal. Violet had never seen in the outside world how cruel love could be when it turned. Nor had she cared for anyone so much as Vibeke before, or felt such empathy for one so hurt.
Vibeke now had to seduce Mishka back to keep an eye on her. She buried her emotions so deep Violet feared they might never surface again. Vibs went to Mishka, softened up after their sparring match, and they talked. When they talked in dreams, the team watched through a special division of Alopex that Alf divvied off for them, which Mishka wouldn’t be able to sense. By day they monitored with Violet’s Tikari, the smallest of the bunch. They kept out of Vibeke’s eyes lest Mishka sense them within. Though Varg was hurt by his inability to punch or kick Vibeke’s pain away and Veikko wished he could have spared Violet the duty, she had to watch through her insect’s eyes and relay it all to the others. She had to be the one to scrape the privacy from what Vibeke most wished could have been private.
Vibs did well. If they still gave out awards for acting, Vibeke would have won hands down. Violet watched them fall in love again gradually, convincingly each day. Then she listened to Vibs toss and turn with rage every night. Vibeke managed to talk about Udachnaya so casually, so subtly that Mishka never picked up on what she was doing. Vibs communicated carefully designed fragments of a puzzle that would assemble subconsciously in Mishka’s head to suggest that she could forgive whoever was behind the attack. She could perhaps even help the attackers in Africa if she knew what they were up to. Nothing happened at first, but by the time the puzzle pieces were all stuffed into her head, and Mishka and Vibs were nearly sexually active, some progress began.
Violet’s Tikari followed the two for a walk in the moonlit meadows of Austfonna, hidden in the iridescent blue fur grown by Vibeke’s suit. Mishka finally spoke the magic words.
“Did you know I had a brother?”
Vibs played her part adeptly. “You didn’t have a brother. I know you. You were the only one.”
“Not quite. He’s a lot older than me. I always thought of him as a sort of uncle. I didn’t meet him until I was almost fifteen, and only then when I could get away from my parents. They wouldn’t admit he was theirs. If they saw him, he was Sasha, just a boy they didn’t know. They even had his records destroyed by a professional hacker so that nobody would know their
shame that they gave birth to this brilliant, silly man. But he followed me from birth when he could, introduced himself when I was hunting a sable. He caught the animal with his bare hands and broke its neck for me.”
“Do you still talk to him?” she pressed. “Do you know where he is?”
“He fell into debt and got sold by Gazprom to an African military. They were going to use him in some Congo fight, some tribal war turned despot company match. He proved himself the hard way. He took villages for them and stole equipment from superior forces. He reinvented guerilla war in the jungles.”
“Amazing.”
“He is. And he’s taking over the continent. Slowly, he’s taking the entire continent. He—”
Vibs couldn’t keep hiding her knowledge. Luckily Mishka couldn’t keep her secret anymore.
“I’m so sorry, Vibs. I didn’t want you in Udachnaya when he broke in, but he had to. He needed the weapon to take UNEGA outposts along the river. But if you could see what he’s doing—Sasha is taming that vile land. He’s turning it into a peaceful, controllable civilization. It has to be done, and he is the only man who can do it. So I gave him what he needed. You have to understand, Vibeke, this is more important than—”
Vibeke put one finger on Mishka’s lips and showed such forgiveness in her eyes as to melt any last barrier between them. She kissed Mishka full on the lips, whispered in her ear, and held her close amid a sea of ice. Back in the ravine, Veikko shuddered with pride. Vibeke had outdone his finest disguise. Violet shuddered with something very different. Something she’d killed was coming back from the dead. Varg stood up and shouted a triumphant, “Yes!”
In the coming days, Vibs professed her allegiance to Mishka convincingly. She learned the rest of the strategy, most importantly how Sasha needed another generator badly. The Congo bases were armored with meter-thick steel, and it was the only way to conquer them.
They knew the plot. It was time to deal with the plotters.
Chapter XI: Suqutra
“DID YOU ever read her little book?”
Vibs looked at Violet for a moment, trying to think of what book she might mean. “Oh, the bible? Yes, in jail before I met her, they passed around a lot of banned books.”
“What’s in it?”
“Creation myths, tribal history, lots of rules.”
“Rules that she lives by? Any we can use to our advantage?”
It was a good idea, but Vibs looked amused. “I don’t think she obeys them too strictly. I can think of a few she breaks quite often.” Vibs reflected on that bit with a knowing expression that rubbed Violet just the wrong way.
Where the Orange Gang’s destruction had been a pleasure to plot, there could be no happy ending to this project. No matter how it turned out, it would be a sad day for Valhalla, and the longer it went on, the more frequently Vibeke had to bear Mishka, and Violet had to watch her do it skillfully. Skillfully meant Vibs looked happy, in love, in ecstasy, and each of those resurrected with a vengeance the feelings that Violet had buried. They’d never put her through jealousy training, so she didn’t know how to counteract its effects.
C team didn’t care. Not that she ever brought it up with Cato. The Cs were all about reports and progress. Even as Violet and Vibeke slept, Claire was in the dreamscape listening to their chat about Mishka’s book. She didn’t add anything useful, didn’t suggest what to do or help in any way—V team was working for internal affairs, not with them.
“Did the book,” Claire interrupted, “suggest anything about her sense of justice or priority that would shed light on her brother’s actions in Africa?”
Conversations in the night were turning into work. Violet floated back and watched Vibeke’s avatar think. How, Violet wondered, could Vibeke’s avatar, a little green worm with glasses, have the same expression Vibs had when she was reading in the real world? How could it be so oddly alluring when it was just a mathematical facsimile of her presence online? Violet reminded herself that she was supposed to be thinking about Mishka, as Vibs was.
Vibeke explained, “The book’s full of contradictory philosophies, some warlike, some pacifist, some wildly insane, and some plainly logical. It says nothing of the sort of people who follow it. There’s no hint of how she works in there.”
Claire was disappointed, another feeling that came across through an expressionless avatar. Claire’s was a black chess pawn. Cato’s was a white knight. He came toward Violet from behind the pawn, moving a step to his side and two in her direction. “Violet? Any thoughts?”
“None you want to hear.” She unplugged and let herself dream offline. They were getting nowhere anyway. That used to be okay, she remembered, even after Udachnaya. V team wasn’t expected to contribute all that much to the plans of other teams. They were the new kids, there to learn. Now nobody in the ravine thought of V as a junior team anymore, so when Vibs was assigned to determine if Mishka was a double agent, it was expected that she would, in so doing, install herself as a double agent. She was a mole before she knew what she was underground to do.
So C team pushed, and when V team didn’t move fast enough in any inspired direction, C team began to plan for them. The haphazard organization of project Alpha was eschewed in favor of a hard logical list of necessary steps and their ideal executions. They had to figure out exactly what Sasha was doing. Vibeke was the one who had to do it. She took on the task admirably. Churro had no problem devising a way to simultaneously prove Vibeke’s worth to Sasha and his army and install yet another agent unseen into their midst. Violet volunteered. So did Balder, and his qualifications for advanced stealth surveillance outweighed hers by several hundred missions.
After Udachnaya, anyone with a Mjölnir generator had dismantled it and destroyed the special parts. The only working copy left was the prototype, constructed by H team at Valhalla. After the first break-in, this generator had been moved, only Balder knew where. With a sudden need for a decoy generator, H whipped up a new one in secret, but instead of a functional copy, this was a Trojan generator. In place of its proper magnetic components, it had only one working system—life support. It held all the right materials to trick a scan. The support system’s electronic signatures were made to pulsate in the same manner as that of a real Mjölnir generator and to disguise human life signs. Thus Balder would be delivered into the core of the enemy stronghold.
The plan was to force a situation where Mishka would need to openly defect and leave Valhalla, and where Vibeke could prove her false loyalties and follow. They would be allowed to steal the fake generator, so they had to design a situation irresistible to Sasha, but not so obvious that he might suspect it. The fake generator would be moved to Antarctica along a route designed with a subtle weak point, the Suqutra archipelago in Yemen.
As they carried the generator, they would pass through the territory of Yemeni Utilities and Programming—the YUP, a draconian company notorious for rewriting its contracts in the middle of jobs. They would believably give Valhalla their allegiance one day, then rescind it the next as they flew through, having done exactly that two years prior and ruining one of Mishka’s first assignments. Her hatred of the YUP and its enforcement army, the Yuppies, was sure to solidify their decision to take advantage. It wasn’t hard to predict her response to their attempt at a hostile takeover of their cargo. V and M teams would have been the likely choices to carry the real generator, so it was no stretch to assign them for their known traitors and double agents to be.
Valhalla’s pals from Karpathos base would play the role of the Yuppies. Two Karpathian teams, Theta and Omega, would come with hovercraft painted in Yuppie colors just as Sasha’s men, presumably in their panzercopters, engaged the Valkyries to take the generator. Churro allowed two possibilities—they would try to take it by force, or Mishka would reveal her loyalties to facilitate a bloodless steal. Vibeke began trying to convince Mishka, as soon as they got the transport job, to shuffle off their Valhalla loyalties publicly and leave with the generator.
Mishka was receptive, but Vibs couldn’t be sure she would do so when the time came, not if her brother’s men allowed for a nonlethal, covert grab-and-go.
To ensure that Mishka couldn’t remain innocent, pretending to fight her brother’s men, the Karpathians would attack her helicopters before the cargo pogo. They were armed with semifluff charges to make giant semiharmless fireworks. That would force Mishka to either defend the attackers or take the generator in the pogo to its destination, while abandoning the rest of their teams. Cassandra diverged from her team on that point, stating that the handover couldn’t possibly go so predictably. She had nothing to add on how to ensure the ideal series of events.
Mishka, while planning the theft with Vibs, had revealed Marduk as an ally. This changed little, as M team was not briefed on the true nature of the mission. M team was as tight as V team, and there was no opportunity to brief Mortiis and Motoko. Their genuine desire to protect the generator had to be negated by V team, and covertly so.
The night before the mission was to take place, V met the teams from Karpathos briefly online. Vibeke was in a separate dreamscape with Mishka, so she had the briefing stored in a memory partition to look over while awake. They went over rescue procedures that would be necessary for Balder should anything go wrong. Churro and Cassandra, present as a rook and a bishop, planned each step and accounted for the enemy’s most probable and all conceivable actions and reactions. After the Karpathians delinked, C repeated outlines with V team thoroughly. All felt it was a good, strong plan, but Cassandra told them not to rely on any of it to go down remotely as expected. She said just as they woke up, “No plan ever survives first contact.”
THE PLUTURUS family had always been rich. As far back as Cetacean records went, they had always been pillars of the undersea civilization. Ionas Pluturus was the most famous, as the founder of the Ionian colony near Patmos. He was not only a pioneer but a leader of the school. He protected his colony against the violence of humans, and with the riches he made as a privateer pillaging the enemy’s ships, he funded and revolutionized gill surgery and nictitating membranology. He instilled in his offspring the belief that one day, all life would return to the sea. That belief passed all the way down to his great-grandson, Pelamus Pluturus.