Valhalla

by Ari Bach

  Pelamus had inherited a submarine fleet painted in black and yellow, his family colors. Every ship was richly decorated on the interior with fine wooden carvings depicting the family’s past accomplishments, present abodes and holdings, and future plans and aspirations. It was one of the most opulent and beautiful fleets in the Mediterranean. When his parents died, that fleet buried them at sea, and Pelamus took charge of the familial empire. He didn’t quite follow in his father’s footsteps as a genetic scientist. He and his sister Nuala found more appeal in stories about their great-grandfather—the ones about piracy.

  Leaving the Ionian colony in the care of their younger siblings, Pelamus and Nuala set to sea with plans to annihilate the human vessels that harassed their rural zones, to pillage the Red Sea spice routes, to make a name as the Cetaceans who wouldn’t stay underwater. They wanted to be the names remembered for turning the tide on humanity. Sadly, on their first venture under the Jolly Roger, the small band of bullies bumped into a YUP security patrol.

  The Yuppies sunk two of Pelamus’s seven ships, crippled his flagship, and in so doing killed Nuala. He stood helpless on the bridge as he heard the breaches crack the deck below and crush everyone in the torpedo chamber. Pelamus won the battle and destroyed the security patrol, but at so great a cost that his mission in life fell to the wayside of his desire for revenge. He forgot the designs carved into the walls of his captain’s quarters and set course for Yemen to make an example of the first YUP ships he found. Then of the second, and third, and on and on until the whole company would be remembered only as the first savage casualty of the great uprising that ended life on the surface.

  IN THE last days of November, the sun still tried to light the northern skies during the day, but it didn’t do very well. It was dark gray at noon when H team dredged the fake generator, passenger inside, from a hiding place deep within the ice of a glacial wall. V and M hauled it to a bay where the cargo pogo waited. Violet was briefly distracted on the way by a brig being assembled. It looked weak and escapable. She made a note to inspect its plans when they got back.

  The cargo pogo lifted off and headed sluggishly south into daylight. The journey was sickeningly quiet, anticipation killing small talk before it left their mouths. They crossed Norge and Europe, crossed the Mediterranean Sea and Arabian Peninsula. As soon as they passed into the Yemeni airspace, Mishka dropped a pellet into the sea. The pellet opened on contact with seawater and made its broadcast across the waves, literally in the waves—a waterborne signal that would not travel in interceptable air. Four panzercopters emerged from the sea, now painted with brown Yuppie colors. As Churro hoped, the enemy was pretending to be company interceptors and had dropped their extreme armor accordingly. Now they were only “lightly” armored unstoppable death machines. Four of them, when only three had survived Udachnaya. Sasha was building one hell of an army. The cargo pogo links activated and shouted forth the copter’s demands.

  “You have entered YUP airspace. Identify yourself and prepare for cargo review.”

  Varg gave the standard response that would remind the YUP of its Valhalla contract, knowing full well the YUP had never been told any such thing. “This is cargo pogo URS5MA, delivering an electrical generator to Chronos Inc., YUP Subsidiary 1442.”

  The copter went quiet as they pretended to look up the information. A real YUP patrol, as there were such things in the area, would then know they were impostors, having never been told of such a delivery. Only Sasha’s men would respond to the statement as if it were legitimate.

  “Info confirmed,” they replied. “Prepare for inspection.”

  Everyone on both teams agreed to allow the inspection, each for their own secret reasons. Mishka and Marduk knew they would take the generator, Mortiis and Motoko thought that the YUP would merely check for contraband then release them, and V team knew they would take the bait.

  The cargo pogo set down in the water and copters hovered close. Two landed on the water and extended plank fields to send a torrent of men aboard. This time they had no masks. Violet looked over every face, wondering which of them had killed men in Udachnaya, which she might have fired on. They looked over the generator and linked to each other with heavy encoding.

  Finally, one man spoke up.

  “Yeah, it looks like YUP has arranged another delivery service for Chronos Inc. We’ll take this from here.”

  “This is security level eight,” said Motoko. “We cannot let it off the pogo until it’s signed for by Chronos.”

  “I’m security level nine,” said one of the men.

  Violet was suddenly aware that she didn’t know if higher or lower numbers in YUP security protocol were superior. Then she remembered it didn’t matter in the least. They had to take the thing somehow. Mortiis did not know that, and he became belligerent and said loudly, “You can have our generator when you pry it from our cold dead hull.”

  Each eager to get the job done without a problem, Mishka, Marduk and every member of V team all simultaneously suggested he back down. The two unwitting Ms were a bit surprised, along with the fake Yuppies. Violet stepped up, drawing attention away from the group call for pacifism and placing it on Vibeke, pushing her to reveal her Sashoid allegiance.

  “Why, Vibs?” she demanded. “Why do you want them to take it?”

  Vibs played her part and blushed. “No, no, that’s not it. We just don’t want—”

  “I knew it, I knew it since Udachnaya! You’re trying to take it yourself!” shouted Varg.

  Melodrama treated their intentions well, but Violet knew it wouldn’t hold without an escalation in tension. Veikko knew it too and dropped his broadcast pellet covertly out the door. It sent a signal to the Karpathos teams.

  Within seconds, two hovercrafts with the same false flags and link labels as Sasha’s copters came to the scene and demanded to know what was going on. To all eyes who needed to see, the YUP had just caught on to the game being played in their waters. This was the point where they hoped Sasha’s men would take the generator and their double agents and run, so Vibeke forced the issue and betrayed her team, making Mishka and Marduk do the same. She held her microwave at Violet and continued the argument. “We’re taking it because you won’t use the damn thing! We’re taking it because we can do some damn good. And we’re taking it clean or covered in guts, so pick fast.”

  Violet had to keep herself from smirking at the hokum and ensure the defections as the Karpathians began to barge in.

  “Who’s ‘we’?” Violet sprung her Tikari and held it to Vibeke’s eye. Luckily nobody saw Veikko cringe as she did so. He and Varg quickly played along and took up fighting stances.

  Mishka answered with her own Tikari, sending it to perch on Violet’s shoulder, wings at the ready. Marduk followed her lead, and all three traitors were in the open. The hovercrafts got as close as they could fit into the crowd and broadcast a loud message. “This is the YUP! Everyone stop doing”—the Karpathians caught a glimpse of the standoff within the pogo—“whatever the heck you people are doing! Stand down!”

  The Karpathians knew the plan, and they knew the standoff in the pogo would remain a standoff without them making a move so, as they shared the Yuppie garb of the panzercopters, a couple of Omegas boarded and sided with the like-labeled fakes. “Lower your weapons! And you, lower your… butterfly!” one demanded. V team and Marduk did so, but Mishka did not. That was in theory no problem, so the Omega went on asking the nearest copter soldier, “What are you here for? Home base didn’t have you logged.”

  “Generator. We’re supposed to take it from here.”

  The Greek happily sided with him and forced the situation. “That’s it, then. Generator goes with the copters. You people come with us.”

  They had such fancy-looking weapons that not even Mortiis or Motoko disagreed. They began the move. Mishka explained that she and two of her companions were the generator technicians. V team glared at her to keep the illusion going, and the Omegas already knew why
, so they agreed to let them fly with the generator.

  All was on course for the traitors and copter troops to take Balder on their way and leave the Valhalla teams stuck with the bill. All the people and props were on their right vessels. Then the real YUP showed up, and wrecked everything as Yuppies were wont to do.

  Despite heavy precautions to hide the internal matters from the real owners of the space, the Yemeni boats wandered onto the scene to find four copters and two hovercraft flying their flags clustered around a foreign craft in their waters. C team would hardly have been an elder team if they hadn’t planned for this, so they had the hovercraft transponders matched to the company’s signature. Sasha was not so great a planner, and the company read his fleet as a copter threat to two of their own hovercraft. Valhalla now had to protect the copters and double agents on their escape without giving away their true nature. That could happen by making the cargo pogo a greater threat to the newly arrived boats than the copters.

  Vibeke and Mishka had made it to one of Sasha’s panzercopters; Marduk and the generator were escorted to another by the Omegas. With all hostile eyes either leaving or not yet arrived, Veikko deactivated the pogo’s flight safety features, and Varg took the cue to turn on the flight fields. Without the safety systems on, the fields extended with brutal force into the hovercrafts, knocking them into the air upside down. As expected, the company ships moved in to protect “their” men, and the copters with Mishka, Marduk, Vibs, and Balder escaped with haste. Violet couldn’t risk a link to Vibs as they fled, so she only thought it. Happy hunting, Vibs.

  Their escape was what C team had planned. But the other two copters stayed. C team had not planned for that. There was no tactical advantage in leaving them there and no way they could have foreseen it. Vibeke knew why immediately. She had read Mishka’s little book. It was why they hadn’t shot first at Udachnaya, and why they would even stay in Suqutra as protectors: Sasha and his men thought they were the good guys.

  Noble as they were, the men in the copters remaining to protect their enemies didn’t know which half of those enemies weren’t enemies. The instant the hovercrafts fell back down, they posed more of a threat than the company boats, so the copters opened fire on them with conventional microwaves. Men aboard the hovercrafts didn’t know which copters their allies were on, so they dared not fire at any of them. The Yuppie boats assumed they were incapable of returning fire, so they did the honors and engaged the copters.

  This all could have ended well had the cargo pogo just left and let the hovercrafts and Yuppies work it out, but they forgot Yemeni seas are subject not only to Yemeni law but Murphy’s as well: The cargo pogo’s field caps did not turn back on. When they tried to lift off, the vessel stayed still, and the wind and sea around it moved instead. The waves forced one of the floating copters directly into Omega’s hovercraft. The Yuppie boat before them had no idea what to make of the malfunctioning field waterspout and ceased fire long enough to let the other copter blow them out of the water.

  Violet watched helplessly as the last remains of the plan fell apart. The damaged hovercraft opened fire on the boat with a damaged microwave array and vaporized all the water beneath it, sending the remaining copter into a vapor cloud that didn’t affect their hardware but rendered the pilot blind, forcing him to gain altitude lest he hit the other hovercraft, which also went blind and plowed directly but harmlessly into the cargo pogo.

  For the next fifteen minutes, copters, boats, hovercraft and the pogo fired on one another, bumped into each other, disabled each other, and tried to hastily repair themselves. Chaos reigned supreme over them all. Finally, the genuine Yemeni boats gave up trying to figure out who was on their side and decided it would be easier to sort out with everyone dead. They fled and called in air support, which came immediately from the company’s air fleet: six panzercopters, all identical to Sasha’s.

  The panzercopter that had plowed into Omega’s hovercraft made the air just in time to get lost in the crowd. Veikko and Violet tried to tell the hovercraft just to get the hell out of there, but the com traffic was as bad as the air traffic, and even the links were useless—someone was jamming. Who the hell would jam a situation like this? The hovercrafts followed the boats and let loose with every battery they had, which annihilated the company’s sea force and infuriated their air force, who now stood ready to destroy anything that was not a panzercopter.

  And then things began to get confusing.

  PELAMUS AND his vengeful fleet arrived in Yemeni waters expecting to find typical company vessels carrying typical company cargo. Instead, his scout subs reported a small but wild battle near Suqutra. Most of the vessels involved appeared to be painted with YUP colors. Captain Pluturus didn’t know what to make of the mayhem and was content to observe. He formed a line a kilometer away from the fight and watched. He tried to make out which side was which, but it quickly became apparent that those involved had little idea themselves. He tried to think of how such a battle could be swayed to his advantage.

  There was a cargo pogo that seemed incapable of going airborne. It might carry something worth stealing, but it was the one thing there not labeled as a YUP ship. There were boats, all clearly YUP and most sinking or sunk. There were hovercrafts, also YUP, but they were shooting at the panzercopters, also YUP. The panzercopters were also firing on each other. Pluturus’s post captains and commanders could offer little explanation. Cetaceans being a generally patient folk, he was content to wait and see how the situation sorted itself out. After ten minutes it became clear that, given the equal armament and armor of each vessel, that wouldn’t happen soon enough.

  Against his nature as it was, Pelamus decided to play peacekeeper. He ordered a jamming signal to break up the link communications. As he and his fleet lacked links and networks, this cut off any communication he couldn’t monitor himself. The next step was to send a clear message that a new and superior force was present and wished to sort out the matter with words instead of weapons. As weapons were all the humans were presently aware of, he used his own to say hello.

  All four of his boats launched surf torpedoes. A total of sixteen of the little monsters floated to the surface and began bobbing around the hovercraft, pogo, and floating chunks of YUP boats. They all sat on their fins, pointed at the sky. In under a second, any of the torpedoes could swim or blast off into any ship present, in the sky or on the water. As he hoped, the belligerents ceased their feud in order to figure out who had just won the fight.

  VARG AND Mortiis were doing a fine job of repairing the field projectors. Violet had kept the copters at bay by firing when they came close, and even managed to cover the Theta hovercraft for a time. Everyone else aboard the cargo pogo hung on to the walls and tried not to get seasick. The instant Varg reconnected the last field plug and proclaimed the pogo ready to fly, Motoko spotted the torpedoes.

  “Fields are back, we can go!” Varg called, then “We’re good, we’re online, we can go,” and finally, “Why are we not going?” He closed the engineering panels and sat upright to see a spiny little cylinder flopping about on the water beside them.

  Violet asked outright, “What are those?”

  Motoko checked the defense monitors. “Torpedoes, at least a dozen of them in the water!”

  “What’s going on?” asked Varg.

  “We seem to have been captured by a naval force,” Veikko mused.

  “And those aren’t YUP,” said Motoko.

  “Then whose are they?” prompted Violet.

  “No clue,” she said. “Nobody dropped them.”

  Varg was at the flight controls, ready to take off. “All stop, then?”

  Violet stuck by her artillery controls. She was a good shot. She could shoot one of the torpedoes if it was in the way. She might even take out two but wasn’t about to begin unless it was their only option. She waited for a consensus.

  “I say we stay put,” said Mortiis.

  “No,” said Veikko, intending to punch through the
stress with a mock American accent. “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!”

  “What kind of dumbass order is that?” demanded Violet, unaware of his jest.

  “Don’t you fucking read?” he retorted.

  “No, I fucking don’t. All stop!”

  “Yes, all stop,” he said, annoyed. Stress was running high, not only for those on the pogo. Omega’s hovercraft didn’t intend to stay passive. As V team watched, they fired with both batteries on the closest torpedoes. Theta followed their lead taking out three more, opening a wide gap in the torpedo net. Omega headed toward the gap; Theta remained as if to hold a door open for V team. Varg knew the signal and gently raised the pogo into the air.

  Pelamus’s front guard was sitting directly beneath Theta’s hull. As they had disobeyed his implied order, he launched two more torpedoes straight up into their engine. On the surface, everyone saw the result. The hovercraft exploded from the inside in a great plume of fire, scattering its crew and mechanical innards across the water. Varg let the pogo flop right back down into the water. Omega set down as well. They might have escaped but weren’t going to leave their allies behind.

  The waters were still. Violet walked to the side of the pogo and looked out at the situation. She saw something moving in the water. Yellow shapes deep below, all of them moving in a serpentine line. As they grew shallower, she could see that they were segments in a great long line, a yellow-and-black mass. Then she could see the fins, jagged dorsal fins atop each segment. And she felt it. The pogo bobbed on displaced water—a very large amount of displaced water.