Valhalla

by Ari Bach

  Mishka’s scream was deafening. Vibeke stepped forward to silence the organ of its origin. Mishka was on the floor, crawling toward the rupture. Varg handed Vibs his own Tikari, which she raised high in the air. Suddenly, Mishka was engulfed in shadow. Vibeke was distracted from her by the absolute loss of sunlight from the hole. There was something gigantic outside, moving toward the carrier.

  Violet tried to link out to Balder, but she was blocked. Something was causing a massive jamming force. Violet realized that was why they hadn’t heard from anyone since H team had destroyed the hull, why they hadn’t heard a warning about what was coming. The four Vs were all distracted by it. Vibeke herself didn’t even see Mishka duck out through the hole and slide down one of the carrier’s legs. It took them a moment to realize exactly what the thing was. First they made out the moving legs. Not the legs of their carrier, but of another just like it. Another giant white jungle carrier.

  “Did Balder’s intel miss something?” shouted Veikko. “How many of these things do they have?”

  “No,” said Varg. “It might not be Sasha’s.”

  “Is it friendly?” asked Violet. She got a definitive answer when the second carrier opened every porthole on its side, revealed massive cannons, and opened fire on them. V team hit the fuel-covered deck as projectiles began annihilating the inner bulkheads. Panic tried to break into their minds, but all of them denied it access. Varg and Vibeke were already firing suppression beams over the fuel to keep it from igniting. Veikko was using his microwave to deflect shrapnel. Violet was looking around for anything that could give heavier cover when the cannons reached their position.

  Her mind was racing, open to anything that popped into it to save them. She had no ideas. Veikko had no good ideas either, but being Veikko, that didn’t stop him from joking that he did.

  “Violet,” he shouted, “you’re closest—take out that carrier!”

  Violet had been so intent on the new dilemma, and so ready for advice on the matter, that she took it as an order and ran for the hole in the hull. Veikko didn’t even see her run until she was jumping from the breach. He suddenly figured out what was happening, and in surprise muttered, “She knew I was kidding, right?”

  Violet did not know, nor did she hear him say it. She had already raised her microwave and leapt for the other carrier. Her team watched her go, thinking they would never see her again, questioning how she could be so foolish, so idiotic as to try—they couldn’t even imagine what. Veikko cursed himself; he’d never imagined she would take him literally.

  They were still between cannons, so Violet took no direct fire as she fell. She still felt a sense of dread as the thing drew closer. The sheer size of it was daunting, terrifying. She aimed her microwave at a point above the cannon portals and fired a full-strength tractoring wave. The force almost ripped her arms out, but she held tight, pulled her legs up and body tight toward the carrier, and swooped up toward the cannon bays. The gain was no comfort. She was alone against a giant.

  She didn’t have time to think when she rolled onto the deck. She was surrounded by six very surprised men in white uniforms. She reset her microwave for a wide stun beam a fraction of a second before the men pulled their sidearms, and fired. All but one fell. He was close enough to kick unconscious, so she did. She checked the area for anyone else. One man ran into the bay: Marduk.

  She didn’t spare him any thought beyond a confirmation that this was Sasha’s carrier. Sasha’s second carrier. He ran toward her at full force, just as Hrothgar Kray had ages before. Thus she knew how to deal with him: She took a step back, grabbed him as he ran toward her, and hurled him as hard as she could out the cannon bay, toward the other carrier. Maybe they saw him, maybe not. Maybe he lived, maybe not. She didn’t care. She had to take out the carrier, any way she could. The expectation of survival diminished, and the expectation of success replaced it. The only way to go was inward.

  She found herself running into another set of passageways, but thankfully not scrambled ones. Nobody was expecting her—an advantage. Balder’s map reset on recognition that the new carrier had the same design. She tried to think while she was running, to take inventory of what she had to work with. The only explosive she had left was a single mild thermite charge, made to produce a lot of heat but little else. A man in one passageway spotted her. She shot him before he could realize what he saw. What could a thermite charge do?

  It could ignite fuel. The carriers had fuel. They needed enough to fill panzercopters, tanks, and keep running themselves. She had seen the tank on the other carrier. It could leak. Liquid fuel. She was one deck over it. Even better. She changed course and ran toward a spot directly over the fuel tank. For an instant, she thought it unwise that Veikko had sent her in alone. The thought didn’t have time to develop further. She was almost over the reservoir.

  She slid down a ramp and made her way cautiously through the passage. Another solitary man saw her on the way. Another microwave beam took care of him. There was greater resistance at the leg-motion engine room, the room immediately over the fuel: guards with batons. They saw her as soon as she saw them. She toasted one, but the other man hit her with his baton. Searing pain exploded from the spot where it hit. The batons were doleos, nerve pain inductors. Pain was fine; it just made her feel like she was in training again. She zapped him.

  The hatches opened by hand. There were two more men inside. Both surprised, both microwavable. The microwave going off in the engine room set off every alarm the carrier had. She felt the thing stop walking, saw the engine reverse direction. None of that concerned her. She set the thermite charge to burn down into the fuel tank. She set it for two minutes and used her microwave to weld it to the metal floor. Her microwave was beginning to overheat. She holstered it and broke off the detonator’s interface. The bomb could no longer be disarmed by any known means. Time to leave.

  As she ran from the room, she suddenly wished she had set it for ten minutes, owing to the ten men blocking her way back to the outside. And she was at ground zero. For the first time, she was truly afraid of a physical threat. Two minutes. Why had she set it for two damn minutes? Her microwave was still too hot to fire. She took a deep breath and surveyed the guards. They were all armed, but only with doleos. They were useless against her. Their only weapons were fear and pain, feeble weapons against Violet. As for numbers, it was ten to one. That wasn’t intimidating; it was the same odds as her little fight in Achnacarry. She tried to think if there was anything strategically different. There was: this time she had a knife.

  She ejected her Tikari into her hand, took the best stance she could, and ran at the crowd. The fools attacked one man at a time. She dug into the force like it was made of cobwebs. She cut off the first five arms that threatened her. The other fifteen began to strike her with the batons. It hurt like hell, and she couldn’t have cared less. She plowed on through the mass, letting them strike her uselessly as she disarmed them left and right and dislegged those she could. She flipped over and under them in a balletic barrage, stabbing and killing whoever didn’t get out of her way. She wasn’t afraid anymore. They were. They saw only a whirlwind of death and dismemberment hurtling toward them, a wave of mutilation in affirmation of all they’d heard about the Hall of the Slain.

  As she came near to the end of the ten-man force, she saw the rest of the passageway flood with another twenty. The sight hit her with a fragment of panic, a jab of concern that she couldn’t possibly make it out in time. She wasn’t going to live, but she wasn’t going to stop. It’s not like she had anything better to do in her last seconds. Still, she was already surfing over the first crowd with the difficulty of the sheer volume of the men, and this new batch would clog the passage further. Worse, they weren’t armed with doleos; they had kukri knives. They didn’t attack one at a time either. They all attacked her at once. She was utterly fucked.

  If it were training, she might have hesitated to do the one thing she knew could give her a chance. She had
never been able to give her Tikari so complex an order and just trust it to do its job. But this wasn’t training. She was going to die and had exactly one way through. She raised the blade into the air, linked it to go berserk, and let go. The Tikari sprang from her hand so fast she couldn’t see where it went. But she saw the first four men fall to pieces. The Tikari was orbiting her at a speed beyond sight, spinning and hacking its way through every man it could.

  The mass was thinning, but not yet thin. Violet still had work to do. She had no knife in her hand, so she picked up the first kukri knife she saw on the ground as she cartwheeled past two shredded men and began to cut into the new heavy crowd. Soon a second kukri knife lay abandoned and doubled her armament. The Tikari anticipated her moves, spinning around her vertically, darting out to kill anyone who got too close to her. Again she flipped through motions as if in a dance, breaking, cutting, and beating her way through the thick pile. The bug killed eleven of them, she killed nine, and soon she ran out of men. She left the kukris in the last two and caught her own knife.

  She clipped the bloody Tikari to her arm. The passage was clear. And it had taken only fifty seconds. She looked back for an instant on the passageway now piled with sixty severed limbs and a half-meter deep with blood. She too was painted red, unscathed and adorned in the innards of her enemies. She didn’t dwell on it. She ran for the side of the carrier and found her entry point. The second carrier was stumbling backward toward Sasha’s first. A jump would land her there if the carrier would stop for just a moment.

  The thermite charge went off. In the moment that passed as the thermite gutted the engine room, the carrier crunched to a stop. Violet used the shift in inertia to jump nearly halfway to the hole she’d come from. She tractored herself to the oncoming gunwale of the original craft and swung fast to the breach in the hull, landing, rolling, and standing almost exactly where she had leapt from only minutes ago.

  She stood before her team as the other carrier burst into flames and clusters of combustion behind her, twisting and breaking apart into a dead mass of burning metal wreckage. The main tank blew and a behemoth explosion erupted from its belly, shattering the deck completely. More explosions ripped across its skin as arms caches blew. She glanced back at the thing, crippled and crumpled in the trees. She turned back and saw Marduk, unconscious on the deck. She took quick stock of the situation. She was uninjured, and she was onboard a safe deck in the company of allies. Everyone was staring at her for some reason. They were looking at her as if she had just done something terrible, but she had done exactly what Veikko said. The last combustible fragment of the second carrier burst apart behind her. And her team still stared at her with open mouths. Just stared at her.

  “What?” she asked. Nobody answered.

  Chapter XIII: Valhalla

  WHEN VIOLET figured out just why everyone was staring at her, she felt both rather stupid for having done it, and also so good for succeeding that her hands went numb. She was suddenly ecstatic to be the fool of the team because without that momentary lapse of judgment she wouldn’t be where she was, before the astonished eyes of every team on the deck of the surviving carrier. Every Valkyrie present met her with cheers and applause, which she accepted with even less modesty than Varg might have.

  Violet had been the center of attention before, but never for anything good. As T team gave a victory broadcast and the encryption on her link turned off, she got some fifty requests from back north to peek at her memory. She let them all in, where they could see all she had done and hear none of what she thought. Back on the deck of the captured carrier, Balder was ridiculed in good humor for having failed to pick up intel that Sasha did in fact have two carriers, hence his intent to steal a second Mjölnir generator.

  “Second biggest mistake I made,” he boasted. “The first was back in—does anyone care?”

  “No,” shouted seven Valkyries and twelve prisoners. Violet was vaguely curious but failed to ask when Vibeke caught her attention. She was coming up from one of the deck lifts. She looked happy but also preoccupied. Violet left her idolaters’ company and ran over.

  “Where have you been?”

  “Seeing if Mishka was anywhere to be found. I think she must have escaped during the barrage.”

  Violet was suddenly very concerned. The day was a victory without question, but for Vibs, she knew that could all be for nothing. Vibeke caught Violet’s expression and laughed. “Just means we have a chase to look forward to. Today’s yours, Vi. Don’t let some old hag get you down.”

  Vibeke meant it. Perhaps because she had just killed Mishka’s brother, perhaps because Valhalla had four new tanks to play with, perhaps because Violet had totally just hacked through thirty guys to annihilate a giant jungle carrier—in like two friggin’ minutes—Vibeke simply couldn’t feel any regret for one fish slipping through the net, even if it was the catch of her lifetime.

  T team confirmed that of the seven tanks, four were captured and two destroyed. One was missing. Let Mishka have it, they thought. Let her pack her dead kin into the back trunk. S team had utterly destroyed the remaining carrier’s weaponry, so the prisoners were set free on its hull and left to gather their belongings for the long walk to wherever. H team gave them a few med kits and survival gear and lifted off for home. Balder took off to escort H with his battle pogo and to hide or dismantle the generator once home.

  T team headed back north in their new tanks, and the remaining teams hopped into the transports. Violet took one last look at her day’s work. A giant mass of twisted metal and flame, too many dead to count, an organization destroyed, and her suit so covered with blood that not a spot of white showed through. Surely the common world would have thought she was a monster for taking pleasure in the horrors she had wrought, for smiling so broadly at this atrocity she’d committed. But there was no regret, not in the least. If I am a monster, she thought, I’m a really fucking great one. After all, her mother had once suggested she get into demolitions.

  Something had snapped in her head. She had changed from the day’s events. She wasn’t sure exactly what she was becoming, but she knew exactly what she was leaving behind. Somewhere buried under the rubble of that carrier was the shame and repression she had always felt for who she was. All that waited for her back in Valhalla were pride and strength, and most importantly—her friends.

  The last pogos left the site and flew north at a leisurely pace. Alopex broadcast to its occupants a transmission to Balder from Alföðr. “Having persuaded twelve tribal leaders, three military dictators, six CEOs, and several scattered mobs across the continent to abandon Sasha’s reign, we’re about to return to the north. We haven’t annihilated Sasha’s mark, but we did decimate it, and according to the laws of psychohistory, our enlightened tenth will bring an end to the other nine parts. C team sends its regards to V for the capture of Marduk, who they look forward to interrogating in the new brig.”

  A second voice chimed in, the only one that might have brought Violet’s spirits down, “Cato here, this is Cato. Hi, Violet? Is Violet there?”

  “Yes,” she grumbled, ready to shoot the antenna if he said anything she disliked.

  “I just reviewed and analyzed your trip to the second carrier. Did you embellish that memory at all? Any alterations?”

  “No,” she said sharply, taking aim at the ceiling link. Varg grinned, waiting for her to blast the thing.

  “Well, it was a beaut, Vi. Made it look like a piece o’ piss! You really bottled your blood’s worth!”

  Despite herself, she blushed and lowered her microwave. Vibs giggled. “Yeah, Vi, you’re really bottling piss now.”

  Violet gave her a light slap on the butt. People stared. She didn’t give a shit. She leaned back against the wall and smiled, then closed her eyes and replayed the memory of her phenomenally skilled rampage.

  Vibeke stared at her, thinking about how Violet had said, “Like a sister?” back before the mission. Vibeke realized she really didn’t love Viol
et like a sister. Her thoughts for Violet were at that moment most unsisterly. Varg and Veikko laughed and mimicked Violet’s balletic assault. Spirits were very high and very relaxed. That’s why nobody noticed Mishka’s Tikari hiding on the roof of their pogo.

  Varg insisted that they swing by SchweizCo for some of his favorite chocolates, so V’s pogo would arrive a bit later than the others. Violet liked the idea because they would not only make a more dramatic entrance but they would do so bearing what Varg called, “Chocolate so creamy your teeth will squeal.”

  They landed to find T team using their microwaves to scrape the old white paint off their new tanks. Veikko saw that they had also stolen some spare tank legs and jogged over to join them. “I’ve got something in mind for Alf, for when he gets back.” The rest of V team didn’t dare guess what joke he had in store. Varg headed for the cafeteria to transmogrify the ten kilos of chocolate into some sort of diabetes-inducing confection for the ravine to share. He left Violet and Vibeke alone. A crowd would soon form around them, but nobody was close just yet. Violet was high enough on endorphins that she thought to ask Vibeke if she wanted to hide from the oncoming crowd. They might head to one of the industrial sonic showers and clean off the thickly caked blood that covered them.