Ragnarok

by Ari Bach

  Violet’s lips were chapped from resisting the need to lick them, a motion that could be misinterpreted by Vibeke in the worst possible way.

  Vibeke ignored the discomfort in her legs rather than uncross them.

  And both were afraid to talk. It simply wouldn’t do.

  “Oh is that the book guy?” said Violet, looking down toward the gym.

  “We’ve been hogging the screen. We should go in case he wants it.”

  “Definitely.”

  Abandoning the arcade, they hit the gym oblivious to the kinky imagery still rattling around their subconsciousnesses. The workout felt different for both of them, though thinking themselves invulnerable to cinematic sex, neither had much of an idea why the burning of their muscles felt more tingly or the sweat smelled better in the air.

  Violet kept her eyes on Vibeke through her workout. Watching her glisten and grunt. She wanted Vibeke desperately and cursed the last weeks of stagnation. She kicked the hell out of the tibialis resistor. She had to do something, anything. Not to solve the mystery of who Vibeke was talking about. It was her, or it wasn’t, and she wanted Vibeke the same in either case. After her set she shut off the machine and floated over to Vibeke.

  Vibs finished a set of pulls and looked to Violet, breathing heavily and sweating buckets. Without gravity to drip, she was coated with a thin layer of water, shimmering.

  “Want to go sparring?” asked Violet.

  They hadn’t fought each other since the flight began. Vibs reiterated why.

  “It’s a bad idea, Vi. There’s no doctor here, none like Niide, I mean.”

  “You’re right. We never stop until we break a limb.”

  “And there’s no real reason to, zero-g sparring isn’t supposed to be very fun. All bouncing and spinning.”

  “No, you’re right, it’s a bad idea.”

  “Right. No good.”

  They took a few seconds to catch their breaths and nodded at each other in affirmation that it was a bad idea. Violet stared at Vibeke. Vibeke stared back.

  “So you want to go sparring?”

  “Yes.”

  They toweled off quickly and floated into the padded ring. They tried to bow but instead awkwardly folded in the middle. Violet let out a short snort of a laugh. Vibeke giggled. They pushed off.

  Violet’s first punch sent her spinning but didn’t connect. Vibeke took advantage and kicked her in the back, sending Violet into the ceiling and herself into the ropes. Violet rebounded fast and darted into Vibeke, pinning her for an instant before they both bounced together toward the center.

  They continued as trained. Calculating their moves for the likely motions to result. Moving to cause the most damage without losing control. Not all the damage they could. With Niide already thirty million kilometers away, they’d have to fix anything broken on their own so as not to alert the ship’s doctor. But it was still a Valkyrie match and bruises began to emerge. Sweat began to form again and flick from their skin with every hit.

  And then Violet grabbed Vibeke’s arm. She grabbed Violet back and tried to put her in an armlock. Violet spun upside down and grabbed her again, then wrapped her legs around Vibeke’s left thigh. Trapping her. Squeezing her. She was squished up against Violet, covered in sweat, breathing heavily, and close enough to look straight into her eyes. Violet was looking up to her, face only centimeters from her breast. Vibeke tapped out.

  “Recover,” she said nonchalantly.

  The two pushed off to their corners. Vibeke found herself uncomfortable. She had some idea what they were getting into but didn’t care to stop. After a moment they both launched into each other. This time they failed to spar; they only grappled. A tangle of limbs spinning in the middle of the ring. The noises they made sounded like the movie they left running in the arcade, grunts and gasps. By the time they twisted each other into a solid state, Vibeke had no illusions whatsoever about what was happening, and Violet had no inhibition against it.

  “There’s nobody here,” said Violet. “It’s a ghost ship.”

  “I know.”

  Violet let go and pushed off into the ropes. Vibeke floated slowly to her corner. They stared at each other. Violet undressing her with her eyes. She’d seen Vibeke naked a hundred times, but this was drastically different. Still clothed she was sexier than she’d ever appeared. Violet’s mind raced, thinking of nothing but what she’d do to Vibs if she so much as made eye contact.

  And Vibeke could feel it. She knew the stare she was getting from Violet, knew it all too well. It was the way Mishka looked at her. And in that moment, she thought of betrayal. Of the hunt.

  Violet was oblivious, too in lust to think straight and too close to the object of her desire to imagine she was thinking anything else.

  Vibeke felt ice cold. Sweat freezing on her skin. A chill in her spine. She couldn’t be betrayed again, not by Violet of all people. She needed Violet. She loved Violet. And all she saw in that moment was Mishka’s gaze. The look that disrobed her, the look that caught her escaping from the carrier with Balder. All betrayal, both of them hurting each other more deeply than Vibeke ever knew she could be hurt.

  Vibeke bowed. Violet didn’t understand at first. Slowly it dawned on her that it meant sparring was over. She bowed instinctively but remained lost. Breathing hard and confused as hell, she tried to reassemble the events to mean something more sensical. They had gone sparring. Nothing more. She didn’t know why she said it was a ghost ship. She wasn’t implying anything. It was just a random statement without meaning. Surely Vibeke knew that. She didn’t need to say anything.

  Vibeke’s mind raced, her Tikari antenna snapping under Mishka’s fist, killing Sasha, Mishka’s escapes, the near misses, the hatred.

  “Just one round, then?”

  Violet couldn’t keep sex out of her mind. She wanted Vibeke more desperately than she ever had before.

  “Yeah, I’m not feeling it.”

  Vibs wanted to gut Mishka, to eviscerate her and watch her innards spill out onto the concrete.

  “Me neither, let’s shower off.”

  Showers, dear fucking hell, thought Violet.

  “Yeah.”

  They floated to the showers and linked them on. Both their hearts racing for opposite reasons, they arrived at the sonic barrier. Vibeke began disrobing exactly as she always did. Violet did the same. Just like normal, because nothing abnormal had happened.

  Vibs floated into the shower first, and its hum filtered her sweat from her skin. Violet floated in after and cursed the vibrations, the absolute last thing she needed to feel just then. They tried not to look at each other, though they’d seen each other in those very showers every day of the trip. Vibeke spoke, her voice distorting in the sound waves.

  “Did you know this was the first transfer liner of its kind?”

  It was more refreshing than the showers. Violet jumped in.

  “No, no I didn’t. What kind is it?”

  “They call it Lasswitz class. It differs from the old Capek class in that the thrusters are quark inversion like Valhalla instead of nuclear.”

  “That’s so interesting!”

  “Yeah, the Lasswitz liners are really amazing. They’re expected to be in use until 2300 at least.”

  “Really built to last.”

  “Yeah.”

  The small talk continued until they made it back to the berth and strapped into their beds. By then it had transmogrified into something slightly deeper, the usual quality of the conversations that kept them awake until the next morning.

  “My parents were in Inverness when they met,” began Violet. “Apparently they got into this big fight the first time. They were at a murder mystery dinner, both dragged along by my grandparents. So they’re at the front bar where you pick up your names, and both of them reach for Robin the Highlander. My dad is like, ‘I get the Highlander, I’m from Inverness,’ and my mom says ‘The hell you do. I’m from Inverness too,’ and my dad says ‘I was born in Dornoch. W
here were you born?’ and she frowns and says, ‘Glasgow.’ He goes, ‘well, that settles it, then. I’m the Highlander,’ and she says maybe they can make a new tag and both be highlanders, and he says ‘No, there can be only one! I’m the Highlander. You can be the wench from Glasgow, bloody keelie…,’ so she took Jeanette from Hoorn, and she turned out to be the murderer, and she got to kill my dad. So every year for their anniversary, they’d go to some dinner and kill each other.”

  “Sounds almost Valkyrie.”

  “I can’t even imagine what Valkyrie weddings would be like.”

  “Well, Viking weddings lasted at least three days, asked for blessings from the gods, and then everyone marched to the marital bed with torches and marked their first legal mating.”

  “How sweet.”

  “Do you ever want to get married?”

  Violet thought about it briefly. “Sure, we can have the liner’s captain perform the ceremony, and Nate can watch our first legal mating.”

  Vibeke laughed. “Me neither.”

  They paused, the long sort where neither knew if the other had gone to sleep. The kind that had become common after a month of staying up until morning just talking, ruining their sleep schedules. They could each duck into the dreamscape and see, but both were afraid to go and find themselves alone. Despite the tension and strange moment in the sparring ring, both found themselves happy to have so close a friend. For the first time in ages, Violet thought of Vibeke as her closest friend and not at all as something to be courted. It was a comfortable thought, a happy one that she wished would persist.

  The next few days it lasted. But it faded. Every visit to the gym, every conversation, every covert stare wore Violet down as it did every time she tried to convince herself to think of Vibeke only as a friend. On the penultimate day of the trip, she finally came to understand that no matter what she did, she’d not be able to eject Vibs from the core of her affections. However Vibeke felt about her, it was hopeless to convince herself that she had to be a friend or that she had any value so great she’d have as a lover. And Violet resolved that somehow, some day she’d possess her utterly, romantically, sexually, mind and body exactly as she wanted her, no matter what the cost. Because losing her teammate and losing her friend were not so terrible a fate as regretting that she’d left some stone unturned, some chance untaken.

  The last night of the journey, she slept, determined to tell Vibeke everything, to demand she admit her own feelings and give in. The trip to Mars would be the last time they wasted such a chance. The trip home would be completely different. And the stay there would be different too, a burning hot stay on the bright red planet—Varg and Veikko be damned. To hell with the mission. This was the moment everything changed.

  The Lasswitz turned and burned to slow down and slipped into Mars’s orbit. The Martian shuttle docked, and the Tikaris broke away from the liner, heading for the shuttle’s ailerons.

  Violet slept through the braking process and awoke hours later, ready and resolved to speak to Vibs. She slowly opened her eyes to the bright berth. She saw Vibeke—floating right between Veikko and Varg, who were both strung out on adrenaline from their wake-up procedures.

  “I fucked forty-seven women in the dreamscape!” shouted Varg.

  “Twenty here, but I was—I won the Hold ’Em tournament three nights in a row, and—and I came in second twice. It was awesome! I made like 40,000 euros and then, then I gave it all to the Armor for Orphans fund!” Veikko’s face went flat. “Why the hell did I do that?”

  “What did you two do?” asked Varg cheerfully.

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing.”

  Varg and Veikko didn’t know what to make of it. They did nothing, apparently. Nothing to tell, then, Veikko thought, and he went on to regale them with the specifics of his straight flush—clubs, nine to king.

  The crowd slowly floated to the shuttle and took their seats. Violet never had her chance, but she didn’t regret it all that much. Nothing would have come of it anyway, she told herself. The landing was smooth under the thin Martian gravity, and the taxi to the spaceport took nearly an hour. They left it intentionally long to give the newcomers their safety lectures.

  “Martian air is currently only 45 percent as thick as Earth’s sea level and contains almost no oxygen. Never go outside without your oto-equalizers and a supply of oxygen appropriate for your activities. Never go outside without a warm jacket, even for a moment. Though the cold may not feel bad at first, you will get frostbite within ten minutes of exposure. Never forget that terraforming is only in its earliest stage. The effects don’t change the fact that this is not a planet fit for life, and that life is now your own.”

  The sight out the windows was far less red than Violet had expected. They were in fact on a brown planet, not a red one. Disappointing, the word echoed through her mind for several reasons.

  “We are now docked at the Valles Marineris Spaceport. The airlock will open in twenty seconds. Mars net will be available to your links in thirty seconds. Please follow all safety instructions at all times, and enjoy your stay on the red planet!”

  It wasn’t red. It just wasn’t as red as she thought it would be.

  Chapter V: Barsoom

  THE TIKARIS began to unweld themselves from the shuttle’s plating. Vibeke’s broke free first and started to help Varg’s, which had the most legs and would take the longest to break free. Violet’s and Veikko’s joined in as they escaped, and soon the group was fluttering across the tarmac, trying to hold up Pokey in the thin Martian air while also juggling four microwaves.

  They weren’t spotted on the tarmac, but as soon as they opened one of the luggage portals to the spaceport, two engineers took notice and ran for them. Nelson and Bob dropped their microwaves and sprang into action, flying for the engineers. Landing on their necks, both Tikaris tapped their quarry with the sedative needles on their front feet and flew back to close the airlock. Pokey was best suited for the tough inner door’s crank so he started the instant the outer door was closed.

  A small pop resounded in the luggage room, but nobody was there. Everyone was still unscrewing the cargo cylinder from the shuttle. The insectoids flew better in the indoor air and carried Pokey up to the ventilation system and, from there, to the intake to await their owners outside of the security zone.

  V team was among the first off the flight. They quickly jogged to the terminal exit, then to the edge of the superstructure and awaited their Tiks. Sal spotted them under the vent and began unscrewing it, quickly magnetizing each bolt so as not to drop them. He was about to lift the grate upward into the vent when he realized it opened outward. The grate fell two meters onto Varg’s head, knocking him over onto Vibeke.

  Violet went into attack mode instantly, and Nelson felt her state, so he flew to her fast and landed in her hand as a knife, dropping her microwave on the floor at her feet. Bob seemed almost offended and flew to Vibeke for solace, and then Sal joined the rest as fast as he could, leaving three microwaves on the floor. That also left Pokey all alone in the vent system, unable to fly down. Varg recovered and looked up to see what dropped the grate just in time to see Pokey walk off the edge of the vent and fall right onto his shoulder, knocking him down again onto the floor.

  Pokey immediately saw the microwave pile and realized he’d left Varg’s sidearm up inside the vent shaft. He linked through Violet to ask Nelson to recover it, so the knife left Violet’s hand and flew up to dislodge the weapon, which fell onto Varg’s head just as he made it up for the third time.

  By some miracle, nobody saw the Tikari fiasco happening in the corner. All four humans finally turned their Tikari back to control mode and chested them, Varg’s around his torso. The team then holstered their microwaves, cursed their bumbling instruments, and headed for the conveyor.

  There was no view in the underground conveyor train to the Barsoom Colony. Only four hours of darkness that somehow made the month-long space flight seem shorter.

>   The large-bellied men from the flight sat beside V team, so nobody from either group felt very vocal. Violet examined them, certain they were Wolves. They had the disgruntled pride she saw in so many Orange Gang members, that subsurface snarl that said they hated the world and loved hating it. If anything they were caricatures of the Orange Gang, more extreme versions. When the conveyor stopped at Barsoom, V team rose to depart, but the three men remained to head farther north.

  Veikko linked, “We can’t risk sending a Tikari to track them. Varg, throw one a node if you can.”

  Varg took three nodes from one of his Thaco pockets and linked out, “Distraction.”

  Violet immediately shoved Veikko into the railing.

  “Don’t you grope me, you bloody pervert! I oughta kill you! I will report you. You’ll lose your job over this!”

  She slapped him and continued. “I swear, I’ve never met such a pervert in my life. I should rip your bloody arms off and stuff them down your throat, I swear to God, you bastard!”

  She gave him one more slap as the doors opened, then stormed out into the station. Varg and Vibeke caught up. Veikko exited the conveyor last, cradling his cheek.

  He linked, “I missed you in cryo, Vi.”

  She linked back, “We missed you too, you gropey bastard. Varg, did you get a node on one?”

  “All three, great show,” he replied.

  THE ARCHITECTURE of the Martian colony was nothing like that of Earth. Everything was redundant, inner and outer windows, inner and outer halls, inner and outer lobbies with inner and outer reception areas. Every wall was two walls, the bulky mass that protected from sandstorms and thin air, then the inner wall full of heating systems and soft paneling. Even the people dressed in layers: pressure suits opened to reveal jackets, jackets opened to reveal thermal suits, thermal suits covered underclothing. Valhalla’s multipurpose garb would offer all those layers and even oxygen on the surface, but it stuck out on Mars as if they were wandering naked.