by Ari Bach
Vibeke sent the same message to Valhalla through Vladivostok’s Alopex connection. They looked at each other. There was nothing they could do on their own. They didn’t dare sabotage the tanks on an island where it could seep into the ocean. They leaped for the vent and started outward again. The great cafeteria chamber was ahead, so they took to the vent shafts.
Violet’s mind was racing. They had failed. Nothing was saved. Worse than that, Wulfgar of all people had the thing to sell to Pelamus. There was no question he would, and he would gain exceptional power in doing so. If Pelamus was behind the YUP’s disintegration, Wulfgar would stand to gain a significant chunk of UNEGA.
And the way he did it, to sacrifice his own men to bring it home. And that she failed to see it on Mars. So did Vibeke, of course, so she didn’t feel that bad about it, but still the notion was sickening on every level. They traversed the ceiling duct over the cafeteria.
Until it broke. A section gave way, wrenching downward and dumping Vibeke onto a table. Violet moved to look down in.
Vibeke was surrounded by a hundred men in the place’s main mess hall. She already had her Tikari in hand. Violet had high ground, but it was too high for a wide microwave to do more than make the men itch. It had to be far more personal than that.
Violet jumped down and stood beside Vibeke. She caught her Tikari. Dozens of men moved slowly toward them.
AT TIMES, Veikko felt like the fear was waning, softening. But these times seemed like a cruel joke as the sensation rocketed up again from his stomach to throttle his brain, as if the fear knew he was growing slowly immune to it, so it fluctuated to trick him into letting down his guard.
The hallucinations were growing stronger. He was certain that Violet had actually sent him a link that the Ares was safe on Earth.
But then, he’d also been reliving his childhood. Undersea—the most fearsome place. Not for the giant squid or the threat of drowning but for seeing them again, the last people who could control him. Anger surged up and fear, briefly, ceased to press in on his temples.
He thought of the Geki, and anger rose up again. It couldn’t replace the fear, but it seemed to dampen it, to make it almost manageable. He focused on the anger and hatred of the Geki, the common-owned bastards in the black cloaks. And fear was only his state, not his master. As soon as he found that foothold, he devoted every free scrap of himself to anger. He lingered in its different chambers, repulsion, disgust, annoyance, exasperation, but it was raw fury that proved most effective of them. In fury he was able to think again.
The Ares was safe on Earth. He was certain he heard it, standing out above the synthetic delusions. He checked his link records. It was like crawling out of a pit under fire, trying to navigate his partitioned memory. The fear was still on his heels. Every time he opened a partition on his way to the link records, there was another blast of it. A cold feeling in his chest, or the shameful jolt of being startled anew. He turned it into rage. Every prick in the soles of his feet was a reason to run faster. Soon he was running at full speed toward the link.
The Ares was safe on Earth. It was there, clear as crystal. Not an illusion. He tried to absorb it. He couldn’t fathom how. The nuclear blast had surrounded the Unspeakable carrier. There was no way it could have survived.
But Violet was going to Hashima. Wulfgar’s lair. She was going to check on the Wolf Gang. Who had lingered on Mars without doing a thing. They must have done something, something that got it home and into their control. It had to be true.
He had to destroy it. He had to get out of there. He had to get what he came for.
For the first time, he made himself aware of his actual surroundings. He was trapped by strands of black fabric, like the Geki cloaks, like a blackened burnt spider web. He struggled to no avail.
A kilometer away, Sal reached the zone where he calculated the air distortion originated. It was easy to pinpoint once he saw the citadel. There was nothing else for kilometers. Sal landed by a river and used the water flow for a quick, slight recharge. Just enough to find Veikko.
The citadel had defenses. It was covered by a black canopy, threadbare with thick ropes. Not ropes on a closer scan, metallic tendrils covered in imaging arrays at their junctions. Sal plotted out the coverage zones, then deployed his sniffers. The long delicate antennae reached out of his head and electrified. Particulate matter from the air covered them. They withdrew.
Analysis showed Veikko’s skin cells in the air, originating from a hole in the ground near the periphery of the canopy. Sal projected a possible route through the air and on the ground that would avoid all the detectors. It would be thick enough for Veikko to escape through as well. It prepared the information to download into his mind once docked.
The Tikari took flight and adeptly navigated the gaps in coverage. When he swooped low, however, a puff of dust was kicked up by his wings. Sal froze. Monitored. No reaction. The imaging arrays weren’t motion detectors. Sal moved more freely.
He entered the hole and found a room filled with more black tangles. He avoided them and quickly found Veikko tied up in their masses. He jumped straight into Veikko’s chest and recharged properly, simultaneously loading the information into Veikko’s head.
Veikko immediately told Sal to jump back out and start cutting him free. Sal wouldn’t leave his chest. He was afraid.
No, he thought, a Tikari can’t be afraid. It’s me. It’s only me. Veikko brought himself to hate the fabric, hate its tangled look, hate the way it pressed on his skin, hate the very idea of the Geki trapping their quarry in those brambly wires. His Tikari emerged and began to cut into them.
Seconds later he hit the floor. He’d fallen only a meter, but the pain was crippling. No, not pain, just more fear. The fear of pain. Worse even in common life than the pain itself. He stood up and grasped Sal, forming a blade in his hand.
The room was drenched in black and grotesquely surreal. Like the inside of an old cathedral dipped in tar. A palace patterned on frightful aesthetics. Anger. He hated the place, and it let him walk through it. The Geki surely never found this shortcut themselves. If they could function so calmly in their work, they must have truly become so immune to the fear they produced that they didn’t need constant anger to navigate their own shrouds. Veikko’s heart ran too fast. His teeth gritted themselves near to the point of shattering in his mouth. No, he had found a way through that they didn’t suspect. They’d never see him coming.
The air was thin. High altitude, or elevation perhaps? The air was 2,500 meters thin. He was 2,500 meters up, more or less. The air was cold. But rich in its scents, pine and grass. He was on a mountain.
There was no door. Only an endless wall of gothic decoration and black gossamer.
He felt his way along the tangle, looking for any exit. Fear kept kicking him in the stomach. Insisting on itself. He wondered how much hatred was left in his system. It was tiring to be so angry. But anger has a way of snowballing, increasing itself. He fell to the floor and beat it with his fists, clawed at it with his nails. Red carpet. The decadence, he screamed with rage.
And looked up. At the base of the wall was a gap. An open gap into a cold blue light. He began to crawl.
Veikko found himself outdoors under the night sky. There was a canopy, though, more black webbing overhead like a threadbare tent. But the ground was rocky nature. Clumps of weeds and dirt. Ugly ground. He began to walk, looking back at his cage. It was a hole in the ground, in a hill. Like the entrance to an old mine. The discordant world played into his anger. All the better.
He crossed a road, an ancient paved road, cracked around its sides. He scanned the horizon. He could see dim mountains and hear a creek. And he could see red. Red lights, like a boat far away. He climbed over a fence at the roadside, black wire with barbs. They dug into his skin, and it felt sublime, pure sharp pain to piss him off. It granted him a moment of perfect clarity.
In that moment he saw the unquestionable core of the Geki’s home. Draped in thei
r signature coarse black cloak was their fortress, an unholy mixture of Egyptian temple and mutant porcupine, sticking out of a squat mountain. Veikko stepped toward it slowly and noticed the bizarre fortifications and fences, all at strange angles, all twisted and warped from any notion of linear architecture. Dim red lights spilled from what might have been windows under the cloak. Red lights also lit the moat surrounding it, making it glow like lava. Veikko walked toward the heart of fear.
He crossed a curvy bridge across the moat and came to a massive door in the building. Another strike of fear pierced his chest and told him not to open it. That whatever was inside was too vile to imagine. It sent him to his knees, demanded he turn back. Veikko hated demands. He rose up and burst through the door.
“‘Land of Song!’ said the warrior bard, though all the world betrays thee.”
It was music.
“One sword, at least, thy rights shall guard, one faithful harp shall praise thee!”
It was Irish music. Veikko was caught by surprise and barely registered the rich, Victorian hall he stood in. He stood on a red carpet in a wood-paneled hall. He thought suddenly of Alice in Wonderland.
“The Minstrel fell! But the foeman’s chain could not bring his proud soul under.”
Panic crawled over him and urged him on, Tikari at the ready, looking frantically around him. All the doors in the hall were closed except for one, from which a golden light shone.
He approached it. Fear of the unknown replaced panic, and it wasn’t so bad. Veikko still boiled with rage, and the unknown held little sway over him. He felt proud. He was surviving. He was functioning. He came to the door.
Inside was a massive library. Thousands upon thousands of books covered the walls, putting Alf’s collection to shame. In the center of the room was a chair sitting next to an antique record player.
“The harp he loved ne’er spoke again for he tore its chords asunder.”
And in the chair was a Geki.
Fear cut through him again like a kick in the face. Veikko cried out despite himself, robbed of breath before the black cloak. But the cloak didn’t stir.
The Geki didn’t move.
Veikko forced himself to walk forward, to lurch step-by-step with his blade drawn until it pierced the cloak. Just the cloak. His blade went through it into the chair. He realized it was hanging on the chair. He’d been looking at the chair’s backside.
“And said ‘No chains shall sully thee, thou soul of love and bravery!’”
He stumbled back and fell on the floor, fear of his mistake gaining a foothold into his mind and attacking again. No rage came to him. Nothing he could use. He was trapped within fear again, so close to its source and so helpless he froze.
The chair began to turn, slowly. Creaking as it swiveled to reveal the true face of the uncloaked Geki sitting before him. Pale, eyes sunken, creased, and elderly. Setting down her book with a wrinkled hand and wincing at the sight of him, her cheeks peeling back to reveal her teeth.
“You came into my house.”
Veikko recoiled at her voice, his anger shattered, his mind raped again. The woman stood.
“You damn Valkyries, you never do as you’re told.”
Her voice grabbed his heart with an icy hand. He pulled in his arms and legs, shriveled up like a dead bug. The Geki raised her hand.
“You will burn, now.”
And suddenly fear was his ally. His fear of death, his fear of pain, they rose up in him and took him over. A spark began to form in her palm. Veikko felt his arm flex. The spark became a flame. His arm began to swing. The flame became a fire. He swung his Tikari blade.
It severed her arm and sent it flying to the ground, where it set the carpet on fire. The old woman began to raise her other hand, but Veikko acted from pure instinct, from pure fear. He leaped up and stabbed her in the chest.
“Aaauugghhhh!”
Her sickening death cry burst his lungs, stabbed needles into his stomach, shattered his brain. Veikko felt his sanity torn in half. Felt himself snap from the fear, from the horrifying sound, from his own empowering rage, from all the monstrous terror held in the reservoir he’d just cut open.
And then suddenly, he felt nothing.
“Thy songs were made for the pure and free, they shall never sound in slavery!”
The record cut off. The room went silent. Veikko had been held in rapturous fear so long, he wasn’t certain what was left when it ended. He was in a library. An old woman was dead in front of him, impaled on his Tikari. Her arm lay by her side. It was on fire. She was a Geki. That’s what this Geki was. A grotesque old witch casting a spell. And she was dead.
Veikko spent a moment on the floor catching his breath, trying to reset his internal workings. He felt as if he should be gathering his guts and stuffing them back in, but there was nothing to gather. He was fine. It had all been nothing more than fear. He tried to wrap his brain around it but couldn’t.
He remembered the implant. He looked to her arm. Burning in the center of its own fire. And the fire was spreading.
Veikko reached into it, catching fire himself. He examined it for a moment before the burning pain finally struck him. He started a vacuum field from his suit and the fire on him went out. The rest he left to burn. He examined the arm, burned and ancient, its skin sloughing off like paper.
He cut open the palm and found a metal prong inside. He grasped it and pulled. The implant slid out from between her radius and ulna. He saw where it replaced some of her wrist bones, where it held its power source and emitter. He wiped it off on the Geki’s chair where her body had fallen back.
And the rage returned to him. After that brief numb moment, it wasn’t the fear that returned but his anger, the rage he’d developed to combat it. That rage wasn’t gone. It was all the more pure and intense.
He grabbed and swung his Tikari and beheaded the old woman, letting her head drop off the back of the chair. He attached her implant to the clingers on his arm and headed for the door. He snapped into Valkyrie mode again, very aware that there had been two Geki and that one would be hunting him very soon, if not already.
He made his way to the door where the cold mountain air caressed him. It was pure air, air so clean he’d never felt anything like it in his lungs, not the refined air of interior Mars nor the ocean air of his former home, not even the comfortable familiar air of Valhalla. Slowly it was tainted by smoke.
He walked out into the beautiful night landscape and out from under the Geki web into the vast mountain range. The Geki web caught fire behind him as he walked away. His geolocator slowly came back on and told him he was in America with a village eighteen kilometers along that black paved road. He set out toward the village.
As he walked, Veikko set his Tikari to the sky to watch for any sign of air distortion. It might give him a fraction of a second’s chance against it if the other Geki came. He set his link to half immersion. He didn’t tap into Alopex, the anger stuck to him, and he didn’t trust his old friends just yet. He wanted to see Valhalla through his own eyes, to check on it on his own terms.
When he’d first arrived in the ravine and learned his first spy tactics, he’d set a few bugs around the place, bugs he never got around to using. Furious and betrayed to the Geki by his home, he logged into the spyware and took a look around, viewing the ravine for the first time as an outsider.
“DO YOU have any idea who we are or what we’re going to do to you?” Vibeke asked. The men seemed unperturbed. They bared their teeth and moved in closer. They all attacked at once.
Violet and Vibeke both set their Tiks to berserker mode and let them orbit. They ran quickly away from each other so as not to harm the other, cutting into the crowd and sending body parts flying.
Violet ran for the exit to the room, to make her way up topside through all the Wolves who crossed her path. But the field of men was incredibly dense. Her Tikari couldn’t cut through them all. She had to recall it for a boost from its thruster again and again
to stab and slice at those immediately in front of her. She glanced to Vibeke and saw she was making the same slow progress.
There was no way around it. They fought their way out, killing swaths of men, drenching the floor in a decimeter of blood and taking no shortage of blows and microwave bolts themselves. Violet was tired after only a few meters of the mass, and the room was twenty meters across.
She made her way to the wall to take some of the pressure off, but that was hardly a break. The energy was sapped from her by her suit to maintain the antimicrowave field. Bullets hit from time to time, and they took even more. She felt cold, freezing cold before long.
By the time she made it to the wall, she was getting alerts. Frostbite would set in within seconds. Her Tikari would need to recharge soon. She was two meters from the exit. Vibeke was running out before her.
For the briefest moment, she was angered at the sight. Vibs was leaving without her. And why shouldn’t she abandon her? After what she’d done, she deserved it. But she wiped the line of thought from her mind. Vibs was running because she knew Violet was right behind her, that she could take it and live just fine. She didn’t want to disappoint her.
Violet cut through the last men and turned off her fields just in time to prevent internal freeze damage. Her Tikari rushed back into her chest to avoid getting left behind. She caught up with Vibeke, and the two continued to run through the hall.
Before long they came to the aperture and spiral staircase. Vibeke closed the aperture behind them and welded it shut with her microwave.
“That was a hell of a room,” linked Vibs.
“I got forty-eight.”
“Thirty-seven, guess I got the shallow end.”
Violet laughed silently. She was sitting at the base of the stairs behind Vibeke, nose right by her boot. She knew she was looking at her foot enamored again. Of all the times—she got two seconds of rest after thinking Vibs abandoned her, and already she was thinking about rubbing her feet.