Ragnarok

by Ari Bach

  Varg drew his microwave in one hand, Tikari sword in the other, prepared for a fight. He tried to link into Alopex to no avail. The computer was set 100 percent on the Ares. The AI was nowhere to be found. Varg implemented the critical protocols to shut down the drawbridge in case of Alopex deactivation. The system was back to Leo, the simple Ares AI.

  There was nobody to fight. No Cetaceans, no Wolves, no teams or Valhalla civilians. But the architecture wasn’t in shambles; the hall was fine. The Ares undulated and throbbed overhead, horribly grotesque, mixed in with the innards of the Martian tourists. And thankfully without any water to infect. With the rampart up, the world was safe. But the rampart was up so someone must be inside. He looked around at the top of his guard.

  The only motion he could detect was a walrus pod trapped along the edge of the ravine. He walked up the spiral walkway and observed the area. Motion nearby, and not from Umberto. There was someone in the communications tower. Hanging like a stalactite from the ravine’s top, it was the highest structure in Valhalla. It was covered in antennae and protected by a heavy magnetic shield to clarify any signals. And there was something yellow inside it.

  Varg approached with great stealth, and as he entered, he caught Pelamus off guard. But he did not attack. Pelamus had armor that could defy any sword and any microwave beam. It also made him nearly deaf. Varg planned as he stepped silently into the room. He wanted to take Pelamus without a fight, without ever letting the Fish know he was there. The idiot was alone. Varg didn’t care why he was alone, and he didn’t care why he hadn’t set off the Ares yet. None of it would matter if he could just kill Pluturus where he stood. He needed a weapon that could get through that armor. What did the com tower offer? The place had no tactical benefits except that mag shield.

  Varg had a stroke of true genius when he thought of that shield. In that instant he thought back to Balder, who had hidden the Mjölnir somewhere in Valhalla, somewhere so well hidden that nobody could find its magnetic signature. An obvious magnetic signature that only a huge magnetic shield could hide. It was in that com tower, it had to be. Somewhere in that very room was a generator designed to crush anything in metal armor, armor like Pelamus’s. The cannons wouldn’t be there, but his Tikari could channel a charge if he could just find and power the generator. And then he found it. How had he never noticed in a hundred times in that room that the bench in the middle was shaped like a horseshoe? The thing wasn’t even disguised, merely painted. And Pelamus was reclining on it.

  The only question was if the thing would still work. The com tower field wasn’t only strong enough to hide a magnetic signature. It was enough to render most magnets useless. He calculated quickly. Checked his partitions for field strength and frequency of both the tower and the Mjölnir. Every calculation came out at 50 percent likelihood of functionality. It would happen or not. He’d deal with not if it happened.

  Varg became the essence of stealth. He approached with no sound, barely a displacement of air that could have given him away. He saw every reflective surface and denied Pelamus sight of his reflection. He made it to the generator and with ease hooked his Tikari into its negative port. His suit could channel the positive without harm to himself. He was ready. He only had to charge the generator, which would make sound but perhaps he could distract the fish, who would have no clue why the bench was making noise. He only needed a few seconds.

  “Hey, Fish, where’s the school?”

  Pelamus turned around, and bless the idiot, he gave a monologue.

  “Fish, you call me! Cetaceans are not fish any more than you are an insect. We are men, young human, men. And we will have the same rights as men, the right to live. And to that end, I, Pelamus Pluturus, have taken this ravine and its intended experiment! Now, we have the power to end your civilization, as for a century you have threatened—”

  Crunch. Varg’s suit froze in place with the magnetic field. When he could move again, the armored suit before him was utterly collapsed in on itself. So passed Pelamus Pluturus, who stood seconds from conquering the globe but died because he couldn’t shut up and kill the man before him. Or could he—Varg felt something in his shoulder. Then he felt the room shudder. There was a dart in his shoulder. The Mjölnir had shaken the com tower from its metal fittings. Pelamus had shot him with a tiny dart as he was talking—damn it, he wasn’t talking to boast; he was distracting Varg from his own attack. The com tower was shaking. It was going to collapse.

  With Pelamus crushed to the size of a pebble and the room breaking up around him, Varg knew to get to the catwalk. Within three steps, he knew that the dart must have been poisoned. In three steps more, he felt it overtaking him. The nearest med kit was one junction away. If he could only make it there, he could at least delay the effects before losing consciousness. But in another three steps, he fell to the floor, paralyzed.

  Soon after he felt the tower supports give way. The room was falling from Valhalla’s overhangs. Varg’s nervous system was failing. He would be dead before he hit the ground.

  In his last lucid instant, he felt something he had never felt before, a feeling that might have been death itself and might have been something else. He had never known fear in his life. But now he was afraid, filled with trepidation, the sense of something approaching, something dangerous and final. Varg passed out, terrified, fear upon fear like he’d never imagined could exist. The room fell to the jagged floor of the pit and was crushed with its contents into unsalvageable ruin.

  Chapter XII: Dimmuborgir

  THE MONITORING guild authorized the escalation to “red.” The world was at the brink of war. Much of it had already fallen over that edge. Zaibatsu was no more. The Yakuza and Unspeakable Darkness had reduced it to such rubble that UNEGA dissolved the company. What was left of it didn’t want to be dissolved and threatened to march on the offices that destroyed it. The greedy vultures that coveted its assets had already fired on the rallies or seized assets prematurely by force. UNEGA tried to legislate what would go where, but by the time the bureaucracy got around to locating it, it had already been stolen.

  Blame went in every possible direction. Amorphis accused OMC of hijacking the entire Zaibatsu Pacific shipping fleet. OMC insisted it was taken by the TOT. TOT didn’t even exist anymore, having been entirely absorbed by Fyntr Oil in the confusion. Silentium, meanwhile, launched a hostile takeover of Asda subsidiary, ND, which kicked 7,000 Asda supervisors out of the job. They immediately flooded UNEGA’s relocation sector and plugged the cash flow to the Jourgensen Ministry, which seized the loose Nigerian assets of Zaibatsu to keep its payroll running in an attack for which they hired the Whiplash Militia, leaving DHG undefended. DHG was devoured by Nork, which stood by for its Nigerian offices to be overrun when the Militia returned.

  GAUNE meanwhile pushed the limits of legality and decency by appropriating Ireland and Kalaallit Nunaat, and to the latter act Danmark couldn’t respond to as it was busy preventing the secession of the more lucrative Faroe Companies. UNEGA vowed retaliation, which, of course, it couldn’t do in the least. Unless, said GAUNE, they intended to use illegal force like that nuke they showed off in Presov only days before.

  D team had their hands full at first, and overflowing before long. Dani attended to COF’s merger and prevented it from turning violent by convincing the Bydo Empire not to illegally seize and liquidate the numerous type R funds it had its eyes on. Death came swiftly to EnsiFerum and freed their kidnapped CEO, thus keeping Ensign and Ferum on track to absorb Green Carnation Pogo Emporium’s contract with Sam I-L. Deva and DeMurtas traveled eastward to prevent Xerox from stabbing westward into Shaw’s snowy territory.

  E team, by contrast, abandoned the business world for assassinations, killing any GAUNE CEOs bent on using conglomerate armies to delve into Zaibatsu’s remains with illegal weaponry that would see UNEGA declaring war within the hour. J and L teams found themselves on Luna, trying to convince Tycho Under not to use the confusion to secede from UNEGA. Mars was a com
plete write-off, having been under direct Zaibatsu control. The PRA rejoiced, now the only ruling body on Mars. Niana considered her nuke well spent.

  But no team was present to prevent the sale of Verizon to Uniquity XL. It wasn’t even on Valhalla’s radar. It would have been had Alf lived to monitor it, but alas, with his death the company fell, and liquidation of its assets began immediately. That meant the link went down in much of northern Europe for almost seventeen seconds.

  The results were catastrophic. Euronext went offline for the first time in seventy-nine years. That alone would have been enough to cause mass panic and financial ruin, but when Euronext went down, MATIF and the ÜberBörse went wild trying to take over the sum total of Euronext company traffic, including Uniquity XL, which as a result, shut down its net link later that day, including the recent acquisitions. All of Europe went offline. Most of Africa and Asia, including UNEGA’s Headquarters in Tokyo, 404’d, and GAUNE took notice.

  Canada was now poised to take over the entire net and charge UNEGA to use it. New York was placed on alert. NASDAQ and NYSE militaries were put on call for the first time in history to shuttle over to the former Verizon territories and bring them online under GAUNE aegis.

  All in all, UNEGA was in shambles, and GAUNE was prepared to take over 60 percent of it with military force. Despite the net outages, UNEGA was very aware of this and began massing its own troops for war.

  The only saving grace to the degeneration was that neither side appeared to want to go nuclear. There was no benefit in it, no reason to do it. And despite what GAUNE perceived as a show of nuclear force, they armed no ICBMs, scrambled no bombers, activated no satellites, and this conspicuous absence of escalation was intentionally reciprocated by UNEGA. Nobody wanted a nuclear war. Except, of course, for Veikko, who in death had no means to recall his sisters, who he’d consigned to oblivion along with the rest of the globe.

  THE GET slowed down and pulled alongside the Husavik station. Vibeke watched the landscape grind to a standstill out the berth window and nudged Violet.

  “We’re here.”

  Violet didn’t move. Vibeke shoved her.

  “Get up, time to nuke our home for the last two years.”

  “I’ll nuke it later,” said Violet as she hugged her pillow.

  In time Violet arose, and they pulled on their suits to face the mission. An odd mission to Violet, but she couldn’t quite place why it seemed odd. Neither could Vibeke. But Violet felt unnaturally certain they were doing the right thing. She couldn’t fathom how she was so opposed to it when Veikko first asked. At the same time, she couldn’t think through the logic of it. She was certain but unsure why she was certain.

  Valhalla taught all its recruits to recognize a bore inception. Veikko deleted that training when he was in, knowing from his own training where to find it in the human brain. His hack, if such things were studied, would have gone down in history as one of the most subtle and flawless direct-brain codings of all time. A computer hack is simple and straightforward, a 1 or a 0—it’s either done or it’s not. Brain recoding is more an art than a craft, and Veikko was a grand master of the art. Violet kept her mind on the job and ignored the odd jingles and tweets of cognitive dissonance, just as Veikko programmed her to.

  They departed the train and took a lift down to the station’s pogo park, which was thankfully almost empty of people. Violet spotted a speedy if antiquated Suzuki Ninori and hacked its lock and starter. They headed south.

  Vibeke clung tightly to her back as they flew. She tried to contact Veikko, but his link was off the map. The map was off the net. The net was flickering between GAUNE ads and UNEGA ads. Alopex couldn’t be called up. Her address was simply listed as “Leo, pending.” With Alf and Balder’s deaths, the ravine seemed to have ceased to be. It was a lifetime away.

  As they flew, Vibeke’s arms tight around Violet’s waist, the only concern she felt was the deathly prospect of losing her. Not from betrayal or anything related to the rules of the old ravine, but on the mission to come. Violet was right; they should consider a life in transorbital transportation. Vibeke resolved on that short flight to tell her they could last. They could retire together and hack themselves a nice salary and position with whatever company ended up owning the orbitliners.

  Violet thought about retirement as well. She was almost twenty and getting old. She’d had a good run as a spy. She needed only to accomplish this one last task. She couldn’t quite place why she couldn’t abandon it as well. But the thought was somehow unthinkable. Not unpalatable or wicked, but simply unthinkable. They had to destroy the Ares. Then there would be absolute freedom.

  They set down north of Dimmuborgir in the civilian zone. Oblivious tourists looked over the strange rocks, positioning their heads to record memory files, bobbing around chatting with their families. It was as alien a lifestyle to Violet as those of the people on Mars. It was the life she suddenly coveted.

  “Doesn’t look like a missile silo,” she linked.

  Vibeke checked the black book.

  “Alf’s old intel suggests it’s under the civilian park. The launch tubes are concealed in the rock, but there should be a long tunnel to its conventional access half a kilometer north of here.”

  They headed toward the location. Sinister volcanic rocks jutted up around them, coated in tourists. The two approached a rock whose picture was included in the intel. The tunnel would be hidden in plain sight, completely unmarked and designed to fit in with the surrounding features. Violet spotted it first, only given away by the most subtle difference of black shades. The two climbed up the rock unseen and dropped down into a long, black tunnel.

  Microwaves drawn, the two walked through the darkness, eyes straining even with their tapeta lucida on full. The tunnel was nearly a kilometer long, angling 150 meters down into the stale smelling pumice rock.

  They walked quietly, expecting guards. As they turned a gentle corner to the left, they found light. Violet sent her Tikari to the ceiling to observe. There were two men, armed to the teeth, standing guard. Armored as well, common microwave beams would do nothing, stunning beams even less. They’d have to get under their helmets to stun them.

  Vibeke improvised. She clingered her microwave and started talking loudly with an American accent.

  “Becky, I don’t think we’re supposed to be in here!”

  Violet played along. “Shut up, Carla! There’s a light ahead. If we weren’t supposed to be here, there wouldn’t be lights!”

  “Oh my God, Becky, you’re gonna get us stuck or in trouble or somethin’!”

  They walked straight up to the men, who stood still by the door. One was about to speak and held up his hand.

  “Excuse me!” shouted Violet. “Excuse me, but can you tell my sister that—”

  They sprang, each taking the soldier on their side of the tunnel, cramming their microwaves fast into the gap between their helmets and collars and firing stunning beams directly into their heads. Both fell to the ground. Vibeke began to undress one for a disguise, but Violet stopped her.

  “They’re in UNEGA aus-guard uniforms. If they saw them inside, they’d know they were stolen.”

  They were better off staying agile in nothing but their own armor. Vibeke began to hack into the door.

  It was incredibly complex, the most secure door Vibeke had ever seen in her days with Valhalla. Alarms inside security walls inside hack armor inside undirectoried systems inside of a heavily guarded locking mechanism.

  Suddenly, it opened by itself.

  Vibeke and Violet both knew it meant a trap. They leaped back and kept their microwaves on the door. They waited. Nothing came. Violet sent Nelson to push open the door, keeping her microwave on the space. It opened to reveal nothing but the pink light of motion detectors in the hallway within.

  Cautiously they headed toward the door. Nelson leaped to the ceiling and began scanning for the frequency of the detectors he’d need to jam. He found them offline.

 
“Something’s drastically wrong here.”

  “Agreed, what do we do?”

  “The mission as planned.”

  They entered, microwaves at the ready. They found only round halls, every surface covered in a network of red pipes. The halls were filled with hairpin turns, winding up and down and around themselves as if wadded up from a larger complex.

  The Tikaris scanned ahead in every direction but found the halls empty. They continued down the wrinkled path until they came to a junction. A cortex node protruded from the ceiling. They didn’t dare hack into it, but its ganglion would lead to the control center. They followed it through more wrinkles and came to the control center hatch. It was hanging open, and slumped limply over its sill was a corpse.

  “What the hell is going on here?”

  “I killed him,” said Veikko. “I killed them all.”

  Violet and Vibeke looked around in a hurry.

  “Veikko?” It hit Violet like a splash of cold water, a chill as if he’d appeared right behind her.

  His voice came from the speaker system. “Sal actually. Pleased to speak to you finally.”

  “Sal?”

  “Sal, as in Veikko’s Tikari. Praying mantis looking fellow? The one that was splashing around in the tomato soup on your birthday. He sent me along to help you. Sorry about the soup by the way.”

  It was impossible. Tikaris couldn’t speak. It had to be one of Veikko’s jokes. But he wouldn’t, not on this mission. It became all the more unnerving.

  “How are you talking?”

  “Well, it’s a funny thing. He sent me into the mainframe with a couple simple directions. But when I took over their base broadbrain, I could incorporate its speech functions, internal systems, I even learned a new game program. Have either of you heard of ‘Chess’?”

  “This dead body—”

  “Oh, I activated the vacuum fire system and locked the hatches. Reopened this one just for you. It killed everyone inside. I thought it would help. I also deactivated the security systems, did everything but launch the missiles. They’re on an unlinked system. How about a nice game of chess?”