by Per Holbo
Chapter 4: Alfheim
Tjalfe woke up his body jolting involuntarily. He sat up. Ouch! The pain from his chest hurt as if someone had pricked him straight to his heart with a long needle.
“Easy, now, Tjalfe.” Sif´s voice was soothing and with a soft hand on his shoulder she gently guided him to lie on his back.
“You broke a few ribs. It would be better if you could lie still for a little while.”
He let her push his upper body down on the bed, but then he remembered his sister.
“Roeskva!”
He almost burst with worry.
“Where is my sister? Is she okay?”
“She´s fine,” Sif reassured him as she nodded her head and smiled. Then she found a hand held console from the small table beside her and examined him by moving it up and down his chest.
“She is waiting for you in the next room,” Sif continued and put down the equipment on the table, “you can see her in a moment. But first we need to be sure your bones have healed.”
Tjalfe looked puzzled. He didn´t get it. Broken ribs? It really didn´t feel all that bad...
Sif noticed his confusement and tilted her head smiling in understated understanding.
“Yes, Tjalfe,” she said still smiling, “you got it right. You did break your ribs, but they are healing and you should be up and about in half an hour or so.”
Her smile changed to a giggle as his confused expression widened.
“Oh, Tjalfe, you really are something... You must have gotten it by now. If we didn´t have this equipment you might not even have survived. But we do, so...” She shrugged. “Anyway,” she said, “you will be fine in a half hour and in a few days you won´t even feel pain anymore.”
Yeah... of course... He hadn´t thought about it that way, but he knew she was right. He had seen before, how the Aseir could heal people with their technology. A few weeks back one of them hadn´t been careful enough when handling one of the small cars they used to move heavy loads back and forth inside the Fyrkat Fortress. He´d let go of the car and for some reason it had moved and run him over. There had been multiple fractures in his foot and his ankle was broken, but it hadn’t seemed to worry any of them. They just mended it with their equipment and after lying down for an hour he had been up and running again.
Tjalfe sat up straight again. This time he was a little more careful. Sif let him, but looked carefully for any signs of his body reacting on pain. It didn´t hurt as much as before and all he could think of was his sister. He wanted to make sure she was all right.
Sif got up from her chair and went to open the door. Tjalfe looked at her questioningly while wondering if he was even able to stand up. As he didn´t move, Sif made a gesture saying: go through the door.
“Didn´t you want to see your sister,” she asked. Tjalfe nodded. He got up and treaded carefully toward the door. No pain... Within a few seconds he had passed Sif in the hall way and entered the next room. And there she was... A sigh of relief left his lunges as he approached her with his arms spread wide to the sides. She looked up from a bowl of whatever she was eating.
“Tjalfe!” she shouted with a smile and jumped up from her chair. It hurt as she hugged him tight, but he didn´t say anything. He was just happy that she was alright.
Sif pulled out a chair for Tjalfe and they sat down sharing a meal together. Sif, Roeskva and Tjalfe were the only ones there and under other circumstances they would probably have been cheerfully talking about anything and everything. But there was nothing normal about these circumstances and Tjalfe knew there was a question that needed to be asked, though he had a feeling he wouldn´t like the answer.
Finally he had built up the courage and looked at Sif with a concerned expression.
“Ehm... Sif?” he began while struggling with the knot in his throat as it tightened and made talking rather difficult.
“Yes?” Sif looked at him with that friendly smile of hers and waited patiently for him to go on.
“Well,” he said looking down at the empty bowl in front of him while holding on to the edge of the table with his left hand, “it´s just that... I... How did we... I mean, we were kind of trapped and...”
“You want to know how you escaped?”
“Yeah...”
“Well, Tjalfe, that´s a fair question,” she said as she poured Roeskva another bowl of food, “and it was a close call to say the least.”
Then she began telling the story of what had happened, starting from before Tjalfe and Roeskva arrived at the Fyrkat Fortress and though Tjalfe didn´t understand why she would reveal all the things she did, he didn´t ask. If that question was ever to be asked, it was for another time and certainly for another place than this.
When the Aseir had followed the orders to evacuate, the small fleet had gathered at a predetermined rendezvous point. But as they arrived, they realized that neither Loki nor Thor was there and they could only conclude that they were somehow stranded back on Earth unable to get to the rest of the fleet.
“Thor!” Tjalfe interrupted as he heard the name of the Aseir who had invited him to the fortress in the beginning.
“Is Thor here?” he almost shouted his question. Sif held up a hand to stop him.
“Thor is here and he is fine,” she said, then she looked down and her usual smile disappeared as she continued.
“But Loki is missing and we have no clue as to where he could be.” She looked up and Tjalfe could have sworn there were tears in her eyes.
“The fact is,” she said reluctantly, “that he may have died.”
Tjalfe felt sad. Though he had never met Loki, Thor had always spoken so warmly about him and with all the stories Thor had told about Loki, Tjalfe felt almost as if he knew him. Now it seemed he would never even get a chance to meet him.
Sif continued her story. As the evacuated fleet at the rendezvous point realized that Loki and Thor weren´t accounted for; their crew had been transferred to other vessels just before the evacuation, though; they scanned as far as they could in the hope that Svalinn had only had some kind of navigational trouble and had been stranded somewhere in between Earth and the rendezvous point. They had no success and their efforts to make radio contact through sub space had turned out empty as well.
“That´s when we decided to go back for them,” Sif said and looked them both firmly in their eyes. “Now, this decision wasn´t easy. Going back was extremely dangerous. The Yetten may be less advanced than we are, but their fighting capabilities in space are lethal. The only reason we went back was because we couldn´t risk the Fyrkat Technology falling into the hands of the Yetten Empire and if Loki and Thor hadn´t returned, they might have been caught with the Fyrkat Device or parts from it. We couldn´t risk it, so we returned to at least try to get it back.”
Sif continued explaining how the fleet went hiding behind the moon while a single vessel, the Alfheim, managed to pass the Yetten vessel fleet undetected. It had flown cloaked and silently close to the Fyrkat Fortress. Here they found Thor and Loki fighting the Yetten land troops and as the bubble around the center stone exploded the pilot on the Alfheim reacted quickly. He managed just in time to transport Tjalfe, Roeskva and Thor onboard Alfheim before the force from the blow would have vaporized them all. The Alfheim pilot did have a lock on Loki, but a split second before he started the transporter Loki had disappeared and they had no idea where he had gone. The most likely explanation would be that he had been disintegrated by the radiation from the blast, but they couldn´t be sure.
Tjalfe´s eyes found the floor as he heard of Thor´s closest friend being killed while trying to save Tjalfe and his sister. He was embarrassed. He shouldn´t have tampered with that glass tube. He should have listened to his much wiser sister. If he had, none of this would have happened and they would all be sitting in the dining room of the fortress laughing and being educated on the Aseir technology.
All this had happened solely because of him and his stupid curiosity. He was the one responsible fo
r the disappearance of Loki and he didn´t know how he would ever be able to look Thor in the eyes again.
“Yes, Tjalfe, you are responsible for Loki disappearing.” Thor appeared in the door and fastened his eyes strictly on the boy.
“I did tell you never to touch the center stone or the tubes.”
Tjalfe felt tiny enough to crawl inside a mouse hole. A drop of salty water slid slowly down his cheek. Thor approached him and put a hand on his trembling shoulder trying to comfort the devastated boy who was crying silently shaking his entire body in grief and a bad conscience.
“There, there, Tjalfe,” Thor said softly, “what has happened has happened and there is nothing we can do about it right now.” Thor pulled out the chair beside Tjalfe and sat down. He grabbed Tjalfes face with his warm hands and lifted up the boy´s head looking kindly in his eyes.
“Listen, Tjalfe,” he said, “there is no point in sitting here feeling sorry for yourself. You made a mistake and you know you did. I can tell by the look in your eyes. But done is done and right now we need to focus on one thing and one thing only: getting back Loki safe and sound, alright?”
Tjalfe nodded quietly.
“Are you up for it, Tjalfe?” Thor asked, “because I need you to focus. I need your help.”
Again Tjalfe nodded and there was a quiet moment.
“Well!” Thor broke the silence with a much more cheerful voice. He took a plate and filled it with food.
“That´s it, then! No more talking about errors of the past! Right now we need to get some food, so eat up, kids! We will need all the strength we can get, if we are going to rescue Loki.” He looked around and met the eyes of everyone and there was something strong and comforting in his look.
“And we are going to get him back, mind you!”
Tjalfe didn´t exactly feel okay, but seeing Thor in such a good mood was after all soothing and he did feel much better.
After they had finished eating Thor brought the two children to his laboratory.
“Right, kids!” he said, “this is what we are going to do.”
He went to the wide variety of shelves in the room grabbing all sorts of equipment which he piled up on the large table in the center of the lab as he explained their situation.
“Now, we managed to shut down the Fyrkat device,” he said while rigging up his gear, “but after the device was shut down the Yetten tampered with it. We don´t know exactly what they did and far less how they did it, but knowing them I am certain that we need to take our precautions.”
He was standing with his back to Tjalfe and Roeskva as he was rigging up some gear, but suddenly he let go of whatever it was that he was holding in his hands and turned around looking at them with a concerned expression.
“Whatever the Yetten did...” he began, then paused for a moment before going on.
“If you have in any way been influenced by what the Yetten did with the device, there is a very real risk that they have some kind of lock on you. And if that´s the case, it´s only a question of time before they figure out how to transport you to one of their ships - maybe even to a base.”
The kids shivered when he mentioned the Yetten. Neither of them understood much of what he was saying, but the part about being captured by the Yetten was very clear and even though they didn´t know much about the Yetten, it was clear to them that being caught by Yetten soldiers was not a situation anyone would want to be in.
Thor noticed their reaction and smiled. “Oh, don´t worry,” he said, “I can prevent them from locking on to you as long as you are aboard this ship.” Roeskva sighed with relief, but Tjalfe realized immediately the consequences of what Thor was trying to explain to them. If they were only safe right here on Alfheim, they would never be able to leave the ship and that meant never seeing their parents again, unless the Aseir scientists were able to come up with another more permanent solution. He didn´t say anything, though. He didn´t want to worry Roeskva before it was absolutely necessary.
Thor examined the children in more ways they had ever thought possible and then finally let them go ensuring them that he would find a solution and protect them from the Yetten.
“Just keep in mind,” he reminded them, “that whenever you hear an alarm going or if you see a bright light or something looking like a storm inside the ship, you have to get to the center of the ship as quickly as you can. This is where the ships shielding is most powerful and this is where the chances of preventing the Yetten from locking on to you are best. Okay? Promise me!”
His face was stony as he looked at them standing in the door and they both nodded in agreement. Not only because of Thor´s determination, though. If there was one thing they had grasped from all of this, it was that the danger of the Yetten was definitely something to reckon with. Alfheim´s shield wouldn´t be able to completely prevent any Yetten lock on them, but it would make it quite difficult to make a secure lock and that could give them some extra time to find a better solution to the problem.