Gudsriki (15 page)

She'd clingered the heart and killed Sal. She stole a pogo from Dimmuborgir and flew it back to Arcolochalsh as the first nukes fell. The city was still there. It was small and wouldn't be targeted for some time. She couldn't link to Veikko; the links must have been down here too. But they weren't, not completely. The net was gone, but she should have found Veikko's tracking node. She landed near the arcology. She saw the collapsed walls and broken cantilevers. She saw fires. She saw people running through the streets.

There was microwave fire in the air. She had presumed Veikko dead with more ease than she had Violet, and left the embattled area. She took cover in an alley. There were corpses. Widget was one of them. Her whole team was dead in the alley. An ICBM contrail cut through the sky overhead, on its way to kill millions—probably in Inverness.

Madness reigned in the street on the other side of the alley. People were running, some to get out of the city, some to find their families. Everyone was calling names; without links all the voices were deafening. From the madness came a Fraser. One of Violet's old neighbors. She was dragging her husband behind her. He was broken in half.

“Monsters! The arcology fell, and they came in to steal from us! Hundreds of them, people I know, they came anyway but not to help! They stole, they only came to steal!”

“Mrs. Fraser?”

“Who are you? Violet's friend! Yes, you are, aren't you! Violet's friend! Where is she?”

“Where's Veikko? Where did her other friend go?”

“Fire! He was in the middle of the fire. Where's Vi—”

“Mrs. Fraser, is there anywhere safe here? Anywhere with a hospital, a basement?”

“No, no, child, we have to get out of the city. Lairg, we have a cabin in Lairg.”

“I have a pogo, let's—”

“Where's Violet?” she demanded. Vibeke couldn't say it. She hoped she wouldn't notice the gore on her arm clingers. Mrs. Fraser didn't, but she understood. Vibeke took them to her pogo and helped Mrs. Fraser on board with her husband's remains. She hit the altitude control and sent them straight up into the sky. She ran to the back of the cabin to check on his body. It would be fine. He was only dead from a broken back. She took a neural stabilizer from her medical pouch and placed it on his head.

“She—he'll be fine. Where's Lairg?”

“Let me fly.”

Vibeke stepped aside, and Mrs. Fraser took the controls. She was panicked but managed to enter the coordinates. The pogo headed east. Mrs. Fraser returned to her husband's side. Vibeke could do nothing for the pieces of heart on her sleeve, affixed like an extra ration pack to her suit. She looked out the window. Kyle and its fallen arcologies were behind them now. The suburbs held jammed ground vehicles and a growing exodus of families. People trying to get away from the city. Suburbs gave way to fields and fields to mountains. A mushroom cloud grew from a flash to the south, not a city, presumably a military target. Violet would have recognized it as the end of Achnacarry.

She hadn't launched the missiles. She'd disarmed them. How could she have caused the war? As if by instinct, she knew it had been her acts. One little firing solution and all this was the result. How weak was peace, how eager the world to slaughter itself. But Vibeke couldn't tell herself that. She was completely aware and unable to deny that it was all completely her fault.

Snow was falling in Lairg. It was sticking to the Scottish ground for the first time in a hundred years, the first millimeters of meters to come. Men were freezing in their tropical kilts. She gave Mrs. Fraser and her husband's body full doses of radiophobics. They stepped outside onto the frosted grass. The cabin was small, made of wood.

“Do you have a first aid kit?”

“We used to, it would be here….”

She looked under a wooden bench and found the kit. Vibeke opened it and found the electrical components still working. She dug into Mr. Fraser's back and found the spinal fractures. Easy work with her training. She applied an artificial nerve stud and closed him back up, then jump started his brain and saw him come back without complications. She took the stasis field from his head and put it on Violet's heart. She took a reading:

Cellular necrosis 78%
.

What little she had of Violet was already 78 percent dead, frozen and then thawed by microwave heat. The stasis field would at least keep that bit viable for—there was nothing it was viable for. An EMP washed over them from the south. The stasis field died. Vibeke did the last thing she could; she stepped outside, gathered some snow, and packed the pieces of heart within. Mrs. Fraser took a moment from her husband to show Vibeke to an ice box.

“It might help,” she said.

The Frasers started a real fire. Vibeke thought it was funny that civilians knew how to do such things. She had only learned them once she got to Valhalla. Then her line of thought gave out and left her to face her dead home, her dead team, and the dying world. She hoped Varg would be able to find her when he got back, though she didn't know what good they could do when he returned. In the end she hoped he would stay on Mars and be happy on that distant rock.

The sun set, or was covered by such thick clouds it seemed to set. It was far too soon for a nuclear winter. The firestorms had only just begun. It was a real winter spell that was hitting Scotland, as if the Earth knew it was time to shut down. The cold helped her go numb. The Frasers huddled together and seemed a small ember of good amid all evils that were happening that day and yet to come. She watched them hold each other and fall asleep.

She tried to think about what she had left and found it a pointless endeavor. She had nothing left at all.

Without Violet what was there to survive for? Misery? Would she rebuild the ravine with them? Would she fall in love again? That seemed even less likely than Violet's return as an animate corpse.

Animate corpses were now taking over the globe. The wave bombs, the “zombie” bombs. Masses of mutating individuals or masses of flesh stuck to flesh, becoming horrors of molten human. Combined with the radiation and the winter, the end of civilization and more. It was not by any means a world worth living in.

Not then, not now.

She could jump off the side of the boat. With her inertial fields off, it would kill her instantly. Fairly painlessly, though pain was far from an issue. She knew she'd never resort to it. She'd persist to the end. Valkyries needed almost nothing to survive, least of all a purpose.

She wanted her purpose to be Violet. She thought of the warmth. The sex. The long talks en route to Mars. Her eyes. Hair. Hips. More out of boredom than anything else, she let herself remember and let her hand wander. But the pleasure was bittersweet, tainted by death. Death, omnipresent now. Corpses lay everywhere. On the mainland, on the island, in the water. There seemed little likelihood of any animal left by now; even the plants would be unsalvageable soon. The surface was dying.

She wondered what lived below. She was passing over colonies, colonies of unknown size. How many Cetaceans lived under the surface, perhaps completely unaware of the happenings topside? She was heading toward the Ares. She could set it off and end the surface for good, turn it over to the Cetaceans and hope they did better with the planet than their progenitors. Vibeke slept.

She awoke as the boat slowed. Svalbarð was visible on the horizon. It looked untouched. She narrowed the destination to Kvitøya and kept a lookout. There were dead walruses clogging the way, and the boat slowed to keep safe. The stink of rotting meat at sea was overpowering. The vista of ribs and spilled organs and withering skin was nauseating.

The boat approached shore. More dead walruses. One exploded from putrefaction gasses as the waves nudged it. And she saw a vast, magnificent dome of rock coated by snow. At least a meter of it, blemished on the surface only by warm wet rot of necrophagist bacteria that spilled out onto the stones.

She hunted for depressions in the snow. The first she found was minuscule, only an inverted lump near the edge. She microwaved the snow into water, then steam, and the region cleared up. There was a hole, deep with a spiral ground into it. She walked into the dark tunnel.

She found it blocked by the back of the drill, which had been cut open by microwave. No surprise if Skadi had brought Veikko there. She entered.

At the end of the brief tunnel she could see into the ravine from high over its rim. Lit in red, sinewy red from the Ares in the center. No other light. Dr. Niide had taken Alopex, not copied her. Valhalla was dead. She found the walrus trap and walked in, checking for detectors as she went. Nothing. Only dozens of devoured walrus bodies. Mostly pups. A mess of gore and rot.

She made her way to the bottom of the walkway next to the former mess hall, where Mishka bashed her skull in with a steel pipe.

 

 

H
ATI
OPENED
the doors to her room. It lacked windows altogether, one of the disadvantages of living in an impermeable fortress. In that respect it couldn't have been more different from her home in Ballard Heights. That home was nothing but windows. An advantage of taking care of the penthouse floors was that she got to live in them. She could see more of the open, desolate Texark landscape than her mind could ever register. Now, she could see about two meters in any direction.

Beyond that, though, it was still the ideal of luxury. Every accoutrement of fine living was present, from the frictionless bed to the chandeliers, from the endless Möbius bar of fine liquors to the old-fashioned television wall, which was finally useful now that the link was dead.

She dialed up a desert vista and the place was at least lit like home. But it wasn't home. She couldn't see it ever becoming home. She was there to convince her father to let her return, nothing more or less. But in the meantime, while he was busy with ruling the world, she would explore her new setting and try not to worry about her real home going to hell while she stood powerless on the wrong side of the Earth.

The luxury ended when she left her room. It was all business and brutalism outside. The halls were concrete without decoration, lit overly well by the bright wall-to-wall light panels above. The floors were black rubber and smelled of cleaning chemicals. The halls were thin and labyrinthine; only the map they'd hardwired into her upon her arrival kept her oriented.

She found her way to the lagoon. Chilled for Umberto. Wulfgar had only told her about the beast in passing, in his usual way. All his messages to her read like listings of events. “Have taken ravine,” “Have captured walrus,” a couple months back, “Hrothgar murdered,” and “Safe on Venus,” before that. He couldn't send warning he'd have her scooped up from Ballard to join him in Elba, so he just sent soldiers.

Growing up with her mother, she had heard little good about her father, but that gave him an aura of mystery. She couldn't bring herself to hate him quite as her mother had. The few times she met him, he was a well-dressed, well-spoken proper gentleman, and he treated her like a princess. So it was hard to grasp the things her mother said about him. Murder, torture, crime. If anything, it made those things sound like the acts of a decent man. So that she could forgive.

She could even forgive, to a minor extent, his kidnapping of her. With the world at war or worse, she'd half expected it. If he hadn't been nuked or mutated, she knew he'd want her by his side, where he could protect her. And now the worst had happened: she was separated from Brendon, her arcology was doomed without her, and her dad was now half beast. He hadn't told her about the metal jaw.

Umberto waddled over to her. He was expecting one of Wulfgar's clams, but the lab had been closed to her. She had nothing to offer. Umberto didn't seem to take the hint and waited. She looked around the lagoon. She saw Donatien.

Not her favorite of her father's cohorts. He was exactly her age; they were born the same hour of the same day. He thought that meant something. His other thoughts, she knew, were disturbed in the extreme—beyond sadism and deep into a realm of philosophical perversion. He stared at her as he always did. She was used to that. It was inevitable any time she visited her father in København. She didn't miss it.

The walrus stared at her the same way, though she expected its thoughts were a bit more innocent. She knew Donatien would never harm her, if only out of respect to her father. She wouldn't let herself consider why he kept Donatien around. She knew his tastes must have been something like the perverse man's, but that was none of her business. She would never ask. Never try to learn. Donatien left the lagoon.

She rubbed Umberto's head. He flopped over and swam away. She sat alone in the lagoon for another hour, contemplating the changes the world had just gone through. And Charlie. And her father. And the giant multiton monster he kept, the one that had killed him once before.

 

 

W
ALRUS
. S
HE
smelled walrus. A lot of walrus. She opened her eyes. She saw a walrus. Two walruses, four, five. Some alive, some dead. She was in a walrus cage. Her head hurt. She felt her temple, recognized the pain of recent medical work. She'd been knocked out and repaired.

What was the last thing she remembered? Valhalla, for the first time in ages. Stepping into the open ravine. Red hair. Walrus cage. Who did she know with red hair?

“Kjøtt, meat. Tenderized again.”

Of all the people….

“Did we teach you so poorly? You sail all the way here and don't duck when you come through the door? I spent days in the med bay trying to patch up your skull. It was like so much goop. Like the rest of you, your muscles were spastic jelly, you were so radioactive you glowed in the dark, so starved you soaked up protein gel like a sponge. Why let yourself go so badly? What, were you depressed? Did you lose it all and weep yourself into a binge? You pathetic Norsky kitten. You were never shit without me, and you'd be dead if I didn't nurse you back. You owe your life to me, Kjøtt. I own you now.”