Gudsriki (16 page)

“Hi, Mishka.”

“Hi, Vibs.”

Mishka reached through the bars of the cage and pulled her by the hair around her wound, where it hurt most. She jerked her head to her own and kissed her on the lips. Vibs tried to fight back, but it was hopeless, she was drugged and weak, and Mishka could kiss her as long as she wanted. Mishka could do anything to her, she thought. The thought made her sick, and she threw up with great satisfaction while their lips were still locked. Mishka stumbled back onto the rocks and laughed.

“You gross little whelp. Ha! I'll be back for you after a nice loud shower. Enjoy the stink.”

Vibeke fell back and cleaned herself as best she could. She didn't have to clean her suit, it was gone. She had only rags to cover herself with. Her cage was next to water, a puddle but water was water. She drank the brackish stuff from her hands. She was starving. The only thing resembling food was the walrus corpse in the next cage. She calculated the nutritional value compared to the risk of eating long-dead flesh and took it. The blubber wasn't half-bad; she wished she could have stocked some in her gullet before vomiting in Mishka's mouth. The thought made her grin. Then she waited and digested the stuff. And waited.

She heard noises from time to time. She didn't think Mishka would be wandering behind her after introducing herself and decided it was a walrus. But she knew it wasn't. Someone was watching her. Looking at her caged. Someone else was there. Veikko, half-assembled. She turned to look at the mass but saw nothing.

She heard a grunt. A guttural rasp. Like a human trying to speak without a mouth. Mishka interrupted it.

“Not yet!”

Vibs heard him back away. He must have been huge, heavy. She was about to call out to him, but she heard footsteps. The bitch was back.

“Okay, whelp, where were we?”

“Kiss me again, I've reloaded.”

“Ha, you like the local cuisine?” Mishka reclined as if to pose on the rocks opposite the cage. “I've had so much blubber in the last weeks, I might be losing my figure. What do you think?”

She pushed her breasts together with her upper arms, tried to show off a body that was clearly exercised and not malnourished. Vibs said nothing.

“You're wondering what I'm going to do with you. So am I.”

“Fight me.”

“There's no pleasure in a fight I know I'd win. But there might be pleasure in something else….”

“Please, try it.”

“Hmhmm. Perhaps I will. But not now.”

Another grunt sounded from behind her.

“You wait your turn. Did you see your teammate? What's left of him? Do you know what your pal did?”

Vibs said nothing; she was all ears.

“He hacked you. You wouldn't nuke your old home, so he hacked you and Violet to break into that silo. After he sent you both to die, he tried to master the Geki's fire. Burned down an entire arcology before Varg arrived. Then Varg killed him, cut his face off and left him for dead.”

Veikko clawed his way over, hauling the top of his giant body like a sack of coal. Strands of flesh and metal trailed back to his lower limbs in the pit. He looked at Vibeke. She looked in terror at him. His hair flowed like a mane of fire from what should have been his face. It was cleanly cut off like a medical cross section just behind his teeth. It was horrible, made worse by the metal stuck into it to keep him alive. Parts of a flesh body remained in the hulking metal gorilla mass of wrongly assembled mechanics.

“Veikko had spy nodes all over this ravine, did you know that? He was spying on you, his own team, everyone else. I took a look at them and watched Varg die. He killed Pelamus, saved the planet, but got himself poisoned. He's buried somewhere under that heap of scrap metal that used to be the com tower.”

Vibeke fell back. Half her team was dead, and Veikko was a monster. In more ways than one. Though Varg….

“But Veikko, he killed Balder, you know. Tricked Weather into killing him, then refused to stop hunting me.”

That was Veikko too. Not Thokk. He'd killed them both.

“You killed Balder. Not Veikko.”

“I may have pulled the trigger, but—”

“You killed him.”

“Tell yourself anything you please, Kjøtt. This monster is why the world went to war. Why Varg is dead. And I presume Violet too? Where is the blonde bint?”

For some reason, Vibeke got a strong impression that Mishka already knew the answer.

“Dead.”

Veikko let out a somber moan that might have had its origins in a word. Vibeke couldn't tell.

“I can't say I'm not happy about that. I'm glad I have you back to myself.”

She seemed disingenuous. Vibeke could see it; she wasn't happy about it at all.

“You've got me like Earth's got a chance.”

Mishka snickered. Her eye popped out.

“Have a chat with your former teammate while I find some tougher chains. The ones in these cages just don't have enough tetanus for you.”

Mishka walked away. Her eye floated in place. She looked over to Veikko.

“You hacked us?”

She tried to sort it out in her mind. It was obvious. She couldn't imagine how she hadn't seen it. Even still she knew it was the right thing to do to break into the silo, to try to nuke the ravine. But at last she knew what she knew was falsified.

“Forgive me,” Veikko rasped, his words barely understandable.

“Of course I do,” she lied. He wasn't the only one who could falsify information. “You're all I've got left of the team. Except Violet's Tikari. It's probably outside the dome right now, ronin and alone.”

“Violet is really dead, then?”

“Yeah. You were right, though. I got to fuck her first.”

“That's good.”

“Yeah. You know your body could rip these bars open.”

“Mishka's watching.”

“Why haven't you killed her?”

“I can barely move. Niide sewed me back together wrong, Vibs. Backwards.”

“No, just unfinished. He said you can fix yourself. You just need to use what you've got to assemble yourself. You'll be shaped like a man again when you're done.”

“I can't. I've tried.”

“Keep trying. Or rip these bars open, anything you can do, damn it!”

Veikko stirred; it was impossible to tell what he was thinking with no face to carry an expression, or body to show anything resembling body language. He lurched forward and two robotic appendages grabbed the bars. Vibeke noticed an integrated weapons system inside one of them.

He pulled on the bars, and they gave way like tissue paper. The A-1 was, as Niide had said, incredibly powerful.

“Thanks!” she said as she climbed out over him and ran. The eye followed her. She heard Mishka running for her from across the ravine.

Vibs ducked into a nearby storage tower and looked for anything she could use to swat the eye out of the air. She tore open the first box. There was nothing inside it, but the slat she broke off would do fine. She went dead silent and listened.

The faintest wisp of sound marked the eye coming through the door. Vibeke swung her slat smack into it, batting it halfway across the ravine.

She had to get out, hide somewhere before the eye returned. It would already be rocketing back to the door. Vibs ran. Out of the tower and down into one of the subbasement tunnels under the rock. Mishka would be expecting her to run out of the ravine, not deeper in.

She followed the tunnel toward the med bay. She needed to counteract the drugs Mishka had given her to keep her woozy. In the freezing darkness she found her way to the hatch and cautiously, silently emerged.

The med bay was dark and abandoned. Most of the fixtures had been hastily torn out by Niide and the nurses. But some kits remained. Vibs moved toward the nearest but saw motion. She froze.

The motion was large. Had Veikko come after her? No, it was something smooth and gray. It turned to face her.

Orson. The colossal bull that ruled the Storøya pod. Six tons of blubber that could only have survived through cannibalism once locked in the ravine. Vibeke moved slowly.

He barked. Vibeke shushed him. He swayed back and forth for a moment and then charged her. Drugged and slow, she couldn't get out of the way in time and got bucked across the room into a wall. Orson continued to bark loudly as if to call Mishka intentionally. She played dead, fell limp. Tried to ignore the tusks prodding her neck and back painfully. Then the biting began. She realized if she remained limp, Orson would devour her alive.

She gave him a weak kick in the nose and he backed off a meter. She used the chance to lurch back into a hall too thin for him to follow. He tried nonetheless, forcing his way into the slim corridor. Vibeke knew the ground, though. She entered a storage room door and came out the other side while Orson was still stuck in the hall. She approached the spare first aid kits.

She opened the first and found a steroid epinephrine kick. She took it and instantly found herself working at full capacity. She could move again. She could think.

And thinking at high speed, she noticed the lipid polarity drives. The brain backups. She was crouching only a meter away from Violet's memories. Too bad she had no use for them. She told herself it was over. She didn't need the drives; she had no use for them because she would not bring them to Dr. Niide. Who wouldn't be able to do anything with them regardless. There was absolutely no reason to take the drives. None at all.

Having taken the drives and an extended med kit she headed for the arsenals. Inside she took two microwaves and tested their power sources. Both good. She looked around. She couldn't carry much so she looked for the most bang for her buck. Limited to whatever was in the arsenal, she took a Talley Buffalo Cannon, a looped projectile machine gun, a cutter rifle, foot fields, a set of field knuckles, and an assortment of explosives and then headed out to the tailor shop. She snuck behind any object she could, certain Mishka would keep her eye in the open looking to detect motion. But obstacles became fewer and fewer as she climbed up the spiral walkway. Soon she was out in the open. She heard Orson whistling from the ravine wall.

She was across from the tailor with a bare stretch of walkway to traverse. If only the Ares weren't assembled she could just walk there directly. But why couldn't she? The water was only a decimeter thick, and it was undulating. It would disguise her motion. She stepped out into the gory red pool collected around the branches. She walked quickly, letting the rippling Ares ebb around her legs. It was slippery as hell and she was overloaded with weaponry.

She slipped and dropped a concussion charge. It fell all the way to the floor of the ravine. It wasn't armed and didn't burst, but the noise was substantial. Luckily it was nowhere near her. A distraction. She moved on. She made the other side in only a minute and headed into the tailor's.

A massive loud static shock hit her the instant she touched the door. She'd forgotten to defuzz her feet. She heard Mishka running below.

She scrambled to collect all she'd need to make a new suit and more. She took every specialty system she could hold along with a repulse cape to carry all the weapons and suits. She rolled it all up and hit the repulsers. The massive load on her back suddenly felt like light foam. She ran from the shop and up to the walrus trap.

She opened the door, and Orson bucked her full speed from the side, almost sending her over the walkway ledge. She pulled herself back toward the door. He began barking again.

“Shut the fuck up!” she shouted despite herself. Orson charged and smashed her into the doorjamb. She saw the room again filled with dead, half eaten walrus pups. Orson had survived by eating his own offspring. She reached into the repulse cape for anything that would ward him off. She found the field knuckles. She slipped them on and swung. He jumped back, and she missed. Then he bucked her into the jamb, wrenching her arm back and bruising her scapula. She slipped into the room as he rebounded, and she hit the manual door closure.

Orson crammed his fat head into the door and barked, showering her face with rancid spittle. She barked back, “Fuck you, Orson!” and tried to kick him. But again he slipped out and away, while she slipped on walrus corpse grease and fell on the weapons pile. The door closed. She got up and ran outward.

She was topside, but still in rags. She'd have to run through the snow with most of her skin bare. No way around it. She ran.

She saw the eye following her, a black dot against so much white snow. Mishka would be up and out soon, but Vibeke was nearly to the boat. The eye stuck with her as she hopped in and started it. She didn't enter a destination beyond southward; the eye was there watching. The boat took off at top speed. The eye remained.

Vibeke dropped her supplies and stared at the black orb. She mustered the most contemptuous face she could manage. She grabbed for it to no avail. She swung the med kit at it, but it dodged her. She spit at it, but it moved out of the way. Then, suddenly, Nelson grabbed it out of the sky and took it down to the deck. Violet's ronin Tikari ripped at it with its legs, tore at it. The eye struggled to break free. It got loose but not without damage, and flew back to Kvitøya.

The Tikari jumped onto Vibeke's shoulder and watched as she set course for Orkney. Then she assembled what she could of a suit. It had the complete under-components. It would keep her warm, but she fumbled with the rest. She wasn't certain she'd taken a complete suit. She might have taken two of some parts and none of others. She had everything she could carry but hadn't had time to see exactly what she brought. She sat down to take inventory of her new suit and supplies and discovered she'd taken a complete suit and then some, enough to make two and a half.

The boat careened south. She had a day of sailing to Orkney. Her hatred of Mishka occupied a few hours, but soon she found herself faced with the enigma of Veikko. He had set her loose from the cage and seemed a pitiable beast in his new form, but the fact remained he was to blame for everything. From the hack to the war to Violet's death. She could understand why he did it all and even forgive him on a purely strategic level. He was doing what he thought he had to do to save the world from deluge. But he had killed everyone, condemned Valhalla and civilization. He was the worst of monsters imaginable.