Gudsriki (20 page)

The last thing Darger remembered was keeping his field pointed upward. If it failed, they'd all be killed by the grenades. He had no defense, but he had to keep his men safe. He didn't even try to move his sidearm when he saw the Wolves fire. He took their microwaves in his chest and fell back, heart stopped. Burnt and never to start up again.

He knew he was dying, but he knew the Wolf onslaught was almost over. He held out hope as he lost consciousness that, somehow, he might survive.

 

 

T
HE
COCKPIT
landed on shore. The men present sighed.

“You're not welcome here, lady.”

“You're letting me in or dying, your choice.”

“We have orders to stop you.”

“You're five seconds from dying.”

“Leave, now!”

She shot them both. She noticed only seconds later that her microwave had been set only to stun.

Vibeke marched straight for the mess tent. There were groans as the men saw her. She wasted no time, climbing up onto a table and stepping in someone's porridge.

“Anyone get a new heart lately?”

Silence.

“I said, did anyone get a new heart lately?”

Silence.

“You can tell me who's got it, or I can cut 'em all out until I find the right one.”

“It was me,” called Darger.

Vibeke walked over to him and sprang her Tikari. Most of the men stood but none made a move. They didn't know what to do. She cut a hole in his uniform and looked at the scar. She dragged him along.

As they left the tent, they found themselves surrounded by twenty men, rifles drawn and pointed at Vibeke. Sergeant Therion walked toward her and spoke.

“Let Darger go or we fire.”

“Have you people not learned to give me what I fucking want yet?”

“You have ten seconds.”

“You have five. Let us go or you all die.”

“Fire!”

Twenty microwave beams ripped through the air. Vibeke fired a dispersion field that caught most of the heat; her armor and its shield caught the rest. Darger got sunburned. Another shot on high power was enough to stun most of the men who'd fired. A last got the final two. Only Therion remained awake.

“Goddamn you to hell!”

“I feel bad, I really do. Here's some intel: Unst is half-dead and ripe for attack.”

“What?”

“I killed half of Unst. Maybe all of it. You'd be wise to get off my ass and attack now before their next fleets arrive.”

Therion stood aghast. Vibeke pulled Darger onward to the panzercopter cockpit.

Within minutes they were on the mainland and walking toward Maeshowe.

“Why are you doing this?” asked Darger.

“Love.”

“You have a strange definition of love.”

“You have my girlfriend's heart. I want it back.”

“What about me, are you going to kill an innocent man to—”

“Innocence? There isn't any. From your first meconium you shat all over something worthwhile. You're in the army. How many people have you killed? Are you gonna beg for your life and tell me you have a family? You killed men with families. No one here is innocent.”

“I don't want to die.”

“Neither did she.”

“You're sick.”

“You have no idea.”

They arrived at the mound, and Dr. Niide ran out to scream at her.

“This has gone too far! I'll microwave the lipid drives if you take one more step!”

Vibeke stopped walking, sprang her Tikari, and plunged it into Darger's chest. She cut around in a circle, ripping a hole through which she reached in and pulled out Violet's beating heart.

“Then he'll have died for nothing,” she taunted.

“Goddamn you, Vibeke!”

“Get to work.”

Vibeke was well beyond caring about what she'd done. She'd done worse for Valhalla, surely. She'd caused the war. One more life didn't matter.

But she caught herself crying. She found hot tears on her cheeks. Part of her was still sane and horrified at herself. That she'd done it for a heart that in the end meant absolutely nothing. But that part of her was growing atrophied. Disused. And another part of her liked that fact. Part of her enjoyed the wicked deeds. And she was reasonably certain that it was the same part that wanted Violet back at any cost, in any form.

Dr. Niide walked up to Vibeke and leveled a microwave at her head.

“Tell me why I shouldn't end this rampage right now.”

“You took a brain bond oath to do no harm.”

“For you it would be worth trying.”

“Even if you could, do you really think you can kill me? Think you can kill a Valkyrie? It's not as easy as shooting me in the head.”

“On the contrary. I believe it's exactly that easy.”

Vibeke's Tikari knocked the microwave from his hand in a single stroke, delivering it into her palm.

“I assure you, it's not that easy.”

Niide stood defiant.

Vibs thought for a second then spoke. “I don't care what you said. I don't care what happened with your wife. And you can see plainly that I don't care who I have to kill. What I have to do to get her back. So play along. Or I'll torture you to death, along with your nurses. I'll kill every soldier on that island. There is nothing, nothing at all I won't do. So zap the drives. Burn her heart. I'll find a way, no matter what you do, to bring her back to me. And the more you defy me, the more it's gonna hurt. Understood?”

Niide said nothing.

“Now get to work.”

“You are the worst Valkyrie I've ever met.”

“Yeah I am.” She smiled. She remembered Violet once saying the same words.

 

 

W
ULFGAR
HIT
the table so hard it broke in half.

“When did this happen?” he shouted.

Hegg timidly said, “At 1600, sire, just before the directive was to arrive. The messengers found—”

“Unst is lost! Unst! How could you allow this?”

Arrgh stood up. “Sire, it was Vibeke. She hit the base and took out 80 percent of its defense capacity. Then the UKI swept in and took over.”

“A witch, sire!” said Uggs. “I warned you she was!”

“It had two panzercopters! Two!”

“She stole one and destroyed the other with it.”

Wulfgar sat down before the broken table and rubbed his head. The base wasn't the problem. With the combined forces, he could take Unst back in a heartbeat, the islands in a day.

“Dad, you just gave up al-Magrib and Crete to fail at catching her.”

“I am aware of that, Hati,” he growled.

“Dad, grow the fuck up.”

He ran his fingers through his thinning hair and sighed. She was right. She was right, and he'd known it from the start. He called Hegg in to cancel the entire fiasco.

“You have to stop fucking with the Valkyries. They're Moby Dick, Dad.”

He knew his revenge for his brother, his lust for Violet, all the fruit they would bear were the loss of Mongol Uls, the disaster at Unst. It had to end.

For all he tried to do, for all he recreated and all he deluded himself into, he'd been a fool. It was impossible. And it was beneath Wulfgar.

“And Ahab died! And I would die, Hati. I would gladly die to… to kill her myself. You don't just give that up! Not that kind of hatred. You don't just turn it off!”

“No, you have a brain hack turn it off for you.”

Wulfgar had never considered it. Hati looked him over.

“You know you can delete every trace of her.”

“It won't work.”

“You won't even try.”

“I will not have a hacker rummaging around my head deleting chunks of who I am.”

“Then die. Lose it all. You can die who you are now or live happily as a better man. Up to you.”

“Better,” he mocked.

“Yes, better.”

“I'm not interested in self-improvement.”

“Dad, you took over the world. If that's not self-improvement I don't know what is. Tell me you're the same man who robbed half of Italia. Tell me you're the man who tortured Hans Orser. You're not the head of the Orange Gang. Or the head of the Wolf gang. You're the head of half the planet, and you need to act like it.”

Wulfgar considered. She was right about his duties at least. He couldn't waste an entire military on a personal vendetta. Hati sat down and huffed.

“Ballard has a doctor, Dr. Blacha. You can trust him. I promise you can. Call him in. Have him delete those girls. Maybe get a tune up for the days ahead.”

“Am I so weak I need a doctor to strengthen me?”

“Needing help isn't a weakness. Failing to ask for it when you do is.”

She was absolutely right. He had no time to question it anymore. He'd not waste another minute failing because of Violet MacRae.

“Blacha would take days to arrive. If we do this, we do it now. I won't wait a damn hour. Dr. Way will do the procedure, and he'll do it right now.”

He felt free of her already. To forget her completely would be the ultimate freedom. He knew he should have forgotten her long ago.

Violet was gone forever, and only a demented, desperate fool, someone far worse than Wulfgar, would try to bring her back.

 

 

V
IBEKE
WAS
ready to bring Violet back. All the components were in place. The heart. The regrowing body. The A-2 system. The drives and readers. Nelson. And of course, Dr. Niide and his staff.

Dr. Niide refused a few more times, but Vibeke was clear that she'd kill him if he didn't do the job to her satisfaction. He simply had no choice. She oversaw the procedure, for seven hours watching as Niide and the nurses began growing Violet whole, then chopping up the parts and replacing muscles with hydraulics, viscera with machinery, bones with titanium and irises with silver scanners like Dr. Niide's own.

By the time they were done, nothing was recognizable as Violet's body. The mess looked very much like Veikko's disfigured mass of flesh and electronics.

“Don't worry,” said Dr. Niide, “Skadi won't steal this one before she's assembled properly.”

Niide engaged the superstructure. The mass shifted. Half of the layout flopped over and locked onto the other. Then it happened again on another axis. Suddenly the organs were in an arrangement more or less how they would be in a torso. The circulatory system for the organic components plugged into its capillaries. Then another shift and plating took shape, forming ribs around the heart and lungs and coolant tanks. Then new plating swung in around the muscles arranging them along metal bone parts, which adjusted themselves into metal bones, and became lost in live muscle and hydraulics. Then skin plates moved in over them, and resembled segments of legs. The segments collected, and by the time Vibs realized what was happening there was something like a body.

Violet's Tikari, soon to be her entirety, was sealed into her chest. Its AI hardwired into her brain the same way Sal's hooked into the wave bomb neural net. The unnatural thing that killed her would soon be her.

Parts of her body were out of place, but they were moving into place. Miniature Hall thrust mechanisms concealed themselves in soles. Soles latched themselves into feet. Feet rotated and conformed to the ends of legs, and all over panels of skin latched in with only the slightest metal seams to form a body, not only a body, but she recognized Violet's body. Something she thought was a grid of power cable revealed itself to be hair, and it drew into a scalp; nearby inner ear assemblies merged with sonic circuitry and withdrew into a metal skull, which sealed behind halves of a face, which slid together and clicked into place. And there was a human body, identical to Violet's. It opened its eyes. Eyes with silver irises that shimmered in the dim cavern light.

“Man,” said Dr. Niide, “how ignorant art thou in thy pride of wisdom….”

“Shove it,” said Vibeke.

She examined the body before her. It had thin lines of silver across it, gossamer seams where it was constructed. Dr. Niide prodded some of them, revealing the metal armor inside the soft skin. Slowly the machine sat up and examined its hands, its body, its feet. Then it looked at Vibeke. Looked her straight in the eyes. She didn't know what to expect.

“Vibs,” it said. With anger in its voice.

“Violet?” She heard the anger, the stress. Had something gone wrong?

“Nelson,” it growled.

Nelson's new body reached for her, its arm coming apart at the seams to pin Vibeke to the wall with incomparable strength. She struggled.

“Nelson,” it said, “the little robber fly that watched you disarm a missile when you could have saved Violet's life.”

Vibeke panicked. “I'm so sorry, I—”

“Not half as sorry as you're gonna be when I'm done with you.”

It got up off the table and walked toward Vibeke, its arm retracting in as it moved closer, tightening its hand around Vibeke's neck.

Dr. Niide spoke casually. “Well, my work here is done. You two have a nice day.”

He walked out of the passage, hauling bags of equipment behind him.

“Why did you put me in this body?” The stress, the rage in Nelson's voice hurt to hear.

Vibeke choked, “I wanted Violet back—”

“Then you probably shouldn't have killed her, huh?”

The guilt of it stung. “I'm sorry, I chose—”

“You chose to let her die.” The Tikari weapon, given human form, stood centimeters away from her, pinning her. It leaned in closer.

“Please let me go!” Vibeke begged.

“Why?”

“Violet loved me. She'd want you to—”

“I can remember what Violet wanted me to do, from inside her own brain. Thanks for the memories, by the way. They really clarify matters.”