Gudsriki (48 page)

Nel was helpless inside her skull. She wished she were a Valkyrie. A Valkyrie would find a way out.

Vibeke caught her breath and looked at the broken machine with horrid contempt. Hatred like she'd never felt before even for Mishka. She swung again upward, cutting into its arm, and again and again, wrecking the thing with all her might. She cursed herself for falling for it, remembered Niide's words, remembered Niide's wife. She was stupid, so stupid to forge the thing, to give it that heart. A rapist's heart. An idiot's heart.

“You fucking cunt!” she screamed. She was screaming at Violet.

She swung the pipe back over her head and brought it down on Nel's stomach, piercing the skin and jarring the mechanics up to her ribs. Every hit reverberated through Vibeke's arms, through her chest. Through her mind. Every hit wrecked her a little more inside. Drove her further toward Thanatos, further toward total insanity.

They'd walked through hell together. They'd been to the depths of the ocean and the ends of the Earth. And now it wanted Mishka. Wanted to hurt her. Vibeke swung the pipe into her leg, that thick curve of thigh she'd sucked on voraciously in the sealskin bed. The skin smashed and split against the hard metal beneath it.

The pipe was their only bond now. The only thing that connected them, that would ever connect them again. She swung it into her cheek and cut through the skin into her mouth, ripping a ghastly grin into the side of her face. Its face. It.

Nel lamented her failure. Her wishes. She had thought once she wanted to hurt Vibeke. She knew now how wrong she was. Even from the start she never could have stood to see Vibeke like this. Like she now was. She wished she could close her eyes. She couldn't take seeing Vibeke so betrayed. But she was forced to see, to feel every hit.

Vibeke stopped only to gain strength to strike again. She wished she had more to destroy. Wished the gynoid owned anything she could break. Knew anyone she could torture. Wished it had a Tikari it could lose. That Vibeke could destroy. But it was a Tikari, she remembered. She ran with her pipe in front of her toward the center of its chest and struck down into the skin and the armor, forcing the pipe under its skin, ripping its skin all the way up to its ear. She stumbled back, lifted the pipe, and struck her again so hard a hip panel broke off and fell into the bloody snow.

The robot was crying, Vibeke saw. Saw through her own tears. Vibeke had cried so many times in its arms. All a lie, all that time had been a lie. She brought it down on her stomach, splitting more panels. Peeling back more skin to see the accursed cold robot that hid within Violet's warm flesh. She screamed again, “Die, you fucking bitch, you fucking—fucking filth!” and beat it on the side of its head, sending blood across its fake silver eye.

She remembered sex. With the robot. With Violet. She hated them both so much, it shook her body. She struggled to lift the pipe for more. She smashed its left clavicle. Then its right.

Nel registered the pain, the damage, the systems knocked offline, but she paid no attention to the precise digital reports. She thought only of Vibeke. She wished Vibs had never made her, never fallen for her, never allowed herself to be hurt so badly. She wished she could self-destruct and give Vibeke the ending she now craved above all else. But she lay there motionless, pushed only by the beating that went on and on.

Vibeke was tired. Nel was a bloody pulp. She wanted to end it. She ran with the pipe held before her, screamed without the ability to manifest a word. She hit it between its hip and belly button and the pipe went in, deep into the mechanics past the spine and out the back into the red snow beneath.

She felt like her ears popped. But it was something deeper. Every strike had driven her closer to insanity and the last barriers had broken. Her mind no longer worked. It didn't think. It was hate, anger, rage, but no inner monologue persisted, no thoughts fought for her attention. The id had devoured the ego, the superego. She had beaten herself into an animal.

Vibeke fell on the robot. On its skin. The stuff that made it look human.

She tore at the holes she'd made. Ripped all she could off of it. Then she could see the pulsing of its organic vessels. The ticking of its gears. It lived. She pushed herself up and pulled the pipe from its body. She lifted it high over her head. She remembered kissing Violet for the first time, naked in med bay, high on victory, lost in her lips and her arms and her legs and her breasts. All just a contemptible lie of Veikko's. She was finally free of it. Free of love for Violet, for Nel. She swung at its head. She hit its neck with enough force to snap off its second link, to shatter its neck panels apart, to crack its spinal column.

The gears stopped. The broken blood vessels stopped bleeding. A death rattle sprayed from its mouth. It was ended.

Nel went unconscious. Knocked out by the blow. Unable to see or hear any more.

Vibeke looked at the pipe embedded in its neck. Satisfied, in a shallow sort of way. She had her revenge. The bitch was dead. Its neck snapped like its thin Tikari link.

Tikari link.

Nel didn't have one.

Vibeke caught her breath. Thought tried to beat its way back into her world. Why did it have a new link? She fell to her knees, the rage that had supported her spent.

Mishka saw her stumble and revved her tank. Now was the time to let her know. She trotted down toward her and set her tank's loudspeakers.

“Kjøttie pie. What have you done to your girlfriend?”

Vibeke turned to face Mishka. Her breathing was ragged and uncontrolled.

“She was so loyal to you too. I couldn't convince her to betray you by a long shot.”

Vibeke didn't understand.

“I had to control her, muscle for muscle, with her mind cut off completely.”

The link. It was all Mishka. Nel hadn't betrayed her.

“She must have loved you to the very end. Ooh, and the way you ended her.”

She had killed Nel as she stayed trapped inside her own mind. Vibeke couldn't breathe. She wanted to rewind, to undo it.

“You wouldn't believe the things that gizmo said about you: ‘I love her,' ‘won't hurt her,' ‘She's everything to me.' What a pathetic animal you grew.”

She didn't want to believe it. Part of her wanted Nel to be as cruel as she'd thought, to justify what she'd done, but she couldn't make it so. She tore in half trying to sort it out. She was hit by a sob, and another. She couldn't control her breathing. Or her tears. She could only think of Nel, loving her, being beaten to death by the girl who made her.

“I never imagined a machine could feel such heat for a woman. Such need for her. I believe in God, Vibeke. I believe in his holy love. But never have I felt a passion to compare to the loyalty that miserable mess of a robot had for you.”

Vibeke screamed from the base of her guts, a wordless cry of overwhelming regret.

“I just wanted to let you know that before you died.”

Alf's tank was too far to make. Mishka had her pinned down, a tank to a girl. A girl too broken to stand, and hacked into harmlessness. Vibeke tried not to look at the broken robot but her head turned against her will. She'd wrecked it, beaten it to a pulp, her lover, her soul. She feebly pulled its remains toward her and cradled the gory mess. Mishka laughed and armed her guns. Vibeke heard the clicks but didn't move. She needed to die, then. She'd destroyed everything—the planet, Nel—it was long past time for her to die. She was desperate to cease to be. She closed her eyes, held her lover tight, and in her thoughts begged Mishka to end it all for good.

A colossal gray submarine crashed up from the shore at breakneck speed and slammed into Mishka's tank, crushing it into an ice wall.

Vibeke came to from her morbid trance. She heard the hissing of its ballast tanks, the rumble of its engines. She opened her eyes. She stared at the submarine. It was gray and white and shaped somewhat like a shark. It was armed to the teeth. Its canopy opened and a Cetacean with a harpoon gun stood up.

“Vibeke?”

It wasn't too late to die. She wanted to die. She prayed it would kill her.

“Yes!”

“You are under arrest by order of Admiral Turunen!”

She breathed heavily. Stared at the gray female with contempt for seeing her so low.

“So hurry the fuck up and arrest me!”

Several Cetaceans in thermal armor emerged from the shore and surrounded her. Others put tractoring fields on Alf's tank and hauled it onto the boat's tower. The Cetaceans lifted Vibeke up and Nel's remains fell limply from her arms into the snow. As she was dragged on board she stared at the ice wall. Mishka's tank had been crushed deep into it. She couldn't fathom if she were dead or alive. She was in a daze.

Mishka was crushed. Her tank around her. Had she just witnessed her death? It was as if Mishka had served her hateful purpose and ceased to be. They carried Vibeke to the warm, warm brig. Where she couldn't see what she'd done to Nel. It was architecturally identical to the brig in Itämeri, but it seemed like a cushion in the pouch of some angelic kangaroo.

 

 

N
ELSON
MANAGED
to cut its way out of the dead A-2 body's chest, careful not to touch Violet's heart with its wings.

The beating had severed the Tikari's tie into its brain. Nelson was back to a bug. A bug with a curious sense of purpose. More than any ronin Tikari had held before. It surveyed the body. Beaten and broken and dead without the Tikari, but not irreparably.

Nelson began by heating its wings and cutting away Mishka's welded wiring. Then it cut off the damaged portions of the body, panels stuck halfway open, hydraulics bent or empty, all the critical damage done by Vibeke. Vibs was strong, but Niide's creation wasn't so easily destroyed.

Nelson began work on the parts. The neck. There was insufficient material to rebuild the organics, but fixing the simple mechanics Vibeke had broken was programmed in since Nelson's manufacture. It took only hours. The Tikari cut off Mishka's link for good and sealed up the metal cranium, confident the brain inside was undamaged by Vibeke's assault.

The bug crawled back into the chest slot and pushed its head into the repaired line to the brain, then put out an electrical pulse to jumpstart the corpse.

Nel stood up and immediately fell back down to the snow.

“Can't even stand? Pathetic.”

She was in horrific pain, physically but also for Vibeke, knowing Mishka had tricked her. Her plan had gone down exactly. A nightmare. An unforgivable nightmare.

“Nightmares are just the dreams we're afraid to admit we wanted to have.”

Vibeke had felt her betrayal. Had destroyed her and moved on. She was functional again but could never go to Vibeke knowing what Mishka had done. Knowing Vibeke thought she'd only lived as an extension of Mishka's cruelty. She loved Vibeke more than she thought her brain could handle, and Vibeke had ended up hating her enough to kill her. To do more than kill her if she could have, she must have.

“It's all over. Now come to me.”

Nel stood up. She wanted to find Vibeke and tell her everything, but there was no way Vibs would believe her. Seeing her again would only cause her pain. Nel knew she had to disappear.

“You know you can never go back. Never let her see you again. But there's a place for us, for us outcasts, we unwanted. Come to the ravine and be a Valkyrie with me.”

She walked for the ocean, tears freezing on her cheeks, cracking and forming again. Her skin was freezing, and she was happy for that. She was feeling the pain she deserved. She would feel more soon. She walked into the sea, where Vibs would never find her. Would never be hurt by her again.

“What a waste, Nel. What a terrible waste it would be to lose you to that void. After all I've done for us, don't you see? Mishka and Vibs, they'll kill each other and we'll be alone together!”

The ocean water was like pure liquid pain, freezing all the skin she had left.

“The hacks, the plots, it was all for us, Nel, for you to be mine. Stop! Stop, damn you. You'd rather die than stay with me? Fuck you, you cunt, you useless gynoid!”

Donatien's blood finally leeched out from her hair, which floated blonde again from her head as she descended.

“We could have had everything!”

She only made it a few meters down before she saw the Blackwing.

 

 

T
HE
ADMIRAL
came for Vibeke.

“You're a versatile ape, I'll give you that.”

Vibeke stared at him.

“You tricked us, lured us into Loki's trap.”

“What trap?”

“You claim not to know?”

Vibeke felt tired. “I don't know shit, Admiral.”

Risto considered her. “Loki has called in Ulver forces with unknown directives. We believe he sent you only to trap us.”

“That sounds like him.” She looked down. It seemed a petty failure compared to—

“What of the other woman? Your companion?”

“I beat her to death.”

Risto stared.

“You should execute me.”

“Cetaceans do not execute. Our only death penalty is for our politicians, and it's purely symbolic. Never been used. Never will. We don't kill, Vibeke. We're not like you.”

“You say Ulver's here? To destroy your ships?”

“It appears so.”

“Then you better get used to killing.”

“We will do what must be done. But I am here to offer you your freedom, if you fight for us. You can do things we cannot. Your tank is… superior. Your skills… we know the Hall of the Slain. We will free you if you fight for us.”

Vibeke considered, swayed slightly back and forth on her hard seat.