Gudsriki (51 page)

He forced himself to focus on the job at hand. He knelt down by Mishka and searched her remains. They were shredded thoroughly, beyond thoroughly. Her former beauty was wasted, turned to slime and bone and burnt skin. But lying by her side was the implant. It had taken some hits, but it was built tough as solid steel. It would function again in his arm.

All that was left was to get to the moon where it could be implanted, where they could serve a purpose again. They jumped for the final time.

On the moon, things were calmer. The Geki had landed just north of Tranquility base. Within an hour they found Dr. Yasumoto. Terrified, he programmed his robots quickly and implanted Varg with the flame with exceptional speed.

Varg would have to learn it slowly and carefully now that they were inside an oxygen rich, atmosphere controlled colony. They made their way to the unused Geki base. They entered to find it fresh and ready for use, with its own med pod, its own library, and even a compendium of Irish folk music, requested by the elder's predecessor when UNEGA and GAUNE built the facility, preparing for the distant future.

They sat down and played a game of cards.

“We have our work cut out for us. The Lunar intel net suggests two major Christian movements have broken out. One is already militant and has executed the senate of Cleomedes. Another is rallying for a holy war against refugees from Earth. An infant was killed yesterday, beaten to death in an exorcism.”

“Sounds like a job for the Geki.”

“Well, Varg, you want to go burn some churches?”

“Soon. I just saw Vibeke dead. Violet's dead. Veikko is—well, it's been a hard year.”

“I know better than you think. Violet's death is the hardest thing I'll ever face.”

“Why? Why do
you
care about Violet? And why did you care that Violet named her Tikari ‘Nelson'?”

“Because she named her Tikari after me.”

Varg looked to him. The elder paused before speaking, looking into the ink black space outside the portal.

“I was her father.”

 

 

T
HE
BATTLES
were intense. Kvitøya was getting erased. Nel felt a perverse sense of relief. The horrific first era in her life was at an end, and she was heading into the unknown. Luna. Violet had known almost nothing about it. Nel knew as much. But on Luna there was hope. On Earth there was nothing.

She scanned the surface one last time before she'd leave the atmosphere. Through the firefight in the sky, she only had one ongoing signal she knew how to look for, the control link from Mishka to the now defunct wetware she'd hastily installed. Low power and short range, the Blackwing could barely spot it through the traffic above. But it gave her a location, so she looked, and narrowed in on the Blackwing's scanners.

She saw the shredded remains of Mishka, the link dwindling as her brain activity ceased. And less than a meter away she saw Vibeke.

Torn apart, broken in a hundred places, her chest empty of her heart. Nel didn't register any conscious feeling. She didn't know why. Maybe it was because it was all over, because she'd already parted with her knowing Vibs would never want to see her alive again. Because she'd done all she could to erase the last remnants of feeling for her as she walked into the ocean. Or because Mishka was right—she was deluded, and her love for Vibeke had been no more real than a few confused memories, residue of Violet's mind. Whatever it had been, Nel was now free. Completely free, and headed for safety.

It must have been some sort of malfunction that made her turn the Blackwing around. No proper AI would have done it; with Vibeke dead and a three-military battle raging between them, it was a pointless, tactically impossible decision that no Tikari nor computer nor any rational human being would ever make.

A single lightning bolt leapt from Nel's brain into the Blackwing's guidance systems and the craft fired its attitude control thrusters, turning it 180 degrees. Then the ramjets sucked in the thin air of the high atmosphere and blasted her back down toward the Earth. Toward the battle.

She didn't slow down. She took the Blackwing to maximum conventional speed. The first stray rounds and beams past her, then the first high altitude drones. They were easy to avoid. Harder to avoid were top range pogos and jets and weapons platforms. She sent dozens of bolts into the system to edge past them, missing some by only meters. When she came to the core of the battle she was missing them by centimeters. Hundreds of bolts erupted from her mind, turning and boosting the Blackwing in incalculable spins and directions, burning into the fabric of her brain's locomotor regions.

At several hundred kph she was through the entire battle in only seconds, but in those seconds she made over a thousand drastic course changes. Past burning battle pogos and shrapnel and missiles and vessels, the Blackwing flew downward until Nel saw the ground and fired every retropropulsion engine the thing had.

The Blackwing sliced into the icy rock of Kvitøya up to its cockpit, encasing the canopy's front few explosive bolts. Nel blew them but the canopy remained in place. All around her, belligerents were spotting the strange craft that had so violently emerged into their field of fire. None recognized it as the stolen BIRP. All knew only that it wasn't one of their own. They began to fire.

Most of the strikes did nothing to the diamond armor. Only a few struck the exposed portions of the aft thrusters and ramjets. But that was enough. Within seconds of crash-down the thought bolts were reporting critical damage to the thermobaric thruster. It was soon to ignite.

Nel struck the canopy again and again, but it was forced into rock. It wouldn't move. The thruster had seconds left before it ignited. Even from zero momentum it would propel the craft into the rock beneath it and send its occupant deep into the mantle of the earth. She mustered every last joule of strength her arms held and struck the canopy with enough force to break the gneiss around the canopy's front, breaking it outward and onto the snow. She jumped out and ran.

The thruster ignited and spewed fuel into the air, forming a thick cloud of metallic hydrogen that caught fire and erupted into an incomparable blast. Nel ran with speed beyond any human body, with force behind every step to propel her away from the craft and toward the two cardiectomized bodies.

She spotted Vibeke from half a kilometer away and adjusted her sprint to hit her. The explosion behind her sent the Blackwing into the rock and began uplifting the surface of the island as it flew downward into the crust. The outer rim of the upheaval was only meters behind Nel's feet. She ran with such force she cracked the rock under her heels. She ran with such force it tore into her organic musculature and ruptured her hydraulics. She ran faster than anything resembling a human had ever run on Earth toward Vibeke's body.

Grasping it, she pulled Vibeke with her, leaving most of the body's left lower half behind and tearing up its side all the way to the ribs. The grasp knocked Nel off her feet and sent her sliding toward the rampart dome. She spotted the drill site and dug her fingers into the rock, steering them toward it. The blast behind her incinerated half of the battle, burning the fleets of Ulver and the UKI. Ending the war in fire.

Nel and the body slid before the expanding blast radius straight into the drill hole. Nel curled herself around Vibeke's head and chest as they broke through the back of the drill and over the edge of the ravine.

The blast continued deep into the ground and uplifted the edge of the rampart, shaking the ravine and cracking the dome. Nel and Vibeke fell all the way down to the bottom of the ravine. As they fell, Nel lost hold of her body, and it crashed down two turns up the spiral walkway. Nel crashed through the roof of a storage bay and landed hard in its contents, warping her metal and cutting off the last of the skin on her legs.

The fire outside shot through the drill tunnel and into the ravine as the rock around it collapsed. A single finger of flame ripped across Valhalla and burnt out to smoke that collected high on the rampart ceiling.

For a moment all was silent. The Ares throbbed and glowed red. Vibeke's body settled on the walkway. Nel pushed her way out of the boxes and canisters and rose to her steaming feet.

She limped slowly from the building and looked for Vibeke around the edge, where she thought she must have landed. As she walked out toward the walkway she found Kabar's body. And Katyusha's. There were Valkyrie bodies all around her, and Cetaceans in armor. Some burnt, some blown apart, some ripped in half.

Every Valkyrie, every Cetacean that had entered the pit was dead and mutilated. One body was so horrifically ripped apart that it lay dripping blood across the ground. It twitched. And slowly Nel realized, as it pulled together, crunching and chewing up its own parts, that it was the cause of the massacre. It was Veikko, assembling himself into a hulking gorilla of metal. The battle mode of the A-1 body. He was finally able to assemble himself fully. He'd left his pit to kill the incoming forces. The surviving Valkyries, his brother's men. The metal within him screeched and tore as he dragged his body into shape. And soon he was formed, and staring at her with his half eyes.

She felt him in her head, felt their brains still connected directly. She forced thought from herself. She heard nothing of his. He had gone silent. The only thing she could feel was a concern, a worry.

He would have to retreat to his hole soon to keep the ravine intact. Killing him, were it even possible for Nel's weaker body, would end the world. And with his elder body, without any safeguards limiting its strength, he could destroy hers without question. But beyond him was the walkway. Vibeke's body. She stepped toward him.

Veikko set every system he had for a fight. His hydraulics reset, his motors revved. He sloughed off what was left of his human figure and reshaped every limb for maximum strength. His skin broke apart wherever it remained and weapons systems loaded and armed. He grew to twice his human size and growled. Systems locked in place and set for battle. He became a formidable beast. The worry in his mind turned to rage. Rejection. Revenge.

Nel wasn't limited to human form herself. She supercharged her muscles and organic motors, readied the hydraulics and weapons Niide had granted her. Her body shifted and her remaining skin panels inverted, layering her with armor. She took a fighting stance as the last of her body sorted itself to fight. She came together in as strong a form as she could muster. In old sparring etiquette, she signaled Veikko to begin.

He ran for her and drew back his arm for a strike. She withdrew and reassembled her body out of the way of his fist. He struck again from the other side, crushing her torso with incomparable force. She managed to get a few strikes in, but they did nothing, while his delivered horrific pain and damaged every system they connected with. She ducked beneath him and lifted up, throwing him into the old Ares tanks, smashing their strong sides and knocking them down. The I-beam that once held them fell down, crushing Veikko beneath it.

He came back up holding the beam. He spun it like a fighting staff and brought it down on her position. She unhinged her spine and leaped out of its way. It broke the rock where she stood.

She could feel the tips of thoughts from his mind, the faintest foreshadowings of his next move. She knew he would be still for an instant as he prepared his stance for a powerful kick. She knew he would be vulnerable for an instant.

She extended one of her legs all the way into his chest, knocking him down as she jumped toward him to deliver a smashing blow from her right fist, her arm disassembling and reforming for more force. It hit him full force in the stomach. And did nothing. He pushed her off with a flick of his arm and it sent her flying into the mess hall, denting its roof and breaking its chimney. She disconnected the thrusters in her feet as they struck into the air and launched them as missiles. One flew past him and destroyed an arsenal, the other hit him and exploded into flames and a concussive force.

He stood as if it had been a flick of the fingers and ran for her. She tried to jump, but he hit her as she lifted and threw her into a rock wall. She extended her arms and pushed him off and sent him flying into a storage bay, which collapsed under the force. He bounced back instantly and ran to crush her against the wall. She had to disassemble half of herself to avoid the hit, then reformed around his arm, crushing it inward to no effect. He withdrew and launched another series of punches that she ducked out from under.

She ran to regroup and rethink how to hurt him. She tried microwaves, opening her arms and firing full force. It burned his skin black but only crackled and sparked on his metal interiors. She launched the last few expansion missiles in her arms and they hit as he ran, not even slowing him down. He opened his arms as he ran to reveal his own. They launched and struck her, throwing her back and burning straight through her.

His thoughts were amused, a deep laughter laden with rage. There was no more signal of his intended moves. He was managing to block her with the rage, the fury. It cleared his mind. She tried the same but felt like her thoughts betrayed her. She faked a jump to the left and instead darted right. He must have sensed it from her. He knew where to run.

He ran right into her and pounded her into a wall of ice, which collapsed and spilled down on them both. It didn't make them move a centimeter. They sparred further. She aimed every attack for his exposed face but he managed to block, even her split-arm blows in multiple directions. She aimed for his torso again, connecting with no effect. Veikko fought hard against Nel's blocks but only rarely managed a hit. But when he hit, things broke. Nel was certain to die if it went on. She opened her shoulders and fired fléchettes into his face. He fell back in pain and scraped them off.