Gudsriki (6 page)

 

 

W
ULFGAR
HAD
just become the richest man in the world. And then the world was no more. Of course the economy survived, in some form. Earth's holiest constant was invincible. The fall of the nets merely delayed trading one morning. What little juice survived in the computer systems was devoted to brain and bulk transfers of information. For a time, the few people whose minds encapsulated the financial records were themselves the most expensive commodity.

But things sorted themselves out soon enough. They cracked open the vaults and gold became the medium of exchange. An ancient joke of sorts to those in the know, but families lined up by the millions to take their share, to prove their identities and trade their wasted homes for gelt.

The insurance companies fell; the relief organizations rose. The armies that could maintain their electric charges took control of their regions and implemented taxes within days of the day-long war they'd all missed fighting. All missiles, it was. And no certain results. GAUNE and UNEGA were both annihilated. It was their subsidiaries that survived, the companies small enough to communicate by speech.

The largest and most powerful of which was of course the YUP, owing to the genius of its new CEO, Wulfgar Kray. While other companies were scrounging together their surviving board members, Wulfgar was acting the warlord and seizing territory and assets. His underlings proved quite willing to follow any order. The cruelest manners in which he functioned as a mobster were simply expected from him as a politician. He could order deaths by the thousands without question, and he had the means. Only hours before the war began he'd inherited the rights to the biggest private army money could buy.

But he hadn't wanted to use it on old-fashioned battles over land and assets. He was lord on Earth, but lord of the flies. They were all that was left. And so Wulfgar took solace in what little he could manage, like his new home.

His new home he'd bartered with Sable Mouvant in the hours before the missiles flew. Mouvant had built quite a fortress on Elba. As the CEO of Dylath-Leen, she'd accrued several billion Euros and two of the largest construction forces in France. She put every bit of all the above into building her home. She owned Elba but UNEGA still had laws governing the place. None of the historical buildings could be touched. So she commissioned a structure to straddle Portoferraio.

It was infamous as the greatest eyesore ever created. A blocky bit of brutalism that cast Portoferraio into shadow from dawn till dusk. What it lacked in aesthetics it earned back in security. Reports of Hashima's demise made Wulfgar less interested in underground living. He wanted a home so secure that not even a fusion bomb would make a dent in the thing. Mouvant guaranteed that the structure was made from fusion grade Fiphp Steel, ten-meters thick around every segment, all TK chromed on its surface.

Mouvant even included her security staff, her array of drones, the ammo for the weapons systems, and more. She even offered Wulfgar her
nain aveuglant
, but some traditions were too grisly even for Wulfgar to enjoy. But she gave him the works in exchange for the YUP's utility rights. When the war began, she owned 1,076 power plants. Wulfgar was sorry to hear 439 of them were bombed with conventional ordinance, 329 of them were nuked, and 117 of them were caught in wave bomb ranges. Mouvant didn't mind, though; she was vaporized along with the quark inversion plant in Al-Hudaydah.

The only real problem with Mouvant's fortress was the powerful radiophobic field. It was a good thing in those postnuclear days, but Wulfgar's jaw was malfunctioning from the magnetized air. He brought doctor after doctor into his castle to look at it, and dismissed each of them upon failure. His men were still hunting for Dr. Mowat, but she'd been in the center of a wave zone. She was almost certainly melted. That was the worst of his problems.

The rest was heavenly. He'd thought that being transferred trillions of euros was the best thing that could happen to his gang. He was wrong—getting transferred trillions of euros a few hours before the world broke into war and the economic nets fell: That was the best thing that could have happened. Every record frozen in its last instant of use marked Wulfgar as the richest man alive. So the masses flocked to him seeking shelter and order. And he gave them both.

The YUP headquarters building in Yemen was hit with a couple fission bombs, eradicated. But Pelamus had already wiped it out and made it mobile. Wulfgar planted it in the Mouvant fortress along with his top wolves only an hour before the first missiles landed. From there he controlled the first emergency measures to protect all he could under the YUP banner, which he had quietly renamed the company and country of
Ulver
in his last linked sleep.

So he and his top wolves survived. When the masses came amassing, he hired them on, paid in “
Loups
,” the money he printed with the mints and printers he bought. He traded his new money for their gold at a somewhat unfair markup, but nobody complained. They had money again instead of shiny metal. It would be a historical oddity to anyone who knew Wulfgar's past, but the Orange Gang was already long forgotten in the year since its demise. Nobody knew, or if they knew they didn't care, that Wulfgar Kray was a mass murderer and crime lord. He was in fact unanimously considered the first genuine hero of the new era.

He still made sure the physical logs of his past were destroyed. He kept hackers on retainer in case the net survived, but it was becoming clearer and clearer that none of the server centers had gone unbombed. Earth's past had been erased as thoroughly as its future.

It only took Wulfgar weeks to take over Europe amid the chaos, and a couple more to take over enough of the old world to proclaim himself Emperor of the Globe. Then he didn't have to buy anything. He owned it all, or so he claimed. Some old armies disagreed, a minor problem.

He actually had about a quarter of a globe to run. His empire, despite his titles, really covered about half the hemisphere, ending around Mongol Uls to the east and at the UKI in the west. Progress was rapid in the east, but the isles were still owned by B&L, and he hadn't figured out how to convince them to sell. He tried a hostile takeover, but was wary of letting the war go nuclear again. He already regretted the frivolous bombs he allowed in the early days.

Ah, the nukes, he thought; why did the world have to offer itself at its crispiest? Of twenty billion souls, he could only claim the four that survived. And of those four he only had about one and a half billion in his extended employ. Indeed he still had work to do. So he gave up on his jaw for the day and barked orders to his top wolves. He had long since run out of boot related names.

“Spike, move the 4th Army to Norge, mass and prepare for a hostile takeover of Lindisfarne.”

“Yes, sire.”

“Mike, the 8th Army will join, subject to Spike's whim. Dagbog?”

“Sire?”

“How goes the siege of Orkney?”

“Not well, sire. UKI still has the coasts, and our troops are being shot from the sky before they can land.”

Wulfgar checked the roster.

“Those men are from the Siberian fleet! How dare you waste them?”

“Sire, we have to take the beaches before we can—”

“Arrgh!” shouted Wulfgar.

“Yes, sire,” said Arrgh.

“You have Orkney to deal with now. Take the beaches with cheap navies and only then use my Siberians for fine-tuning. Understood?”

“Yes, sire!”

Wulfgar grunted in anger. Had he known ruling the world would be such a pain, he might not have taken it over in the first place. Well, he thought, grinning a wide chainsaw grin, yes, he would.

 

 

V
IBEKE
WOKE
up and realized she'd slept—a rarity. She'd made it through nearly an entire night without having to kill someone. And in a city no less.

She stood and stretched and surveyed. There was nobody around. She followed the street toward the center of the city. It had been plowed somehow. The roads were only a couple centimeters thick with packed snow. There were even tread marks in places.

Beyond the largest crater, she spotted a market. The street was filled with vendors. In the burnt remains of buildings, commerce had persisted: merchants selling food and supplies, water they claimed was clean. All the lies and trifles of civilization, going strong. She had yet to see how people traded without monetary implants. But she had something to sell and ventured to find out. She headed for the smell of burning flesh and found something like a restaurant. She approached the maître d', a woman in a tattered suit.

“Table, dearie?”

“Selling, do you buy meat?”

“What did ye find?”

“Some wild pigs. Made pork.”

“Live pigs? You found live, unmutated pigs?”

“Healthy ones too.”

“Sliver a pound if it's good.”

She pulled the choice cuts from her satchel, keeping only a few for herself. The vendor examined them. Vibeke was certain they were small enough bits to ensure they were unrecognizable, but the flavor could still give them away to anyone familiar with real pork or soylent goods.

“Very good,” she said, weighing them. “Fourteen slivers for the lot?”

Vibeke nodded.

“One more if you point me to your hunting grounds.”

“Due west in the outskirts. They were wandering around a blue house. Could I have a shaker of salt instead?”

The vendor jogged over to a table and gave her one. “Anything else you're buying?”

“Boats.”

“Shore's nothing but debris. Some broken boats, hull of a big ship ashore a kilometer north of the pier, but I don't think you'll find anything seaworthy, or anyone selling if there is.”

“Is there a medical vendor around here?”

“There's a doctor, Steven Shagrath. He's set up in the basement of the glass tower right there past the pissweed.” She pointed.

“Pissweed?”

“You haven't come across—wow, you're lucky! Used to be asparagus until the wave bombs mutated it. Now it grows fast and far and oozes uric acid, or whatever it is makes pee smell like pee. You'll know it when you smell it.”

“Thanks,” said Vibeke. She walked the short way to the tower. Sure enough the smell of urine was overwhelming as she passed a grotesque outcropping of mutant shrubs, covered in odd seeds and dripping yellow.

The glass building was among the least damaged. It had a short line running into its lobby and down the stairs. Makeshift torches lit the way down. Vibeke walked alongside the line; nobody seemed to object to her passing them. In the basement she saw the doctor tending to a man's legs, which had been badly burned. A nurse spotted her.

“What can I do for you?”

“Buying med supply.”

“Don't have many surpluses.”

“I just need clamps.”

“Clamps we've got.”

The nurse led her past some beds toward a table with supplies. In the beds were diseased men and women, not from wave bombs or radiation but bacteria, infections. Without electronic antibiotics, superstrains had returned. The world saw plagues it hadn't seen since the post-antibiotic era.

From under the table, the nurse pulled out a box of clamps of varying sizes. Vibeke silently sorted through and found the largest of them, then paid the nurse four of her slivers.

“Oh my! Thank you!”

“Was that a lot?”

The nurse looked worried.

“Don't worry, keep it,” said Vibeke as she took her clamps and left. She walked topside and headed for the coast. It was only a few blocks away.

The smell there was rot. Sea rot—thousands of dead fish clogged the water along with scattered debris and several corpses. Some nearly skeletonized, others fresh. She wandered the coast toward a distant pier.

The fish lasted out to the horizon, and when the wind blew toward her the smell was almost unbearable. She put up her oxygen mask again, but still the stink permeated. She spotted the big, broken hull. A fire in it marked some strange gathering that braved the smell for a secure spot. The men inside watched her hungrily. She wasn't in the mood to play with anyone, so she kept Bob, her own Tikari, on her shoulder, ready to kill them all without risk.

One began shouting. He started following her. She sent Bob to cut his head off. She wished to high hell that Violet was there with her. To kill people. Torture them, fight them, survive them. It would be so different with Violet. They'd talk on the long stretches of walking. About how things used to be, about how they could be. About whether the miserable present was truly any worse than the glowing, linked-in past. She felt like with Violet there, it wouldn't have been. Not for her at least. She often caught herself holding imagined conversations with Violet. She never spoke out loud but knew every word in her mind.

“Did you ever get to this part of Scotland?”

“No, I stuck to the west. The east was all artsy and pompous.”

“Not your style?”

“My parents took me to a Shakespeare play once. I pounded on the seat in front of me the whole time. The poor man in it didn't know what to do. My parents had to keep apologizing and holding me back, but I bit their arms.”

“You sound like you were a lovely child.”

“Who said child? I was sixteen.”

Vibs laughed, and then it soured and threatened tears. She tried not to think of it. The thoughts came unbidden every hour or more and stabbed into her. She could feel it in the back of her neck. The thoughts were destroying her. Making her act foolishly.

The battle to walk on and the battle to stay sane amid madness. The world had gone mad in days, but Vibs was a fighter, a Valkyrie. It would take weeks to drive her completely insane. Maybe even a whole month.