The Valkyrie Chronicles: Titans (14 page)

Seven Ragnarok, if I had full use of my nanites, nano-lattice, and other abilities, would last less than a minute against my fury.  But with the energy leech flaring and burning into me anytime I tried to draw on more power, I was a mortal Asgard.  Typically, less than a match for seven of the most fearsome warriors in the galaxy.  But I am more than the sum of my parts, even powerless like this, I am Valkyrie!

I spun and dodged and deflected a hurricane of blows from three directions, keeping my back to the wall.  I was hit with powerful electric bursts every time I came in contact with one of my opponents.  I rolled between two of the projections and kicked the knee of one to the side, and he fell into his buddy and his form dissolved.  I rolled into a three-point stance then flipped twice avoiding blows from the others that pressed the attack.

I quickly reversed my direction, taking one of the oncoming opponents off guard. I grabbed his arm, searing pain going through my hands and used my momentum to flip myself up on his shoulders and then I grabbed his head and gave it a violent twist and his form dissolved.

I was hit from behind by a staggering blow and I gasped in pain.  I noticed Thea's eyes go wide almost in concern.  Hmmm...  I just stopped fighting and stood there as two of the false Ragnarok restrained me and I bit back a scream of pain from the electric pulsed burning through my body.  A third one started landing blows to my abdomen and I just stood there, not struggling, not fighting back.  The third projection grabbed my hair and pulled my head back then reared back a fist to deliver the killing blow.

Thea yelled, “Enough!” The projections disappeared and I fell to the ground gasping in pain, trying to catch my breath.  She jumped down into the pit and grabbed me from the floor, cradling me with one arm, examining me.  “What were you doing Kara?!  They could have killed you!”

I looked up at her and shrugged weakly. “I will not fight for your amusement.”

She looked angry as she glared at me. Then she said with a measured quaking tone, “I do not find it amusing.  Our Queen wants you to stay in fighting shape, so you need your exercise.”

I pushed out of her arm and stood shakily and said defiantly, “Then the coward can come down here and fight me herself.”

This time she did backhand me as I hit the wall of the pit and slid limply down the wall.  She stared at her own hand in shock and whispered to me, “See what you made me do?”

I pushed myself up the wall backward, using it for support.  “You really stopped the fight for your Queen?  Or were you worried about me.”

She looked frustrated and quickly retorted, “Rhea has ordered you feast with her.  It wouldn't do for you to get blood on the new dress.”  The energy tether jumped to her hip pack and she started stalking away.  Steps formed under her feet from the very surface of the seamless arena raising up to her workshop floor.  I was yanked along behind her and through the endless corridors of the mammoth vessel to Rhea's quarters.

From the glances I have seen throughout the ship whenever Thea was ordered to take me for a walk like a dog, there were thousands of cavernous bays for research and science experiments and not many habitable areas.  From the looks of it, there are only a couple hundred Haflings and the ten Titans on the ship.  It must get incredibly lonely.

Rhea motioned to the second chair at her table that had the bland synthesized proteins that passed for food here, in different colors to give some sort of illusion of choices.  “Please join us Thea.”

Thea lowered her head in acknowledgment and silently sat in the second chair as my tether transferred back to Rhea.  Rhea loaded up a plate with a small portion of food for a Titan and reached down and placed it on the floor beside her.  I rolled my eyes and grabbed the plate and stood with it.  I hated being treated like an animal, a pet.  I longed for the day I would make her pay for the treatment.

The worst part about it is that I believe she really didn't do it in spite, or to keep my morale down.  I really think she believes she is being kind, that I am actually just an animal to her.  She smiled down at me and said, “You look positively lovely in that dress.”

I ignored her and started eating the flavorless food, it reminded me of tofu or rice cakes from Earth.  I knew I'd only get water to wash it down, how I longed for a good mead. 
Kroth I needed a drink!

She seemed perturbed at me not acknowledging her. Then she looked to Thea as they both ate plates with at least twenty pounds of food on them.  “How was exercise?”

Thea said without meeting her eyes, “She refused to fight today, so I ended the session before she got herself killed.”

Rhea stood quickly and swept Thea's plate off the table with a clatter hissing, “And you let her do that!?”

Then she swept her glare down to me and raised her hand high to backhand me.  But then Thea's shaky voice said, “Wait!”  Then she quickly added, “My Queen.”  Rhea's glare snapped back to the other Titan who quickly said, “It is, of course, your right for her defying your will, but the poor creature seems to stupid to learn from punishment.  Maybe we should try other forms of encouragement and training.”

Rhea stared first at her then at me for a long moment, then her smile bloomed on her face as she said to me, “Oh, this IS a fun game isn't it?”  Then she looked back to Thea thoughtfully.  I could see the gears spinning in her mind.  Then she handed another plate to her as she said thoughtfully, “No, I think she is more intelligent than we are giving her credit for.”

As she ate she murmured toward me, “ Well played... well played...”

I started counting days by the bodies I was stacking up rather than referring to my Verr.  After one hundred and twenty, or four months.  Things were different.  No longer was there a Hafling in the room to pull me to my feet so I could kill him.  I half grinned, she had reached a breaking point where I had dwindled the ranks of the Halflings to the point she didn't want to lose anymore.  She could no longer breed anymore to replace them since she no longer had the Olympians on board.  I'm sure they could clone some more, their technology would allow that but they didn't for some reason.

From my daily talks with Thea, as she cleaned the blood from me and tended to my wounds, it had something to do with sentience.  The Olympians, and now the Asgard, were the only experiments out of tens of millions of biological weapons created by either the Frost Giants or the Titans, that had attained sentience.

All of their countless calculations over millennia showed that it should not be possible, you cannot engineer self-awareness.  All of the dumb hybrid beasts they have had to outfit with battle computers to make them usable weapons demonstrated that.  So it had to be something else, not even just a random aberration of the design would account for it.

Then to top it off, the Asgard had stumbled upon creating two new sentient artificial intelligence species with the Verr and Sky.

With all of their seemingly unlimited intelligence, from the way Thea spoke, they were afraid of breaking whatever accident had created that sentience.  By breeding directly with the Olympians, they were able to progenerate the Halflings, who maintained that sentience.  They were however not against cloning of any of the lower species they had created in their labs for use as hybrid weapons.

It was a little bit of a shock to me when I had realized that it came down to fear and an almost moral decision not to.  The idea that the Titan's had something that passed for morals was hard to grasp.  But then again, Thea has sort of become my champion against Rhea's treatment of me.  Rhea sees it as an amusing addition to her games.

That morning Rhea had just sat down in her throne and just stared at me for a while after the tether switched to her.  I caught her eyes narrowed a bit when I realized that there was no Halfling in the chamber.  She didn't like my realization of my small victory.

Then she stood and stepped beside me and sat on the step up to her throne and motioned her eyes down to the step.  I remained standing and she half chuckled as she shook her head almost sadly. “It is not an order stubborn little Valkyrie.  I wish to speak plainly with you.”

I locked eyes with her, trying to read her, then nodded slightly and sat beside her.  She looked up at the slightly glowing seamless ceiling then took a breath and said, “Before we speak let me ask you again to join me in our fight against the Jotunn.  Help us rid this realm of their tyranny... or give me access to your nanites.”

I shook my head and she smiled at the ceiling then looked down at me.  “Then I am sorry for what comes next my precious pet.”  She made a clicking noise and a holo-display appeared in front of us.  Thea lowered her head in shame where she stood by the door.

A hybrid, not unlike the dinosaurs down on the planet appeared on the display.  She pointed and the battle computer that was wired into the beast's nervous system and brain was highlighted.  She nodded at it. “This is how we and the Jotunn get the lesser beasts of our creation to do our bidding.  I have tried to be patient with you, let your primitive mind come to the conclusion that helping me, helps you and your kind.  But you leave me little choice, as Thea has pointed out, we cannot break you, you are too stupid to learn from your punishments.  So it is time to take the decision away from you.”

I stared at the highlighted apparatus as it swung up and shrank and appeared to attach to a representation of me.  I could feel the blood drain from my face.  From what I was reading, they have had the device ready for months.  I didn't let on that I had learned their language and writing within the first few days of my arrival here.  I had been studying their systems and controls that they just had on display as they operated them unaware that I was learning and understood much of what I was seeing.

She caught my despondent look and smiled almost cruelly at my realization.  Then she looked over at the other Titan.  “Thea has been trying to figure out a way around your skeletal structure so that we could connect the harness to you.  At first we couldn't determine that why your bones might crack, they would not fully break.  And we were not able to drill into your skull to attach the harness after I had beaten you unconscious for your defiance.”

My eyes widened at the fact they had tried to drill into my skull.  She smirked and continued, “Our scans of your body always come out partially scrambled because of that naughty race of nanites that we can't seem to fully suppress.  But then we got lucky when I had exposed part of your skull when I had punished you and she was able to see a mesh of our Mithreal armor alloy suffused in your bones.  She is just a few of your days away from determining how to get past the Mithreal without killing you.”

Then she tilted her head. “Then you will be our puppet and you will fight for us.  I would have preferred you do it willingly as then we could tap into your full knowledge and battle skills, but this will have to suffice.”

Then she cocked an eyebrow. “Oh don't look so sad.  It is your own fault.  We need to collect some breeders from other Titan vessels so that we can replenish our supply of Titanspawn.  If you hadn't killed so many, we could have played the game for much longer, and you do so keep me entertained.”

It was my turn to cock and eyebrow, this was the first time they referred to the Halflings as anything but pets.  So they are Titanspawn, and they see them as something more than the pets.  An accidental admission.  I chided myself for even caring about that when they were planning on robbing me of my free will.

I told my Verr in my mind, “ I will not allow that to happen.  If they attempt it, we will defeat the collar and fight to our death, taking as many of the krothing Titans with us as we can.  I am sorry I have failed you and not found a means of escape.”

They responded with a feeling of fierce determination and love for me as a message dimly scrolled across my vision from them, “We shall fight and die with our charge, Fire Soul.  If this is our end, we will go out in glory.”  My pride for them had no end.

My gaze hardened and I glared defiantly at her and said in a dangerous tone, “You do what you have to do, and I shall do the same.”

She regarded me for a few seconds then nodded her head once almost imperceptibly.  She seemed sad and she reached over and laid a massive arm over my shoulder and we just sat there silently for at least an hour.  Knowing that in the end, either she or I would be dead.  Again it struck me that she knew it was inevitable and it saddened her.  Was I, just now, near the end, staring to understand their ambiguous morals?  Though subtle, they did exist, even though they acted as though they could not act upon them.

Then Rhea removed her arm from me and stood and just started walking away.  The tether just melted away though the collar was still energized.  Was she trying to be nice to her doomed pet?  She said to Thea, “Bring her to my quarters for mid-day meal after exercise.  Just walk her today.”

As Thea got in range, the tether snapped to life and we walked out into the main corridors.  There wasn't much traffic as I had probably halved the numbers of Titanspawn.  We walked about a mile in silence to the mostly unused aft section of the vessel that had a harmonic hum that always filled the air this close to the massive engines.

She looked around and we stepped into a familiar corridor and she deactivated the tether as we walked a quarter mile through the small tunnel through the huge slab of Mithreal armor to an airlock.  The only place to actually see the stars from the vessel. I looked out over creation and saw the warping and bending of the light of the stars toward the engines as whatever they used to power the vessel warped the fabric of space near the engines.

There were ten of these airlocks dispersed evenly around the vessel.  She explained that they were from before the before, when they had small scout ships to explore all of existence before the war began.  These airlocks had been unused and almost forgotten in all those eons.

We both sat on the bench with the formed seat-rests, I must have looked like a small child in a large seat as we looked out.  I looked past the nearby asteroid field, that looked like a dusty cloud, to a pinprick of greenish-blue light.  Ragnarok.

A couple weeks back, whenever we were alone, Thea would deactivate the tether, though she still left the collar active, and we would talk.  Not as Titan to pet, but as two people sharing experiences.  She was amazed at the stories I told her of the different worlds I have seen, and all the beauty and wonder they offer.

Their original realm was not like this one, it was constructed of energy and mass commingling in a void, the exact center of that realm had something that would loosely resemble a world.  It is where the Frost Giants had willed themselves into existence according to The Firsts, Ymir, and Rhea.  They procreated to create the thousand Jotunn and thousand Titans.  There had to be a balance because they found that only a Titan could create the new lives.

There were ruins in that mass in the middle of  the realm, left by the Ones Who Came Before.

The Jotunn had no concept of time, they just were, they were eternal in their realm.  It wasn't until experiments created a dimension of time that different ideas about their existence came to be.  Ymir had asked Thea if there were more worlds in the realm than this one, what they must be like.  The other eight realms they had visited were all different but the same.  They even found life in a couple of them.

So Thea had come up with a design for our realm and said that that was what she had envisioned for it.  With countless worlds and countless possibilities.  Ymir commissioned her to work on refining it.

The Jotunn had started treating the Titans differently when one realm with an inferior race defied Ymir's rule and were erased them from existence, sterilizing that realm.  Ymir didn't want that to happen again so the Frost Giants started patrolling the realms with twenty ships each with twenty men and women on board.

He wanted to create more of our race so that we could more easily patrol the endless expanses in the nine realms.  Rhea and the Titans disagreed with that.  He wanted to use the Titans like animals to breed an army.  An unneeded army, as there was none that could stand against them.

So Rhea had Thea take her plans and execute them.  They depleted almost all of the energy from their realm but spawned a new universe and the Titans fled into to hide in the new infinite universe.

Now here, I was again telling Thea about the endless wonders on Earth this time, showing her what her concept of planets had birthed.  I finished, “And all of those cultures have come together in mutual support.  War is almost a foreign concept as all of the races across the worlds live in peace with each other after long last.”  I smirked. “So in a way, we should thank the Titans and Jotunn.  You made peace possible with the threat of a greater war against advanced enemies.”

She was shaking her head. “So much diversity, so many new things and new concepts to learn. And that is just six worlds, there are almost endless possibilities now in this realm. I long to see these wonders with my own eyes.  Thank you for sharing this with me.”

I nodded at that and almost cruelly said, “Not that I'll ever be able to share anything with you in the future after you enslave me with that harness, making me the mindless beast you believe me to be.”

Her eyes dropped from the display of stars in the viewport.  “It is not my choice.”

I shrugged. “Yet you still do it.  You are just as much a slave as you are going to make of me.  Why not use your free will to defy your Rhea?”

She looked at me as if I were simple.  “She is our Queen, since before the before.  It is how it has always been. We are eternal.”

I shook my head. “You almost sound brainwashed Thea.  Every being has a right to live their lives the way they want to.  You are naught but a vessel for Rhea's will.  Fight for what you believe.”

She said more to herself than to me, “I cannot.”  She was lost in thought as I turned back to the window to stare at Ragnarok so far away.  Then she absently asked, “Are there truly that many wonders on the worlds you have visited?”

I nodded and then looked up at her. “Come with me, help me escape Rhea's grasp and I will show you those wonders and more.  We can show you how to live again instead of only exist.”

She shook her head again though her eyes did glitter.  “I cannot as much as I may wish to.  In a few days, I will have to outfit you with the harness.”

I nodded and said sadly as I laid against her arm to let her know I did not blame her.  “I know Thea, and before you can, I must either escape or die while doing as much damage and taking out as many Titans as I can while doing it.”

Her aura, which had been taking on a bluish hue as the months marched on wavered and I saw tears welling in her copperish eyes.  She whispered, “I know.”  Then she stood.  “Time to feast with Rhea Kara.”

I nodded and we stood and started the silent walk back, the tether sprang to life as we re-entered the main corridors.