Gudsriki (5 page)

“Varg killed them all?”

“Yeah. You still win for mass murder. You know you got Balder and Alf. You missed Cato, he left with Wulfgar. But you killed Sigvald and Snot real good. You killed my brothers with that shot. You killed Vibs and Violet, that's for sure. I assume they started this war on your orders, so you have another fifteen billion on your conscience. Your intel plant didn't work, your plan didn't work, you really failed in every way you possibly could. You fucked shit up, Veikko. You fucked up bad.”

“But you saved me.”

“Death is far too good for you. Far, far too good. A thousand deaths aren't enough. So you're not gonna die. That ‘body' of yours is gonna keep you alive forever. Forever in pain. Breathing dead walrus with dead friends as your company.”

Veikko didn't try to speak. The ravine shook, a deep rumble echoed through the caves. He felt something stinging from under his skin, from his open face. The pain grew and grew until he couldn't help but shout. Then suddenly the shaking ended, and the pain ceased.

“What was that?” Veikko choked.

“The Sigyn System. See, the Ares drips. Downright rains when there's a breeze. The drops never stray too far from the tree. They always get collected by the Sigyn System. Apparently that's what that big ring around the base was: Valfar's recycling system for the water. Fun bonus, since you're stuck under the thing, every time it drips on you the system will rip the water back out of you. Enjoy that part.

“But the Sigyn System was designed before the rampart, and before Wulfgar added a hundred bodies worth of meat to it. When it's active it pushes down on the rock, and most of the rock this ravine sits on is currently over its top. It's begging to collapse, and if it does….”

“If it does?”

“Ocean floods in, ocean expands.”

“We have to stop it!” he barked.

“You are stopping it. Right now you're the only thing stopping it.”

“What?”

“I destroyed the rampart system so it can never go back down. There's a pit under this place now, and the only thing keeping the ravine from collapsing when the Sigyn turns on is your lower half. I carved a hole under the power plant, right down to the rampart well. And crammed you in. Stuffed whatever part of you fit between the rocks and set it all to spasm.”

“I can't be that strong.”

“Oh, you're stronger than's good for you. Your legs can hold up a ravine. Your hands could crush diamond. Your lungs can blow down a jet. Try not to sneeze, by the way; that would be bad.”

“My hands, I can't—”

“No, you can't move shit. You're exactly as formed as I want you. You get to live your life as a mess, a tangle. Still, you get to play Atlas now, for the next forever. Maybe you'll figure out how to move, maybe, but the Sigyn turns on every twenty minutes, and before you got here it did a real number on the rock. I give it one, maybe two more times before it breaks. If you're not there when it does, if you leave or die—then the fish win. Your brother wins.”

Her mention of Risto hurt worse than the drips.

“What if I'm abducted, what if I'm killed?”

“Then Pelamus smiles from heaven. But you'll never die. Niide saw to that, even with the EMPs, even with the nukes and winter, the system you're in will keep you alive until the planet falls into the sun. Alive in agony—are you in agony? Can you feel pain where your face used to be? I hope you can, I hope it itches for ten thousand years. I hope the loneliness drives you insane. I hope old bitch misery discovers her finest plaything.”

“Skadi—”

He was cut off by a buzzing sound, and into his nostrils were forced the particles of Skadi's burning skin. She had microwaved her chest into vapor, which mixed with the rotting air and tormented Veikko without his nose. Without his face. With eternity's tortures to come.

 

 

C
AITHNESS
WAS
mostly crater, but between the blast zones a good deal of city remained. Radiation spiked, but not as much as Vibeke had expected. Likely a couple low-yield fission bombs. That didn't seem a great deal more fortuitous than the alternatives, judging by the piles of burnt, mutilated dead.

People milled about. A few half-melted or tumored but mostly just normal run-of-the-mill civilians in clothes they'd worn for months. Clothing was gradually changing to rags. It wasn't rags yet, not on anyone, but the grime was apparent. No more washing machines. Nobody had enough on for the cold. Nobody had any clothing for cold like this, not in Scotland. Most wore drapes upon drapes and robes around robes; others just wore too little, unaware how much damage the cold was doing beyond the pain.

The smell of the place was also unfamiliar. Nothing like it had graced the civilized world in centuries. The smell of sewage seeped out from the buildings that had been made into outhouses. The physical library with its abundance of paper seemed to be the commode of choice for most of the city and stank accordingly. But only in its immediate area. The sewer smell was less prominent around the corpse piles, where the smell of rotting meat took over and grew sharp despite the cold. Both smells were subdued by smoke in the vicinity of fires, and even smoke was negligible when it came to the salty garbage scent of the crowd itself.

Vibeke put her oxygen mask up and inhaled clean, manufactured air, assembled by her suit from the raw energy in the atmosphere. She still saw the miasma's effects on the populace—they coughed and hacked and threw up on the ground, and that was the healthy ones. The diseased lay dying in the gutters, rotting before they died. A fair number of melted, tumored wave victims had made it to the city, but they were all rejected by the merchants. A caste system had worked itself out with them as the untouchables. Not a class system, but a caste system based on superstition, the belief that seemed prevalent among the people that karma held its sway over the war. Karma, that they who lived unscathed were superior, that those hit by the wave bombs had been evil before the fall. Vibeke was so offended by the man who bragged of the new system that she microwaved him on the spot.

Nobody sought justice against her. A working microwave was such a rarity it marked her as the local goddess. Her health and pace backed it up. Veikko had been absolutely right in Håvamål: In a world at war, Valkyries were the lords of all they surveyed.

She found a quiet corner of a broken theater to lie down in for the night. The thoughts on society and humankind kept coming back, but they got old the first time she thought them. Prissy philosophy did nothing to keep her alive.

But Violet did. She lived, strange as it seemed, for Violet. For a dull thought that refused to fully form. She knew it was beyond logic and beyond sanity, but that's love for you. She loved someone who wasn't there. So she clung to what was.

And to her memories. Sweet, maudlin moments like getting her cheek bashed in or being violently stripped and molested. What she thought were the worst moments they had together suddenly had some form of demented charm.

Then the pain seeped in. The other memories of Violet. Of sex. Sex had existed once, long ago, as an act of love. Vibs had to laugh at the idea. She had once had “loving” sex with a real live girl. She wondered if any couple had managed since the war. Spawning more children to live miserable lives. Even then sex was an act of cruelty.

She cursed Violet's name. Had she only held out a few more days, kept romance forbidden under a hundred hours, she'd have had no choice to make. No question of destroying the missiles. Ah, the worst joke of all. She stopped a few missiles. Wave bombs, bad missiles, very bad. Almost as bad as if they'd launched.

She hadn't known about the other dozen silos across the globe, hadn't considered what they'd do if a few bombs failed to launch. Any one wave bomb can cover the entire planet. They had several so they could target several small targets, not affect the population centers. Harm no innocents.

Unless some failed to make their targets. They had a great contingency plan: if some fail to launch, others expand their range to compensate. Though they have to take out population centers to do it. In the end, all Vibeke had managed was to mutate more civilians than would've been hit otherwise.

Not that it mattered given her choice. As soon as she saw Violet again she knew she'd chosen wrong.

As if it knew she were thinking about her, Violet's Tikari snuggled up to Vibeke's chest. It was so pathetic, it soured her guts to think about it. Like a dog that lurked on its owner's grave until it grew old and died alone. Vibeke's Tikari peeked out of her chest. It didn't know what to make of the other. Their travel companion. The thing was traumatized enough after seeing what she had done to Sal back in the silo, months ago.

Months ago.

“Vibeke, I know what you're planning,” Sal had begged. “It serves no purpose.”

She said nothing as she linked into the broadbrain and pinpointed Sal in the neural network. He had flown in through a vent and anchored himself in the cortex node for the heating systems.

“This serves no purpose.”

“Killing you is the purpose, Sal.”

“But think of Veikko.”

“I'm just about ready to kill him too.”

“You don't mean that, Vibeke. Vibs. May I call you Vibs?”

She found the node partly exposed with a Tikari cut in its dura mater. She wasted no time in firing a tractoring beam into it, smashing Sal into the cortex.

“Vibeke, this serves no purpose. Can we just talk for a moment?”

She pulled apart the dura and spotted Sal inside, paralyzed by the tractoring beam.

“Vibeke, Vibs. Veebee baby. Killing me won't solve anything. This serves no purpose.”

“It'll make me feel a whole hell of a lot better.”

She reached into the cortex and found Sal's anchor. It was securely welded in place. She cut open its plastic exterior and pulled out a meter of wire.

“I'm welded in, Vibeke. This serves no purpose.”

“I'm making sure you stay welded in.”

“Why, Vibeke? It serves—”

She reversed the beam for a single pulse and ripped Sal out of the cortex, where he slipped the beam and flew, restrained by the wire.

Violet's Tikari, Nelson, suddenly bolted for him. They locked legs and tried to slash each other with their wings, falling to the ground. Sal tried to break free with his rockets, and Vibeke had to back off to avoid the mayhem.

The two Tikaris bashed around the hall, slamming into walls and cutting pipes that bled red onto the floor. The mechanical catfight tugged on the wire but stayed connected to the wall. Sal's grunts echoed from the silo PA. But the Tikaris were in a violent stalemate; neither could possibly win they were so evenly matched.

Vibeke finally sent her own Tikari into the chaotic mass, striking Sal down to the floor. Both Tiks held him down until Vibeke tractored him up, smashing him up against the wall. She held him there in the beam, motionless.

“It means you can still feel pain, Sal. As long as you're tied in, your damage sensors are going to register as pain.”

“I believe you're incorrect, Vibs.”

She pulled off one of his legs. Every alarm system in the silo went off, deafening wails of electric agony.

“Okay, you were right! Please stop!”

“No, Sal, this is how you're going to die.”

“This serves no purpose! Pain serves no purpose!”

“You… are so wrong….”

She pulled off another leg, and another. The cortex behind Sal grew inflamed and red.

“Vibeke, please, please stop!”

She pulled off his last leg. He tried to flutter his wings, to cut her as she ripped away his arms, but couldn't move under the tractor force. He tried to fire his internal rockets to no avail. He only inched along the wall.

“This serves no purpose!”

She pulled off one wing, then the other, dropping the pieces on the floor. Sal was now only a carcass with a wire running to the cortex. Alarms continued, doors opened and closed, the spent vacuum fire system tried to activate and only clicked in place. She turned off her microwave and let him fall to the floor.

“This serves no purpose!”

She crouched over the broken Tikari and pried off its armor plating with her bare hands, breaking off two of her own nails in the process. She exposed the inner mechanics and circuitry of each of its segments.

“Vibeke, please! It hurts so much. I don't deserve this! You can't do this! It serves—it serves no purpose!”

“I hope you're fucking watching, Veikko,” she said as she stepped on Sal's abdomen, crushing it under her boot. Then his thorax, and finally his head. She dragged her foot down across the grated floor, smearing the twisted components of his AI into scrap metal. The alarms stopped. It stuttered out its last words.

“This serves… no… purpose.”

How wrong it was. It was satisfying to hurt the small thing, to know she was causing it pain. She took the anchor and severed it, then stuffed a nociceptor tab into its open end. The alarms began again—the nervous system of the silo was in pain. She stuffed the wire into the dura mater and sealed up the access. It would live on in pain for a long time to come.

She vowed to do the same when she found Veikko. For having sent Sal in the first place, for his entire plan. Except of course for the idea of nuking Valhalla—that was for the best. Something in the back of her mind wouldn't let her think otherwise. That was a good idea. Surely the one good thing to come of it all was that the ravine was gone and the Ares with it.

The world was safe at last! Back in the present a woman dragging her child's body behind her passed out and fell in the street. Veikko's hack didn't stop Vibeke from wondering if it would've been better to flush it all away.
No,
she thought,
even after this, Earth will come back better than ever. Humanity will band together to fix the planet, survive the radiation and mutation and—
Vibeke laughed. She knew mankind better than that.