Ragnarok (25 page)

 

 

T
HE
FIRST
two days were an uneventful misery. The lope of the runners was possible to sleep through, but only just. Most of the time, V immersed themselves in a local network with a Tikari flying overhead as lookout, Vibeke's small red Tikari by day and Veikko's larger Tik by night. Staying aware in their bodies was to be avoided at any costs. A standard chemical cocktail kept them from freezing to death. Even under their furry suits the temperatures were below freezing at night and little better by day. It was an enduring pain that didn't quite go away online.

Over the rumble of waking motion, V team got to know Weasel and Spit better. Weasel was born on Phobos. He lived there with his parents until age twelve, when they were evicted to make way for a Zaibatsu executive. They were shipped to Mars and placed in Ylla Colony in housing one-tenth the size of their Phobosian home. Weasel couldn't stand up in Martian gravity, Phobos being nearly weightless by comparison.

“If an Earther jumps on Phobos, they don't come back down. On Mars I was like putty, took me years to stand up. I was twenty before I was able to work. Wanted to be a fauna engineer, but the terraforming companies were already dying out, giving up. Nobody was hiring. Nobody was working, started to riot instead. First time out of our little house with my parents and I saw them killed by Zaibatsu cops. I got carried off by PRA members, they took care of me.

“They asked what I wanted to do, and I thought they meant for a career, so I told them I wanted to design animals. The PRA doesn't do that shite, but they were using what few organics they could steal. Already had a zoologist, but she took me as an apprentice. Genius woman, Karrine. Can stretch a scrounge beetle to clean up an entire
tent, stretched these runners to live five days. Most live for two, there's only so much energy you can squeeze into 'em before they burst. But she found a way to, well, I won't bore you, but these beasts are the fastest runners ever to exist. Only downside is they can't stop. Their muscles would petrify with acid if they did, have to kill 'em to stop 'em.”

It seemed cruel to Violet, but Weasel pointed out, “No brain, no pain.” Organics weren't animals. They were biological machines. They had roughly the same intelligence as flies, a few hardwired behaviors and nothing more. Still, gripping onto the white fur with her own suit growing fur to match, she had to wonder if humans were much different. More nerves, but where there are nerves, there's consciousness, or so she had learned in school. It was amusing to think of plugging into school a few years back while tied to a strange furry mass of limbs cantering across brown Mars.

Before long they could see the second sign of the old terraforming attempts. After the thickened air, there was snow. Never falling snow, it had last snowed actively while the machines were still on in 2218, but dirty patches of the stuff littered the ground.

“The machines were monstrous,” explained Spit as she retied her long hair. “They created humidity, but they put out ten times more smoke than water. They did more to wreck Mars than make it livable. I didn't care about Phobos when I joined. I just wanted to take down the machines. By any method. Basically I wanted to blow shit up, and they gave me the bombs.

“Of course, I got to care a great deal about Phobos after I joined. And Deimos, a lot of people don't realize the PRA is as much for Deimos as its original moon. UNEGA rapes the moons for the good of the planet and gives nothing back. They take the people, the resources, use them for docks or testing grounds. The last time a wave bomb was tested, it was on Deimos, and they have the mutants to prove it. The zombies, the diseases.

“We don't attack civilian targets, but I'd stick around if we did. Civilian is another word for company man. The processors, the pencil pushers, and penny pinchers, they do as much to torture the moons as any cop. Any army.”

Violet realized as Spit said it that fighting the PRA on Earth might have been her job had she stayed at Achnacarry. She grew uneasy at the thought, or perhaps it was at the terrain.

The land grew more rocky and uneven. The runners could see and adjust for obstacles, but they didn't care about any nuance to the ground that wouldn't trip them up. They went top speed over any bump, and that could result in a massive lurch to anyone hanging on. Violet took another nausea tab from her Thaco pockets and checked in with Nelson.

Aga was about to reach Vastitas Borealis‬ and disembark the conveyor. All four Valkyries entered full immersion into Violet's Tikari feed. Aga met with two men in black rubber suits. They took him to a sport utility skiff, and the skiff headed east.‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬

The Tikari stayed glued to the underside of the vehicle and soon gave them their first look at the Ares tanks. They were identical to the three tanks near the YGDR S/L system in Valhalla. Tall, round silos reinforced by buttresses. Thinner on the top and bottom, intended for transportation. They were too far to tell if the nuke was intact. Next to the tanks was a large tent to which the skiff traveled.

The Tikari took to the sky and surveyed the area. There was no sign of Yakuza, nor of any organization but the Wolves. It snuck into the tent and revealed a small complex of buildings. It was able to identify some as barracks and one as a mess hall, with one small storage building. Nothing else. There was no ship under construction, no rocket pad, no visible means of transportation.

Nelson took to observing the behavior of the men. There were too many of them to count living at the facility, but none of them seemed to be doing anything. They talked, they wandered the thin Martian net, they ate and drank and slept, and they did no work whatsoever. V team couldn't put it together.

Spit called them out of immersion with an alarm link. As they came out, she shouted, “Avalanche!”

They had run into an area of mountainous high snowdrifts, one of which was falling down, disturbed by the runners' footfalls. Varg was the first to draw his microwave and fire. He fired a wide spread on the weapon's normal mode, turning some of the snow to steam. Violet and the others did the same, but as the runners neared the accumulation zone of the fall, the microwaves only turned the snow into scalding water, and they had to stop firing.

They had given Spit enough time to reach one of the gear runners and pull out their avalanche safeguards. A giant Mylar bubble inflated around the runners, who continued their canter as if inside a hamster ball. Immediately the ball ran over rocks that burst it, and it began to deflate.

“Don't worry,” shouted Spit, “they're only meant to last a minute. It'll get us out of the avalanche. Cut it if you can when it falls on us.”

Violet and the team did so, firing thin beams into the Mylar as it floated down onto them. The runners headed for the holes, and all six burst out into the bright, snowy landscape. Weasel gave his beast a pat on the back, and they ran on north.

As the snow pack let up, they began to see the next result of failed terraforming. One of the first attempts involved a plant that took in the carbon-dioxide-thickened air and output oxygen. Called the white weed, the stuff managed to take in plenty of carbon dioxide and grow over massive swatches of the planet, but it put out little oxygen, only a half of a percent of what was expected.

It was neither white nor a weed, Violet recalled from school, but a yellowish fungus that grew like a weed. Far worse, in fact. Its tendrils would take root in any living tissue that touched them. That included the runners.

“They'll go down in this! Get ready to bail,” shouted Weasel.

The runners had taken them four of the five days possible, not bad in the long run, but a day for the runners meant five on foot. They'd arrive far later at the Ares, just in time to meet E team and fight the Yakuza. Not a problem as the Wolves didn't seem to be doing anything. Violet's Tikari had witnessed numerous Wolves come and go. None did anything to move the Ares.

Tendrils began to root into the runners feet as soon as they left the snow. Their feet were tough pads, and they lasted several kilometers into the thicket, but soon the tearing sound of broken fungus resounded from beneath them. They started to slow and then stick, and finally they fell to the ground where tendrils began to devour them.

Violet could feel the tendrils trying to reach into her boots, as if they sensed her inside. She was unnerved by how fast they tore into the beasts, which shook as their muscles seized up, going still after the long run. Weasel wasted no time with an emotional farewell. He went to each beast and cut them open with a laser tool. From each he took a few tiny eggs, the next generation of runners to incubate once he got back to the PRA.

They took the landskiffs from the packs and rode them across a few kilometers of the white weed, hoping they'd outlast it. But at the end of their range, the skiffs only took them an infinitesimal portion of their journey. The weed persisted.

Without a word they abandoned the skiffs and began to walk. The white weed grabbed at them with every step but broke off unable to penetrate their suits. The expanse of it went to every horizon. The six stuck to any snow patches they could find, but for the most part, they were stuck on the gripping plain. Walking felt good, though. After four days tied to the organics, Violet could finally stretch and pop the joints in her legs. But walking got old after a few hours, and as night fell, she realized they couldn't lie down to sleep on the white weeds, or they'd be consumed in minutes. They walked until dawn came, and the first patches of weedless land emerged. They slept in the first one that would fit them.

Finally in sleep, they monitored Violet's Tikari feed. Aga had left by skiff. Violet abandoned him at the conveyor and recalled her Tikari to keep watching the Wolf site in case anything happened. Without the Tikari present at the conveyor station, she missed watching Mishka arrive to collect her eyeball and lie in wait.

Fewer and fewer weeds appeared as they trudged farther north. There was little snow accumulated in the lowlands. Mars was back to brown rock. The team talked by link with Weasel and Spit, slept for three hours each day, and walked for twenty-one and a half. Violet found herself wishing there were a private link she could share with Vibs to recapture some of those funny first days on the shuttle, but the brown planet insisted on itself, the terrain just uneven enough to demand her attention. Until a simple encrypted link came from Earth.

“E grounded, Y shortly.”

E grounded. Surely it meant E team wouldn't be following the Yakuza, who were soon to arrive. They didn't bother to link back to ask why. The Earth to Mars communication was as good as public, and they wouldn't be able to say. But it meant a drastic change in their mission. They were now in charge of seeing that the Yakuza didn't get the Ares back to Earth. They had expected the Wolves to try taking it first, but it was now becoming clearer it was all an act of misdirection. The Wolves only wanted to make the Yaks think they were after the thing.

That would explain E team's disappearance. A gang war between the Yaks and Wolves on Earth must have erupted. They were either preoccupied with it or prevented from flying by it. It all came together. Mishka was working for the Wolf Gang to see that they couldn't inform anyone of the fake operation, a random net meeting that gave Mishka the opportunity to kill her old pals. With the Yakuza in a space race, they'd have left their home turf unguarded. Wulfgar was going to seize Yakuza assets while they desperately clamored for something Wulfgar never wanted in the first place.

V team was 300 kilometers from the Ares when they began seeing shuttles in the sky. The Yaks meant business. They were likely using their regular fleet to build a rocket capable of taking the Ares home. A massive undertaking. There was hope in that, the bigger the operation, the easier it would be to foil. A couple malfunctioning thrusters would negate the need for the fission bomb, at least for a while.

But their arrival also meant security, more than the fake Wolf tent. At 200 kilometers they heard the first growl.

“Guardthings,” said Weasel. “Security organics. We have a few outside the main crater. Extremely dangerous, resistant to microwaves. Those things in your chests are knives, right?”

“Right.”

“I hope you keep 'em sharp.”

Three of the monsters appeared on the horizon. They were kicking up dust, running toward them. Vibeke and Veikko ejected their Tikaris and prepared to fight.

The guardthings bore even less resemblance to any earthly animal blueprint than the runners and went for broke in the teeth department, having six legs ending in two ten-taloned feet each, uncountable eyes, ears, and nostrils, several tusks and like a starfish, a central stomach orifice surrounded by sharp fangs. Things as nightmarish as the Kolossus.

“Their weakness is the nerve cluster on the tops of their backs,” explained Weasel. “Sever any part of it, and they'll go down. But it's surrounded by a carbon-fiber-grown spinal column. Look at the bumps along their spines and cut between them, try to get through the cartilage disks. It's the only way.”

“Not the only way,” shouted Spit as she took a box of explosives and wired it. She quickly arranged the contents and then gave the box a kick. In midair, the box began to burn like a roman candle, slashing through the air toward the first guardthing. When it hit, it exploded, sending chunks of the head guardthing across the rocky field, cracking the bulk of its torso in half. She began to wire a second crate, but the guardthings drew close enough to leap and pounced toward V team, one at Varg and one at Violet. Vibeke threw her Tikari to Violet, who held it firmly and ran under the monster to avoid its initial spring. Its underbelly teeth cut into her head, through her welded hair but no deeper than the skin. As soon as it was behind her, she leaped for its short tail. It wasn't enough to hang on to, so she leaped again and tried to get on its back.