Ragnarok (39 page)

The corpse leaped down onto Wulfgar and reached its arms around his neck. It wasn't strong, and he threw it off in seconds, but it was enough time for Vibeke to send her Tikari straight into his chest. Violet sent hers into his head. Both bounced off, he'd been implanted with heavy armor. He ran.

Violet and Vibeke gave chase, the eyeball right behind them. They spotted raw coal walls and didn't risk firing their microwaves. Wulfgar ran down a short corridor and through another aperture in the rough wall. It closed tightly behind him. Violet reached it first only to get thrown back by a shockwave as the aperture burst open and outward. Her suit reacted automatically to protect her from the concussion, and she was merely thrown into the opposite wall. She dropped down from it and ran back toward the door.

It had been a pneumatic escape valve. She looked up in time to see daylight appear from the top of the long shaft as the capsule left with her nemesis. She cursed loudly.

“This is why we have four goddamn people on a team!”

Vibeke caught her breath. She checked the shaft for any way to tractor outward only to see it begin to collapse. A one-time-use escape route. There was nothing left to do but get out and report back to Valhalla. But Wulfgar knew they'd be coming for him. He wouldn't return to this base. They'd lost him.

Unless there were clues. As men who heard the bang flooded in from outside the office, Vibeke severed the first three heads and affixed a bore to one of them. Violet turned to guard the door, and Vibs monitored until it had a complete relevant memory load, then stowed it on her arm clingers.

“We head out, hunt for any clues on the way,” said Violet.

“What about your body?”

“What?”

“The other body?”

“What do we need it for, the carpool lane? Leave it!”

Vibeke smirked for a fleeting second. Violet caught her and suddenly felt better than she had in days, despite the loss of her enemy only seconds prior.

Leaving the office and Violet's corpse behind, they navigated the lowest levels adeptly and returned to the conventional hallway of the mine. They wasted no time with the air ducts. They ran through the humid, winding passage at top speed, striking ahead with their Tikaris at anyone who emerged around any bend.

Soon they came near to the top of the passage and smelled blood. Not any they'd spilled, the smell was overwhelming. The strange room they'd passed before.

Violet was curious about the stench. For some reason it stuck out to her. She let her Tikari take a long last glance.

The room was a giant ventricle of the mineshaft. There was ancient equipment for moving coal scattered about. But there were also three giant tanks of blood. And guts. She recoiled at the thought. Then she saw the blender. Wulfgar had blended and tanked what must have been a great number of men.

And in a pile of clothing by the blender was a pair of yellow boots. Something snapped together like two puzzle pieces in her brain. They were the bulbous Wolf men from Mars.

“Vibs, wait.”

“What?”

“This room, come back.”

Vibeke scurried back through the shaft, and the two jumped down into the ventricle. Vibeke looked around as Violet spoke.

“He's blended God knows how many men, and he's keeping them in water tanks. One was Yellow Boots.”

“The men from Mars,” said Vibeke. She had it too. But Vibs went further. “They smuggled it back inside of his gang. They got to it before the Yaks.”

Violet realized what she meant. “The Ares is here on Earth, intact.”

Violet sent a brain-to-brain link to Veikko. It couldn't be encrypted, but it would hit him wherever on Earth he was. “Ares safe on Earth.”

Vibeke sent the same message to Valhalla through Vladivostok's Alopex connection. They looked at each other. There was nothing they could do on their own. They didn't dare sabotage the tanks on an island where it could seep into the ocean. They leaped for the vent and started outward again. The great cafeteria chamber was ahead, so they took to the vent shafts.

Violet's mind was racing. They had failed. Nothing was saved. Worse than that, Wulfgar of all people had the thing to sell to Pelamus. There was no question he would, and he would gain exceptional power in doing so. If Pelamus was behind the YUP's disintegration, Wulfgar would stand to gain a significant chunk of UNEGA.

And the way he did it, to sacrifice his own men to bring it home. And that she failed to see it on Mars. So did Vibeke, of course, so she didn't feel that bad about it, but still the notion was sickening on every level. They traversed the ceiling duct over the cafeteria.

Until it broke. A section gave way, wrenching downward and dumping Vibeke onto a table. Violet moved to look down in.

Vibeke was surrounded by a hundred men in the place's main mess hall. She already had her Tikari in hand. Violet had high ground, but it was too high for a wide microwave to do more than make the men itch. It had to be far more personal than that.

Violet jumped down and stood beside Vibeke. She caught her Tikari. Dozens of men moved slowly toward them.

 

 

A
T
TIMES
,
Veikko felt like the fear was waning, softening. But these times seemed like a cruel joke as the sensation rocketed up again from his stomach to throttle his brain, as if the fear knew he was growing slowly immune to it, so it fluctuated to trick him into letting down his guard.

The hallucinations were growing stronger. He was certain that Violet had actually sent him a link that the Ares was safe on Earth.

But then, he'd also been reliving his childhood. Undersea—the most fearsome place. Not for the giant squid or the threat of drowning but for seeing them again, the last people who could control him. Anger surged up and fear, briefly, ceased to press in on his temples.

He thought of the Geki, and anger rose up again. It couldn't replace the fear, but it seemed to dampen it, to make it almost manageable. He focused on the anger and hatred of the Geki, the common-owned bastards in the black cloaks. And fear was only his state, not his master. As soon as he found that foothold, he devoted every free scrap of himself to anger. He lingered in its different chambers, repulsion, disgust, annoyance, exasperation, but it was raw fury that proved most effective of them. In fury he was able to think again.

The Ares was safe on Earth. He was certain he heard it, standing out above the synthetic delusions. He checked his link records. It was like crawling out of a pit under fire, trying to navigate his partitioned memory. The fear was still on his heels. Every time he opened a partition on his way to the link records, there was another blast of it. A cold feeling in his chest, or the shameful jolt of being startled anew. He turned it into rage. Every prick in the soles of his feet was a reason to run faster. Soon he was running at full speed toward the link.

The Ares was safe on Earth. It was there, clear as crystal. Not an illusion. He tried to absorb it. He couldn't fathom how. The nuclear blast had surrounded the Unspeakable carrier. There was no way it could have survived.

But Violet was going to Hashima. Wulfgar's lair. She was going to check on the Wolf Gang. Who had lingered on Mars without doing a thing. They must have done something, something that got it home and into their control. It had to be true.

He had to destroy it. He had to get out of there. He had to get what he came for.

For the first time, he made himself aware of his actual surroundings. He was trapped by strands of black fabric, like the Geki cloaks, like a blackened burnt spider web. He struggled to no avail.

A kilometer away, Sal reached the zone where he calculated the air distortion originated. It was easy to pinpoint once he saw the citadel. There was nothing else for kilometers. Sal landed by a river and used the water flow for a quick, slight recharge. Just enough to find Veikko.

The citadel had defenses. It was covered by a black canopy, threadbare with thick ropes. Not ropes on a closer scan, metallic tendrils covered in imaging arrays at their junctions. Sal plotted out the coverage zones, then deployed his sniffers. The long delicate antennae reached out of his head and electrified. Particulate matter from the air covered them. They withdrew.

Analysis showed Veikko's skin cells in the air, originating from a hole in the ground near the periphery of the canopy. Sal projected a possible route through the air and on the ground that would avoid all the detectors. It would be thick enough for Veikko to escape through as well. It prepared the information to download into his mind once docked.

The Tikari took flight and adeptly navigated the gaps in coverage. When he swooped low, however, a puff of dust was kicked up by his wings. Sal froze. Monitored. No reaction. The imaging arrays weren't motion detectors. Sal moved more freely.

He entered the hole and found a room filled with more black tangles. He avoided them and quickly found Veikko tied up in their masses. He jumped straight into Veikko's chest and recharged properly, simultaneously loading the information into Veikko's head.

Veikko immediately told Sal to jump back out and start cutting him free. Sal wouldn't leave his chest. He was afraid.

No
, he thought,
a Tikari can't be afraid. It's me. It's only me
. Veikko brought himself to hate the fabric, hate its tangled look, hate the way it pressed on his skin, hate the very idea of the Geki trapping their quarry in those brambly wires. His Tikari emerged and began to cut into them.

Seconds later he hit the floor. He'd fallen only a meter, but the pain was crippling. No, not pain, just more fear. The fear of pain. Worse even in common life than the pain itself. He stood up and grasped Sal, forming a blade in his hand.

The room was drenched in black and grotesquely surreal. Like the inside of an old cathedral dipped in tar. A palace patterned on frightful aesthetics. Anger. He hated the place, and it let him walk through it. The Geki surely never found this shortcut themselves. If they could function so calmly in their work, they must have truly become so immune to the fear they produced that they didn't need constant anger to navigate their own shrouds. Veikko's heart ran too fast. His teeth gritted themselves near to the point of shattering in his mouth. No, he had found a way through that they didn't suspect. They'd never see him coming.

The air was thin. High altitude, or elevation perhaps? The air was 2,500 meters thin. He was 2,500 meters up, more or less. The air was cold. But rich in its scents, pine and grass. He was on a mountain.

There was no door. Only an endless wall of gothic decoration and black gossamer.

He felt his way along the tangle, looking for any exit. Fear kept kicking him in the stomach. Insisting on itself. He wondered how much hatred was left in his system. It was tiring to be so angry. But anger has a way of snowballing, increasing itself. He fell to the floor and beat it with his fists, clawed at it with his nails. Red carpet. The decadence, he screamed with rage.

And looked up. At the base of the wall was a gap. An open gap into a cold blue light. He began to crawl.

Veikko found himself outdoors under the night sky. There was a canopy, though, more black webbing overhead like a threadbare tent. But the ground was rocky nature. Clumps of weeds and dirt. Ugly ground. He began to walk, looking back at his cage. It was a hole in the ground, in a hill. Like the entrance to an old mine. The discordant world played into his anger. All the better.

He crossed a road, an ancient paved road, cracked around its sides. He scanned the horizon. He could see dim mountains and hear a creek. And he could see red. Red lights, like a boat far away. He climbed over a fence at the roadside, black wire with barbs. They dug into his skin, and it felt sublime, pure sharp pain to piss him off. It granted him a moment of perfect clarity.

In that moment he saw the unquestionable core of the Geki's home. Draped in their signature coarse black cloak was their fortress, an unholy mixture of Egyptian temple and mutant porcupine, sticking out of a squat mountain. Veikko stepped toward it slowly and noticed the bizarre fortifications and fences, all at strange angles, all twisted and warped from any notion of linear architecture. Dim red lights spilled from what might have been windows under the cloak. Red lights also lit the moat surrounding it, making it glow like lava. Veikko walked toward the heart of fear.

He crossed a curvy bridge across the moat and came to a massive door in the building. Another strike of fear pierced his chest and told him not to open it. That whatever was inside was too vile to imagine. It sent him to his knees, demanded he turn back. Veikko hated demands. He rose up and burst through the door.

“‘
Land of Song!' said the warrior bard, though all the world betrays thee
.”

It was music.

“
One sword, at least, thy rights shall guard, one faithful harp shall praise thee
!”

It was Irish music. Veikko was caught by surprise and barely registered the rich, Victorian hall he stood in. He stood on a red carpet in a wood-paneled hall. He thought suddenly of
Alice in Wonderland
.

“
The Minstrel fell! But the foeman's chain could not bring his proud soul under
.”

Panic crawled over him and urged him on, Tikari at the ready, looking frantically around him. All the doors in the hall were closed except for one, from which a golden light shone.

He approached it. Fear of the unknown replaced panic, and it wasn't so bad. Veikko still boiled with rage, and the unknown held little sway over him. He felt proud. He was surviving. He was functioning. He came to the door.

Inside was a massive library. Thousands upon thousands of books covered the walls, putting Alf's collection to shame. In the center of the room was a chair sitting next to an antique record player.

“
The harp he loved ne'er spoke again for he tore its chords asunder
.”