Ragnarok (13 page)

Violet's team stood on the rocky floor outside of C team's office. Veikko broke the silence. “I think she's gonna rip his balls off.”

Violet had been in there for several minutes, and no nurses were on their way. Vibeke was afraid for her. She couldn't fathom why Violet and not herself would be held back. She felt sick from the fiasco. The net had seen worse; this wasn't even the worst net disaster of the year. Months earlier the entire Kelpo net fell apart, killing hundreds of users. Before that the British Columbia link service went out and sent over 9000 businesses into bankruptcy. The Nikkei crash killed only a couple dozen when all was said and done, and those were all criminal slime anyway. And it wasn't Vibeke who did it. The Geki were right; it was the Crag. It was Bill Ulster. Their provocation meant little to nothing.

“And stuff them down his throat, just wait, the nurses will be here any minute,” added Varg.

But they didn't find Mishka. All trace of her was gone now. With the Crag gone and the Undernet with it, Mishka might respawn her mercenary marketing on any of the lesser Undernets. Even if she did, Vibeke wouldn't be on the case. She'd watch Veikko's kids take the woman down. W team, babies. None of them had even died yet. Some in the ravine said the teams just kept getting better and better. Maybe it was true. Maybe Wart and his crew would never die. They'd just outshine V in every way, capture Mishka, save the planet, and leave Vibs with the damn coffin on her collar, the last time a junior team member got herself briefly killed.

Violet stepped out of the office. Her armor was sadly devoid of blood. Cato closed his door behind her. He looked happy enough. And Violet didn't look half-mad either.

“What did he say?” asked Varg.

Veikko hurried to ask, “Did you rip his balls off?”

“Did he give you more shit about the Nikkei?” questioned Vibeke.

“Where are his balls?”

“Are you okay, Violet?” Varg whispered.

“Did you stuff the balls down his throat?”

“Geez, Veikko, his balls are in his pants. Let the girl talk,” Varg finished.

Violet considered how best to summarize. “When we were down there, I saw a meeting on the Undernet, something about a major shipment from Mars. Apparently C is always on the lookout for that one spec. There's something there that could…. Well, Cato wants us to talk to Alf. We need to run an investigation and…. He said if it is what he thinks it is, we have one hell of a mission to do.”

“Great. New crap,” muttered Vibeke.

“He did say we'd get to save the planet,” Violet pushed.

“I'm all for that,” added Veikko. Varg nodded as well.

Vibeke thought about the situation. V team hadn't had a global save yet, even T had topped out at half a continent. If she were ever going to give up on Mishka, the time was now. Or at least time to stop thinking about her and move on to bigger fish. Save the planet. Maybe see Mars. All the Valkyrie fun and games. She managed to spit up the words.

“Yeah, let's do it,” she said. But felt deep down like it was just another insult, another reminder of failure after failure to destroy the bitch to end all bitches. Vibeke would give the new mission her all, but felt like, after the Nikkei and Cato, the day couldn't get any worse.

“Veikko, Vibeke, Violet, Varg,” linked Alopex, “Hangar 18, Walrus Detail.”

 

 

T
HE
FOX
shrieked and fell under the treads. Carrie hit the brakes, and the snowcat ground to a halt. Snorri hopped out into the snow to take a look.

“Is it okay?” Carrie shouted.

Snorri checked over the poor creature. It was dazed but still alive. He took off his right glove and stroked the animal, felt along its ribs and limbs.

“I think so!” he called back. “Just stunned.”

He lurched back through the snow, cradling the fox in one arm and pulling himself up to the cab with his other.

“What are you doing?” asked Carrie.

Snorri looked at her, then the fox.

“Could still be seriously injured,” he explained. “I'm not leaving it out there.”

“We can't keep a fox where we're going.”

“Why not? We had a parakeet on Luna. That's a bigger deal than this.”

Carrie didn't reply, it was no use. If Snorri got his mind around something, there was no point in arguing. She'd just stay silent as the man tried to explain a damn fox to the project supervisor. The snowcat plodded east. They had one more day to get to Kvitøya before the melt got bad enough to break ice.
Funny
, Carrie thought,
we're trying to melt the ice on Mars, and we can't keep the ice frozen here on Earth.

They arrived at the ravine. As it happened, the project supervisor thought the fox was adorable. That didn't stop her from sticking the couple in a corner barrack not a meter away from a dead rotting walrus. They fell asleep despite the smell but woke up their first day to the blast and splatter of an inept technician trying to dispose of the walrus with mining explosives. She ordered them the next morning to help dispose of the walrus chunks and mop up the ravine floor. Two programmers mopping up guts. Carrie was about to quit right then and there, but Snorri reminded her of the contract. Two years on the Ares Project. Finish the contract, and they'd have 137,000 euros each and islands named for them on Mars. Bail, and they'd spend the time doing hard labor. They got on their knees and mopped up dead walrus.

No day was ever so bad as the first. Leo the fox recovered fast and grew popular among the scientists and construction personnel alike. As Snorri began programming the pattern extraction algorithms
for the Ares computers, he put Leo's face on the hard drive icon. Soon after, Leo was the mascot of the whole project. And what a project it was. A year earlier one of the Ares whiz kids had invented “hydromacrosis.” He had altered the Aufbau Lattice in hydrogen in
such a way that it could, given the proper Zeeman kick, form the same lattice in any other hydrogen atom it touched. An infectiously obese Aufbau. He had quickly altered a liter of water and found that it suddenly took up three liters. It also lost the ability to freeze at anything but near absolute zero or boil at anything short of fissile temperatures.

As other scientists back down south applied the principle to make supercooled water systems, the fifteen-year-old genius Valfar Bakken sailed north to Kvitøya to work on the most profitable project his invention could accomplish. Mars had water but not nearly enough of it to terraform the planet, nor was the temperature of Mars high enough to keep the stuff liquid. And he had invented subfreezing water that took up three times the volume of the natural stuff. All he had to do was invent a way to force it to infect the Martian polar caps in their entirety.

He had demonstrated, in a most unscientific move of drinking his “fat water,” that it was in fact drinkable and usable by the body. Later tests showed that fish could breathe it with no problem. It had exceptional heat insulation qualities, and it kept its original mass. Only the molecular density and gross volume changed. It was great stuff. If little Valfar had owned the patent instead of his native company, he might have been rich. But as it was, Jamaica owned all the inventions of its citizens, and the same company that owned Jamaica owned Ares. So Valfar headed north, bundled in jackets and thermal underwear, to tell Snorri what he was doing wrong.

Snorri detested the upstart, but it was still good work. It would pay very well, and when he was offered a second contract, he took it, this time for four years. He forgot to ask Carrie. She headed home, two years older and two years richer, leaving Snorri and Leo to the cold north. That suited Snorri just fine. He met Veronika when she came in on the next boat. Within the month, they went to Maximilian Quorthon, director of human resources, to marry them. The project grew and grew. The ravine was carved deeper and deeper into the rock and in the center, Valfar's magnum opus began to sprout. The YGDR S/L system grew like a tree. The engineers and construction details kept armoring the sides, but the actual power source, the thing that could create the Zeeman kick, had to be grown from a chemical bath. Snorri couldn't fathom the thing. It was so new, and he felt so old in those days that he never tried.

His only concern was the overrides. He was there to program the computers, not to learn about the thing they controlled. By the time Snorri and Veronika were welcoming a new bride, Kristina, into their marriage, he had most of the system complete. Quorthon was governing an entire village of company men, women, and others and
had Snorri program up a village counsel. And Valfar, the day after he finished the giant twisted tree of a power plant, began work on the fat water. He had calculated that in order to spread the Zeeman kick to an ice cap, he'd need just under 1,000 kilograms of fat water. A mass three times the size of 1,000 kilos of normal water to coat the big tree. Engineers built the distilleries deep in the ravine caves. They built three massive specialized tanks near the YGDR S/L to hold the stuff. They sent Ares the bill for fat water distillation, just over 75,000 euros per liter.

As the stuff came out drop by drop, Valfar began to pester Snorri more and more about the override programming—about backups for it, backups for the backups, a dozen layers of activation security, backups for the security—so much programming he had to give Leo an AI to handle it all. “Leo” referred only to a computer by then. The fox had died at a ripe old age in Snorri's lap. As the fat water was finished and Valfar began to stick it to the YGDR S/L, Snorri was working up the nerve to ask Quorthon's daughter on a four-way date and the Ares Company was running out of funds. Mars was far away, and the executives were coming to realize that they might not be able to afford sending the thing there. The news sent Valfar into a panic. As soon as he heard about the possible shutdown, he ran to Snorri and began reviewing the overrides again.

“Damn it, kid,” Snorri objected, “I've shown you this crap ten thousand times. It's as secure as it gets! This thing can't turn on unless you and fifty other men give it the go-ahead.”

“The fat water's
on
the power system, Snorri. It's there and ready to go.”

“And if it goes to Mars someday, it'll take them a year to activate it thanks to all this junk.”

“Look, Snorri. You know how this thing works. We don't want it here a second longer than it has to be. I'm going to start taking the fat water off tonight if we don't hear word from central.”

“Why? Why are you so damn uptight about it sitting there?”

“Because it reaches the top of the ravine!”

“And?”

“Think about it, Snorri. It triples the size of the water it touches. If it activates here and touches the ocean, Mt. Everest would go under.”

That same night, the Ares executives in a rare moment of corporate concern and wisdom decided the thing was too dangerous to leave intact. Or even on Earth. They had funds to ship 10,000 kilograms to Mars. Not enough for the whole thing—the power plant weighed ten times that. But they could move the water supply and keep the Earth safe. Valfar supervised as they siphoned off the fat water and shipped it to Spitsbergen Spaceport in the massive safety tanks that took up the rest of the budget to move. As the rocket took off, Ares Corporation went out of business.

With no more company, the hundred and fifty residents of the pit lost their contracts and transport fees back down south. But not many really wanted to leave. They had a home in that ravine, a chance for life away from the company betrayals and fights and life they'd left behind. Almost everyone stayed. Valfar never got used to the cold, but he managed to keep busy. He focused on the trivialities of life in the pit. He built a movie projector from scratch and downloaded half the movies on the net to the thing. Quorthon brought in a few new cooks and kept the ravine alive and very peaceful.

Snorri finally asked Quorthon's daughter, Merrit, out on a date. She hit it off with his wives spectacularly and moved into their cabin not long after. Snorri had built the place out of brick, not too different, he said, from laying out binary. In his spare time, he'd work on his chronicles of the Ares Project and the ravine, or sleep with his gorgeous and plentiful wives, or retrofit the Leo program with new tricks and gizmos. As its AI developed, he decided to make a few changes to the original fox, which reminded him too much of Carrie. The last wife who got away. Not that he dwelt on her loss too often. He had Veronika, a master programmer. Kristina, a master climatologist. And Merrit. She had the most beautiful voice he'd ever heard.

 

 

“S
O
WE
go to Mars and boil the fat water before they can bring it home?” asked Violet.

“Fat water doesn't boil,” explained Vibeke, “not short of fission. We should let them take off, then send the transport into the sun.”

“Exactly my thoughts, Vibeke,” Alf said with admiration, “but not Valfar's.”

Valfar began in his unintelligible accent, “The sun is a fusion engine. In the same way deuterium accelerates fusion, fat water is a ‘quantum isotope' of sorts. Its infectious rate is amplified by the internuclear energy and the shattering electrostatic force is exponential due to my tinkering. If a single drop of heavy water entered a fusion reaction, the result would be extraordinary.”

“So this stuff,” asked Veikko, “can destroy the sun too?”

“Oh no! Not at all,” explained Valfar happily. “The sun would do great. It would grow up to be larger than Woogie 64 and Canis. In fact Canis Majoris may well be a fat-water-based reaction. The sun would love fat water. It's only the planets that would be destroyed,” he smiled proudly, then frowned.

Varg asked bluntly, “What about a fusion bomb on Earth? Standard Tsar Yield?”