Ragnarok (32 page)

Still nothing. The warm fuzzy feeling turned into a sharp icicle.

“We should probably start fucking too.”

Clearly she wasn't even listening.

“Right here on this table.”

It was almost fun.

“I'll invite Umberto for a gangbang.”

“Did you know,” Vibeke reminisced, “Toshiro wrote a kids book before he joined up? He let me read it. It wasn't long. But it had drawings, the main character with his horn, copper dragons, a seed fairy. It was really cute.”

Vibs snorted. Violet stewed. She was tempted to keep going and see how raunchy she could get before Vibeke noticed, but it seemed too frivolous for the night. She scooched her chair closer and put her hand on Vibeke's. She didn't notice or didn't say anything if she did. Violet let the anger fade and the pleasant buzzing return, let her mind wander. She took another sip, and another. She thought drinking sounded like a great way to die.

 

 

A
TARGATIS
HATED
her job. She worked online, and she felt her body pay for it. She was growing limp and atrophied. Every day she spent two hours working out. She ate only health cubes. All to no avail, eight hours a day of lying inert still took their toll. She decided it was time to quit.

Unfortunately B&L decided she would stay. Her contract was for another twenty years and she was doing a fine job, so they told her she could stick with the job or go to prison. That was that.

Or at least it would have been for anyone but Atargatis. She logged right into her department head's office and demanded they renegotiate her contract. They wouldn't, of course. And after that the job got worse and worse. The pay went down, despite a contract clause stating it wouldn't. They didn't honor their own word. Atargatis sued, also to no avail given the company's lawyer system. Then her hours got cut. Then she got reassigned to synapse debugging, which she simply couldn't do. They were torturing her.

At the end of her rope, Atargatis picked up her bow for the first time in years. She hadn't had time for archery in so long, but well, they cut her hours so she had to do something. Once again she enjoyed the sweet thokk of an arrow flying and penetrating the soft target.

She did some digging and found the names and exact locations of her chain of command, all the way up to Will Fredard, its CEO, and she began shooting them. First came Cecelia Wongraven. She woke her from her dreamscape and put an arrow into her brain, penetrating just past her link. Cecelia's boss Alexei Bodom suffered the same fate, one arrow, halfway into the brain. His regional manager, Johnathan Mäenpää, was found alive but pierced the next day. She had shot her way up the corporate ladder all the way to Vice President of Acquisitions Martha Amon by the time police caught her.

The doctors noted that none of the victims were dead, or really in any danger of it. Every arrow had penetrated just far enough to sever the wetware matrix. None of the victims would ever work online again. In their careers, that was an ending blow. They were all back to square one, jobless and without the ability to do the only things they were good for.

The courts didn't care about poetic justice. Sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, Atargatis considered jumping from her high ring of the George C. Fisher High Security Panopticon, a prison infamously nicknamed the Gallery of Suicide. But she wasn't the suicidal type. Nor was she the type to live in a panopticon for the rest of her life. She vowed to escape or die trying.

Her first attempt was sloppy and brief. She attempted to wrestle the microwave from a guard and got her arm burned off.

Her second attempt was more subtle and clever but roughly as successful. She snuck from the floor detail to an out-of-prison work detail and managed to run four kilometers down the road before she was caught and sizzled by four broad beams.

The one armed, heavily tanned inmate made one last attempt to escape, and it was quite ambitious. She began by dunking and nearly drowning Frosty Haraldstadt, the kitchen supervisor, in a giant pot of chicken soup. Taking a knife, she stabbed one guard in the back and the other in the belly and took possession of one of their microwaves. She barbecued five more guards on her way to the gate. But despite her hostage, Tomas Tveitan, they refused to open the gate.

Atargatis did something nobody expected. She gave up the hostage and microwave and lay down to be taken. The prison didn't really care, nor did they care that all her attacks were skillfully nonfatal, nor did they care about her clever reasoning in giving up—the gate was her only way out. Once it was clear it wouldn't open based on a hostage situation, she knew the game was over and laid down her king. The prison guards were far more vicious to her ever after, and her sentence grew by centuries. Nobody at the prison was grateful for her restraint in the least, and certainly nobody there was a fan of her remarkable fighting skill.

G team, however, was very impressed.

 

 

M
ISHKA
KEPT
the radiophobic beam on her tank for half an hour longer than was necessary. She'd piloted an irradiated pogo on a mission for Valhalla, and her butt itched for weeks.

She wiped the gel off her eye and put it back in. She ran through the recording. There was no doubt it would be enough for the client. Vibeke was clearly visible and clearly crushed. She sent the video in to Red Boots. Almost immediately he linked back.

“Decent work, if a bit late. But Mars is Mars. The second half of the funds will be transferred tonight at midnight, minus the interrogation bonus. Little Boots is also willing to grant you right of first refusal for other assassinations. We need a good woman outside of the gang.”

“Thanks, I'll keep it in mind.”

“First refusal runs out in thirty minutes after each offer if we don't hear back from you. Out.”

R team had arrived far too early for comfort. She wouldn't be surprised if all of V team survived. She cursed Toshiro, at least she thought it was Toshiro. What kind of damn Valkyrie sacrifices himself? Vibeke was centimeters from the blast. Centimeters.

Mishka revved up the tank and trotted out of the cleanup system. She checked her Hashima nodes. No Valkyries had flown to Hashima, but with the Mars mission blindingly, spectacularly over, they'd be sending in a team to research it if not destroy it. Mishka had two distinct interests when they did: First, she had to be certain they didn't send V team. If Vibeke had lived, and she knew deep down that she had, Mishka couldn't have her showing up at the Wolf Gang's door. And less importantly, they were a paying client, and she didn't want Valhalla to erase them from the planet as they tended to do.

She set the tank to head to Nakanoshima, where she could monitor Hashima closely, and immersed herself online.

The news planetoids were going wild over the nuclear blast. It was the first in the lifetimes of anyone on Earth. UNEGA was publicly blaming GAUNE and throwing accusations like mad. GAUNE had more nuclear weapons than UNEGA. GAUNE wanted to destabilize the (mostly empty of any financial interest) region during their sensitive time of intracompany dispute.

But the company actions betrayed the truth. UNEGA truly believed it to be an act of either the Yakuza or the Unspeakable Darkness in their own fight. Presov marked the start of a full-scale earthbound civil war between Zaibatsu's subsidiaries. UNEGA was putting the utmost pressure on Zaibatsu to take care of the problem peacefully, but the YUP was disassembled, and there was no legally usable peacekeeping force powerful enough to suppress either subsidiary.

GAUNE denied any involvement, honestly, but there was no chance whatsoever they wouldn't try to take advantage of the situation. The nuclear blast was not an act of war, but it would be a perfect excuse for one to UNEGA, and GAUNE would want to take over as many assets as possible before they had the chance. With UNEGA in shambles, nobody on Earth expected GAUNE to sit back and let things resolve themselves.

Peacekeepers were at a loss to control the situation. Most of them had plans to drop a squid on it in one way or another, but the companies were closed off to their projections and pleas. Even the famous Nate Sanderson was at a loss to compel the companies to work toward a peaceful solution.

Mishka watched the situation closely. Not in the hopes of a lasting world peace, but for her next job. Assassination requests would soon be booming.

 

 

A
TARGATIS
,
NOW
named Thokk, arrived without ceremony and knew her place from the outset—replacing a long honored member. It was T team's mandate that G send them the first replacement possible. They all had the intense urge to move on, to avoid any mourning period, and to become an effective team as soon as possible. Tahir would admit the three-person team's prospect of constant walrus duty might have been a slight motivator.

Her adjustment was not without some problems. Firstly, she was upset that bows and arrows weren't used at all in the ravine. She kept one for sport, but it wasn't a Valkyrie standard. She insisted on using hers with her new arm for kill training but in time had to depend on her Tikari. She was disappointed again that Tikaris weren't flexible enough to act as bows, either. Of course nobody who gets a Tikari objects for too long, but she was never happy about her most treasured skill going to waste.

Her age saw her butting heads with a few senior team members who didn't recognize her life experience, reminding her it was all outside the ravine and therefore meant nothing. But she was a couple years older than anyone in O and P and felt they condescended a bit much.

Her biggest rivalry was with Balder. The first time they met, he was impressed by her name and suggested she simply shortened it to “Targ” to fit in with T team. She took offense to the name, explaining it was the name of a type of horned furry pig. Balder didn't grasp her reference, and things were awkward for them ever since.

She didn't take well to his dislike of religion and challenged him on it frequently, even going so far as to write an article in
Håvamål
, on her first day, which Alf enjoyed but Balder found to be a personal attack. But still he set out to teach her and teach her well.

She got along with Tasha and Trygve far better. Fitting their psychological profiles as G predicted, the team grew tight within a day. Tahir and Thokk grew more than tight within a day, and it pissed Violet off in the extreme. The notion of an in-team romance starting instantly filled her with envy and regret. Thokk never understood why Violet was so cold to her, but Tahir explained it was her own problem and nothing that reflected on Thokk.

It might have been the loss of his closest friend, it might have been Thokk's thrill at escaping her miserable previous life, but the two bonded fast. As if they were caught in a whirlwind, desperate for each other. Tahir didn't hide it well. He was like a schoolboy with a crush at first, oblivious to how hot she found his timid act. She kissed him first, and after that first kiss, when he felt her finger on the back of his suit, he grabbed her as tight as he could and pounced on her.

She missed training with Balder that morning, an extreme rarity among new recruits. Balder was quite disappointed.

 

 

D
R
. N
IIDE
looked over Violet and the other six for any signs of residual problems from their repair a few days prior. He began to mutter his usual subvocalizations of “severe” and “permanent,” but the teams' faces forbid his usual remarks, and he left, almost apologetic.

Nurse Taake explained, “He's sad you couldn't bring Toshiro back.”

“Poor him,” muttered Tasha.

“It's not sympathy. He wants to try out some new mods, wanted to build someone from scratch.”

“I'm sorry our partner's death didn't suit him.”

“We stay detached,” the nurse defended. “What we lack in bedside manner, we make up for in efficiency. You're all clear.”

They hopped off the medical tables and headed for the tailor.

Eric was solemn but still congratulated them on destroying the Ares in the nick of time. He had their new suits ready. They were completely identical to the originals and even felt broken in. Valknut kept trying to find any fault so they wouldn't have to head to their next meeting. Though the mission was a success, the matter of the nuclear bomb was sure to be a topic of discussion in the meeting with Alf and Balder. There would be no avoiding it, and they couldn't have anything nice to say about it. As the team entered the library, Alf handed a small black book to his Tikari and sent it to deposit the book on a high shelf.

“Twenty-nine years of nuclear arms intelligence I've logged in that book. I never expected to write in it that one had gone off.”

Violet swallowed.

“Don't tell Balder I said this”—Balder stood right next to him and pursed his lips—“but I'm glad I lived to see it. A mushroom cloud, hot and bright in our day and age.”

Violet remembered the bright heat, the fire that burned through her inside and out. She was certain Alf was happy enough to have seen it only through their visual memory.

“I must have watched every old clip of the testing, seen every film-caught photograph of every cloud, and I never thought I'd see a new one. The Ares vaporizing within it was a mere bonus by comparison to see the fireball rise, sucking the dust up with it. Mmm. But we are to deal with another matter first. Varg.”

Varg stood at attention, an odd habit of his, considering he'd never been in any military.

“We need to convince the world that the Blackwing has been destroyed. H suggests that simply using its main thruster will provide a large enough explosion to catch everyone's attention and that a specialized fluff bomb will convince them of its demise.”