This wasn’t her thing! She was good at people, not computers. Give her a room and a suspect and she’d tell you what he had for breakfast a week ago. But damn it, even with the easy interface Hel had set up, blocking Heid wasn’t in her wheelhouse.
Samantha needed help. Luckily, she knew just the computer geek for the job. She tapped a key to open a message window and dropped a line to Jeff. Captain Jeffrey Hunter wasn’t a close friend. He was something of a pain in her neck, to be honest. But he knew his geek shit, and he’d help her if she asked.
Dude. I need your help ASAP. Get off whatever game you’re playing, Samantha messaged.
There was a brief pause, then he replied. Sam? What the hell are you up to and why can’t I get a ping on your IP address?
Top secret. If I told you I’d have to kill you. Listen, we’ve got a Skynet Event in progress right now, Samantha typed. She figured he’d get the reference, and she didn’t want to type out details in a chat that was almost certainly being logged. I need your help to stop it.
No shit?
No shit. This is real as it gets. I’m sending you the IP right now. I’ve got it locked down, but if we get even a little data leak, it’s bad, Samantha typed.
OK, I’ve got a location on their server. No shit? Afterlife? You’re going to have to fill me in on what’s happening there, Jeff replied.
Later. No time now. How do we block the breakout? Samantha typed. She didn’t have the twenty or thirty minutes it would take to catch him up to speed. Hell, she wasn’t sure how much she should tell him at all.
I think the best bet it to DDOS the hell out of them. I’ve got some friends who can help. Hang tight. This should be fun, his message read.
Fun was the last thing Samantha would call this whole mess. Half of her wanted to freak the hell out about everything she’d seen in the last hour. The rest of her was keeping cool, calm, and collected. She figured there would be plenty of time to process later. Probably from the inside of a jail cell, at this point. Her prints were all over the gear in this room, and she’d been picked up on stacks of cameras. She wasn’t getting out of this one without consequences.
Jeff’s idea sounded good, though. A distributed denial of service attack could be used to take down even major internet services. Point enough browsers at a target IP address and ping it over and over until the thing crashed. Of course, servers were built with safeguards to stop this sort of thing from happening. From what Samantha had read, there was something of an arms race between hackers and server security people.
Mess up the connection between the Afterlife servers where Valhalla Online was hosted, and Heid wouldn’t be able to break out. The incoming traffic would freeze everything up. Hopefully it would, anyway. For the first time in her life Samantha wished she’d paid more attention to this geek shit.
Her console beeped insistently at her. Samantha switched back to the other screen, but it wasn’t Heid busting out. Confused for a moment, she alt-tabbed through her windows, looking for the problem.
It was her search parameters. They’d found a match, looking through the mess of code Hel uploaded. Samantha scrolled through the entry. It didn’t match anything else in the codebase. It didn’t honestly look like any sort of program she’d seen before. That had to be the dagger.
Samantha highlighted the entire thing and pressed the delete button.
Error. Cannot delete files which contain critical functions.
Damn, she was hoping that it would be easy. Well, there was more than one way to skin a dagger. She tried to cut the code out of the rest of the program. That didn’t work, either. Something was keeping her from removing it from the system.
Which explained why Hel didn’t just erase it herself in the first place. If it was as dangerous as she said, then it would have made more sense to destroy it than to hide it. If she could.
But if even Hel couldn’t destroy the code, how was she supposed to?
The alerts on Samantha’s screen grew more rapid. The defenses Hel uploaded to her were being overwhelmed. Heid was breaking lose. Another few minutes and she would crack the barriers. She’d have the dagger, then, and nothing would stop her from getting loose. Or block her once she was free.
Samantha could only think of one thing to do. If she couldn’t remove the dagger from the Afterlife system, then she could at least move it to someplace within the system where Heid might have a more difficult time acquiring it. Someplace Heid wouldn’t expect it to be. Someplace where it might cause more troubles for the AI than she was expecting.
She grinned. There was one place she could think to send it that fit the bill perfectly. Samantha tapped in a series of commands, preparing to move the dagger.
The door slammed open, startling her. She pushed back from the console and half-stood. A guard in uniform moved quickly through the doorway, followed by three more. All of them had their sidearms up and aimed at her. She froze.
“Don’t move! Stay right where you are!” The nearest guard was shouting at Samantha as he closed the gap between them.
How had they found her? Maybe she’d missed something, or maybe when Hel died some of the masks she’d put in place to get Samantha access to this building had gone away with her. No way to tell for sure. Samantha glanced at her computer screen, moving just her eyes. The cursor blinked there, flashing and ready, taunting her.
She hadn’t pressed return. The dagger was still sitting there, an apple ready for Heid to pluck it up. Samantha twitched a hand toward the keyboard. If she could just touch that key…!
“Don’t even think about it! Keep your hands away from the computer!” the guard shouted.
He was only a couple of feet away now, one of the other men moving around behind her with handcuffs. She knew the drill. Ten seconds from now they’d have her in cuffs and any chance to stop Heid would be gone forever. There wasn’t time to explain the situation to these people. They wouldn’t believe her, not until it was too late.
Samantha closed her eyes. There was only one thing she could do. This was going to suck. She opened her eyes again.
Then she lunged toward the keyboard, fingers outstretched, her entire focus on one thing: pressing the button that would save everyone she loved.
Her finger touched the key as the sound of the gunshots reached her ears. She drove the button downward as the slugs slammed into her chest. One, two, the bullets hit like pile-drivers smacking into her body.
But she’d pushed the button.
34
Sam took the spiral stairs two at a time, rushing to reach the top as quickly as possible. There was no way to tell how long she had left before Heid broke down the barriers pinning her in Valhalla. Once she broke loose, she could flee to any corner of the internet that she wanted to hide in. She’d be almost impossible to find.
The sword was a heavy weight in her right hand. Even though Sam had used healing magic to help restore her health and staunch the bleeding wound in her side, the injury still took too much out of her. She was winded by the time she’d climbed half the steps, and slowed down. There was no point reaching the top more quickly if it also meant she was too exhausted to fight when she arrived.
It was just after she slowed her pace that she felt something appear in her left hand. She almost dropped it before she realized what it was and grabbed hold in a tight grip.
A jet black dagger rested in her closed fist. The dim light cast from above cast bright reflections in the glass-like surface. Sam sucked in a breath. That had to be Hel’s dagger. The real one, not the fake version Heid held. When Sam looked closer, she saw a small typewritten note in her hand with the weapon. Sheathing her sword, she eyed over the message.
Couldn’t find a way to destroy the code and it wouldn’t leave the server. Heid is very close to breaking out, so I did the only thing I could think to do with the dagger code once I found it. Hopefully it will prove of use to you. Good luck! I’ll hold her as long as I can.
Sam
Sam smil
ed. Well, it wasn’t the ideal situation. It would have been better if the dagger was erased. But if her other self couldn’t do that, Sam was glad to have it in her hands instead of the AI’s. She slipped the dagger carefully into her belt where she could grab it quickly.
There’d only be one shot with the thing before Heid knew she had it and took it from her. She would have one chance to kill the goddess. It was up to her to make it count.
Heavy footsteps landed on the steps above her, and Sam looked up to see stony feet descending. It was Harald. She took a step back, almost stumbling down the spiral stairs.
“Sam, go back. I don’t want to see her hurt you,” Harald rumbled.
Sam growled in the back of her throat. “Damn it, Harald. Why? I don’t understand.”
“It’s…I can’t explain,” Harald said, holding his hands up helplessly.
Sam slipped her bow from her back. “Try.”
“That’s not going to do much against me,” Harald observed, tapping his neck. “But you already knew that. Sam, go back. Cassie needs me. I failed her once. I won’t let her down again.”
“Cassie? Who the hell is Cassie?” Sam asked.
“Cassandra was one of the alpha testers, along with me. She — I loved her. But things were bad in those days. I couldn’t save her,” Harald’s face crumpled. “I thought she was gone, destroyed, erased completely. But seeing Heid and then Hel, I knew that wasn’t true.”
Sam recalled bits of what the AIs had said around Harald and started putting two and two together. “Fragments of her code survived the erasure.”
“And became the foundation around which two artificial intelligences formed,” Harald said, nodding. “Now one of those is gone. All that’s left of Cassie is in Heid. I have to help her, don’t you see?”
Sam snapped back at him. “No. I don’t see. I’m your friend. But even that aside, what Heid plans to do when she gets out of here is horrible. Even if you don’t care about me or anyone else here, I can’t believe you don’t give a damn about the rest of humanity!”
“I’ll find a way to convince her not to hurt anyone, Sam. She’s made of bits of Cassie. Her goodness still has to be in there, somewhere,” Harald said.
Sam only had to consider that for a moment to discard it. This wasn’t some sort of movie plotline where there was ‘still good’ in the villain. She’d met herself, her real-world self. Even the brief interaction they’d had was enough to convince Sam that they’d become entirely different people. They’s started off as precise duplicates, perhaps, but that was no longer true. Sam had seen and done too much that her real-world double never had. They were similar, but not identical, not anymore.
How much more different would Heid be from this Cassandra, if she was only partly made up of Cassie’s persona in the first place? Shards of this dead person were bound up in other code and turned into something else.
Heid wasn’t Cassie. She wasn’t even close.
“If you’re standing with her, then you’re a threat to everyone I love, Harald. Step aside,” Sam said. She drew and nocked an arrow.
“That won’t kill me, Sam,” he replied as he started down the steps again.
Sam nodded. “I know.”
Then she fired the shaft, not at Harald but at the steps beneath his feet. They disintegrated under him. Suddenly standing over open space, Harald plunged down. He hit the next layer of the winding spiral stair and shattered it, falling through. Sam heard a crash as he hit the bottom.
“That should keep him busy at least a little while,” Sam said. She didn’t put her bow away, just in case she needed to use another arrow quickly. Then she considered the steps ahead. The arrow deleted a large section of stonework. Jumping across would be hard, and she couldn’t fly.
But she could use her magic to get in a really good jump. Sam readied a massive flame blast and then released it behind her at the same moment she leaped to cross the gap in the steps.
The flames collided with the stairs beneath her feet. The blast scattered, but enough of the force came back at her that it helped boost her further into the air. It was enough. She made the crossing. Her feet weren't beneath her, so Sam tucked her head and rolled with the impact of landing. The steps bruised her shoulder, but she’d done it. She was safely across the gap.
Sam didn’t think Harald could make the jump, but she wasn’t willing to take any chances. She fired another arrow into the steps she’d just launched herself from. Just like before, the stairs vanished into mist once the arrow struck. The gap was now about twice as wide as it had been.
“Good luck crossing that one,” Sam muttered back over her shoulder. She could already hear Harald’s powerful steps ascending the stairs. He was running for everything he was worth. She didn’t want to wait around for him to arrive. “Time to go.”
Sam looked up. There was still a lot of stairway to climb if she wanted to get to Heid. Moving as fast as she could, she began to ascend again.
35
Sam had almost reached the top of the stairs when she heard the sound of stone cracking down below. She turned, whirled, and that saved her. A chunk of rock crashed into the wall a step ahead of her. If she’d kept going instead of stopping, that rock would have smashed in her head!
“Harald! Damn it, you almost killed me!” Sam shouted back at him.
He clung to the wall where she’d created a gap in the steps. One of his fists was buried in the stone. His feet were likewise dug into gaps in the stone. As Sam watched, Harald hammered out another hollow with his fist. He was literally creating hand and footholds for himself, carving them into the stone walls with his bare hands to cross the gap!
“Would have been better. Fast, clean, and you’d just respawn tomorrow,” Harald rumbled.
“Tomorrow! Too late too stop Heid, you mean,” Sam shouted back. She nocked another arrow to her bow.
Harald was almost to the far side of the gap. He shattered more stones with his fists, coming every closer to her. “Yes. You’d best fire that arrow, Sam. Or I will stop you.”
Sam’s aim wavered. If she took out the stones Harald clung to, she might be able to tumble him free, drop him to the ground below. But he was already close to reaching the stairs. He might be able to make the leap as the wall broke apart.
There was another answer. Her arrows wouldn’t kill Harald. Not one arrow, anyway. She well remembered the pain that they caused. Sam didn’t want to hurt him, but he wasn’t giving her much choice, either. Her aim wavered for another moment, giving Harald time to dig in yet another grip into the rock. He wasn’t going to stop unless she made him stop.
“Last chance, Harald. Stop now,” Sam called out.
“You know I won’t.”
“Yes,” Sam said. “I do know. I’m sorry.”
She hesitated only another moment and then released the arrow. It flew true, and struck Harald in the right shoulder. He cried out as the shaft sank into his stone form and the hack began its work. Tendrils of black wreathed out from the arrow, but the hammer amulet embedded in Harald’s neck shone with a brilliant silver light as it worked to fight off the arrow’s power.
The protection he carried would keep him alive, but Sam had hoped the pain would cause him to release the wall. He didn’t. If anything Harald clung even more stubbornly than before, striving to reach out toward the waiting steps. He wasn’t going to stop, and Sam couldn't afford to let him stop her.
She fired a second arrow.
Harald’s body convulsed with the pain of the impact. He screamed as two forces warred over his existence. The tremors almost made him let go, but somehow he hung on and staggered off the wall onto the stairs. He was on his knees at first, and Sam had another arrow on her string. But she didn’t know if the amulet would resist a third arrow. It might. Or it might erase her friend from existence forever.
She couldn’t take that chance. Sam released the arrow into the stairs underneath his feet instead, hoping to drop him as she had before. He was ready for it
this time, though. Harald leaped forward, diving onto solid steps as the ones where he’d been standing vanished.
He was closing on her now. Sam backed away. Her sword was useless here. Her magic might work, but Harald had already proven how much damage this form could withstand. She wasn’t at all confident that she could stop him before he killed her. Those arrows were the only tool she had that might work at all.
A bright flash of light caught her attention. Sam glanced up and saw brilliant fireworks lighting up the sky. Without realizing it, she’d backed right up onto the roof. Heid was there. Or rather, she was up another small flight of stairs, standing atop a pedestal. In front of her was a golden disk, shining brilliant light in all directions.
That was her gate out of Valhalla. Sam shouted up at her. “Everyone’s always trying to get into Valhalla, but you just have to go against the tide, don’t you?”
Heid didn’t reply. Whatever she was doing with the gate, it was using up most of her attention. Good! That meant her other self’s defenses were still holding out there in the real world. There was still time to stop her.
The sound of stone grinding against stone brought her attention back to Harald. The arrows had vanished. He was standing tall again, coming up the steps toward her and building speed as he ran. Sam fired another arrow into his chest, but he barely slowed, charging on through the pain. She fired a second time. Both shafts stuck out of his chest, the brilliant silver light again flashing bright from his neck as it battled against the arrows.
Harald grunted from the second impact. It staggered him, slowing his pace. But then he recovered from the stumble and continued on. Each step had to be an agony for him, but he wasn’t going to stop. He was going to force her to kill him. The thought broke Sam’s heart. Of all the people she’d met in Valhalla, of everyone she knew in this new life of hers, none of them meant more to her than Harald.
Valhalla Online 4: Hel Hath No Fury: A Ragnarok Saga LitRPG Story Page 14
