Starship Ragnarok

by Alex Oliver

  While the crew had been imprisoned here, Freya in her chariot had returned them all to where they had started. Just as Ruari said—to the boundaries of their galaxy. And now those boundaries were under attack.

  The diamond-waked ships were visible now, and they were beautiful. Sleek, dark arrowheads that gleamed in the galaxy's light. Everything about the shape of them said sharp. Danger. Yas caught his breath.

  The view of space flicked out. He realized the apparent hole in the chariot was a view-screen when it flickered and suddenly it was showing the interior of a ship. Its shapes were hard for Yas to make out. There was barely any light and every surface was a glossy black. Instruments cast a peculiar silver-blue evanescent glow that hovered in the air like a bioluminescent pollen. He thought it was deserted at first until a sharp movement drew his eye and his brain suddenly resolved part of the darkness into a black figure with jet black skin in a black uniform. The creature opened its eyes, and they were molten gold, the same color as its hair.

  "Kelkalyn, son of Kruin," Freya drew herself up, her chin raised and her mouth set in a defiant smile. "How strange to see you, just after my chariot was attacked by giants. Did you come to my aid? If so, you are a little late."

  "You know why I came," the creature said, moving forward into the haze of light. Now that its face was in motion, Yas could see that it had taken the form of a young and beautiful man, but taller, sharper and slighter. Like Ruari.

  "I came to prevent you from creating another army of enslaved idiots. While you were willing to ignore them, so were we. But you shall not fill your halls with a new race of champions you intend to unleash on us."

  This seemed to Yas to be a fair concern. He didn't want humanity to be used that way either.

  "What do you intend to do about it?" Freya asked, coolly, and Yas noted that she didn't deny it.

  "This." Kelkalyn made a jerky movement—Yas parsed it because his hand left a trail through that haze of light, and a pin or cufflink glittered at his wrist as he raised it.

  Immediately every one in the fleet of small ships let loose a beam the color of bone. They hit the orbital structures above the gate world, and sliced them into a million shards. Then still working as a singular entity, the beam slid down toward the planetoid's surface itself.

  "No!" Yas yelled, leaping to his feet. He was fixed abruptly by a golden-eyed stare. Kelkalyn, seemed almost as surprised as Freya that one of her people would speak out of turn. Yas could make out his face now, quite clearly, entirely through the sharpening effect of boiling rage.

  Kelkalyn was smiling. He was smiling as the bone beam hit the first of the domes of the settlement and drove through them. Shards of habitation material peeled off and went flying. The ground smoked beneath them.

  "Do something!" Yas demanded, turning to Freya, with the dark alf's smile burning like a bomb in the back of his mind. She recoiled as if she'd been slapped, but a moment later she was poised again. Holding her clasped hands to her chest as if in shock, she nodded.

  "Champions! To the skies once more. Drive these dark creatures from our shores."

  Half the warriors were dead drunk on the ground. As light alfr went among them, sobering them, getting them up, Kelkalyn's ships turned about and leveled the settlement from the opposite direction. The viewscreen was sharp enough that Yas could see bodies being thrown up from the ground, fast enough that they were breaking free of the planetoid's gravity and spiraling away.

  A force of three thousand mounted warriors launched from the other wheel, but it was far too late. The arrowhead ships curved over the planetoid, used its gravity to slingshot around it and were gone, back into the darkness from which they came.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The execution chamber

  The crew returned to their barn-cum-pavilion where basins of water had been set out for washing and piles of new clothes lay on each sleeping bench. Yas had been given a tunic and trouser combination of yellow and red linen, which was better than the all white outfit, but not by much. This was clearly how they earned their living, was it? By defeating whoever Freya sent them to defeat, like the pet bullies of a local crime-lord, beating people up for treats.

  Desultory and the doctor were still in their corner, and Yas made sure to bring over his bowl of stew and jug of water in case the Ocuilin had not dared to move. "Did you see that?" he said. "They bombed the hell out of the outpost and killed everyone living there."

  "I saw," the doctor agreed, as Yas tuned his own datapad to translate Desultory's speech. "Now I expect you to try to argue that Freya is the lesser evil. That these dark alfr are the true enemy. Antagonist. Foe."

  "I don't know," Yas slumped to the ground next to the two and took a spoonful of stew. It was, of course, delicious, and something about that really annoyed him. "I mean, she is keeping us alive, and the dark alf guys are killing us, so..."

  He watched glumly as Desultory extruded a pseudopod into the rest of his meal and sucked it slowly in. Some of the shades of violet on his skin lightened as he turned to the water. "Have you asked her yet what she intends for us?"

  "I'm sorry, no. I think I gave myself away by shouting at her. She looked at me like she'd finally realized whatever it is she's doing to the others isn't working on me. I'm a little afraid that—"

  "Non-human creatures," a voice from behind him snapped. He turned to find Red-beard and his friend from yesterday, both with spears in their hands and long hauberks of steel rings. "You will come with us."

  "Why?" Yas asked, but Red-beard ignored him in favor of lowering the spear and jamming the tip of it against the doctor's throat. They met with a tinking noise of metal against metal. It was highly unlikely that a mere spear in the hands of a man of ordinary strength could do anything to damage the doctor's duranium skeleton, but Yas remembered having to reassemble the guy out of spare parts only yesterday and feared that it might not be an ordinary spear.

  "Up you get, abomination."

  "Hey!" Yas scrambled to his feet and went to push Red-beard in the chest. The next thing he knew, his wrist had been seized and twisted and he found himself flipped over his own shoulder onto the ground. Meanwhile the other guard was poking Desultory in the side with his own spear. Desultory managed to flow around the obstruction without getting cut, but he had gone an almost neon orange with fear and something like shame.

  "Captain!" Yas called, "Ambassador Sasara! They want to take Desultory and the doctor away."

  Harcrow looked over, frowned and ambled toward them. "What's with the poking?" he objected. "My people will come with you freely. There's no need to threaten."

  That was not quite as helpful as Yas wanted. "Ambassador?" he asked again, with a pleading expression."

  "I think it's a good thing that Freya is finally turning her mind toward greeting our colleagues," Sasara said, infuriatingly untroubled. "Singling them out makes sense, since they are singular themselves. She has our best interests at heart, I'm sure.” She turned to smile at the two non-humans. “You should both go."

  "Fine, but I'm coming with you," Yas insisted. He didn't like this. There was so much wrong about the whole situation from the crew's obliviousness onward, and he couldn't understand why no one was seeing it but him.

  "You will not come," Red-beard reversed his spear and prodded Yas in the shoulder with the butt. "You will stay here and join the celebration being held for you. You could try being a little less ungrateful."

  "Ungrateful?" Yas exclaimed. "Ungrateful for being kidnapped and impressed to someone's army without my consent? Ungrateful for watching my team-mates get neglected and my people blown up? And for being thrown around by thugs like you? That's not how we do things in the Alliance, and you could learn a few things from us."

  Red-beard flushed to the roots of his very pale hair. A flush of anger, it looked like. He turned to Harcrow. "You are the war-leader of this band? Get them into order before someone begins to suspect that you are spies for the Proteans yourselves."

&
nbsp; "Proteans?" Harcrow asked, and Yas felt a moment's fondness for him. That was a good part of the sentence to home in on.

  Red-beard huffed with disgust. "You are among the first humans chosen by Freya for thirty generations. We were all so excited to meet you, to find out what the gods' worshipers had been doing all these years. To experience a little of your awe and gladness that they were back and your prayers had been answered. Every time I go home, my family ask me 'what are they like, these new humans? Did they weep with happiness? Do they understand how lucky they are?' I wish you were not such a disappointment to us."

  "Well, you know you can just throw us back," Yas said, because Captain Harcrow was frowning at this like it had wounded him. And because he knew that the Captain's feed was playing these images back to whoever was watching, and they deserved to know that not everyone in the Alliance had gone down with slavering servility.

  Red-beard shook his head, with a long exhale of breath, and addressed the Captain again. "He cannot come with us. Keep him here."

  Meanwhile two light alfr and another two guards had turned up. One of the guards was a woman in a feather cloak, carrying the slightly larger spear with the intricate gold knotwork around the head that Yas recognized as a beam weapon in disguise. This could certainly hurt the doctor, and judging from the holes such weapons had left in the giants, it could vaporize Desultory in one blow.

  "It's fine," the doctor rose from his bench and Desultory slid out between the wooden slats that held it up. It was like watching a gorgeous lump of glitter-putty ooze out of its box, and Yas didn't understand why nobody else seemed to find the Ocuilin beautiful. "We will come."

  "What if they want to hurt you?" Yas stood very still with one of the guards' spear tips just touching the skin beneath his jaw. This was an ordinary spear, but it would slit his throat perfectly well.

  "Why would you care?" Red-beard scoffed. "They're only abominations."

  Yas's skin went cold all down his back. History books had been very clear on what happened when you started calling people that word. The Alliance school system had drilled into them all the necessity of respecting diverse forms of life, diverse forms of people. "How else can we learn and grow except by encountering and understanding—coming to love—that which is strange to us?" That was the ethos of the Native-Xeno Alliance. He had seen footage of wars and atrocities enough to know what happened if you treated the Other as something that needed to be assimilated or destroyed.

  "Captain!" He objected again, glad to see the expressions of uncertainty on his crew's faces. Even they, brainwashed as they were, knew at some level that this wasn't right.

  "Can we talk to Freya about this?" the Captain said, addressing the woman with the white cloak. It was obvious enough that the cloak and spear were markers of some kind of authority.

  "Of course," she said, smiling. "But your creatures must come with us first."

  "Yes. Affirmative. Yeah yeah," the doctor nodded. "This discussion is at a standstill. Let's break the loop."

  Yas watched them go. The doctor like a steel skeleton from the back, except for the backpack where the majority of his processing power was stored, and Desultory like a river of coral with his remoras clinging to him as if they were afraid to detach and do their jobs. Both of them were deceptively harmless. Certainly Yas had seen an Ocuilin engulf and almost suffocate a student back at the Academy, and the doctor was probably stronger and more capable of violence than anyone other than Keva—if he had the programming to use it. They were not helpless. They had managed without him all their lives and doubtlessly would do so again right now.

  Once they had gone out into the train station the remaining guard lowered his spear from Yas's throat, bowed and walked away. Yas didn't wait for conversation or permission. He sprinted straight after them.

  When he got there, the platform was empty. He despaired for a moment, but then noticed the slime Desultory had left, gleaming against the brassy surface. The remoras usually cleaned that up, but now it formed a perfect trail, leading right to the end of this platform and out of another arch. Quietly as he could, Yas followed it.

  The arch lead into a corridor too small for a hover-boat train. Here the shining brass of the decor had dimmed into a verdigris green. Yas could hear the footsteps up ahead: The two guards in their heavy leather boots; The cloaked woman with a lighter tread but a harder shoe; The doctor with the thud of rubber against metal - his feet were equipped with rubber soles to stop him from slipping. There were no sounds from Desultory, of course - he flowed on his thin carpet of slime.

  Between the trail and the sounds, it was easy for Yas to follow, even though entrances to other tunnels opened often on either side. Without the trail, he would have been almost instantly lost.

  They seemed to be traveling downhill, into the less salubrious workings of the chariot. Away from the tiny, artificial sun, the air grew colder and the passage was lit only by torches that seemed to burn with an inexhaustible fire. Yas fought the urge to roll his eyes. She was very wedded to her medieval aesthetic, wasn't she?

  At length, the trail passed through an archway closed with a forbidding gate. It looked like the end of his journey, but when he tried it, he found it opened easily. Something scalpel sharp had sliced through the lock. Grinning, remembering that the doctor had in-built laser scalpels in his fingertips, Yas entered.

  Inside, corroded steps lead into a circular pit. He saw Desultory and the doctor waiting on the base of the pit, where a pathway lead up to a circle of metal that shone like silver. There, a creature that must have been one of the dark alfr knelt in chains. Perhaps the folk from the other wheel had had some success in going up against the space ships after all?

  It was easier to see the alf out of her natural environment. She really was jet black. This one had copper hair, though, and her eyes were dimmer than the furious gold of Kelkalyn.

  "Llamryn daughter of Sharael," a voice spoke from the ceiling, where Yas now saw the grill of a speaker, next to a silver circle that matched the one in the ground. "For your enmity and your continued resistance, you are sentenced to death."

  The dark alf snarled upward, so the white light that burst from the upper circle hit her in the face first. For a long, horrible moment, she seemed to melt, twisting in torment as every part of her writhed, liquidizing, and then the circle in the floor opened and the howl of air escaping into the vacuum sucked her remains out into space.

  "Step forward, abominations," said the voice.

  "I don't think so," Yas exclaimed, running out of the entrance to his crewmates' side.

  "No," the doctor agreed, as even meek Desultory flashed a solid block of bright yellow that also meant no.

  The guards looked to one another with disturbingly bloodthirsty grins, and the cloaked woman took a step back, as if she was graciously allowing them this. The doctor spread his hands and ignited all ten lasers. There was a moment when the guards hesitated, seeing the metal man armed with ten claws of light, but then the doctor leaned in to Yas and muttered, "I cannot actually use them. My protocols forbid me from doing harm to organics."

  Yas reevaluated their options. So it was him - unarmed - and Desultory against two men with spears. Three if the woman decided to join in. Given the ease with which one of them had put him on the ground earlier, things were not looking good.

  "Wait!" he shouted, spreading his hands in surrender. "You said you'd ask Freya. You!" He pointed at the woman. She had a long scar down past her eye, and her hair was shaved on the same side of her head to reveal a knotted network of scars. Under the cloak she wore armor with the ease of someone who had lived in it day and night. He suddenly felt like he was addressing one of the elders, like she'd seen way too much to be impressed by the likes of him.

  "You promised," he repeated, nevertheless. "Was that just a trick? Were you lying to my Captain and my people? Do you know that when Captain Harcrow looks at you, all the people of the Alliance look too? Is that what you want? For everyone in
our galaxy to know you're a common liar?"

  The woman turned her face from him with a flinch, looking out at her prisoners, then back to him.

  "Disa," one of the guards growled. "Let's just toss him in with them. There's something weird about him anyway, everyone says so. You are a Valkyrie. It is your right to choose who is brought into Freya’s house for their honor and who is rejected."

  "It is my right," Disa replied, her mouth twisting in an expression of distaste. "And it is also my responsibility. It must be done properly." She nodded, obviously having made a decision. "I will seek the goddess's guidance. Bring them. We have nothing to lose but time, and time we have in abundance."

  "Your intervention is timely," the doctor said in his over-loud private voice. "My attempt to re-designate the guards as a virus, so that I could destroy them with impunity has failed thirteen thousand and fifty three times."

  "Silence!"

  They were marched back up to the habitable levels and deposited in a private chamber. This seemed to be another barn-cum-hall, but whitewashed inside and lit with many of the sootless torches. The pillars were painted with flowers and battles intermingled, and the blue ceiling was dotted with gold stars in the shape of unfamiliar constellations. In one corner of the room a great bed lay amid hangings of cloth of gold. It looked like it had come straight out of a storybook, but Yas wondered how many of the items scattered around were high technology, disguised as antler and bone.

  Disa left them with the guards and returned swiftly with Freya. The goddess had a wreath of sweet-pea blossom on her metallic hair, and its perfume entered the room before her.

  "Mm," she said, seeing them. "I might have known it was you, Yas Sundeen. I hear of trouble and of course it's you."