The grating sound of crashing steel filled the room as Vili blocked two more blows. He used all his might to deflect the ax high, giving Vili a clean show at the lieutenant’s jaw. Finding his center of gravity, Vili extended his arm and catapulted his body around the axis. His hammer swiftly arched upward through the air, almost completely unimpeded by the lieutenant’s head. Flesh and blood burst from the guard’s face—along with his jaw—exaggerated by the small points on the end of Vili’s hammer. Sinew coated the parked ship in the direction of his swing.
Vili turned to see the still-wounded hoplite back on his feet and leapt at him. He led with his shield and knocked the man back to the ground, blocking a strike of the ax while doing so. Vili used his shield and left foot to pin the Olympian’s ax to the ground and ended his life with a blow to the temple. As with his first victim, he felt a mist of warm Olympian blood cling to his face. He took a step back and looked around the room.
The only noises left were alarms overhead and electrical sounds coming from the damaged ships. The other scientists had escaped the hanger during the commotion, but failed to evacuate the research ship. They all must have run back to the core of this dying vessel. Vili sabotaged the engines of the last useable ship and ran back to the one he stole with Loki and Sigyn.
Loki and Sigyn were no longer in the cockpit. Vili knew they must have exploited the chaos to locate the condensation chamber used to construct Hades vessels. They needed to initiate the process to provide an encasing to last two hours on a new ship. If they ran into trouble they had hidden weapons of their own.
Vili prepared the triangular Hod ship for takeoff while waiting on Loki and Sigyn’s signal. Their objective was to, after outfitting a new Hades vessel, wreak havoc in the system. The Hades vessel could, under the right circumstances, be utilized as much as a weapon as it could a shielded transport. He felt the ground rumble and heard additional sirens start to blare. Loki and Sigyn just disabled this lab. Vili initiated flight. I need to get out of here before they destroy the Chronos Passage and any still functioning ships.
He closed the hatch to his vessel—immediately silencing the blaring alarms and toxic smell of malfunctioning engines—and engaged his thrusters. As he departed from the portable research facility he glanced back at the doomed starship from afar; Loki and Sigyn had already carved the once-bustling ship into a few open caskets. Vili suppressed a smirk and headed to the rendezvous point on the far side of Earth’s moon. He planned to wait for his colleagues there while they attacked the research facility around Jupiter—the only other known station in the area. On his way, he would send a single-word transmission to both the military leaders on Valhalla and a dormant Aesirian fleet near the edge of the galaxy: “Prepare.” He would then wait for Sigyn and Loki by Earth’s moon so he could follow in the wake of their Hades vessel. Their intention was to fool any Olympians that came to investigate into thinking only one ship was used to land on Earth.
Normally, his message would take up to a week to be delivered to Valhalla. Since superluminal communications were only possible if they were manually delivered in a ship that could hit superluminal speeds, the galaxy was full of automated communication vessels—‘Hermes Couriers’—that continually flew to various systems. Upon arriving in a system, they would spend about an hour moving between message storage stations orbiting the host star and collect all communications that were logged since the last time the storage systems were ‘emptied.’ Additionally, Hermes Couriers would transmit all communications labeled for that system to the storage station and the storage station would emit those messages back to the planets.
The messages were anonymized at every level: content, sender, and receiver. The Hermes Couriers could hit a few more stations to collect and deliver messages—whatever was calculated as optimal—and then fly to a central location to unload pending communications for other systems so that another Hermes Courier could carry it to its destination. It was a complex system, but ran smoothly due to automation.
Vili’s message wouldn’t be headed to any of the publicly used Hermes Couriers, though. His went straight to a moderate-sized cloaked and automated Aesirian ship that periodically passed near Earth’s solar system. Once it received Vili’s message, it would take it directly to both the acting Hersir of Valhalla—the highest ranking general of the Aesir—who was currently his brother, Ve, and to the admiral of the dormant Aesirian fleet toward the edge of the galaxy. In theory, his message would arrive to both locations in no later than 48 hours.
Vili arrived on the far side of the moon and waited. He knew that on the way to the rendezvous point the last objective Sigyn and Loki had was to knock out one of the five stations controlling the Svalinn shield around Earth. Located at Earth’s Lagrangian points, these stations needed fairly constant maintenance to ensure they all worked efficiently and correctly. If any of them were destroyed, the shield could only compensate for a couple of days. After, it entered a form of emergency hibernation mode that would scramble all forms of communication both ways, as well as forfeit the ability to cloak images. Within a week of hibernation mode, the shield would fail entirely.
Vili waited nearly two hours before the Hades vessel containing his team arrived. He followed the vessel to their destination: Nazca, Peru. After Sigyn and Loki were able to exit the shell of their Hades ship, Vili used Mjolnir to puncture its side. He kept his hammer hooked in the opening and directed the empty hull over the ocean, leveraging the flattened Hod vessel to bear the weight of the spherical ship while he applied his raw strength to keep the vacant hull steady. He flew low and, once he was well out of sight of any coasts, Vili allowed the Hades vessel to fall to the ocean. He stood atop the Hod and positioned the spherical corpse so that the sea would drown its interior. It only took a few moments for the once unstoppable piece of machinery to sink under Earth’s capricious and unforgiving blanket.
After ensuring the pieces weren’t visible above the Pacific Ocean, Vili removed a small, metallic vial from a concealed pocket on his hip and swallowed its liquid contents. He tossed the empty container into the ocean and returned to the cockpit. Setting a course to the closest coast, his plan was to wash his body of Olympian blood and then head north. If the virus he just ingested was going to have the intended impact he needed to find densely populated areas and, if he was lucky, hubs of transportation.
Act I, Chapter 6
Sigyn and Loki
Location: Rainforest, Northwestern Bolivia
Sigyn was losing patience with Loki and they’d only been traveling for a day. His latest tactic was incessantly pressing her on her modifications. “Beyond tracking Primordials, does your modification allow you to bend space even a little bit? I didn’t think Aesirian biological augmentations were advanced enough to allow anything resembling a merger with space-time.”
“I told you, I’m not physically bonded to space. Like you, my genetics were simulated against various modifications and I matched to one of the hybrid models. Nano machines—Mimir Interpreters—in my bloodstream are programmed to check for specific undulations in the fabric of space-time and, once detected, communicate with me via amino acids and proteins that bond to specific synthetic cellular receptors I was given,” Sigyn said while continuing through the hot, humid forest. Sweat was collecting on her forehead and back; she had already removed her jacket revealing the breathable long sleeve underneath, but it didn’t help much. To compound the heat, she was continuously stepping over old fallen trees and tall brush while pushing back branches and moving through spider webs. Loki wasn’t making the experience any easier.
“I get it: you’re a scientist trapped in a military officer’s body,” Loki mocked before continuing. “But what the hell does all that mean? Can you differentiate among Primordials? Can you detect Aesirians? Can you detect me?” Loki blurted in a single breath.
Sigyn abruptly spun in front of Loki and grabbed him by the shoulders. “Loki, in theory, all matter leaves its own unique imprint in the f
abric of space. Sentient life—especially Primordial life—is complicated and, therefore, leaves a more distinct imprint. The Aesir only have the technology to detect Olympians. They are the only Primordials we have interacted with for a millennium and we are still on the first generation of Mimir Interpreters—”
While she was speaking, Loki turned his eyes from verdant green to milky blue with hints of yellow. Sigyn lingered on Loki’s eyes a little longer than she would have liked before pushing him away and continuing onward. It was always hard trying to argue with or scold Loki. He was gifted with aesthetic augmentation and already had natural charm. He knew how to read Aesirians as well as anyone and used subtle, physical modifications to distract. She could hear him smiling when he spoke.
“Oh Sigyn, you’ll have receptors for me one day. Don’t worry.”
Sigyn clenched her fists and didn’t respond. She knew Vili and his brothers thought Loki may have ulterior motives for joining the mission; Odin even personally asked her to keep an eye out. Given Loki’s abnormal disposition, she may be the only person capable of distinguishing his normal behavior from something aberrant.
Still, Loki was important for the mission.
The day before, Sigyn and Loki were part of the Aesirian landing party in Peru. They parted ways with Vili as he went north and they traveled east, planning to reconvene in southern Iceland in one week. Their mission was straight-forward, but difficult: find any Olympians still on Earth and either kill them or lead them to Vili so he could kill them. Knowing their targets would inspect their landing site, Sigyn and Loki planned to create distance—taking note of where they could find quick transport back—and then follow whoever showed up in Peru.
Sigyn was able to detect Olympian movement within about an 800 kilometer radius through the large imprint that subtly rippled through space as they moved. Moreover, her senses would get stronger the closer she got to them. Creating a large distance with their landing site—and any Olympian that may inspect it—was necessary. Chances were any Olympians hiding on Earth would be elite military. Sigyn and Loki likely wouldn’t survive an encounter with even one of those trained soldiers without an idea of their weaknesses first, or the element of surprise, both of which required tracking and observation.
Thankfully, they didn’t worry about an Olympian sneaking up on them—that was the other advantage of Sigyn’s modifications. But even knowing one was coming wouldn’t be enough to ensure their survival. Sigyn’s abilities might allow her to anticipate Olympian movement in a fight, but at best that would buy her enough time to retreat. They had weapons to defend themselves if necessary, but Sigyn desperately hoped that situation would never arise.
She carried a pistol to match Vili’s and a short-barreled, Scorpionem assault rifle that fired the same explosive pellets as her pistol, but at a rapid pace. She could toggle between normal explosive pellets and incendiary ones. Loki was in possession of two weapons; both were abnormal, even for him. One was a custom-produced handheld gun—dubbed the Retiarius—that shot a type of strong, electrically charged web. The web wrapped tightly around the first object it hit and squeezed the victim via an attractive force between the nodes of the net. The filament between the nodes was thin enough to cut and dig into skin.
If a target’s skin was thin enough then Loki’s net would cut them to pieces. His gun could only carry three shots at a time, so he carried two spare cartridges on him. The other weapon in his possession was a dagger of unknown origin with the words “Thoda Chandra” carved into the hilt. Loki found it while exploring various systems in Olympia that had been decimated by war. The knife had yet to break or even dull, at least according to him. Between the structural integrity of the knife and the language of the carving, Loki surmised it was produced by a now extinct Primordial race called the Naga.
Sigyn wasn’t sure why he so desperately needed to bring his precious knife, but her uncertainty barely registered against the backdrop of his peculiar interest in her Mimir Interpreters. She unclenched her fists and glanced over at Loki. Why is he so curious about my modifications? What is he up to?
“How long do you think it will take Vili to find these ‘Descendants?’” Loki asked, catching her gaze.
“Who knows? The models Eir and I ran suggested there is a good chance we could find an average of one Descendant every few days for the next month.” Sigyn’s gut told her that was optimistic, but she ignored it. Those feelings came to represent a weakness in ‘Lessers’, driven more by emotion and experience than cold, hard logic. It was one of the many perceived disadvantages the Aesirians had relative to the Olympians.
“How exciting,” Loki said unenthusiastically.
Act I, Chapter 7
Vili
Location: Longyearbyen, Norway
“Enjoy your stay, sir!”
Vili looked at the man quizzically. Was his statement a command or suggestion? Is this a form of human ‘politeness?’ Unsure, Vili grunted and moved toward the direction of his room. Despite studying the bits of human culture the Olympians released to the general public, he was still having trouble understanding some of the subtleties of human socialization. Specifically, he found the concept of ‘being polite’ odd. The Aesir’s general conduct was influenced by a military-esque hierarchy that extended to both institutions and personal life. Moreover, especially within the Aesir that lived through their initial horrific contact with the Olympians, there was a sense of mutual respect that permeated interpersonal interactions. Do humans use ‘politeness’ as a way to mask a natural disrespect for one another?
The data available on humans suggested that may be the case, but there wasn’t much information available to the Olympian and Aesirian public. Obviously, that was by design. Olympian scientists ostensibly watched over Earth to make sure humans remained undisturbed—they were keen to avoid another catastrophe like the Aesir—so they claimed ignorance of many aspects of life on Earth. They wanted humans to evolve naturally and let them initiate contact with the broader galaxy. Vili and the Aesirian leadership knew that was all propaganda; the Olympians had intimate knowledge of human life, but feigned ignorance to the public as to not draw unwanted attention to their experiments on Earth.
At least we were able to gain a general understanding of the humans’ level of technological advancement by aggregating both information requested for faux anthropological studies and rumors heard by low-level technicians on Olympian star fleets. Combustion-based technology—terrain vehicles, aircraft, weapons—and manipulation of basic electromagnetic waves were exactly what we expected…and it turns out humans do still trade in gold. A primitive currency relative to their technology.
Vili locked himself in his room and checked on the progress of the contagion he had been spreading since his first interaction with humans. Every breath he took, thanks to the vial he downed earlier, released a few more extremely contagious viruses. The viruses were, in theory, harmless to humans. They would rapidly spread across the population looking for evidence of genetic tampering by the Primordials in every person. Vili knew, like all Aesirians, that the Primordials conducted experiments on humans prior to the Fracturing. Back then, Earth was a neutral zone in the galaxy and only used for research purposes.
A lesser known fact was that in the initial experiments some of the Primordials accidentally over-charged certain human bloodlines. It was reported that when the scientists discovered their error they were ordered to eradicate those bloodlines from Earth. Councils among all races recognized the danger in artificially enhancing an inferior species. The potential leaps in evolution that could occur within a few generations meant introducing a civilization with advanced tools, but inferior brains, to the galaxy.
Vili and other high-ranking Aesirians that knew about those bloodlines didn’t believe they were all eradicated. They concluded that, given the abrupt exodus of researchers from Earth during the beginning of the Fracturing and questionable ethics among individual scientists, it was highly unlikely all research
ers from all Primordial races abided by that rule. A quick fix of simply “disabling” the advancements in those bloodlines must have been used. Vili was tasked with finding those individuals—dubbed “Descendants”—and unlocking the latent programming in their genes, which is exactly what the virus was designed to do.
As the virus continues to rapidly “infect” the population of Earth, it’s searching for suspicious strands of disabled DNA. As individuals that possess those strands are found, the virus will attach to their brain stems for one week and release instructions to urge the individual to migrate. The brain will modulate hormones so that each person will naturally be inclined to head as far north as possible, subconsciously using Earth’s magnetic field as a guide.
The virus will also continuously modify the infrared radiation emitted by the body of the infected individual in various regions of their anatomy, mostly by varying their metabolic system. Part of Vili’s biological augmentation allows him to see in both the ultraviolet and infrared spectrum, so a Descendant in a crowd will be as obvious to him as a meteor shower on a dark, cloudless night. He simply needs to watch the only road entering the town—connecting both the harbor and airport—from his hotel window. This method won’t find all of the infected Descendants, but it will find some. Vili’s hope is that the rest will come forward once it’s known what these initial Descendants can do.
Tired from spending the past day flying to various cities and mingling with the local populations to spread his benign virus, Vili tried to make his hulking frame comfortable on the tiny Earth bed. He was the only one of the three in the landing party that could still use some advanced technology. Loki and Sigyn couldn’t risk being detected by Olympians under any circumstances, and that meant not leaving physical or eyewitness evidence of their advanced technology. Vili had some wiggle room mostly out of necessity.
The Gods Who Chose Us Page 5
