Valhalla

by Ari Bach

  Well, shit, she thought. All those ups and downs and twists and turns, and it ends like this, with an old thread we never tied down. The police, though…. They had the detectors on. But detectors detect projectiles and microwaves, not daggers. They’ll take video, but the cops won’t watch it until they find me dead. Such incompetence.

  Her thought process struck her as strange. Why was she not jumping into battle mode again? There was more awry. The Orange Gang had never been known to use such daggers. The Orange Gang men could have taken her on the train, in the atrium, in the hall, or anywhere but here—where they must have known there would be detectors. Then the avatars online, where were they? They’d wanted her to head home, so surely they were part of this new Orange Gang trap, but why trap her with the promise of such a peculiar job? And how could the Orange Gang have known what they knew, and why, if they were the Orange Gang, didn’t they fry her online when she touched them? None of it added up.

  As if to add another curious integer to the crooked adding pile, the huge man who had followed her from the train was holding his dagger in the worst possible way. And that detail solved it all. She was not switching into battle mode because she was not in danger. They wanted her in her apartment so the detectors could see her. They weren’t acting like the Orange Gang because they were not the Orange Gang. They merely had to look like it. To fake her death. She was not joining a company that recruited common people in common ways. This was an underground so deep it would need its denizens relieved of not only their earthly families and duties but their lives. They needed her dead to the world and alive in their hands. They needed to put on a show for the detectors and net monitors that would remove her from the living world.

  Clever, she thought, without any concept of how she recognized it or any faith that her death was about to be faked. She hunted for anything to suggest it would be. Dagger aside, the fact they weren’t attacking was a solid step. But why would he be holding his weapon so poorly, exactly how she had failed the first time in blade training? Because he wanted her to take it. She suddenly felt a flicker of gratitude toward her new recruiters. They were going to let her go out fighting. She didn’t have to die fainted or failed. She’d get to die with a blade in her hand. He must have seen the realization cross her face. He moved to attack.

  She took his invitation and his weapon and fenced lightly toward the other man. Had he backed off, she might have been disappointed, but like a good drill sergeant, he was not going to overlook a weak move. He struck back with such force that she questioned whether it was all fake. And so she gave it all she had, not to kill the man but to make the Sergeants Cameron proud when they saw how their old failure went out. So they fought, but they fought like her former teachers—to hit the knife, not the wielder. She fought in kind, and when she felt him push her ever so subtly toward the outdoor deck, she made her mock retreat.

  When she made it to the deck, she saw a landed orange pogo. They wanted her on that transport, to appear to be taking her to Wulfgar, but secretly to take her… she knew not where. She did not care. Violet was delighted when they bested her, disarmed her, and forced her savagely inside the door, like a lioness taking a cub in her jaws. To the police it would appear to be the vicious capture of a girl fated to die, and to the cub, her mother was gently taking her home. One of the men pulled her into the back of the cabin.

  She was set down in the seats and not restrained. The huge man boarded after her and spoke quickly. “Do you have any pets, any irreplaceable valuables in the apartment?”

  “No, nothing.”

  She knew exactly why he asked. The third orange figure jumped in and removed her hat, revealing her gender and long hair, neither of which would have been found in the Orange Gang. She threw a device into the apartment and slammed the deck door. The pogo took off, and below, a flash annihilated the place Violet had grown up.

  “Don’t worry about the Frasers,” the woman told her. “It’s a containment grenade. Won’t singe a hair beyond the set radius.”

  They began to take off their orange charades, revealing armored uniforms with gray camouflage coloration. They made no attempt to hide pride in a show well performed. The two men applauded, and another woman beamed back from the controls. Beyond comfort, Violet felt a blush coming on.

  “Were you the two online?” she asked.

  “No, we work with them. You’ll meet them soon.” The large man pulled a familiar device from under his seat, one she had been somewhat afraid of the last time she’d seen it. “We need to turn off your link again.”

  She wasn’t nervous this time. She turned her head to let him at the antenna. He disconnected her, and she felt the net disappear again. He handed her a notarization pad. This was unusual. With her link off, the pad shouldn’t work. Such pads functioned by linking through the user’s own antenna to confirm that they were who they claimed. Without considering what a linkless procedure would mean, she touched the pad and it went black.

  “You have been logged dead at 1912 hours, March 24, 2230. Your net accounts have all been deleted, so you won’t be able to link until we reset you. Don’t worry about any loose ends. We’ve handled everything.” He smiled. “You put up a damn good fight, Violet.”

  “Thanks. Is that how everyone joins?”

  “You join how you like. You could have given up.”

  “Has anyone?” she asked.

  “Never. Our kind tend to prefer to go out fighting. I hope you don’t mind being killed off.”

  “Not at all.”

  She realized immediately after she said it that she really didn’t mind. She tried to think of how her friends would react. She realized it was okay because she had no friends. She couldn’t think of anyone who would be surprised or hurt, except for the neighboring Fraser couple. She felt a vague regret that they would be further depressed by the now total destruction of the family next door. She was more taken by the idea she could be utterly erased in a day. Was her life so thin before? She knew it to be so, and again she didn’t mind.

  Considerations of her past ended when she saw the huge man slide his dagger into a gap in his chest plate. It looked like he had slid it deep into his own chest. She was about to ask about it when he introduced himself.

  “My name is Ragnar. You met Ruger and Rebecca in the apartment. The lady piloting is Ripple. We’re Reid team.” When he said “Reid,” he pointed to a shape on his belt. “Teams have runic letters. We’ll explain it all soon. But we’re the rescue team. We also pick up new recruits.”

  Violet was starting to detect an accent in his voice. Language across the globe had long since degenerated into a nearly homogenous yogurt of English, but there were still many local flavors. Ragnar’s sounded gentle and faintly whimsical, reminding her of a net guide who’d once shown her some simulations of the far north. She looked out the window and saw a sort of confirmation.

  They were headed northeast. They had jumped over the remains of her apartment, away from the arcology and over the remains of the old Skye Bridge. Soon she was beyond all vestiges of her former life. They passed out of the city and over the lochs, where the lights of civilization dwindled, and they passed into the darkness of the oceans. Without her link the darkness was near absolute, no ads, no icons, only stars above and the dim undulations of the sea below. It was as soothing to her eyes as solitary confinement, but infinite and empty and beautiful.

  She thought about asking one of the men where they were going but decided against it. Though the people to whom she had just signed her life away had answered all her questions clearly, and though the team around her seemed kind and open, she suspected there were to be a great deal of things that one did not ask. Military policy had meant absolutely no questions. She suspected her new situation would be quite different, but she didn’t want to pester them with a barrage of questions. She had so many that they wouldn’t even form a proper queue behind her tongue, so she remained silent for much of the trip.

  Some questions, t
hough, stood out in her own mind. She didn’t know why she trusted these people. It only occurred to her now that she probably shouldn’t. Hadn’t they just complimented her on the sort of character that would never trust strangers? Hadn’t the strangers just put her in a flying crate and nuked her last possessions? Why, then, was she so wholly at ease? Perhaps the trauma was finally starting to affect her, making her reckless. Perhaps that was part of why they wanted her. She felt almost ashamed to be thinking such things. Her thoughts felt idiotic in the face of such an ingenious departure, but that was okay. Like her dad once said, “If you worry that people may think you inadequate, you need only stay silent to rob them of confirmation.”

  Soon they were traveling at extremely high altitude and the pogo cabin was still open. It was cold and windy. Suppression fields on the windows and doors only softened the effect of the raw elements. The vehicle was clearly meant for tough use by tough people. She was suddenly quite concerned about what would happen if she failed training when they’d already annihilated her former home and declared her dead. Would such people have any qualms about annihilating their failures as well? They flew north at high speed, so far and so fast Violet wondered if they were headed to the pole. She looked down and saw faint white patches in the darkness below. They were tiny. There wasn’t much, but she thought she knew what it was. She had to ask.

  “Is that stuff snow?”

  “Snow and ice,” said Ragnar.

  “Can you fly closer? Can I see it?”

  “Not now,” he laughed. “You’ll be seeing plenty soon enough.”

  And so she did. It was deepest night when they landed. They set down in a field of glacier-sculpted rock, and snow was all around, draped over rocks and floating down through the sky, just as the simulations had shown. Ragnar and Rebecca stepped out, and she rushed after them to see the flakes up close.

  As soon as she stepped out of the pogo, the cold hit her like a wall. It was well below freezing, and windy, and she was still wearing the thin, scant cover of tropical Scotland. Now she was in air that felt like the inside of a freezer, that felt like skinny-dipping in ice cream. The cold hit the sticky pads that held her shoes on, and they fell off. She tried to get one to stick again, but it wouldn’t stay on. Her feet were on bare freezing rock. She had absolutely no more desire to touch the snow. Fuck snow, she thought. Snow is fucking cold.

  What kind of place had they taken her to? She felt betrayed by what she had learned online. Supposedly the global climate had warmed over the last three hundred years, enough to melt most of the world’s polar ice, rendering the arctic like the subarctic, the subarctic like the temperate zones, the temperate zones like the subtropics, the subtropics like the tropics, and the tropics only habitable by Centaurian gremlins, who would still only live there in a time-share. But the poles were supposed to be like Scotland had been before. Scotland could never have been like this. People would have died. Only the wooly cows could have survived, the things that always looked overheated in all that hair. What she wouldn’t have given for wool like that now. As if someone had heard her thoughts, a furry, warm cloak hit her from behind, and she pulled it around herself.

  “Welcome to Kvitøya!”

  She turned. There were people in fur coats. She quickly realized these were the same four, and they were in the same attire, but their armor had grown fur. She wanted armor like that.

  “We’re in the Svalbarð Archipelago,” said Ragnar, “at the top of the world. Let’s get inside!”

  She shivered and nodded her agreement and followed the men to a spot indistinguishable from the rest of the unlit field.

  Ragnar warned her, “Hold on!”

  There was nothing to grip, so she held on to the nearest furry armor. The rock beneath them began to descend. Violet caught a last glimpse of her shoes as she dropped under the surface. Once they were below ground level, a ceiling moved into place. The air heated rapidly, the rocky ground heated too, and the team’s coats rescinded their fur.

  “Be glad this isn’t midwinter. It’s a lot worse.”

  She couldn’t imagine any worse. “How far underground are we going?”

  “It’s not underground, just secluded,” said Ragnar. “The ice that used to cover this island carved out a nice ravine for us.”

  “Actually,” added Rebecca, “it’s not technically a ravine, just a crevice. But we call it the ravine.”

  “And it wasn’t technically for us. The whole thing used to be a terraforming lab,” said Ripple.

  Ruger started, “But about half a kilometer down is—” He stopped. The banded-gneiss walls of the shaft ended, and she could see where they were going. They were level with twisted crags that hid the sky, heading down fast into a deep pit of ice and stone. Small structures hung from the ceiling and clung to the rock walls. As they descended farther, she could see the lights of stalactite towers and communication arrays, all gold. What should have been darkness, hidden even from the starlight, was lit from deep in the pit by pure gold light. The light revealed walkways spiraling down across the outcroppings and glacial forms and a honeycomb of small caves cut into the walls, some with hangars or buildings, and others that seemed to extend deeper into the rock. Into every cell and up to every building were thin strands of something, all glowing with gold light. Violet thought she could see people walking on the shimmering lines.

  Deeper still were towers and landing pads not unlike Achnacarry’s, full of vehicles and strange craft she didn’t recognize. For an instant she thought she saw the pogo they’d arrived in traveling down a larger lift across the great chasm, but then a network of glowing strands became sharply thicker and the source of the gold light came into view. The strands were all branches of one central trunk, a gargantuan glowing tree, twisted like an ancient ash. Its limbs stretched out to every section of the place, bringing light to every corner. At the base of its trunk, a city sprawled across the ravine floor, extending up the walls and into several massive caves that plunged yet farther into the earth. Every building was plated in gold, all reflecting the gold light of the core.

  As they neared the ground floor, she could see people. Hundreds of them walking on the branches or walkways, standing atop the buildings, or on decks on the sides of stalagmites. Those on the branches had faint halos, as if the light was crawling up their sides. But there was something even more peculiar about the people. It was how she felt seeing them. She didn’t instantly dislike them as she tended to with the nameless masses of Kyle City. They weren’t a cold foreign crowd, but somehow inviting, like people she might someday know. The place felt alive yet calm, serene, and above all, bright. What light the world of her youth had was all false, projected into their minds by the links. All the colors and signs and busy glowing icons disappeared the moment she dimmed her link. But this light was real, and unlike the bright and garish Internet, it was warm. After that moment outside, this pit was the warmest place she had ever felt. What shells she had spent her life erecting began to crack at the experience.

  The lift fell into darkness again behind a rock face. The tunnel illumination took over, and she could see the armored uniforms of the team changing color, losing their camouflaged gray tones in favor of different colors. She was about to ask about the phenomena when she was caught off guard by an intercom. It took her a second to remember that it was sound, not a link.

  “Second report, 2115 hours. Arrival: Violet/Reid Team. Calling: Alföðr, Balder, Veikko, Vibeke to lift three.”

  Ragnar explained, “No ranks, no titles, no family names. For the most part, new team members choose new names after they arrive. They always start with the letter of the team you’re in—R for Reid team. It lets you know who you’re dealing with quite efficiently. You however, arrived in the middle of Valknut team’s assembly. Violet would fit.”

  Ripple gave Violet a poke and cut in, “Vibs, that’s Vibeke, kept her name too. She and Veikko are going to be your flatmates and soon teammates. You’ll get a fourth someday to c
omplete V team. Then W—Wunjo team—starts up.”

  “And those names are… you said runic?”

  “Right. We used to use Futhark but ran out of letters.” Without her link she didn’t know half the terms they used. She was suddenly quite worried she might not be smart enough for the place. Ragnar continued, “So the alphabetical order got a bit deranged. Reid is nearly a senior team, but Mannaz, Othala, Perth, and Tiwaz are your immediate elders. Actually, Mannaz will be a middle team once yours is complete, and R will become senior, finally. The real elders are still A, B, and C.”

  “Then D, E, F?”

  “No. Then K—Kaunan—the weapons team. Best not to worry about it yet.”

  She remembered two names from the intercom. “So Balder and Al, uh, Alfootir are—”

  “‘Alf’ if you can’t pronounce it. Yes. He wasn’t the first here but he designed the rune system, so he’s at the top of it.”

  “What happens when you run out of letters again?”

  “A matter of intense mess hall debate. We’ve already had to improvise a few runes like Valknut. Other bases use Cyrillic, Latin, and Greek.”

  “Other bases?”

  Before he could answer, the floor came to rest in a cozy lounge, a room that looked far too comfortable to be in a spy base at the outer reaches of the north. Every surface was curved and smooth; the colors were still based in gold but subdued by oranges and browns. The rock walls were left as bare rock, and some of the room was made of wood. Real wood. Wood seemed at odds with a fire in the middle of the room, one brighter and hotter than any she had seen before. It smelled strange. She gathered it must be a real fire, and it was only contained by a fireplace. It seemed unsafe. She almost said something until she pictured the result of the new kid telling the grown-ups to mind their fire. Stupid, she thought. Keep quiet.