Transmission: Ragnarok: Book Two

by John Meaney

  ‘La-di-dah,’ he said. ‘You think Helsen’s not going to notice you?’

  ‘What are the chances,’ said Tannier, ‘that you’d win this lottery fair and square?’

  She would know he was a Judas goat. Of course she would.

  ‘So if she comes after me, it’ll be all-out, with some devastating attack.’

  ‘Probably. Right now, it’s show-time.’

  Tannier led the way to the dais, where they climbed up, and someone in scarlet uniform made the introductions – Roger, Tannier, and of course this is Rhianna, and you’ll know who Faubourg is, naturally – while the quickglass surroundings recorded everything for the public’s viewing pleasure.

  ‘Look.’ Rhianna pointed to the great view-window. ‘Did you see?’

  A massive tidal ripple swept along the length of Deltaville, floating a kilometre away. Then another. The crowd’s voice became a sort of hum, low but strong, then raised in pitch as quickglass split from quickglass, and the complex-but-roughly-spherical rearmost mass changed colour, reddening, beginning to pull from the mother city.

  Outside the view-window, a promenade extended, a finger pointing into the void. A thin yellowish film covered it, transforming the extrusion into an elongated pavilion. Rhianna slipped her arm through Roger’s, while Faubourg did the same with Tannier – Roger forced himself not to laugh – and they walked through the liquefying window and into the promenade, just the four of them. They walked right to the end – which later, presumably, would form a docking-point with Deltaville – to watch the birth unfold.

  Glancing back at Barbour’s upper hull, Roger saw streamers and pennants and tendrils flicking their teardrop-ends through an intricate choreography. It took a moment to realize that each teardrop contained a dancer or an acrobat, pinpoints of humanity against the city’s vastness.

  ‘Sky Dance,’ murmured Rhianna. ‘Very nice.’

  All around Deltaville, a profusion of towers clenched, the great mass rippling and convulsing, pushing hard.

  ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ said Faubourg.

  The corner of Rhianna’s mouth twitched. Perhaps her true thoughts were like Roger’s: that Deltaville’s giving birth looked painful, an extended agony of effort, the sort of process that felt wonderful only in the aftermath, when everything was over. When everyone was partying, letting down their hair.

  Letting down their guard.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  LUNA, 502019 AD

  While Gavriela remained asleep, she awoke to that other reality, the one that would slip from consciousness in that long-past morning to follow, imprinted only in her subconscious mind, in the molecular depths of her mortal brain.

  As always, the hall was airless, and she adapted to vacuum without thought as she swung her living-crystal legs down from the bier and stood. She checked the axes, spears and shields on the walls, and the pinpoints of light glowing below the ceiling. All was unchanged.

  There were sounds as she walked through to the greater hall, but only the natural sounds from within her. She stopped at the entrance to the corridor leading to the external balcony, where she might stand and stare at the moonscape. But Ulfr and Kenna were seated at the conference table in their high-backed chairs, and they were looking at her, their crystalline faces glittering.

  Kenna tilted her head.

  —You are most welcome, Gavi, though unsummoned.

  —Unsummoned?

  —Not summoned by me. Brave Ulfr and I are exploring the concept of contingent battle plans. Perhaps you are drawn to it.

  Spectra shifted inside Ulfr’s shaking head.

  —Or maybe you’ve come to say thank you.

  —I …

  —But I enjoyed it, however brief, sweet Gavi.

  She held herself in stasis, trying to bring forward those memories of a half-million years ago; and then she smiled.

  —You were with me when I called, berserker. You have all my thanks, in truth.

  —Any time.

  All three smiled rainbow smiles.

  Then Gavriela walked to the table where complex phase spaces hung in dozens of orthogonal projected realities. A part of her – the part that had absorbed hundreds of millennia of strategy training – understood the problem they were trying to solve: given that no plan survives contact with the enemy, how do you plan for that?

  With sheaves of alternatives that can be chosen in an instant, was one answer.

  She examined the attacking forces.

  —A thousand billion of them, striking at once?

  Ulfr made a fist; but Kenna put her hand on it, and looked up at Gavriela.

  —We need the small-scale simulation first, before planning for the real thing.

  In apology, Gavriela put her own fist against her collar-bone.

  —I beg your pardon. Of course you do.

  For they had half a million years, still, before the end.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  EARTH, 1941 AD

  It was a sound once associated with the limbo of factory work, empty and impersonal; now it signified the imminence of incandescent hell. Moaning strongly, then low, then strong again, the siren’s sound resonated along the buildings. Gavriela held still, Brian’s one arm around her back, as they stopped opposite Madame Tussaud’s and looked to see where people were headed. The flow towards Baker Street Tube was already starting.

  She could not hear them yet, the killers above the clouds; but then, was she so different? Gavriela Wolf with blood on her hands once more. Debriefing, she had said nothing about the Gestapo men she murdered in Berlin; but in the SOE cellar, Rupert and Brian had seen her every action. For her the moment had been confusion, a swirling of stroboscopic vision and physical motion, glimpses of the riflemen interspersed with blood-red nothingness; and then the corpse below her, and the wet slickness on the rifle butt. It was lucky that Rupert, sharp despite the danger, had interpreted the situation exactly: the prisoner having mesmerised his guards, causing them to turn on their own superiors; Gavriela entering berserkrgangr to save the day.

  I did what?

  But Brian was shaking her arm.

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Down the Tube, come on.’

  Past banked sandbags, down metal-edged stairs, spherical lights a soft glow atop bronze stands, the glazed-tile walls wet with cold, condensed sweat, and down on the sooty platforms, the blanket-wrapped crowd sitting and lying, frail humans huddling and waiting for destruction to fall overhead. As always, every space near the exits was full, so they pushed and slipped among their fellow beings, eventually to reach a shadow-wrapped alcove, shared with a water-filled extinguisher. Somewhere around the corner, a child and an older person were weeping.

  Why can’t it ever stop?

  She pressed against Brian, and he against her, his arm tight.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘You did the right thing, and we’re proud of you.’

  Closing her eyes did not shut out the redness; neither weeping nor sirens could obliterate the thud of wood through skull.

  I’m not a killer.

  Except that in science she believed in operational definitions, and if someone who killed was not a killer, then what were they? But now, despite her insulating coat, here was an interruption to her guilt: Brian’s manhood pressing against her, as her crotch grew warm.

  No. Oh, no.

  She had had so little to do with men, but she was scared and so was he – poor Brian, with demons of his own to fight, the loss of his arm among them – and then they were kissing, tongue against tongue, and it was urgent: the unbuttoning of heavy coats, wrapped around each other as they stood; fingers against skin, rough against nipples, the ripping of her knickers, the fumbling of her fingers unbuttoning his fly; and then he was in her, hard, thrusting, harder, and her fingers were like claws, nails like talons in his skin, pushing and hauling and wanting the hurt, needing the pain, forcing it, needing it to—

  Oh. Oh.

  —e
xplode inside her, and she could not hold down the whimper and neither could he; but no one remonstrated or even showed they noticed; because this was wartime and life was ephemeral and things could change in an instant; and now they had.

  She felt him slip out of her.

  Brian.

  Wet and slick against her thigh.

  Morio was Dmitri’s seventh male lover among the High Command, or rather the ultra-nationalists who held such strong positions there. Today’s half-brutal intercourse had followed a bout of archery – shooting live dogs in snow-covered Shibiya Park, one of Morio’s favoured methods for hardening his warrior spirit. Then he announced he was being sent to China.

  ‘This time, we will crush Changsha,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sure you will,’ said Dmitri.

  The Chinese had held out against the previous two onslaughts; but in the wake of Pearl Harbor, Japanese determination was renewed.

  ‘They declared war!’ Morio’s face was red with booze and outrage. ‘War!’

  ‘How dare they,’ said Dmitri.

  How dare they honour their international treaties, as they’ve always done? How dare they declare war on Germany and on Japan, which has been striking inside their borders for a decade, treating the population, women especially, with all the regard Morio showed Shibiya’s dogs?

  ‘When I come back, we will have much celebration.’

  ‘Why wait?’ said Dmitri.

  But Morio lay back on the cushions, breath whistling in his nostrils, until his mouth dropped open and his snoring became an impression of a pig snuffling in mud.

  So Changsha is under threat again.

  It would be the last piece of news to be passed on via his existing courier network, before he boarded the ship for Germany. His cover had been deepened by Soviet agents in Berlin, so that he now had an opportunity to penetrate further; or perhaps his masters were being kinder than usual, removing him from a zone made increasingly dangerous for westerners since General Tojo had replaced the civilian Konoye government with his own military cabinet.

  Morio thought the world had changed last month, on the 7th of December; but for Dmitri, the turning point had occurred the day before, when General Georgi Zhukov flung 100 fresh divisions – infantry, the near-indestructible T-34 tanks, cavalry and artillery: seven army corps and two cavalry corps – against a shocked Wehrmacht army already worn down by mud then snow. No one, not the Abwehr or Hitler himself, had suspected the existence of such a force.

  I may be a country boy at heart, but Moscow is my city.

  They were élite divisions, Zhukov’s forces, and they had been stationed on the border with Japanese-occupied Manchuria, guarding against the threat from Imperial Nihon … until Dmitri’s report informed Moscow that the Japanese were directing all of their attention against an American naval base, and the Pacific arena was about to explode into warfare.

  So Mother Russia had vented her wrath at last, breaking the myth of the Wehrmacht’s invincibility.

  Are you shocked by my treachery?

  But the darkness in his mind did not respond.

  From her room in Swiss Cottage, as Gavriela peeked out from between the blackout curtains, only a small, broken garden and the back of another house were visible. But snowflakes were drifting, some curling back up, and snow lay like bunched loaves atop the garden wall, luminescent in the grey dawn light, while a thin layer obscured the soil, save for circles like bullet holes where clumps of defiant grass broke through.

  She looked back at the one-armed man sleeping in her bed. When the landlady found out, she would no doubt throw them out; but she, Gavriela, was supposed to return to Bletchley today, while Brian had his own lodgings near Cambridge Circus.

  How do I feel?

  The world had turned cold and strange, and something else had changed: some new purpose forming inside her, whose nature she did not know, not yet.

  Outside, the snowfall clenched, thickening and uncaring.

  TWENTY-SIX

  THE WORLD, 5563 AD

  After a ninenight of planning, Harij was ready to break her out. When everyone in the town was asleep – even old Farkil, the daywatchman who guarded the fungal farms – he passed the shell-dome homes of those who lived close to the school, then stopped at the entrance.

  Far above, on the cavern ceiling, glowfungus glimmered.

  He teased apart the laminae of the locks, his flux control better than he managed in class; then he was inside, at the shielded door that led to the special dormitory, where Ilara and the others like her slept. This door locked from the outside, and opened the same way.

  **Ilara. Wake up. We’re going for a walk.**

  **Not time not time not time not time not—**

  **Shh. Hold it in. Hold it in.**

  **HOLD IN. IN. In. In … **

  She damped her flux emissions, curled them inside herself. He touched the polished silver of her face.

  **Good girl. With me, now.**

  Ilara trusted him, that was the thing.

  **This way.**

  Hand in hand, they passed out of the school, skirted the glimberry patches, and left the town proper, climbing the long scree slope that led to the outside. In an alcove at the top, where natural minerals twisted ambient flux into painful, intense knots, Harij reached inside – silver lips pulling back from his teeth: it had not hurt this much before – then dragged out three large sacks.

  He covered himself and Ilara with hooded robes, slung the foodsacks over his shoulder, and took Ilara’s hand once more.

  **We can’t go far in daylight, but we can make a little distance.**

  **In. In. In.**

  **So trust me, sister. Trust me.**

  They went out into the burning.

  This was the beginning of the long trek, travelling when daylight was least searing, only switching to normal habits on the third night, when they were far enough away that no one would spot them. When Harij told her to, Ilara ate an algal wafer or drank from a sweetmilk sac. The only trouble he had was when she would stop, her attention taken by an oddly shaped stone or a scuttling tripion, and rock herself back and forth a thousand times before continuing.

  At those times, he reminded himself of the old story, [[The Strongest Dreamlode]], and told himself he was doing the right thing.

  Once, after they had stopped only when the sun was white-hot, he slept deeply and did not wake up until the night was far gone. He found Ilara bumping her head against a rock, over and over – insistent though not hard – while the silver-and-black glory of Magnus hung directly overhead like an omen. He placed his hand between her forehead and the rock, and kept it there until she stopped.

  **Seven thousand nine hundred and thirteen, tastes like a glimberry.**

  **Very good, Ilara. That’s nice. Shall we go on now?**

  **Yes.**

  Across the mesa, they walked.

  They journeyed until the sweetmilk and myobread were gone, and only a few algal wafers remained at the bottom of one flapping, near-empty sack. Harij cast everywhere as he walked and as he slept, without the faintest taste of the resonance he sought.

  He had killed Ilara, along with himself.

  **I’m sorry, sister. I’m sorry.**

  She squeezed his hand, but her eyes were burned shut, and she could barely stumble on. Her skin was cracked and flaky, shiny no more.

  He had been so sure the resonance lay in this direction.

  **Through here. The gap.**

  A broken outcrop stood before them, showing a fang-shaped opening they might be able to crawl inside. The night was ending, and soon the scorching would begin.

  Their last day, surely.

  He pulled her in with him, held her close, and slipped too easily into sleep.

  When the night was at its coolest, something blasted in his mind.

  **IT’S ALL RIGHT, HARIJ!**

  He winced, trying to focus.

  **What?**

  **YOU FOUND THE DREAMLODE. IT’S RIGHT
BENEATH US, SWEET BROTHER. WAKE UP! WAKE UP!**

  Her words pulled him into the waking world.

  **Ilara? Ilara!**

  Was this her real voice, the flux contained inside her for so long, the thoughts imprisoned in her damaged mind? The potential Ilara made real?

  **Where are you?**

  **EVERYWHERE, BROTHER.**

  He could not see her, though her words pounded through him.

  **WHAT YOU SEEK IS FURTHER BACK. SEE?**

  Crawling, hurting everywhere but not caring, he hauled himself deeper inside the crack; and finally he found her. Found it, the thing that once had housed her.

  **IT WAS ONLY FLESH.**

  Her body, blackened and cracked, desiccated to oblivion. But if that was Ilara, who was this?

  **Dreamlode. This is a dreamlode?**

  But he could sense it now, as he revived: deep thrumming resonance, a vast hidden seam of crystal below.

  **WE’RE FINE NOW, ALL OF US.**

  **All?**

  **WE UNDERSTAND BEING TRAPPED. BUT IDENTITY IS SUCH A FRAGILE CONCEPT.**

  Some of the flux was redolent of Ilara – of the stunted, unable-to-express-herself Ilara – but some of it tasted ancient; and some it was mere Ideas, snagged by chance, captured from the winds of flux.

  **Need to go … Home.**

  **YES. YOU MUST, HARIJ. GO HOME.**

  But he could not carry her body all that way.

  **LEAVE THE FLESH-THING. SAVE YOURSELF.**

  There were algal wafers he had saved for her.

  **BEAR LEFT DOWN THE RAVINE AS YOU LEAVE, AND YOU WILL FIND A SPIKER BUSH. IT WILL SUSTAIN YOU FOR A TIME.**

  **Leave … **

  **YOU MUST LEAVE, HARIJ. YOU MUST.**

  **I need to … **

  **YOUR THOUGHTS ARE TOO TEMPTING, SO FRAGILE AND DELICIOUS. DO NOT TORTURE US MORE, OR WE WILL NO LONGER HOLD BACK.**

  **I don’t … **

  But he did understand, even in this pain-wracked state.

  **I love you, Ilara.**

  **WE LOVE YOU ALSO, BUT GO.**

  He dragged himself out of the gap.