James Lovegrove - The Age Of Odin

by Lovegrove, James

Between the castle and the snakelike, burrowing vehicle stood us and our guns.

  Not much opposition at all, relatively speaking.

  Fifty-Nine

  "Jormungand," said Thor.

  "Jormun-who?"

  "Jormungand. The Midgard Serpent."

  "Loki's tech version. What's the real Jormungand do? What's it capable of?"

  "Killing. Killing with its breath alone."

  I looked back to the massive tubular behemoth barrelling towards us. Men in the front ranks had already opened fire on it, and their bullets were bouncing off like grains of rice. An RPG arced towards it, trailing smoke. The explosion left a star-shaped scorch mark but made no appreciable difference.

  "Its breath..." I said, wonderingly.

  And then Jormungand was within spitting distance of the outer defence perimeter, and it let rip.

  The noise was indescribable. Beyond loud. Staggering. Gut-wrenching. An immense booming blare that sprang from its hollow front. The sound radiated outwards in a visible cone, a warped, white-tinged shimmer extending perhaps twenty metres ahead of the beast. And anyone touched...

  ...burst.

  No other word for it.

  Humans became patches of red fog. Clothing was shredded. Bones were pulverised. Even guns were shattered into components and fragments of components. One moment, a living, breathing person. Next, a thinning spray of popped organ and vaporised blood.

  Jormungand was fitted with some kind of audio generator, massively amplified, and used soundwaves to drill a path for itself through the earth, pummelling rock to dust. Up above ground, those same soundwaves could be employed as a weapon. Nothing - organic or inorganic - could withstand a volley of such sheer volume. It was instantaneous destruction by decibel.

  There was nothing else for it but to retreat. No point holding the line when the enemy could carve through so easily. The outer defence perimeter broke. Men scattered and ran. Jormungand ploughed onward, propelled by those serrated wheels. It was on a direct course for the castle, and I doubted there was anything we could do to divert or waylay it.

  The radio on my belt crackled.

  "Ground forces, this is Sleipnir. I see you're, ah, having a spot of bother down there."

  "Too bloody right we are, Thwaite," I said. I scanned upwards and spotted the Chinook zeroing in over the treetops. "Any ideas?"

  "Flight Lieutenant Jensen's had one. Can't say I'm mad keen on it myself."

  "Right now I'll take any suggestions you've got."

  "We're, er, we're going to ditch the chopper."

  "Ditch...?"

  "On top of that thing. See if we can't stop it that way."

  "Are you sure about this?"

  "Christ, no. Jenners reckons there's a one in ten chance we'll make it out alive. My own estimate's somewhat more conservative. But needs must and all that sort of thing."

  I didn't think I could talk them out of it. Didn't want to, truth be told. There weren't a whole lot of other options available to us.

  "Fair enough," I said. "Thwaite? About your moustache?"

  "Yes, Coxall?"

  "It's a pretty nice one, actually. Lush. I'm just jealous."

  "Acknowledged," said Thwaite. "Over and hopefully not out."

  I watched Sleipnir pick up speed. It swooped in behind Jormungand, its rotors two discs of grey blur. Jensen was keeping its nose up, so that when the crash came - and it came jarringly hard - the Wokka's underside took the brunt. Sleipnir bellyflopped onto the back of the unsuspecting Jormungand, a dozen tons of aeronautical engineering colliding at speed with Loki's crawling serpentine vehicle.

  The force of the impact smashed Jormungand's rear end deep into the ground and crumpled part of its topside inwards. It also split Sleipnir's fuselage in two, and I saw the forward section of the helicopter, cockpit and all, shear off and roll down Jormungand's flank. It hit the earth head-on, bounced, and came to a halt.

  The aviation fuel in Sleipnir's tanks ignited. The fireball engulfed fully half of Jormungand, and the vehicle jolted, then shuddered to a complete standstill.

  The explosion flung chopper parts far and wide. One of the rotors hurtled into the woods, scything through trees. The other shot over our heads, falling apart as it flew, each of the three blades separating from the rotor head mechanism in weird slow motion. One blade struck the castle, embedding itself in the side of a turret. The other two sailed lazily over the top of the building to land somewhere on the far side.

  As the smoke cleared and the flames subsided, it became apparent that Jormungand had been halted in its tracks for good. Jensen's possibly suicidal ploy had worked. The burrowing machine's back had been broken and a significant number of its serrated wheels damaged beyond use, including the crucial underside ones, crushed by the falling Wokka. Jormungand was disabled.

  Not entirely, though.

  It might not be able to move but its soundwave drill remained intact. Its nose was pointing straight at the castle, but I judged that the building was safe; Jormungand had been stopped a hundred metres short of it, well outside the drill's range.

  What I hadn't counted on was that the focus of the drill could be narrowed and elongated. The aperture at Jormungand's front began to contract like the iris of an eye un-dilating. Metal plates slid inwards from the circumference, screeching against one another as they tightened the drill's scope to a circle just a couple of metres in diameter. They were honeycomb-patterned, sound-deflecting.

  Then the metal beast roared, and a beam of pure bludgeoning sonic power leapt from it, pounding into the castle like some huge spectral lance. Stones and mortar imploded. The whole building groaned and seemed to recoil. Ripples spread outward from the initial point of impact, solid three-foot-thick walls quivering like jelly. Windows detonated, spraying out shards. Flakes and fragments of masonry tumbled down in a kind of landslide, leaving jagged gaping views of the rooms within. Sections of roof fell in on themselves. The castle from end to end seemed to be losing cohesion, shaking itself to bits as though in the clutches of a Richter 10 earthquake. No doubt all this demolition would have been as noisy as hell, if Jormungand hadn't been drowning out everything with its drill's devastating howl.

  "No!"

  This was Thor, and I saw him mouth the word rather than heard it. His face was aghast, a mask of disbelief.

  "No!" he exclaimed again, and then without any further ado he turned and charged at Jormungand, tugging Mjolnir from his belt as he went.

  I followed him, for no good reason other than that somebody needed to cover his back, just in case. Also, I wanted a piece of that machine almost as much as he did, although I wasn't sure there was a great deal I personally could do.

  Thor leapt up onto the front of Jormungand, right into its gaping maw. His only thought was to destroy the device that was destroying his castle. Hammer in hand, he set about beating the metal plates that served as a focusing lens for the drill. They began to crack and splinter.

  It occurred to me that this wasn't a wise move. Thor hadn't thought it all the way through. Or maybe he had and just didn't care. Ending Jormungand's attack was his sole ambition. The likely consequences of the method he'd chosen to achieve this were neither here nor there.

  One of the plates broke away, and the quality of the drill's sound changed. It became less steady, with a shrill edge. Thor continued to chip away at the plates, and I saw the sleeve of his tunic fly off in tatters. His left arm was exposed to the soundwaves and the skin started to wrinkle and tear.

  I yelled at him to give up, that he was going to kill himself. Of course he couldn't hear me. Teeth clenched, jaw set, he rained hammer blows on the plates. The skin of his arm was curling off in ribbons and bloody loops. Either he was so intent on what he was doing that he didn't notice or, more probably, the pain was of no importance to him. Only subduing Jormungand mattered.

  Another plate shattered and fell free. The drill was now making a hideous, irregular droning noise. The soundwaves needed a circular, sy
mmetrical outlet to function properly. By ruining the funnel, Thor was disrupting their pattern of emergence. De-optimising the drill's efficiency. Already - a backward glance showed me - the castle was shaking far less violently, although deep fissures were still appearing in its walls. One entire buttress crumbled away, as though cut loose. Roof tiles slithered off in cascades.

  Thor himself wasn't faring much better. His left arm had been flayed to the muscle and hung useless at his side. Flesh dangled off it in grisly tatters. Blood poured down in rivulets.

  He didn't let up, though. One-handed, he pounded with Mjolnir, relentless. The more damage he did to Jormungand, the more damage it did to him in return. The vehicle's "breath" was butchering him, peeling him, rending him to pieces. His left leg was starting to go the way of his left arm. His chest was bared and reddening. The drill ate away at him layer by layer. It was as though he was being sand-blasted to oblivion. And there was little else I could do except stand and watch. If I climbed up there with him, I'd be gone in a nanosecond. It was only because he was a god that he could withstand the drill at all. Divine strength and durability were buying him the time he needed. Those and his own sheer willpower.

  Would it be enough?

  It had to be enough.

  Rib bone glinted. Muscle glistened. The hammer beats slowed but didn't stop. Thor had cleared a hole in the plates that allowed him to step through. He did so. He staggered into the full hurricane force of the drill, which cleaned the hair off his head, the beard from his face. I had no idea how he was able to keep going, how he could even put one foot in front of the other, but nonetheless he somehow managed to stumble on into the throat of the machine. Mjolnir was suffering too, its head turning to dust, its handle to splinters. Both it and its wielder were losing integrity before my very eyes.

  Finally Thor raised Mjolnir above his head and delivered an immense, devastating blow to something inside Jormungand. I didn't see precisely what he hit. I was at the wrong angle, not close enough. Whatever it was, though, it must have been vital to the operation of the drill because in an instant the sound died and a silence fell. A silence shot through with the screaming of tinnitus.

  Thor, what was left of him, tottered backwards. He took nine steps. He was a ghastly, gory scarecrow version of himself. Barely alive, ruined beyond redemption. He sagged to his knees on the rim of Jormungand's front end, and then slipped off onto the ground. When his body hit the snow it splashed rather than thudded.

  I hurried over for a closer look. Was he - could be conceivably be - still alive?

  No. Not a hope.

  What lay in front of the vehicle was only just recognisable as physical remains, a fractured skeleton in a soupy puddle of blood and organs. Nothing apart from the half-eroded hammer still clutched in one hand would have told you that this mangled mess had once been the god of thunder.

  Sixty

  Vali, Vidar and Tyr got inside the incapacitated Jormungand and wrought havoc on the crew. As reprisals went it was neither swift nor gentle. They took their time exacting revenge for the death of their brother. Screams came from within the vehicle - raw, pleading, protracted. The windows that were its eyes were spattered with red.

  It wasn't unsatisfying to know that this was being done.

  Then there was an interval of numbness. A period in which to take stock. Regroup. Lick wounds. Drink. Eat. Tally up how much we'd got left.

  Our inventory of assets went something like this:

  * a dozen Aesir and Vanir

  * the Valkyries

  * ten trolls

  * just over one hundred and fifty mortal troops

  We'd lost our head man, our strongest warrior, our one and only transport helicopter, and most of our castle. Heimdall was out of action for the foreseeable future, lying comatose in bed, blood still leaking from his traumatised eardrums. Frigga was tending to him and to the injured men, most of whom were suffering from wounds inflicted by falling debris, bone breaks, severe contusions, concussion, that sort of thing. One of the intact wings of the castle was now a field hospital. Thwaite was there. He'd been pulled from the wreckage of Sleipnir in very bad shape, and Frigga had promised to do what she could for him, but she wasn't optimistic about his chances. Jensen, unfortunately, was past saving.

  The respite lasted, in all, a little under three hours.

  Then the frost giants arrived.

  A delegation of them appeared at the castle gate. Three in all, led by Bergelmir himself. They requested an audience with Odin, but didn't seem surprised to learn that he wasn't around any more. Nor Thor either.

  In the event, they got lumped with me. I went out to meet them, taking Cy, Paddy and Vali along for backup and moral support.

  "Gid Coxall," Bergelmir said, almost affectionately. "Well, well, well. What a state Asgard finds itself in, eh? That it should come to this. And your poor castle. An impressive edifice once, although hardly the rival of Utgard."

  "We're redecorating," I said. "Once we're finished, you'll love what we're doing with the place. It's going to add hugely to the value when the time comes to sell. Kirstie and Phil would be proud."

  "You speak in riddles, as always," Bergelmir said. "Familiar words put together in incomprehensibly strange ways. It's one of the things that makes you so intriguing and so maddening."

  "All right, so what's the deal here? Let's cut right to it. I'm not in the mood for fannying around. Have you come to a decision on my offer? Us and you, in partnership. Because I'll be frank, we could do with reinforcements. Loki's got us on the ropes and there's surely more to come from him. Frost giants and Asgardians together, the dream team, what do you say?"

  Bergelmir's contemptuous laugh was an answer in itself.

  "Oh no! Dear me, no. That bird has definitely flown. In the light of your treacherous behaviour in Utgard, an alliance? I think not."

  "It was an accident," I argued, not convincingly because I wasn't convinced myself that it had been. "A slip-up. I wish it had never happened."

  "And well may you, but it doesn't change anything. Jotuns died, among them Suttung, a much feared and respected figure among our race. And after I'd granted you immunity from harm, too. I took that as a personal affront. A blatant slap in the face. No, any charitable feelings I may have harboured towards you, Gid, are long since vanished. Now I desire only your painful demise."

  "Well, that's good to know. I mean, at least I'm clear where I stand. So you're here to tell us any deal's off, yes? Is that all?"

  "In a manner of speaking. This is us doing you the courtesy of informing you that there now exists a state of all-out war between Jotunheim and Asgard. Ragnarök is upon us, and it is beholden to us as jotuns to assist as energetically as we can in the complete and utter destruction of the Aesir and all their collaborators."

  "So you're siding with Loki. That's it. Non-negotiable."

  "Yes."

  "And if at a later date he turns on you?"

  "We will act accordingly," said Bergelmir. "But I doubt it will ever come to pass. Especially not if we prove ourselves to be diligent aides to him in this instance."

  "Right now I'm looking at three frost giants," I said. "Forgive me if I'm not exactly quaking in my boots."

  "Ah, but observe."

  Bergelmir turned, put a hand to his mouth, and let out a long, loud, hooting call that echoed across the landscape.

  And frost giants appeared. They came out from the woods, stomping into view, kitted out in a glittering array of ice armour and weaponry. There were hundreds of them. Maybe even thousands. Everywhere I looked, frost giants.

  "We have the castle fully surrounded," their leader said. "Every able-bodied jotun of fighting age, male and female, has taken up arms and come. We will grant you one hour in which to rally your forces and prepare. One hour and not a minute more. Think of it as a vestigial mark of the esteem in which I once held you. Then we attack. No mercy. No quarter. We will fight you until the very last of us is dead - or the very last of you. G
ood day, Gid. When we two next meet - and I'm sure we will, and soon - you will find me altogether less congenial."Bergelmir smiled, bowed, and left with his companions.

  Sixty-One

  He was as good as his word. One hour later, almost to the second, the frost giants moved on the castle.

  I'd used the grace period to assess where the building's weak points were - and there were plenty of them - and make sure they were as well defended as they could possibly be. Jormungand had inflicted the most damage on the west-facing aspect. One major hole and several minor ones. Rubble formed convenient ramps, and I'd predicted the frosties would concentrate their efforts on using these to storm the breaches. That way they could establish a beachhead within the castle walls.

  Which was exactly their plan, and we hit them with a withering crossfire as they came. We had to shoot from reasonably close range since we couldn't afford to waste too much ammo. Ice armour was effective at deflecting bullets at a distance, so we kept it down to fifty metres or less, which didn't leave much room for error. A few of the frosties got through and the combat turned dirty and hand-to-hand. The majority didn't make it past the slopes of rubble, however. The bodies began to pile up in the breaches, two, three, even four high.

  The first wave of the attack lasted nearly forty minutes before a horn sounded the retreat. Bergelmir's troops withdrew to the trees, to retrench and steel themselves to start again.

  By that point I'd had an idea. "A brilliant one, even if I do say so myself."

  "Go on then," said Paddy, and when I'd outlined it he twisted his mouth up and said, "That could work. Maybe. Can't hurt to try, at any rate."

  "Oh give over, it's genius!"

  "No, Finnegans Wake is genius. You've come up with something that might make a difference and equally might not. Which is hardly the same."

  "Sour grapes. You just wish it was your idea."