Ragnarok 03 - Resonance

by John Meaney

  ‘We have healers,’ said the holy man. ‘Let us help.’

  ‘I should hamstring the whelp,’ muttered Brökkr, behind Fenrisulfr’s shoulder. But for the locals, those words were drowned out by Bjartr’s loud acknowledgement of their kindness.

  Fenrisulfr hoped that the healers’ ministrations, whatever they were, would burn like the flames of Surt, the Fire Giant who ruled hot Múspellheim.

  Ivarr and Knótr helped Thóllakr – at least he had the sense not to whimper – follow the holy man back to the village by the sacred tower, or whatever it was.

  In broken Tongue, the villager said: ‘We feast. Now. You join?’

  They would need to keep watchful and go easy on the mead or ale, but eating well would be a good thing after the voyage.

  ‘We will feast with you,’ said Bjartr Red-Tooth.

  And so they did.

  When he had eaten enough of the local fowl, and drunk a horn of watery mead, Fenrisulfr clapped several of his men on the shoulder, then went outside. In the wake of the storm, the night smelled fresh beneath a white full moon, strong enough to cast shadows.

  He felt good, and knew there was a small task left undone: telling Thóllakr what an idiot he was. Fenrisulfr grinned, since the young warrior’s clumsiness seemed to have done no harm; but he would use harsh words nonetheless.

  Someone was throwing up in the stinking middens. On the way back, he would check that it was not one of his own band, whom he expected to maintain discipline. The locals seemed cowed, but there was always an element of doubt in an unknown country, the possibility of allies secretly summoned and moving through the night – it was bright enough to travel by – for a dawn attack.

  Possible, not likely.

  And then he heard it.

  Dah, dah-dum, dah-dah-dah-dum, dah-dah.

  The nine-note sequence was faint, not as if the darkness were distant, but as if it had grown weak. And what of that? A weakened enemy was easier to kill, that was all.

  It’s been fifteen years.

  So it was possible the tainted spirit belonged to someone other than Stígr; but as the berserkergangr roiled within Fenrisulfr, begging to take over, he knew it did not matter: whoever this was, they were going to die.

  He hefted his twin war-axes, lately his weapons of choice – he wore his sword as status symbol and back-up weapon, along with a dagger, while the crystal-tipped spear remained at the longboat, guarded – and set off at a jog, following a flattened path through moonlit silver grass, towards a large roundhouse inside which an orange fire burned. If his quarry was warm and relaxed, so much the better, for cold wind and chaos would enter along with him, the hell-wolf, and destruction would follow.

  Ready.

  His foot smashed the door in, and he was inside.

  Stígr!

  The one-eyed man was there, mouth opening—

  NOW!

  —as twin axe-blades cut down through his collar bones and into his chest, cutting his heart so that unconsciousness came instantly, but that was not enough because the spirit might yet feel agony before it left the body, and this one deserved to suffer, so in his berserkr rage Fenrisulfr continued to cut and smash, to kick and hew, smashing the dead thing into butchered parts, over and over—

  Done.

  —and then it clicked off, the berserkergangr, as only he could manage, and Fenrisulfr was a man once more, only a man.

  The inside of the roundhouse was wet, all dripping red, painted by Stígr’s blood. A warrior knew, as a non-warrior could not, just how much blood might spray and gush from a human body; but even so, it was spectacular, the scarlet decoration of the interior: ceiling, curved walls, the table and cots, and the spattered clothing and faces of the people staring at him, shocked.

  Thóllakr, his wound bandaged and wrapped with a poultice, was the first to speak.

  ‘Chief? Why, uh . . .?’

  Fenrisulfr answered: ‘He was possessed of the darkness.’

  A holy man was there, not their chief but a relative youth, along with a young woman who looked to have been holding Thóllakr’s hand: under other circumstances, Fenrisulfr would have thought Good for you. But there was the aftermath of destroying his enemy to deal with.

  ‘He prayed,’ said the young holy man in passable Tongue. ‘For many years, he prayed to weaken the demons that tortured his spirit. And the darkness is weak, he said. It can only touch men’s spirits, and that barely, and makes do with that because it cannot move worldly objects directly, so it really is not mighty but very, very weak . . .’

  He seemed to realise he was babbling, but could not help spilling more words: ‘Stígr said the dark powers needed a bridge that was not Bifröst. That everyone forgets Múspellheim in their schemes. And he said only you would understand that.’

  ‘You’ve never seen me before.’ Fenrisulfr shrugged, spilling blood from his axe-heads. ‘You cannot know me.’

  The holy man wiped his face, then looked startled at the sight of his hand, as if he had thought he was wiping off sweat instead of dead man’s blood.

  ‘Stígr said a wolf from hell would come for him.’

  There was more the young holy man wanted to say, but though his mouth worked, his throat seized up; and then he turned away, making a mystic gesture – hand to forehead, stomach, then either side of his chest. Fenrisulfr had seen it before, as far east as Byzantium, and now here in the west.

  The scrape of blades withdrawing from scabbards came from outside.

  Fenrisulfr crouched and growled, ready to strike. Then he heard: ‘Chief? Fenrisulfr?’

  ‘Come inside, good Brökkr.’

  Behind Brökkr came Egil Blood-Sword, then his warrior Davith, and Ári from Fenrisulfr’s band, along with the chief holy man, whose face was pale.

  ‘Y-you killed Stígr. He was under our protection.’

  Fenrisulfr felt himself tremble.

  ‘Don’t think much of your protection,’ said Davith, while Egil frowned.

  ‘This was a creature of darkness,’ said Fenrisulfr. ‘A seithr adept. An abomination, holy man, that you sheltered.’

  ‘You had no—’

  But the holy man reached out to grab Fenrisulfr, and that was a mistake.

  ‘Agh!’

  Blood gushed again as Fenrisulfr’s axe severed the arm.

  ‘Shit,’ said Egil.

  He punched the howling holy man in the back of the neck, and the holy man dropped face-first and silent, blood spurting from the glistening stump.

  Then Egil looked at Fenrisulfr and grinned.

  ‘Guess we just changed our plans.’

  Behind Fenrisulfr, Thóllakr groaned as he swung himself up from the cot, and put one arm around the young woman, who had not spoken and who looked in shock. It was a wordless claim of ownership or at least protection, which his fellow warriors would not break. The remaining young holy man shrank back, as if hoping no one would notice him.

  ‘Blood and death,’ said Fenrisulfr quietly.

  ‘Blood and death,’ agreed Egil Blood-Sword.

  And Brökkr laughed.

  ‘The Hell-Wolf is with us again.’

  Fenrisulfr growled once more as berserkergangr came upon him. Egil dropped to one side and Brökkr to the other, understanding the danger, and allowed Fenrisulfr to rush outside first, before following with weapons ready. Fenrisulfr, sprinting hard, gave vent to his wolf-warrior’s roar, and everywhere the raiders responded, heartbeat-fast, drawing and swinging weapons, instantly transformed in a way soft villagers and holy men could never understand or cope with.

  And the slaughter began, as the Middle World reduced to two things only, for in warrior rage it is hard to hear the screaming.

  Blood and death were all.

  TWENTY-NINE

  VIJAYA & METRONOME STATION, 2606 AD

  Every war needs a name, though its survivors normally term it just that: The War. In human history there had never been a war across the stars, never mind spanning continua; but as the h
unt for revenge against the Zajinets intensified, the massively non-linear dynamics of mu-space engagements, not to mention the indecipherable thought processes of the enemy, meant that for Pilots, only one name sufficed for the struggle thrust upon them.

  They called it the Chaos Conflict.

  And while human warfare requires dehumanising the enemy – because over ninety per cent of men and women possess strong inhibitions against killing their own species – the Zajinets were clearly alien already. The difficulty for strategic planners was in understanding them enough to predict their actions and reactions.

  Roger Blackstone knew of the Zajinets’ fears, thanks to Ro McNamara, and he had shared what he knew with his superior officers. The key quotation was this: ‘They [meaning humanity] will allow the darkness to be born. It will spread across the galaxy, and they won’t fight back until billions have perished.’

  The numbers of Pilots training for combat and adopting full-time military roles continued to increase, to perhaps two per cent of Pilots possessing ships, but that figure was a guess. Roger did not have clearance for accurate numbers. Conversely, details of his ability remained classified, because there was only one of him, along with a tiny number of Pilots with a weak sensitivity to the darkness.

  Hence the importance of allies who might share Roger’s ability, even though they were confined to realspace.

  On first arrival at Vachss Station, Roger had checked the residents’ list and failed to find the name he was looking for. But al-Khalid had given him access to the arrivals/departures data, and it seemed that he was four standard tendays (or a Vijayan month) too late: Leeja Rigelle had departed for Earth, no return journey booked; and a certain Tannier had flown with her.

  There were things to distract Roger. His work meant spending half of his time on Vijaya’s surface, based in a luxurious building in Mintberg that would have done justice to Imperial Rome or Byzantium, with some high-tech embellishments. It was in many ways a Renaissance or neo-classical culture, and he came to enjoy being among the Haxigoji.

  Whenever possible, he flew, coursing mu-space and filling himself-and-ship with energised elation; and when Corinne, also graduated from Tangleknot, had leave from her classified Admiralty work, she would fly to Vachss Station where they would book a suite together and not venture outside until it was time for her to leave.

  Their future was a subject they avoided.

  Local Haxigoji, when Roger was in Mintberg, were used to seeing him pound the streets early in their twenty-eight hour day (he had adjusted his circadian rhythms to suit), running and returning to his quarters for strength and combat training. On occasion, to their mutual benefit, he sparred with Haxigoji bannermen from the City Guard.

  Working alongside Nectarblossom, he embarked on creating a training programme for Haxigoji recruits: learning how to move among humanity, deciphering their cultures, and the clues that might lead them to a darkness-corrupted human, and how to deal with the authorities when they detected such a person. Combat skills were a part of it, and Roger drilled them hard because it was more than their own lives at stake; but he also emphasised the extent to which this was a last resort.

  Then there were anti-surveillance skills and the like, because once Haxigoji started living among humans, and the darkness-corrupted individuals among them understood the threat, all Haxigoji would be at risk of assassination. It should not be a high risk, since any act of violence brought attention, but it was a factor.

  It took time to get the programme up and running, but by the end of two standard years, the third batch of trainees was getting ready for their final test. Partly for psychological reasons, to seal in the previous training, every intense programme needs a rite of passage on completion.

  And that, for these very special recruits, was where the human prisoners came in.

  On several occasions, Nectarblossom told him, ‘You should not feel sorry for them, Roger. They’re not really human. Their infection makes them something else.’

  ‘We can cure infections,’ he had answered the first time.

  ‘Not this one.’

  Initially, for safety, Roger preferred to use non-Pilot agents of the darkness, captured on sweeps through realspace cities or orbitals. At first, those sweeps had been carried out by other Pilots on Max Gould’s books, recorded as possessing a tiny portion of Roger’s ability. Some of the current batch of prisoners had been detected by Haxigoji graduates of the training programme.

  They normally resided, the non-Pilot prisoners, in ultra-secure facilities on one of three isolated realspace worlds; but for the test, Roger had commandeered a long-disused deep-space research station. He had wanted a place where he and Nectarblossom had total control, and got it.

  Roger had not been party to the Admiralty discussion regarding renegade Pilots, but it had been decided on high that certain trusted Haxigoji would be told of the renegades’ existence – to the best of Roger’s knowledge, Nectarblossom was the first to learn of it – on the basis that the programme’s graduates needed to be prepared for anything, including the detection of renegade Pilots operating among ordinary humans on realspace worlds.

  It was not a secret to be shared with humanity at large. The Chaos Conflict, war against the Zajinets, was open knowledge; the notion that Pilot might fight Pilot in all-out warfare, that was something to keep quiet for as long as possible.

  Realspace populations needed to feel safe, and they could only continue to do so if they did not realise the extent to which Pilots felt fear, like anybody else.

  And so, the prisoners.

  This time around, there were in fact three Pilots, all caught while operating on realspace worlds undercover, all equipped with countersurveillance measures. Their captured tu-rings had been of great interest to Admiralty scientists. Two were caught simply because of superior concentrations of surveillance tech. The third had been recognised by a Pilot delivering goods to Göthewelt; after the prisoner was taken and fifty unconscious passers-by were revived from the smartmiasma-induced coma used in the arrest, local Sanctuary representatives had spun a story about a new Anomaly seed, rather than a darkness-corrupted Pilot. The local authorities were satisfied, and awarded a civic medal to the Pilot who had recognised the threat.

  If renegade Pilots were beginning to operate undercover in greater numbers, Roger’s Haxigoji trainees had better know for sure they could spot them. So this time around, Pilots would be part of the final test.

  Which the trainees had better, after all of his and Nectarblossom’s efforts, pass with ease.

  When Roger had first boarded Metronome Station, protected by a quickglass suit, he had watched while engineers brought the lonely facility back to life, installing modern technology, bringing the station up to a stable spin and restoring warmth and breathable air, section by section, until the whole thing might have been in its heyday, had it not been for the lack of crew.

  Because of his meetings with Ro McNamara, Roger had become something of a history buff where Pilots were concerned; and so he made a private pilgrimage to the long-abandoned control room where long ago a scientist on duty, one Dorothy Verzhinski, had picked up a wordless distress call whose audio signal contained only one thing: the sound of a baby crying.

  The drifting mu-space ship contained an unconscious and fading Pilot, along with the baby she had given birth to before transiting into realspace: a breach birth delivered by performing a Caesarean upon herself, using her inboard robotic tool-arms. The Pilot, saved by shuttles despatched from Metronome Station, had been Karyn McNamara; and the baby grew up to be Dorothy McNamara, named after Verzhinski, except that she hated her first name and shortened it to Ro.

  By mean-geodesic time, that had occurred four hundred and eighty-three years ago. No wonder Ro remained hidden from the rest of humanity: how could anyone cope with a society that had advanced by nearly half a millennium from the one they had grown up in?

  Today, on the occasion of the final test for the third run of the
six-month training programme, Metronome Station was once again warm and comfortable. Roger wore only a normal jumpsuit, though a nodule of quickglass fastened against his skin would spread to cover him should it be necessary, while Nectarblossom wore a heavy white tabard, decorated with gold brocade, over a pale-blue silk-like tunic and trews: her formal best, designed to intimidate the candidates before-hand, and increase the sense of ceremony afterwards, when they were told they had passed.

  Assuming they did pass.

  Roger and Nectarblossom walked along a grey-carpeted central corridor, wide and tastefully lit and scented, trailed by twenty-four hopeful Haxigoji of both sexes, dressed in the dark sleeveless jackets and breeches that served as tac uniforms, giving off a faint odour of excitement that even Roger had learned to recognise. To Nectarblossom, the scent would be anything but faint, he guessed. Then he stopped, and the recruits did likewise as Nectarblossom walked on to check the testing area.

  ‘All right.’ He turned to face them. ‘Good luck, everyone. We’ll call you in one by one. The exit from the testing-area is on the other side, where you’ll meet up afterwards. You can do it.’

  Amber eyes with horizontal slits were fastened on him. Several Haxigoji nodded: a learned human gesture.

  ‘Crisp,’ he added, ‘you’ll be first. Two minutes, and we start.’

  Then he strode ahead, passed through unfolding security doors, nodded to the two heavily armed Pilots on guard – there were half a dozen others stationed at sensible locations – and passed through to what had been a viewing gallery. The entire wall to his right formed a window on space, opposite a relaxation area on the left, now transformed into a series of seven open-fronted cells. Each cell’s opening glowed dull orange: inbuilt weaponry ready to blast any person or thing that tried to pass through.

  Inside each cell was a single captive; and the central cell was occupied by a Pilot called Morik, the one captured on Göthewelt. He sat pale and glowering, darkness lapping strongly around him. A smartmiasma guarded him, sensitive to his biochemistry, ready to respond to a build-up of adrenaline, satanin or other precursor to physical action.