Ragnarok 03 - Resonance

by John Meaney

  ‘So either the attacks were faked to look like Zajinet weapons-fire,’ said Roger, ‘or Helsen really was helping Zajinets to attack our people, stirring things up. In either case, a known agent of the darkness’ – the bitch is dead – ‘actively wants us to engage with the Zajinets. My question is, given it’s what Helsen wanted’ – dead at last – ‘why would we even consider it?’

  And it was Jed who had taken out Helsen! That was excellent news . . . although a younger Roger might not have celebrated a friend killing for the second time.

  ‘The easiest way to physically unbalance an untrained person,’ said Whitwell, ‘is to shove their chest—’

  ‘—and then catch their reaction and whip them forwards. Or pull them and throw them backwards when they jerk back.’ Roger smiled at the analogy. ‘That’s a neat idea.’

  ‘I’m glad we meet with your approval, Captain,’ said Max Gould.

  It would suit the darkness – assuming the phenomenon could be anthropomorphised that way – to disperse Labyrinth’s forces against the widespread Zajinet attacks. But to draw out the Zajinets en masse, apparently going along with the intention of the darkness, was like taking an enemy’s momentum and subverting it to cause their downfall. If they could cripple the Zajinet fleets in one massive action, there would be less distraction from pursuing Schenck and his renegade force.

  ‘It’s a large target that we hope they can’t resist,’ said the unnamed officer, ‘and which they can’t attack in the piece meal way they’ve been operating in so far. Our xenopsych specialists believe that Zajinets will attempt to operate collectively, possibly to the extent of committing every ship to one massive fleet in order to attack.’

  Pinning one’s hopes on anticipating Zajinet thinking was risky, but there was no point in Roger’s saying so: everyone in the room would know that.

  ‘We want you to aid in planning a series of deception raids,’ said Whitwell. ‘Counter-strikes that you’ll take part in.’

  ‘I see.’ Roger glanced at Max Gould.

  ‘And you’d better survive, Captain Blackstone. Because we expect you to lead the enemy to this location.’ Whitwell stabbed a finger at the holo showing the decoy base location. ‘You understand the objective?’

  ‘I do.’

  And it would be subtle in the execution, or it would be unsuccessful, because at every stage the Zajinets had to believe in what they were seeing and learning. Plus there was the possibility of counter-bluff: Zajinets mounting a deception strike of their own against the decoy, while targeting Labyrinth whose forces were committed elsewhere.

  Speaking of which . . .

  ‘If the decoy is here in realspace,’ asked Roger, ‘what is the congruent mu-space location? Is it—? Oh.’

  Smiles around the war chamber matched his own, as he examined the infinite twists and whorls in the holovolume he had picked out.

  ‘Mandelbrot Nebula,’ he added. ‘That is very nice indeed.’

  The perfect hiding place for a battle fleet mounting an ambush.

  It’ll need more than good topography.

  There was also the matter of leading the fleet to victory, and while Roger would have had little idea on how to start organising a fleet, none of the people in the room, not even Max Gould – master of the decades-long covert operation and always as ruthless as he had to be – struck him as being a war leader, a simultaneous strategist, tactician and messianic figure that others would follow.

  But this was a personal perception based on incomplete data, and there were limits to what even a special forces captain dared say to senior command. If they must mount this operation, then the primary requirement was to do it right, or they really would be playing into Helsen’s hands, even though the bitch was dead.

  Later he would realise he had forgotten someone, despite having talked to the legend’s own mother in person. Perhaps the battle planners were more astute than Roger had imagined, or perhaps this was simply the unravelling of fate, and sometimes you got lucky.

  He could only hope.

  Twenty-seven days later by mean-geodesic time, two days before the operation was due to commence, Roger was in a hangar deep within Ascension Annexe, looking over his beautiful black ship, her powerful form webbed with lines of scarlet and shining gold, her newly grown weaponry impressive, actually frightening. She was fantastic, and if anyone could get through the dangers to come, it was her.

  A pulse signal indicated an authorised visitor approaching. Roger strode across the deck, his beloved ship behind him, and stared at the area of hangar wall about to open. Soon it liquefied and drew apart, revealing a wide-shouldered, strong-looking adventurer. And suddenly Roger thought they might succeed in this insane venture against the Zajinets.

  ‘Admiral,’ he said. ‘Sir.’

  Formality might not be SRS’s strong suit, but this was a legend walking towards him with an arrogant grin and easy muscularity.

  ‘Dirk McNamara.’

  ‘Roger Blackstone.’

  As Roger held out his hand, an unwelcome image flitted through his mind’s eye: Dirk’s twin, Kian, face disfigured by the Molotov cocktail, one hand a claw, a mysterious figure who was rumoured to appear from time to time on realspace worlds and nudge people towards peace; while here was Dirk, the twin who had taken immediate vengeance on the mob, left them with eyeballs smoking, and made a daring escape from custody that led eventually to his centuries-swallowing hellflight. Son to Ro, the First Pilot, and in his own right a deadly fighter who could take action while others were only starting to assess the situation.

  They shook hands, Dirk’s strength and aura palpable.

  ‘If all goes to plan,’ said Dirk, ‘you’re going to have Zajinets on your arse. And they might decide to blast you out of existence, instead of sneaking along to see where you end up.’

  ‘They’ll have to be fast to catch me, sir.’ Roger could not help grinning.

  ‘You’ve one hell of a beautiful ship, Captain Blackstone.’ Dirk’s eyes were assessing her lines. ‘Powerful as anything, and I’ll bet she tumbles through manoeuvres like nobody’s business.’

  ‘She does that.’

  ‘Hmm. Well, good.’ Dirk’s obsidian gaze was on Roger now. ‘That answers my question.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘I needed to know you’re a fighter.’

  The rest had no need to be spoken, because there had been non-verbal recognition between the two of them, at the primate and even reptilian level, the instant Dirk walked inside the hangar.

  It takes one to know one.

  In this case meaning a warrior who would die sooner than quit.

  A soundless message pulsed through the hangar.

  =A devil-may-care leader can bring a fleet to victory when even the best of the others would fail.=

  Dirk looked up at the ceiling.

  ‘Are you talking about me or him?’

  The response came so fast that Roger wondered if Labyrinth had anticipated the question.

  =Yes.=

  Roger and Dirk laughed together, and then they bumped fists.

  Soon enough, the shit and chaos of battle would be upon them, the blood and screaming and awful fear, when desperation and focus and camaraderie would see them through or they would die; and none of that would matter except that Labyrinth herself needed to be safe, because she was the past, present and future of Pilotkind.

  And here she had her defenders.

  FORTY-THREE

  EARTH, 798 AD

  The stench of the middens was strong, as the man who had been Ulfr and Fenrisulfr rode past them on the edge of the city. This place was huge, a vast complex of longhalls and other buildings including wharves, and for the first time he believed the travellers’ tales were true: Lundenwic contained fully ten thousand folk, living together in one gigantic settlement, constructed around the ruined fortifications that once enclosed Londinium.

  A quartet of warrior-guards was extracting tax from new arrivals. He pressed his knees
inwards, and his mare walked forward and stopped.

  ‘And you are—?’ The warrior stared up at him.

  ‘My name is Wulf.’

  He understood the puzzled, careful looks. They would sense that he could fight, and well – though they could not know of his berserkergangr ferocity and his ability to control it – and his cloak was of better cloth than theirs. But whether he was thegn or ceorl, the lowest of aristocrats or the highest of commoners and a freeman, they could not tell.

  Wulf leaned over and handed the nearest guard a coin.

  ‘We all piss, shit and fart,’ Wulf told him, grinning. ‘Even eorls. Even kings.’

  They laughed at that, fellow fighting men stuck with boring duty. And after five years of working to lose his accent, Wulf-once-Ulfr no longer sounded like a foreigner to beware of. His spear, slung against his saddle, had leather wrapped and tied around its head, and its haft was scarred: an old weapon, nothing special, giving no hint that it was tipped with crystal, not metal.

  ‘King Coenwulf will be shitting out westerners,’ said one of them. ‘On account of he’s chewed them all up.’

  ‘What is that?’ asked Wulf.

  ‘Deorwine has the right of it,’ said the nearest guard. ‘Our boys killed old Cartog what’s-his-face, King of Gwynedd. We heard yesterday. Sheep-shagging bastards, the lot of them.’

  ‘That’ll be Caradog ap Meirion.’ Wulf nodded. ‘Biggest sheep shagger of them all.’

  The oldest guard shrugged, and Wulf knew exactly what he meant: kings fought kings and ordinary soldiers died, and afterwards what had changed?

  ‘I’ll see you men around,’ Wulf added.

  ‘Go well, friend.’

  Wulf nudged his horse into a walk.

  Over the coming weeks, his new neighbours became intrigued by and then accepting of the man called Wulf. With him, to his lodgings where his horse lived at ground level while he slept in the hay-insulated loft, he had brought a rolled cloak full of brooches and torcs, combs of carved bone, and similar lightweight trinkets that he could sell at a profit. He also bought such goods off travellers he met at the local inns and in the nearby market. The reputation he built up was one of fairness, never taking advantage of a wounded soldier down on his luck, nor selling at too high a margin to a love struck thegn eager to impress the maiden of his dreams, or perhaps her parents.

  In the mornings he would ride out to exercise the horse, though for half the time he would run alongside her – of all the beasts in the Middle World, none could outlast a man provided he was fit: not a mare, gelding or stallion, neither a dog nor a bitch, not even a wolf.

  He missed Brandr, his faithful war-hound, long dead, but would not dream of getting a replacement.

  Maybe if I settle.

  Even here in teeming Lundenwic, the notion of settling down seemed a strange and distant fantasy for a man who had wandered so far and seen so many things, and carried so much blood on his hands.

  Part-way through his daily run, he would work his strength by lifting, pulling and pressing boulders and stones, and by throwing them hard across muddy meadows. And there was weapons practice, of course, for without daily discipline the skills would grow dull, and then he would be unequipped if violence fell upon him. Then he would die embarrassed, deserving to be carried off to Niflheim, ignored by Óthinn’s Death-Choosers.

  Or whatever gods ruled here.

  Perhaps none of the stories are true.

  Except that the Norns clearly ruled men’s lives, and when he woke in the mornings he sometimes, just for a moment, held on to a fragment of a memory from the dreamworld; and in those times he was convinced that both Valhöll and the preparations for final war, for Ragnarökkr, existed for real.

  When his stock of trinkets threatened to become large, too much to carry with him when he left his lodgings, he had a choice to make. Surprising himself, he hired two local men to alternate guard duty on his place. Osmund and Cerdic seemed honest enough, though not warriors he would trust in battle, not comrades; but some twenty days after they began working for him, he returned from his morning training to find Osmund poking around the lodgings, looking puzzled, while Cerdic was gone, along with the lightest and most valuable of Wulf’s goods.

  ‘I saw him walking, hurrying’ – Osmund gestured – ‘and wondered what was wrong, so I came here.’

  ‘Stay on guard,’ Wulf growled.

  Osmund nodded, fast.

  Wolves excel at tracking prey.

  *

  There were courts for justice, but not in Wulf’s world, for men could lie and how could a stranger tell which one told the truth? So Wulf trailed Cerdic, and watched him hide up among stacked coracles on a mudbank, clearly thinking he was safe, and planning to slip out when darkness fell. But Wulf stood in shadow for the remainder of the day, unmoving, until the sun grew large and scarlet, low in the grey sky, and then diminished.

  Cerdic headed away from the crowded, muddy alleys, and Wulf followed.

  The moon was already high, her light shining stronger as darkness grew, and Cerdic was close to the old Roman walls when Wulf fell on him from behind and that was that: Cerdic’s soul was gone to Niflheim.

  All you had to do was not betray me.

  Wulf had retrieved most of his goods from the body, wrapping them in scraps of leather one by one, and slipping them into the new pouch he wore at his right hip, when a whimper sounded from beyond the walls.

  The old stones were the colour of bone in moonlight, and his sword came free of its oiled scabbard in silence as he heard the low laughter of men, and the single cut-off cry that had to be a woman. She would be one of the toothless whores who worked close to the ruins, snatched by a gang who could not be bothered to spend even the pittance she sought.

  My reavers did worse.

  But he would not allow this, all the same. There was no sound as he slid among dark gaps in the ruined walls, yet still they stopped, six grey figures, though the bundle on the silvery grass continued to struggle; and then Wulf laughed softly, knowing the effect it would have on them.

  Six dead men, although they did not know it yet.

  Now.

  He howled as the berserkergangr came upon him, and then it was a turbulence of death, joy in chaos as he whirled through bodies in the night, killing by feel more than sight, blood soaring until it was done, tides of triumph in his veins, chest heaving, as he pushed down the urge to kill because only the woman was left and she deserved to live.

  Calm.

  And cold, like a dropped cloak as the madness fell away.

  There it had been eight of them, it seemed, but the woman had used her daggers to good effect before they subdued her, leaving two corpses in the mud-strewn alley where they trapped her, while at least two of the men Wulf had killed bore wounds from her blades.

  ‘My name is Sunngifu,’ she told him, standing straight despite the tremble in her voice. ‘My father will reward you, if you see me safely home.’

  Wulf had cut the ropes from her arms – they had bound her thumbs together first, not tying her ankles because of what they had in mind. The surprise was that they had snatched her in a decent part of Lundenwic, perhaps believing they might ransom her if she survived the rape, and even if she did not, so long as the family believed her alive.

  ‘I don’t need—’ Wulf began.

  One of the men groaned, and Sunngifu whirled, dropping to one knee as a flash of silver descended to a wet thud, then silence.

  ‘—payment,’ he finished.

  He checked again, this time making sure they were all dead.

  ‘It’s that way.’ Sunngifu, pale beneath the moon, pointed out the direction with one of her daggers. ‘You won’t mind if I keep my blades unsheathed?’

  The first thing she had retrieved after Wulf cut her bonds had been her pair of daggers.

  ‘So long as you don’t sheathe them in my liver’ – Wulf grinned at her – ‘I’ll be happy to have you guarding me. My name is Wulf, by the way.’


  Sunngifu stared at him, then: ‘Good name.’

  Which did nothing to prevent her from keeping a dagger in each hand as they walked, but that was fine by Wulf. He talked softly, telling her where he lived now, and a little of his travels over the years, minus the killing. As they drew close to her home, they were clearly among rich folk, for rush torches burned in iron holders set on staves in the mud, bringing light to those who walked in the night.

  Wulf’s thump on the door, and Sunngifu’s calling out: ‘It’s me,’ prompted the sound of two heavy beams being hauled sideways, and then the door swung open, a heavyset woman standing there, gaping. Then she turned to one of the young men further inside, grasped his tunic in her substantial fist and said: ‘Run and tell Swithhun she is found. Run fast and do it now.’

  ‘Er . . .Yes, mistress.’

  ‘Now.’

  Then she turned to Wulf and added, ‘You have brought our daughter home, warrior.’

  ‘Er, yes.’

  She dragged both of them inside, then hugged Sunngifu hard, raising her off the ground.

  ‘Your husband is out searching?’ asked Wulf.

  ‘With half the city guard.’

  That was impressive. Wulf liked the guards he knew, but had not thought them dedicated enough to search Lundenwic at night, not with the manifold dangers that darkness brought, especially to someone who had already worked through the daylight hours.

  Then he saw Sunngifu’s face properly for the first time.

  She’s . . .

  His heart stopped, just for a moment. Her face was long and evidently strong, her eyes were pale grey and staring at him without fear or shyness, and he could not take his gaze from her. The big woman, Sunngifu’s mother, whose name Wulf had not learned, looked from one to the other, and back.

  ‘Well.’ She crossed her arms, her bare forearms huge and strong. ‘Well.’

  Sunngifu ignored her, being too busy returning Wulf’s stare.

  . . . beautiful.