Alfheim

by Erik Schubach

  The All Mother's projection looked up to her and her eyes scanned the crowd beyond, “By the Fourth Gate, Sure Step, you know I am in the middle of something of monumental importance just now. Can you not handle some excitable Elves on your own?”

  Jani ground out through clenched teeth, “I would if they weren't drawing weapons on me and accusing me of treason and helping to spirit you off world. Just tell them so that their fears can be put to rest.”

  A couple of the Elvish warriors tried to follow Breem as he stepped through the shield to gawk, wide-eyed, at the Dark Elf. It still amazed me at the intelligence of Asgard shields to understand who is a threat and who was not. The warriors slammed into the shield and fell on their asses.

  His eyes still on the Dark Elf, Breem mumbled absently, “My Queen?”

  Nerthus sighed in exasperation and said to everyone, her holographic eyes moving over the troops, “I am unharmed and I will return to the gates soon.”

  Koar reached out a hand and it passed through Breem's face, making the man jump back hissing and feeling his own face as the Leader of the Dark Elves said, “By the Gods of the Fire Sky, what witchery is this?”

  This had murmurs of shock flowing through the ranks as fast as wildfire, “It speaks!”

  Their Queen corrected. “He speaks. He is Koar, leader of the Dökkálfar in our area.” Then she locked eyes with her personal guard. “Phalamine, disperse this crowd, I shall be back in Allrbus soon for the Naming ceremony for our new friends who have passed the final Sund. And I hope to have some news that will have the Story Tellers singing about for the ages.”

  Phalamine started to ask, eyes wide, either at the fact there was to be a Naming, or that Nerthus had just indicated there may be no more Sunds, “The final...” Then she snapped to attention. “Yes, my Queen!” She spun and called out with authority, “Disperse immediately, by command of the All Mother, She Who Lived!”

  Like a signal bell had rung out, Elves started bleeding back into the trees around the clearing at the gates as the girls dropped their shields. Jania turned to see Breem sticking his finger into Koar's head, as Koar did the same to him. She snorted and sang out, “Thank you, mother.”

  Then the hologram extinguished, leaving Jani to shrug and say to us, “Well, that just happened.”

  Then she turned to watch her people dispersing and gleeped as Phalamine and two other guards in shining armor flanked her. “What the heck, Phali?”

  The woman gave our friend an apologetic shrug. “Sorry, highness, but you yourself said you accepted the Flower Crown. Three guards to the crowned princess at all times as per tradition.”

  Jania huffed and marched up to us and did a cartwheeling back handspring to land on Intark's shoulder as she played with Phalamine's sword which she had in her hands again. “Well, that's inconvenient. I don't suppose I could say I was just kidding?” The impassive looks from her new guards dissuaded her from the notion. “Well, drat.”

  Then as Phalamine froze and checked her empty scabbard, we all finally relaxed. I realized my hands had been halfway back to my bow and quiver that entire time.

  When Jani absently flicked the blade through the air, just to have it caught deftly by the leader of her new guards, Phalamine called out, “Prepare the Naming ceremony for when our Queen returns!” Two runners went into motion, barreling down the path to the City Tree, scrambling over the debris of the trees I accidentally felled.

  The woman cocked an expectant brow at her crowned princess and said patiently, “I would ask that you restrain yourself from helping yourself to my weapons, majesty. It would be inconvenient if you find yourself in need of my services.”

  Our friend nodded down at her seriously. “Ok, then you'll probably want these back.” She tossed two throwing knives with long tassels down to embed in the ground by her new guard's feet.

  Phalamine sputtered out, “How? When?” as she retrieved them and slipped them into the sash at her waist, which accentuated the gleaming armor with a splash of color.

  As we were led back inside the gates to some sort of planning room in a hollowed out tree trunk next to the wall, Essa blurted, “We're getting data from Olympus again!”

  I exhaled, and said to Dite, “Never a dull moment with the Asgard.”

  She nodded and said with a purr in her voice, “I can see why you adore them so much, Artie, they're simply fascinating and never dull.”

  Kara was pulling her wrist console off, speaking to the air as she placed it on the table in the middle of the space. “Mother? Father? Is the signal able to be resolved through the interference?” Odin's workshop bloomed in the middle of the room, and I could see Odin frantically typing in calculations that were beyond me, and I could calculate trajectories including all environmental and spatial variables in real time, and my armor could refine my calculations on the fly.

  “Father?”

  Odin looked up then toward us. “Oh, yes. Well met everyone. Loki is here to do just that.”

  A woman behind him at another console turned around, and I had to smile at Loki. The broken Asgard was the only person who matched Arina's sheer intelligence, though she was quite erratic as her mind was not always on track. Odin, though First Scientist of Asgard, was not close to their level, even though he was still the smartest man I have ever had the pleasure of knowing.

  The woman looked at Odin like a child seeking the approval of a parent. “I need those numbers, Uncle. Spinning, spinning, space is folding, time is screaming, and fortune favors the bold.”

  He nodded and sputtered, “Of course.” He finished and flicked the results to her. She smiled to herself as she turned back to work. “How is the Archer, the favorite of the Asgard?”

  I blushed and said, “I am well Loki. Thank you for...”

  She interrupted. “You forgot the feedback resonance in the theta band, Uncle.” He winced but she just chirped out, “There, fixed. We can try again now. Titans scheme, the world burns, they lose their own. Arina, are you there dear, sweet girl?”

  Our holo projection warped and expanded, static on one side forming into fuzzy representations of Arina and Thea. In a warped and hissing tone, Arina said, “Yes Loki, well met. Love you.”

  Arina the Whispering Breeze and the Three Embers were a stabilizing force on Loki's mindset, and they all truly loved the wayward woman. As did we. But they would always tell her and reassure her since she had performed the greatest betrayal of Asgard in order to pay penance for the sins of her father, Thor, and to try to regain the sanity she once had.

  Loki blushed and inclined her head, “And I you. Well met, Whispering Breeze, Thea.”

  Thea waved from her station where she was working as frantically as Odin. “I can only hold the connection for a few minutes, be quick, the changing frequencies are almost more than I can compensate for.”

  I swallowed knowing that if my Titan friend was doing something manually, it meant that the computers could not keep up. As intelligent as I have just shared that Arina is, Thea helped to create entire universes including ours, and was at a level most would compare to that of gods.

  But even then, the Jotunn, the Frost Giants, and Titans were still fallible. As they cannot figure out how the Asgard have harnessed force as stored energy as it would be akin to storing velocity, an intangible, into something physical without mass. It still boggles my mind, and we Olympians are almost, but not quite at the technical level of Asgard.

  But even they haven't figured out how our space folding technology works, so all races are fallible it seems. For the Asgard to move Valhalla between the planets in the cosmic engine the Jotunn built, they... well, they cheat for lack of a better word. They “transition” through a thin membrane of reality into the pocket universe that the Jotunn had constructed to house the Asgard when they created them as an experiment to see what went wrong when they created us.

  Then as a planet rotates into the same relative space as Valhalla, they transition
through the membrane again. Appearing to have made the journey between the stars in mere moments, when in actuality it was the stars which were moving and Valhalla was sitting still in a static state.

  It still boggles my mind that for countless eons, Valhalla took up every square inch of their pocket universe, and it was all that they knew until one of their scientists was able to see through the veil to our universe and saw the endless amounts of space. I have watched the visual records of the first transition Valhalla had ever made, and the stunned, amazed, and even terrified looks on all of their faces when they were presented with a whole world of space beyond what they had always known to be all that there is.

  The First Ones, one of whom I know personally as a friend, Hajart the Loom Master, got the name by being the first group of Asgard to ever venture beyond the walls of Valhalla on the planet of Folkvangr. The historic venture lasted just five hours as they ventured farther than the breadth of Valhalla itself. It took months before they braved even more ventures out into the jungles of the uninhabited world.

  I had to smile because few Asgard lived as long as Hajart had. Most of the older Asgard get lost in the fog of ages, doing the same thing for so long that they sort of get lost and just fade away without new stimulus. But some embrace change and every few eons, change their professions, to learn something new. He always says that an active mind is a key to long life.

  He had been a young physicist back then and part of the team who had actually postulated the veil. Now he is the grandfather that we all never knew we needed. The ruling caste of Asgard, especially Inatra, loves the man like family. When I ask Inatra why she dotes so on the Loom Master, her simple answer breaks my heart every time, “Besides the ruling caste, Hajart was the first of the Asgard to accept me, instead of seeing me as only as a Ragnarok, their hated enemies. And he gifted me a scarf!”

  It was years later I learned of the significance of the scarf. I doubt even Hajart knew back then. But the Ragnarok race was singleminded in purpose and would do anything to achieve it, and that was to destroy the Valkyrie and the Asgard. They were taught that emotions were the enemy that they would distract from their main goal.

  So very, very rarely, a Ragnarok would be brave enough to show favor on another, whether it be family or a loved one. And they would do that by gifting a death shroud... a strip of cloth that would serve as the funeral veil if they were to fall in battle, and signified that someone loved them enough to show it in the open.

  Inatra wears Hajart's colors tied to her arm into every battle, and Kara has taken up the tradition as she wears the colors of Kenatar, and bears the title of Right Hand of Kenatar with honor. Kenetar had flown her generational starship into a Frost Giant Vessel at fractional C speeds, a suicide run, leaving the tiniest of cracks in their armor which afforded Kara to exploit it to bring down the first Star Killer in the history of all the races.

  I'm off course here. Back on topic, I'm sure it is only a matter of time before the Asgard figure out our space fold technology and create a more efficient design and implementation. We Olympians have always taken a more brute force approach to technology than other races, and that is the true secret.

  We store the energy for a jump in a fold of its own, only a dimensional fold instead of spacial fold. In effect, I guess it is like storing the energy in a little pocket universe. Since to fold space, it takes the power of a sun. We just store up that energy over centuries, but shunt it through a jump pack in a single instant to cause the fabric of space to fold in upon itself.

  I'm sure that with all the time Arina has spent rapid charging the 'capacitors', she has already figured out the secret and would come up with a more elegant solution soon, once Olympus is brought to safety.

  Arina spoke up, “Minutes ago, we detected movement of the Titan vessels again.” Her face was one of concern, “I fear that Kara's deception has only bought us ten hours.”

  Tych! My heart sunk, the Star Killers would be in main weapon's range of Mount Olympus an hour before they could fold the Citadel to safety. Krothing Titans!

  Kara huffed out in exasperation, “Show me.”

  Arina made a flicking motion and a new screen bloomed in the air, Odin and Loki moved to look up at the same information I knew. She rewound seven point two minutes Earth time units. We saw the two vessels drifting in space, and it looked as if hundreds of fleas were combing their surfaces.

  Kara's mouth twitched into a smile as she showed her teeth. Though lacking the menacingly sharp canines of the two Elven races, her's was no less chilling. The First Valkyrie of Asgard said, “They search to see if I left any other gifts on their hulls. If only they knew to look inside.”

  That was the second reference she had made that she may have done something else when she space folded the airlock door away with her.

  The time index sped up as Arina increased playback speed, and it looked like the ships, likely piloted by Halflings since there were only ten Titans on each vessel, were sucked into a ventral port back by the main engines.

  Intark, Inatra and I shared predatory smiles with Kara, now that we knew where they have hidden their docking bays. Right in the interference zone of the powered sublight engines, which is why we never detected them before. Then the screens flared as those monstrous sublight engines which could move a small moon blazed to life.

  And the playback stopped, replaced with realtime data since we had caught up in our frame of reference. Time dilation of light speed transmissions was always a bitch. What we watched 'live' was actually a couple of hours old as we had to wait for the light speed scans and visuals to return to us. It was so much better when Pegasus was out there, feeding us actual realtime data.

  We all leaned closer to the holographic display when the trailing ship suddenly broke to port and climbed at a forty-five-degree azimuth, firing its main weapon at the lead ship. Odin and Arina gasped as Intark and Inatra hissed aggressively, the excitement of battle in their eyes. Hera's Tits! They were firing on one another! What was going on there?

  We watched as each took hits to their main engines as they rolled to keep them out of the firing envelope.

  Kara was chuckling as she asked us, “Better than Thor's Hammer? Yes?”

  We noted that the velocity and acceleration numbers had decreased by three percent on the lead ship and two percent on the one vectoring away, back toward the event horizon of the spatial gateway that was still open and waiting for them.

  Odin was asking with stunned disbelief as his eyes were locked on the display, “Daughter... what did you do? How is this possible?”

  As the lead ship realized it would not be able to catch the other with its decreased engine efficiency, it changed its vector back toward Olympus.

  Kara just shrugged and admitted, “I didn't know if it would work at all, and it looks as if it did at an opportune time.”

  Essa whined out, “Mooom.”

  The Wild One chuckled and said, “Fine. Not one of you appreciates suspense. Did you not notice I returned with only three jump packs, Artemis?”

  I blinked at her as she grinned impishly. I looked at Jania and accused, “Kroth woman, you've infected Kara with your hijinks.” Then I growled at Kara, “Don't make me test your lattice against my vibro-arrows woman.”

  She crinkled her nose at me, again reminding me that possibly the most dangerous woman in the universe has no right being so cute. She said, “I had cut my arm and bled all over the pack, then jettisoned it just as we space folded, and when we were clear the timer folded the belt into one of the environmental control rooms of the second star killer. I had run past one enough times when they exercised me on one of the vessels that I could extrapolate a general target location.”

  She shrugged like it was all self-evident from there.

  Aphrodite was the one to ask, “How would bleeding on the pack...”

  Loki's almost unhinged laughter startled us and we looked at her as she gurgled out between bouts o
f laughter, “The temptress without her siren is temptress no more.”

  We saw Kate step into view, her eyes twinkling in amusement as she looked at her mate. “Kara, you didn't?”

  Kara said, “I did. As I said, it was a gamble, I didn't know if it would work, or if their system would filter out any contagions. But as the Jotunn technically could never get sick, I had hope they didn't.”

  Then Odin started chuckling, and so did Essa and Brunie when Arina joined in. I huffed out, “Do the smart kids wish to share with those of us who are slower than...”

  And Jania blurted out, “The cure!”

  The what? Then my eyes widened in realization. Nanites were not the only thing swimming around in Kara's blood, and they would have dissolved into proteins once they left her body. The cure for the Titan nano-phage which held our men enamored to the Jotunn women.

  Kara shrugged at me and said, “I didn't know how long it would take to propagate throughout a vessel that size if it actually worked. I guess the answer is ten hours.”

  I whispered, “That would mean...”

  Dite finished my thought, her eyes as wide as mine, “... our men are no longer bewitched by the Titans on that ship. After so many eons of enslavement, they are free.”

  I nodded and grinned, feeling the predator inside me pacing to get out to join the fight that was so very far away at this time. “And they must have overpowered the Titans and taken control of the Star Killer!”

  Then I made another realization, Olympus now controlled a Star Killer. Only we had no way of contacting the men on board and letting them know we are still here. And if they left through the gateway, we may never come across them again. Tych! So close.

  Essa was asking as the transmission started failing, “Aunt Arina? Does the decreased acceleration of the incoming vessel give you the time you need?”

  Arina's voice was garbled as we started to lose the transmission, but a strong burst communications stream came through before the channel collapsed. We all looked at the time estimate blazing away in front of us as we all held a collective breath. Two minutes. How could the universe be so unfair? They were slowed by fifty-eight minutes. We just needed two minutes! I wanted to scream to the heavens but I knew they would not hear me. This was all for naught.