Ragnarok Read online

  Copyright

  Published by

  HARMONY INK PRESS

  5032 Capital Circle SW, Suite 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886 USA

  [email protected] • http://harmonyinkpress.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of author imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Ragnarök

  © 2014 Ari Bach.

  Cover Art

  © 2014 Ari Bach.

  Cover Design

  © 2014 Paul Richmond

  www.paulrichmondstudio.com

  Cover content is for illustrative purposes only and any person depicted on the cover is a model.

  All rights reserved. This book is licensed to the original purchaser only. Duplication or distribution via any means is illegal and a violation of international copyright law, subject to criminal prosecution and upon conviction, fines, and/or imprisonment. Any eBook format cannot be legally loaned or given to others. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Harmony Ink Press, 5032 Capital Circle SW, Suite 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886, USA, or [email protected].

  ISBN: 978-1-63216-622-7

  Library Edition ISBN: 978-1-63216-623-4

  Digital ISBN: 978-1-63216-624-1

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014949326

  First Edition December 2014

  Library Edition March 2015

  Lyric excerpts from "The Minstrel Boy" (Traditional) by Thomas Moore (1779-1852).

  Printed in the United States of America

  This paper meets the requirements of

  ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

  Chapter I: Utah

  VIOLET JUMPED and hurtled toward the troposphere. As she fell deeper and deeper into the thickening air, the wind began to punch, then stab. She fell with no parachute, no personal descent thrusters, and no crash armor. All she had was a sticky suit, and all that could do was stick to things. Her only hope was her target. If she failed to connect with that target, the result could be bad, worse, or catastrophic: She could miss the target and fall to her death, splattered on the rock-hard salt flats below. She could slip into the target’s jets and be incinerated utterly. If she were truly unlucky, Vibeke could pilot the shuttle fast and accurately enough to catch her, and she would never hear the end of it.

  V team had spent the last week preparing for the jump. Veikko had infiltrated Skunkworks, no small task, and snuck a peek at the upcoming test schedule and flight paths. Varg and Vibeke ran simulation after simulation of physics and contingencies. Violet practiced the jump online and in the air over the Arctic Sea. They all surveyed the jump location and calculated the altitudes and atmospheric pressure. Vibeke studied the air of the Bonneville wasteland, the toxic air of old industries and old wars, obsolete poisons that lingered on like noxious vapors over a tomb. Varg showed her which abandoned skyscrapers she was most likely to get impaled on if the target dropped her over the ruins of Provo or the last surviving megaliths of Salt Lake City. Veikko programmed up a pretty simulation of what would happen to Violet’s body should she fall all the way to the salt flats, complete with comically inappropriate sound effects. Absolutely none of that made her feel any safer as she fell at terminal velocity toward the white land below.

  After falling just long enough to question if she missed the target, she saw it beneath her. A tiny black speck against the white earth, moving at exceptional speed. It looked fast enough to meet her right where it should. It was traveling at just over twice the speed of sound. The shuttle Violet jumped from was moving at subsonic speed, so the acceleration when she hit the target would be fatal without an inertial negation field. The craft would at least be slowing down. It was on its way home after a test of its thermobaric thruster, the speed limit of which was unknown even to those who built it. From earlier tests monitored closely by H team, they knew it could pass Mach 40 with ease in the atmosphere and maintain 350 g’s of acceleration for at least half an hour in space. That was only one of the reasons Valhalla wanted it.

  The critical feature of the X-292 Blackwing Impact Resistant Plane was its flex-diamond armor. It made the craft so tough it could fly through solid rock. As Valhalla’s last line of defense was solid rock, Alf thought it best that the craft not belong to anyone but them. Given Skunkworks’s terribly overbudget development of the prototype, there would not be any more if this one disappeared in testing. As GAUNE had stolen the designs from an UNEGA company, which they later sent Skunkforce to massacre, Valhalla had no ethical problems stealing it.

  Also appealing to much of the ravine was the idea of a new space-capable vessel. V had flown to Bonneville in Valhalla’s only space shuttle, and it wasn’t one of the finer models. It was a twenty-seven-year-old P-Zero that the ravine stole from the Crystal Methuselah drug gang. When the shuttle was stolen, the gang made no effort to recover it. Once plated in special thermophobic gold to prevent rust, the decrepit P-Zero shuttle developed “Purple Plague” and lost its shimmer within only two reentries. Thus it had to get TK chromed and appeared as the only silver vehicle in the ravine. The interior was as cramped as a boiler room and twice as hot. It was made for two people, and the retrofitting for four was known throughout the ravine as H team’s worst job ever. Any team that used the P-Zero shuttle would relentlessly mock H over the two “jump seats,” which were not so much seats as scraps of jagged metal with bumps in just the right places to irritate the rumps of their unfortunate passengers. Varg especially had height problems and had to man the weapons array by lying flat on his stomach under the front seat. Violet had donned her sticky suit en route in the cargo hold where the smell of old smart-foam made her eager to jump out.

  She jumped with her inertial negation field off and set it only to turn on a fraction of a second before hitting the wing. The field would show up on the target’s sensors, but without it she’d be turned into putty as soon as she touched the Blackwing. The field would also render the oncoming air stagnant within so it wouldn’t tear her to shreds. It would even lessen the impact if she were to miss and hit the ground, but only enough to see that her innards exploded from her mouth instead of her back. Veikko had done a great job with simulations of both, utterly realistic except for the sound effect, a file he had labeled as Splort.

  Recollections of the simulation ended when the field turned on too soon. She was right over the target when a jagged blue mist appeared under her, halting the airflow. Her inner ears told her she was no longer falling, the ground was moving up toward her. She was in pleasant, calm free fall. She was also visible to every sensor the target had. Nothing to be done for it. They knew she was coming, but it wasn’t like she could turn around. Her perception aside, the field actually turned on only a quarter second too soon. Not a fatal mission error. In that quarter second, the target turned from a distant speck to a wall of black diamond wing right before her. Calculations had gone as well as could be expected, she would hit near the back. Advantage: It would give her plenty of objects to grab. Disadvantage: The time to climb forward. More time for the pilot to prepare. She elected to go for one of the tail fins and reached out.

  Her hand stuck to the dark fin like a gecko to glass. The texture of the suit elongated, dozens of small sticky points held onto the craft and distributed her weight among themselves. A solid catch. No time to waste. Hand over hand she pulled herself down to
the fuselage and began to scale forward. The inertia field prickled madly, deflecting and stopping tons of oncoming air. The still atmosphere would then fall back and pick up its original speed, leaving Violet in a near-vacuum pocket. She took a deep breath from her Thaco armor holds, but the sticky suit left no room for the exhalation system, the air sucked out from her lungs painfully with each breath. She got just enough to stay functional. The sooner she got to the cockpit the better.

  She kept climbing, her suit like a shadow moving over the black fuselage. Her link told her one of the markings on the craft was text. No time to have it read the tag for her. She kept moving, stepping right on it. Apparently it said No Step. Her foot pushed it open, a minor vent cap that dislodged some ice. It was startling, but it didn’t slow her down. She approached the ramjet intakes behind the cockpit. Severe air distortions confused her inertia field and weakened it. The air was hitting again. She ignored it. She was at the cockpit.

  She took a thin, flat thermite charge from her back and slipped it into the miniscule seam between the unbreakable canopy shield and the unbreakable fuselage shield and detonated it. H had predicted that although the shielding was indestructible by conventional means, the bolts holding the cockpit door in place would not be, for rescue purposes. She detonated the charge and found that H was right. The cockpit shield flew back so fast it almost disappeared, leaving only an unsurprised and very angry pilot. Another inertia field turned on to cover the cockpit, a heavy-duty aircraft field.

  When Skunkworks built the Blackwing, they devoted a special team to finding the right test pilot. Firstly, they had to find someone capable of using the direct brain interface. Not everyone’s brain can interface with raw bolts of electricity from an array around their heads, but it was the only way to link a pilot to a craft with absolute unbreakable security. Valhalla never recruited anyone in the first place who wasn’t compatible with a DBI. Secondly, Skunkworks needed someone who, in the event of a hijacker breaking into the cockpit, could fight them off in hand-to-hand combat. Keith Kalessin was chosen in part because he was champion of personal combat at his academy.

  The instant Violet’s inertial negation field had activated, the Blackwing’s alarms sounded. Keith watched her connect, climb toward his cockpit and step clumsily on a vent cap. He smelled the thermite burning through his oxygen mask. When the canopy disappeared and he saw the figure outside, he already had his sidearm ready.

  Violet wouldn’t have lasted long if she weren’t expecting exactly that. She watched him level his microwave at her, looking down her leg like the sight on a rifle, poised to kick. She let loose, and her boot knocked the microwave from his hand. The sticky suit held onto it, and she grabbed the weapon from her heel. The bolts of electricity around Keith’s head doubled in quantity as he began to send alerts and warnings to Skunkworks. Violet couldn’t allow that, so she used his microwave to fire a dull magnetic beam into the brain interface, dulling and warping the signals. He lost control of the craft, and it began to spiral and fall out of control. The magnetic wave also interfered again with Violet’s inertia field. A jolt of motion seeped in like a hard slap on the back.

  She let the force push her into the cockpit. Keith punched her in the face so hard that the field spasm felt like nothing. The microwave fell to the earth. She punched him right back, but he blocked. Violet wasn’t easy to block. She realized she was up against one tough pilot. Her surprise lasted only an instant, replaced quickly by the worse surprise of getting slugged so hard in the ribs that she fell out of the cockpit and into the ramjet intake.

  Her fingers barely snagged the intake vents and saved her from vaporization. Violet’s annoyance was burning hotter than the fuel behind her. Her fingers stuck to panel after diamond panel, and she crawled forward to face the skilled, dangerous man who had just bested her. A man who now knew how she fought and knew she was coming. It was time for extreme measures.

  Keith could see her escape the intake, but she disappeared as she crawled up the Blackwing’s diamond skin toward him. He awaited the sticky devil, calculating her most likely attack. She could come from behind and drop in above him. As she would expect another punch, he would deny her that. Then, as she struck, he’d pull her in to break her in half. If she came from either side, she would be at the same angle he saw before. He could see the field generator on the back of her neck, so if he could hit it squarely, he could turn inertia against her, and she’d splatter like flies around him. Keith didn’t expect her to appear in front of him, jumping from the nose of his jet.

  Having climbed under the craft all the way to its exceptionally sharp front edge, Violet dimmed her field by 5 percent and leaped toward her enemy with the force of the jet’s motion behind her. The Blackwing’s inertia field was hit with an inverse Boolean effect and dropped to match. Violet was forced in at more than 100 kph. She aimed her foot at Keith’s face with horrific force. His reflexes were superhuman, thanks to the superhuman reflexology project he completed in the academy. He managed to move his head and replace it with his survival knife just as her foot connected.

  First Violet felt the pain of her leg breaking against the headrest, then the pain of a twelve-centimeter blade sticking through her foot. She didn’t grow any angrier at the pain because, though he had performed an impressive move, it had left Keith bent over to his side and without the benefit of his seat’s protection. She unsheathed the blade from her foot and cut his belts in a split second. Keith managed two good punches in that half second, but they weren’t enough to push her off him, not with acceleration affecting her at 5 percent—she weighed 250 kilograms.

  And it was acceleration, not wind that she was feeling now. The craft was still out of control and speeding up in awkward bursts. They were going into a barrel roll and losing altitude rapidly. Whoever won would have a dangerous few seconds to right the craft and stop it from crashing.

  Violet had to act fast. She linked her field back on full and grabbed his oxygen mask, tightly strapped to his head. She yanked the apparatus hard enough that it would snap his neck, or if he was smart, checkmate him and force him to follow the direction. He was smart, but he had lost. The move gave Violet enough leverage to shove him out of the Blackwing’s field and he flew from the cockpit, hit by the air and speed.

  As he fell to the ground with his personal inertia fields up and his parachute field ready to deploy, he was filled with admiration for the hijacker who evicted him despite a dagger in her foot. Then came the lamentation that if he ever got out of the desert alive, his salary would be docked until he could pay off the craft he had lost: 220,000,000,000 euros on pilot’s wages.

  Violet had worse problems. The Blackwing was in an uncontrolled barrel roll and losing altitude faster and faster. So fast, she calculated, that if she kept calculating, it would hit the ground before she finished. She sat back in the seat and let the electric bolts feel out her head. The interface loaded at once to inform her that she was not its pilot and that the ship would self-destruct in five seconds. She began the system hack, which back in Valhalla she had proven capable of performing in only seven seconds.

  Skunkworks had included self-destruct mechanisms in all its craft for ages in case of theft. V team’s research prior to the mission showed they had never sold a single craft without it since 2104. They had, however, lost the prototype for a boat back in 2193 that showed up for sale in 2194. Though the thieves in that case were all killed by Skunkforce, it did strongly suggest that prototypes intended solely for testing were not granted their suicidal charges. Certainly one so expensive as the Blackwing wouldn’t be an exception.

  Seven seconds later, Violet had control of the Blackwing, despite the craft’s solemn belief that it had blown itself to smithereens two seconds prior. In ten seconds she had restarted the computers and piloted the Blackwing out of its barrel roll. In twenty seconds she had taken the emergency auto-lattice polymer can and sprayed out a new canopy. In twenty-one seconds the Blackwing crashed full-force into the solid
salty ground.

  Despite every measure onboard, she felt it. From Mach 6 to 700 kph in an instant. As the concrete-solid salt split around the unbreakable diamond shields, she was pitched forward in a sickening explosive jolt. The thin new canopy cracked to the point that she couldn’t see through it, but the craft’s design did its job and directed the force away from the broken cockpit. The Blackwing held, and Violet managed to pull up out of the salt and back into fresh toxic air. She took inventory of the events and state of things. All were as favorable as could be expected. She welcomed a complex bolt of lightning into her head and told the vessel to set course eastward. North would have to wait until its tracking systems were disabled.

  “Sloppy, Vi,” chimed a voice in her head. She pulled off the sticky suit’s face mask, leaving only her Thaco oxygen prongs.

  “Vibs is right, that was a ‘rocky’ start,” said Veikko.

  Varg linked last. “I can’t think of any salt jokes. But hey, knock knock.”

  “Who’s there?”

  “Skunkforce! Five wave hoppers on your Arsch, laser armament, unmanned. I’m shooting at the six that aren’t there yet.”

  Microwave drones could be a real problem on most missions. They’d managed to spoil one of O team’s attacks on an organ smuggling ring, they’d successfully assassinated Luka Carcass before R could reach him, and only a week prior, they’d shot down Luzie’s experimental reconnaissance saucer. On the theft of any common aircraft, they could foil V team in a dozen ways, from recording telemetry all the way back to the North or simply cutting the wings off with their damn vibrating lasers.

  Violet saw the red dots all over the Blackwing. Useless, thankfully, against its armor, they couldn’t even make the slightest scratch in the black diamond. They could tear open the makeshift canopy and cut her to ribbons, but short of fifty more of the things appearing right in front of her, she could keep the canopy aimed away from them.