Ragnarok (21 page)

“The red planet, I think.”

“Oh yeah! I hear it's bright candy apple red all over.”

He was cutting into their time together again. Violet elected to end the conversation for good. “I've heard it's actually more of a pink color. Hey, Vibs, do you remember that hot pink Uzi that Katyusha had? With the modified clip?”

Vibeke didn't but wanted to see where Violet was going. “Yeah?”

Violet turned to Nate. “It was real easy to change ammo, see, the front lip on the ammo clip was bent inward so it fit real close, same with the back.”

“Oh,” said the oblivious peacekeeper, nodding.

“Yeah,” Violet continued. “There's nothing like a tight pair of lips around a hot pink clip.”

Nate turned bright pink himself. He departed, and they didn't see him again for the rest of the trip.

“That was in poor taste, Vi.”

“Actually I hear they taste really—”

“Odin's balls, Violet! He's gone, you don't need to keep it up.”

They floated toward one of the sun domes.

“Sorry,” Violet said.

“You don't need to apologize for joking,” Vibeke sighed.

“I mean for scaring off the third wheel. Just wanted you to myself.”

“Aww.”

Violet pushed against the window strut and turned herself toward Vibeke. She could have told her that she wanted her to herself again, with more meaning. Vibs would get it. If she didn't know already. Violet had hid her infatuation for a year, and she doubted she'd done it very well. Part of her said Vibeke knew everything. She was that smart. She couldn't possibly have missed it. But another part of her said Vibeke was just like her, socially inept when it came to such things. She might not. But if anything were to happen on the trip, it would need to be out in the open. Violet tried to approach the subject cautiously.

“You know in two years I never asked about your first time.”

“First time in space?”

“Yeah, if ‘Space' is a girl's name.”

It was one subject they'd avoided in all their conversations. Vibeke knew exactly how many kilograms Violet could lift with a broken arm, and Violet knew exactly where on Vibeke's body she could safely fire a restrained microwave beam to kill someone standing behind her, but neither had ever asked about a past girlfriend, let alone each other's sexual histories. For a year they'd avoided it like stepping between snails.

Vibeke asked, “Counting Mishka?”

“Egads, no!”

“Then never. You?”

“Counting Gabrielle?”

“Hell no.”

“Then me neither. We never actually did….”

They floated silently for a moment.

“Guess we're fighters, not lovers,” said Violet.

“I don't think so. Veikko and Skadi seem happy enough. There's plenty going on in the ravine.”

Violet was hopeful. “So you would, if you met someone?”

“Would have to be a hell of a girl.”

“So nobody you know now?”

Vibeke knew how Violet felt and knew the question for what it was. She didn't know why she'd never told Violet she had moments when she felt the same way about her. Now was certainly the time, but nothing so clear traveled her nerves.

“There's one girl, but nothing could ever happen.”

Violet simultaneously hoped it was her and hoped it wasn't.

“Why couldn't anything happen?”

Vibeke was tempted to lie and say it was “in-team romance” but that would reveal everything. She could more easily tell Violet the truth, if not the fact the truth was about her.

“She reminds me of Mishka.”

Violet very much hoped it wasn't her.

Vibeke thought for a moment, then continued. “It doesn't leave this dome, but honestly, I think I'm broken. Useless for anything romantic now. Because the things I fall for are the things I fell for in her. So anyone I love, I'll be terrified of. Afraid they'll betray me. Afraid I'll have another girl to hate. And this girl, the one I like… I can't afford to lose her like that. I need her. Even if it's just as a friend.”

Violet was deathly scared that she was talking about her. And even more afraid she was talking about someone else. She didn't want Vibeke to have a closer friend. But she didn't want Vibeke to fear her. She didn't want to remind her of Mishka, not in any way. There was no good solution. Not for Vibeke at least. For Violet things seemed simpler.

“It's obvious what you should do, then.”

Vibeke was very surprised. “What's that?”

“Try her out, and if you lose her, you lose her as a friend. Won't matter. You'll still have me as a friend.”

Vibeke didn't know if she said it because she knew or because she didn't. She tried to think of a response that wouldn't openly declare her love as if from a balcony.

“I really couldn't stand to lose her.”

Violet needed to know, desperately. She stared at Vibs until she looked back.

“I can't speak for your crush, but for what it's worth, you'll never, ever lose me.”

Vibeke might have shed a tear if gravity held its sway. “Thanks, Vi.”

They floated and took in the sun, warm behind the protective layers and warm inside despite themselves. Violet wanted Vibeke more than ever.

Vibeke, however confused, knew she was in love, and for a
moment, she forgot the implications and let a slow shiver fill her body, arms and legs and chest. She was so overcome that if Violet had reached over and touched her just then, they'd have tangled up and not let go until Mars.

But Violet was still uncertain. Hopeful but daunted by what Vibeke had said. More daunted than any mission had ever kept her. She had to know if it was her. She said it as clearly as she could stand.

“It's too bad we don't want each other like that,” she ventured.

“Yeah,” said Vibs. “We would've had another activity to pass the time.”

Her words turned Violet on like she'd never felt before. It was no answer, but Vibeke saying it felt like an electrical shock and its tingling aftermath. She couldn't respond, not for real.

“You mean loading each other's Uzis?”

Vibeke laughed, “You're such a lech!”

“What? We're talking about guns.”

 

 

B
ALDER
UNLOADED
another clip at the Martian terrorists. It didn't feel the same as firing on Earth. Not because of the weight or oxygen-deprived atmosphere. It felt different because he had too much sympathy for the terrorists. If they were terrorists at all. Their targets were always military or police. Their cause was just, in Balder's opinion.

The PRA demanded only one thing—that Phobos be allowed to govern itself free of direct company interests. They'd still pay taxes, and they'd still obey UNEGA directives, but they could do so in their own way without Zaibatsu enforcing it with decimation. One tenth of Phobos was sold into slavery on Mars. Who wouldn't have expected those slaves to rebel and start bombing their owners?

Balder had enough of it. He wasted the clip into the newly thickened sky. Once it was spent, he set down his rifle. And that night, he spoke to his team.

“We're fighting on the wrong side of this war. If anyone disagrees, they can leave.” Nobody left. “Then we're all on the same page. You three will stay here and sabotage the Martian forces. I'll see if I can meet with the PRA. I'll head out on my skiff at the end of the extra forty. Any objections?” Silence.

Balder skiffed out at the start of the new day, after the forty-minute hour that constituted a Martian midnight. He headed for the Ocampo crater where the satellite tracked the last band. He was unarmed except for his Tikari, and when they came, they surrounded him with a force larger than anything intelligence suggested they had. If they tipped that bit of intel, it meant they didn't expect to let him leave. Or live.

He was sealed into a plastic pouch and thrown unceremoniously into an armored landskiff.

When he arrived at the tunnels, he was cuffed and dragged to their prison. It was empty. The PRA didn't generally take prisoners. But they knew he was from an independent body, not from UNEGA or GAUNE. And they knew he came unarmed to meet them. They had to find out why.

“Why?” asked the woman. She was a beast in stature, six foot six and muscular enough to match Balder. She had short black hair and a sleek face. She wore the torn remains of a Zaibatsu space suit around her actual suit.

“My team got involved on Zaibatsu's side because we had to protect our lone interest on Mars, a water tank near the North Pole. You were raiding silos in the region, and we couldn't have you raiding ours.”

“What's in it?”

“Water. Fusion sensitive and infective of other water sources.”

“How forthcoming. What's your name?”

“Balder.”

“Niana. General.”

“Pleased to meet you.”

“What do you offer?”

“Leave our water tanks alone, and we'll leave.”

“And if we prefer you fight for us? We've seen your organics. We could use those, I'm sure you guessed.”

“We can't stay here forever. It's not our war. And we can't leave you our organics.”

“Sure you can. I don't expect you to stay forever, of course. But you have no need for organics back on Earth, if that's where you hail from.”

“It is, but my people don't just trade arms.”

“You came here to trade. You didn't come here to sit in prison and chat.”

“I offered to leave. You can't have our organics.”

“What if I had something to offer you?”

“I'm listening.”

“We know about the Ares Project, and we know what's in your water tanks and exactly where they are. We know that if you're the interested organization you must own the rest of the Ares. Am I right?”

“Yes.”

“So the last thing you want is for those tanks to head home, yes?”

“Yes.”

“We have a fission bomb.”

“You? You have a fission bomb?”

“Mmhmm. We can annihilate the fat water for you. Of course we'd need your organics to do it.”

“Ah. You want us to hand over our organics because you have an atom bomb, let me guess…. From the Høtherus incident. You have a nuclear weapon you can't use without its living components, and you want me to hand over that capability. Make you a nuclear force. Do you really think I'd agree to that?”

“You will.”

“I most certainly will not. We're not in the habit of giving nuclear bombs to terrorists.”

“One nuclear device, and we'll spend it on you. Here's the deal—you give us the organics to arm it, and we coil them around your water supply. We set it off, solving your problem and making ourselves known as a nuclear force. No one need know we have no more nukes. You are, essentially, disarming us.”

“How can we trust you not to nuke one of your own targets?”

“Easy, we'll give you the trigger.”

Negotiations continued. Balder and his team would spend another two months on Mars. They set one of their eggs to grow the arming device for the PRA's bomb and kept the wormy appendage that triggered it. Balder was expected to take it home, but in his time with the PRA, he came to understand exactly how they worked. They would never use the bomb on a civilian target. That much was certain.

He got to know Niana better than he knew the PRA division she commanded. He got to know her better than her first husband did before he was killed by Zaibatsu's assassins. Valhalla thus gained a link to the PRA something like a medieval wedding, a political wedding or its opposite, a romantic treaty.

In the end, Balder hid the trigger in one of the Barsoom colony's air gardens. There it would live as a giant earthworm among the other organics, unrecognized in plain sight. If the PRA should need their bomb, Balder would tell them where to find its trigger. And if Valhalla ever needed to destroy their unusual water supply, they'd need only find the trigger and use it, as the PRA left the bomb attached to the center tank, its organic components freezing in the Martian arctic until awakened.

Balder and Niana ended their affair as he left for Earth. He heard her speak when she came topside to list demands or announce new campaigns, and he sabotaged a few Zaibatsu shipments to Mars as a sign of affection. Within a year, Phobos was independent of Zaibatsu and the PRA went to sleep.

Then eight years later, Niana received a transmission from Balder. It said nothing of the bomb or the battles or their brief romance, it read only “Take care of my kids.”

 

 

“I
STILL
have nightmares about that thing from Project Kolossus,” admitted Vibeke.

“I never got nightmares, but I can imagine.”

Two weeks of nothingness had passed. Violet and Vibeke hadn't read a word of their books. Violet hadn't steered the conversation back toward love or sex, nor had Vibeke.

They talked over their hours in the gym, and then in the showers, in the sunrooms and in their berth but never went back to that moment, though Violet thought of it constantly. She hunted for ways to return but what came was too obvious. There was no segue, no excuse. She'd have to say it outright, and that tempted her from time to time. But her friendship with Vibeke was so strong and so important to her that she didn't want to ruin it either.

The risk was too great, and the reward too unlikely. She couldn't just ask if Vibeke had been talking about her. Not even counting the risk she'd answer it was someone else.

“It's Tasha, you know,” said Vibeke.

Violet's heart nearly stopped.

“Tasha?”

“That anonymous paragraph in
Håvamål
last month. It's Tasha. She gave it away when she referenced Las Vegas. T team had just been there the same day.”