Free Gudsriki by Ari Bach

the tank to dig out of its tomb. It shoved away the heavy rocks and deployed its periscope. She looked over the water. There was nobody to be seen. She assumed that if Valhalla had found her she’d not be alive, so she anticipated no traps. Valkyries didn’t trap enemies like her. They killed them. She let the tank surface.
    There was nothing around but virgin snow, covering all of Kvitøya. A giant bulge where the rampart was still up. And nothing else but an eerie calm. She set the tank as tall as it could go and still scraped the snow with its belly. She trotted over to the bulge in the snow. She waited. There were no alarms, no discernible links from the HMDLR. No links at all.
    The net was gone. She felt around for anything, any sign of link traffic, but found nothing at all. Radiation and pollutants. A nuclear war had been fought as she slept.
    And Valhalla wasn’t attacking her. She slowly walked around the rampart. Scans showed nothing under the snow but the wreckage from Balder’s Ice-CAV and a pogo. No sign of the chromatic drawbridge—it must have been off. But she spotted a depression in the snow. She fired at it with the tank’s microwave, melting the area. It was a drill hole in the rampart. Wulfgar’s access. She dismounted and walked down in, microwave ready.
    The drill was still plugging the hole, but someone had cut through the back of it, offering a cramped but slick trapdoor down onto the edge of the pit. She took it and walked inside.
    Mishka entered the ravine to find nothing like it was left. The power system was still glowing, but glowing red. Throbbing, living water stuck to it as if by design. Bloodred water striated with guts, as if Valhalla’s heart had come alive, but come alive as an evil, seething core.
    There were several walruses, most dead, some dying, some seemingly alive and well and unashamed of necrophagy. The place was overrun. The smell was terrible. She continued down the spiral wall, cautiously and keenly aware of the emptiness of the place. Except for one spot near the core. Something was moving, something clearly not a walrus.
    It was a mechanical beast like nothing she had ever seen before. It was alive, that much was certain. It had once been a man. But now it was something else. It had no face, just a bare cross section of its original head. It still had human parts, scattered throughout its heavy mechanical frame. It had clothing distributed in pieces, affixed to what might have been its torso. Thaco armor. The color was familiar.
    â€œAre you alive?” asked Mishka.
    Veikko tried to stand up, but he only heard more grinding. He tried to say “help” but heard only his grisly rasp.
    â€œWhat are you?” she spoke again.
    He recognized her voice. “Mishka?”
    â€œWho are you?”
    â€œVeikko,” he grunted.
    â€œVeikko? Valknut team Veikko?”
    â€œNo, Veikko Jacobs, inventor of the automatic spatula. Mishka?”
    â€œWell, fancy meeting you here. Or, what’s left of you.”
    â€œWhat’s left of me?”
    â€œNot a great deal. Do you… do you know what you… are?”
    â€œMore or less.”
    â€œYou have some retina left. Let me get you some adaptive lenses from the med bay.”
    She left; Veikko was about to tell her to wait, but the promise of sight was too great. He reclined, or at least let his body rest.
    He’d spent the last week trying to find some way in which he could move, and not entirely without success. Though 99 percent of his nerves ran into dead ends of grinding and pain, the last percent were like the start of a puzzle box. Each opened nerve led to two more. He was almost able to crawl, though he feared tearing his organic components if he tried too hard. So he stayed cautious and worked slowly.
    â€œThis will hurt,” said Mishka.
    He felt pain in his eyes, more pain than he was in before. Something burned around them. He tried to blink, but