Space Marine Loki (Extinction Fleet Book 2) Read online

  This was a resurrection dream, of that he no longer had any doubt, though in his long tour of duty he had not experienced anything so vivid. He watched as she set her torch into an iron ring bolted into the stone wall. She then knelt to pick something up. When she stood, the skald could see that she held a rough wooden bowl in her delicate hands.

  She approached him and the warrior felt a knot begin to form in his chest, so badly did he wish to reach out and touch her. He dared not speak, at once for fear of giving her cause not to approach him and out of a disciplined approach to his captivity. While the garm were no takers of prisoners, each skald was immaculately trained to observe the conditions of a situation before taking reckless action.

  As if in response to his silent wishes, Ariana came to stand next to the slab upon which the skald was bound. She set the bowl upon his chest and leaned in close, her hands running across his thickly muscled arms and her hair brushing against his forehead. She pressed her full lips to his and kissed him deeply as tears fell from her eyes and splashed against his cheek. Her touch was electric, and Skald Thatcher remembered himself.

  He remembered Grendel.

  The familiar bone-on-bone sound of the alpha garm filled the cave, and Ariana looked up from Thatcher. He did his best to follow her gaze despite his bondage and caught a glimpse of the mighty creature's reticulated body moving through the shifting shadows cast by the torch's light. Thatcher strained against the bonds and found himself held even tighter.

  Ariana squeezed his shoulder as Thatcher watched Grendel slither into the light, its terrorizing visage just as nightmarish as he remembered. This beast had given him the hardest fight of his long life, and Thatcher had been found wanting. Despite wounding it numerable times the skald had fallen to its projectiles and barbed tail. His last sight of the beast had been of it lowering the wicked proboscis towards his face.

  Thatcher's blood ran cold as he thought of the other men who had been slain by Grendel and had their minds plundered by the creature's unique bio-weapon. The resurrection would not hold, and there was a growing pile of torcs that contained the lives of men who could not be reborn. They always died again shortly after resurrection, most of them screaming and clawing at their own faces.

  Grendel towered over Thatcher and Ariana, its teeth glistening and its chest shuddering as it extended its proboscis. The skald watched, helpless, as Ariana bravely stood in front of Grendel and picked up the bowl. A drop of bright green liquid dripped down from the garm's appendage, and as soon as it landed on Thatcher's face it began to burn and sizzle against his flesh. The skald did not flinch, unwilling to grant the alien beast the satisfaction, though the pain was very nearly unbearable.

  A second droplet fell and this time Ariana positioned the bowl over Thatcher's face to catch it. Thatcher looked at his wife, a woman dead these many years, and began to understand what he was experiencing. More drops fell into the bowl and soon the only sounds to be heard in the cave were the crackling of the fire and the splash of the corrosive effusion. She wept as she held the bowl, already her arms trembling from the effort of holding it aloft even as it grew heavier with every drop.

  Skald Thatcher was a believer in the 'narrative strategy' movement that had been growing in popularity amongst the various command elements of the Einherjar. That belief is what had encouraged him to request that his skald force be allowed to insert themselves into the Heorot campaign. There were too many serendipitous factors in this great struggle against the garm for a man like Thatcher to ignore, and when the garm attacked a settlement with the very name from myth, he'd known there was more at work in this struggle than a simple contest of beasts and bullets.

  He had been arrogant, Thatcher told himself as Ariana struggled to keep the rapidly filling bowl steady, and convinced himself that he was the Beowulf of this tale. It seemed to make sense at the time, as he and his skalds joined the fighting only after the marine companies were taking a beating and barely able to hold the line. Like the ancient hero, Thatcher and his warriors had laid a trap for the beast, and when battle was joined, the skald commander had met Grendel one on one. Their struggle had been mighty indeed, and yet, it was the monster who slew the thane as it were, and here the skald found himself.

  The bowl was full, and as more drops fell the liquid threatened to slosh over the side. Ariana's lips trembled as much as her arms, and she looked down at Thatcher apologetically. She took a deep breath and moved the bowl. As she did, a drop landed on Thatcher's cheek, and he growled low as he fought against the near blinding pain.

  The young woman turned and walked quickly across the cave to a hole in the floor where she dumped out the contents of the bowl.

  Without the bowl to protect him, another drop fell from Grendel, this time on his nose, and then another on his lip. The skald fought the scream valiantly, every scrap of his willpower invested in remaining stoic in the face of this torture, and yet as more drops fell into his eyes he could not contain it any longer.

  Skald Thatcher roared in pain and frustration, only to swallow more of the burning green fluid, which assaulted his vocal chords with caustic savagery. Ariana returned and positioned the bowl above his face, and after a few moments Thatcher calmed himself enough to focus on his breathing. The pain had been excruciating, and by the time he was able to recover he could see Ariana already beginning to struggle again with the bowl.

  It was not long before she had to dump the bowl again, and once more Thatcher suffered in agony as Ariana rushed to return to him. The skald lost count of how many times it happened, and soon his world was reduced to moments of emptiness and fullness as his life was measured by the bowl. Such was the relentlessness of the mind shattering pain that for all the skald knew he could have been resurrected and died a thousand times, always returning to this single nightmare.

  There was another story at work here, thought Thatcher madly, after what could have been years or mere minutes of torture underneath Grendel's dripping bio-weapon.

  He watched Ariana hold the bowl over his face and thought of the Norse god, Loki. He was the trickster, the lord of misrule, and a bastard half-giant son of the god's own enemies. Thatcher recalled that Loki caused a great evil against the gods, and his punishment was to be bound to a stone and tortured. In the story, a serpent dripped poison onto Loki's face, his only respite being his wife Sigyn holding a bowl to protect him when she could. Until the end of days this would go on, a time when the world would be destroyed by titanic war and reborn from the ashes.

  In between the seemingly endless bouts of blinding pain, Thatcher's mind began to fixate on the story. It was a lifeline that kept him from drowning in the caustic waters of torture. He clung to it with a fierce tenacity borne of a lifetime of war and loss, and eventually the skald found that he could handle the pain more than he could at the beginning. He was not immune by any stretch, though he found himself snarling with defiance each time Ariana was forced to move the bowl. He would endure.

  Thatcher decided he had been wrong about his role in this great saga. There seemed little difference to him any longer between reality and the resurrection dream, and he determined that he would embrace the reality presented to him. Humanity had named the garm, and so warriors like him had risen to be the Einherjar. A distant settlement had been named Heorot, and so came Grendel.

  His mind was consumed with the thought of Ragnarok, the Norse end of days, a glorious end to this grinding stalemate between humanity and the extinction fleet. A final contest between the Einherjar and the Garm.

  Yes, he had been wrong, and he was never meant to be Beowulf.

  Upon this acceptance, the skald's eyes opened and he found himself in the body forge, attended by Idris and surrounded by a dozen of his most loyal operators. To resurrect those slain by Grendel had been forbidden, and yet they had persisted despite protocol. No doubt trying over and over, undeterred by every repeated death, ever measured by the emptiness and fullness of the bowl. The man who used to be Skald Thatcher
looked into the eyes of the assembled warriors and knew what had to be done.

  He was fated to be Loki.

  ANGRBODA

  The Einherjar gunship slid through the void like a shark through the sea. The armored ceramic panels that covered it from bow to stern were made with a blend of volcanic ash that turned the ship into a matte black form set against the darkness of open space.

  Compared to the larger Einherjar warships like the Bright Lance, or even the security frigates of the United Humanity Coalition, the gunships were small, though with fire power enough to accord themselves well in battle against the living ships of the extinction fleet.

  Armed with four rotating chainfire weapons, each the size of what one would expect on a battle tank, and a small assortment of ship-to-ship rockets, the gunships were deadly craft when on the attack. They were rare vessels indeed, built exclusively in the shipyards of Prax and every one of them assigned to skald forces.

  They were used predominantly as stealth vessels that could bite back if threatened, executing recon patrols, search and destroy missions, and high value troop insertions for the Einherjar special operators. A crew of engineers, pilots, gunners, and officers, twenty men in all, kept the ship flying, and it had the capacity to transport and deploy upwards of thirty warriors in full kit. By all accounts they were coveted pieces of equipment, and as a result several men had to die in order for Loki and his followers to make good their escape from the Bifrost.

  Loki shook gently in his seat, the straps holding him in place as the gunship, now renamed Angrboda by the men who had seized it, tumbled in a tight roll to avoid the floating organic wreckage of what had once been a garm warship. From his vantage point behind the pilot's pulpit the warrior could see that the vast expanse of space was filled with dead and dying garm vessels. Behind them by many tens of thousands of miles, just out of scanner range, lay the great circular star fortress known as Bifrost, and in front of that even more carnage hung in the cold void.

  Upon awakening, his followers had told him of the titanic assault launched by the extinction fleet, though it was not until he consumed the remains of Grendel that he understood the true intentions behind the attack. The memory of that heinous act was bright in his consciousness, and he found himself reaching up to rub his fingers across the inflamed resurrection injection sites at the base of his skull. It had been the hardest thing he'd ever done, taking that nightmare creature into himself.

  It was the first step of a long and bitter journey, Loki thought to himself as he recalled the sickeningly sweet taste of Grendel's alien brain as he scooped it from the skull with his bare hand and ate it raw.

  The psychic garm cells that rested inert in the beast's brain entered his system and awakened with the ferocity of lightning in a storm cloud, pairing with the cells that had been encoded into Loki's body by Grendel's proboscis fluids when they fought in the streets of Heorot, and he had now become something not quite human.

  Loki looked at the pilot and took note of how the man's hand did not shake as he expertly brought the ship out of the roll and righted their course. The man had previously only been the co-pilot, a man in reserve, though both the chief pilot and the former ship's master had been unwilling to yield control of the ship to Loki's followers. The two men, along with two engineers, were now drifting in the frozen darkness of space thousands of miles behind them.

  The already mythic status and reputation of the skald special forces, combined with the swift brutality of their seizure of the ship had brought the rest of the crew in line.

  The traitor marine looked down at the five torcs that had been fastened to a bandolier and draped across his armored chest. Five men who had to die so that Loki could escape and go to meet his destiny. While those men would certainly be resurrected in the body forge, so long as he kept the torcs, they would have no knowledge of that particular life they'd lived. It was like this for all the men who served in the armies of the All-Father. It was not uncommon for a warrior to die and his torc to go unrecovered. Gaps in the memory of their lives was part of the sacrifice they made to fight as equals against the garm.

  "Skald Thatcher, ahem, sorry. Loki, we are starting to get ping-backs on long range scans," announced the pilot, "I'm showing massive heat spikes and audible shockwaves. There's a hell of a fight going on out there, sir."

  "I have felt it for some time now. Tune your instruments to the center of the storm, pilot, and take us in," responded Loki. He grit his teeth from the effort of resisting the psychic pressure of the Alpha Hive Mind. "I will direct you onwards once we have visual contact."

  Upon awakening, he had been swiftly briefed by Idris and the other skalds. The man who used to be Skald Thatcher learned that he had been resurrected and died horribly dozens of times since first being killed by Grendel. He was told of the unassuming rifleman, Ajax, who continued to beat the odds, not only breaking away the beast's proboscis, but eventually slaying the beast in close quarters combat.

  The man listened raptly as he was told of the heroic final stand of Jarl Mahora beneath the trophy of Grendel's severed head, and of how Ajax was the last man to fall, the corpses of the enemy at his feet. Beowulf had indeed emerged from within the ranks of Hydra Company.

  As the Angrboda crept through the shattered corpses of garm bio-vessels, Loki fought off the continued psychic pressure of the Alpha Hive Mind.

  While the man that people had taken to calling the Bloodhound might not realize it, there were two hive minds now, and upon inviting the essence of Grendel into himself, Loki made contact. Both Hive Minds wanted to dominate him, but he was a skald of many hardened years, and neither could fully take him. He understood from his communion with the Usurper, his own name for the Beta Hive Mind that has risen in his consciousness, the true mother of Grendel, that the titanic assault by the extinction fleet had been two-fold in its purpose.

  The first was, of course, to smash through the Einherjar lines, destroy or bypass the Bifrost, and consume humanity. However, a more sinister purpose was to occupy the forces of humanity so overwhelmingly that a bloody garm civil war would go unnoticed. The Usurper was strong, but its own power was dwarfed by the might of the extinction fleet. What the Angrboda now flew through was the aftermath of that brief and savage insurrection.

  The pressure of the Alpha Hive Mind increased, and Loki felt the desperation of the Usurper, pleading with him, for all its brood, to save it. It was a cunning and ambitious thing, this Usurper, not at all the brutal hunger made manifest that was the Alpha Hive Mind. The Usurper was just as much a dire enemy of the Hive Mind as the Einherjar were. Our purposes are aligned, thought Loki, as he keyed deployment prep commands to his team of operators.

  Skald Unferth's icon glowed green on Loki's wrist display, indicating that the man had received the orders. Loki considered his men for a moment, and a surge of pride welled up inside of him, soon to be joined by a hollow dread at what must be done.

  Idris belonged in the forge, and is was easy for him to cover his tracks, to obscure the fact that Skald Thatcher had been resurrected over and over, well beyond the threshold of protocols. Even the Watchman, esteemed as he was, had only been brought back twice before command deemed the way shut for all men whose minds had been plundered by Grendel. Thatcher's torc remained in the pile along with the other victims of Grendel, and none were the wiser that he lived again.

  It was not so easy for Unferth and the other eleven skalds who now rode with Loki into hostile garm territory. The moment they murdered the security guard who watched over Grendel's severed head, they became blooded traitors to a man. The bonds of the skald ran deep, especially so with Thatcher's crew, one of the most decorated forces in the All-Father's great army. It was they who had been instrumental in throwing back the swarms on Orion 12, they who had led the Tardis sector purges, and each man among them had multiple WarGarm kills to his name. It was a testament to their loyalty and to the firmness with which they believed in the unfolding narrative strategy that the
y accepted him as Loki. Only in a universe where alien swarms threatened humanity with extinction could such hardened men choose to give themselves over to a half-remembered collection of myths from ancient Earth.

  Much like the Norse warrior traditions upon which the Einherjar military had been founded, a marine's service record meant more than his life, doubly so for soldiers to whom death was just another journey. The old Vikings had called it 'wordfame', the idea that a man's deeds lived on in story and so his life mattered as long as his story was told. While the service record of the man named Thatcher remained untarnished, each skald who now prepared to die against the garm was marked a traitor. Their service records would bear that shame long after they were dead on whatever distant field their fate demanded. While they still wore their torcs, no body forge waited to honor their deaths with rebirth.

  Now that the crew of the renamed Angrboda were sailing with them, those men would share the same eventual end. Loki needed himself and every skald aboard to execute the coming assault, which meant he had to leave the vessel in the hands of a crew he'd pressed into service at gunpoint. He knew it was a gamble to leave them without a skald to hold them fast, but there was no other way. Thirteen of humanity's most fearsome warriors would still only have a thin margin for victory as it was, much less being down a man just to keep the crew from mutiny. The time had come to see what this crew as made of, and how far he could stretch their sense of duty before they rose up against him.

  The debris field of organic wreckage cleared and Loki was given a clear visual of the scene before him. A lone hive ship limped through open space, bearing the wounds of a savage space battle. Swarming over it were dozens of assault craft, each one having the appearance of a giant needle with a bulging sack attached to the base. Those aboard the Angrboda had seen this before, and recognized the craft as troop transports, each sack containing swarms of boarders. Usually the garm boarding parties consisted of clutches of gorehounds and ripper drones, with at least one Wargarm in command. The Ultragarm and ridgebacks were too large for effective shipboard action, and shriekers were barely combat effective once grounded, though that was little comfort when facing the alien menace in the tight confines of a spacecraft.