Return to Valkyrie

The outside world was unknown to her, but she could see a glimpse of it through the window in his room. Of course, what she knew as a window was a door to everyone else. A locker door that periodically swung open, and served as her prison.

She thrashed back and forth in her gurney, limbless. It was the only way she could see any sunlight.

Dace rolled her back into the darkness of the storage locker. Hundreds of doors stretched out in both directions, like a filing cabinet for war criminals. The clerks complained about them moaning at night when the building was most silent.

He didn’t know much about the storage protocol. His duty was to locate terrorists and bring them here; surgeons removed their teeth and limbs upon arrival. Beyond that, the facility ongoings were above his pay grade.

Dace meandered from row to row with vacant disdain.

He put a lot of these prisoners away throughout his career. Reaping was a line of work that still gave a man a sense of purpose – even if that purpose was perpetuating his own extinction. With the manner in which the old world fragmented, very few of the values carried on into the new generations.

Those values became the enemy.

“Speak of the Devil!” Coker chirped from the next row over.

Dace gave a curt wave. Coker was an ex-fieldman and very, very annoying. He was standing with a fresh faced clerk.

“How’s retirement?” Dace asked with a grin.

Coker slapped his chest with a meaty hand and roared with laughter. “You know the streets can’t handle me. They had to lock me in here with all the broads!” He rolled his eyes back and let his tongue fall out of his mouth.

Dace nodded with a faraway look. I hope they kill you first, you fat fu-

“Anyway, I was just telling the kid here about the glory days. Recon work, you feel me?” Coker nudged Dace with a scaly elbow.

“Oh, yeah.” he confirmed. “Free range hunting back then.”

“Dace went and bagged ten or twenty of these bitches every day.” Coker explained while banging on a locker door. Spit catapulted from his lips.

“That sounds like bullshit,” the clerk reasoned. “Twenty? They’re fully psychic, right?”

“You work here, kid,” Dace shrugged. “Check the books.”

The clerk chewed on his bottom lip.

“He’s a man’s man, a true ladykiller.” Coker insisted.

“Bingo.” Dace added.

He moved on from the smalltalk. This place was going to be a bloodbath any minute, and buddying up with cowards was a guaranteed death sentence. There wouldn’t be a lot of time to act after the fighting started.

Guys like Coker were the new standard; obnoxious, abrasive, and completely unaware of themselves. Dace had been like him, and a damn near spitting image. The new world nurtured their testosterone. The social landscape in leftover cities was akin to a gentlemen’s club.

Dace found that men who didn’t go to war with the Valkyries just went to war with other men. The feminine energy that once balanced the Earth now tipped the scales without ever touching it.

High levels of testosterone led to low brain function, whereas high levels of estrogen made a human psychic.

A trade for the ages.

With parameters like that, it was a mystery how the government came out victorious. Scholars praised technology and science, but the Valkyries had access to the exact same advancements. Some conspirators said that men in power always had a plan in place for a gender war, long before the telekinetic breakthrough.

We wrote whole books and languages to justify ownership of our wives and daughters. Books we can't even read anymore.

It didn’t even feel like that long ago. Dace thought he could remember prostitutes still walking the darkest downtown streets when he was a kid. There weren’t laws in place now, though. A woman on the street today would be followed by a string of corpses. Civilians had a low survival rating with Valkyries.

Dace rounded a corner and stepped into the control room. It reeked like sweat and cigarettes. The office was removed from the storage floor, and had the luxuries reserved for higher ranks: real ground coffee, filtered water, fingernail clippers, and a molding plate of cheese and crackers. A pile of reused plastic silverware rose from the center of the table.

How many mouths do these spoons serve before someone finally rinses them?

“Afternoon!” a captain called out to Dace.

He fumbled a return hello. The conglomeration of bad breath halted him in his tracks.

How is this the world we desire? Filth mongering?

The captain took a sip of coffee, which dribbled down his already stained shirt.

“So me and Carl have her cornered, right?”

“Right.”

A pair of sergeants bullshitting in the corner.

“And she’s beautiful. I’ve never seen a Valk with all their teeth, you know? We’re trying to get her cuffed, and I’m saying to myself, I’m saying, I gotta have a piece of this one. I say ‘this is one of the women they used to write stories about!’”

Alarms cut the air through the facility, and emergency flood lights washed the room in red.

The senior officers froze in place like snowmen. Dace turned to cover his half smile.

“The hell is going on?” the captain demanded.

An explosion rocked the entire building.

“I said ‘the hell is GOING ON?”

Automatic rifles erupted in the hallway.

“Valkyrie assault-”

“Incoming!”

“OH GOD-”

The captain dropped his coffee mug and started barking orders: two groups of three, clear a path to the exits. Do not let them take the facility.

“We’ve got action, boys! This is live!”

The group charged their energy weapons and checked the meters on their TK armor. It wasn’t much, but it helped disrupt any nearby psychic focus; ample seconds in the fight. The tactics against telekinetic enemies was a true cat and mouse simulator. Half of the necessary equipment was just smoke and mirror distraction to provide time to pull the trigger.

The officers split into teams and flanked the door to move out. Dace remained still at the back of the room.

“Let’s go, Reaper.” The captain gestured to the door.

Dace pursed his lips and nodded. He slipped the pistol off his belt and checked the payload – hot and heavy. The officers turned to the door and waited for a signal.

This is it. This is your window.

Dace lifted his blaster and emptied the battery. He shot the sergeant nearest, then the captain, then the three other sergeants that had their backs to him. There was no urgency, or even will to live. It was like putting down dogs that were already half asleep.

Watching them cower and die only strengthened Dace’s resolve. He moved to a computer stall and punched in his passcode, and listened to the unending tremor of gunfire while he logged in.

The system pulled up a database:

FEMALE RECORDS (VALKYRIE)

Dace pulled his sleeve up and exposed a key scribbled on his wrist. He tapped it in and turned an ear to the door; someone was shuffling down the hall.

PRL20971D

REAPER ACCESS

The screen blipped out and offered a buffering symbol. Dace shook his head. Government networks were so bogged down with porn and video games that nothing ever loaded on time.

Coker grabbed the door frame and flung his fatass into safety. He hit the security button and a blast door sealed the room off.

“It’s a killing floor, man.” Coker started.

“I know.”

“How’d they get the drop on us? How’d no one see this coming?”

“I did,” Dace turned back to the computer. “I just didn’t notify the board.”

Coker ignored him and looked around at the decimated officers. “What the hell happened in here?”

“Same thing that happened out there.”

Coker really looked around; it didn’t take a detective to piece it together.

“Nah, man. You turned coat!” he deduced.

“Bravo,” Dace clapped his hands. “We all got it coming.”

Coker dropped to the floor and scrounged for a firearm.

The computer pinged and displayed the corresponding information: UNIT 9 LOCKER 818T

Dace lunged at Coker with his bare hands. He made the mistake of unloading his blaster on the officers, and had no other option. The two men wrestled around on the floor until they locked up in a corner.

Dace had him pinned to the floor by his throat. Coker’s neck was so fat that he struggled to keep a grip on it, even with both hands. Dace counted his breaths and waited.

“Traitor!” Coker wheezed.

Dace leaned more into his airway until the lights went out.

He got up, found his breath, and started rearranging the room. If Dace’s mission failed, he’d at least have an alibi for all of this. He put a gun in Coker’s hand and staged the shootout so it looked like he was the traitor. His chins were bruised a deep purple.

No more glory days.

The chaos in the hallways dulled to a murmur, but there was still gunfire in every corridor. Groups of men were still in the fight, which gave Dace the cover he needed. No one noticed him navigating the skirmishes unarmed.

He’d run this operation a thousand times in his head. He could almost count the steps necessary as he tracked along the storage panels.

There was minimal fighting in his target corridor. A dozen corpses lay mutilated up and down the walkway, which told Dace the combat had moved into another area. A single woman lay dead amongst them, propped up against the locker wall. Her veiny hands were locked in the deathroes of a final spell.

Dace took a cautious step over her body. It wasn’t uncommon for a Valkyrie to finish a divination in rigor mortis. They could kill you even if they were dead.

The pitter patter of footsteps echoed down the corridor. He could tell they were women because of the barefeet; men in combat still wore boots and leg plates like it was the 15th century. They were deathly silent as they approached Dace’s position.

He threw himself against the locker wall and clasped at his chest in a breathless fit.

A woman peeked around the wall of locker units.

Dace paid her no attention and continued his routine. He put on his most agonized face and began to slip down to the floor.

Another woman peered around the corner, and then another. A whole psi unit came around to take a brief look at his performance.

One of them spit on the floor, and nodded to the fallen comrade amongst the sea of bodies.

“They killed Lyzz.” one of them declared. Her face was plastered with an intricate web of warpaint.

“Looks to me like she did the killing,” a woman explained beneath dreadlocked hair. She looked like a banshee from the old world.

Dace struggled to balance eavesdropping with pretending to die. The painted Valkyrie pointed a finger at him writhing against the wall.

“Should we finish her handiwork?”

Oh, no, not good.

Dace slumped into a pile and stopped breathing.

“Save your energy, let’s go.”

The footsteps scampered back down the way they came. Rounds of gunfire followed them through the facility.

Dace peeked with one eye and found the coast was clear. It never failed to surprise him how gullible psychic people could be. He’d survived certain death more than once by just acting out the motions.

He climbed to his feet and shook the nerves away.

Locker 818T waited.

Dace drew in a long breath and let his hands shake at his sides. He double checked the hall and made sure he was alone.

The locker door swung open and he slowly pulled the gurney out into the light. Inside the black confines lay a shriveled old woman. She struggled beneath the fluorescent lights of the facility.

“Hi.” Dace whispered. The locker was rank with body odor.

The woman cracked an eye open and looked him up and down. Dace reached out with a hand to block the glare from her face.

“Let’s get you out of here.”

He balled her sheets up and placed them like a pillow beneath her head. Years and decades of storage made for delicate bones.

Next he removed the array of tubes that fed into her vascular system; some for nutrition, some for hydration, but they mostly served to keep her drugged and incoherent. The women locked away in the walls hadn’t just been robbed of their bodies, but of independent thought. A working female mind was a detonator in the modern age.

Without the drugs, she’d be lucid again in ten minutes – and pissed. Dace reminded himself this was more of an escape and less of a reunion. Legally speaking, we’re not supposed to know each other.

He reached down and cradled her skeletal form. She cooed and wriggled against his touch – the first without abuse in decades.

“Oh,” Dace teared up and surrendered. “Oh.”

He surrendered to a lifetime of guilt. He surrendered to the grief he caused and that which he was given.

Bullets rattled off the wall just down the corridor.

Dace blinked away the tears and scooped her up by where her arms should have been. Her tiny head rested atop his shoulder, and her wispy little hairs tickled his neck. He closed the locker and charged in the direction of certain death.

__________**__________

“Window’s closed.” Tissa announced.

Shadre nodded back to the breach point. “Call for full retreat.”

They allotted themselves fifteen minutes to get in and get out; it was minute seventeen. Shadre rarely skewed off mission, but the facility folded beneath their pressure. The risk was worth the reward.

Squad units began to trickle through the Valkyrie checkpoints back to the dropship. The Valkyries pushed into the building and set up a series of defense lines, and then ran extraction from there. This kept them cycling back into safety like a combat tributary.

Shadre and her squad crept down a cleared passage – bullets and bloodstains accented every wall. The lockers were open and empty of prisoners.

“Contact!” Tissa shouted. She was point leader, and also running commlinks. A hulking transmitter hung off her shoulders.

The team fanned out to find cover. There were a pair of gunmen ahead, holed up in an office with a desk pressed against the doorframe. They popped up every few seconds and sprayed bullets in every direction.

The squad nestled into the hallway and tried to bait the marksmen. Another team snaked down from the opposing corridor and waited.

One of the gunmen peeked over the desk.

Shadre curled her fingers in the air and pulled the eyes out of his head by half an inch. He dropped his gun and screamed in agony.

Tissa brought her hands up and made a sweeping motion to one side, and the desk in the door frame slid out of view. She made complex motions with her fingers before both gunmen went limp.

She took a strained breath and signaled that it was clear.

The squad proceeded to the breach point.

“Wait!” someone clamored behind them.

The unit pivoted and turned their weapons on the voice.

A man came sprinting down the hall, hugging the limp body of a prisoner. She was old and wrinkly, the victim of total atrophy.

Tissa and the others tickled their trigger bars.

“What is this?” Tissa asked.

Shadre shook her head. She recognized the uniform as the man approached; he was a Reaper. The quintessential killing machine.

His face was flushed, and tears raced down his cheeks. He held one shaky hand in the air as he got closer.

“Wait,” he sobbed.

“Kill him!” Tissa hissed. “This is a setup.”

Shadre silenced her with a hand. She stepped toward the Reaper.

He held the prisoner out to her.

“Please,” he whispered. “I think this is my mom.”

Shadre and Tissa exchanged a look. None of this was protocol.

“Take her.” Shadre instructed.

__________**__________

Dace couldn’t see through the bubbles in his eyes. A pair of Valkyries flanked him and took the woman from his hands. He froze as they stripped her away, and waited for his execution.

“I said kill him-” the woman in warpaint insisted.

“Take the squad to the dropship,” the commander said. She was the same banshee woman beneath the dreadlocked mane.

The unit grumbled and turned back down the hallway.

Dace felt his organs slowly begin to fail in order of priority; his lungs, and then his brain, and finally his heart. He couldn’t tell if it was fear from being alone with this woman, or if she was shutting him down from the inside.

“What made you do that?” she asked.

He winced and began to weep.

“Why?”

“Look at this fucking place,” Dace tried to catch his breath as he spoke. “We call it storage, but it’s a breeding farm. We’re manufacturing an extinction event.”

The woman nodded along. “Understanding is a burden, but you won’t carry it for long.”

“Kill me.” he encouraged.

“Your government will.” She turned and moved to follow her squad.

Dace collapsed against the wall as she disappeared. He swallowed anxious breaths while he waited for the medical teams to pass through; he didn’t know if they’d patch him up or finish him off.

__________**__________

The dropship was a rickety thing, but it kept the girls in the air between fights. It peeled away from the storage facility once Shadre climbed onboard. A series of departing explosives went off behind them to prevent anyone from following.

Troopers stuffed themselves in every nook and cranny; proof of a successful raid. A high headcount was always a good indicator. Tissa and the other psi-heavy troopers hooked themselves up to hydration IVs.

Shadre climbed into the medical bay and sifted through the prisoners. The nurses guided her to the Reaper’s mother, who rested on a cot in the back. It was darker and quieter, only disturbed by the hum of her oxygen machine. A tube ran up to her nose.

“I hope you’re comfortable.” Shadre started. She placed a hand on the woman’s heart.

The woman held a glare so frigid that Shadre looked away.

“Did you kill him?” she asked in a cracking voice.

Shadre pursed her lips and shook her head. “No. We left him alive.”

The woman took a breath of relief. Her tapered body heaved just to fill her lungs.

“No one meets their children anymore.” she explained.

“It was very special,” Shadre agreed. “Do you know why he’d do that?”

The woman shrugged what was left of her shoulders.

“There’s something else.” she started.

Shadre waited.

“I can still see him back there in the compound. I have a window into his vision.” she rasped.

“I’ve never known that to be possible,” Shadre said. “It might be the drug residue leaving your system.”

The woman shook her head, “I can see him just as clearly as I can see you.”

Shadre bit her lip. It wasn’t the wildest thing she’d ever heard, so it was possible. New things were happening all the time on the psychic frontier.

“A neural link to your bloodline. That might provide the frame for your window.” Shadre reasoned.

The woman nodded, “I’ll try to keep it open.”

The dropship screamed into the ghostlands, and returned the desecrated women to Valkyrie.