natural grease slipped in her hands and sent the thing sputtering out to sea like a leaking balloon.
She sighed and got up to look for another corpse. There were no more animals, just their owners, an extended family of cherubic freckled Scots. No sense in letting them go to waste.
The sailboat, The Sinclairs , left port early the next day. She rowed toward a small speck she could identify on the horizon, hoping whatever was floating so far out would make a better boat than the unfortunate family. As she approached she found she was in luck: it was a real sailboat. She abandoned the Sinclairs and climbed up its ladder.
She could smell the boatâs crew. Dead for quite some time, rotting from before the freeze. She found two men and one woman in the cabin, killed by microwave burns. Working microwaves were rare after the EMPs. She assumed pirates were at work and cleared the boat just in case. Once certain it was abandoned, she dropped the bodies overboard and tried the motor, also dead.
There was just enough buzzing radioactive wind, so she checked her Valhalla partitions for sailing and found a simple file with the basics. She still had to fumble with line and sail for an hour before she caught a breeze that sent her toward the Orkney Islands.
She stood at the bow and reapplied radiophobics to her head and hands. The wind was very cold on her wet skin. Nelson and Bob fluttered around, orbiting her slowly on the prowl for anything dangerous. But the sea was dead silent except for the sound of the boat cutting through the water and hitting the occasional rubbish or body.
The bodies were everywhere. Inescapable. Sheâd long since stopped telling herself they werenât all her fault. She tried at first to blame Veikko alone, or assure her conscience that GAUNE and UNEGA were on a path that wasnât dependent on their break-in or the Presov nuke. But she suspected, accurately, that hacking the Ehren Plates kicked off the nuclear war.
She knew there was no point in dwelling on it. No matter how bad the results, she had to try to nuke the ravine. She simply had to. She wondered why the Geki hadnât killed her to stop it from happening. Had Veikko crippled them at the critical moment? Had he not killed one would she have been burned to a crisp before she couldâve launched the missile? Had he finally killed the other? That was her only guess. On the Geki scale of Fucked Up Shit, total global nuclear and wave war had to be an eleven, so why else wouldnât she be dead? Or perhaps there never was any Geki fire, nothing but tricks to keep Valhalla and its allies in order.
Those allies. She thought them through. Karpathos, Udachnaya, Vladivostok, Abu Simbel, Luna, Qosqo. She should be heading for one or another. Dr. Niide might be in one already, the last net whisper of Orkney was weeks ago, and she had only pried a few words out of it before the net went dead for good. Surely Karpathos or some other base was on top of things. Valhalla might be nuked, but the loose allied organization, the nameless amoeba, was still going strong. And hunting her if they knew what happened. The fact she wasnât dead likely meant the others had all been nuked by merit of their proximity to cities, to civilization. The destruction presumably knew no end. Fuck it, she thought.
It took only hours to reach Kirkwall at the center of the archipelago. It was something of a shockâit looked like a perfectly normal city. People wandered about in the snow, heading to a nearby bar or market or heading home. She saw families out in the open. It was as if sheâd entered an alternate dimension where the war never happened. She linked into her Tikari and confirmed there was still no shortage of radiation in the air and the temperatures were in flux, but the buildings stood, not in ruins. And the people seemed almost happy. One approached her. She remained wary.
âWelcome to Kirkwall, young lady! Have ye come
She sighed and got up to look for another corpse. There were no more animals, just their owners, an extended family of cherubic freckled Scots. No sense in letting them go to waste.
The sailboat, The Sinclairs , left port early the next day. She rowed toward a small speck she could identify on the horizon, hoping whatever was floating so far out would make a better boat than the unfortunate family. As she approached she found she was in luck: it was a real sailboat. She abandoned the Sinclairs and climbed up its ladder.
She could smell the boatâs crew. Dead for quite some time, rotting from before the freeze. She found two men and one woman in the cabin, killed by microwave burns. Working microwaves were rare after the EMPs. She assumed pirates were at work and cleared the boat just in case. Once certain it was abandoned, she dropped the bodies overboard and tried the motor, also dead.
There was just enough buzzing radioactive wind, so she checked her Valhalla partitions for sailing and found a simple file with the basics. She still had to fumble with line and sail for an hour before she caught a breeze that sent her toward the Orkney Islands.
She stood at the bow and reapplied radiophobics to her head and hands. The wind was very cold on her wet skin. Nelson and Bob fluttered around, orbiting her slowly on the prowl for anything dangerous. But the sea was dead silent except for the sound of the boat cutting through the water and hitting the occasional rubbish or body.
The bodies were everywhere. Inescapable. Sheâd long since stopped telling herself they werenât all her fault. She tried at first to blame Veikko alone, or assure her conscience that GAUNE and UNEGA were on a path that wasnât dependent on their break-in or the Presov nuke. But she suspected, accurately, that hacking the Ehren Plates kicked off the nuclear war.
She knew there was no point in dwelling on it. No matter how bad the results, she had to try to nuke the ravine. She simply had to. She wondered why the Geki hadnât killed her to stop it from happening. Had Veikko crippled them at the critical moment? Had he not killed one would she have been burned to a crisp before she couldâve launched the missile? Had he finally killed the other? That was her only guess. On the Geki scale of Fucked Up Shit, total global nuclear and wave war had to be an eleven, so why else wouldnât she be dead? Or perhaps there never was any Geki fire, nothing but tricks to keep Valhalla and its allies in order.
Those allies. She thought them through. Karpathos, Udachnaya, Vladivostok, Abu Simbel, Luna, Qosqo. She should be heading for one or another. Dr. Niide might be in one already, the last net whisper of Orkney was weeks ago, and she had only pried a few words out of it before the net went dead for good. Surely Karpathos or some other base was on top of things. Valhalla might be nuked, but the loose allied organization, the nameless amoeba, was still going strong. And hunting her if they knew what happened. The fact she wasnât dead likely meant the others had all been nuked by merit of their proximity to cities, to civilization. The destruction presumably knew no end. Fuck it, she thought.
It took only hours to reach Kirkwall at the center of the archipelago. It was something of a shockâit looked like a perfectly normal city. People wandered about in the snow, heading to a nearby bar or market or heading home. She saw families out in the open. It was as if sheâd entered an alternate dimension where the war never happened. She linked into her Tikari and confirmed there was still no shortage of radiation in the air and the temperatures were in flux, but the buildings stood, not in ruins. And the people seemed almost happy. One approached her. She remained wary.
âWelcome to Kirkwall, young lady! Have ye come
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