“Sharpen your axes! Remember your training! Hyrg la, Ragnar!”
“Hyrg la, Ragnar!” they roar.
It means “Ragnar lives.” The Queen of the Valkyrie salutes her razor to me and begins the Obsidian war chant. It spread through the black armored assault craft. A horrible dread sound, this time it is on my side. I’ve brought the Valkyrie to the heavens, and now I let them loose.
“Victra, you prime?” I ask, worried about Antonia being so near. Is my friend distracted by her sister?
“I’m gorydamn splendid, baby boy,” the tall woman says. “Take care of that pretty little ass of yours.” She slaps my butt before backpedalling, blowing me an obnoxious kiss and jogging to her shuttle. “I’ll be right behind.” I’m left with the Helldivers. They’re smoking burners, watching me with evil red eyes.
“First one through gets the bloodydamn laurel,” I say. “Helmets on.”
Little needs to be said to such men. They nod their heads and grin. We depart. I fly thirty meters upward on my gravBoots to land atop of one of the four clawDrills we confiscated from the platinum mining company in the inner asteroid belt. They stand in a row on the hangar deck, each fifty meters apart. Like grasping hands, the cockpit where elbow would be, the dozen drill bits on the deck where fingers would reach. Each is retrofitted by Rollo to have thrusters on the back and thick plates of armor extend down the sides. I slide into the cockpit, enlarged for my frame and armor, and slip my hands into the digital control prism.
“Fire them up,” I say. A familiar thrum of energy goes through the drill, vibrating the glass around me. I grin like a madman. Perhaps I am one. But I knew I could not win this battle without altering the paradigm. And I knew Roque would never be driven into a trap or lured into an asteroid belt, for fear of exposing his larger force to ambushes. So I had only one recourse: hide my ambush in a flaw of
character. He always preached for me to step back, to find peace. Of course he thought he knew how to beat me. But I’m not fighting as the man he knew today, as a Gold.
I’m a bloodydamn Helldiver with an army of giant, mildly psychotic women behind me and a fleet
of state-of-the-art warships crewed by pissed-off pirates, engineers, techs, and former slaves. And he thinks he knows how to fight me? I laugh as the clawDrill shakes my seat. Filling me with a dormant, crazed sort of power. An enemy boarding party breaches the hangar from the same gravLift we took.
They stare up at the huge claw drills and evaporate as Victra’s shuttle fires a railgun at them from point-blank range.
“Remember the words of our Golden leader,” I say to the Helldivers. “Sacrifice. Obedience.
Prosperity. These are the better parts of humanity.”
“Bloodydamn slag,” one says over the com. “I’ll show her the better part of my humanity.”
“Drills hot,” I order. They echo confirmation one by one. “Helmets up. Let’s burn.”
I flip the rotation toggle on my clawDrill clockwise. Beneath, the drill whirs. I plunge both hands forward in the control prism. Existence shakes. Teeth rattle. The metal deck sags under me. Molten metal peels back. I lurch ten meters down into the ship. Carving through the deck in five seconds. And the one after that. I sink again, falling through the floor of the hangar bay completely. Chewed metal
around the cockpit. Then the next deck goes. Then the next. Heat builds along the drill as I slam through more of the ship, leaving the Valkyrie behind. Slow, the drill jams, slow and you die. And this speed is the pulse of my people. Momentum flowing into more momentum.
My clawDrill is building up a hell of a pace. Slamming through decks. Murdering metal with molten tungsten carbide teeth. I glimpse fractured sights of the other clawdrills ripping through the heart of the ship as we fall through the dimly lit barracks. Each drill glowing with heat and then slamming into the next deck. It is a glorious, horrible sight. Going through a mess hall. Through a water tank, then a hallway where a boarding party stumbles back from the debris and stares at the megalithic drills carving through the ship like the molten hands of some hilarious metal god.