The Only Gods We Know, Vol. 2 Ch 13: The Root Takes Hold

The station had emptied out four days ago and had not stopped feeling empty since.

Brynja Vingfalk stood at the tactical holotank in C2 and listened to a room built for forty people hold six. Valaskjalf had been the anchor of the expansion for two hundred years. Now the main fleet sat in the gravity-siege at Ísarnkol and what remained aboard was a duty roster, a maintenance rotation, and her. Deck plating that used to carry three legions carried one junior rating in soft-soled boots. She could hear coolant moving behind the wall panels.

She scrolled the manifests. Fuel allocation. Ration draw-down. Filter replacement intervals for Sectors 1 through 14. The arithmetic that kept a war machine from starving, and she had been doing it for eleven days because High Command wanted her somewhere they could see her.

Her hand found the haft of Storm-Singer. Celestial bronze, warm through the gauntlet, always warm. She had never worked out whether that belonged to the metal or to her.

The unease was not political. She knew political. Political sat behind the sternum and made her want to talk. This one sat lower and made her want a weapon in her fist.

"Atmospherics flagging an obstruction, Sector 7," the duty officer said. He did not look up from his console. "Recycler's fouled. Algae, most likely. I'll push a drone down."

"Push a body," Brynja said. "Eyes on it."

"Ma'am, a drone can—"

"A drone can tell me a pipe is blocked. It cannot tell me why." She turned. "Send a tech."

His shoulders came up around his ears. He worked the roster and dispatched a junior technician out of Environmental. Petarch, second shift, four hours left on rotation. Brynja pulled the corridor feed onto her secondary screen and watched him walk.

Service corridor 7-C ran at quarter power to spare the grid. Petarch's mag boots banged on the grating. He carried a hydro-spanner and a hand lamp and he was whistling something with too many notes in it.

"Getting thick down here," Petarch said. Static chewed the edges of his voice. "Smells like wet dirt, ma'am. And something sweet. Fruit that's gone over."

Brynja leaned toward the screen. Valaskjalf smelled of scrubbed air, disinfectant, and hot metal from a grid that never rested. It had never once smelled of dirt.

"Petarch. Step back from the grate."

"Just having a look."

He set the lamp on the deck. Four bolts, then the grate came free and he leaned it against the wall. He put his head and one shoulder into the duct.

"Ma'am, there's something—"

It came out fast.

Not a hand. Pale, thick as a thigh, lit from somewhere inside itself. It took him around the chest and took him in one pull. He made a short wet sound. The lamp spun on the grating and threw light across the ceiling, and then the feed showed an open duct, a spanner, and nothing else.

Every alarm on Valaskjalf went at once.

Not fire. Not breach. Environmental. Every board in C2 turned red inside the same half-second.

"Obstructions, Sectors 1 through 12," the duty officer said. His voice had climbed a register. "Ventilation. Water recovery. Thermal regulation. All of it, everywhere, at once."

"Say the last part again."

"At once, ma'am."

Brynja turned to the holotank. The Dominion hung there in pale blue light, and while she watched it caught. Iðunn's Orchard. Himinbjörg. The forge colonies. The relay chain out to the rimward stations. Sixty years of fortress-worlds going red in no sequence at all, because there was no sequence. They went together.

"The seeds," she said.

Eleven months of soil samples out of the reclamation drops. Somebody at Logistics had signed for every crate, and somebody above him had authorised the routing, and she had read the summary sheet on the second day of her posting and initialled the bottom of it because it was a page about dirt.

The corridor feed shifted. The walls of 7-C were coming apart at the seams, durasteel plate shrieking as it bent, roots pushing through the joins and thickening as they came. They did not grow. They arrived. A conduit burst and sprayed lubricant and the roots turned toward the heat of it.

The C2 crew were shouting, but not much, and not for long.

On the feed, an Einherjar squad came around the junction in good order and opened up. Plasma scorched the mass black. It did not burn. It opened, and a cloud came out of it, gold and heavy, filling the corridor floor to ceiling.

The lead trooper did not choke. He did not claw at his gorget seal. He lowered his rifle, and he stood there, and he took a long breath of it.

Then he smiled.

He put the rifle down on the deck with both hands. He lay down beside it and drew his knees up. The vines came over him slowly now, threading through the gaps in his plate, closing him in.

"They're not killing them," Brynja said. "They're putting them to bed."

* * *

The briefing room door sealed behind them with a solid magnetic thud. Through the bulkhead came the sound of the station changing, metal giving way in long groans, and under that a wet tearing.

Brynja, Mist, Sigrun and Hrist stood in the middle of the compartment.

"Helmets," Brynja said. "Seals tight. Rebreathers on internal supply. Nobody breathes station air. Nobody cracks a seal for any reason."

Four helmets locked. Oxygen hissed. For three seconds that was the only sound in the room.

"Vent," Sigrun said, and brought her storm-bolter up toward the ceiling grate.

It came in like water through a broken dam. Green muscle, thorned, lit from inside, pouring down the far wall and across the table.

"Hangar deck," Brynja said. "Cut us a lane."

The corridor outside was not a corridor she recognised. Moss carpeted the decking and swallowed the noise of their boots. Vines hung off the overhead and dripped sap that beaded on her visor and would not wipe clear. The emergency strips still glowed behind the growth, red at ankle height, marking a route to a muster point nobody was going to reach.

And the Einherjar. Everywhere, along both bulkheads, wrapped in lattices of root, faces slack behind their visors. Brynja knew one of them by the field repair on his left pauldron, a weld she had signed off herself. Half his backplate had already gone into the wall.

"Eyes forward," she said.

She kept walking and she did not look at the pauldron again. Sap came down off the overhead in strings and beaded across her visor, and the wipers smeared it into a film she had to see the corridor through. Sigrun had her bolter up and Hrist kept turning to cover their backs and finding nothing behind them but more sleepers.

At the Sector 4 junction the gold hung so thick that thermal optics gave her nothing but soup. Something moved in it.

They were shaped like men. Bio-armour, ribbed and seamless, filtration masks over the lower face. They stepped over the sleeping bodies without hurrying and without looking down. They carried no rifles. They carried sprayers, and wands, and datapads on lanyards.

One stopped over a cocooned officer. He scanned, he checked his pad, he pressed a wand to the root lattice and left a glowing mark on it.

"Tagging," Mist said. "They're tagging the fucking livestock."

The nearest one turned toward them and raised an open palm.

"Sleep," he said. His external speaker made it soft. "The war is finished. Rest."

"Drop them," Brynja said.

Sigrun's storm-bolter went off in the enclosed space like a hull strike. The rounds took the man apart across the chest. He went down without a sound.

The others did not shoot back. They threw pods underhand, and the pods opened on impact into tangles of wire-thin vine that snapped taut across the deck.

"Suppressing," Hrist said, and put plasma into the fog.

Brynja went through it. Storm-Singer took the vine wall apart in two cuts, the blade sizzling against wet matter, and then she was inside a Cultivator's reach and driving the spear through his chestplate. He caught the shaft in both hands. His eyes above the mask were wide and wet.

"Why fight it," he said. Blood came up around the words. "The metal is cold. The root is warm."

"I prefer the cold," Brynja said, and put a boot on his hip and pulled the spear free.

They left them where they fell, the dead among the sleeping. The main transit lift was forty metres on and the doors were shut behind a woody knot the size of a landing skid.

"Melta," Sigrun said, already slapping paste onto it.

The charge blew the knot into wet splinters. They crowded into the car. Mist punched the override. The lift fought its own cables for eight decks, groaning against the growth wound through the shaft.

* * *

The bridge of the Gungnir's Vengeance was dark except for standby lighting along the deck edge.

"Detach us," Brynja said, going for the command chair. "Mist, light the mains. Hrist, plot anything that isn't here."

Mist was already at the board. "Clamps are non-responsive. The roots have gone into the locking gears. They've grown into the teeth."

"Blow the bolts."

"The bolts are jammed. Captain, we are anchored."

Every screen on the bridge came up at once. Not only theirs. The status repeaters showed the same feed running on Valaskjalf's internal channels, on the yard tenders, on the beacon chain out to the jump line.

A face. Skin lit gold from underneath. Hair drifting as though the man stood in water. He was somewhere green, and behind him Brynja could make out a collapsed C2 dome and a Dominion crest on a wall, half swallowed.

"Children of the Iron," Freyr said. His voice did not come through the speakers. It arrived behind her eyes. "You paved the stars in metal. You called that order."

He smiled. It was a small, kind expression.

"You brought rust."

The feed quartered. Iðunn's Orchard, its dust gone, forest standing where the tailings pits had been and towers going down into it. Himinbjörg trailing vines out past its own docking arms, miles of them, black against the star field. Nidavellir dark on every band.

"The Iron is broken," Freyr said. "The Garden is restored. Lay down your weapons and sleep. In the dream of the Vanir there is no pain."

He looked out of the screen, straight down the lens.

"Or hold onto your metal, and burn inside it. That is yours to choose."

The feed cut. Standby lighting came back.

"Kill it," Brynja said, three seconds too late.

"It was never on our carrier wave," Mist said. "It was on all of them."

Hrist had not moved from her station. "Spore saturation, ninety per cent and climbing. The Vengeance filters are already passing it. If we sit here we sleep."

Brynja looked through the forward viewport. Roots as thick as gun barrels lay over the carrier's dorsal plating, following the seams, pulsing.

"She doesn't fly," Brynja said. "She's too big and she's already theirs."

"So that's it," Hrist said. Her voice cracked in the middle of it.

"Secondary bay. The Skittermule."

Sigrun turned. "It's a transport. It won't take the complement."

"It takes the command crew." Brynja stood. "The complement is asleep."

Nobody argued. On the security repeater, three decks of Einherjar lay in their lattices. Their faces had gone smooth behind the visors. Not one of them was going to wake up and ask her to account for it.

"Move," she said.

The run to the secondary hangar took eleven minutes and cost them every melta charge they carried. They burned through two vine walls. They shot four more Cultivators who came at them holding nothing but open hands. Hrist went down in a tangle at the Sector 9 hatch and Sigrun cut her out of it and carried her the last hundred metres.

The Skittermule sat on its pad, squat and ugly and asymmetrical, a hull nobody had ever bothered to make look like anything. Past it, the blast shield that separated the bay from vacuum had a vine across it as thick as a frigate's spine, grown through the smashed booth and woven flat over the whole exit.

"Sealed," Sigrun said. "Both leaves."

"Aboard," Brynja said. "Mist, reactor. Sigrun, ramp."

The lock cycled. Positive pressure took the gold out of the air in a rush and dumped it. Brynja got into the seat and pulled the harness across.

"Cannon."

"Hot," Mist said. "Captain, we are inside a pressurised bay. If you fire that in here the blowback comes straight back down our throat."

"Better vacuum than vines."

She lifted the Skittermule off the pad and held it in the hover, nose down. Through the canopy the vine wall moved. Tendrils came off it and reached, sweeping the space where the ship had been sitting.

"Brace."

She fired.

The bolt crossed forty metres and went into the wall and through it and into the blast shield behind. The bay flashed white. The wave picked the Skittermule up and threw it into the aft bulkhead and every alarm on the board went off at once.

Then the shield was gone, and so was the air.

The fire snuffed out mid-burn. Shattered plating, burning matter, a loader still chained to its pad, all of it went out through the hole in one long silent rush.

"Punch it."

Brynja put the throttle through the stop. The Skittermule went out riding the decompression, tumbling, thrusters firing on their own to argue against the spin, and then they were clear and the black was all around them.

She fought the stick until the horizon line settled.

Behind them, Valaskjalf filled the aft screen. Not grey. Green, the whole sphere of it, vines trailing off the docking arms for miles and turning slowly. Every window that used to be lit was dark. The light came from the growth instead, soft and even, all across the hull.

"The fleet," Sigrun said. "Where do they put in? The Starforge is under siege. Every fortress-world on that map is red."

"There's no harbour," Brynja said. "There's no Empire to have one."

Hrist was breathing hard through her rebreather, both hands still on her console.

"So what are we fighting for."

"Somewhere to stand." Brynja put in the course herself, out and away, until the green light was behind the pillar of the canopy and gone. "That's all there is now. Somewhere to stand."

The engines lit.

She reached past Mist and brought up the duty log. Nothing had told it anything. Sector 7, second shift, Environmental, Petarch, T. Four hours remaining on rotation.

She left it open.

* * *

Glossary

Bulkhead: A solid, vertical partition or wall within a spacecraft or space station, designed to maintain structural integrity and seal off sections in the event of a vacuum breach.

C2 (Command and Control): The central nerve center or operations room of a military installation or ship. It is where officers monitor sensors, coordinate fleet movements, and manage internal station systems.

Carrier Wave: A primary electromagnetic frequency used to transmit standard communications and data across a military fleet or star system.

Complement: The total number of personnel—including officers, enlisted crew, and soldiers—officially assigned to a ship, station, or base.

Deck / Deck Plating: The floor of a spacecraft or space station.

Duty Roster: The official schedule detailing which personnel are assigned to specific shifts, watches, or tasks.

Einherjar: The Empire’s heavily armored infantry or elite shock troops. (Derived from Norse mythology, referring to warriors who have died in battle and are brought to Valhalla).

Gorget Seal: The environmental locking mechanism at the collar of a soldier’s combat armor that connects the helmet to the chest plate, protecting the wearer from toxic atmospheres or the vacuum of space.

Gravity-Siege: A massive, high-tech orbital blockade or bombardment tactic that likely utilizes artificial gravity fields to trap, crush, or isolate a planet (in this case, Ísarnkol).

Junior Rating: A lower-ranking, non-commissioned enlisted crew member, typically assigned to manual, maintenance, or basic operational tasks.

Mag Boots (Magnetic Boots): Footwear equipped with electromagnets that allow soldiers and technicians to walk on metal decking in low- or zero-gravity environments.

Melta (Charge / Paste): A highly volatile, heat-based explosive used by military boarding parties and engineers to rapidly melt through heavy armor, locked bulkheads, or dense biological matter.

Pauldron: A piece of heavy plate armor covering the shoulder, often used to display rank, unit insignia, or in this universe, field-repair weld marks.

Rebreather on Internal Supply: A command to switch helmets to a closed-circuit breathing system. It cuts off external air intake and recycles the user's own oxygen supply to prevent breathing in hazardous materials (like spores).

Storm-Bolter: A heavy, rapid-fire military firearm that shoots highly destructive, explosive kinetic rounds.

Suppressing (Fire): A tactical maneuver where continuous weapon fire is directed at an enemy position. The goal is not necessarily to kill, but to force the enemy to take cover so allies can move, escape, or flank safely.

Tactical Holotank: A three-dimensional holographic projection table used by High Command to visualize star systems, fleet positions, planetary deployments, and station schematics in real-time.

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