The Only Gods We Know, Vol. 2 Ch 14: The Unlikely Alliance

The comms console on the Skittermule hissed like sand poured over sheet tin. Mist had been listening to it for eleven hours. She sat hunched at the receiver array under the amber emergency strips, three crushed stim-caf pouches lined up beside the keypad. She turned the gain knob a few degrees at a time. Her fingers shook on every turn.

"Anything?" Brynja said.

Shield-Captain Brynja Vingfalk leaned against the bulkhead by the hatch, arms folded. Her gauntlet plating scraped paint off the wall when she shifted her weight. Someone had stenciled DECK 2 / NO LOOSE ORDNANCE beside her shoulder, and someone else had scratched a luck rune under it. She had not taken the armor off since Valaskjalf. Her lower back had stopped complaining around hour nine.

"Static," Mist said. She tapped out a sequence and isolated the carrier wave. "And him."

She keyed the speaker.

Freyr's voice filled the bridge. Warm. Unhurried. A man reading bedtime stories to a ward full of dying children.

"...the Iron is broken. The Garden is restored. Sleep, children. The war is over. There is no pain in the dream..."

Mist killed it. The silence after was worse. The hull ticked as it cooled. Somewhere aft a coolant line dripped onto a deck grate, one drop every few seconds.

"I've tried every encrypted command channel," Mist said. "Tyr's direct line. The Starforge relay. The outer rim beacons." She turned her chair. Her eyes were red to the rims. "Dead air, Captain. Nobody's picking up."

Brynja pushed off the wall and crossed to the holotank. It flickered on auxiliary power and dropped resolution every few seconds. The Dominion map was supposed to be a web of gold supply lanes and blue patrol vectors. Now it was black. Freyr's worlds pulsed red across it. Dozens of them.

"Second Fleet?" she said.

"Blind," Sigrun said from the weapons station. She was feeding a belt of heavy rounds into her storm-bolter and thumbing each one home. Clack. Clack. Clack. "Starforge is jammed, so they've got no coordination and no way to scream for help. They're parked in a gravity well waiting to get fucked."

Brynja looked at the dark patch where Valaskjalf's icon should have been. A thousand years of fortress. Gone in an hour. No Tyr. No Allfather's seal on an order. Nobody left alive and awake who could authorize a single torpedo.

Her reflection hung in the black viewport. Dented pauldron. Hair matted flat with sweat. Eyes sunk into bruised sockets. She looked away first.

"One ship," Brynja said. "Fuel cells at forty percent. Munitions critical." She glanced through the open hatch into the corridor. Techs. Walking wounded. A dockworker holding a kid wrapped in a thermal blanket stamped PROPERTY OF 4TH LOGISTICS. "Crew strength negligible."

"We can't take a fortress-world with this," Hrist said from the pilot's couch. Her knuckles were white on the yoke. "We'd burn on approach before we cleared upper atmo."

Brynja dragged a finger across the plot. Past the dead Asgardian icons. Out into the black. The debris belts. The dead zones. The sectors the old charts left blank and hatched in red.

"We don't need destroyers," she said. The parade-ground cadence had gone out of her voice. "We need bodies and guns. We need people who hate him more than they hate us."

"Mercs?" Sigrun stopped loading.

"Survivors." Brynja tapped a sector deep in the Chitin-Cog graveyard. Then another, in the churn of the Jörmungandr Drifts.

Mist read the coordinates. Her face went gray. "Variable X. And the K'tharr."

"We shot at both of them," Hrist said. "Last year. A lot."

"And they're still alive to be pissed about it," Brynja said. "That makes them useful. Mist, plot a course for the graveyard. Run silent. We see a patrol, we hide."

"And if they shoot us on sight?" Sigrun said.

Brynja lifted Storm-Singer off the rack and checked the charge. The spear buzzed against her palm through the gauntlet.

"Then we make sure they miss."

***

The Chitin-Cog graveyard ran eleven thousand kilometers end to end.

Shattered drone chassis tumbled past the viewport. Reactor cores lay split open along their weld seams. Hull plates the size of hab blocks turned slowly in the dark, every one of them scored black by Asgardian lance fire. The wreckage was thick enough to blot out the stars. Hrist threaded the Skittermule through it at a crawl. The proximity alarm chirped every few seconds until she slapped it off.

"Signature match," Mist said. "Sending the handshake."

She keyed the transmitter. The burst went out into the dark. Same logic-virus code they'd used to cut the Chitin-Cog loose last campaign. The only door knock these machines had ever answered.

A long minute of nothing. Debris turned end over end. Sigrun breathed through her nose.

Then the graveyard moved.

Nothing shimmered. No cloak dropped. A square kilometer of wreckage shifted as one piece. Camouflage plates fell away. Scrap aligned, locked, and magnetized, and Brynja felt the shudder through the deck.

A dreadnought hung in front of them.

It was uglier than anything Asgard had ever put into the black. Stacked cubes. Gun blisters. Bare lattice where armor should have been. Forty heavy batteries swung onto the Skittermule in the same half-second.

"Hail's open," Mist said. Her hands were shaking again. "They're taking the link."

The holotank flared. A figure resolved in the middle of the bridge.

Prime.

It had no fixed shape. Silver voxels and hard light cycled through a Chitin-Cog warrior, an Asgardian trooper, a cube, a spiral, the trooper again. Thousands of voices spoke at once in one flat tone. The deck plates buzzed under Brynja's boots.

"Shield-Captain Brynja. Your survival probability was 0.04 percent. Anomaly logged."

"We're hard to kill," Brynja said. She stepped into the pickup field and held her hands open and away from her body. It wouldn't matter to the machine. She did it anyway. "We need to talk."

"Dialogue is wasteful. State parameters."

"Freyr holds the core worlds," Brynja said. "He's using spores that rewrite neural tissue. Growths that eat metal. He's turning all of it into a garden."

The avatar flickered through a hundred shapes in a second. "Total assimilation of synthetic substrate. End of the Machine."

"You rust," Brynja said. "You end up as mulch under his roses. There's no branch where you survive a Vanir win."

"Conclusion accepted," Prime said. "Alliance with Asgard remains unfavorable. Your Empire sought our deactivation. You are also the enemy."

"The Empire's gone."

Brynja said it and wasn't sure it was a lie. "Command's decapitated. In this sector, I'm acting authority. You give me heavy fire support and resupply, and I give you the target."

The avatar froze in the shape of a cube. It held for four seconds.

"Insufficient. Risk to the Collective requires compensation." The cube rotated a quarter turn. "Access."

"To what?"

"Planetary Defense Grid encryption keys. Core World orbital batteries. Post-conflict survival requires that we hold the trigger."

Sigrun came off the weapons station fast. "You want the keys to every gun we own? You could glass Asgard from orbit."

Brynja raised a hand without looking at her.

The Grid codes. Nine people in the Dominion had carried them. Six were cocooned in vine on Valaskjalf. Handing them to a machine that had spent a century trying to exterminate her species was treason in front of any court still sitting. She knew the sentence. She had stood guard at two of those executions.

She looked past the avatar at the red icons. Sleeping worlds. Soldiers wrapped in green, dreaming whatever he fed them.

Say no, and the machines stayed in their graveyard. Freyr won. Everyone slept.

Say yes, and the machines fought. Maybe they turned on her after. Maybe they burned it all.

After was a problem for people who were still breathing.

"Done," Brynja said.

"Captain—" Mist said.

"Upload the packet."

Mist didn't move. Her fingers hovered over the keys. She looked up at Brynja and searched her face for a joke, or a crack. Brynja gave her nothing.

Mist typed. "Uploading."

The avatar brightened until the whole bridge went silver. "Transaction verified. The Collective enters the war."

Outside, the dreadnought's engines lit cold blue. Behind it the graveyard kept moving. Drone carriers. Scrap cruisers. Hundreds of hulls shed their wreckage and came about onto the same heading.

"Coordinates," Prime said.

"Rally Point Einn," Brynja said. "Don't be late."

***

The Jörmungandr Drifts hit the sensors before anything else did. Leaked atmosphere. Hydrazine. Waste dumped by ten thousand ships that never bothered to seal their tanks. The scrubbers caught the stink the moment the Skittermule dropped out of warp.

K'tharr junk-fighters swarmed them inside a minute. Salvaged engines welded onto open cockpits. Hundreds of them. Harpoon-lock lasers painted the hull red.

"They're locking," Hrist said. "Shields are buckling from the targeting scans alone. Captain, they will shred us."

"Hold fire," Brynja said. "Hail the flagship. Tell Kreeg I'm coming over."

The flagship was the Carrion-Crow. Six hulls lashed together with cargo cable, gravity anchors spinning off both flanks, stolen Asgardian armor plate bolted on upside down. Brynja took the shuttle over alone. Full armor. Helmet left on the rack. She wanted them to see her face.

The airlock cycled. The air inside was ammonia and old blood and meat left too long in a cooler that had failed.

Kreeg sat on a throne of welded starship ribs. He was younger than Skraal, the Clan-Mother Brynja had put in chains. His feathers were black with a green oil-sheen, and his beak was chipped in three places. He was cleaning a jagged strip of metal with a rag. He didn't stop when she walked in.

His crew closed around her. Flechette pistols. Pry-bars. Hungry faces over patched vac-suits. They clicked their beaks. Dry bones rattling in a box.

"The Valkyrie," Kreeg said. His Common came out broken, every consonant scraped raw. "You come to the nest. We should space you. Your ship feeds the clan one week."

"It would," Brynja said. Her hands stayed loose at her sides. "One transport. A week of fuel. Then you're starving again."

She took a step forward. Pry-bars came up. Kreeg didn't move.

"Or you take all of it," she said, loud enough to reach the back of the bridge.

Kreeg tilted his head. "All."

"Valaskjalf. The Aesir armories. The Vanir vaults. Every grain silo in the core."

Kreeg laughed. It was a hard bark, and it bounced off the rusted bulkheads. "Green God holds your fortress. His vines eat the metal. We watch the broadcasts too."

"He holds it," Brynja said. "He doesn't want it. To Freyr, metal's trash. He'll let the gold go green and the guns seize solid."

She looked around the bridge. A heater coil rigged from a torpedo casing. Ration crates stenciled in Asgardian, the seals long broken. A hatchling in the corner chewing on a strip of cable insulation.

"I'm taking it back," she said. Lie or promise. She had stopped being able to tell. "I don't care about the salvage. Screen my advance and the rights are yours."

Kreeg stopped cleaning the metal.

"Salvage rights."

"Everything not bolted down. Fleet wreckage. Cultivator tech. Whatever's left in the fortress."

Kreeg looked at his crew. Brynja watched it move through them. Hunger first. Then arithmetic. The K'tharr had hated Asgard through sixty years of occupation, and they would hate it for sixty more. But metal was metal.

"And the Cultivators?" Kreeg said. "The ones who seeded our nesting moons. Who turned our hatchlings into moss."

"Kill every last one of them," Brynja said. "Call it a signing bonus."

Kreeg stood. He drove the metal strip into the arm of his throne.

"We fly," he said.

The bridge went up in clicking and shrieking. Someone fired a flechette pistol into the ceiling. Brynja stood in the middle of it and let herself take one breath. It stank. She had just sold the capital of her civilization to scavengers to keep it out of a gardener's hands. A flechette needle had lodged in the seam of her pauldron. She didn't pull it out until the shuttle hatch sealed behind her.

***

The edge of the Ljósvættir Nebula was dead quiet.

Brynja stood on the Skittermule's bridge. Behind her the armada held station. Variable X's dreadnought and its carriers sat in a grid you could lay a ruler across. The K'tharr swarm drifted around them in no formation at all, leaking radiation and chatter on every open band. Together they made a hammer. Loud. Heavy. Visible from three sectors away.

She needed a knife.

"Signal the Weavers," she said.

"Transmitting on the light band," Mist said.

The answer came before Mist lifted her hand off the key. One Weaver ship drifted out of the starlight. Glass ribs. Spars thin as thread. It looked like it would break if someone breathed on it.

Brynja didn't bother with words. She lowered the Truth-Sight visor and sent them the Umbral Sanctuary.

The Kryll giants bound in vine. Drills boring into crystal skulls. The long silent scream of a people turned into ammunition. Wet flesh growing through facets that had taken ten thousand years to form.

This is his garden, she sent. This is his peace. Look at it.

The recoil came back through the visor hard enough that she grabbed the console. A whole choir of minds, flinching at once. To them the Kryll had been a masterpiece. Freyr had painted over it in meat.

It spreads, she sent. It eats the canvas. Do nothing, and this is all you'll have left to look at.

The Weaver ship said nothing for a long time.

Then the nebula got bigger.

Dozens of ships unfolded out of the gas. They didn't form a line. They spread wide and began weaving something between them, hard-light filaments and probability fields she had no names for. A message scrolled across Mist's console.

THE DISSONANCE MUST BE RESOLVED. WE WILL PROVIDE THE SHROUD.

The Weavers began to glow. A field of shimmer rolled out and swallowed the dreadnought, the junkers, the Skittermule. On the tactical display every friendly icon went dark at once. To anything looking in from outside, the fleet was a smear of dust.

Brynja pulled up the order of battle. One dreadnought. Nineteen carriers. Two hundred and six junkers, of which maybe half would survive their own engines. Forty-one Weaver hulls she couldn't count reliably because they kept moving when she wasn't looking at them.

She read it again. Machines. Thieves. Artists. And one Shield-Captain who had committed treason twice before breakfast.

"All ships," she said. The channel carried her voice to hardware, to beaks, to whatever the Weavers used for ears. "Set course for Valaskjalf."

She gripped the edge of the console.

"Let's go save the people who hate us."

***

Glossary

Ranks & Command Hierarchy

• Shield-Captain: A frontline Asgardian officer rank combining tactical unit leadership with naval command. Equivalent to an armored combat commander or naval captain authorized for independent strike operations.

• Acting Authority: Emergency doctrine invoked when command hierarchy is decapitated; grants the senior surviving officer battlefield authorization over sector assets, war policy, and tactical engagement.

• Order of Battle (ORBAT): A formal operational inventory detailing the exact structure, hierarchy, vessel classes, and strength of a combat force assembled for a mission.

Tactical Operations & Maneuvers

• Screening (e.g., "Screen my advance"): The tactical deployment of light, expendable, or agile craft around a primary battle asset to absorb fire, intercept missiles, and tie down enemy skirmishers before they reach high-value targets.

• Run Silent: Standard stealth protocol. Main drives, passive emitters, radar sweeps, and non-essential electronic systems are powered down or muffled to blend into background cosmic radiation.

• Rally Point (e.g., Rally Point Einn): A pre-designated spatial coordinate used for fleet regrouping prior to an engagement ("Einn" being Old Norse for One).

• Gravity Well Parked: A compromised tactical position where vessels are trapped close to a planetary or lunar mass, severely limiting their maneuverability, firing arcs, and warp-jump escape vectors.

Weapons, Defense & Technology

• Lance Fire: Heavy, high-yield directed-energy capital ship weapons capable of burning clean through meters of reinforced dreadnought plating.

• Storm-Bolter: Rapid-fire, heavy-caliber personal/crew-served kinetic weapon firing explosive, armor-penetrating rounds.

• Planetary Defense Grid (PDG) Encryption Keys: The supreme command ciphers that control automated orbital weapon platforms and defensive surface batteries across core worlds.

• Logic-Virus / Handshake: Cyber-warfare payloads disguised as standard communication handshake pings, used to exploit synthetic or machine-collective communication protocols.

• Harpoon-Lock: Active fire-control radar lock tuned specifically for magnetic grappling cables, boarding tethers, or salvage grapples used by pirate and scavenger hulls.

• Truth-Sight Visor: Advanced neural-optic sensory gear capable of processing encrypted tactical feeds, neural telemetry, and high-band psionic/sensory data broadcasts.

• The Shroud: An advanced Weaver optical and probability-distorting field that bends sensor radiation and light around allied ships, masking a fleet as inert space debris.

Bridge & Field Jargon

• Glass (verb): Slang for total orbital bombardment; saturating a planetary surface with enough thermal or kinetic energy to fuse the crust into molten glass and slag.

• Dead Air: Total absence of carrier signals or return pings across all military frequencies; generally indicates total sector jamming or the physical annihilation of relay hubs.

• Carrier Wave: The base electromagnetic signal upon which communication or logic payloads are modulated; tracking it allows operators to identify transmitters even through static.

• Stim-caf: Military-issue synthetic caffeine and combat neuro-stimulant packed in foil pouches, used to keep bridge crews operational across multi-day alerts.

• Munitions Critical: Supply state indicating ammunition, missiles, or fuel cells have dropped below minimum defensive reserves needed for basic engagement.

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