The Only Gods We Know, Vol. 2 Ch 15: The Siege of Alfheim

Alfheim Prime filled the forward viewport. Shield-Captain Brynja Vingfalk stood locked into the command harness of the Gungnir's Vengeance. Her mag-boots held the deck, and the idle reactor came up through the soles into her shins. Below, the continents were cut by lines of green and gold light thick enough to see from orbit. They swelled and slackened every eleven seconds. She had timed it twice. Spore clouds sat in the upper atmosphere and threw the starlight back in colors the nav charts had no names for.

"Target package locked," Mist said from the sensor pit. She worked the console two-fingered. Her free hand rested on the bezel, where somebody's grease-pencil kill tally from Vanaheim had never been wiped off. Eleven strokes and a skull. "Blockade's running a standard hex screen. Lazy as hell. They think they own the sky."

Brynja checked the chronometer on her HUD. Amber numerals, counting down.

"Shroud?"

"Holding at ninety-eight percent," Mist said. "To their sensors we're background radiation and bad math."

The Alliance fleet drifted inside the Weavers' shroud. The Vengeance had point. The Variable X dreadnoughts rode her flanks, and their plating shifted and re-seated every few minutes for reasons nobody aboard had asked about. Behind them came the K'tharr flotilla. Three hundred junk-fighters, welded together from whatever the bird-men had stripped off dead hulls.

The Freyr-loyalist blockade slid past on the tactical plot. Living Dreadnoughts hung in geostationary orbit. Their hulls were crystal bone grown over meat, and the meat moved when they breathed. Root tendrils trailed kilometers off their sterns. The tendrils turned toward the sun, slowly, all of them at once.

"Range?" Brynja said.

"Two thousand klicks," Mist said. "We're in their throat."

Sigrun racked the slide on the bridge's pintle-mounted storm-bolter. Nobody fired a pintle gun in orbit. She racked it anyway. "Tell the K'tharr to hold their run. If those scavengers jump early, the Weavers drop the cloak and we're vapor."

"They know the stakes," Brynja said.

Her hand had found the command rail. The paint there was worn through to bare steel in four grooves, left by captains before her. On the plot the K'tharr icons jittered in place. Greed kept them in formation. She did not trust it to keep them there much longer.

The flank of a Bio-Dreadnought crossed the viewport. Close enough to see pores in the hull armor. Close enough that Brynja smelled wet soil and copper, which should have been impossible through the shielding. Nobody else on the bridge said anything about it. She didn't either.

"Mark," Brynja said.

"Weaver Actual acknowledges," Mist said. "Dropping the veil. Three. Two. One."

Space blinked.

Where there had been nothing, an assault carrier, two Chitin-Cog capitals and three hundred junk-fighters sat point-blank off the enemy's starboard quarter.

"Weapons free," Brynja said. "Burn them."

The Variable X dreadnoughts fired first. Depleted uranium slugs hit the nearest Bio-Dreadnought along its spine, and the crystal came apart. Bone shards tumbled into vacuum and caught the sun. Something screamed across every open channel. It had no voice behind it. It stopped when the slugs reached the brain-stem.

"Splash one," Sigrun said.

Then the swarm went in. The K'tharr didn't bother with missiles. They fired grapples through the meat-hulls and reeled themselves in until their fighters slammed flat against the bio-armor. Cutting torches lit up along the whole enemy line inside ten seconds.

"Boarding actions across the blockade," Mist said. Proximity alarms were stacking up under her voice. "They're stripping the weapon mounts. The ships are still alive."

Brynja watched a Bio-Dreadnought swing its spore-cannons toward the carrier. The turret stopped halfway. A K'tharr breaching team had sawed into the nerve bundle behind it, and the cannon hung there, twitching. Two of the bird-men were already prying the barrel loose.

"Main batteries on the flagship," Brynja said. "Find me the central node. Break its spine."

The Vengeance shook as the Gungnir-lances fired. Two gold beams crossed the dark and struck the lead Bio-Dreadnought amidships. The flesh boiled off in sheets. The crystal underneath went white and split down its length.

Below them, the ley lines flared.

"Planetary output's spiking," Mist said. "Ground-to-orbit batteries are active. They're growing new firing solutions."

"Brace," Brynja said.

Trees came up through the cloud layer. Miles high, their bark plated like ablative armor. The canopies split open and threw pods the size of frigates into the upper atmosphere.

"Incoming," Sigrun said. "Magma bombs and heavy spore clusters. Density is fucking enormous."

The pods burst in the exosphere. A K'tharr fighter caught a spray of molten rock and was gone. No debris. No beacon. The Vengeance plowed into a spore cloud, and the void shields went violet and started to hiss.

"Shields forward," Brynja said.

It turned into a brawl. Chitin-Cog drones tangled with root-serpents in low orbit. Weaver light-constructs painted phantom fleets across the enemy's eyes. The Bio-Dreadnoughts turned to fire on ships that weren't there while the K'tharr carved meat off their real flanks. On the plot, the hex screen buckled, and two of its six points went dark.

"Press it," Brynja said. "Clear a lane for the pods."

"Slipspace rupture," Mist said. "High mass. Bearing zero-zero-nine. Capital class, Captain."

Brynja turned to the rear display.

Space tore open in the blue-white jag of an Asgardian drive. A blade-shaped prow came through. Gunmetal grey. Macro-cannon batteries ran the length of its spine, and the Golden Sun was painted ten stories tall down its flank.

"The Sun-Eater," Sigrun said. She spat on the deck.

Astrid.

Behind the heavy cruiser came the Second Fleet. Destroyers and frigates with scorched hulls and missing turrets, still venting atmosphere from the siege at Ísarnkol.

"Hail them," Brynja said. "Before they shoot the wrong ships."

Astrid's face filled the main screen. Helmet off. Hair plastered dark to her forehead. Behind her, a damage-control crew was spraying foam on a console that hadn't stopped burning.

"Shield-Captain," Astrid said. She leaned on the title. "You found the garden. And you brought your pets."

"Stand down, Astrid," Brynja said. "The blockade's suppressed. We're prepping ground insertion to take Freyr."

Astrid laughed. It cracked in the middle. "I lost nine ships at Ísarnkol to things that grew out of the ice overnight. This planet is a seedbed. You don't take it. You burn it to the bedrock."

"Sun-Eater's charging main batteries," Mist said. "She's loading Planet-Crackers in the vertical tubes."

Brynja had seen a Cracker used once. A dead moon, for a training reel. The moon had come apart in four pieces, and the reel ended before the pieces stopped moving. Alfheim was not dead. The ley lines under her pulsed brighter than they had an hour ago.

"I have people in the kill zone," Brynja said. "K'tharr. Weavers. My own Stormbringers. You fire those and you kill all of us."

"I kill the enemy," Astrid said. "You stand next to xeno-scum, you die next to them. That's what treason costs."

"Target lock," Mist said. "She's painting the primary ley junction."

Brynja did not look away from the screen. "Weapons. Lock main batteries on the Sun-Eater."

Sigrun's hands stopped over the array. One second. Asgardian guns on an Asgardian hull. Then she moved. "Solution locked. Lances one and two hot."

"Astrid." Brynja kept her voice low and level. "Your reactor sits forty meters aft of your bridge. My gunner served on your sister ship and knows the frame number. Stand down."

Astrid stared at her. A muscle jumped under her left eye. Somebody off-screen said her name, and she didn't turn.

"You wouldn't," Astrid said.

Brynja said nothing.

On the plot, the two ships hung nose to nose in a ring of burning bio-hulls. Nobody on the bridge moved. The reactor ticked up through Brynja's boots.

"Calculation complete," a synthetic voice said on the open band.

Prime.

The Variable X flagship didn't fire. It burned its main drive and slid its hull between the Sun-Eater and the planet. Millions of tons of thinking metal, parked across Astrid's firing line.

"Destruction of the biosphere renders resource acquisition null," Prime said. "This outcome is illogical. The Collective prohibits the bombardment."

Astrid screamed at it. No words at first. Then she put both fists on her console. "Get out of my way, you fucking machine."

"She won't fire through it," Mist said. "Her penetrators can't punch that much mass."

"It won't hold," Brynja said. She pulled her helmet off its hook. "Sigrun, get Hrist and the Stormbringers to the pods. Mist, you have the conn. Keep Astrid busy and don't let her burn this world before I'm done with it."

"Aye, Captain." Mist slid into the command chair. "Go kill the gardener."

The launch bay stank of coolant. Steam hissed off the pod lines. Three Weaver Truth-Seers were already strapped in, tall enough that their helmets touched the pod ceilings. Their environment suits shifted color whenever they moved. Someone had stenciled POD 3. CHECK HARNESS TWICE on the hatch, and underneath it someone else had scratched MEANS YOU.

Brynja checked her harness twice.

"We drop hot," she said on the squad net. "Atmo's toxic and the flak is heavy. Target is the World-Tree District, central spire. Mark."

The floor fell away.

Fire filled the viewport. The pod shook hard enough to click her molars together, and the Gs drove her chest plate into her ribs until she stopped trying to breathe. Outside, tracer fire and bursting spores webbed the sky. Organic interceptors peeled off the canopy and climbed toward them on wings that bent wrong. Somebody on the open band was praying in old Norse. Brynja muted the channel.

"Flak, flak, flak," Hrist said on comms.

The pod to Brynja's left took a magma bomb and stopped existing.

"Hrist," Brynja said.

"Hit. Stabilizers gone." Hrist's pod corkscrewed away and left a smoke trail behind it. "Drifting wide. Sector Four."

"Stay alive, Four. Rally point."

Brynja fired the retros to slip a stream of acid bile from a floating bio-platform. The ground came up green and crystal and fast.

Impact. Metal shrieked. Mud sprayed the viewport. The hatch blew.

She rolled out, Storm-Singer already in her hand. They had come down in a plaza of white stone. Vines as thick as subway cars had crushed the buildings around it. A street sign hung off one bent pole in two scripts, the Asgardian half scraped clean. Golden pollen hung in the air so thick she could see ten meters, maybe less. It got into her helmet seals. She tasted it, chalky and sweet.

"Sound off."

"Two up," Sigrun said. She hauled herself out of her crater by a broken railing.

"Three up," a Weaver said. The translator flattened its voice into something almost human.

Brynja checked the squad net. Hrist's tag was still grey.

Ahead, the Central Spire went up through the clouds. Crystal and wood, fused into one mountain. It pulsed on the same eleven-second count as the ley lines.

"We're on the ground," Brynja said. "Move."

The push to the Spire was a slog. The pavement heaved under their boots. Roots shifted beneath the stone and split it in long seams, and twice the street dropped a meter without warning.

"Contact," Sigrun said.

Shapes came out of the pollen. Not soldiers. Masses of tangled wood and stone, twice her height, swinging limbs of petrified oak.

"Fire."

Storm-bolters barked. Explosive rounds blew chunks out of the golems, and the vines knitted shut over the holes before the smoke cleared.

"Kinetic's useless," Sigrun said. She put her shield into the nearest one and shoved it back a step.

"Weavers," Brynja said.

The Truth-Seers stepped forward. They didn't carry guns. They raised their hands and drew lines of hard light in the air between them. Where the light touched a golem, it stopped. The wood dropped in a heap. Just wood. A root still twitched at the edge of the pile, then didn't.

"Cover them," Brynja said. "Nothing touches the Weavers."

Battle-mages appeared on the rooftops. They threw lightning that blew craters in the plaza stone, and then the rain started. It hissed where it landed. It ate pits into Sigrun's pauldron as Brynja watched.

She triggered her personal generator. The Weaver beside her lifted one hand. The rain stopped a meter above their heads and slid away down nothing she could see.

"The path is hidden," the Weaver said. "He twists the road."

Brynja looked ahead. The street ran straight toward the Spire and never got any closer. They passed a burned-out tram on its side. Number 41. Two minutes later they passed it again. Same scorch pattern. Same cracked window.

"Then straighten it," Brynja said.

The Weaver's light went white. The street bent once, hard, and was gone. In its place was a steep slope of rubble running up to the Spire's base.

They fought up it meter by meter. Vine barricades choked the slope every twenty paces. Storm-Singer cut through them, and the vines blackened back from every cut and did not grow again. The haft got warmer in her grip each time. Her gauntlet ticked against it.

The base of the Spire was a wall with no visible top. At its foot stood a door of woven gold and ironwood, sealed, three times the height of the Vengeance's cargo hatch.

"Sigrun. Door."

"With pleasure." Sigrun slapped melta-charges onto the seam. "Fucking finally."

The blast threw the door inward.

They stepped into the atrium. It was vast and silent and full of gold light. Pollen drifted down from somewhere above and settled on Brynja's visor. Her boots left prints in the gold dust on the floor. There were no other prints. In the center of the floor, a shaft of light went straight up into the dark.

Brynja keyed the long-range band. "Mist. Status."

"Astrid's holding fire," Mist said through static. "Variable X has her boxed. The blockade's crumbling, but Freyr's growing new ships off the surface every minute. You're on the clock."

"We're inside," Brynja said.

She looked at what was left of her squad. Sigrun's armor was scored to bare ceramite down the left side. The Weavers' light had dimmed to the color of old brass. Hrist's tag on the net was still grey.

"Keep the sky clear," Brynja said. "We're climbing."

She stepped into the shaft. The light took her weight and lifted her. No sound. No vibration in her boots for the first time since the Vengeance. The plaza shrank under her until the vines looked like cracks in a plate. Above the clouds, the burning fleets were points of orange against the black. She counted the Sun-Eater's running lights and found them where she'd left them.

Storm-Singer was hot against her palm. She shifted her grip and kept it.

The doors above slid open.

The smell reached her before the light did. Wet soil and copper.

***

Glossary

Naval & Tactical Jargon

• Blockade / Hex Screen: A defensive spatial formation where capital ships and defensive nodes are arranged in interlocking hexagonal patterns to maximize overlapping fields of fire and sensor coverage.

• Conn (Have the Conn): Traditional naval terminology meaning to hold physical control and navigational authority over the bridge and vessel. (“Mist, you have the conn.”)

• Firing Solution: The calculated trajectory, lead time, angle, and weapon parameters required for a projectile, missile, or energy lance to hit an intended moving target.

• Hex Points / Screen Buckling: Specific defensive nodes in an orbital barrier. "Buckling" refers to a defensive line failing under concentrated kinetic or energy damage.

• Kill Zone: An area designated to be saturated with overlapping, lethal direct and indirect fire to guarantee the destruction of any targets caught within it.

• Point-Blank (Orbital): Combat engagement at ranges far closer than typical space warfare thresholds (in this context, directly on top of the enemy’s flanks rather than hundreds of thousands of kilometers out).

• Point (Taking Point): The lead element or spearhead of an advancing formation responsible for navigating danger first and drawing initial enemy fire.

• Prow: The forwardmost structure or bow of a starship hull.

• Pintle Mount: A swiveling mechanical bracket used to mount a heavy support weapon (like Sigrun’s storm-bolter) directly to a deck, railing, or bulkhead.

• Rally Point: A pre-designated grid coordinate where dispersed or surviving ground forces regroup if an insertion is scattered by anti-air fire.

• Slipspace Rupture: An artificial tear in local spacetime created by a specialized drive to allow faster-than-light (FTL) entry or exit.

• Splash One: Traditional military aviator brevity code indicating the confirmed destruction of a single enemy vessel or aircraft.

• Weapons Free: A combat directive authorizing operators and gun crews to fire at will upon any target not positively verified as friendly, without waiting for individual clearance.

Ground Insertion & Infantry Warfare

• Ceramite: A dense, high-strength composite armor material commonly layered onto mechanized power suits to dissipate kinetic impacts, extreme heat, and energy weapons.

• Drop Hot: A high-threat orbital deployment where assault pods are launched directly into active enemy anti-aircraft fire and contested combat drop zones without prior suppression.

• Flak: Fragmenting explosive ordnance detonated in mid-air/upper atmosphere designed to shred incoming atmospheric craft and drop pods.

• Melta-Charges: Heavy, high-heat shaped demolition charges engineered to burn and liquefy heavily reinforced doors, hulls, and armor plating via concentrated thermal reactions.

• Pauldron: The curved piece of armor protecting the shoulder and upper arm.

• Retros (Retro-Rockets): Reverse-facing thrusters fired just before landing to decelerate an atmospheric drop pod and prevent fatal kinetic impact with the ground.

• Sound Off: A squad commander’s command ordering personnel to check in over comms and report their operational and physical status in sequential order.

• Storm-Bolter: A rapid-fire, twin-barreled heavy ballistic weapon that fires self-propelled, explosive penetrator munitions.

In-Universe Tech & Weaponry

• Chitin-Cog: Cybernetic/biomechanical hybridization technology utilized by Alliance-aligned factions, featuring drone swarms and modular capital ships.

• Gungnir-Lance: Heavy ship-mounted spinal beam weapons, firing high-density golden energy beams designed for armor penetration and cracking enemy superstructures.

• Macro-Cannon: Massive, multi-deck kinetic artillery mounted along the spines and broadsides of Asgardian cruisers.

• Planet-Cracker: A devastating orbital superweapon warhead loaded in vertical launch tubes, capable of tectonic disruption sufficient to fracture planetary crusts and break celestial bodies apart.

• Stormbringers: Elite Asgardian shock-trooper assault infantry deployed via drop pods for high-risk orbital boarding actions and deep-strike planetary insertions.

• Truth-Seers (Weavers): An enigmatic allied species capable of projecting and weaving "hard light"—solid, geometric energy constructs used for defensive barriers, illusionary sensory decoying, and cutting through biological barriers.

• Variable X: A faction characterized by sentient "thinking metal" dreadnoughts that dynamically shift, repair, and optimize their own plating and internal mass based on cold tactical logic.

• Void Shields: Protective energy barriers projected around starships to absorb and deflect kinetic slugs, radiation, and beam weaponry.

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