Ansible
I wasn’t out for more than a few minutes. I woke with Laharu crouched beside me in his native form, siphoning energy into my body and helping it regenerate the more nasty wounds I’d taken in the fight. I blinked, surprised to see that we were still in Tyr’s prison.
“Scathsa was concerned that you weren’t regenerating quickly,” Laharu said, correctly interpreting my expression. “E didn’t want to risk carrying you back through the bumpy ride of the Bifrost, so Loki went back and called for assistance. We brought a troop of guards with us, and an expert of some sort who’s up in the study with the other two, poking at something Scathsa found.”
I sat up, flexing my wing, and winced. “Am I cleared for duty?” I asked, tucking it back against my side.
Laharu snorted. “Don’t get into any fights for the next day or two, if you can help it. Otherwise, yes, you’re cleared. Though I know what you really want is to go upstairs and see what they found.”
“Considering the beating I took to find it, yes,” I said, shifting into my Aesir guard form and reassembling an illusion of armor as I stood up. “Aren’t you curious about it?”
“Of course,” Laharu said, also putting on his guard form to walk alongside me. “I just hope e’s disabled all the traps this time.”
We could hear Scathsa’s voice as we walked down the hallway, chattering excitedly with another Aesir. Loki looked up and flashed a quick smile at us as we entered the study, but the other two didn’t seem to notice our arrival.
“The resonance crystal doesn’t store the vibrations, no,” Scathsa was saying, pointing at something on the desk. “But there’s traces left in the buffer, and—”
“Only traces!” The Aesir had long black hair woven into a thick braid, dark skin, no beard, and seemed annoyed. “I’m not going to waste days running it through our most finely-tuned particle detector looking for something that might not even—”
“You don’t have to spend days,” Scathsa snapped. “Look, all you have to do is…”
I walked to stand beside Loki, with Laharu behind me. “What are they talking about?” I asked quietly.
“Scathsa found an ansible,” he said. “He’s pretty sure that’s what set off the trap, when he touched it.”
“E,” I said. Loki glanced at me, then nodded.
“Scathsa thinks that e could get information about what was being transmitted from the ansible itself,” he continued. I couldn’t help a small smile, pleased with Loki’s ready adaptation to our pronouns. “The ansible isn’t Asgard-made, and Jari doesn’t think that she could get anything useful out of it.”
“Tyr’s ally must have brought him the ansible,” I said, watching the argument across the desk. “Unless he was allowed to have it when he was banished—or built it himself?”
Loki snorted. “Of course not,” he said. “That was part of his banishment—no outside contact whatsoever was allowed. If Tyr had tried to make the parts for an ansible, the security system would have immediately noticed it and alerted Odin. Whoever gave it to him also set up the traps and alarms we found—Tyr never had enough magical skill to do such workings on his own. Scathsa told us that the first trap was meant to destroy the ansible if it was touched by someone other than Tyr, to destroy the evidence, and e was able to disable that. But e didn’t find the secondary trap, the one that shut down the aether around us and summoned the energy being. We certainly weren’t meant to bring the news back to Asgard.”
“I know Asgard ansibles can communicate with all the other Nine Realms, because they use the same material that the Bifrost is made from. Is there any way to tell what was on the other end of this ansible’s transmissions, or where they went?” I asked.
“Only generally. Scathsa says that the resonance crystal is tuned to Muspelheim, but can’t pinpoint it any better than that.”
“Surtur’s realm?” Laharu said. “Our information is that most of the Marauder gangs are based there, one way or another. We don’t know if Surtur is actively supporting them with dark energy to make their raids between the realms, but he’s at least tolerating their presence.”
“Ours is the same,” Loki said, nodding. “It’s expected that he’ll be mustering for war sometime soon, possibly in the next few centuries. He’s prophesied to be the bringer of Ragnarok, the doom of Asgard. If Tyr is working with Surtur…” he trailed off, and we were silent for a moment as we digested this idea.
Our thoughts were interrupted by shouting from the desk. Laharu quickly threw a shield between Scathsa and Jari, as they seemed about to come to blows. When Scathsa’s gesturing bounced off the shield, e turned and glared at us, then stalked out of the study while Jari folded her arms, fuming.
“Have you agreed on a course of action?” Loki asked her mildly. Laharu glanced at me, then followed Scathsa out into the corridor.
The dark-skinned Aesir took a second to compose herself, then bowed slightly. “Yes, my lord,” she said. “We will transport the ansible back to Asgard, where Scathsa and I hope that more advanced equipment will allow us to extract information from the device.”
“Do you believe you can work with Scathsa without needing guards to prevent violence?”
Jari’s face flushed darker still, her aura swirling with conflicting emotions as she caught sight of Scathsa walking back into the room with Laharu. “I—yes, my lord,” she said, then bowed again and left, carefully avoiding looking in Scathsa’s direction.
Loki raised his eyebrows as Scathsa approached and also bowed. “No offense against Jari or Asgard was intended,” e said. At a nudge from Laharu, e added, “I will not harm her while we are working together.”
“Thank you for your assurance,” Loki replied.
Looking at Scathsa’s aura, I rubbed my head and sighed. “Don’t worry, she likes you too,” I told eir.
“It’ll give Daucus something to gossip about other than your relationship with the Jotun,” e snapped in our language.
I looked up, casting a quick sound screen in the doorway to prevent the guard in the corridor from overhearing. “Loki and I have been working to establish a diplomatic foundation to the negotiations, and to maintain our security in Asgard,” I replied heatedly, also in our language.
Loki stepped forward, frowning. “Wait,” he said in Aesir. “What—did you say I was—a Jotun?”
Scathsa glanced at me with a mortified expression. “There may have been a mistake in your translator,” I said, switching back to Aesir.
“No.” Loki shook his head, looking at me. “You’ve said other things… what do you mean?”
We started at each other for a minute. I cursed myself viciously in my head, and wished I had the skill to remove the memory of what had been said from Loki’s mind, but couldn’t think of a reply.
“It was—a jest,” Laharu said with a forced smile. “A private joke among us, and a poor one.”
I winced as Loki took a step backwards, his expression darkening. “If you have any affection for me, if anything we have said or done together meant anything at all to you, then tell me the truth.” His words pierced me like a spear of ice. “Why do you think I’m a… Frost Giant?”
I sighed. There was no way out of this. “We’ve known ever since we first saw you,” I said. “All of us did. We can see it in your aura, and in the pattern of your form.”
“But I’m…” He gave a small, gasping laugh, reaching out as if he could grasp the disintegrating shroud of his identity as an Aesir and wrap it around himself again. “I’m short, even for Aesir. And I’m not blue!”
“You’re pattern-locked.” I shrugged, unsure why he wanted me to explain this. “Whether it was done by your parents or by—your Aesir parents, your natural shape-shifting ability is locked down into your appearance of an Aesir, so that it would take much more effort than usual for you to change. I thought it was to prevent you from shifting accidentally, or to remind you to stay in Aesir form.”
Loki’s already pale face blanched further, and he staggered away from us, leaning against a wall. “I can’t shape-shift,” he whispered. “It’s just illusions. Tricks.”
“You can’t because you’re locked down,” I repeated, and stepped forward, holding out my hand. “Loki… I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have brought this up. I hope this doesn’t cause any problems with the negotiations—”
He retreated from me, eyes wide and staring. “I can’t—I have to go.” He turned away, shoving past the startled guard and retreating down the corridor at almost a run.
I cursed under my breath, glaring at Scathsa. I had no idea what Loki was going to do, but I had to assume the worst—that he was going to tell Odin about our transgression, that the talks were over, and we were quite possibly about to go to war. I only had a few seconds before he would be out of sight at the end of the corridor, so I constructed a simple aetheric dart and attached it to his aura.
“What was that all about?” Laharu asked, switching back to our language. “I know we weren’t supposed to talk about him being a Jotun, but I don’t understand his reaction.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It—doesn’t make sense to me, either.” We all felt the surge of energy as Heimdall activated the Bifrost, presumably to bring Loki back to Asgard.
“I should stay here, make sure the ansible is secured properly,” Scathsa said.
“No,” Laharu said. “We’ll find Jari, you tell her what needs to be done, and we all go back together. No more splitting up until we’ve reported to Aizerue. Maybe e can figure out what’s going on.”
I tried to control my anxiety as we hustled down the corridor in search of the Aesir tech, but it was impossible to ignore the feeling that I had missed something, and whatever it was could put our entire mission in jeopardy.