Walküre - SCP Foundation

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Walküre — (lit) Valkyrie; female warrior in Norse mythology.

+ Sarah Walschausen, U.S. Army (2003 - 2011), Peoria, Illinois

- Sometimes, she thought she would never really get used to civilian life.

She didn't cry. Not when she got shot in the leg on patrol, not when the discharge papers came, not when we were cuddling in her bunk, under the sheets, deathly afraid someone would come along and know without Asking the answer to a question we couldn't Tell.

She was my first girlfriend. I think I was hers, too. It was unhealthy, but not the way you'd think — never mind the fact that I was her commanding officer. She had a way of being cold. Wouldn't crack a grin, wouldn't say "I love you," wouldn't even respond to a hug — it was just sex to her, bare and mechanical, no feeling. Except for when she was drunk.

She let something slip when she got hammered. There was an animal inside of her, deep down — some human thing, greatly wounded, keening quietly inside her heart. Then she'd cry. Then she'd hug me, and kiss me, and tell me she loved me, and I'd cry too because I did love her, deep down, I loved her and I knew she wasn't just the machine I knew in the daylight.

I only remember her crying once, when sober.

We were on patrol — it was '04 I think, outskirts of Baghdad. The field report was three sentences, no drama, just a terse snapshot. We were moving up a city street — another dusty alley, boxy buildings, worried eyes from the windows — when we heard gunshots, distant cracks a few hundred feet away. We saw a dull red Volkswagen barrel out from a side street, before we had time to react, before we had time to dive behind cover — just a car, driver invisible behind tinted glass, veering down the road in our direction.

She sent twenty rounds downwind into the windshield. It was in the moment, just a snap reaction, no real human thought involved. The car veered to the right and then flipped before unceremoniously crashing into the wall of a nearby home, red streaks now on the stucco.

The driver was a father, maybe, a worried man, a little harsh to his wife, sometimes, but always good to his children — who just wanted to get home, probably, who had heard the shots and was scared, who had no idea that Lily Barkley, of Sacramento, CA, was just around the corner with a gun designed in windowless rooms by the Department of Defense to kill men in body armor, some soldier with lethal intent, not a clerk in a dress shirt and tie. Not the two women in the backseat, maybe family, maybe not, who I never saw, except for the blood pooling on the ground.

It wasn't that unusual. It happened all the time at checkpoints, with a little more process, usually. Escalation of force: the same incident, the same outcome, just slightly more in line with regulations, the soldiers absolved of blame because they followed procedure and it happened at night, maybe, or on some distant road with no prying eyes to contradict the official story. But it happened in broad daylight, on a city street, and now there were three innocent dead, three bodies in a graveyard, because one soldier was scared.

She was court-martialed and dishonorably discharged, but she cried two weeks before any of that, when I read the report the day after, looked at her, and asked her what had really happened, in that moment, in her mind — how she justified it, slept with it at night, convinced herself it was okay.

She couldn't answer. She couldn't find the words. I told her that I didn't want to see her anymore — in not so many words — and she started crying, genuinely sobbing, the desperately human animal at the surface with no liquor involved. She tried to hug me, and I shoved her off.

I never saw her again, except for a grainy photo I kept in my wallet for a year afterwards and maybe once from the back, on a truck full of soldiers anxious to leave, headed towards the airport.

I still love her. Not actively. I just notice it in everyone I date. There's always some element of her, hiding there beneath the surface, waiting for me to recognize it.

+ Nomusa Emvelo, Senior Aid Worker, Durban, KwaZulu-Natal

- All she wanted was to help, but the Charitable could only do so much.

We were crossing the desert when we found them. Well. When they found us.

It was the middle of the night, then. We were heading for a hermitage in the Nubian desert. A group of monastic Coptic wizards suffering from a tuberculosis outbreak. Poor souls were so sick they couldn't even use their own magic to treat themselves. It was four days' walk from the nearest village, but they were hurting, and they needed our help. Desperate people that would have been hurt by the Foundation or the Initiative if they tried reaching out to anyone else.

So we packed our things and went, sleeping by the day and walking by the night. We had more than enough resources, both for ourselves and those we were meant to help. Of course, if we ever needed extraction, all we had to do was call for it. It was a safe journey, no real risk of any danger. It was supposed to be one.

When they came from beyond the dunes, it was obvious they were warriors, battle-scarred soldiers. I didn't need Abeni's experience to tell me that; I could see it in the way they moved, even before I noticed the guns they carried on their backs. They were led by the woman, the only one of them that wasn't hurt. She was calm, relaxed almost, as if this was just another blue day for her, just something she'd seen hundreds of times before. She was in her element. It was obvious, from the way she looked at us and her comrades.

We tried telling them that we could try and share, but that we didn't have enough resources to help all of them. I offered to call in for support so that we could have what we needed delivered, but all I got in response to that proposal was a barrel of a gun pointed at my head. They were fleeing from someone, Abeni said. A battle not yet lost. A battle that left them wounded, vulnerable. They couldn't risk getting spotted. They needed what we had. They needed what those wizards needed more.

I tried to explain it to the woman, but she didn't listen. She already decided it was either them or the wizards, and she wasn't about to let her people die in the middle of the desert. They needed the food and the medicine, or they would bleed out. It was simple as that, in her mind. A black-and-white equation. A necessary evil, perhaps; something she liked to think she had no choice in. Abeni looked at her and tried to tell her it didn't have to be like that, that she too had once been a soldier, that she understood what they felt. She told her the helicopter would be there by sunrise, if we just called for it. She begged for her to listen, almost.

The woman shot her in the leg for that. A sign she meant business.

We didn't really fight back after that. We weren't warriors, even if some of us had once been. We were volunteers. And we didn't volunteer to die.

So we gave them what they wanted, and for a few days carried on beside them; they couldn't risk us wandering out into the desert alone, thinking we could tell whoever left them scarred like that where they were. It was a murderous couple of days, a ceaseless march for hours on end with almost no respite. For those few days, I observed them, almost like a scared animal. I saw them talk and I saw them care for each other. I saw them drink.

The first day after they took what wasn't theirs, they drank. All of them, except the few that they put out on guard. The woman was the first to take up the bottle. She drank and she drank until the day turned into night again, and I watched it all happen from just beyond the corner, just beyond her field of vision. I saw her lay there, her body bordering on blacking out, her eyes staring somewhere before her.

I've seen many people drink in my life, you know. But none like her. People change, when they pick up the bottle. Most don't want to admit it, but somewhere deep inside, there is an animal we only let out when our blood runs with ethanol and our mind wanders off into nonsense. We are all like that. But not her. Not the woman with the sniper rifle and with the insignia of a raven. When she drank, she just stared, some spark of consciousness still fading within her eyes, as if anticipating something.

Whatever it was she waited for, she didn't find it.

When they finally reached their destination, they let us go. Said we were free to go and do whatever it was we were doing, before they came. Almost the second they disappeared beyond the horizon we called in for help, saying we lost our resources and needed support. We still believed that if we hurried, we could help the people we were sent to aid.

None of them made it, in the end. The monastery was empty when we arrived, the halls of the mages silent. A husk drying out in the harsh desert wind.

I wish I could've shown her, the soldier, the empty bunks and deserted nave. The sand coursing over the pews, working its way into the cracks in the sandalwood. I wish I could've made her understand what she had done, or at least see it.

We registered the wizards as war dead, killed by a battle they had never fought and never seen.

+ █████ "Methuselah" ████████, Insurgent Operator, █████, ███████

- He'd made it seven years in the Insurgency. Most only survived months.

They came after dark. I remember it still, four years later. The clanks of their armor and steps of their boots, treading the rocky ground before them.

We were in Algeria, then. The Atlas Mountains. It was supposed to be a quick recovery mission; get in and get out with the object, as dictated by the Engine. We didn't expect trouble. All nine of us, only thing we were looking forward to was capturing the asset and getting home before the end of the month. It was some eigenweapon part, I think. Something the Engineer needed from some local thaumists. I don't really remember. But it's not like it matters.

It all turned out to be a setup. How they did it, I'm still not sure. But it's irrelevant now. We all realized it the moment we heard the first gunshot, splitting the sky like thunder. There was no warning, no sign they were coming — just a rifle booming to life across an otherwise dead wasteland beneath a sunless sky.

They took Simon first. The poor guy didn't even see it coming. Just fell down, his head and spine little more than wet pulp.

We fought well, I think. We were all armed with the finest Eurtec could offer, and we paid them handsomely for what they did to us — but it wasn't enough. It couldn't be enough. We fought like men and we died like men, still motivated by our human wills and desires. Still somehow bound by the ideology we all joined the Insurgency for, motivated to kill for some higher goal we genuinely believed in.

But they weren't like that. Not really. They came in their shining armor and spruced-up guns, all twelve of them; and they were like wolves. A pack that cared only for victory, no matter how much it cost. They fought without hesitation, one shot after another. We managed to take out five, in the end. But the remaining seven — well. They didn't care for their fallen. Just pushed on, hellbent on taking us out. They shot and shot until our tents were little more than leaky blankets, our armor shredded clothing. The worst one of them was the woman and her rifle, I think. She took four of our men, three in one shot. They didn't even have the chance to scream. Almost half of us. Well. Half, me notwithstanding.

I'm not proud to say that I ran. I've been a soldier my whole life, but them — they weren't soldiers. They were warriors. To fight wasn't just their job — it was their life. It was who they were. They came and they won, and there wasn't anything anyone could do about it. It was just a fact of life, some force of nature maybe, an unstoppable one. And we were far from unmovable objects.

I couldn't risk actually leaving the camp. Not out of fear, but out of some shredded remain of honor, somewhere deep inside my heart. I might've taken the cap and hidden from them with magic, but I needed to stay. I needed to make sure that once they were away, I could give my fallen the funeral they deserved.

But they didn't go away — not at first, at least. The second the job was done, they set up camp, on the ruins of what we called home for a few hours. They lit up a fire and put up their own tents, setting chairs around some food, I think. And then they talked.

For hours on end they talked and they sang and they smiled and they laughed, their rifles far away enough to pretend they weren't there but close enough to grab them should need arise. They ate and they exchanged stories under that starless sky, the darkness beyond the fire masking the fact that for all it was worth, they sat inside a graveyard. A graveyard of their own, just as much as it was ours. And I just sat there, silently observing from some faraway tree, my presence all but hidden from everyone but myself.

When they were finished, they drank. Couldn't tell you what it was. Something strong, from the looks on their faces. They all drank until they were drunk enough to go to sleep — all of them but the woman. Before, she was the loudest of them; she talked and laughed the most, and you could hear her firm voice even from where I stood. I remember they gave her the bottle, and for a while she took it, sipping from it almost — but only almost. She took it and looked deep into its neck, silent, then murmured something under her nose, and smashed it on the ground beneath her. And they all laughed, again. All except her.

When they went to sleep, I wondered if I should come closer and try to get them while they were vulnerable. There was just seven of them, I told myself, and only one on guard to dodge with my invisibility. But… I didn't do anything. It wasn't that I couldn't do it — and I couldn't, even if in the moment I believed otherwise — but seeing all of them around that fire… it made me realize something. I knew how to fight demons. I've killed more than a few in my time. But them? Underneath all those plates and vests, when they slept, they were all still just human. And I'm not a murderer.

They departed when the sun came up again. Took all their things and set off god knows where. And I stayed. It took me all day but I buried all of the fallen; both the ones I've failed and those I've failed to kill. I buried them and covered them in the gravel and rock that was all around us, until all that was left from what had once been a battlefield was little more than a bumpy hill.

I left the next day, heading for our nearest recovery spot. I didn't look back.

+ Cesar Aros, Unemployed, Barranquilla, Atlántico (Displaced)

- During the day, he sold sweets by the roadside.

She had come to my bar with a friend of hers. He introduced himself as Leif, before stating his full name as "Jake, from El Paso" with a grin. He wanted me to know he was human, beneath all the metal grafted onto his body. He had a rifle, an ugly, scarred thing marked with twenty-four notches.

The day after, they found Parmenio, the butcher's son, dead in a ditch. He helped his father around the shop, sometimes, hauling the carcasses and arranging the cuts. He dreamt of being a journalist. On the rare occasions he'd come in to drink, he would take sparse sips and ramble for hours about the power of words — to enlighten, to uplift, to condemn. He was barely nineteen, and someone had shot him once in the head.

Twenty-five notches on the rifle of the man from El Paso that evening, as he walked in with a smile. He was not meant to be there, nor was the woman. Drinking was not permitted, he said to me, with a sly wink. Drinking with a civilian who was not meant to know they existed, even more so.

One night he drank more than usual, and left stumbling, with a bottle in his hand. He was dead the next day, his just another a body by the side of the road. There was a twenty-sixth notch on his gun, in a different hand. A cruel joke.

She came to my bar one last time. She never drank, normally. She just stood, rifle at the ready, watching Jake warily. Now she sat at the counter, and motioned for a bottle. I passed her one, and she sat silently. She did not drink. She only peered at the dusty label, the glass glinting green and red in tandem with the lights on her face.

Discipline, she murmured, looking at me with nothing in her eyes. Discipline was the soldier's duty, what made them warriors, brave and true, not just men with pikes, the same medieval troops that plundered and savaged the lands of all who did not pay them, and even those that did, sometimes. The implants signified this. The technology separated them from the barbarity, the brutality, the evil. What this had been was discipline. The punishment had only been to remove his implants. Without them, he was just a bastard again, a soulless killer — even they could see that. And there was no reason to keep a man like that alive.

She recounted it as if it was all a fact of life, and nothing more. The wisp of smoke rising from her rifle's barrel. The blood trickling from his forehead. The stalks of cane, twice her height, rustling in the wind. The grimace on his face, a wordless scream that persisted on his twisted lips and gaunt cheeks even in death, the pain and loss beneath it strong enough for the rigor mortis to etch it on his face forever.

As she watched them pick the implants out of his body so as to make him mortal again they reminded her that underneath all that armor she too was no legendary warrior, no Walküre out of myth. Just someone who could shoot well enough to be useful.

Not nothing in her eyes. It was the sky that night, lying behind her pupils — black clouds, no stars, no moon. Midnight forever as she looked up and away from his corpse, her grinning CO, the idling Jeep.

Just something that had happened. An object passing through space. Another blue day.

They found seven more bodies over the next two weeks, other innocents. A peasant, a beggar, a policeman, all one shot, directly through the head. It was rumored to be something criminal, some great underworld conspiracy coming to the fore in a town of a bare few thousand. There were rumors of pitched battles between rival gangs high in the hills with strange weapons, things that made odd noises and produced great flashes of colored light. Anyone who ventured close turned up days later, another bullet, another head.

Then it stopped, the hills falling silent, no more bodies, no reminder that anything had even happened at all. After a month the world ceased to wonder what had killed them, those corpses out of town, on the roads and in the cane fields. It just carried on, as it had always had.

I see her in my nightmares, sometimes. Her scarred face, her jagged and paranoid movements.

Parmenio's funeral was short, sad, quiet. His father cried, the careworn wrinkles on the face of the man who sliced tendons and drained blood drowned with tears. His mother stood stone-faced looking at his coffin, beautiful mahogany wood lined with pristine white cloth. They could not entirely afford it, but here death was an occasion to be celebrated. Pay out in a lump sum to the corpse the debt that you would otherwise slowly have diminished in life with gifts, kind words, small acts of love.

After a few minutes, she started to sob, too. The tears welled from his whole extended family, aunts and uncles and distant second cousins united in pain, loss, grief.

It was a quiet goodbye. Just broken hearts, trying to heal a scar they knew would never fade, not really.

+ Frey, Valkyrie, Odin Base, █████

- There's two bullets in her body, and her breathing's shallow,

and she's gasping for air on the stretcher as they lift her up and rush her to the medevac helicopter with its blades beating the dust in great arcs and they tell her to Hold On Frey and Stay With Us Frey but it doesn't work because her name isn't Frey, it's Lily, she's a homeschooled American girl who reads history books in her bunk late at night and thinks of the only relationship she ever had to lull herself to sleep afterwards and can't herself remember just how many people she's killed.

She reads by lamplight about Mad Mike Hoare and Jean Schramme in the Congo, the Les Affreux — yes, monsters, neo-colonialist soldiers of fortune, self-described romantics who threw hand grenades at civilians and took photos of the aftermath, and she's just like them, and she's dying just like them. The only form of justice mercenaries ever face: death.

Blades beating over the Gulf, the Golden Hour ticking away, those sixty minutes between life and death — but it's pointless, some animal part of her already knows this, that the blood loss and the lead in her lungs is too much. The medics put on a good show. They have a game they like to play, pretending that even though they save the lives of monsters that they aren't monsters themselves, that they can go home when their contracts are done with clean consciences. But there's a reason they always re-up, always return for another season in the copters and in the tents.

Odin Base in Texas, the American South, the spiritual locus of the right-neoliberal private military-industrial complex. Brown & Root, Dyncorp, Military Professional Resources Incorporated — companies not much better than Valravn, really, the higher-ups always rationalize in their sales pitches, just in front of the Veil, with friends in slightly higher places.

The base itself is just nine grey buildings next to a cane field, a short barbed-wire fence, never any trouble from the cops. No paranoid need for secrecy here. No bodies in the fields because they spotted Valkyries on a training exercise, lounging around on base, out for an officially-prohibited drink. She wonders why that is, but deep down knows the answer already, that the supposedly apolitical mercenaries may have personal agendas that the money just helps reinforce.

Heartbeat weak, low blood pressure, her face turning white, come on, come on, let's go, off the helicopter and into the medical building with expensive new equipment and a painting of the god of healing, Eir, on the wall, a little joke from one of the commanders. She's unconscious, someone intubate her — and out come the scalpels, more a formality, just so they can say they tried.

Back in Colombia, the wind whistling through the cane fields. Jake isn't her friend, not really, just someone who's willing to bend the rules with her. He's an explicit atheist, which doesn't really click with the more than vaguely fascist neopagan ethos of the high command. The people that actually pray to Odin and Thor and all those masculine warrior-gods are a definite minority, of course. Most just accept the Norse stuff as little more than aesthetics — which it is, really, the higher-ups are just the same white supremacist ghouls you'd see anywhere else, no real difference from the Christian kind — but he explicitly rejects it, an attitude that's likely to get him killed, people whisper.

What the hell does he care. He wants a drink.

Smoke rising from her rifle's barrel, because this is what it means, to be a soldier: to pull the trigger and feel nothing, to serve your country. She doesn't feel anything when she kills, hasn't ever, not even in the Army. Something wrong inside her from the start.

Still American. Still from Sacramento, despite everything, the River City, sunny days in the Central Valley. Childhood days, maybe she's forgotten something, some initial moment of moral failure, some animal homicide like the serial killers she sees in non-fiction books and dramatized miniseries.

She's just like them, and she's dying just like them.

Massive perforation, think one nicked her stomach, really don't know if she's going to pull through being honest.

The years in the Sahara, sun, heat, sand. Once she came across an empty monastery, long abandoned, barren but for a dense coating of dust. A few miles east snow-white bones poked out of the dunes, worn crosses still with them, something Jake found quite funny.

They swept over oasis towns, desert villages, taking and doing whatever they wanted — because this is what they do, the mercenaries in the history books, the men with pikes and plate armor. They loot and plunder, murder and kill.

In Iraq again, in her bunk, with Lt. Walschausen, crying, the day before that fateful patrol. She misses her, and that's all she can say, she misses her.

Pupils dilated. She's not breathing.

Eighteen years old, standing at the bus stop late at night, her parents don't want her to enlist but what the hell else is she going to do, she can't work fast food, can't afford a degree.

So what the hell did you do, huh? So what was it then, Lily, what the hell was it, huh? Three people dead. Three innocent people and you're just staring at me, staring at me like you always fucking do.

Always thought it was funny, how the helicopters flew through U.S. airspace fine, how the UIU truck drove by once and left, how she never stopped serving her country, not really.

No pulse. Heart stopped. Attempting to revive.

She doesn't drink anymore because it stopped working. Nothing left now not after everything.

You're Frey now, said the smiling officer.

Midnight forever in the cane field. Blackness, darkness, the stretching sky.

Patient expired, mark the time, 3:27 PM.

She liked the way her hand felt on her cheek. She liked the way her hair felt and smelled and how she was soft to the touch and how when they held hands when they cuddled she would flex hers and move a finger around maybe to let her know that she was there, that she was loved. She liked her a lot and when they broke up she was sad, in her soul sad, a sort of lethal kind of heartbreak that just followed her around until another recruiter came and found her, this time in a smart suit and tie and a weird medieval-looking eagle pin on his lapel, asking her would she like to find gainful employment again, and she said yes, gladly yes, and when they put her under anesthetic for the first of the implants she was back in Sacramento, on that lonely bus stop night, waiting for the chariot that would take her away from this life, away from this world, everything, up into Valhalla where the valiant warriors rest, carried there by the Valkyries, Odin's chosen few.

But she's not rising, they're carrying her down, she's falling, and—