Copyright © 1986 (revised 12/98), by David Brin. All rights reserved. No duplication or resale without permission.

1.

     Loki's dwarf rolled its eyes and moaned pitifully as the sub leveled off at periscope depth. With stubby fingers the gnarled, neckless creature pulled its yellow-stained beard and stared up at the creaking pipes.
     A thing of dark forest depths and hidden caves, Chris Turing thought as he watched the dwarf.
     It wasn't meant for this place.
     Only men would choose such a way to die, in a leaking steel coffin, on a hopeless attempt to blow up Valhalla.
     But then, it wasn't likely that Loki's dwarf had been given much choice in being here.
     Why, Chris wondered suddenly -- not for the first time.
     Why do such creatures exist? Wasn't evil doing well enough in the world before they came to help it along?
     The submarine's engines rumbled and Chris shrugged aside the thought. Imagining a world without Aesir and their servants in it was as hard as remembering a time without war. He sat strapped in a crash seat listening to the swishing of icy Baltic water just behind a tissue-thin bulkhead -- and watched the gnome huddle atop a crate of hydrogen bomb parts. It drew its clublike feet up away from the sloshing brine on the deck, scrunching higher on the black box. Another moan escaped the dwarf as the Razorfin's periscope went up, and more water gurgled in through pressure relief lines.
     Major Marlowe looked up from the assault rifle he was reassembling for the thirtieth time. "What's eating the damn dwarf now?" the marine officer asked.
     Chris shook his head.
     "Search me. The fact that he's out of his element, maybe? After all, the ancient Norse thought of the deep as a place for sunken boats and fishes."
     "I thought you were some sort of expert on the Aesir. And you aren't sure why the thing is foaming at the mouth?"
     "I said I don't know. Why don't you go over and ask him yourself?"
     Marlowe gave Chris a sour glance. "Sidle up to that stench and ask Loki's damn dwarf to explain its feelings? Hmph. I'd rather spit in an Aesir's eye."
     From the left side of the cabin, Zap O'Leary leaned out and grinned at Marlowe.
     "Dig it, daddyo. There's an Aes over by the scope, dope. Be my guest. Write him runes in his spitoon."
     The eccentric technician gestured toward the Navy men clustered around the sub's periscope. Next to the Skipper stood a hulking figure clad in furs and leather, towering over the submariners.
     Marlowe blinked back at O'Leary in bewilderment. The marine seemed less offended than confused. "What did he say?" he asked Chris.
     Chris wished he weren't seated between the two.
     "Zap suggests that you test it by spitting in Loki's eye."
     Marlowe grimaced. O'Leary might as well have suggested he stick his hand into a scram-jet engine. One of the marines crammed into the passageway behind them made the mistake of dropping a cartridge into the foul water. Marlowe vented his frustration on the poor grunt with rich profanity.
     The dwarf moaned again, hugging his knees and pressing against the sealed crate.
     Wherever they're from, they aren't used to water. And these so-called dwarfs don't like submarines.
     Chris wasn't exactly partial to this one, either. But nowhere else in the world was much safer. In late 1962, very little time remained for the Alliance Against Nazism. If anything could be done this autumn, to stave off the inevitable, it was worth the gamble.
     Even Loki -- bearlike, nearly invulnerable, and always booming forth laughter that sent chills down human spines -- had betrayed nerves earlier, as the Razorfin dropped from the belly of a screaming bomber, sending their stomachs whirling as the arrow-sub plummeted like a great stone into Neptune's icy embrace. The fall seemed endless. The crash and shriek of tortured metal, when they hit the sea, was even worse.
     And yet, almost anything seemed an improvement over the long, screeching trip over the Pole, skirting Nazi missiles, skimming mountains and gray waters in lurching zigs and zags, helplessly listening, strapped into place, as the airmen swooped their flying coffins hither and yon... praying the enemy's Aesir masters weren't patrolling that section of the north tonight...
     Of twenty sub carriers sent out together from Baffin Island, only six made it all the way to the waters between Sweden and Finland. And both Cetus and Tigerfish broke up on impact, tearing like ripped sardine cans, spilling their hapless crews into freezing death.
     Just four subs left, Chris thought. Still, our chances may be slim, but those poor pilots are the real heroes.
     He doubted any of the crews would make it across dark, deadly Europe to Tehran and safety.
     "Captain Turing!"
     Chris looked up as the Skipper called his name. Commander Lewis had lowered the periscope and moved over to the chart table, making a beckoning motion. Chris unstrapped and jumped into the brine.
     "Tell the swabbies we're savin our hooch for ourselves," O'Leary advised him, sotto voce. "Good pot's too rare to share."
     "Shut up, fool." Marlowe growled. Chris ignored them both as he sloshed forward. The Skipper awaited him, standing beside their "advisor," the alien creature calling himself Loki.
     I've known Loki for years, Chris thought. I've fought alongside him against his Aesir brothers... and still he scares the living hell out of me each time I look at him.
     Towering over everyone, Loki regarded Chris with fierce,enigmatic eyes. The "god of tricks" looked much like a man, albeit an unnaturally large and powerful one. But those black eyes belied every impression of humanity. Chris had spent enough time with Loki, since the renegade Aesir defected to the Allied side, to know he should avoid looking into them whenever possible.
     "Sir," he said, nodding to Commander Lewis and the bearded Aesir. "I take it we're approaching point Y?"
     "Correct. We'll be there in ten minutes, barring anything unforeseen."
     Lewis seemed to have aged over the last twenty hours. The young sub commander knew his squadron wasn't the only thing considered expendable in this operation. Several thousand miles to the west, the better part of what remained of the United States Surface Navy was engaged hopelessly for one reason only. To distract the Kriegsmarine -- and especially a certain "god of the sea" -- away from the Baltic and Operation Ragnarok. Loki's cousin Tyr wasn't very potent against submarines, but unless his attention was drawn elsewhere, he could make life unbearable when their tiny force tried to land.
     So tonight, instead, he would be far away making hell for American and Canadian and Mexican sailors.
     Chris shied away from thinking about it. Too many boys were going to their deaths off Labrador, just to keep one alien creature occupied while four subs tried to sneak in through the back door.
     "Thank you. I'd better tell Major Marlowe and my demolition team."
     He turned to go, but was stopped by an outsize hand on his shoulder, holding him gently but with steely adamancy.
     "Thou must know something more," the being called Loki said in a low, resonant voice. Impossibly white teeth shone in his gleaming smile.
     "Thou wilt have a passenger in going ashore."
     Chris blinked. The plan had been for only his team and their commando escort... Then he saw the pallor of dread on Commander Lewis' face deeper than any mere fear of death.
     Chris turned back to stare at the fur-clad giant. "You..." he exhaled.
     Loki nodded. "A small change in plans. I will not accompany the undersea vessels, as they attempt to break out through the Skagerrak. I will go ashore with thee, instead, to Gotland."
     Chris kept his face blank. In all honesty, there was no way this side of Heaven that he or Lewis could stop this creature from doing whatever it wanted. One way or the other, the Allies were about to lose their only Aesir friend in the long war against the Nazi plague.
     If the word "friend" ever really described Loki, who had appeared one day on the tarmac of a Scottish airfield during the final evacuation of Britain, accompanied by eight small, bearded beings carrying boxes. He had led them up to the nearest amazed officer and imperiously commandeered the prime minister's personal plane to take him the rest of the way to America.
     Perhaps an armored battalion might have stopped him. Combat reports proved that Aesir could be killed, if you were very lucky, pounding one hard and fast enough. But when the local commander realized what was happening, he decided to take a chance.
     Loki had proven his worth many times, since that day ten years ago.
     Till now, that is.
     "If you insist." He told the Aes.
     "I do. It is my will."
     "Then I'll go explain it to Marlowe. Excuse me, please."
     He backed away a few meters first, then turned to go.
     As he sloshed away, that glittering stare seemed to follow him, past the moaning dwarf, past O'Leary's ever-sardonic smile, down the narrow, dank passageway lined with strapped-in marines, all the way to the sabot launching tubes.
     Voices were hushed. All the young men spoke English, but only half were North Americans. Their shoulder patches -- Free French, Free Russian, Free Irish, German Christian -- were muted in the dim light, but the mixed accents were unmistakable, as well as the way they stroked their weapons and the gleam Chris caught sight of in several pairs of eyes.
     These were the sort that volunteered for suicide missions, the type common in the world after thirteen years of horrible war -- that had little or nothing left to lose.
     Major Marlowe had come back to supervise the loading of the landing boats. He did not take Chris's news well.
     "Loki wants to come along? To Gotland?" He spat. "The bastard's a spy. I knew it all the time!"
     Chris shook his head. "He's helped us a hundred ways, John. Why, just by accompanying Ike to Tokyo, and convincing the Japanese --"
     "Big deal! We'd already beaten the Japs!" The big marine clenched his fist, hard. "Like we'd have crushed Hitler, if these monsters hadn't arrived, like Satan's curse, out of nowhere.
     "And now he's lived among us for ten years, observing our methods, our tactics and technology, the only real advantage we had left!"
     Chris grimaced. How could he explain it to Marlowe? The marine officer had never visited Tehran, as Chris did last year. Marlowe had never seen the capital city of Israel-Iran, America's greatest and most stalwart ally, bulwark of the East.
     There, in dozens of armed settlements along the east bank of the Euphrates, Chris had met fierce men and women who bore on their arms tattooed numbers from Treblinka, Dachau, Auschwitz. He heard their story of how, one hopeless night under barbed wire and the stench of chimneys, the starving, doomed masses looked up to see a strange vapor fall from the sky. Unbelieving, death-starkened eyes had stared in wonderment as the mist gathered, coalescing into something almost solid.
     Out of that eerie fog, a bridge of many colors formed... a rainbow arch climbing, apparently without end, out of those places of horror into a moonless night. And from the heights, each doomed man and woman saw a dark-eyed figure on a flying horse. They felt him whisper inside their minds.
     Come, children, while your tormenters blink and stammer in my web of the mind. Come, all, over my bridge to safety. Before my cousins descrie my treason.
     When they sank to their knees, or rocked in thankful prayer, the figure only snorted derisively. His voice hissed within their heads.
     Do not mistake me for your God, who left you here to die! I cannot explain that One's absence to you, or His plan in all this. The All-Father is a mystery even to Great Odin!
     Know only that I will take you to safety now, such as there may be in this world. But only hurry! Be grateful later, if you must, but come!
     Down to the camps, to bleak ghettos, to a city under siege, bridges formed in a single night, and vanished with dawn like vapor or a dream. Two million people, the old, the lame, women, children, the slaves of Hitler's war factories, climbed those paths -- for there was no other choice -- and found themselves transported to a desert land, by the banks of an ancient river, arriving just in time to take up hasty arms and save a British Army fleeing the wreckage of Egypt and Palestine. They fused with the astonished Persians, and refugees from crippled Russia, to build a new nation out of chaos.
     After that night of miracles, Loki could not return to Europe. For the fury of his Aesir kin would be savage. Returning to Gotland, he was in as much peril as the commandos.
     "No, Marlowe, you're wrong. I haven't any idea what on God's green Earth he is. But I'd bet my life Loki's not a spy."