The Milkweed Triptych 01 - Bitter Seeds

by Ian Tregillis

  All part of Marsh’s ill-conceived plan to attack the Reichsbehörde. Marsh and his crusade.

  The door opened, sending warm yellow light across the darkened office. Will’s reflection appeared in the window. He looked like a haggard ghost hovering outside the Admiralty building, a revenant spirit condemned to wander endlessly through a landscape of winter fog.

  “Beauclerk? What are you doing in my office?”

  Will turned. Stephenson tromped in. Droplets of ice water sparkled in his graying hair. He shrugged off a sodden black mackintosh, flipped it off his shoulder with his good arm, and hung it on the coatrack in the corner in one practiced motion.

  “Watching the festivities,” Will answered. He jerked his chin toward the window. It made the room spin. He shuffled sideways.

  “Don’t you and the others have more pressing issues to occupy you right now?” said Stephenson. The empty sleeve pinned to his shoulder flapped up and down as he kicked off his galoshes.

  “I came to talk to you about that very thing.”

  Stephenson turned on the light and joined him at the window. He looked pointedly at the bottle on the desk and the tumbler in Will’s hand. “Dozens of men down in St. James’, working their arses off in this weather, and you’re up here having a little party.”

  “I’d offer to share, but . . .” Will took the bottle by its neck and waggled it upside down above the floor. Nothing dripped out. He set the bottle back in Stephenson’s drawer, where he’d found it.

  Stephenson looked around the room, assessing his office for further indignities. Will knew he’d left several strewn across the old man’s desk. A finger’s worth of spirits seeping across the blotter. A bent letter-opener. Scrapes and gouges in the finish along the edges of the drawer.

  It had surprised Will to discover that the old man had taken to locking his desk drawer. Apparently he’d noticed the bottle slowly going empty.

  “You’re pissed. On my brandy.”

  “Me? Heavens no. Empty stomach. Low blood sugar.” Will giggled again. “Blood. Yes. That’s the problem.”

  “Beauclerk.” Stephenson shivered as he said it. Perhaps owing to the draft; perhaps not. “I am wet, I am cold, and I am hungry. I wanted to come inside, dry off a bit, down a bracer to warm me, then go home and eat dinner with Corrie. You will note that nowhere on this list of desires did I include chatting with a soused toff.”

  The room wobbled. Will plopped down in the wide leather chair behind the desk.

  “And get out of my chair,” said Stephenson. He gave the chair a swift tug. It spun, and so did Will. Will lurched to his feet. Stephenson took the seat he vacated. “What the hell is wrong with you to night?”

  “We need to talk. One Englishman to another.”

  “Would knowing I’m Canadian born make you go away any sooner?”

  Will waved away the objection. “We’re none of us perfect. Take me, for instance. Completely pissed.” He gulped from the tumbler. “Runs in the family, you know.”

  Stephenson sighed. “How long have you been waiting?”

  “I really couldn’t say.” Will pointed at the empty bottle. “How full was that when I found it?”

  “Do I need to call a ride for you?”

  “He’s quite mad, you know.”

  “Who’s mad?”

  “Your boy.” Will waved his arm at the window, slopping the remaining brandy with a gesture that encompassed the park and, by extension, all Marsh’s works, and therefore Marsh himself. “Marsh.”

  “He’s not my boy.”

  “Oh, but he is. He is, he is. Perhaps not by blood, but—Ha. There it is again.” Beads of liquid splashed across the desk when he set the empty tumbler down. “Can’t get away from it, can I.”

  “I wasn’t jesting about wanting you out of here. Is this about Marsh?”

  “It’s about this whole bloody project.” Will pointed outside again. “It’s a terrible idea. Sir.”

  Stephenson said, “It’s a brilliant idea.”

  “What ever it is that you and Marsh hope to achieve with this ploy, I tell you true, it will end badly.”

  “We can hobble the Reichsbehörde in one stroke. We stand to obtain the research as well. Britain needs us to do this.” Stephenson looked outside, down at the park. The fingernail rattle of sleet against the window had tapered off; a handful of cottony snowflakes blazed in the office light as they eddied past the window.

  “It’s a brilliant idea,” he repeated. “It’s Milkweed’s chance to balance the scales. And we have to take it now. At present they can’t have more than seven or eight, perhaps a dozen at most, of von Westarp’s creatures running around. But how long will it be until they number seven hundred? Seven thousand?”

  “Have you forgotten that we don’t even know what the woman, Gretel, can do? We had her, right here, and we still have no idea.”

  “Marsh suspects she’s some sort of mentalist.”

  “All the more reason not to do this. If she is as he says, they’d only have to capture a few squad members to get a complete picture of the state of Milkweed.”

  “Which is why every member of the team will be issued a cyanide capsule. Including you.”

  Will rubbed his face. “Look. Sir. You and I both know that on a typical day he’s the smartest chap in the room. But what’s escaped your notice is that he’s not the smartest fellow right now. He’s not thinking clearly. Hasn’t been since Agnes died.”

  “He’s mourning.”

  Will ran a hand through his hair. Too late he realized his fingers were sticky and smelled of very good brandy. “Of course he is. But it’s not just that. Did you know he’s been sleeping down in the storerooms?”

  Stephenson frowned, his head jerked back in surprise.

  “They had a falling out. Liv and he.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “As best as I can determine, soon after they returned from Williton. He’s fanatically private about his home life, you know.” Will shook his head. It hurt, getting cut out of somebody’s life. “It wasn’t always that way.”

  “They lost a child. Tragic? Yes. And yes, their marriage may falter. But he’ll get the job done.”

  Will said, “You coldhearted bastard. We stood there in your garden, you and I, while they said their vows.”

  “I have larger concerns right now. And so do you. I recommend you go dunk your head in a bucket and pull yourself together.”

  “I’m telling you, sir, he’s not himself. And if you let him, he’s going to take us so far off the fucking map that ‘Here be Dragons’ will be a quaint memory.”

  “Jesus, Beauclerk. You’re raving—”

  “He wanted us to resurrect his daughter. Bring her back to life. It’s true. Practically fell to his knees and begged me to make it happen.”

  “Can you do that?”

  “Oh, not you, too. Of course not. The best result, the very best, would be nightmarish. But that’s just it, sir: Marsh doesn’t care.”

  The outburst left Will feeling lightheaded again. He took the chair across the desk from Stephenson. More snowflakes glittered past the window behind the old man. It was getting dark outside.

  As if reading Will’s thought, Stephenson rose and pulled the blackout curtains. “He is very focused. Always has been. I’ll grant you that much.”

  “Focused? Was that your reaction when he pinched your motorcar?”

  Stephenson scowled. “That was understandable, given the circumstances.”

  “And yet you say he’s not your boy,” Will muttered to himself. To Stephenson: “You’re not listening to me. He’s fixated on one thing and can’t be bothered to think past that result or the consequences of getting there.”

  Stephenson turned. He pursed his lips, staring across the desk with narrowed eyes. “You’re frightened.”

  “Of course I’m frightened. I’m not an imbecile.”

  The old man sat again. “Your colleagues are rather excited about this.” The uns
poken word danced through the space between the two men like a snowflake: teleportation.

  “They’re eager to see whether or not it actually works. To them, it’s an experiment. But they won’t be the ones traveling piggyback on an Eidolon.”

  “If it works, it will change the war overnight. We’ll have the ability to send men and matériel anywhere we want, and to retrieve them just as easily. Without the Eidolons, this raid would be impossible. It would be a one-way trip for those men, assuming they made it as far as the farm in the first place,” said Stephenson. “But with the Eidolons, nothing, nowhere, is beyond our reach. Imagine inserting a squad directly into the Berghof. Or sending a half ton of explosives to the OKW.”

  “These actions aren’t free. If we tried to make this our standard means of waging warfare, the blood prices . . . well, we’d end up doing Jerry’s work for him. And consider this. Every person who goes on this little jaunt, including most especially your lad Marsh (don’t give me that look) will be giving himself to the Eidolons for safekeeping during the transition. And again on the way back. Assuming anybody comes back.” Will waited for his head to stop spinning. He summarized, “It’s a bit like using a pride of lions to escort a zebra across the Serengeti. Bloody daft.”

  “I think you’re overstating things just a bit.”

  “Overstating? Understating. Here’s yet another consideration for you: the blood price. Nobody knows what this will cost. This is so far beyond the pale that the others won’t even hazard a guess.”

  “The prices haven’t been a problem thus far. I don’t see why this would be any different.”

  Will tasted blood. He’d bitten a chunk out of the inside of his lip. The blood seeped across his tongue, chasing away the brandy.

  Not a problem? So that was it, then. The old man truly was an icy bastard. Will had first sensed it during the trip to Dover, where they’d seen the Eidolons in the Channel and the toll this took on local children. He’d hoped it wouldn’t come to this. But it had.

  Stephenson had an agreement with Hargreaves and the rest of the warlocks; he indulged their fanatical insistence upon keeping blood prices “in the family.” Anything that threatened to breach the connection between the negotiator and the price—such as appealing for outsiders’ help in paying it—was dangerous and therefore strictly forbidden. But the old man knew damn well what was happening. The escalating prices had forced the warlocks to seek out new tools and new training; Stephenson had arranged for their demolitions training with the Special Operations Executive.

  Not a problem? The old man didn’t consider the prices a problem, because he wasn’t the one paying them. But that would change, if they stayed on this course.

  “You know nothing of these things.” It was all Will could say, and perhaps even that was too much. He stood. “Think about what I’ve said. Good evening, sir.”

  Will paused in the doorway on his way out. “What I tell you twice I tell you true, sir. This will end badly.”

  eleven

  10–11 December 1940

  Westminster, London, England

  Reichsbehörde für die Erweiterung germanischen Potenzials

  Sunrise was a dull glow peeking over Downing Street when Marsh entered St. James’ Park. The sleet and snow of the past few days had tapered off after coating London with slush. But the clouds had remained, shrouding the sky like a wet wool blanket.

  A pair of sentries stopped him at the checkpoint on the east side of the park, just across from the Old Admiralty building. They recognized him, no doubt, but they did their jobs just the same. One of the sentries, a thumb under six feet tall with a blotchy face, stepped in front of Marsh, rifle held across his chest.

  “Can’t let you through, sir. Password?”

  Marsh said, “Habakkuk.” And to the other sentry, he spoke the second half of the password: “Rookery.”

  The guards stepped aside, nodding their approval. “Have a good day, sir.” They didn’t know about Milkweed, or what it hoped to achieve from this impromptu base camp.

  The park was silent. An early hour, and anybody with a modicum of sense would catch as much sleep as possible before to night. Later, Marsh would go back inside and try to do the same. But not now.

  Ice water drizzled from the camouflage netting as Marsh picked his way between the tents. It dripped into his hair, trickled down his neck, down his back. Throughout the staging area, tarpaulins and tent tops had bowed inward under the weight of water, occasionally dumping it all without warning in torrents that doused the unaware and muddied the earth.

  He went to the largest tent, in the center of the staging area. Pain twinged in his knee, strong enough to evoke a grimace. Marsh felt, for a moment, like an old man. He gritted his teeth and shrugged off the pain. It receded to a dull throb. More water dripped on his head and neck when he limped inside the tent.

  Two rows of chairs arranged in a semicircle faced a table, a lectern, and two blackboards. This was where they’d deliver the final briefing before to night’s mission.

  Wood-and-Bakelite mockups of a battery were arranged along the table next to the lectern. These were models of the battery they’d taken from Gretel. Snipers had been training with these models for weeks, taking target practice on dummies wearing battery harnesses.

  The battery they’d captured bore no identifying marks, not even a manufacturer’s stamp. That by itself didn’t rule out the possibility that the batteries were constructed under special contract by one of the chemical corporations within the IG Farben conglomerate. Agfa, perhaps, or BASF. But it seemed plausible, based on what little they knew of von Westarp and the massive construction work carried out on his family farm in the late 1920s and early 1930s, that he kept every aspect of the fiefdom under his direct control. So there was a possibility that the batteries were constructed on-site—perhaps by engineers on loan from IG Farben—meaning Milkweed could destroy the Reichsbehörde’s ability to make new batteries. Failing that, they’d eliminate the stores.

  Objective: Destroy the technology.

  Rows of photographs had been affixed to one blackboard. The first was an enlarged version of the single photograph in von Westarp’s dossier. The photo was thirty years out of date, but it was, Marsh hoped, better than nothing. Beneath the photo, somebody with a steady hand had printed DR. KARL HEINRICH VON WESTARP.

  Objective: Get the research; capture the researchers.

  Only one photograph other than von Westarp’s had a name printed beneath it: Gretel, the olive-skinned girl. Hers was the clearest of all the photos. They’d photographed her from every angle. It had taken an entire box of film just to map in detail all her surgical scars.

  The remaining photos were grainy reproductions of still frames from the Tarragona filmstrip. There was a photograph for each person featured in the film. Each had a single question mark chalked beneath it in place of a name. Even under the shot of Gretel’s rescuer. In a few places, a key word or two had been chalked in a different color: Flight? Speed? Fire? Invisibility?

  Objective: Kill or capture the subjects.

  A crust of snow crunched under Klaus’s boots as he walked the perimeter of the grounds with Reinhardt, Buhler, Pabst, and Doctor von Westarp. The doctor called a halt every thirty or forty yards to consult a map of the grounds. The map contained annotations in Pabst’s hand, based on intense debriefing sessions with Gretel.

  “One . . . two . . . heave. One . . . two . . . heave . . .”

  They watched a handful of mundane troops struggle to erect klieg lights inside the forest at the edge of the complex. The block and tackle clattered while the men ratcheted upright the heavy mast supporting the lights. The cables sang in a rising wind that smelled of cold snow and diesel fuel.

  “Put your backs into it!” yelled Pabst. “I want these lights installed and tested before sundown.”

  Farther back in the trees, more soldiers were busy hiding the generator that would power the lights. The bulk of the generator rested below ground
level, in a hole they’d excavated. A buried cable ran from there to the lights. They’d also landscaped a fake thicket to hide the exposed portion of the generator.

  In daylight, Klaus mused, the mess of boot prints and trampled snow around the thicket might have been a giveaway. But at night, in the pandemonium of combat, it wouldn’t matter at all. The lights would stay off until the attackers arrived. Then the lights would illuminate their landing sites and make it impossible to hide.

  Installations like these were going up on the south, west, and east sides of the Reichsbehörde. Each surrounded what Gretel claimed would be a landing site.

  Assuming she could be trusted. Klaus had severe reservations on that point, but he kept them to himself. He’d known for months, at least since she had maneuvered to get herself captured, that she acted according to her own interests and motivations, what ever those might be. But until the failed invasion, and maybe even after that, he’d clung to the belief that her personal motives more or less aligned with the interests of the Reichsbehörde and the greater Reich. But what she’d done to Heike . . .

  When Rudolf had died, back in Spain, Gretel had used her prescience like a blunt instrument. But now she wielded it like one of Doctor von Westarp’s scalpels. Heike’s suicide had been engineered: the culmination of subtle, devious psychological manipulations that neatly excised the will to live from Heike’s heart and mind.

  Von Westarp muttered to himself, nodded. He made a mark on his map and then set off again through the blowing snow. The tattered hem of a dressing grown dangled beneath his long leather overcoat, tracing snake trails through the snow. Klaus and the others followed.

  Wind hissed through bare boughs, as though the oak and ash trees were commenting upon the preparations. It carried a knife-edge chill that pierced the tiniest gaps in Klaus’s clothing. The cold slipped through the buttonholes in his coat, sliced through the seams in his uniform, raked his skin with ice. His breath caught, trapped by the constriction in his chest.

  He considered using his Willenskräfte, letting the snow and wind pass through him by virtue of the Götterelektron, but the relief would last only until he rematerialized to breathe. It would waste his battery to no good effect.