Anno Frankenstein

by Jonathan Green

  “Icarus.”

  They all turned on hearing the slurred voice. They hadn’t heard the creature arrive.

  It stood in the shadows of the doorway. What struck Hercules wasn’t just its massive size, but the four powerful arms sprouting from its strange, hunched shoulders.

  Shelley gagged. “I know you,” he hissed.

  No one moved as the creature eased itself through the doorway and into the state rooms, to be met with shock and revulsion.

  The thing was seven feet tall, legs bolstered by hydraulic joints at the knees and down the length of its spine. Its flesh was livid with purple bruising all around the staples and rough sutures holding it together.

  And there was someone else there, hiding in the shadow of the monstrosity, a pathetic hunched thing, clad in a stained lab-coat.

  “Icarus,” the thing said again, forming the word very deliberately with its remade mouth.

  “Yes?” Shelley said, wild hope suddenly lightening his face, giving him an even more manic appearance.

  “Project Icarus.”

  “Yes! That’s it!”

  Shelley suddenly ran over to the huge Promethean and for a moment looked like he was going to grab it and shake it by the shoulders. “What do you know of it?”

  The monster’s once handsome face knotted, as it tried to pluck one wriggling memory from a sea of nebulous thoughts.

  “Sch… Schloss…”

  “Yes? Schloss-what?” Shelley pressed.

  “Schloss… Adlerhorst,” the monster managed, spitting it out at last. “Schloss Adlerhorst,” it repeated proudly.

  “AND YOU’RE SURE you can fly this thing?” Hercules asked Jinx for the thousandth time, as she buckled herself into the pilot’s seat, the roar of the iron eagle’s engines shaking the glass of the hangar roof as they ran up to speed.

  They had done what they could to clear up the mess left by Mr Hyde when he turned on the fleeing Nazis, but it seemed like every surface now carried a reddish sheen.

  “Look, do you want me to fly you to this Schloss Alderhorse or not?”

  “It’s Adlerhorst,” Hercules corrected her. “It’s German for ‘eyrie.’”

  “Well, it sounds pretty eerie to me too. I mean, a castle in the Alps, mounting a death ray that can pick off targets hundreds of miles away?”

  “No ‘eyrie’ as in an eagle’s –”

  Jinx threw him an acid look and he decided that, given the pressure of the moment, the language lesson could wait.

  “But you’ve got a point,” he finished.

  He turned to Katarina, who was standing at an ornate golden map-desk on the starboard side of the flight cabin. “You’ve got the location?”

  “Of course,” the vampire replied, not once looking up from the chart pinned beneath her compasses.

  “And we’re all ready to do this?” he asked the rest of those squeezed into the cockpit inside the eagle’s head – Cat, Cookie and the knowledgeable Shelley.

  “We were born ready!” Cookie laughed, slamming a fresh magazine into the clip of her machine gun.

  “Come on,” Cat said, throwing him a warm smile, “let’s finish this.”

  “For Queen and Country, then,” Hercules said.

  “For Queen and Country!” the response echoed back to him.

  “Mr Hyde!” Hercules shouted back down the ladder into the body of the great bird, where Hyde crouched in the hold. “If you would be so kind?”

  “Right you are, guvnor!” boomed the giant’s Cockney tones from below. “Chocks away!”

  There was a resounding clang as Hyde, inside the craft’s underbelly, released the claw-clamps securing the iron eagle to the stone-flagged floor. With a sudden lurch, the great bird – its steel wings at full stretch – began to rise.

  Jinx’s cheer of excitement was loud within the confines of the cabin as she punched the air with a bunched fist.

  “And we’re off!” Hercules exclaimed, unable to hide his amazement as the iron eagle – impossibly – started to climb.

  Two seconds later it met the still closed glass roof of the hangar. In another second it was through, splinters of fractured glass falling into the hangar below in a cascade of white noise.

  As those who could hurried to the window-ports of the eagle’s eyes to watch Castle Frankenstein dwindling beneath them – except for Katarina, who kept well away from the windows – Jinx focused on the open skies above them, ever watchful for cyber-eagles and enemy zeppelins.

  “Free at last,” Shelley muttered, his one remaining eye glistening with moisture.

  “Jinx, take us away,” Hercules declared.

  “Wait,” Shelley said. “There’s one last thing I have to do first.”

  “What’s that?” Hercules asked.

  “One last promise I have to keep to myself.”

  “BROTHERS!” THE FIRST bellowed from atop an overturned personnel carrier, his voice carrying clearly over the crackling flames. As one, the Prometheans held off pummelling the broken bodies of the soldiers and turned to face the towering presence standing above them. “Today is the first day of your lives as free men. But, in the words of Vegetius, si vis pacem, para bellum. ‘If you want peace, prepare for war!’”

  The crash of glass and the splintering of timber interrupted his first rousing speech as leader of this band of brothers. But it was nothing compared to the roar of engines that followed, as the iron eagle rose from its hangar into the cold morning air, black against the washed-out autumn sky.

  “What is that?” Adam grumbled, annoyed at having been so rudely interrupted.

  The von Stauffenberg creature saw it too – the eagle ascendant – as did the twitching Seziermesser at his side.

  “God in heaven!” the scientist swore.

  As all those present watched the eagle climb higher above Castle Frankenstein – Prometheans and Frankenstein Corps personnel alike – and the shadow of the great bird fell across the courtyard, the belly of the great metal bird split open and a myriad black, finned forms dropped whistling from within.

  “You bastards!” Adam growled. And then again, screaming his fury to the heavens like the voice of doom itself. “You bastards! You bastards!”

  And then the bombs hit.

  FIRE BLOOMED ACROSS the complex as the eagle’s entire payload of explosives fell on Castle Frankenstein like the wrath of God, His divine retribution enacted at last against those who had usurped His role as Creator. The black and orange blossoms obscured the fortress from view completely.

  “There,” Shelley said, looking more haunted and strung out than ever. “’Tis done. And there’s an end to it.”

  “An end?” Hercules laughed as the castle crag was consumed by fire beneath them. “This is only the beginning.”

  He turned to his companions, absent-mindedly stroking his moustache as he did so.

  “The game, as they say, is well and truly afoot!”

  Act Four

  Where Eagles Dare

  “National Socialism will use its own revolution

  for establishing a new world order.”

  – Adolf Hitler

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-SIX

  Pride before Destruction

  AMIENS, FRANCE, 1943

  GENERAL SIR HENRY Stamford Raffles raised a large pair of brass-rimmed binoculars to his eyes and scanned the enemy lines on the far side of the battlefield.

  A low mist drifted across the black water-filled craters between the barbed wire lines. Beyond the pitted, churned-up grey muddy mess of no man’s land the men and machines of the Third Reich were arrayed; everything from standard troopers and Jotun-class tanks to clanking units of Landsknechts and even the occasional remade abomination.

  The Nazi menace was persistent, he’d give them that.

  Raffles lowered his binoculars, placing them on the silver tea tray his batman was holding out ready beside him and picking up the cooling cup of tea next to them. He took a sip, the leather armchair creaking as
he eased his bulk back into it, crossed his ankles on the footstool in front of him and took in the Magna Britannia forces, of which he was commander-in-chief, with a proud, rosy-cheeked grin.

  To his left stood the massed ranks of the Galahad and Gawain regiments, ten thousand automata strong. To his right were arrayed the combined might of Lancelot and Percival; another ten thousand head of robo-infantry. Supporting them were the gigantic land-battleships Samson and Atlas, mounting mighty cannon and mortars, Gatling guns and iron spear-firing ballistae. He could hear the mighty roar of their engines as their crews stoked their boilers, thick black smoke and geysers of white steam rising from their towering smokestacks. The land-battleships of the Wellington Dreadnought Brigade were a sight to behold, the Britannian flag snapping from their banner-poles in the chill autumnal wind.

  And there were men of flesh and blood amongst the forces too – weapons crews, engine teams, stokers, droid handlers, engineers, tacticians, the men piloting the stalker tanks and Trojan support vehicles, not to mention the trusted Tommy foot soldier – but there weren’t many. Only a couple of hundred, compared with the twenty thousand grunt-bots. And, as General Kensington Gore, the oft-quoted First Great European War general and all-round hero, famously said, “Give me one hundred droids or, failing that, a thousand ordinary men.” But then he had been half-automaton himself.

  It was a sign of Raffles’ status and rank that he had been afforded the privilege of leading the Magna Britannian forces at Amiens into battle from atop his own personalised pachyderm-droid Hannibal. Before freedom-threatening war had come to the heartlands of Europe for a second time, he had served in India, where the vision of the monstrous robo-phant charging the gates of Bombay had sent many a revolutionary fleeing for his life.

  The howdah shaded Raffles and his batman from the weak rays of the milky sun. The commander-in-chief’s command post might have looked out of place, had it not been for the Magna Britannian iconography that had been worked into the ornate scrollwork of the giant droid’s flanks.

  Raffles eased himself back into his chair. He could feel the comforting rumble of the boiler bubbling in the guts of the metal beast, as its own engines were stoked with coke, ready for action. He was going to enjoy this. It was going to be a walk in the park, but he was looking forward to it anyway.

  Putting the china cup to his lips at last, he took a sip. He grimaced; the tea was cold. With a flick of the wrist he sent the contents of the cup over the side of the pachyderm onto an unsuspecting automaton below. He rattled the teacup and its saucer back onto the tray.

  “Is the pot still warm?” he asked of his batman, without once taking his eyes from the battlefield in front of him.

  He could see sinister airborne shapes – something like birds and something like flying bombs – circling and wheeling above the enemy lines. He was comforted to know that above his own forces, the Darwin Corps’ tamed Pterosaurs hung from the airborne eyries of the airship Harridan, ready to swoop down and rend any enemy aerial forces wing from wing.

  Lister put a hand to the silvered teapot sitting on the small stove at the back of the howdah, testing the temperature. “Yes, sir.”

  “Then pour me another cup.”

  “Right away, sir,” Lister replied dutifully. “Do you think we’ll win, sir?” the batman asked as he passed the general a steaming cup.

  Raffles turned a withering gaze upon his batman.

  “The Germans are losing this war, Lister; their resources are stretched to the limit, and this is a last ditch attempt devised by the Führer and his lackeys to hold back the inevitable. Show some backbone, man! Whatever happened to your stiff upper lip, and all that? Mark my words, we’ll have this all wrapped up in time for Tiffin. We’ll be in Paris for cocktails and Berlin for a little hair of the dog tomorrow. You mark my words!”

  Raffles took a sip. “Ah, that’s much better.” Satisfied, he placed the cup carefully back on its saucer, exchanging it for the speaking tube hung on its hose in the bracket on the other side of his chair. He raised the horn to his mouth.

  “Men and automatons of the Magna Britannian Fourth Cybernetic Expeditionary Company! We march to war, that we might eradicate the Nazi menace once and for all. We march for Queen and country! We march for freedom from oppression! The command is given, and that command is – atta –”

  But Sir Raffles’ command to engage was drowned by a scream of burning air and boiling mist as a beam of retina-searing light, like fire from heaven, streaked out of the sky. The beam hit the front row of Galahad regiment, which vanished in a blinding flash of concentrated sunlight. The noise of the explosions that followed in the wake of the beam reached Raffles a moment later.

  The flaming spear vanished as suddenly as it had appeared, leaving Raffles blinking grey sunbursts from his eyes and seeing nothing of the automaton infantry line but a mass of fused and burning wreckage.

  The beam came again, a sustained blast this time, taking out the entire front line of Lancelot to his right.

  Raffles was out of his chair now, panic rendering him silent.

  The giant Atlas was the next target of the devastating death ray, the British colours cooking off its hull plating under its fiery fury, the Britannia flags reduced to blackened cinders that were then carried away as glowing orange embers on the firestorm wind following the beam’s onslaught.

  Two seconds later, the shells inside the giant’s right arm cannon touched off.

  The force of the explosion flattened almost all of Gawain regiment and even threatened to send the Hannibal crashing over onto its side, but the ten-tonne pachyderm stood firm.

  “By all the saints!” Raffles spluttered as he picked himself up off the floor of the howdah, his ears ringing. The tray beside his seat was swimming in hot tea now, the cup tossed over by the force of the explosion. “What the blazes was th –”

  His sentence remained unfinished as the super-heated death ray found its next target.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Icarus Burning

  “THERE!” CAT SUDDENLY shouted, drawing everyone’s attention to the window-port in the side of the great bird’s head.

  Ulysses Quicksilver was at her side at once. He was momentarily distracted by the curious flutter he felt in his stomach at being so close to the young woman, still stunningly beautiful despite all they had been through.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked, and Ulysses blushed, suddenly realising how strange he must look, staring at her so intently. “You should be looking at that!” she said, pointing out the reinforced glass of the eagle’s eye.

  Ulysses looked, and the sight that greeted him took his breath away.

  Schloss Adlerhorst rose above the peaks of its Alpine home, a melange of Romanesque pinnacles and turrets, so utterly unlike Castle Frankenstein.

  It rose above the pervasive cloud cover atop its mountain peak like an island fortress emerging from amidst a sea of white spume.

  And more impressive even than the castle eyrie itself – built hundreds of years ago and thousands of feet above sea level in the Alpine peaks – was the structure that had been erected around and within it since, coiled about the towers and minarets like a serpent of twisting steel scaffolds and grilled iron platforms.

  Winding around the rugged near-white walls of Schloss Adlerhorst, the structure branched halfway up. One branch led to a vast parabolic dish surmounting the highest point of the castle, covered with mirrored tiles. The mirrors were dazzling in the morning sunlight, too bright to look upon directly as they caught the sunlight and redirected it to a mass of collector prisms at its centre.

  The second branch of the structure led to a slightly lower platform, built out over the battlements of the castle, where part of the original wall had been knocked down to accommodate it. Clearly, nothing was more important than the device, not even hundreds of years of historic architecture.

  The platform supported a swivel-mounted cannon piece, which l
ooked like a cross between a huge telescope and a cannon, tapering to a lance-like point. It had to be at least a hundred feet long. Massive bearings below the platform looked like they could be used to lever the platform out on a telescoping arm and swing it around the side of the castle. There was nowhere that could not be targeted from the schloss using the device.

  “Talk about German efficiency,” Hercules muttered as he joined Cat and his future son at the window-port. “How long did you say the Nazis have had the ability to build this?” he asked, addressing Ulysses directly.

  “Well...” Ulysses was momentarily caught off guard. He still found it strange talking to his father, when he was actually younger than Ulysses was himself. “I think I was first taken to Castle Frankenstein about two months ago.”

  “You think?” Cookie interrupted.

  “But it must have taken much longer than two months to build this,” came Katarina’s thickly-accented voice from the shadows around the navigation table.

  “Well I know that Dashwood arrived before me,” Ulysses said, suddenly feeling as if he was being interrogated again, “but I don’t know how long precisely. I’d thought it at most a matter of weeks.”

  “It must have been months,” Hercules said. “Maybe a year.”

  “I should think so,” Katarina agreed, watching them from the dark at the back of the cabin.

  “I don’t understand,” Cat piped up. “How can there be all this confusion over when you got here and when this Dashwood man did? Where was it that you came from, anyway?”

  All turned to look at the eye-patched Ulysses, and he felt the hackles on the back of his neck rise as his stomach began to tighten. “It’s a long story,” he muttered evasively.

  “Well, we’re not going anywhere,” Cookie said, crossing her arms.