by Ewing, Al
ROLF BAUMGARTNER WAS getting thoroughly sick of his post in the castle dungeons.
He would have preferred to be up guarding one of the turrets, enjoying fresh air and a little sunlight; instead, he was stuck in the very depths of this miserable ancestral pile, trapped in a dank stone cul-de-sac with only a flickering candle for light, babysitting one of the most depressing men he’d ever met. He couldn’t decide if the post was worse when Hawthorne was around or when he wasn’t.
During those times Hawthorne was absent, having been dragged away from his cell by the SS for whatever nonsense he was helping with upstairs, the dungeon was a deeply boring place. Baumgartner wasn’t allowed to read a book to pass the time, or bounce a ball off the stone walls, or anything that might let the endless hours drag by a little faster. There were various speaking tubes through which he could speak to his fellow guards in different parts of the castle, if he wished, but the penalty for misuse was strict, and there were little sneaks like Ehrlichmann around who’d jump at the chance to report him for some minor infraction if it meant scrambling a little further up the greasy pole to the officer class.
When Hawthorne was in his cell, as he was now, that was a little better. He and Baumgartner could play a word game, if they chose, or discuss what the weather might be like outside. Or they could sit in dreary silence, as they were doing at the moment, since Hawthorne had decided to sulk for some reason. Baumgartner sighed; it wasn’t that much better, after all. Hawthorne was such an astonishingly pitiful specimen.
It was the way he was constantly cringing, as if expecting to be hit, or found out for some unimaginable crime. And he never smiled or looked you in the eye – just sat there, hunched over and trembling. Baumgartner often found himself wanting to grab Hawthorne by the throat and shake him like a rag doll, just to give him something real to cry about.
Part of it, surely, was that Ackermann and his SS thugs refused to allow Hawthorne a proper room. Anyone would start to go a little mad if they were forced to eat and sleep in a dingy cell without a single creature comfort. What harm would it do to give him a real bed, for goodness sake? Or a window? What was he going to do, squirm through the bars like an eel and make a mad dash for freedom? He’d surely earned a degree of trust at this point.
No, if Baumgartner was ever put in charge of the SS, the first thing he’d do would be to allow Herr Hawthorne a proper room, and a good night’s sleep, and some decent food – a little bratwurst would probably do wonders for him. After that, Baumgartner, in his role of Reichsführer – or at least Oberstgruppenführer – of the entire, nationwide SS... would make some changes to the uniforms.
Get rid of the skulls, for a start. The skulls were just tacky.
Baumgartner looked over at Hawthorne, huddling in his cell, and thought about bringing up his ideas for the new SS uniforms. Best not, he thought. It didn’t pay to voice one’s private thoughts on the subject of the SS; they had a habit of finding out, somehow, and after that your position in the Ultimate Reich could get very tenuous indeed. Baumgartner had no desire to end his career as one of the lobotomised ‘human robots’ in Berlin, thank you very much. Or was it Fortress Berlin, now? The wall was more than half-built, after all. Baumgartner wondered idly if any of the allied spies had had a chance to see it yet. It’ll put the wind right up them, he thought. It does me. Pray God I never end up in there.
He shivered. The silence was growing intolerable. Hawthorne was in one of his moods, Baumgartner could tell – one of those spells where his frown was a little deeper, the slope of his shoulders a little more profound, his eyes even more eager to avoid yours. He hesitated, struggling to remember the English, and then spoke.
“Cheer up, Philip, ja? It might not ever happen, you know.”
Hawthorne scowled, and turned away. Be like that, then, thought Baumgartner. We’ll just sit here in silence and die of boredom. He let out a loud, melancholy sigh, tinged with a hint of bitterness. Surely, thought Baumgartner, he was the unluckiest man in the entire Ultimate Reich!
In this, he was mistaken. Rolf Baumgartner was a very lucky man indeed.
If, when Marlene and her team had crept up on him through the shadows of the dungeon, anyone other than Mike Moses had reached him first, he would have died without even knowing about it. As it was, his jaw and nose were shattered when Moses slammed one of his outsize fists into his face, he lost several teeth, and he suffered minor brain damage from the extended concussion, but at least he wasn’t killed. Mike Moses, for reasons his team-mates could never quite grasp, made it a point of principle not to kill his fellow human beings.
Luck takes strange forms.
“Professor Hawthorne? We’re here to help.” Marlene smiled, as Moses took hold of the iron door of the cell, braced himself, and began to pull. Slowly, under Moses’ incredible strength, the metal bars warped – then tore loose from their moorings altogether, leaving a hole big enough for a man of Hawthorne’s size to walk through.
Hawthorne only sat, looking bewildered. “I... I don’t understand. Help me? In what way? Are... are you here to help with the experiment?” His eyes narrowed. “Or are you with them?”
Marlene’s smile lost some of its warmth. “It’s been quite a while since you were kidnapped, Professor. It’s understandable you might have lost all hope of rescue...”
Hawthorne blinked. “You’re not with them at all, are you? Or perhaps they’re just using you. They use everyone. They used me...” He shook his head, chuckling darkly. “Kidnapped, you say?”
“Yes, Professor,” Marlene said, suddenly unsure of her ground. “You were kidnapped in Geneva, don’t you remember?” She looked over at Wolf, and then at Moses, and both of them seemed suddenly as worried as she was.
Professor Hawthorne began to laugh.
Marlene took a step back. The sight of the man wearing a smile was so incongruous as to make her feel slightly ill.
“Professor Hawthorne –” she began, hoping there was another explanation for her looming dread than the one that came uncharitably to mind. Deep down, though, she knew exactly what was coming.
“You honestly think I was kidnapped?” He shook his head, trying to control the fits of giggles. “Oh, my hat! They really know how to string their agents along these days. Kidnapped indeed!”
“You weren’t?” Marlene asked.
His eyes narrowed. “Of course I wasn’t. I defected, you silly girl.” He smiled. “In fact, if you want to get technical? I defected for show, and then I decided to defect for real. Because nobody uses me! Not even Hitler, not even...” He stopped, as if aware that he might have been about to say too much. Then, quite suddenly, he made a mad lunge for the speaking tubes, grabbing one from the wall and screaming into it.
“Help! Help me! The Americans are in the dungeon –”
A moment later, his head, looking shocked, was bouncing across the cold stone floor, and Cohen was sheathing his cutlass.
“All hands on deck, me hearties!” He growled, as he struck a match to light the fuses in his beard. “Stand by to repel boarders!”
Marlene looked around for Johnny Wolf, but he was nowhere to be seen; either he’d already melted into the shadows, looking for cover to attack from, or he’d left them to face the music alone.
She honestly wouldn’t blame him.
EL SOMBRA SHOOK his head.
“This... does not look good.”
“I am so sick of you saying that!” Reed hissed. “Is that your catchphrase now? Every time we come across something out of the ordinary, we get a statement of the obvious from a half-naked swordsman! Of course it doesn’t look good! We’re an elite commando unit tasked specifically for abnormal operations – we handle things that by definition do not look good! If they looked good, do you know who’d be looking at them? Private Normal and his Tedious Boredom Platoon!”
El Sombra blinked. “I was just saying, amigo.”
“Where’s your shirt, anyway?”
“It itched.”
> “Quiet, both of you.” Scorpio hissed. The corridor had led to some sort of balcony overlooking the dining room; perhaps at some point in antiquity it had been used by musicians, or actors, to entertain the nobility and their guests. The important thing was that it gave them a perfect vantage point to watch Herr Doktor Diederich tinkering with his experiment.
He wasn’t alone. Scattered around the room were SS troops of various ranks, from the Standartenführer himself on down, there to meet their own future selves as they stepped through from next week, or next month, or next year. In addition, a pair of immense brass and steel robots flanked the Doktor at all times, the furnaces in the bellies glowing with fires akin to Hell’s own. Occasionally, one of them would stomp over to a coal bin in the corner of the room, take a large handful and tip it into the great furnace-doors that formed their mouths. Zinnsoldats, they were called, and El Sombra knew them of old; he knew that, should they ever run out of coal, the next thing to be forced into those doors and burned for fuel would be a human being.
“Last time, I smothered its flames with sand...” he muttered, then looked furtively around. “Has anyone got any sand?”
“Quiet. What are we looking at here, Reed?”
Reed frowned. “Analytical engines. Lots of them. Still in standby mode, until the good Doktor starts to flip some of those switches over there – see that bank of levers over on the far side? That’s the input. I’m guessing that disc there is supposed to be the gateway they’ll bring things through from. I’m not sure quite how it all links up... I wonder, is that an Omega field?”
“A what?”
“Omega energy. The ‘cursed science,’ according to legend. People who go looking for it have a habit of ending up dead.”
Scorpio nodded. “I seem to remember Doc Thunder harnessing it for some machine of his...”
“And look at him now. Makes you wonder, eh?”
Scorpio frowned, and changed the subject. “We’re going to have to stop this from –”
And then the voice of Philip Hawthorne filled the room.
“Help! Help me! The Americans are in the dungeon –”
The words echoed from one of the speaking tubes on the wall – then the voice went dead.
“Was that Hawthorne?” Scorpio couldn’t believe it. What the hell was he doing?
Immediately, the SS troops sprang to attention, six of them running for the exits. “Bring Der Zinnsoldat! Bring both of them! The Americans must be stopped!” The robots, following the new orders, turned and stomped out of the room.
“It seems we are out of time,” Herr Doktor Diederich sighed, moving towards the bank of levers. “The experiment must begin slightly ahead of schedule. Cross your fingers, my friends, and wish us luck, or at least a quick and painless death, ja?” He chuckled humourlessly.
El Sombra frowned. “We need to make our move now.”
Scorpio shook his head. “Not yet.”
“What?” El Sombra looked incredulous. Diederich was already flipping the switches, and the chittering of the clockwork crickets in his gigantic maze of arrays was growing louder and louder. “Amigo, in another second it’s going to be too late –”
“Wait for my signal, I said! Damn it, I need you to trust me!” Jack Scorpio reached up to brush the back of his finger across his forehead, and realised he was sweating. Through his special glasses, El Sombra’s aura was glowing an angry, pulsing red, like a throbbing vein. “Just... trust me. I’m asking you to hold back for just five minutes. Reed and Savate will back me up on this – there’s more going on here than you know.”
El Sombra just stared at him, his lips pulling back from his teeth in a cold snarl.
“Trust me. That’s all I ask.” Jack Scorpio looked into the blazing eyes behind the bloodstained mask, and spoke softly, soothingly, almost desperately. “Can you just hold back for one minute?”
The eyes behind the mask narrowed.
“Can you?”
PERSONNEL FILE: DJEGO ‘EL SOMBRA’ (LAST NAME UNKNOWN) - ??? - SKILLS: UNARMED COMBAT, BLADE COMBAT, PARKOUR, HIGH PAIN THRESHOLD, STEALTH, DISGUISE, GUERRILLA WARFARE, UNCONVENTIONAL WARFARE, (CONTINUED ON SEPARATE SHEET) - PREFERRED WEAPON: SWORD - WEAKNESSES: UNIQUE PERSONALITY DISORDER (SEE MEDICAL FILE #ES1007, ‘DJEGO SYNDROME’)
EYES ONLY: THIS INDIVIDUAL IS HIGHLY DANGEROUS. IT IS STRONGLY RECOMMENDED HE NOT BE INCLUDED IN ANY OPERATIONS CLASSIFIED ABOVE TOP SECRET OR HIGHER.
(I’ll take the risk - J.S.)
El Sombra spat in Scorpio’s face.
“Chinga tu madre.”
Then he drew his sword and leaped down into the fray.
THE SOUND OF Mike Moses punching Der Zinnsoldat was like Big Ben striking the hour – a heavy, ringing gong that echoed right through the walls of the dungeon. The metal buckled with the force of the blow, and inside the robot’s head, the complex clockwork that made it function slipped its gears, cogs and wheels coming loose as the machine tottered a step to the left before crashing to the floor.
“Now that’s what I’m talking about!” Moses bellowed, turning to backhand a stormtrooper who’d been getting too close.
“Mike! Are you okay?” Marlene yelled over the roar of her automatics, as she aimed a hail of bullets down the bleak tunnel before rolling back into cover. The SS answered with a fusillade of machine-gun fire, their bullets chewing great chunks out of the stonework. Lev Cohen, snarling unintelligibly, pulled a stick of dynamite from the recesses of his borrowed uniform, bellowed something about the Spanish Main, and lit it from one of the fizzing fuses threaded into his beard. Marlene threw herself down on the ground, covering her ears as Cohen hurled the stick overhead – the explosion was enough to shake the whole castle, but it didn’t seem to do more than buy them a moment’s respite against the waves of SS pinning them down.
“Mike!” Marlene screamed, over the ringing in her ears. “Are you okay?”
“I think I broke my hand and I might be deaf!” Moses yelled back.
“Well, how’s your other hand? They’ve got another one of those things back there –”
Moses grit his teeth. “Gimme a damn gun, I’ll take care of it!” He scrabbled around for the machine-gun the stormtrooper he’d knocked out had been carrying, but it was lying out of his reach; if he broke the cover of the alcove he was hiding in and went for it, he’d be gunned down in an instant. “God damn it! I need a gun here!”
“Arrr, I thought ye were a man of peace, matey?” Cohen grinned, before switching his voice to a parrot’s high-pitched squawk. “Aharr, I be Mike Moses! I pity the fools! Pieces of eight! Mikey wanna gun!”
“Leave your damn invisible parrot outta this, fool! You can’t kill a damn robot! Now quit your jibber-jabber and gimme some of that dynamite before I come over there, pick you up and throw you at it!”
“Too late for that, me brave bucko! ’Twas the last gunpowder in me hold!” Cohen spat, then grinned savagely. “Let ’em come, me fine lads! The noose holds no terror for Edward Teach!”
Marlene winced as her own guns clicked empty. “I’m down to my last clips!” She looked up as she reloaded – and saw the SS troops pulling back, clearing the way. Behind them, the remaining Zinnsoldat snorted, great clouds of steam and smoke coming from its horrifying maw. It looked like the Minotaur roaming the ancient labyrinth.
“Wait a second.” Marlene frowned, concentrating. She nodded to the dead-end wall behind them. “What’s behind this?”
“Who cares?” Mike yelled, “It’s gotta be a foot thick! Hell, maybe if Captain Crazy here hadn’t shot his load we coulda blasted it, but now? The only way out is through these fools and their crazy-ass man-eating robot –”
“Maybe not.” Marlene took a deep breath. “Maybe it’s the other way around.” She stepped out, standing in front of the dead-end wall, and raised her twin automatics.
The Zinnsoldat charged.
“What the hell does that even mean?” Mike yelled, as the twin .45s roared into life again, bullets bouncing o
ff the oncoming robot. Marlene was aiming for the robot’s eyes, but they were thin slits in its nightmarish head, and she just couldn’t make the shot.
It was getting closer. She had to take out the viewing slits now, before it slowed. If it reached them intact, it would kill her instantly, then start on Mike and Lev and Johnny. She couldn’t allow that to happen.
Marlene frowned.
Where was Johnny?
And then Johnny was behind her, stepping out of nowhere as he always did, and his hands were on hers, guiding the guns upwards just a fraction, inwards just the tiniest amount... and when she pulled the triggers, the bullets chewed through the glass lenses of the robot’s eyes and into its clockwork brain, and even though it was dead now, just mobile junk, the momentum of the charge kept it ploughing on blindly, even as Johnny and Marlene threw themselves to the side and out of the way.
The blind robot hit the back wall with a sound like a wrecking ball. The room shook.
Marlene looked back at Johnny and grinned. “You too?”
Johnny just smiled.
“We got our way out! Move it!” Moses bellowed, as Marlene raised her guns again, this time to lay down covering fire as her team ran through the hole in the wall and into the next room.
Which, it turned out, was being used as a garage.
For the King Tiger.
The largest, most powerful, most indestructible traction engine in the world, just waiting for someone good enough to take it and drive it away.
Marlene’s grin widened. “Face it, Tiger...”
PERSONNEL FILE: MARLENE ‘BLOOD WIDOW’ LANG - CIVILIAN (PREVIOUS OCCUPATION: VIGILANTE) - SKILLS: PROFICIENT WITH ALL LAND-BASED VEHICLES, COMBAT DRIVING (ULTIMATE CLASS), VEHICLE THEFT (ULTIMATE CLASS), AMBIDEXTROUS, STRONG LEADERSHIP SKILLS - PREFERRED WEAPON: DUAL .45 CALIBER PISTOLS - WEAKNESSES: UNKNOWN
“...you just hit the jackpot.”