Black Chamber

by S. M. Stirling

  The narrow intense focus of absolute effort flared wider, and she was suddenly conscious that she was panting and running with sweat. And that the other fight was coming to a conclusion. Evidently the Englishman had been distracted—probably frozen by disbelief—for just the necessary fraction of a second.

  Her first glance at Horst had been enough to make her think that he was a very dangerous man, quick and enormously strong and with a streak of savagery underneath. Close contact had made her sure of it.

  I was right, she thought.

  He had the other man’s throat in one hand and was about to club him to death with his own revolver, looking small in his right fist. From the purple shade of his enemy’s face, that might not be necessary.

  “Nein, Horst!” Luz said sharply.

  Then she took another risk, grabbing for the Englishman’s arm and twisting it into a lock with all her strength; that put her face close to the German’s snarling mask of killing fury.

  “No, Horst! We can’t explain the bodies! Think! We’d have to get them down three levels to the keel compartments before we could drop them off the ship and into the water.”

  That brought humanity back to the wide, ice-pale eyes; he’d looked very much the Norse berserker he’d invoked in jest. When he actually looked at her she shoved the English agent against the cabin wall and spoke rapidly:

  “The Dutch police would be all over us in Amsterdam—a Dutch prison would mean death.”

  Horst grunted. “True, the city’s got more Entente agents than it has canals.”

  “And even if we could get them into the water without being spotted, there’s the wireless once they’re missed—the crew would report a disappearance and the English would have people waiting for us. If we hold them until just before docking, we’ll be able to disappear and they will be the ones explaining things to the police.”

  She could see him thinking, and looking at her with narrowed eyes. “You are a woman of unexpected depths, Elisa.”

  Luz shrugged. Then he blinked and smiled. “And their compartment will be unguarded now.”

  He made a swift decision. “You are right, or at least we have no need to do anything irrevocable just yet.”

  Together they swiftly bound and gagged both men, sitting them side by side on her bed. Horst agreed that it was a good idea to pop the Indian’s shoulder back before he started screaming uncontrollably, and they took a minute to do that—it needed two pairs of experienced hands to do quickly, but they were both used to this sort of field expedient.

  “Scarcely the use I had in mind for my bed this night,” she said.

  Horst barked laughter as he finished pulling on dark-blue silk pajamas and a belted smoking jacket. It was perfectly credible for him to be abroad in that on the passenger deck, since the cabins didn’t include toilet facilities, and she’d gotten him into this section officially unnoticed by the simple expedient of a massive bribe to the stewardess, probably not the first time someone had paid her to turn a blind eye. He put the Webley in one pocket of the robe, and assorted interesting blades and devices into the other.

  “Will you . . .” he began.

  She fished her navaja out of the loops in the pocket of her skirt, which had been tossed aside over the table amid a scattering of underclothes. Then she snapped the blade open with a flick of thumb and wrist and rolled the weapon across her knuckles before throwing it spinning from right hand to left and back. Snake-quick, literally faster than the eye could follow, a showy gitano-style maneuver called el cambio. The subdued light of the electric lamp glittered on the honed edge of the Toledo steel and the mother-of-pearl inlays in the bone scales and brass of the hilt. The eyes of all three men followed it.

  “Well, yes, you will be able to handle them,” Horst said, following the knife with his eyes. “Keep them quiet; I want to do a thorough search of their quarters.”

  When he’d left she stood glaring at the two British agents, counting to a hundred and then cracking the door enough to scan carefully, while they looked back at her—mostly at the knife. The corridor was dim, with only a single hooded blue electric light, and quiet beneath the muffled throb of the engines. She locked the door and turned back to the two captives. The Indian was still a bit dazed, but recovering enough to turn gray and sweat at the pain of his dislocated shoulder; popping it back didn’t magically heal the damage to tendons and muscle, or make it possible to use it naturally. His Anglo-Saxon partner was fully alert, and watching her with lynx-eyed hatred.

  “You idiots,” she hissed. “¡Estupidos!”

  Then she laid the knife down for a moment, held up her left palm, touched the fingers of the other to it, clenched that right hand into a fist, and bent the other to enfold it.

  “Manifest,” she said, making two fists and tapping the knuckles together. “Jackson. Rocket.”

  The English agent made muffled sounds through the gag, and Luz loosened it with the point of her navaja, keeping it ready for other action. He knew death when it was cold on his skin and stayed still until she moved back to the chair. His eyes were slitted thoughtfully now.

  “Keep it quiet, or I will hurt you,” she added.

  He nodded, wisely and obviously believing her about that at least.

  “You expect me to believe Elisa Carmody is a Black Chamber agent?” he said.

  “No,” Luz snapped in a deadly hiss. “I expect you to believe Elisa Carmody is in Lecumberri wishing she still had toenails—”

  That was rhetorical exaggeration; except for emergency field expedients like fists, boots, and pistol butts, for Room 101 interrogations the Chamber generally used a less drastic and more scientific version of the Water Treatment that had been common during the Philippine insurrection back around the turn of the century, which could be repeated indefinitely. The old saying had it that cowards died a thousand deaths, but modern scientific progress meant you could put the brave through the same thing.

  “—and that I am impersonating her to get next to the man who is our only clue to what the Germans, and their new best friends the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Partido Nacional Revolucionario, are conspiring to do in the United States now that we’re going to declare war on the Central Powers. What it is they plan, we don’t know, except that it’s very big. Bigger than Dublin.”

  The Englishman winced. That revolt had been very embarrassing for his empire and far too close to its heart, among people who were in theory at least voting citizens of its homeland. Personally she thought their handling of it had been a ham-handed disaster mitigated only by the commuting of the death sentences to life imprisonment on Uncle Teddy’s urging, but that didn’t count in the larger scheme of things.

  Luz’s own father, Patrick O’Malley, had said more than once there was something in the air or water of Ireland that made men demented, and that was one reason he’d never once wanted to set foot on it. He remembered his ancestors and honored them, but his homeland was the place where his only child was born.

  “And you just endangered our only chance at it with this piece of blundering amateurism! You decided to do this on the spur of the moment, didn’t you?”

  The Englishman probably wasn’t convinced, just open to the thought that she was telling the truth; the code she’d used had been set up some time ago as a fail-safe, but too many people knew it to be really safe.

  “I’m not interested in any secrets you think you have,” she went on, which made him relax a little. “And Horst couldn’t break you in the time we have left—not without making too much noise and leaving marks that would be as bad as having your dead bodies found. Rest assured this idiocy will be in my next document drop. You’re Indian Secret Service, you two, aren’t you?”

  Neither of them answered, and their tells weren’t obvious, but she could see them—it was very hard to control the expansion and contraction of your pupils.

 
; “Back in ’14 after we helped you with the Ghadar business you agreed not to operate on American soil without prior notification. Don’t insult my intelligence by claiming this airship doesn’t count as American soil!”

  He started to answer, and she realized she’d been gesturing freely, enough to make certain things bounce and jiggle, distracting his attention. When she was upset, the way she spoke with her hands was very Latin, unless she consciously suppressed it, and while her figure was fashionably slender it wasn’t meager, either. The Indian was fully conscious again, but hurting too badly to notice, or perhaps just feeling too humiliated.

  “Men!” she exclaimed. “Get your mind on business and your eyes off ¡mis chichis!”

  She took a moment to get into her own pajamas. She did it slightly reluctantly; she hated dressing or sleeping after intercourse without an opportunity to wash or remove the precautions. It was still advisable, since she might have to go out into the corridor herself. The Englishman averted his eyes, which was a good sign.

  “Ah . . . well, this will make your cover more convincing to the Hun,” he said, flushing.

  “No,” she said. “It would have made it absolutely convincing if I’d helped him kill you and hide the bodies. Now he’ll be wondering at least a little if I was saving your lives because I’m not what I claim. Now shut up. I have to do this before Horst gets back.”

  She turned to the little table, took out the copy of Kim—there was no time to be humorous with Baudelaire—and wrote quickly, referencing the necessary words from a mental image of the key. Then she folded the paper and tucked it into the Indian’s turban; even if Horst did another search, there was no way he could tell that it wasn’t a British code, and coded messages were entirely natural for spies to have on their persons.

  “Turn that over to your superiors when you get to Amsterdam,” she said. “They can forward it.”

  Then she smiled. “And we do have to explain why I removed your gag. Ah! ¡Eso es! It was to stop you from choking to death on the blood from your nose!”

  “But my nose isn’t—” he began.

  Her fist whipped forward and he gave a choked grunt. “There! A bleeding nose!”

  THREE

  Luchthaven Nummer Één

  (Airport Number One)

  Amsterdam,

  Koninkrijk der Nederlanden

  (Kingdom of the Netherlands)

  SEPTEMBER 5TH, 1916(B)

  The great floating hangar below had been fabricated in New Jersey and sent over to Amsterdam in naval transports during February, heavily escorted by American warships—both for safety’s sake and as a calculated thumb in the eye of the Kaiserliche Marine, daring them to do anything about it. The assembly had been completed in the spring, with the hangar resting in a basin dredged off the main canal to the ocean and looking nearly identical to its counterpart in New York except that a giant Dutch flag was painted on the exterior . . . ironically, in the same red-white-blue colors. Originally the hangar had been intended for London or Portsmouth, but the war had intervened and the Netherlands had eagerly bid for the privilege. Not only because of the commercial advantages for which they always had a keen eye, but because they were a small neutral country who desperately wanted the diplomatic support of a large one. They must be dreading the moment the United States declared war on the Central Powers, with the fates of Serbia and Rumania and their own Belgian neighbor before their eyes.

  The San Juan Hill came into the wind with a long low circle over the Dutch capital, its great teardrop shadow scrolling across a flat sprawl with a glint of canals and streets of high narrow brick houses. Here and there were clusters of larger, newer structures or the church spires that dominated any skyline except in Chicago and New York; avenues and electric trams and thronging traffic; and then a sprawl of warehouses and modern docks and ships from everywhere.

  The sun was westering, an hour or two from setting, and the long golden-gray light turned the city into a dream of Old Europe. It made you think of explorers setting forth in big-bellied, well-gunned galleons, and returning—when they did—with their sails beaten to rags, laden with gold and silks, furs and spices and pearls and brags.

  Luz sat with Horst on the observation deck, patting her mouth with a gloved hand as she yawned, with a broad-brimmed hat before her on the table and her suitcase and hatbox resting ready to hand. She felt a little underdressed because her knife and automatic pistol were back in their receptacles in the suitcase, under the false bottom and its cover of trashy romances, adventure stories, and naughty French poetry. Not that she was going to fight her way into a neutral kingdom, but . . .

  . . . I’ve always got me, she thought with what she considered pardonable pride. Considering what I did stark naked and armed with two glasses of tequila, that statement covers a great deal.

  The steady throb of the engines changed as they were throttled down until they barely balanced the wind from the west, and the airship sank toward the surface of the water as gas was loosed from the valves along the upperreel. A thunk sounded, and out of the corner of her eye she could see the towing cable falling away from the bow of the airship, turning thread-thin and then caught with a long turntable-mounted pole on the aft deck of the tug. Hooking it up took a few minutes, since it had to be done with exquisite care not to damage the fragile frame of the San Juan Hill.

  When weight came on the line there was a subliminal shiver through the deck beneath them. The motion of the airship changed as the hawsers fore and aft held it rigid, a quicker almost-fluttering feeling and then a stillness as the engines were cut for the first time since they left New York, a noise so accustomed you heard only its sudden absence. A large hose dropped down as well, now that they were within fifty feet of the surface, and a pump throbbed as it drove water into the ballast tanks. The dirigible slid into the cradle and the dozens of ground crew sprang to lash it down with ropes through the eyelets set into the lower ribs. Looking up, Luz could see that there were great blocks of the more expensive incandescents in front of reflective panels, not arc lights of the type usually used for large public spaces or big industrial buildings.

  Her parents had both been adults before they lived in a house with electric lights, and she’d seen the world grow brighter every year.

  “Our mothers and fathers were born in a world lit only by fire, as it was from the beginning of time,” she said. “And we have . . . this.”

  Horst nodded agreement to the point. “My father only put in electric light at the Schloss when we added a power plant for the sugar-beet mill.”

  Then he looked up into the vaulted vastness of the hangar himself. “That is good practice. Hydrogen goes up, and you don’t want high-temperature naked arcs there where it’s leaked and mixed with the air. Plenty of ventilation panels, too. The Yankees have good engineers, damn them. We have airships just coming into service bigger than this with more lift, built specially for a . . . special mission. But the design is very similar to this.”

  “You’ve flown often?” Luz said admiringly—and, mostly, honestly. “This was wonderful, but it’s my first time.”

  Horst grinned, indicating the lounge with a sideways flick of the wrist—she recognized a mensur-swordsman’s gesture. “The ones I’ve flown on before are much less comfortable than this—flying at six thousand meters to stay above the ceiling of the enemy’s fighting scouts; freezing cold, and sucking on an oxygen tube and still feeling as if you were smothering for hours on end. And in Flugzeugen, but those I have piloted myself.”

  “Ah, and what’s that like?” she said enviously.

  She could have gotten into a flight school course, since the Chamber encouraged you to pick up any number of skills and some field operatives did fly, but she’d never found the time, and it was harder for a woman to do so without attracting notice anyway. Male operatives could just be dropped into the Army Air Corps training system with co
oked papers, but sending her would be like tattooing dangerous Black Chamber female spy on her forehead for the duration of her stay, while dozens of regular-Army blockheads memorized her face and then blabbed.

  “Flying a Flugzeugen yourself,” Luz clarified.

  Flugzeug translated literally as “flight tackle” or “flight stuff” and meant what in English was called an aeroplane, a heavier-than-air winged craft of the sort invented by the Wright brothers. That had been in ’03, but nobody had paid much attention at the time except for a few like her father, not for years afterward. Then suddenly six or seven years before the war everyone was talking about aeroplanes; she’d seen that flight in North Carolina grow more important in retrospect as she grew up herself.

  A dreamy look came into the man’s pale eyes as he remembered.

  “Noisy, rough, dangerous . . . magnificent!” Horst said. “This”—his foot tapped the deck—“is like sailing. A Flugzeug is like flying yourself, as close to being a bird as is possible for a man. Like an eagle, like a bird of prey! Like riding a lively, ah—”

  Lively woman, Luz supplied with an inner raised eyebrow; Horst had forgotten exactly who he was talking to for a moment, speaking as if to another man, which was even a compliment in an odd way.

  We’re both very tired; they’d been spelling each other, which meant some sleep—but not enough of it, and frequently interrupted.

  “—a good horse, but much better. Louder and with bad smells, but . . . glorious.” He chuckled. “My father was a captain of Uhlans when we beat the French in 1870, and his grandfather the same at Leipzig and Waterloo when we crushed Napoleon a century ago. He was vastly disappointed that I would not be a horse soldier, but the day of men sitting on the backs of animals and poking each other with pointed sticks is past, even if some of the elders won’t admit it.”

  “You have a point,” Luz said. “The Yankee aeroplanes—and armored war-autos armed with pom-poms and machine guns—have hurt us badly in Mexico, and they have swarms of both now, thousands. They can make it impossible to move in daylight in open country, across the deserts and plains where in the old days the vaquero was lord. The war-autos run down bands of mounted men and kill their horses with exhaustion even before the fighting, and then machine-gun riflemen who can’t hurt them except by accident. And the flying scouts pinpoint our bands of fighters and attack from the air with more machine guns and bombs and mustard gas, while motor trucks bring gringo infantry up ten times faster than marching speed. And even in the mountains where vehicles cannot go, the air scouts can see much—they can guide foot soldiers or mounted infantry and bomb and machine-gun the camps of los guerilleros unless there is thick forest. We have to move in darkness, make no lights nor show smoke, and hide in daytime like mice from hawks.”