Black Chamber

by S. M. Stirling

  The principle was the same as hunting, except that you were the stalker and the prey at once. Insects hopped and buzzed, but more quietly than in the autumn woods she was used to; squirrels were that spectacular fire-red you got on this side of the Atlantic, blurring in streaks up and down the trunks and occasionally pausing to curse at her; a fox went trotting by, intent on getting away from the noise and trouble and doing a double-take and sideways jump when it saw her. Birds fluted or squawked.

  Von Bülow took the bottle, lifted it in salute, and surprised her again when he spoke softly:

  “Vielen, vielen Dank, gnädiges Fräulein.”

  Which was not only thank you, but a very formal thank-you indeed, and he’d called her gracious miss, as well. His voice had been a bit of a croak until he moistened it.

  “Gern geschehen,” she said; you’re welcome. Though if there was some way to keep you alive and kill you . . . “Quietly please, if you speak.”

  “Ja.” After a moment: “You are of mixed nationalities, are you not, miss?”

  She spoke—quietly but not in a whisper. Whispers carried. “Yes. Irish and Criollo . . . Creole Spanish-American.”

  She didn’t mention that there were almost certainly Arawak girls in there many generations back, and it being Cuba the odd much-diluted and officially denied African too, though the Aróstegui family would have rather been racked and burned alive than admit it.

  Von Bülow muttered under his breath; Luz thought she caught Vandal and Visigoth in it, and suppressed a grin at the mention of Germanic tribes who’d settled in Iberia back in the Völkerwanderung after the Roman Empire fell. The good professor was looking for reasons to account for her in the mental categories he was accustomed to, like his monarch’s genealogical research project to prove Uncle Teddy was really a German Uradel. Which was sort of sad and funny for Queen Victoria’s grandson, especially when you considered that his idol Frederick the Great had thought German an uncouth language where you had to read a whole page to get to a single verb, mainly suitable for speaking to servants and livestock. In Frederick’s day much of Berlin’s population had been French, Protestant refugees he’d welcomed to give the dowdy provincial city some culture.

  If you go back to the Visigoths . . . or even just medieval times . . . everyone is descended from everyone, including Charlemagne and Genghis Khan, she thought but did not say. You can prove that with some simple mathematics. I prefer to think of myself as a purebred American mongrel. As Uncle Teddy says, if you subscribe to the Constitution and speak the language and call yourself American, you’re an American. And if you say I have a man’s spirit I will clout you, Ernst von Bülow, or at least wish I could.

  Something prickled at her, a sudden silence in the wood. She went flat and leopard-crawled through the soft moist duff of the forest floor for a few yards until a big knotted root gave her cover, then leveled the shotgun over it.

  “Wer da?” von Bülow called . . . which made him a useful decoy.

  The Ride of the Valkyries answered. Horst came through very quietly indeed and went to one knee as she rose to hers. He was all business despite the puckish choice of recognition signal.

  “They’re on the road,” he said, clearing the duff and drawing a quick sketch map in the dirt with a stick. “Two automobiles, large touring cars, but only three men guarding them. About a thousand meters from here.”

  “Only two vehicles?”

  “Only two in sight.” He shrugged; they had limited time to scout around.

  Which might kill them, but delay certainly would.

  “How far can you throw a grenade, Horst?” she asked.

  “A little less than fifty meters accurately with these egg types,” he said, which was impressive. “But the autos would burn.”

  “One of them would burn, hopefully,” she said.

  “And the other could be very useful, ja,” he replied thoughtfully; she’d relied on his being quick on the uptake. “Risky, but much must be risked in war. The frontier is only six kilometers away, very little time by motor.”

  “And more than a lifetime by foot,” she said, which prompted a grim smile.

  “I lead, you cover,” he said, as they exchanged rifle for shotgun again. “Start shooting when I throw the first grenade. I prefer it this way.”

  “So do I, Horst, so do I,” she said with feeling—and truthfully.

  Not being concerned with proving my manhood, ¡gracias a Dios!

  Not for the first time, Horst disconcerted her a little by saying before he turned away:

  “And perhaps your courage is more pure than mine, eh, Süsse?”

  * * *

  • • •

  Stay here,” Luz whispered. “Come as fast as you can when we finish the Frenchmen.”

  Von Bülow sank down behind a tree, looking tightly calm. “God go with you,” he said.

  Closer to the edge of the wood the beeches grew shorter, squatter, thicker and branched more. One with a divided trunk would give a good view at about the right distance; she pushed the rifle ahead of her, jumped, gripped knobs through the smooth gray bark, and climbed, as agile as the girl who’d played chase with a pet raccoon through the live oaks of their Santa Barbara home until her mother called her down. Fifteen feet up, the trunk branch split again, and she edged up to that; there were leafy branches right behind it, so her head wouldn’t be outlined when she raised it into view. The road was just ahead, stretching north-south in two rutted sandy strips with scruffy grass between them, from the look of it made by nothing more elaborate than foresters’ carts and farm wagons, cows and sheep, and generations of blond peasants in wooden shoes whacking out anything that tried to grow enough to block it.

  The two dark-green automobiles with black trim were there, both parked heading south; Renault 40CV touring cars, big open-topped brutes that could carry seven passengers, with massive V-6 engines that could push them very fast indeed, better than sixty miles an hour on a good flat road. They’d been expensive before the war and unobtainable since with the Renault factories making other things, but she supposed the French secret service would have first call on what was available. At a guess, the French agents had parked them there and then crossed the woods she’d just traversed to remove the rails before the train arrived. It would have been a rushed, improvised operation, which was all the better—people were always more likely to make mistakes when they raced the clock. They might have gotten all the gear necessary and all the men she’d seen here in those two, if they’d started out around the same time the train did . . . and by then it would have been obvious they’d lost their snatch team.

  Less than a hundred yards from her, the three Frenchmen were waiting, one in each car—those would be the drivers; it wasn’t a common skill anywhere, and less so here in Europe than back home—and one man taking a knee between them, with a rifle in the crook of his arm. Luz lowered her head and looked down; Horst was behind a tree and looking up at her. She held up three fingers—remembering to use her thumb and the first two in the German fashion—and then folded a fist with the thumb inside and tapped it against the tree in the gesture for “good luck”—the American thumb-and-forefinger OK symbol meant something entirely different and very rude here.

  Horst took a grenade in his right hand, pulled the pin, and dodged forward, moving in smooth darts from tree to tree with the shotgun held at the balance in his left. Luz edged back up to just below the fork in the tree, making herself breathe deeply and slowly—the Japanese combat instructors Uncle Teddy had imported for the Black Chamber emphasized the benefits of that, and it did help.

  I am getting very tired of this, occurred to her; then she suppressed it. Millions of soldiers all over the world are probably a lot more tired of it than you!

  And they were doing it knee-deep in mud saturated with bits of corpse, trying to breathe in the claustrophobic closeness of a gas mask a
nd watching obscenely fat rats run by, not dining in the Hotel Victoria or taking first-class trains. A moment of waiting, controlling her breathing, not looking at anything in particular. Then a loud but muffled bumpf!

  Luz surged back up to the fork in the trunk of the beech tree and leveled the rifle. The northernmost car had been thrown a little to one side and there was a trickle of smoke—the grenade must have gone off right under the body. The driver was out but staggering with his hands to his head. She ignored him for now. The kneeling rifleman had gone prone and had his weapon leveled, waiting for Horst to expose himself to throw again. Fortunately she was twenty feet up, which gave her an excellent field of fire.

  Crack.

  Crack.

  He shot and she did in almost the same instant. Her round kicked dirt out of the roadway beside the Frenchman, and he rolled frantically backward. Luz dismissed self-blame—it was a clout shot and she should have made it—and squeezed off the rest of the magazine at the moving target. By the time the bolt locked back and she reloaded, he’d gotten into the ditch on the other side of the road. When she put the rifle back through the crook he was shooting at her, and his third round gouged right through the two-foot-thick beech a foot above her head in a shower of splinters that stung the left side of her face. Her belly tensed where it was pressed against the slightly—very slightly—thicker main stem. Amateurs tended to underestimate what rifle rounds could penetrate . . .

  Just then the Frenchman seemed to levitate out of the ditch and roll frantically away. The bumpf of a grenade came less than a second later, and dirt shot upward from the ditch near where he’d lain. He sprang up and aimed for the woods Horst was throwing from, apparently more worried about another grenade than a bullet.

  Crack.

  This time she hit, low in the pelvis or thigh, and he started to crumple. There were no second prizes when people shot at each other.

  Crack. Crack.

  The French rifleman went still, and Luz was freed from the peculiar focus of a marksman’s duel. Two more grenades went off at almost the same time under the first Renault, and this time there was bright fire and then a big soft whump of expanding flame. Enough gasoline had spilled and vaporized to really go up. And to splash when the tank ruptured; the dazed driver caught a gout of it, and rolled on the ground screaming and beating at himself.

  The driver of the intact car was standing, firing a Star automatic at the woods, presumably at Horst, which was futile, unless he was one of the rare really good pistol shots. Then he jumped down and ran for it across the road, the long yellow chauffeur’s duster he wore flapping around his ankles, a cap on his head, and goggles pushed up. She swung the rifle’s muzzle toward him, but he staggered and clouds of dust burst out of the back of his coat as she watched. Then his knees buckled and he fell flat, hitting the ground with his face full-force and not moving. Horst walked into view breaking open the shotgun and sliding two more shells into the breech and snapping it closed. He walked over to the other Frenchman and fired both barrels into his struggling, smoking body, which was an act of soldier’s mercy.

  Luz slid backward in a controlled fall and landed on the ground crouched, her skirt flaring up for a second. Von Bülow was already hurrying toward her.

  “I knew you had disposed of the enemy when the firing stopped,” he said.

  “Or they had disposed of us,” she said, jerking her chin toward the road.

  He fell in beside her as she walked quickly, seeming spry enough, and gave a pinched smile.

  “In that case, I would not be losing much. I am . . . it has been a very long time since I was a young Fähnrich serving my King and Fatherland against the Danes.”

  At her well-hidden surprise, he chuckled a little. “Yes, gracious miss, I was not born such a dry old stick as I am now. Though even in my youth in the Wars of Unification I was never such a Siegfried as the good Hauptmann von Dückler, nor so fortunate as to fall in with a beautiful and fearless shield-maiden.”

  They came out onto the road and met the unpleasant stink of burning gasoline and the worse one of burning flesh. Von Bülow’s nose twitched and he finished softly:

  “And there are some things one never forgets. There was a barn full of injured men . . . we could do nothing . . .”

  Well, that’s the fuel for the locomotive of history, Luz thought. And plenty of bad dreams.

  “Are you injured?” Horst said sharply, turning as they came up.

  Surprised, she brushed at her cheek and saw a little blood on the wrist. “No, just scratches—splinters from a near-miss in the tree I was using. He was too good, I should have gotten him with the first shot.”

  “Many shots, few hits,” he said, shrugging, and sliding in behind the wheel of the remaining Renault. “You’re alive and he is not and that’s what counts. Let’s go. That burning car is marking us for all to see.”

  The black smoke was already fairly high in the sky; the larger pyre of the train was to their east. She helped von Bülow in, feeling a bit less inclined to throw him in than she would have been yesterday, and rolled into the backseat herself, kneeling and facing to the rear. Acceleration threw her breasts and stomach against the cushions instantly, and nearly blew the hat off her head. She removed it and tossed it to the floor; that reminded her to unstrap the suitcase she’d been carrying like a soldier’s pack since they left the train and let it fall too.

  “You are attached to your underwear,” Horst cast over his shoulder as he manipulated clutch and shift.

  The big engine roared smoothly, well kept and still warm from its drive from Amsterdam. It probably didn’t have all that much fuel, but they didn’t need to go far.

  “Only to the parts next to my skin right now,” Luz shot back without turning. “But I have deathless works of literature in there,” she went on.

  “Trashy popular fiction,” he called back, and they both laughed.

  Then . . .

  “No, no, no! ¡Mierda!” she swore. “We keep killing these Gabacho pigs and they keep coming!”

  Three motorcycles came through the smoke of the burning auto, crowding the eastern edge of the road to avoid the flames and swaying back upright as they followed. Sand spurted from under their rear wheels as they accelerated. Luz loved driving autos and motorcycles herself, work aside, and recognized the model—Alcyon’s dispatch-rider type. Not faster than the Renault car on a good hard road . . . but with much better acceleration and much better at any sort of rough country. Perfectly logical to bring along on a mission like this, an ambush in the countryside; you could take those anywhere a horse could go, and most places that a man on foot could, and much faster.

  She hadn’t even realized what language she’d mostly been yelling in until both the Germans laughed.

  “Now you know how we feel all the time, Süsse,” Horst called over his shoulder.

  “You don’t have any more grenades?”

  “No,” Horst said; she hadn’t thought so from the count, but it was easy to miss things when you were fighting.

  She thought, juggling times and distances as the driver concentrated on making the best speed he could. It wasn’t necessary to tell Horst to slow down; the cycles were going to catch them anyway, and too soon. Luz leveled the rifle and emptied the magazine at them, not expecting to hit moving targets from the bouncing, lurching platform of the car, just to keep them away for a moment. She used it to pull a ribbon from the band of her hat and tie it around her brow to keep the wind from behind her putting hair in her eyes, something that wouldn’t have been as much of a problem if it were longer and up.

  But the Frenchmen were brave men and rode well, and they’d be desperate now. All three of them wore leather jackets and leather helmets and goggles. As she watched they all drew pistols . . . which was something of a relief; she’d been worried that one of them would have grenades too, and get close enough to toss one int
o the car.

  “Five-second delay on the Mills grenade?”

  “Four to six,” Horst said, then added pedantically: “English quality control is not up to our standards.”

  Oh, wonderful, she thought, shooting again, the rifle hammering at her shoulder; it was impossible to keep a proper cheek weld with the car doing better than forty on this surface, and the muzzle wavered no matter what she did.

  What I need for this is a Thompson gun, something I could spray like a hose. ¡Por Dios! They’d turn up their toes at that.

  The Frenchmen were counting her shots. At the fifth they all gunned their cycles, the one in the center firing his pistol, the other two spreading out to come up on either hand. She reloaded with the rifle down and out of their sight, probably faster than they thought she would, but then pulled the second grenade out of her jacket just as they broke out of the shadow of the woods into bright sunlight.

  “¡Estoy hasta la madre de harta, aqui! ¡Toma esto, Gabachos estupidos!”

  She’d grown up speaking English and Spanish interchangeably, sometimes from sentence to sentence, and often didn’t even notice which one she was thinking in. But for some things Spanish was just more satisfying, particularly some words and phrases she’d learned from the staff and in the markets rather than from her mother.

  Luz pulled the pin on the second grenade, hoping that between aiming their pistols and keeping their motorcycles upright one-handed they wouldn’t worry what she was doing, or would just think she was still reloading. Making her hand relax enough for the spring-loaded lever to fly off and set the grenade’s fuse going was hard, but flipping it out was much easier, as if hidden hands were guiding hers. The one coming up on the left had just enough time to show a gape of surprise beneath the goggles before she lobbed the grenade at him and instantly ducked.

  Bampf!

  The explosion came so fast that she was very, very glad of that quick flip and could feel sweat running down her flanks. Right on the heels of it there was a sharp metallic tink-tink sound, and Horst cursed mildly.