Black Chamber

by S. M. Stirling

  More careful feeling—or as careful as it could be when the tips of her fingers were numb—showed that the slanting section of slates projecting from the base of the wooden wall was at about forty-five degrees. She planted her hands on it—it was about chest high—and did a straight lift, wheezing a little with effort as she brought her feet up and set them between.

  Then she stood and leaned forward against the surface of the oak planks, arms stretched wide and body plastered to the surface. There was nothing to keep her from falling backward if she slipped.

  So don’t slip, she thought, and began inching rightward.

  Moving one foot at a time and sliding her body, keeping it in contact with the wood every moment. Except when she came to the two central windows, which were utterly black; she could just get a grip on the frames with her fingertips but had to bow her body out slightly as she passed them, the lower sills bumping at her knees. Then the downslope of the roof above, as she came to the last of the gable end.

  This section of roof sloped down to about her breastbone level, and it did have guttering. The half-timber addition had been built on top of the original stone structure, giving the whole thing a mushroom-like organic quality. It all reminded her of illustrations from books of European folktales, for the excellent reason that those artists had used buildings just like this as their models.

  Copper, I think, she thought, testing the metal of the guttering with her hand. Thin and it’s only pegged on the underside into the ends of the roof beams. It’ll rip free if I try to put all my weight on one spot.

  It was times like this that she wished she could still pray with any conviction; a good useful saint would be a relief right now.

  Instead she took another deep breath, put her right hand on the slates just above the guttering, her left a bit higher on the edge of the roof, bent her knees, and jumped. Her body came down on the sloping surface of the roof, and she used the momentum to swing her legs over too. The tips of her toes came down on the guttering, spread wide in a frog stance and she moved as slowly as she could. Thin sheet metal buckled a little but did not give way.

  Another long shaky breath; now she regretted the lack of anything to thank, except good fortune and those acrobats.

  Muchísimas gracias, Flying Corelli Family, she thought.

  One thing she could not let herself think about was doing all this in reverse, only by then she’d be even more chilled and exhausted. The impulse to beat her brains out against the slates would be too strong if she did. One inch at a time . . .

  She worked her way rightward, squirming her entire self against the slates, digging her fingertips into the slightest irregularities in the stone, never letting her palms come out of contact with it, trying to think of herself as a sort of organic pancake creature out of Wells or Burroughs just oozing along.

  Her right foot touched something: the junction of the two sections of roofing, one heading back eastward to the tower. That would only be about twelve feet long, and the guttering would continue around the corner. But the ridgeline would be much closer, less than six feet up. Six feet up wet slick slate, a jump and mad scramble . . .

  When her hands closed on the ridgeline she paused for three minutes, every muscle in her body quivering in relief—the relative relief of having a handhold that she could actually squeeze hard, instead of relying on nearly nonexistent friction from keeping her away from a brief scrabbling and a long fall. A few tears squeezed out from between her clenched eyelids, and then she pushed sensation away again, making herself operate like a machine. You could do that . . . but sooner or later the price had to be paid.

  A pull and scrabble and she was astride the roof. The white stuccoed stone of the tower was ten feet away, and just visible, if you also used the eyes of faith. She hitched herself forward rather than getting up and walking; she had a feeling that it wasn’t time to tempt fate right now. When she came to the spot where the roof ran into the side of the tower, rising to her feet was almost a luxury.

  The windowsill was exactly where she expected it—a little below breastbone level while she stood on the roof ridge. The latch was just at the practical limit of her reach; nothing as convenient as having it at chest height, of course. She slid her right hand up the side and identified the spot she’d have to work on—entirely by touch and memory.

  She undid two of the buttons on her pseudo-pajama jacket, gritted her teeth, and ran her hands up under it and the shirt beneath to warm them against her body under her armpits. It was very much like being groped by an animated corpse while locked in a cold-store closet, and her torso wasn’t exactly toasty by this point either, but it was the best she had. When some sensation had returned to them she brought them back out and pulled up the mask far enough so that she could grip a little pencil-shaped electrical torch in her teeth; for this she had to risk a little light, and she had something from the Chamber’s secret labs—advised by Tesla—that was much handier than anything the world in general could get. The windows were the old-fashioned type like a miniature door, with four panes of glass in a metal frame, fastened on one side by a simple lever that pivoted its catch into a U-bracket.

  Her lockpicks contained a very thin section of spring steel like a flattened wire, covered in a sheath of oiled rubber that kept it from scraping things. Luz’s teeth clenched on the trigger of the electric torch, and even the feeble light of the little shielded bulb was almost blinding for an instant. She squinted upward through the rain—luckily now mostly coming from behind her since she had her back to the northeast—and carefully, gently, despite the pain of working with her hands over her head and racking the overstretched muscles of her shoulders and arms—began to work the strip through between the window and its frame just below where the handle would be.

  And at this point the alarm would have silently gone off except for my new good friend Ciara. Who is really amazingly clever.

  Not only had she recognized the alarm system and analyzed it, but despite the ugly stress she was under, from the situation and Nicolai personally, she’d thought to look for it. That argued for a clever mind, and a basically alert one too. Even clever people were often too focused on themselves to really take in the world around them.

  “Bendita seas, muchacha,” Luz said softly. “You were right. I have to do this for you too. Not only, but too.”

  The strip was through, and she relaxed her teeth on the torch. The light went out, but the darkness was so complete that she could see the glow of the cooling filament inside the bulb for several instants. She slowly pressed the strip upward, fractions of an inch at a time; it was just as essential not to mark the paint visibly as it was to get the window open. The information was only valuable if Abteilung IIIb didn’t know anyone else had it.

  Resistance. Luz pushed upward again, steadily, gently. A little yielding, disguised by the spring steel’s flexibility. Rain was making even the roughened surface of the leather on the fingertips of the gloves slippery; she corrected her grip and pushed upward. Bit by bit . . . and then the window started to swing open. She halted it instantly, lest water get in and leave traces. The strip went back into the pouch at her waist, and she brought the haversack on her back around. What was on top beneath the buckled flap was mostly cloth sheeting from Castle Rauenstein’s stores. Luckily nobody was going to miss it, with a major exodus tomorrow morning.

  Or rather, when they miss it they’ll know exactly what happened to it; those thieving bandit bastards in von Hindenburg’s HQ company special train stole it.

  If there was one universal constant of military life it was foraging, including the view that stealing from people in your own immediate unit, your uniformed family, was unforgivable, but robbing strangers in the same uniform was simply showing soldierly initiative and only slightly worse than taking things from civilians or the enemy. Your friends were what counted.

  Luz opened the window, and warm air struck h
er like the forgiving breath of the God she didn’t believe in. Slide a hand beneath the flap of her haversack, grab the edge of the sheet, flick it through the window and open, toss the haversack after it. Jump and catch the stone and keep the momentum going and through in a forward roll. Turn and swing the window shut again . . .

  She collapsed to the sheets, teeth chattering, retching dryly. The room wasn’t warm, not by any sane standards, well under sixty degrees, but it felt warm, without making her feel any less miserably cold. Gradually she won back her self-control, pulled off the hood and the rest of the pajamas and dropped them to the sheet. Then she pulled the second, smaller cloth of actual toweling out of the haversack and used it to mop herself until she wouldn’t drip, working up a little circulation with the scratchy-soft surface as she did. For a small mercy the hood had kept her hair merely damp rather than sopping.

  The windows had blinds, and it was the work of a moment to pull them down; it wouldn’t do to have anyone seeing lights. Even heavy rain might not hide a glowing window. She set the electric torch on Colonel Nicolai’s desk, pointing upward, and turned the dial that surrounded the bulb. That opened out in mirrored segments and the light grew brighter, enough to cast her shadow gigantic on the wall. It would drain the battery more quickly, even the incredibly compact, powerful products of the secret labs, but she wouldn’t be needing it for long. Then she unpacked the rest of the haversack. That contained the business part of the camera that had been in her handbag, and the very latest development from the labs: miniature lightbulbs containing fine filaments in an atmosphere of pure oxygen, ready to yield a moment of intense light for taking photographs in darkness. The rest of the world used a trough of magnesium powder, which worked but was impossibly cumbersome for this. She supposed that eventually the little bulbs would become commonplace, but it was good to have the best toys first.

  “And here are good Colonel Nicolai’s map racks,” Luz murmured to herself. “All still set up from your last conference with von Hindenburg and Ludendorff and the admiral. How fortunate we had good luck with the weather before everything was packed away. There is a special Providence that protects children, drunks, and the United States of America, and also this Cubana-Irish-American standing freezing in the altogether.”

  She did a quick search for the usual tricks of the trade, hairs kept in place by minute dabs of spirit gum and so forth, but there weren’t any.

  Any that I can detect, Luz reminded herself, as she fixed the exact position of everything she planned to touch in her mind . . . using Kim’s Game again, and very useful it was too. It was surprising how much actual spy work borrowed from fiction.

  Colonel Nicolai, I do believe you’re overconfident of the security of this eagle’s nest of yours. And probably you’re very picky about who you let in here, so you’d have to do all the little chores yourself. Tsk. Bad balance-of-risk assessment.

  The maps—they were U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey issue, and recent ones—were of the harbors of the cities south from Halifax; she whistled silently as she flipped through the stack and saw how many there were. This attack was no piker, no case of doing an enemy a small injury. It would hit every major shipping point on the East and Gulf Coasts; probably it would cut the cargo capacity down to a small fraction of what was necessary to sustain an army across the Atlantic and keep it down for months if not years, besides the carnage and panic. Most of the ports were assigned a pair of U-boats, but not all; New York got six. Savannah, Georgia, had only one. The location of each was carefully marked, with notes on precise distances to landmarks and the orientation of the submarine when it was put on the bottom in attack position.

  A cryptic notation, Auf/u/Ang . . .

  It’s an abbreviation, I think. Auf/u/Ang. That would be something like Aufstieg und Angriff. Rise and Attack. Or . . . come to the surface and attack? The number . . . that’s time in military twenty-four-hour reckoning. All of them set to catch the maximum number of people going to work to kill off the skilled labor.

  The haversack included an aluminum frame for holding the camera when she was photographing documents. She set it up, locked the camera itself in place with a set of wing-nut fasteners, and centered the first map beneath it. The little bulb screwed into a socket near the camera; she stopped and blew on her fingers and worked them until they were supple enough to fasten the delicate connections to the battery. Then she covered the whole with a folding cloth of dense stuff.

  A tube and squeeze bulb set the camera and flash off simultaneously. She squeezed her eyes shut and glanced away each time she triggered it, but the flash from beneath the edges of the cloth was still bright. A dozen times, and just the maps; it would be lovely if there were engineering drawings of the specialized U-boats they were planning on using, but there wasn’t time. Then she stowed the camera and frame and put the haversack back on the sheeting with her clothes and used the electric torch to examine the desk, wiping carefully with a cloth and making sure that nothing was disturbed—pen, inkstand (evidently Colonel Nicolai didn’t use a newfangled reservoir pen), telephone stands.

  The maps were more delicate still; each had to go into its original pigeonhole in the wall rack, and then she had to use the memory game to recall exactly how each had been rolled, which edge had been uppermost, which had shown a slight bit of corner because it was rolled unevenly . . .

  Closing and locking the window behind her would require a slipknot in a very thin strong cord; she set that up before she raised the blinds again. Then she had to re-don the cold, clammy-wet silks and use the sheeting to remove any trace of moisture from the floor. Out into the rain again, and the window; the beat of the cold sluicing drops on her back seemed to make something heavy settle in her stomach.

  I have a million American lives in here, she thought, reaching back to touch the haversack, now mostly stuffed with sodden sheets but also carrying the crucial roll of exposed film.

  And possibly the outcome of the Great War. Get going, mi corazón. It’s a voyage of discoveries and firsts. How often do you get to save the world?

  * * *

  • • •

  Luz was only vaguely conscious of Ciara’s frantic hands pulling her limp body through the window. She wanted to say, Pull up the rope, there’s stuff tied to the other end, but she was barely aware that the other woman did it anyway. Strong hands under her armpits pulling her toward the fire, pulling off the sopping pajamas and undergarments, toweling her down, and wrapping her in heated blankets.

  That’s right, she thought absently, disconnected from her limp body. She looked after her sick father for a long time. She’s used to dealing with invalids.

  A cup against her lips; she gulped strong sweet wine mulled until it was just enough below boiling point to be drinkable, coughed, gulped more. It was a terrible thing to do to a first-class Moselle dessert wine, but that didn’t bother her now as heat exploded in her midsection. The gray at the edge of the world drew back a little, but that made her more conscious of the utter misery of her body, and she started to shake uncontrollably. The blankets were ruthlessly pulled away and another set wrapped around her, almost painfully hot. Luz clutched them and managed to choke out, “Muchísimas gr-gr-gracias, querida,” between chattering teeth.

  “Oh, Mother of God, don’t try to talk,” Ciara said. “Here, eat some of this chocolate.”

  Luz managed to get several mouthfuls down and keep them from coming right back up. She sighed deeply and collapsed onto her side as the shaking subsided into shivering, feeling the heat of the coal fire on her face. Ciara knelt beside her in her nightrobe, eyes wide and hand moving out uncertainly.

  “Toes,” Luz said, sighing again as something unclenched in the center of her body.

  Ciara looked down; her own bare feet were not far from Luz’s face where it lay in a cocoon of blankets.

  “What is it, Luz dear?” she said anxiously.

  “You .
. . have . . .” Luz said slowly; sheets of darkness were descending, warm as the fire or the blankets, and there seemed to be no difference between thought and words and the world. “. . . such . . . lovely toes.”

  Blackness.

  THIRTEEN

  Schloss Rauenstein

  Kingdom of Saxony, German Reich

  SEPTEMBER 11TH, 1916(B)

  The secret is to exclude light,” Luz said as she set the roll of exposed film that was the fruit of last night’s efforts in the depression and pressed until the studs at each end of the cylinder clicked home in the built-in guides. “Then it’s just a matter of machinery that can pull the film through the chemical baths at set intervals.”

  “The devil is in the details,” Ciara said, looking at the device with fascination. “Someone paid attention to them!”

  The room itself was dim; the day outside was overcast and wet and cold. Luz had slept ten hours and woken ravenous, which was a good sign, and with a splitting headache, which wasn’t. Aspirin and the very late breakfast that Ciara had fetched and the last of her hoard of coquitos had helped, but she still felt heavy.

  Heavy and slow. You were pushing yourself very hard there, mi corazón. Heavy rain just above freezing can kill you almost as fast as going into the drink off the Titanic. You’ll need a couple of days of rest to be at your best again.

  Now that she was near a good coal fire and she’d eaten, that didn’t seem quite so depressing. She certainly hadn’t felt ready to confront a room full of cheerful German officers a few hours ago, unless she absolutely had to, and thanks to Ciara she hadn’t.