Final impact aot-3

by John Birmingham

  “Not long at all,” Lohrey answered. “Those things are really moving.”

  She nodded at a large screen to her right.

  The Havoc’s Combat Intelligence had a fix on eighty-two rocket bombs screaming toward the Soviets in a long stream. Apparently there was no forming up into squadrons for the attack. The Ohkas just took off and made for the enemy at top speed.

  “Amanda, as Captain Judge would say, git-r-done.”

  D-DAY + 39. 11 JUNE 1944. 0351 HOURS.

  PACIFIC AREA OF OPERATIONS.

  As he sped toward his death, Corporal Chuji Asami could not shake the image of the girl, Reiko, who had tormented him so with her cat. Asami had always hated cats. It was only natural, having been born in the Year of the Mouse.

  Around him the world had contracted to the cramped cockpit of the rocket bomb. The roar of the engine was so powerful, the tremors of the airframe so violent, that he felt as though he was trapped at the very center of an earthquake. Asami gripped the flight stick so tightly that his arms ached, and he tried to concentrate on following the long line of exhaust plumes that stretched out in front of the bubble canopy, like a string of shooting stars. But he seemed fated to face the end of his life pursued by the memory of Reiko, giggling as she chased him around the little noodle house in Chiran Town, holding her cat up like an evil charm.

  Was it his fault that he couldn’t stand to be in the same room as the filthy animal? Could he help it if his face contorted and his flesh crawled at the very sight of the beast? How many times had he complained to Torihamasan? But his friends in the squadron thought it a great joke, and they encouraged the girl in her endeavors, roaring with laughter when Asami fell off his stool in his haste to escape the little troll and her pet. It was only natural that the girl’s parents would not discipline her, given the joy she brought to the Thunder Gods with her antics.

  That’s what they were known as now. The Thunder Gods. Meteors screaming toward destruction. His friends. His leader, Lieutenant Uemura.

  That would be Uemura, up ahead. One, two, three, four exhaust plumes. He was much older than the rest of the squadron. Twenty-five to Asami’s seventeen. A graduate of Rikkyo University, and a father, while most of the men did not even have girlfriends. Asami’s heart swelled with memories of how diligently the lieutenant had trained them, how he had looked after them as though they were his own family. He was a kind man, unusually so. He had taken all of his charges to one last meal at Torihama’s noodle house before they left Chiran for the fleet base at Hashirajima.

  Uemura had produced a barrel of junmai-shu sake from somewhere-a rare treat in these hard times-and among them they had sipped to the last draft. Asami had been so drunk, he had not been able to change the records on the phonograph. And of course Reiki had waited until he was almost incapable of fleeing before suddenly leaping at him from the shadows with the cat in her hand. Such a shock had he received that he bumped his head on a low beam trying to get away. He could feel the gash rubbing against his goggles even now.

  Everyone had roared with laughter, but Lieutenant Uemura had picked him up off the floor and shooed the cat away.

  “A mouse you may be, Corporal Asami,” he’d said, laughing, “but soon the little mouse will terrify a great elephant. Yes?”

  “Yes!” Asami had agreed, nodding his head so vigorously that a few drops of blood flew from the graze he had given himself.

  “Then drink up, little mouse! You have earned it.”

  The roar of his friends that night echoed still beneath the roar of his engines. Below, and away to the west, a low moon threw a curving scimitar of flickering light across the waters. Ahead of them, the volcanic peaks of the lower Kurils glowed a dim ruby red. To the east a new dawn hovered on the cusp of the world.

  Asami wondered if Uemura was thinking of his family.

  Masahisa Uemura’s heart ached. The lieutenant had fixed a small doll to his dashboard where he could see it easily. It belonged to his little daughter, Motoko, who had played with it in her crib, and it bore the marks of having been chewed and sucked and handled roughly by her. He intended to focus only on the doll as he plunged his rocket plane into the enemy. That moment, the ending of his life, could not be far away now.

  As they approached the volcanic range that shielded them from the Russians his stomach felt like it was trying to rise up into his mouth. The Ohka’s airframe shuddered at it plowed into weird, contrary masses of air. He’d struck pockets of turbulence and thickness and strange, empty spaces that were less than nothing. The fiery peaks rushed toward him at an insane rate.

  Life rushed away just as quickly. The life he would have led raising little Motoko. Her life, which he would never know, but for which he was about to die.

  He craned around as far as could in the restricted confines of his flying coffin. As far as he could tell the men remained in position behind him. He felt better, thinking about that. They were good boys. The bravest of the brave, and he hoped he had trained them well. They were all that stood between the Japanese people, the emperor, and annihilation at the hands of the Communists. He was sure they would do their duty. If only he could be certain that it would mean anything-that the admiral’s gambit would pay off. After all, this was not the mission they had trained for.

  As he swept through the gap between Kunashir and Iturup islands he caught his first glimpse of the invasion fleet: a dozen or more vessels anchored offshore, their running lights blinking in the gloom. With their speed it seemed they would be past the enemy’s lead elements well before he could respond, and indeed, the Communists fell behind him before he observed any reaction on their part. It was probable, however, that the last of the Ohkas would fly into a barrage from those ships as the crews realized an attack was under way.

  Uemura wrested the plane around on a new heading, taking her a few degrees to the northwest, where the bulk of the Soviet armada lay ahead. He had a very short time left to spend in the same world as his wife and beloved daughter now. A quick check of his wings told him that the guidance lights were functioning properly. His men would be watching closely, trusting in him to lead them toward the quarry. They had been assigned the task of the striking at one of the two “helicopter carriers” identified as potential command centers for the invaders. Little was known of how the Soviet air defenses might perform against them, but hopes were high. They could not be anywhere near as advanced as the Americans or the Emergence barbarians.

  Some of the Thunder Gods should get through.

  To the left of his cockpit the northern shores of Hokkaido ripped past. He took a moment to savor the view. Soon he would have no time, and everything would pass in a blur. He sent his daughter a last prayer, reciting the lines of the letter he had left for her.

  Motoko, you often looked and smiled at my face. You slept in my arms, and we took baths together. When you grow up and want to know about me, ask your mother and Aunt Kayo. I gave you your name, hoping you would be a gentle, tenderhearted, and caring person. I wish you happiness when you grow up and hope you become a splendid bride, and even though I die without you knowing me, you must never feel sad.

  As the sun’s first rays poured over the horizon, he chanced a brief gesture, taking one hand off the control stick to stroke the small doll his daughter had played with and enjoyed so much.

  When you grow up and want to meet me, pray deeply, and surely your father’s face will show itself within your heart. You must not think of yourself as a child without a father. I will always protect you as I do right now.

  And then, it was time.

  The enemy ships had appeared in the distance before them.

  26

  D-DAY + 38. 11 JUNE 1944. 0734 HOURS.

  HMS TRIDENT, NORTH SEA.

  The smell of something like bratwurst awoke him.

  “Sorry, guv’nor, but it’s sausage sangers for you this morning. Bit of a blow on, you see. No sit-down feed this morning.”

  “Was ist los?” he asked in his o
wn language, before remembering where he was. “Sorry. What do you mean?”

  The English sailor passed him a sausage wrapped in a piece of white bread. Brasch had to brace himself against a bulkhead so as not to go tumbling out of his bunk and onto the floor.

  “See what I mean, guv. Got some big seas today. Had to nuke this up for you. Couldn’t use the fryer. Brought some coffee, too. Black, two sugars.”

  As he shook the cobwebs from his head, Brasch thought he understood. They were in the middle of a storm, or at least a rough passage of water, so the galley could not operate as normal. It was good to know that these people hadn’t mastered everything. He nodded his thanks as he took the “sanger” and the plastic squeeze bottle with his coffee. The sailor tipped him an informal salute and waited until the ship rolled in the right direction to take him out of the small cabin. Brasch noted that a new guard had come on duty while he’d been asleep.

  He checked his watch. He had slept for twelve hours. Exhaustion had caught up with him. Not just the physical and mental strain of his escape, but something more. A release of some sort. For two years he had expected to die in a Gestapo cell. His one respite from the gnawing terror had been the knowledge that his family was safe, somewhere in Canada. He had not been conscious of the effort involved in suppressing his fears for the future of his wife and boy, but it had been enormous.

  Now, with the very real possibility that he might not just see them again, but that they might live out a normal life, uncontaminated by the poison of the Nazis…well, it was almost too much to bear. Brasch felt giddy, as though teetering on a precipice, which in a way he was. Fate was about to spill him into an entirely new life. Just as it had when he’d survived that day at Belgorod, and been sent east to investigate the arrival of the Sutanto. The ship from the future.

  He ate the sandwich in three bites, amazed at how the small patch on his inner wrist had quelled his usual seasickness. A few sucks on the coffee bottle revived him even further. The ship’s cook brewed an excellent espresso. When he was finished, he swung his feet down and climbed into his boots. The British had given him new clothes, a comfortable civilian outfit. It was odd to think that he would never wear a uniform again. They had relieved him of his flexipad and sidearm, which was to be expected. Otherwise, apart from the guard on his door, he’d been treated with rare civility.

  “Excuse me, sir.”

  Brasch looked up from doing his laces. The guard had put his head inside.

  “When you’re ready, General. The captain would like a chat, sir.”

  Brasch nodded as he finished. Steadying himself, he waited for a sympathetic movement of the ship and used it to propel himself upward with at least some control. He had no idea how these nautical types put up with this rubbish. The Sutanto had been even worse.

  The ship plowed into the base of a steep wave and began to climb. Forcing him to haul himself out of his cabin and into the companionway, where he found an additional guard waiting for him. Whenever he moved about the ship he always had at least two overseers, but they were unfailingly polite, even deferential, as far as it went.

  The three men struggled along the corridor, flexing their knees as the deck shifted beneath them. About thirty meters down they climbed to a lower deck and doubled back, ending up somewhere beneath his cabin. Brasch swung in through the door as indicated and found himself in a darkened room, with a handful of Allied personnel gathered around a bank of large, glowing computer screens. Brasch had never made it aboard the Dessaix while it was being stripped, but he imagined it must have looked something like this. As advanced as the Sutanto had appeared to him at first, this vessel was obviously a great deal more sophisticated. The British had not been very forthcoming in answering his questions about it, though.

  The Trident’s commander, the half-caste woman Halabi, was waiting for him with Prince Harry and a small group of men and women, none of whom he recognized.

  “Good morning, Herr General,” Halabi said. “I’m glad to see you got your head up. I take it the Promatil patch is working.”

  “Yes,” he answered. “It is working very well indeed, thank you, Captain. Is there something I can help you with? I thought I was supposed to be transferring to land today.”

  Halabi, who seemed to have no trouble maintaining her balance in the difficult conditions, waved a hand at one of the screens. “My colleagues wanted your input on a few questions, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  Brasch shrugged. “I imagine I’ll be doing nothing but answering questions for a long time to come.”

  “I’m afraid so.” She pointed to a distinguished-looking man seated at the table, wearing a British army uniform. “Colonel Hart.”

  The officer smiled unsteadily at Brasch. He was having a hard time with the violent movement. “Herr General. Young Harry’s been telling us of your adventures in Paris. Sounds like a smashing time.”

  Brasch returned the smile uncertainly. “Like most adventures, it was best experienced in the telling, rather than the execution.”

  “Marvelous,” Colonel Hart said. “Now, if I might. Would you mind awfully telling us if you chaps had any plans for using germ bombs, or poison gas?”

  The abrupt change in topic caught him somewhat off-guard, and he had to search for an answer. It wasn’t that he wanted to hide anything. Rather, it was that he didn’t want to appear to be doing so.

  “I didn’t work on any such projects myself,” he said at last. “It wasn’t my specialty. But I understand Himmler did have a special projects section of the SS investigating such weapons. When it became apparent that the atomic program might not deliver quickly enough, he was quite desperate to find an alternative. Why? Has someone used such a weapon?”

  “Not on us,” Hart replied, before moving aside to give Brasch an unrestricted view of the large computer screen behind him.

  Captain Halabi spoke up as he did so. “These images were captured by one of our drones a few hours ago,” she explained. “To my people, this looks like a bio-weapon.”

  Brasch looked on with creeping horror as a movie played in a window on the screen. Shells burst among what he assumed to be Soviet troops. A few near the detonation were knocked down by the blast. Then within seconds their comrades had also dropped, their bodies racked by violent seizures. The small room remained in silence while the footage played. At the end of it, Brasch released a deep breath.

  “I see. And how much of this…gas, I suppose…how much has been used?”

  Prince Harry spoke up, his usually jolly personality held in check. “It’s impossible to say with accuracy, but we think at least five SS artillery regiments have been equipped with the stuff.”

  “Only SS?”

  “Yes. No Wehrmacht units, so far.”

  Brasch gripped the back of a chair as the ship took another wild ride through a canyon of seawater. “And tell me, does the effect persist? Are they using it as a-”

  “As an area denial weapon?” Harry finished for him. “Yes. It appears so, which is why we wanted to know if you knew anything of this program. Nerve agents that do not easily disperse tend to come from what we call the V-series. They wouldn’t have been synthesized for another seven or eight years yet. This doesn’t look like the sarin or tabun Hitler began making at the start of the war.”

  Brasch’s lighter mood evaporated, replaced by a dark melancholy that felt all too familiar from his time on the Eastern Front. So inured to surprise had he become since the Emergence-indeed, since his survival at Belgorod-that for a moment part of his mind seemed to float free, to detach itself from his body with a slight tug and hover just above the clutch of military men and women gathered here. Two days earlier, had any of these people chanced to cross his path, they would surely have tried to kill him.

  The disconnected moment collapsed in on itself abruptly as Captain Halabi pressed a hand to her ear and began to speak to someone he could not see. Brasch assumed she enjoyed some sort of communications link, perhaps even embedded in
her body, of which he was ignorant. There had been no guided tour of the Trident for him, but what little he had seen bespoke a level of technological advancement that was still almost incomprehensible.

  “Excuse me,” she said, and Brasch was fascinated to see that they all deferred to this small, colored woman as easily as they might have to Eisenhower himself. “We have more data feeding through on the laser links. Live coverage this time.”

  Halabi then said something in a hushed tone to the machine operator sitting at the console around which they were gathered. The young woman-another schwarzer, although much darker in skin tone than the captain-began to dance her fingers across the screen in front of her. Brasch watched in fascination as items on the display seemed to follow her touch, some collapsing, some inflating to display new windows in which he could see some sort of movie that was running, this time in full color. The woman occasionally dropped her hands to a keyboard and ripped out quick bursts of typing, doubtless entering some command that required more than the brush of a fingertip on a monitor.

  “My Intelligence Division informs me that the Soviets are trying to push a division through a valley just here.” She pointed at a topographic map on one of the screens. “We’d best watch this down in the CIC, but…”

  She favored Brasch with a level stare.

  “Herr General. It’s is not my usual policy to allow enemy combatants into the heart of my ship. But Colonel Windsor and your controllers in London assure me that you can be trusted.”

  Brasch bowed slightly in the direction of the warrior-prince, but Halabi wasn’t finished.

  “I can be trusted, too, Herr General. I can be trusted to have you thrown over the side in heavy chains if you give me even the slightest reason to doubt you.”

  “I would expect no less, Kapitдn. You have quite a fierce reputation in the Reich. Gцbbels calls you the black widow, but the men of the Kriegsmarine prefer the Black Widowmaker,” Brasch said with a wry curve of the lips. He saw Prince Harry smile and heard a couple of the English officers snigger.