by G T Almasi
It’s unprecedented for us to get bumped off the comm-grid like this. I can’t imagine ExOps being so pissed about Bastogne they’d fucking abandon us. Especially since my unofficial Front Desk is my dad.
We thought about asking Hector to check in with his employer, Ambassador Kennedy, but we decided JFK wouldn’t know what the heck to tell us, plus he’d be obligated to report the call to the State Department and we don’t want to reveal ourselves to anyone who…well, anyone who isn’t one of my parents, I guess.
After Talon hitched her ride east, we bugged outta Bastogne as well, but all of our worries have come with us. I grip the steering wheel too tightly, which makes my knuckles hurt. My left eyelid flutters up and down a few times. I wink my left eye shut to hold my eyelid in place and grumpily continue driving. We cross into Germany with me peeking out of one eye, steering with my knees, and gnawing the inside of my mouth.
They can’t be that mad at us.
What if something happened in D.C.? Maybe another bombing? What if Cleo was nearby?
I bite my lip so tightly I wince and almost cry out. Thinned blood seeps between my teeth. I try to focus on piloting Pepé Le Porsche south toward Karlsruhe, home of Europe’s leading technology university. The school is a logical place for a Carbon lab, and our original Job Number anticipates it’ll be Fredericks’s next stop. Patrick figures we might as well press on with Operation SCORPIO until we reconnect with ExOps.
He also reckons the mess in Bastogne was a trap laid by Mister Scorpio himself. First a set of orders that—on reflection—must have been counterfeit. Then a preprogrammed denial-of-service attack from our location that crashes the agency’s comm-grid. Finally, the appearance of Fredericks’s personal bodyguard, who probably didn’t expect us to be reinforced by another Level.
Speaking of whom, Hector is scrunched sideways across Pepé’s skinny backseat, nursing a steady dose of whatever pain managers Russian Levels use. Whatever it is, he’s been asleep for about an hour. This is just as well since his shooting match versus Talon did not go in his favor.
Until earlier this morning, I’d barely seen our erstwhile comrade in action. He let us comm into his Day Loop so we could view Talon’s ambush from the beginning. Her first shot had Hector dead to rights, but the shifty Russian dodged his head just in time and the bullet snapped past his ear.
As Hector dove for safety, Talon’s next round deflected off his SoftArmor. After that, all T-Bitch could do was try to grind the pope statue to dust, one bullet hole at a time.
While I approached from the roof, Hector advanced to cut off our opponent’s retreat. When Talon dropped down to the alley, she caught Hector in the open and fired straight at his armored body. Although her pistol’s bullet didn’t penetrate Hector’s SoftArmor, it did fracture a pair of his ribs.
We made a first-aid stop after we’d been on the road for half an hour or so. Hector, it turns out, is a decent field medic. He gently cleaned and disinfected Patrick’s wound and then did a much tidier job of patching him up than I did. My partner returned the favor by washing out the cuts on Hector’s head while I helped the man wrap his black-and-blue chest and stomach to stabilize his impact injuries.
We enter Karlsruhe and drive toward the town’s famous geek school. I park beside the town’s Fasanengarten, a tree-filled mini wilderness near the university.
“Darwin,” I say, “Talon isn’t done with us.”
“Agreed.”
We review our options. Talon found us because her boss:
A) Can monitor ExOps comms.
B) Is receiving intel about our movements from his host-captors, the Gestapo.
C) Some other fucking thing we haven’t thought of.
But Jakob isn’t even our biggest concern anymore. His defection and political monkey-wrenching unleashed a coupnami that’s rocked the Reich from stem to stern. The car’s radio blares with news of how every Province in Europe is clawing for their chance to either strike off on their own or perhaps take over the Reich to milk the Great Tit of Power.
As we hoped, with Heydrich six feet under, the Luftwaffe switched to the Good Guys. Now Berlin’s Loyalists have everything they need to suppress Markus Wolf’s rebellion and pacify the warring Provinces—except a cohesive army.
Covert agents like us are doing what we can—namely, blaze ribbons of panic and confusion among our enemies. What we cannot do is capture and hold real estate. Neither can pilots. Foot soldiers can—but unless the German Army gets off its ass, Wolf will continue to build his base of influence until he’s too powerful to stop.
This could really happen. Greater Germany’s dominant ground force, the Wehrmacht, has splintered into more pieces than a baseball bat in a toothpick factory. The country’s crisis of confidence in the chancellor has cost him the good faith of his General Staff and decapitated the army’s Gorgon-like chain of command. Full independence from civilian authority: It’s every officer’s dream. Except—surprise!—the reality is a nightmare because none of the Unterführers know where to go or who to fight. Leaderless and paralyzed, the isolated units watch over their own outposts, but little else.
“Fuck it.” I turn around in my seat. “Hector! Wake up!”
Hector’s eyes pop open and his right hand zings to his pistol strapped to his side. The thugnik winces as he sits up to look out the windows.
He lets go of his pistol. “Karlsruhe?”
“Yeah. You hungry?”
“Yes.” He gently touches the vividly stained bandages on his head and the appropriated pair of slacks we tied around his torso to hold his ribs in place. “But I am also conspicuous.”
“Me, too.” Patrick indicates the bloody gauze wrap holding his left ear in place.
I have a few small bandages on my head from the grenade at the missile silo, but for the most part they’re hidden by my hair. Obviously, I’m the one who has to go check things out, but that doesn’t mean I’ll make it easy for my teammates.
“Do you princesses want your gowns dry-cleaned while I fetch room service?”
Patrick deadpans, “Tell them no starch this time.”
I get out of the car, slam the door, and stalk across the street toward the college. Students are always hungry; there’s gotta be food around.
“Hey!” Brando comms. “You didn’t take our orders!”
“I’ll get you guys the usual.”
“What’s that?”
“Shit sandwich.”
“Blech.”
Genteel stone-and-brick structures poke above the park’s thick stands of trees. Paved paths curve from one little sitting area to another. I walk around the back side of a broad academic building and emerge in a large open quadrangle.
The quad is full of people, but not students. Rows and rows of camouflage tents stretch out of sight. Between the tents are precisely trimmed dirt lanes. Thousands of uniformed ruffians bustle around the camp. Everyone seems keen to get where they’re going, like something is about to happen. They all wear black uniforms.
I duck back behind the building. “Darwin, Hector. You’d better get over here.”
Patrick replies. “What’d you find?”
“An entire regiment of Staatszeiger jagoffs.”
“On our way.”
I study the scene. To the left is a collection of military vehicles, mostly armored half-tracks. An area to the right has been cleared for a brooding pair of attack helicopters. The center is dedicated to tents, mess trucks, and an assembly area.
Patrick and Hector arrive.
“Damn,” my partner breathes. “Where’d the SZ get so many guys?”
Hector presses his left hand over his wrapped-up ribs while his right holds his pistol. “They have absorbed the Wehrmacht battalion from this sector.”
Brando and I look a question at Hector, who says, “Observe closely at the
ir uniforms, bulvans.”
Dummies, eh?
I reexamine Camp Bluto. Hector’s correct: Some of the busy-bees are regular army. They’ve supplemented their field-gray uniforms with black armbands bearing a hastily attached Gestapo eagle.
“Darwin,” I say, “still no word from ExOps?”
“Nothing. Almost twenty-four hours now.”
“What’s going on? Where the hell is everybody?”
“I don’t know.” He continues observing the enemy camp. “Hector, your Greeter assignment is technically over, right?”
“Yes.”
“So nobody knows you’re still with Scarlet and me.”
“Correct.”
Brando thinks for a moment, then says, “Can you comm Ambassador Kennedy’s office for a sit-rep about ExOps?”
“On the ride here, I tried. Everything about ExOps has been reclassified past my access. Perhaps not even the ambassador knows what is going on. But there is another source of information.” Hector gestures for us to follow him. “This way; I think I saw something.”
Our strange bedfellow leads us to the rear side of the building. A gray door sits flush with the wall, above a plain concrete landing. The landing has a heavy, semicircular scrape etched into it. This out-of-the-way door gets opened a lot considering the only thing written on it is the word VERBOTEN.
Anything labeled “forbidden” makes grade-A spy bait. My partner picks the lock and steps back to let Hector go first. We play follow-the-Russian down a long flight of cold stone steps. As we descend into the unlit space, the ambient sound outside is replaced by the hum of an industrial-strength ventilation system.
At the bottom of the stairs we turn on the lights. It’s another cloning chamber. As usual, the walls are lined with specimen capsules and the center is dominated by a big silvery box. It’s like the others, except this place is unoccupied. No clones, no Original, and no technicians.
Also, no Fredericks. Brando and I walk around the lab to confirm its emptiness while Hector takes a seat at a jackframe terminal.
“Shit,” I mutter. The place is indeed deserted.
“Darwin, Scarlet,” Hector comms.
“What’s up?”
“I have tapped into Carbon’s communication network.”
“So?”
“Perestan’ bit dabayobom,” Hector curses at us. “Carbon is how the Gestapo now talk to each other, remember?”
Patrick tilts his head so he faces the ceiling and exhales sharply. It’s my partner’s nonverbal way of saying, I should’ve thought of that.
I console Brando with a pat on the shoulder and ask Hector, “Anything about ExOps?”
“About your agency there is nothing, but here is information pertaining to your mission. The secret police have taken to Munich your Director Fredericks.”
“And Talon?”
“No sign of her. But she terrifies them greatly.”
As well she should.
Patrick and I sit next to each other on a table. “Anything else?”
“They wait for…what does this mean?” Hector looks at us. “The Gestapo wait for a ‘package from Antwerp.’ ”
Antwerp.
My response is cut off by a shrill howl from upstairs. The room rocks from floor to ceiling. The concussion knocks Patrick and me off the table. Hector’s chair flips over and drops him on his head. Reality as I know it becomes a wall of pure noise crashing through my body like a bull through a bell factory.
Finally the explosions stop. Dusty rubble tumbles from newly formed crevices in the walls and ceiling. Faintly, from above, we hear men’s voices shouting. We get to our feet and charge up the stairs to the surface.
The scene outside is completely transformed. Half of the buildings around the quadrangle are blazing shells. The SZ camp is wreathed in flames. Pieces of soldiers dangle from what’s left of the trees. Survivors hotfoot it out of the area.
Two jet fighters wing over the campus. Their machine guns rip rows of shot-up earth, shredded tents, and mangled jarheads. The planes leave as quickly as they appeared.
A pair of soldiers emerge from the smoke and face the departing aircraft. One trooper hoists what appears to be a huge bazooka onto his shoulder.
Patrick comms, “Stachelrakete.” Stinger missile.
Bazooka Fritz fires his weapon. The recoil staggers him, but his buddy holds him up. The rocket erupts from the launcher and streaks after the Luftwaffe attackers.
The two jets split up. One descends to the treetops while the other powers into a vertical climb. The missile tracks the high-flying plane. The pilot tilts his jet onto its belly and begins weaving and rolling wildly. The rocket gropes closer and closer until the two contrails are right next to each other. The warhead explodes and rips the plane’s tail off. The jet is blown into a falling spiral. A small white puff of smoke pops out of the cockpit, followed by a blossoming parachute.
The Staatszeiger missile team on the ground are so busy congratulating one another, they fail to notice another pair of Luftwaffe planes swooping in. The pilots unleash their machine guns and tear the two SZ wretches apart. The riddled Stachelrakete is knocked across the ground like a broken branch.
Patrick peers up at the sky. “Let’s scram.”
The three of us run back to the Porsche. We’re about to cross the street when Li’l Bertha jiggles a warning from her holster.
“Wait!” I shout, reaching for my pistols.
Brando and Hector stop in their tracks. A shot rings out from the trees in the park straight ahead. Hector flies off his feet and flops on his back like he’s been hit by a bus. He cries out and presses a hand to his chest.
Madrenaline gushes into my nervous system. My vision Mods kick in and my legs whisk me across the street toward the shooter in a single bound. I juke back and forth, pressing toward the orange person behind the dull-green trees. Another shot bangs through the trees. I approach the warm shape only to realize it isn’t moving. I switch to regular optics. It’s a dead SZ cud-chomper, propped against a tree trunk.
Sneaky fucking bitch!
A third shot, very near. My knees crouch reflexively while Li’l Bertha’s gyros spin so hard she nearly pulls my arm off. My LB506 upshifts to “Murdilate” and bangs out a convoy of .50-caliber Explosives. Before I can turn my head to see what Li’l Bertha is shooting at, my vision swirls like a blender. Everything goes dark. The leafy ground bashes into my face and I tumble into a black abyss.
19
My mother emerges from the sea like the birth of Venus. With her are three little girls, arguing to be Cleo’s favorite. The fight grows more and more intense until two of the girls hold the third below the water and drown her. Then the final pair turn on each other and savage the other so severely they plunge below the gentle waves and vanish.
Through all this, Cleo remains completely serene. She stares at me for some time without speaking. When she finally opens her mouth, her voice is much lower than I remember it.
THIRTY SECONDS LATER, FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 10:29 A.M. CEST
I croak like a frog as my back arches off the ground. My lungs burn coal-hot until I inhale what feels like a cubic mile of air. My Mods have crashed. I watch everything reboot on my Eyes-Up display. I notice a digital circle slowly filling itself in. It’s the capacitor for my onboard defibrillator.
“Scarlet?” Patrick’s voice warbles from…somewhere. Dizziness grips me like a drunken boa constrictor. My Nerve Jet hit me with its maximum dose of Overkaine and CoAgs. This chem cocktail threatens to slip my noggin from its moorings.
I peek from behind my eyelids. My head is in Patrick’s lap. Past his face, dark-green leaves spin against the flint-colored sky. The underside of Brando’s jaw is bruised and one of his eyes is watering.
I lightly brush my fingers along his bruise. “What hap
pened to you?”
“Oh,” he says. “I clonked myself in the face when I revived you.”
My voice scrapes like granite in a cheese grater. “You’re supposed to clear before you—”
“Yeah, I know,” he says, irritated with himself. “I just forgot.”
I look around. Hector lies in the street, completely still except for his breathing.
Patrick follows my eyes. “Talon nailed him right in his chest, but I think he turned away from her shot enough that it deflected off his SoftArmor.”
I prop myself on my elbows. Liquid heat seeps through something on my scalp. The warm wet trickles down my cheek. I touch my head.
Bandage.
Ouch.
I take a deep breath and try to orient myself. I remember Hector falling, but after that…
“What happened?”
“It was Talon. Tap into my Day Loop, and I’ll show you.”
I comm into my partner’s Loop. He rewinds his view a minute or so and activates the replay function.
It’s weird to see myself through his eyes. We tried this once during sex and my near-orgasm face looked so silly I cracked up and completely ruined the mood. Laughter may be the best medicine, but it’s ice water in the bedroom.
Patrick was trailing Hector and me as we crossed the street, so I see our Russian comrade and myself from behind. I look past my own shoulder at what I now know to be Talon’s hiding spot. In the blink of an eye her weapon’s muzzle flash leaps from the bushes, Hector cries out, and I pull out my pistols. Patrick crouches and glances at Hector as the man lands on his back.
My partner looks from our wounded companion to me as I splash into the brushery. There’s a moment of furtive rustling, which must be me finding the dead trooper. The lull is terminated by a fusillade of small-arms fire, punctuated by shrieks and shouts and detonations from Li’l Bertha’s explosive rounds. I leap backward into view. A shot from Talon spangs across the top of my scalp, slams my head sharply to one side, and knocks me out cold. Even as my knees buckle under me, my left arm extends toward the foliage and fires Li’l Bertha. She slings such a dense pattern of bullets even Talon’s Vapor Mod can’t avoid them all. The girl’s high scream pierces the echoing pistol shots and abruptly concludes Psycho Siren Bowl III.