Bitter Seeds mt-1

by Ian Tregillis

  Well, at least this will be over quickly, thought Klaus. He sighed, wondering who would get stuck digging the graves for these men. Or perhaps the doctor would test the ovens on their corpses.

  Klaus pulled out a grenade and rushed the invaders.

  Marsh yelled, “Somebody kill those goddamn lights!”

  Will tried to untangle himself from his rifle. The light, the noise, the confusion and panic all melded into a fog. He fumbled with the rifle. How had the strap become wrapped around his arm like this? He couldn't unsling it gracefully. He gave up and took instead the revolver from his belt.

  He stood, squinting up in the direction of the lights. Somebody tackled him. His shot pinged off the metal light boom and went caroming into the woods.

  Lorimer bellowed in his ear. “Don't! Stand! Up!” His hot breath cascaded over Will's face. “Unless you want your chinless head blown apart, you worthless toff.”

  Somebody yelled, “Take cover!”

  Will rolled over, facedown, covering his head and ears with his hands, just as he'd been trained to do. There was a crack and then the ground shook. Clods of earth pelted him. He rolled over just in time to see one of the light booms lean over with much creaking and groaning. It stopped after tipping a few feet out of true. But the night was just as bright as ever.

  He realized that part of the chaos filling his head came from elsewhere, a cacophony of gunfire and explosions. And screaming.

  Is this what you had planned, Pip? Is this how you imagined it?

  Will crawled on his stomach behind the line of men who had taken position at the edge of the tree line. Those who had recovered their senses after the transit from London lay under bare bushes, or hid behind trees, the barrels of their rifles and Bren guns pointed toward the buildings.

  But they weren't, he noticed, firing. They were waiting.

  A wave of dread swept over Will. We haven't been attacked yet and this whole operation has already gone pear-shaped. Snow funneled into his collar as he pulled himself across the ground. Damn you, Stephenson.

  Somebody tossed another Mills bomb. The tilted light boom toppled the rest of the way, crashing to the ground in an eruption of glass and sparks. But two spotlights still highlighted their position.

  Will scuttled over to where Lorimer and Marsh were huddled together. “This isn't working,” said Marsh. “We have to move out.”

  “The pixies will make short work of those lights,” said the Scot.

  Marsh shook his head urgently. “They know our position. Tell the men to move out.”

  “Aye.”

  Marsh crawled over to Will while Lorimer spread the word. “Where's your magic rock?”

  Shit. Will cocked a thumb over his shoulder. “It's, uh, back there.”

  “Don't you dare lose that bloody thing!”

  Marsh was right. Without the stone, they couldn't get back. Will turned and crawled back to where he'd come from.

  Closer to the tree line, Lorimer yelled, “Oy! You lot first! Then the pixies! Twenty meter—”

  He crumpled up like a rag doll, shot into the air, and slammed back down again. The impact rattled Will's bones. Lorimer's body pounded the earth again before spinning off into the forest. It smacked into an oak tree, knocking snow from the boughs. What was left of Lorimer rained to the ground as an unrecognizable mass of bone and meat.

  Marsh noticed, too late, two men standing in the center of the field. He recognized them from the Tarragona filmstrip. One wore a collar; the other stood behind him, yanking on his leash and screaming in his ear.

  Marsh dived for cover. “Fire on those two!” He ordered the squad. “Aim for the battery,” he reminded the snipers.

  They unleashed a volley. It achieved nothing. The rounds stopped in midair a few feet from the leashed man, and tinkled to his feet. The squad's cover started to disappear as trees and shrubs disintegrated explosively, showering them with splinters. The night smelled like sawdust and smokeless powder.

  One man stood and lobbed a Mills bomb at the duo. It stopped a few feet over the leashed man's head, hovered, and then made a snap sound no louder than a Christmas cracker. The fragments of shrapnel fell unceremoniously to the earth.

  Marsh reached for one of the phosphorus grenades on his belt. Just as he prepared to yank the pin, the man who had tossed the Mills got plucked from his hiding spot and rammed into the earth—headfirst—like a tent peg. Marsh opted to stay down instead.

  Time for drastic measures. “Fire a pixie!”

  Lorimer had designed the pixies for use in the heat of combat. Which meant that each had a bright red Bakelite panic button on its base, where it could be tripped by foot or hand, depending on the circumstances. A sniper rolled over to the pixie and kicked the button. “Everybody take cover!” he yelled.

  The pixie emitted a high-pitched whine. The squad made a hasty retreat into the woods.

  Marsh counted backwards. “Ten ... nine ...” He grabbed Will, who was sprawled on the ground clutching the stone to his chest. “Eight ... seven ...” Marsh shoved Will along in front of him. Trees erupted in their wake. “Six ... five ...” More than one man screamed as he got caught up in the destruction. “Four ... three ...” Marsh pushed Will down into the hollow behind a tree stump and landed next to him. “Two ... one.”

  Somewhere in the bowels of Lorimer's machine, an electrical relay clicked shut. It caused a capacitor bank to discharge its hoarded electrical energy through a wire coil. This turned the pixie, ever so briefly, into an electromagnet. A microsecond later, as special circuitry shaped the time profile of the electrical current, a second relay clicked shut. This activated detonators at both ends of a high-explosive cylinder in the center of the coil. This created a pair of convergent shock waves that squeezed the coil and crushed the magnetic field.

  The end result was an electromagnetic pulse tuned to the electrical characteristics of the battery that Milkweed had obtained.

  Bullets sprayed through Klaus's insubstantial body, pattering harmlessly against the brick wall of the ice house behind him. He'd lobbied Doctor von Westarp for a new assignment, something real to do, for months. Now he had a new task, but it didn't fill him with pride as he'd hoped.

  One of the attackers yelled, “It's one of them! It's one of them!” as he fired. He watched, unbelieving, as Klaus approached the submachine gun leveled at his chest.

  Klaus stopped just short of the barrel. He shot the panicky, trigger-happy soldier in the forehead.

  He advanced on the rest of the soldiers. Though they'd watched him kill their companion, they continued to try to shoot him. Klaus imagined it was panic making them dull. Until he heard one of the British order his colleagues:

  “Disable his battery!”

  Somebody yelled something about a “pixie,” but Klaus couldn't make it out over the noise of the gunfire directed at him. One man broke off and ran for a tall pillar of wood and copper wire that the British had apparently brought with them from England. He slapped a large red switch. The pillar started to whine.

  Klaus pulled the pin and dropped the grenade he'd been carrying. It became substantial again when it left his touch. The grenade bounced in the slush at his ghostly feet. It had a four-second fuse.

  The shooters dived for cover behind trees and underbrush. The man who'd gone for the pillar didn't see what Klaus had done. The concussion drove shrapnel through his chest and cracked the pillar in half.

  A blinding flash erupted on the far side of the complex. It came from the east, like a sunrise, but Klaus knew it was Reinhardt blazing brighter than the sun. Klaus was too far away to hear the screams of the men he cooked.

  He checked his battery gauge while the four remaining men climbed to their feet to renew the attack. The battery retained nearly 75 percent of its charge. That was more than enough to finish off these men.

  First, he tried to goad them into shooting each other while he stood between them. To their credit, they didn't fall for it. He jumped through one man, s
pun, stuck his pistol through a second man's chest, fired at a third. The man through whom he'd shot dropped his gun, screaming incoherently as he stared at Klaus's arm protruding from his chest. Klaus withdrew and shot him in the back of the head. The two remaining men tried to empty their magazines into Klaus. He reached into one man's rib cage and squeezed. The dead man collapsed.

  The lights went dead without warning, followed by the thunder of a distant explosion that shook the earth a moment later. A strange and painful surge from his battery left Klaus reeling. The sudden return of night disoriented him; his eyes had adjusted to the glare of the klieg lights.

  The last man took advantage of the distraction and fled into the woods. Klaus tried to give chase by leaping through an ash tree.

  And crashed facefirst into the bole.

  The impact sent him sprawling backwards. He tasted blood, but not the copper tingle of the Gotterelektron. All he could feel was the searing pain of an exposed nerve in his jaw. He'd cracked a tooth in half.

  He rolled over to check his battery gauge. It was dead. It had lost nearly three-quarters of its charge in an instant. Head pounding, he climbed to his feet and switched over to his second battery. This one was low, too, but usable.

  Klaus turned to run after the man who had fled. He stopped short, and almost fell for a second time, because Gretel had come up behind him.

  “Careful, brother.”

  “Gretel? What are you doing out here? It's not safe.”

  “Kammler needs your help. Go, quickly now.”

  As Klaus set off to cut through the battery stores, he said over his shoulder, “Go back inside the farmhouse, Gretel. It's safe there.”

  She might have responded with her accursed little half smile, but it was too dark to see for certain.

  The pixie emitted a burst of violet light when it exploded. The spotlights died in the same instant. The combination left Will blinking furiously, trying to banish the spots behind his eyes.

  The tree stump behind which he and Marsh huddled hadn't disintegrated yet. Nor had any of the adjacent underbrush.

  Next, he noticed the smells: ozone, sharp enough to sting, and entrails. Poor Lorimer.

  “Scheisse!”

  “T-t-t-t—”

  “SCHEISSE!”

  Will peeked over the stump. The yellow glow from the farmhouse windows silhouetted their assailants. The pixies, he knew, were tailored to knock out the batteries. The farmhouse appeared unaffected. The spotlights had been much closer, and had taken the brunt of the EMP.

  The leash-holder cursed in a constant stream of German while he fidgeted with something on the belt of the collared man. His battery, presumably. He was having trouble because the collared man wouldn't stand still. He ambled back and forth, stuttering.

  Marsh took a shooting position. He rested his rifle on the stump and sighted along the barrel. He hardly seemed to breathe.

  Will had seen men die to night, and more men than that had died by his own hand these past months. Always at a distance, of course. But Marsh didn't flinch from killing. It showed Will a side of the man he'd never known. The same sense of focus was there, but now it was alloyed with something dispassionate, too.

  No. Not dispassionate. A deceptively quiet rage. The man carried thoughts of his daughter. The look on his face made that much clear. It was a look that Will hoped Marsh would never direct at him.

  Marsh fired. The side of the leash-holder's head erupted in a fine mist. He fell to the snow, unmoving.

  “Damn it! Damn it, damn it,” Marsh muttered as he worked the bolt.

  The collared man stuttered more loudly. It was a mournful, distraught kind of sound.

  “B-b-b-b-b—”

  Marsh prepared another shot. While he aimed, another figure emerged through the wall of a long, low building and dashed across the field. “Kammler!” He leapt and grabbed the stutterer just as Marsh fired. A window behind the pair shattered.

  The insubstantial man did something to the stutterer's belt. The stutterer—his name was Kammler, apparently—knelt next to the body of his companion. “Bu-buh-g-g-g-”. It sounded like he was crying. He seemed to have lost his interest in fighting.

  The insubstantial man turned and headed for Will and Marsh's position. Somebody behind and to the right of them fired—the squad had been whittled down three or four people by now—but it had no effect.

  Will looked around for the second pixie. It was nowhere to be seen. It had been caught up in the destruction of the woods.

  Marsh recognized the man advancing on his position. The very same bastard had rescued Gretel, and in the process led Marsh on a wide-ranging chase through the Admiralty.

  Marsh scanned through the mental list of things he'd learned from that experience. Weaknesses: He can't breathe when he's insubstantial. He has to monitor his battery.

  Why didn't the pixie knock out his battery as it had with the stutterer? It seemed they were carrying spares. The man Marsh had shot—why did I have to miss?— must have been trying to swap out his companion's battery.

  With luck, the pixie had taken a toll on the spare, too, although Lorimer and the science boffins had designed the pixies assuming the batteries would be in use when the pulse hit them. They'd have to drain it the hard way.

  “Everybody, fire!” Gunfire echoed from two positions in the wood behind him. Marsh lobbed a Mills bomb at the advancing fellow, but of course it had no effect other than to force him to stay incorporeal.

  “Maybe, Pip,” said Will, “this would be a good time to leave.”

  Will was huddled behind the stump, watching the man coming closer and closer. One hand held the cleft stone to his chest; the other held his revolver. Both hands shook.

  If Will died, there'd be no going home for anybody.

  Shit.

  “Stay down,” said Marsh. “Don't let them see you. And for God's sake, don't lose that bloody stone.”

  Marsh stood.

  Will said, “Are you daft? What are you doing?”

  “If you die, we all do. Now stay down and shut up.”

  Marsh took off at a dead run along the edge of the wood. He hoped the Jerry bastard would recognize him, and that he had a taste for irony. He did. On both counts.

  Marsh ran east, drawing his pursuer away from Will. His best hope—a feeble, fleeing hope—was to lose himself in the shadows between the buildings. With luck, he might find the battery store house before they caught him.

  Pop. Crack. A tree bole splintered above Marsh's head. Apparently the Jerry could still fire his gun while in his altered state. Marsh peeled away from the trees and headed north, along the east side of the complex. He squeezed off a couple of shots from his revolver now and then to keep his pursuer insubstantial and thus, Marsh hoped, desperate for air.

  Once around the corner and out of sight, he took a phosphorus grenade from his belt and lobbed it toward the outer wall of the closest building. Toward where, if he could walk through walls, he would have taken a shortcut to catch himself. Toward where he'd probably take a deep breath when he emerged.

  The grenade hissed out hot, dense white smoke that glistened like a pea-soup fog in the moonlight. Moments later a human figure emerged through the wall. The cloud eddied around him.

  Marsh heard a gasp, a violent cough, and then his pursuer leapt back inside.

  Hope you got a lungful, you son of a bitch.

  A Mills could have finished the bastard off for certain, but it might have turned out to be a waste of good explosives. Marsh wanted to save what little he had left in case he could find the battery stores.

  He set off to do that. And tripped over something very warm that crumbled under his weight. Marsh had to stare for a moment before recognizing it as a human body, charcoal-black and curled tightly in the fetal position. It smelled like charred pork. Bodies like this littered the field.

  Somewhere, back toward where he'd first arrived, where he'd left Will, a roar shook the earth. The cacophony of gunfire and exp
losions started anew.

  He considered going for the dead squad's pixies, but the ground had been seared into ash for fifty feet in all directions. No doubt their pixies had burned, too. But where was the man who had done this? He thought back to the Tarragona filmstrip, and a man with pale, pale eyes.

  Marsh crept through a cluster of darkened buildings, looking for anything that might have suggested a storeroom. The thin layer of snow squeaked under his boots and left a record of his movements. He tried to step lightly, and he paid attention to the wind-shadows of the buildings where snow hadn't dusted the ground. He could tiptoe through these areas without leaving prints.

  Watching the snow saved his life. Marsh was turning a corner when the snow in front of him evaporated. He leapt back. Flames erupted from the ground where he'd been about to step.

  A man stepped around the corner, laughing, wreathed in blue fire. The light illuminated the adjacent buildings and made Marsh squint. He scuttled frantically backwards through mud that had been snow and frozen earth seconds earlier.

  “You're quick,” said the burning man in English, over the crackle of his fiery aura. “Quicker than your comrades. I'll grant you that much.”

  Marsh emptied his revolver. The first shot went wide, scarring the bricks alongside the burning man. The second bullet flared purple when it touched the man's aura. The man took a step back to steady himself, still burning.

  Marsh scrambled to his feet, trying to steady his hands so he could reload. But his assailant recovered before Marsh could pull out a new cylinder. The man clutched his shoulder, wincing.

  “All done? I'd—”

  A woman yelled: “Reinhardt! Reinhardt, come quickly!”

  Marsh knew that voice. It was Gretel. He had replayed it in his head countless times. Congratulations. It's a girl.

  The burning man—Reinhardt—hesitated. Marsh ran. Behind him, he heard Gretel yelling, “Reinhardt, please, this instant!”

  Marsh weaved between a few buildings before pressing up against a wall and plucking a Mills from his belt, in case he was being followed. But the snow didn't melt behind him, and the earth didn't spit forth new flames.