"I don't want to hurt you or to force my way in here," said Troy, switching to English. "Why not do me a favor, and tell the one named Dillon that Serena's son would like to speak to him?"
"I know no one named Dillon."
Troy considered stunning her, but she was so old and frail and shrivelled that he wasn't sure she could survive the shock, so he settled for gently lifting her by the shoulders and setting her back down a few feet to the left. Then, smiling at her, he walked calmly through the doorway.
And, smiling at him, she pulled a wicked-looking knife out of her sleeve and thrust it into his belly.
He uttered a surprised grunt, clutched his stomach, and collapsed in a heap at her feet.
21
RECONSTRUCTED FROM
TROY'S DEBRIEFING SESSION (Continued):
At first his body seemed to be one gigantic ache. Then, as he opened his eyes, he was able to distinguish the different agonies: the pain in his abdomen, the throbbing of his head (which, he concluded, must have banged into the floor when he fell), the dizziness that still remained even after his eyes began focusing.
Jamie was bending over him, mopping his forehead, and Dillon was looking at him with a worried expression on his face.
"What happened?" asked Troy.
"We told our hostess to be on the lookout for you, but we didn't tell her you'd be in a Nazi storm trooper's outfit," said Dillon. "She thought the Germans had captured you and sent someone in your place."
The old crone walked over. "I am sorry," she said in a cracked voice that sounded every bit as old as she looked. "It was all my fault."
"It's all right," said Troy. "You couldn't have known."
"I am forgiven?" asked the old woman.
"There's nothing to forgive," said Troy, rolling over slightly in an effort to get more comfortable.
"Troy," said Dillon, "let me introduce you to Ramona Brandhorst. She owns this building, and she'll be letting us stay here until we have to meet Xaviar."
"My house is yours," said the old woman. "But it would be much safer for you in the attic. If the Nazis come, you're too weak to move in a hurry."
"You're right, Ramona," said Troy, gesturing Dillon and Guidry to help him to his feet. The pain was excruciating, but he merely grimaced and refused to utter a sound. "If we could only get the MedKit from the Viper . . ." he said, his voice trailing off.
"I have medicine," said Ramona.
"It's not as good as ours," said Dillon. "Maybe I ought to sneak back and pick it up."
"No," said Troy. "It was hard enough to get here a first time. No sense taking extra chances that might give us away."
"Right," said Dillon, leading Troy up to the attic. "Ramona tells me there's a cot up there. You lay down and try to get some sleep. I'll stand watch downstairs."
"All right," said Troy, consciousness escaping from him again. "And Dillon—no heroics."
"Of course not," said Dillon, crossing his fingers behind his back.
22
RECONSTRUCTED FROM
DILLON'S DEBRIEFING SESSION:
"Jamie," said Dillon, descending the stairs, "keep an eye on Troy. I've got to get back to the Viper."
"But it's miles away!" protested Jamie.
"No choice," said Dillon. "That's a mighty big hole in his belly, and the bleeding's started again."
"Isn't there some alternative?"
"How?" said Dillon. "You can't tie a tourniquet around a stomach. And what doctor in this town will treat him without making a full report to the Nazis?"
"What have you got on the Viper?"
"A MedKit that'll clean and suture his wound in a matter of minutes, and drugs that will prevent infection more thoroughly than your primitive penicillin can do. And I've got some amphetamines that will help him function efficiently tomorrow. He's lost a lot of blood, and he's in mild shock; even if some local patched him up, we'd have to carry him to the Viper on a stretcher tomorrow. What do you think our chances of getting there unscathed would be?"
"Will you be all right?" she asked, lines of worry crossing her pretty face.
"Sure," said Dillon. "I've got my invisibility field." He switched it on and promptly vanished. "Nothing to it," he said. "I'll leave it on all the way there and back, and I'll be back here with the MedKit in less than an hour."
"Good luck," she said, walking him to the door.
A moment later he was out in the street, and within thirty minutes he had found the Vipers. He withdrew a MedKit and began walking back to town.
"Halt!" cried a voice when he was within about three blocks of Ramona Brandhorst's house. He kept on walking, and was surprised to feel a firm hand on his shoulder a few seconds later.
"Did you not hear my command?" said a German lieutenant.
Dillon's jaw fell. He looked down and saw—himself. Then he remembered Doctor Zee's warning, that even a small invisibility field took an enormous amount of power. Evidently his energizer had run down, and he hadn't even been aware of it until the German had spotted him.
"I'm sorry, Lieutenant," he said in German. "I am a little hard of hearing. I truly did not hear you."
The lieutenant looked him up and down, obviously comparing him with a description of Troy. Finally he shrugged. "Pay more attention in the future. Now let me see your papers and you can be on your way."
"I left them at home," said Dillon.
"We are under martial law," said the officer. "You must produce your papers or come back to the base with me."
"Well, possibly I do have them," said Dillon. "Let me search my pockets." He reached into a pocket, withdrew a hand weapon, and fired. The officer collapsed without a sound.
Dillon quickly examined his alternatives. He could continue walking boldly along as if he had every right to be on the streets—but Obersalzberg was a small town, and it was doubtful that he could cover the remaining three blocks without being stopped again, and it wouldn't do to stun too many policemen near Number Three Morganstrasse. After all, Ramona Brandhorst had to live here after he and Troy and Jamie were gone.
He could simply wait until daylight and then try to get to the apartment house while the townspeople were scurrying to work—but Troy needed the medication now. And besides, there was no guarantee that he wouldn't be stopped, if not by the soldiers, then by some of the loyal citizens who knew all the town's inhabitants and would know that he was not one of them.
So he chose what seemed to him the only viable alternative, and began sneaking furtively through the shadows, stopping in a building's outer court, skulking down an alley, pausing for long minutes before attempting to cross any streets or walk under any streetlamps. He did not approach the house directly, but took a very circuitous route. Within forty minutes he was on Morganstrasse, a block away from his destination. Then, waiting long enough to make sure there were no Nazi soldiers in the vicinity, he walked boldly down the middle of the sidewalk. He was within twenty feet of the front door when a neighbor stuck his head out of a second-story window and shouted: "Who are you! Why are you out in the street? Officers! Officers! Spy!"
"Damn!" muttered Dillon. He broke into a run and raced past Ramona Brandhorst's building. Four buildings farther down the block he cut between two apartment houses, ducking out of sight just as he heard a score of troops running up the street.
He crouched down between two garbage cans, his back propped up against the wall of a building, and waited. Ordinarily the Nazis would probably search for a few minutes and then assume that the neighbor had merely given in to an overactive imagination. But not today, not after he and Troy had saved Guidry and immobilized nine officers in the woods, and especially not after Troy had single-handedly fought his way out of a certain deathtrap.
So he waited, ten, twenty, forty minutes. The footsteps grew dim and distant. He waited another ten minutes, just to be on the safe side, then slowly, carefully, his back sliding against the wall, he edged his way toward the street. There was only one soldier in sight.
Then his eyes fell on the soldier. The man had six hand grenades strung around his belt. Dillon had never seen a grenade explode, but he was easily able to analyze how it worked—and he suddenly knew that he couldn't take the chance of stunning the soldier from this distance. If the man fell wrong, two or three of the grenades could detach themselves from his belt and explode, and that would bring the whole command post down on his neck in a matter of minutes, possibly seconds.
Carefully, softly, he removed the MedKit from his back and placed it down on the ground, just out of sight around the corner of the building that was shielding him. Then, catlike, he moved in a silent crouching run. He ducked behind a stone staircase when he was about fifty feet distant from the soldier, and held so motionless that he barely even breathed. He looked ahead. There was a lone tree for cover between himself and the soldier, and he waited until the soldier turned his back and darted for the tree.
He made it, still unseen and unheard. But now he knew further stealth was out of the question. Once again he crouched, like some huge, muscular beast of prey ready to spring, and waited.
The soldier lit a cigarette, threw the match into a wet gutter, and began walking in Dillon's direction. He stopped about twelve feet from the tree, turned to go back as if he had forgotten something, then shrugged, took another puff, and turned back toward the tree.
Dillon took one more huge gulp of air and leaped out from cover. He crossed the intervening space between himself and the soldier in two long strides and had thrown the man on his back before the fellow knew what had hit him.
The soldier tried to scream, and Dillon put a huge hand over his mouth and leaned. The soldier responded by sticking a thumb in Dillon's left eye and clawing at his face with his other hand.
Dillon tried to draw his head back out of the way, but he couldn't do that and still keep the soldier quiet. He took his free hand and squeezed the soldier's throat with all the power he possessed.
The soldier's body began jerking and he redoubled his efforts to separate Dillon's eye from his head. They remained motionless, each wondering if the other would ever give in, when suddenly the soldier jerked spasmodically one more time and his whole body relaxed. Dillon rolled off him, rubbed his eye, and then checked to make sure he hadn't killed the soldier.
The man was breathing, shallowly but regularly, and Dillon ran back, picked up the MedKit, and a moment later was once again inside Ramona Brandhorst's building.
"What kept you?" demanded Jamie as he took the MedKit up the stairs to the attic.
"Just lazy, I guess," he said, trying to force a carefree grin.
"What happened to your eye?" asked Guidry.
"Nothing much," said Dillon. "Why?"
"It's bleeding, and the flesh around it is discolored," said Guidry, following the two of them up the stairs.
"Lucky I've got the MedKit then, isn't it?" said Dillon.
He entered the attic room. Troy was out cold, completely oblivious to the world. Dillon took the bandages and gauze off Troy's stomach, pulled out a molecular cauterizer, laid it down next to the bed, then found the disinfectant he was looking for.
"Might as well add a little viruscide to the germicide," he muttered. He injected a small amount of solution into Troy's arm, sprayed the area around the cut which was already turning a nasty-looking shade of blue, and applied the cauterizer to the wound. It sealed without leaving a noticeable mark, and he then injected Troy with a solution that was part steroid, part amphetamine, part antibiotic, and part phenylbutazone.
A moment later Troy opened his eyes. He felt his stomach, then swung his legs to the floor and sat up on his cot.
"You went back," he said accusingly.
"I had to," said Dillon. "I'm going to win so many honors and medals for stopping Xaviar that I'll need help carrying them around."
"Thanks," said Troy. "Any trouble?"
"Nothing I couldn't handle."
"Is that why your eye looks so good?" said Troy with a smile.
"I'd forgotten all about it," said Dillon. "Have you got a mirror?"
"You're a heck of a fighter, Dillon, but you've always had a queasy stomach," said Troy. "Do yourself a favor and don't look in a mirror until I fix you up." He began going through the MedKit until he found what he needed, and a moment later Dillon's eye was as good as new again.
"Well, what now?" asked Troy, standing and stretching.
"Now," said Guidry, standing in the doorway with his pistol trained on Troy, Dillon and Jamie, "we talk."
"What's this all about?" asked Jamie.
"I saw what these two guys just did to each other, lady, and Uncle Sam hasn't got anything like that in his medicine bag. So you're finally going to tell me what's going on here, or your adventure is going to come to a very unhappy end on the count of three."
He cocked the trigger.
23
FROM THE DIARY OF
COLONEL JOHN H. GUIDRY:
I held the gun on them and waited.
Finally Troy spoke up. "We're from what you might call a planetwide organization. More than that I'm not at liberty to tell you. A member of our organization, a man named Xaviar, has defected to the Nazis. You've seen some of our equipment, you know how technologically advanced it is. You'll have to take my word that we possess weapons that make the standard bomb look like a child's firecracker. Our mission is to get to Xaviar and stop him before he turns the secrets of these weapons over to the Nazis."
"No group I know of has weapons, or even medicine, like you people," I said, not lowering the gun or taking my eyes off them for an instant. "I know enough German to know your German is flawless; so's your English. Where are you from and exactly what nations do you represent?"
"They've pulled your fat out of the fire," said Jamie. "Isn't that enough?"
"No," I said coldly. "I'm used to giving orders, not taking them. If I'm going to keep doing what these two guys tell me to do, I've got to know who they are and why I should obey them."
"We simply can't tell you any more," said Troy calmly. "If you knew the truth it would have too great an influence on your future actions, and those actions must follow a certain set pattern."
"I don't know what you're talking about," I said, "and furthermore, this is war. So far everything you've done seems like you're on our side, but I can't be sure, and if I can't be sure than I can't trust you with my life or my mission's success. There are some gaps in your behavior, too, and I've got to know about them."
"Such as?" said Dillon.
"Such as why you wouldn't lift a finger to help the Jews who were being loaded onto the train. Why you won't kill any Nazis, but are content to temporarily disable them. Why a White Sox fan doesn't know who Bill Deitrich is."
"We aren't here to help or harm anyone," said Troy. "Our directions and mission are quite specific. We are here to stop Xaviar from aiding the Nazis. Nothing more, nothing less."
"But you won't do a damned thing to the Nazis themselves," I persisted. "Why?"
"I can't tell you," said Troy.
"I'm only going to ask you one more time," I said meaningfully.
"You're going to have to shoot, then," said Troy. "I've told you all that I can."
I pointed the gun at his chest and began squeezing the trigger. Then, no more than half a second before the gun would have fired, I heard the little Jewish girl scream, and the sounds of the front door being broken.
"We'll settle this later," I said, running out of the attic and leaning over the rail at the head of the stairs. The little girl was racing up the stairs, screaming in panic, with a trio of storm troopers hot on her trail. I leveled the gun at them, then felt Dillon's hand on my own.
"No," he whispered. "Too noisy."
He a
imed his own weapon at them. There was a little hum of power, and the three troopers dropped their weapons and tumbled back down the stairs, senseless.
Jamie lifted the girl up in her arms and took her back into the attic, but I knew we weren't out of danger yet, because I could hear the sounds of a lot more soldiers walking around the main floor. They were speaking harshly with Ramona Brandhorst, who took up her blind-deaf-and-sullen old lady act with them.
I went back to the attic.
"We've had it," I announced softly. "There must be a dozen of them talking to the old lady right now. Any second they're going to see those bodies on the stairs."
"That's bad," mused Troy. "We don't want to draw any further attention to ourselves."
"You don't understand," I said, exasperated. "We're trapped like rats up here! There's no exit and they're going to take us like shooting fish in a barrel."
"No sense stunning them," said Dillon, totally ignoring me. "They'll just send more."
"Damn it!" I said. "Doesn't anyone know what I'm talking about?"
"Be quiet, Guidry," said Troy distractedly. "They'll be up here soon enough as it is, without your shouting."
"My energizer's on zero," said Dillon.
"And my controls are broken," said Troy. "Have we got enough time to transfer my energizer to your field?"
"I doubt it," said Dillon.
"Wait, you guys," said Jamie. "I've got a field too, you know. Adama gave it to me before we left."
"I know, Jamie," said Troy. "But it won't encompass the three of us plus Guidry and the child."
"How many will it hold?" she said.
"If we're very very lucky, it might shield three of us plus the child."
"Fields and shields?" I said. "What the hell are you talking about? Draw your guns and get ready to sell your lives as dearly as possible."
"Do shut up, Colonel Guidry," said Jamie impatiently. "We've got a serious decision to make."
"There's no decision at all," I snapped. "Let's take as many of these Nazi bastards with us as we can!"
Battlestar Galactica 5 - Galactica Discovers Earth Page 10