Apparatus 33: Dead Man Switch

by Lawston Pettymore

  Pyotr had become Amerika Rackete’s most recent, but not its final victim.

  Pyotr was dead.

  Radioactive Amber

  In April of 1945, soldiers of the Soviet Army were fighting historically severe winter conditions and concomitant deprivation only Napoleon’s Grande Armee had previously been obliged to endure. For most, their uniforms were separating at the seams, lining exposed and torn, buttons gone and replaced with sinew or leather from looted farm animals, and ammunition low. The average soldier caught as much sleep as possible on the frozen ground and ate what remained of the squirrel and bird population of Eastern Europe.

  But the battalion assigned to and encamped outside Die Kuppel, was a trophy battalion, relatively well cared for, a bit better off than the typical Soviet infantry. The 6th Trophy Battalion NKVD Motor, marched with general orders to sniff out and abscond with anything that was valuable to “Uncle Joe,” and to destroy anything that was not. The division was led by a full Kombrig16, who was educated in engineering gymnasiums in Berlin, Paris, and London, and being special in Stalin’s eyes, was feted with a variety of perks unique to the politburo. One of a handful of trophy battalions roaming through Germany, the 6th traveled with its own well-stocked food wagon, long links of sausages handed out to minor officers to distribute among the troops. They had hygiene platoons carrying portable toilets, de-licing stations, and even portable showers. Nothing was spared for the trophy battalions if such lavishness could result in finding some shiny lagniappe that would be returned to Papa Stalin.

  Whereas the food wagons in other battalions had, at most, one cauldron to prepare some sort of soup, 6th Trophy Battalion NKVD Motor had four: two for vegetables, one for meat, and the remaining one for coffee. Lockers were built into the caissons that transported the cauldrons, each the size of howitzer truck. These contained eggs, cheese, and for the officers, dried fruits, sour cream, and milk on occasion, from which cream and freshly churned butter were made. The enlisted men of the 6th ate as well as or better than officers of the Soviet Navy. As a cruel form of psychological warfare, cooks were ordered to pipe the aromas from these cauldrons into the ventilation structures in the buried, star-shaped Die Kuppel, which Soviet intelligence had informed them was a secret research facility, the words ‘secret’ and ‘research’ being as catnip to any trophy battalion.

  Though the perks were highly appreciated, some grumbling was heard that their mission was to bring back shiny German toys rather than participate in the glorious conquest of Berlin. Not helping morale was the slow progress by the sappers to demolish an opening into the bunker with its four, mysteriously flute shaped, open concrete ducts emanating from the central dome.

  Each of the four concrete trenches was as wide as a T38 tank, but as yet impervious to the shells that had been fired without effect into the dense concrete bulkheads, that appeared to lead into, or perhaps out of, the submerged bunker.

  The sullen April sky hung like a blanket cloying the treetops, deploying a mist of water droplets and sleet, and creating an acoustic ceiling under which sound traveled, even the sound of whispers. The moist silence was punctuated as the sappers warned “strelyat17!” before each detonation, giving everyone a chance to cover their ears and spare themselves the ringing and period of brief deafness that followed.

  This morning, however, their 10-day routine was interrupted as the food wagons were serving breakfast. A new sound groaned from the concrete structures, the sound of chains rotating gears, the sound of heavy metal like a T38 tank, but more muscular, and profoundly more hesitating. The concrete bulkheads at the ends of the ducts were visibly moving, a few centimeters per minute, hinged at the top, like the overhead door of a garage.

  The motion continued for several seconds until a small gap appeared at the bottom. The riflemen positioned there put their breakfast tins aside, eyes wide open for whatever was coming next.

  Evidently, the Soviets reasoned, the occupants could not take another day of living inside what amounted to a sewer pipe pounded by steel ice hockey sticks, and were coming out, or at least asking to parlay, knowing full well that there was never a parlay when it came to Soviet soldiering. Whoever they were, there would only be Russians talking, prisoners obeying, criminals executed, spoils looted.

  The rumble of the four concrete barriers, each thirty meters wide and six meters high, resumed, and intensified, groaning like the gates of Pluto and the Sibyl or the garage doors of Olympus had opened for the first time since Aeneas. A crack at the bottom grew to a meter and a half, enough for a man to slide under.

  “Finally,” thought comrade Kombrig. “This whore is finally spreading her legs.” Then, aloud, he said, “Comrades, put on your condoms. Let’s fuck this bitch in her ass.” The men correctly interpreted this as an order to don gas mask discipline, and none too soon, the odors wafting from the opening were visibly green, a conspiracy of sewage, rotting, death, and toxic chemicals.

  Soldiers on top of the dome watched as the oculus opened like the shutter of a camera, scattering its collection of fake rocks and trees to the side, exposing the darkness below, illuminated only by a few blinking lights and gasses moving ghost-like upward to the sky. Among the aggressively foul odors and smoke were no visible signs of humas.

  Comrade Kombrig clambered up the sloping cupola roof to peer inside and size up the order of rape firsthand. The steam stung his nostrils and made his eyes water. Whatever was alive down there could not exist in that toxic soup for more than a few minutes. Were the Germans surrendering or were they sharing their misery? He yelled down some words of comfort in his best German, calling on the inhabitants to come out and join the Russians for breakfast, breathe fresh air, have as much water as they could drink, and even take showers if they wished. Surely, they would wish for showers after bathing in these toxic chemicals.

  As he peered in looking for a response, one of his men produced a torch to help illuminate what they expected to be an empty interior, but what instead turned out to be something else that the darkness had hidden. There was a tall, arrow-shaped structure painted in a calico of dirty olives and browns, its arrowhead-shaped tip emerging from the clouds of smoke. Comrade Kombrig considered the structure for a moment, thinking it was shaped like a rocket, but it was much too big to possibly be one.

  One of his officers who could read German used his torch and binoculars to read markings on the equipment inside, hoping to document and ascertain the purpose of the structure before it was scuttled or otherwise booby-trapped.

  “Chetyre,” he yelled out. A rotating drum on a prominent panel behind a pane of thick glass was counting down, advanced with a click to “3.” The reels of what resembled a kinescope were whirring, surrounded by relays, cables, and flashing lamps.

  “Dva,” he yelled. His voice was the drowned by an eardrum bashing whine of spinning machinery and opening of pressure release valves. No conversation was possible. The countdown continued to “1,” accompanied by the sound of booming drums.

  The Battalion Commander did not know what the significance of counter ticking to zero could be, but of the possible options, none were good. Zero was never a good thing to be around. Zero is where cataclysm lives. Soldiers who wanted to survive ran away from zero.

  “BeeZhat18!” he yelled as the counter reached “nul.” No officer wanted to command his troops to retreat orderly, let alone run in a panic. But he was running out of time and options.

  The sequencer, as oblivious to the consequences as any automaton, blindly compared the panel of inputs to its portfolio of expected values and thresholds of turbine speeds, temperatures of preheating and precooling, pressures of plumbing and ignition chambers, door position sensor voltages, and cog positions. At ‘nul’, and with all conditions met, the sequencer sent a high voltage pulse to four of the A4 sparking mechanisms now being showered with fuel and oxidant, resulting in a sonic boom of combustion, and thousands of tons of thrust venting onto the concrete flame diverter, and from there into the fou
r respective flame trenches out into the Polish forest.

  But the Amerika Rakete did not climb immediately off its stand. The sequencer cycled a few milliseconds for the thrust from all four strap on A4 motors engines to rise to symmetric minimums before releasing the large clamps that held it in place. As the clamps flung back, the beast charged out of its stall, through the open oculus, and into the gray Polish overcast.

  Oxygen-rich air rushed in to fill the vacancy left by the fifteen-story high rocket, combined with the methane still spilling onto the launch room floor, and blasted everything in Die Kuppel into elemental particles, including Zerrissen’s marvelous sequencer. No matter now, as it had done its job with distinction.

  Those on top of the cupola, including the Kombrig himself, were in mid-escape, when they were taken by a volcanic blast of superheated gas and plasma, carrying with it jack hammer air compressions, smashing the internal organs and soft tissue smashing any organism within fifty meters to jelly, producing the loudest sound planet Earth had heard in sixty-five million years at Chicxulub.

  The blast shredded the food wagons, tents, and other temporary structures forming the siege camp. The heat wave that followed vaporized the skin and bones of the dead before their corpses hit the forest floor, now itself on fire. The battalion never saw the full size and shape of the green and brown, multi-stage serpent ascend through the oculus that had just vaporized them.

  The beast extracted itself with increasing velocity from the cupola, saving itself from becoming its own victim. Not spared were the two-hundred-liter drums of silver-gray powder, always warm to the touch even when not underneath angry rocket motors. Bursting open, the hot gasses lifting the dusty contents in a cloud of sparkles high into the sky, follow by a superheated channel of air several hundred feet into the air, down which jagged bolts, first of lightning precursors, followed by actual lightning, connecting to the static discharges accumulating in the cloud layers above.

  With the rocket clear of its nest, ascending rapidly upward, a similar carnage was spread to everything within reach on the outside. The manner of death by this spectacle within the 6th depended entirely on where a particular soldier was stationed.

  The rifle men positioned at the flame trench doors had caught a mere glimpse of the base of the rocket, their eyes not understanding the lights, meters, outgassing, and ventilator motions only meters away as they attempted to enter, however cautiously, through the open doors. They never heard the Battalion Commander’s order to run, and it would not have mattered in any case. They were knocked unconscious by the burst of sound that was intensified by the flame trench, followed by the plasma, hotter than the surface of the sun, incinerating and vaporizing not only their flesh and bones, but also the cold rolled steel of their rifles.

  If Todtenhausen was hoping for maximum retaliation for the days of relentless, wanton bombardment his people had received, his expectations had been exceeded by more than double. In a little more than two seconds, over half of the soldiers of 6th Trophy Battalion Motor, including its Kombrig, were wiped from the surface of Earth.

  But neither the scorekeeping nor the rocket was finished. Amerika Rackete was still on its improbably successful climb to the place where it would eventually reign as Earth’s first artificial moon.

  The four trenches funneled their volts of superheated plasma into the Polish forest unabated, setting the dense and oily pine trees into exploding, flaming Roman candle fireworks. The air compression increased, pushing against the denser, freezing morning air, until the equilibrium halted the spread. Following the inescapable consequences of Boyles Law, the temperature rose to that of a smelting furnace, with sublimating solids into gaseous forms of hydrogen, silica, iron, and radioactive cesium and cobalt, all the cesium and cobalt the Reich could fleece from its occupied territories, gathered here in two-hundred-liter drums, the largest such depository in all the world, for use and dispersal by the Wermut warhead. These drums gasified into a shimmery cloud a few hundred meters above the cupola, then cooled in the upper April sky, mixing with water, and turning into radioactive snow.

  Confined by the physics of superheated gasses, the firestorm could not spread into the relatively cooler air surrounding the cupola, so it spiraled upward into a corkscrew-shaped structure, a mesocyclone drafting greater quantities of oxygen, which significantly increased combustion, creating more heat. This was a self-feeding accelerating cycle one ordinarily expected to see in an advanced turbine engine, except at temperatures elevated to the point where everything was fuel, including asphalt, concrete, and sand.

  This translucent tornado of swirling superheated solids was the spectacle that set the jaws of the still surviving perimeter guards agape, watching with wide eyes, understanding nothing except the Soviet training that taught them to stand their ground no matter what. This training would be the last cogent thought any of them had before the compression wave hit them with a force that shattered their teeth, and dissolved their ear drums, nasal membranes, and eyeballs.

  A few struggled to their feet, deafened and blinded, pulling themselves up by their rifle butts, just in time for the heaviest particles to rain down on them. These were hot beads of superheated sand, still viscous and very sticky, tiny flashbulbs that popped audibly and emitting a few photons of light when cesium collides with a molecule of .

  The orange and yellow radioactive mist drenched the landscape and its human statues, coating their lungs, solidifying as thin layers within their bronchi, bronchiole, and alveoli. As the temperatures finally abated, the components solidified into a glass, entombing each man in his own sarcophagus, as diaphanous and delicate as the expensive lingerie from Paris. Each glass cairn, as the victims of Pompeii, blended into the same glass that carpeted the forest floor, suspending the remainder of 6th Trophy Battalion NKVD Motor like prehistoric insects in amber.

  Sparkling, radioactive amber.

  AGGREGAT 3

  SEQUELAE

  Assimilation

  While the Wermut capsule settled into its lunar orbit, Raynor Zerrissen, Halina and Nicolaus, each sought out individual post-Bunker lives earthbound. Zerrissen was brought under the aegis of the Allies’ war criminal investigation board, and the children absorbed by re-location services organized by the Red Cross to reunite separated families.

  Zerrissen was never a member of the SS nor an ardent Nazi, all that mattered to the Allied occupation managers, and was subsequently released to the State after a brief interrogation, which was also willing to overlook the question whether he was more than an innocent farmer, or as another version claimed, a shopkeeper.

  Zerrissen could not distinguish between a breast plow and a fromard, so his claim to have been a lowly farmer was suspect. On the other hand, Zerrissen’s facility with math and both electrical and mechanical engineering should not be punished either. Everyone had a secret during those days and there was a new Cold War to fight, so his conflicting stories were venial compared to those with the more difficult-to-ignore SS tattoo of which Zerrissen had none.

  The State chose instead so order him into a program of Communist indoctrination that the Soviets called de-Nazification. Finding his memorization of anti-Capitalist slogans and mastery of Soviet history acceptable, Zerrissen was absorbed into the Workers’ Paradise and was put to work as a mechanic at a state-owned automobile repair shop in a heavily damaged neighborhood near the River Spree now known as East Berlin. There, he would be left to his own to emerge as a Marxist Superman and an inveterate alcoholic, his guilty pleasure being the ubiquitous and affordable Russian vodka, but only because it was less expensive than milk and beer.

  Having no families by with which to be reunited, Halina and Nicolaus handed over to an order of nuns, kinder, gentler than the order of Schwesterkriegerine which the Holy See tucked away somewhere in the basement of the Vatican until needed again.

  As was its customary practice, the Vatican stood mute behind the privilege of clergy, knowing that in time all traces of the order, lik
e Die Kuppel itself, would disappear into the tapestry of history, along with the beliefs in unicorns, gargoyles. For now.

  This gentler breed of nuns searched the bulletin boards and boarding houses for the two children’s surviving families, a task made hopeless as neither of the children carried last names. Both Halina and Nicolaus eventually became wards of the state and placed into separate gymnasiums, separated by their genders and a hundred kilometers of torn landscape. The nuns remarked that Nicolaus was easy on the eyes; a courteous, well-read boy, who would be a charming dinner guest and a good catch for a high-placed German, or perhaps even the daughter of a Soviet apparatchik someday.

  Being a female who was not only a brace-legged Pole, Jewish, and who could not, or would not, speak, Halina and her interests were less relevant. She was assigned work for which women were known to be suited: cleaning and filing papers. She attended a school for the mute during the day and cleaned offices and factory floors on her off hours to repay the State. Only months later everyone on the planet was receiving a polio vaccine, ironically created by a researcher who was both a Pole and a Jew, and the scourge became extinct only a decade after she and a generation of undesirable children were sent to places like the Bunker to be stashed out of sight. Such was the timing of the advancements of mankind.

  Halina was eventually assigned as a cleaning woman for a State-run apartment complex known as a Khrushchyovka19, managed by a man named Ulf who secretly spied on inhabitants for the secret police, the Stasi. She was not allowed to apply to the few positions open at any of the prestigious East German upper schools, but when a slot in an unheralded welding and metal working institute opened, she grabbed it immediately.

  As for Nicolaus, his conditions were much better. Hearing live music for the first time at a State-sponsored field trip to the East Berlin Philharmonic, he became infatuated with its storytelling power. Music used a language that everyone in the world could understand and told stories that no other language could. He fell headfirst into opera, absorbing its history, structure, and heroes, learning the architecture of a libretto, of instrumentation, and the polyglottal portfolio of grammar, spelling, and conjugation; dialect, enunciation, and pronunciation; and idiom, contraction, and elision.