Final Impact (33 page)

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 own 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,
Kapitän.
You have quite a fierce reputation in the Reich. Göbbels 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.

Halabi merely cocked a very cool eyebrow. “Well then, if you wish to see your family again, you will behave yourself.”

“Of course.”

“Mr. Waddington!”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Brasch jumped slightly at the strength and proximity of the voice behind him. He hadn’t realized that anybody was standing there, but turning slightly he found a slab-shouldered, hard-faced man holding a black device of some sort down near the small of his back.

“Chief, stay close to our guest. If you have to, taser him.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the man called Waddington replied, with an evil glint in his eye.

“Right, then, follow me ladies and gentlemen,” Halabi said, and they began to file out.

Prince Harry hung back and fell in beside the German.

“She is quite the dictator, yes?” Brasch said.

“Liberated women.” Harry shrugged. “What’s a bloke to do?”

In a different part of the ship, Julia Duffy awoke to find herself dreaming—or at least she thought she was dreaming for a few seconds of free fall before she realized that Captain Marcel Ronsard was indeed standing, somewhat awkwardly, by the side of her bed.

“Holy shit,” she said.

Ronsard shrugged. “Not the welcome I was hoping for, but it will have to do. And how are you,
mon cherie
?”

“Well, for one thing,” she said, pushing herself up in the bed, which moved to compensate at least partly for the pitch and yaw of the ship, “I’m not your fucking
cherie.
But I guess I’m glad to see a friendly face. A little surprised, though. What the fuck are you doing here?”

Ronsard unloaded another Gallic shrug on her. “You know I cannot say. You, however, I have heard all about. If you did not want to join me in Scotland, you had only to say so, you silly girl. There was no need to run away with Patton to end our affair.”

“Asshole.” She smiled. “You hear I almost got waxed?”

“They told me,” he said, the levity disappearing from his voice. “They said the fascists tried to murder you, along with some GIs.”

Duffy sighed, feeling ragged and all too fragile.

“They killed all those boys,” she said, shaking her head. “Woulda killed me, too, but I was so covered in mud and crap by that stage they didn’t see that I was wearing matrix armor. I don’t think they even realized I was a chick. And the boys kept it quiet, God bless ’em. It was kind of a rush job. Not up to the usual efficient SS standards when it comes to atrocities. Himmler is gonna be pissed.”

She found a relatively comfortable position and settled into the pillows. “So if you can’t tell me where you’ve been, can you at least say where you’re going?”

“Back to Scotland, like I told you. I was delayed in France by a broken heart.”

She chuckled, and then winced at the pain. “Jesus, Ronsard, you’ll fucking kill me where the Nazis failed.”

Julia felt the ship climb up a precipitous wall of water, hover in the air, and come crashing down on the other side with an almighty hollow
boom.
In her specially constructed bed she was hardly troubled, but Ronsard had some difficulty keeping to his feet.

“You wanna hop in with me?” she asked.

“Well, I—”

“I don’t mean in that way, Filthy Pierre. I couldn’t put out at the moment if my life depended on it.”

Ronsard gingerly hopped up on the bed, making sure not to squash her. “So, you are on your way to hospital back in England then?” he said. “And I could come down from Scotland, perhaps, when you are well enough to, what was it, get the leg over?”