Shattered Shields - eARC (8 page)

The commander shook his head. “I’m afraid,
Freiherr
, that we must delay the end of your case yet a while. The magic of dragons interferes with the magical charges of our rifles and the discharge of the cannons. You might think that you’re being loyal to your comrades by not talking, but the truth is that you’re costing the lives of more men.

“Take him to detention cell A.”

“Not,” Manfred said and, as he spoke, he twisted his ankles behind the legs of his chair. “Without my uniform. A uniform, at any rate.”

“
Freiherr
—”

“Oh, yes. Doubtless you can hit me with a low discharge of magic and carry me unconscious. Though there is a good chance that I’ll freeze in this position and you’ll have to carry the chair with me. All I’m asking for is my uniform. You can strip it of insignia.”

The commander hesitated. Then he nodded to a man nearby.

The uniform they brought Manfred was his own, folded as he’d left it. He removed the pine needles from it fastidiously, and dressed carefully—underwear and socks, pants, shirt and tunic and cap. He slipped his feet into the boots that had been his grandfather’s, the boots of a Prussian cavalry officer. Then he stood and saluted, before turning to head for the door.

There were six more men there. They fell in on all sides of him and, by his bearing, he contrived to give them the appearance of a guard of honor as they led him down a long rock corridor to a door at the end.

* * *

The cell was more comfortable than Manfred had expected. It was, in fact, much like officer’s quarters. It had two camp beds, against opposite walls, and a small table holding a pitcher of water and two glasses. There was no dresser or trunk for his clothes, but there were pegs on the wall. The beds had sheets and blankets.

On one of the beds a man sat, looking dazed. He was darker than Manfred, and probably taller, but more importantly, the uniform he wore, even if it looked like it had been dragged through a mire, showed an insignia of three stars and a pair of wings.

Manfred snapped a salute. “
Hauptmann
!” he said.

The man lifted lusterless eyes, then smiled, or at least attempted to. He stood up, and offered his hand to Manfred, “In the antechamber of hell, does that matter?” he asked. “My name is Oswald Boelcke.
Hauptmann Fliegerabteilung
62. And you?”

“
Rittmeister
Manfred,
Freiherr
von Richthofen,” Manfred said, and snapped a salute again.

The other man turned away from him. “They…captured you?” he asked.

It occurred to Manfred that the man might be a spy, but what he said was, “They are almost for sure listening to us.”

“Undoubtedly,” the other man said. He went back to sitting on his bed. “If there are secrets you would keep— I have none. They think that other flyers are also dragon shifters.” He shrugged. “I was discovered because my plane was hit, and I couldn’t help but shift and save myself on the way down.”

Manfred made his way to the water glass, searching in his pocket for a handkerchief. He poured some water onto the folded linen cloth, and rubbed it on his face. “I was pig hunting,” he said.

“Oh,” Boelcke said. “Wolf?”

“Dragon.” Manfred resumed cleaning blood from his face. “I used to listen to the airplanes overhead and dream—” He stopped.

Boelcke laughed. “It’s not much easier. You want to…You want to do things you can’t do in a plane. I needed so much discipline to fly.” He shook his head. “But at least you’re in the sky, and almost alone.” He paused a moment. “It was good while it lasted.” He paused again. “This will kill my parents. And my brothers.”

“My mother and my siblings, too,” Manfred said. “Only…Violation 46. Many people will not know what that is.” He chose to lie with a straight face. “Perhaps not even my family will guess.”

Boelcke looked at him. The look passed between them. Boelcke’s family also knew, and neither of them was going to say it aloud or make a gesture that would endanger their relatives.

“How long will they keep us before they execute us?” Manfred asked.

Boelcke shrugged. “It depends on how long it takes the commander of the ZND to become convinced we know nothing. They believe that there must be at least thirty fliers and thirty or so support personnel below who are shifters and likely, they say, dragon shifters, from the burst of magic they received, all from the same area. They think when my fliers impinged above the trenches, the magic caught and amplified.”

“Is there any chance they’re right?” Manfred asked.

“No. There were twelve of us on the mission, flying patrol to keep the British from bombing our positions.”

“And yet they got some great burst of magic,” Manfred said.

“Perhaps,” Boelcke said and shrugged, “The British bombs give off a magical charge.”

Manfred frowned. All the large weapons they’d seen used in this war so far had been nonmagical. He couldn’t imagine the need for magic in something such as that.

He felt tired suddenly, and fumbled in his pocket for his watch. He did not find it.

“I have no idea what time it is, but it must be close to dawn. I was hit with what I presume was a low magic charge, and I’m sore through. I’m going to sleep till they wake us to execute us.”

* * *

He woke up in total darkness. From the sounds of breathing, he thought his cellmate must be asleep.

Manfred felt as though he’d just discovered something important, but he couldn’t tell what. He stared into the dark, his heart beating rapidly. There was something he knew, something—

He got up, stumbled towards the little table, found it by hitting it and making the glass rattle. “Richthofen?” said Boelcke’s voice from the general direction of Boelcke’s bed.

“Yes,” Manfred said. “I need water.” He poured water from the pitcher to a glass by touch, then drank, feeling as though it were the freshest water he’d ever had. His mouth still tasted vile.

And then he wished they’d let him bathe before killing him, but another thought intruded, a memory of a…dream?

“Boelcke?” he asked.

“Yes?”

“What if the ZND aren’t lying? What if their instruments aren’t defective? What if there really was a burst of magic that big from that area? What if out of that burst of magic, there were only you and I, shifters, on our side? Surely we can’t be the only shifters in the world. The English have their own shifters.”

“They put shifters to death.”

“Everyone puts shifters to death,” Manfred said. “Except the Americans. And yet, we are still here.”

Boelcke’s feet hit the floor. “What do you mean?” he asked. “Precisely?”

“I know we have an Imperial air service, but I heard the men in the trenches grumble that you people up there are doing nothing. They hear the planes, they look up and see our planes. And yet, bombs still fall. I’ve never been up there. I can only guess at what happens. But…is it possible that bombs come not from the English planes but from above?”

The air in the small cell was still and too warm, and Manfred smelled the warm wool of the uniform, his own sweat, and remnants of pig’s blood.

“I don’t know,” Boelcke said. “It’s so noisy, and your goggles limit your peripheral vision. And you’re paying attention to the enemy in front who might shoot at you. There might always be planes above you that drop bombs, though we’re trained to listen for their engines, of course. Because that’s a vantage point from which to shoot at you.”

“I didn’t mean planes above you,” Manfred said. “That’s not what I meant at all.”

There was a long silence, and then Boelcke understood. “Oh.”

* * *

Manfred rushed to the door, started pounding on it with his hand. When that didn’t answer, he joined kicks of his feet.

“Hey, there, what are you doing?” Boelcke asked, sounding alarmed, as though afraid Manfred had lost his mind entirely.

“They wanted us to talk,” Manfred said. “We’re going to talk. Why should they sleep softly in their beds, while we’re in here, desperate to talk to them?”

It was odd how, in perfect darkness, and Boelcke such a new acquaintance, he could tell the other man had smiled. Presently, he joined Manfred in pounding on the door, but not before he said, “I have no idea what you hope to gain by this, but the worse they can do is execute us earlier.”

A few moments of this racket, and the light came on, and there were sounds of running feet down the stony corridor outside.

The key turned in the door, and Boelcke stepped back, hands up. Manfred imitated him, which was a good thing, because when the door swung open, four men stepped in, each of them holding the belled, silver magical guns, but these were longer and thicker, and Manfred suspected they’d deliver death at an instant’s notice.

Behind them, the commander appeared, his hair tousled, his uniform looking like he’d dressed before he was fully awake, both of which gave Manfred a great deal of comfort.

The ZND commander glared at them. “What is the meaning of this? Have you decided to stop pretending you don’t know anything, and to tell us the names and the posts of the other dragons?”

Manfred shook his head. “We told you we didn’t know any other dragons, because we don’t,” he said. “It is like this—did you run sweeps after that burst of magic? Is it still so elevated?”

“It would only,” the commander said drily, “be that elevated if the dragons were in shifted dragon form. We followed you and
Hauptman
Boelcke to your shifted forms, from that burst.”

“Yes? And you think that so many infantry soldiers, so many cavalry officers, so many airmen shifted—unnoticed?”

The commander looked stunned. He stepped back. He was silent. Manfred knew the silence wouldn’t last. He spoke quickly. “Listen, what if the English have a dragon corps, which flies above their planes, unseen, in the clouds? Would that explain how their bombardments are so successful, despite our best attempts to stop them?”

“The English are civilized,” the commander said. “They execute shifters.”

“Do they now?” Manfred asked. “But what if they didn’t? What if they thought our kind, abominations though we are, can do a greater service alive than dead? What if they have recruited their guards to supplement their as yet ineffective air force? What if that explains their dominance of the air?”

“You’re trying to escape.”

“We’re most assuredly not. Where would we escape to? We’re both men with well-known families, loyal to the Kaiser. Where could we go, if we escaped?” Boelcke said in a reasonable tone.

Manfred joined in. “Have there been other such bursts of magic recently? During heavy bombardment?”

“Naturally,” the commander said. “During bombardments, dragon shifters shift and escape.”

“What? From the trenches? Don’t you think someone would have noticed?”

The commander drew in breath through his nostrils and let it out through his mouth with an explosive effect. “I will have to ask. I will have to talk to…This might go the Kaiser himself.”

“Undoubtedly,” Manfred said. “And meanwhile, I’d like a bath and some coffee.”

* * *

There had been coffee, and bread and butter, but not a bath, or not for some hours yet. But if the matter had gone all the way to the Kaiser, it must have been resolved with unseemly haste, because it was not yet noon when several ZND guards escorted Boelcke and Manfred to separate rooms, and each was given the use of a bathroom and the luxury of a bath, then proffered clean uniforms.

When they met again, they both looked like new men. They were escorted into some sort of a meeting room, with a large round table, and around it were seated men that Manfred knew only by name: the strategists and planners of the war.

It turned out they didn’t want to ask either of them much, only to make a proposal. Whether the British were making use of dragons in the war or not couldn’t be fully decided, of course, until the Germans tried it. The Germans proposed to try it. If the British were indeed deploying sixty dragons each time they made a bombing raid, there might be no defeating them—certainly not with Manfred and Boelcke alone. In time they would track down and find more German dragons. They thought they might have another one, right now. But even three would be ineffective against that many. So it might be a suicide mission, but if Boelcke and Richthofen were willing to try.…

Boelcke had spoken, then, with some good sense. If the English were doing this, their dragons were not armed. They were bomb carriers, no more, no less. Could the magical guns used by the ZND be adapted so that a dragon could carry one of them? Also, he added, having been up there, he knew the dragons would need goggles. Their eyes were as sensitive as human eyes. Or more. And if they were to go that far up above the clouds, they’d need something for the cold. And how were they to know friend from foe up there? Sure, if it was just two of them and maybe this other dragon they were tracking. But with so many English dragons, wouldn’t it be easy to be confused?

The planners and generals nodded, and agreed, and made suggestions.

* * *

Two days later, they had their trial. The third dragon was a dark-haired young man called Werner Voss. Manfred would later learn that, on capture, he’d been offered the chance to join them and had taken it eagerly.

They were provided with cannon-sized magical-ray-firing guns, and their process explained. The guns could be set on high or low charge. A low charge would not kill, but falling from the sky almost certainly would, particularly since, when unconscious, shifters tended to revert.

They had been allowed to practice their flying only once, in the dark of night, handling the cannons. Manfred’s red dragon had been joined by Boelcker’s golden one, and Voss’s shimmering green.

The identification mark, essential, in case the English had dragons of the same color, was an imperial cross in a circle of white, painted on their wings.

And the solution to the cold had been to have the dragons’ bodies rubbed with goose grease, something that long-distance swimmers in cold waters often used.

The dragons sat side by side in a huge, temporary tent, while mechanics who had been briefed and told they must keep absolute secrecy rubbed them with wool impregnated with goose grease.