The Milkweed Triptych 01 - Bitter Seeds (35 page)

Will and Marsh joined Lorimer and the others. They stretched, limbered up, tightened their belts, checked their kit yet again. Marsh did the same. He clenched and released the muscles in his arms, legs, and back. He concentrated on his legs, banishing the cold so he wouldn’t cramp up. His knee felt solid. The pain didn’t return.

The elder warlocks launched into the shrieks and rumbles of Enochian. The earth seemed to shift slightly and assume an impossible cant, much like the floor in the Admiralty building had done so many times over the past seven months. An ozone crackle filled the room. And just for a moment, Marsh caught a fleeting whiff of baby powder.

Focus. Focus.
He cracked his knuckles.

The rest of the squad watched and listened with expressions that ranged from hostility to something just short of abject terror. They’d all heard Enochian dozens of times, but to night would be something different.

The stone spoke. Will cocked his head, as though eavesdropping on a hard-to-follow conversation. Which, Marsh supposed, he was.

The Eidolon’s presence swept over them in a wave that threatened to rip the Nissen apart at the seams, so vast was the sense of its being. A boundless intellect swirled through the hut as though it were inspecting every atom. The men squirmed under its attention.

It lingered on Marsh for a microsecond eternity. The naked, inside-out feeling flashed through him again, just as it had when he’d severed Will’s finger. More Enochian emanated from the stone as it withdrew.

Will inhaled sharply. “There it is again.”

“There’s what again?”

“Your name,” he said.

Marsh started to inquire, but Will shushed him. He nodded at the stone, and the chanting warlocks around it. “Here it comes.”

The warlocks stopped. Hargreaves pointed at Will. “Now,” he said.

Will lifted the sledgehammer. “Ready yourselves, everyone.”

Stephenson said, “Godspeed and good hunting, gentlemen.”

Will flexed his knees, preparing his swing. He counted backwards. “Three . . . Two . . .”

On
one,
Will shouted something in Enochian, the hammer landed square on the chisel, and then—

Will felt the bifurcation of space in every particle of his being. His body was an impossible construct held together by the whim of an Eidolon. He was a riddle, a paradox, a rift in the cosmos within which
here
and
there
held no meaning.

He cried out. But sound, he discovered, did not carry through the crawlspaces of the universe.

“Ah.” Gretel put down her spoon.

“What?” said Klaus around a mouthful of black bread.

She dabbed her lips with a napkin. “They’re here.”

—darkness.

The Eidolon withdrew. Marsh occupied a single space once more. This space was colder and darker than the Nissen from which he’d departed, all those eons ago.

It took several long moments to regain his bearings, to become reacquainted with the claustrophobic confines of body and mind, space and time.

First, he noticed the breeze tickling his face, and the creaking of tree boughs. He looked up. Stars twinkled overhead just as they had in London. Wherever they were, their latitude hadn’t changed appreciably.

Then he noticed moonlight on a snow-dappled field. Across the
field, yellow light spilled from the windows of a three-story farmhouse perhaps a hundred yards away. Silhouettes paced behind gauzy curtains on the third floor. It appeared to be the same farmhouse featured in the photograph that Marsh had salvaged from Krasnopolsky’s valise. The farmhouse and field were flanked by other buildings. He checked his compass. Marsh’s team had arrived in the tree line along the south edge of the field, at the top of a U. The field constituted the center of the U, and the farmhouse was the base.

I’ll be damned. It actually worked.

Only then did he hear the sobbing. He took a quick head count. Most of his men had come through looking pale and shaken. One member of the squad lay in the snow in the fetal position, crying and sucking his thumb. Another man—Ritter; he’d served with distinction in Norway—hugged his knees, rocking back and forth, muttering loudly, “I can’t exist. I can’t exist. I can’t exist.”

“Lorimer, where are you?” Marsh whispered.

“Back here,” said a voice in the shadows.

“Shut that man up or knock him back to his senses.”

“Damnation,” said Will. “I tried to tell you this would happen.” He dropped the sledgehammer. It thudded to the ground alongside the cleft stone at his feet.

Lorimer’s machines appeared to have weathered the passage with no ill effects. Marsh gestured at his squad. “You two, and you two, get ready to move those pixies into position. Everyone else prepare to cover them.”

The first man had just grabbed a handhold on one of the pixies when a blinding white light flooded the world. Marsh reeled. At first he thought the transit had failed after all, and that they had ricocheted back to London.

Then he heard the yells emanating from across the field.
“Beeil dich!”

They hadn’t moved. But they were pinned under a ring of spotlights.

“Well,” said Lorimer, unslinging his rifle, “I’d say we’re fucked harder than an East End whore.”

The quiet night erupted into gunfire and explosions almost as soon as Pabst gave the order to activate the klieg lights. Doctor von Westarp waited for the lights before giving the order to attack. Otherwise, of course, he wouldn’t have been able to watch the proceedings from the comfort of his parlor. And the cameramen wouldn’t have been able to film the night’s events.

According to Gretel, the attackers had arrived in three teams. Klaus, Kammler, and Reinhardt were assigned the defense of the west, south, and east sides of the Reichsbehörde, respectively.

Klaus charged through the ice house, past Heike’s remains. The doctor had dissected her, laying her open like the illustrations in an anatomy textbook as he cataloged the physiological alterations the Götterelektron had wrought upon her body.

He wore two batteries to night, on a special double harness designed to distribute the weight evenly across his shoulders. It didn’t. Every step jolted the batteries; it felt like getting punched in the kidneys.

He emerged through the west wall of the ice house into blinding, deafening chaos. Light shone through the trees on the edge of the grounds, highlighting perhaps a dozen men. Some were curled up on the ground, unmoving. Others yelled to each other in English, or fired at the lights.

The men dived for cover, hands over their heads. The crack of a fragmentation grenade echoed back and forth across the grounds. Soil erupted from the forest floor near the base of one of the light masts. It toppled over like a great steel oak, making shadows swirl through the trees until it smashed its crown of glass against the earth.

The invaders didn’t see Klaus. The men were too preoccupied with the remaining lights to notice that they weren’t, in fact, under attack.

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.”