Ian Tregillis - Bitter Seeds

The man's gurgling, Marsh's gasping, and the hammering of Marsh's heartbeat together sounded loud enough to alert the entire building. He could hear the scuffing of boots, the rattle of hand trucks, and men talking in another part of the cellar not far away.

As the man atop him thrashed, Marsh worked one knee up against the base of the taller man's leg and dug his opposite elbow into the man's lower back, near the kidney. Then he flexed his body, using those two contact points like fulcra. His opponent arched his back, scrabbling at his throat with his free hand. The gurgling trailed off. Marsh, quivering with too much adrenaline to loosen his grip on the wooden handles of the garrote, struggled to roll the archivist off him.

He kneeled over the man he'd just killed, panting as though he'd run a steeplechase. It couldn't have lasted beyond a minute, but the fight felt as though it had gone for hours. Marsh's ribs ached, and his hands shook violently. He wrinkled his nose at the melange of sweat, blood, and panic.

Different parts of his mind followed disparate threads of thought as he struggled to get his body under control. Hide the body. Watch out for blood. Something's wrong with my disguise. Find the clipboard.

First things first. Marsh reaffixed the loose wires to the tape under his hair. It took two tries because his hands trembled so badly and his scalp was damp with sweat from his exertion. But he managed to repair the gravest damage to his imperfect disguise.

Marsh heaved the dead man over his shoulder, careful not to smear blood on his uniform. The man was thin but tall, and a damn sight heavier than he looked. Marsh staggered into an abandoned wing of the cellar, where the shelves stood empty and where, he hoped, nobody would have reason to venture. He propped the body in a niche behind one of the brickwork arches, where the light didn't reach. He retrieved the garrote in case he needed it again. The wire made a wet slicing sound as Marsh pulled it out of the thin gash in the dead man's throat. After coiling the wire and putting it back in his pocket, he wiped his hands clean on the archivist's uniform. He listened for several long moments, to see if anybody in the cellar had heard the struggle. No shouts; no alarms.

The archivist had dropped the clipboard where Marsh jumped him. Marsh retrieved it. He scanned through half the pages before he found a sequence of entries marked “REGP.” The Reichsbehorde records comprised a sequence of thirteen consecutive catalog numbers. He tore the sheet from the clipboard and folded the catalog page in his pocket. It took another fifteen minutes of searching the cellar before he found the cabinets marked with the same catalog numbers. They were empty, meaning the records in question had already been loaded on one of the trucks.

He rushed back outside, but was relieved to find the trucks still queued up. Marsh again scanned the supervising officers' cargo manifest—their replacements had arrived, while Marsh was inside—and traced his quarry to the fourth truck from the end of the queue. The lieutenant behind the wheel saluted when Marsh climbed in.

Marsh said, “I'll be escorting our cargo to its new destination.”

The driver acknowledged this but otherwise said nothing. They passed the next half hour in silence broken only by shouts of the men loading the trucks. It took an effort of will not to fidget, not to inspect himself in the mirrors. The truck occasionally bobbed up and down on its suspension as more crates were loaded on the cargo bed. It rocked Marsh into half sleep; the adrenaline rush evaporated, leaving him wearier than before. But fear that the dead archivist would be discovered too soon kept him jolting back to wakefulness.

Eventually, the stream of men filing in and out of the SS Haus slowed to a trickle. One of the supervisors walked down the line of trucks, loudly pounding his fist on each. One by one the trucks belched exhaust. Marsh's driver turned the ignition, and their own truck grumbled to life.

When the driver reached for the gearshift, Marsh said, “Wait.” Marsh watched the trucks in front pull away, and checked the side mirror until the trucks in the rear had pulled around them. When they had fallen to the end of the line, he said, “Now. Proceed, slowly.”

The lieutenant obeyed him without question. He didn't object when Marsh directed him to take turns that separated them from the rest of the convoy. They wove through Berlin, heading roughly west.

Marsh waited until they were well outside the city before ordering his driver to pull to the side of the road.

“Roll down your window, Obersturmfuhrer.”

The driver hesitated. “Sir?”

“Lower your window,” said Marsh. “That's an order.”

Cold weather had left the window crank stiff and unresponsive. The driver struggled with it, but managed to lower the window glass.

Marsh pulled out his sidearm, pressed the barrel to the driver's temple, and pulled the trigger. Blood, bone, and brain matter exploded through the open window.

He dumped the driver's body under an ash tree, in a shallow grave of snow.

He parked the truck on a disused back road kilometers from the nearest town. The lingering glow of a late springtime sunset paled the sky while Marsh, working by the light of an electric torch, rearranged the cargo bed to free up the crates he sought.

His ploy had worked. Marsh had stolen the operational records of the REGP stretching back at least to the early 1930s. As he'd suspected, the project had used the Spanish Civil War as a playground for field-testing and training Doctor von Westarp's subjects.

Marsh skimmed through the files in roughly chronological order. He learned of a pair of psychic twins, rendered mute by the process that had forged them into bonded empaths, each seeing and feeling everything the other did. He learned that the ghostly man who walked through walls was named Klaus, and that Gretel was his sister. (Interesting: Klaus wasn't the first person to manifest the ability, but he was the only one to survive it longer than a few days.) Marsh also learned of a flying man named Rudolf, who had been killed in an accident weeks before the conclusion of the Spanish war. That fact was annotated with a footnote that led Marsh, after more searching, to a very thick folder: Gretel's file.

This last thing he read until the batteries in his torch died. Which was how he learned that Gretel had been roughly five years old when von Westarp had acquired her and her brother for his “orphanage.” And how Marsh learned that through years of random experimentation, the mad doctor had created a mad seer, imbuing her with a godlike prescience.

Marsh sat up. “Bugger me.”

He set the file down, absently, on the crate where he'd made his perch. He cracked his knuckles, staring into the distance while the cogs of his mind turned.

That single piece of information— the girl's a bloody oracle —was like a fingertip nudging the first in a long chain of dominoes. So many things fell into place.

That's how she knew me in Spain, though we'd never met. That's how she knew when Agnes was born. That's how she escaped so easily; they probably had the entire operation planned before I captured her. That's why they were ready for us, why our December raid never achieved the element of surprise. We never had a chance.

Click, click, click, fell the dominoes.

He remembered little things. Her tone of voice:

Try anything, anything at all, and I'll put a bullet in your gut.

No, you won't.

And the daisy: For later.

He took up the file again. As the years dragged on, the men who ran the IMV, and later the Reichsbehorde, had come to realize they could not control her. She was immune to their coercive tactics. Yet they tolerated her because her advice, when she deigned to give it, was invaluable. Marsh let out a long, slow whistle: Gretel had guided the Luftwaffe through the systematic destruction of Britain's air defenses.