Ian Tregillis - Bitter Seeds

The icehouse stood between them and Klaus's truck. He grabbed Gretel's wrist, invoked his Willenskrafte, and ran.

Twenty meters from the ice house. Ten meters. Five.

And then—

WHUMP! WHUMP! WHUMP!

A chain of muffled explosions circled the facility in rapid-fire succession. They strobed the grounds with flashes of blue and violet like artificial lightning. The odor of ozone washed across the field thick enough to sting Klaus's eyes.

He recognized these explosions. He'd seen something like them once before, when the British had attacked the Reichsbehorde. Pixies.

His battery died, leaving the pair tangible and vulnerable. The Communists' operation was well-planned.

Soviet infantrymen emerged from the tree line. They jogged past the tanks, rifles at the ready. The evacuees raised their arms.

Klaus tried to slip away with Gretel, but they didn't get far before a trio of soldiers surrounded them. They stared at Klaus's battery harness and the wires twined through Gretel's braids. She squeezed his hand. One of the men called over his shoulder, something in Russian. An officer joined them. He looked the captured siblings up and down, consulted a clipboard, then barked an order.

The men took Klaus's sidearm and the rucksack, then stripped the siblings of their batteries. He felt naked.

The sounds of combat faded away as the Soviets established control of the Reichsbehorde. Klaus stood with his arms raised, wondering what would happen next. He knew they wouldn't be shot. Gretel would never expose herself to such danger. Unless it somehow suited her purposes.

He looked at her. As always, she observed the unfolding scene with perfect sangfroid. She noticed his attention, and winked.

A low drone echoed across the facility. It was so faint at first that Klaus mistook it for the rumble of idling engines. But it quickly grew louder, and soon his captors seemed to notice it, too.

Klaus looked up, searching for the source of this new noise. He found it in the western sky.

British Halifax bombers. The Royal Air Force had arrived at the Reichsbehorde.

23 May 1941

Reichsbehorde fur die Erweiterung germanischen Potenzials

In a strange way, it felt like Williton all over again.

An eerie sense of deja vu prickled Marsh as he sped toward the Reichsbehorde. This time, it was a German road cratered by British bombs, rather than the other way round. But it was so similar: the cratered landscape, the smell of cordite, plumes of oily smoke rising in the distance.

Marsh's stolen truck teetered around the edge of a crater and seesawed over another rut. The transmission groaned in protest. The farther he went, the slower he had to proceed, and the worse his frustration.

Milkweed's plan appeared to have worked. The RAF had flattened the REGP, if the condition of the surrounding area was any indication.

Grand job.

It was a good plan, but they'd formulated it before they fully understood their enemy. A sick feeling had taken root in the pit of Marsh's stomach.

The girl's a bloody oracle.

Gretel was no fool. Mad as a hatter, but no fool. She wouldn't have stayed for the bombing. She'd have an escape hatch. He knew it with a certainty deeper than the marrow in his bones.

Marsh parked his stolen truck on the outskirts of what had once been the family farm of the von Westarp clan. The truck wasn't designed for this kind of terrain. Taking it any farther risked getting stuck, tipping over, or even snapping an axle. And he wasn't about to lose the files he'd worked so hard to obtain.

With Walther P38 pistol in hand in case he encountered survivors, he toured the ruins. It took an exercise of imagination to reconcile his memory of the layout, based on a single dark night in December, with the charred debris strewn across the clearing. What the RAF lacked in numbers it had made up for with munitions. They'd even dropped incendiaries. The smell of kerosene and phosphorus lay thick on the still air, overlaying the odors of burnt pork and hot stone.

Bricks. Bodies. Tongues of flame licking at shattered timbers. Just like Williton.

But there was other debris, other things that he and Liv hadn't seen on their fruitless search for Agnes. Dismembered Waffen-SS soldiers. Flattened trucks and heavy equipment. Dead men in white laboratory coats. Half a troop transport. A mangled tank turret, its paint blackened ...

... but faintly visible, the suggestion of a sickle and hammer. Another dead soldier, his body and uniform torched beyond recognition. So, too, the rifle in his hands. But ... the length of the stock, the shape of the magazine ... Had he been carrying a Tokarev?

The devastation was so complete, he hadn't noticed at first. But once he knew what to look for, he found subtle hints strewn everywhere. An officer's cap with a red star badge. Fragments of Cyrillic lettering.

Oh, no. No, no, no. You grotty little monster.

The sick feeling in Marsh's gut became an oily dread. He shivered, afraid that he'd found Gretel's escape hatch.

Simply leaving before the bombs fell, before the Soviets arrived, didn't suit her style. It was simple, but she leaned toward the baroque. The information in her file suggested as much.

Handing herself over to old Joe might have been a crazy thing to do, but it also ensured Marsh couldn't find her. And she knew he was looking for her. He knew this, felt it, with a certainty that he couldn't voice.

Some of the ruins still crackled with fire. Behind a toppled wall, Marsh found mounds of shattered glassware partially melted into slag and a metal gurney with what looked to be wrist or ankle restraints. This might have been a medical ward, or a laboratory; the dead here wore lab coats. These had died under falling debris when the roof collapsed, or perhaps from shrapnel when the windows blew.

Marsh checked every dead body for wires in the skull, or a battery at the waist. But he found none. His census of the dead turned up dozens of Germans and Soviets, but also a large number of bodies either in pieces or burned beyond recognition, or both. If those men and women had once worn battery harnesses, it was impossible to know.

He did find one survivor. It was a young man, no older than twenty, wearing the uniform of the Leibstandarte Schutzstaffel Adolf Hitler, the elite Waffen-SS unit spawned from Hitler's original bodyguard regiment. This didn't surprise Marsh; an operation like the REGP would have required a standing population of mundane soldiers who could keep their mouths shut. The boy had been thrown against a brick wall, part of which fell on him. His breath came in gasps, and his chest gurgled when he exhaled.

Marsh crouched in front of him. The boy looked at him with a dazed expression. After taking a moment to recognize Marsh's uniform, he attempted a salute despite the compound fracture in his free arm.

Elite, indeed, thought Marsh.

“At ease. What happened here?”

The dying soldier struggled to explain, pausing frequently to shudder or cough. “Communists ... attacked. Tanks ... bombers ...”

The Soviets had bombed their own troops? Unlikely. The boy was understandably confused about what had happened. It was clear, based on what Marsh found in the debris, that the RAF bombers had arrived before the last of the Soviets had pulled out. But to somebody in the middle of the chaos, it could have seemed that the Soviets were dropping bombs.

Marsh didn't correct the misconception. His interests lay elsewhere. “Was the facility evacuated? Did our people get away before the Communists attacked?”

“ ... loading trucks when ... came through ... trees.” The look in the boy's eyes became distant, unfocused.

Marsh jostled him. “Hey! Stay with me. The medics are coming,” he lied. The boy coughed explosively. Marsh ignored the warm spray of blood that speckled his face. “Did anybody get away?”