I sighed. No help for it, I’d have to abandon the Direnaut. I didn’t have this one configured for fire suppression, and with the head gone, it was pretty much a lost cause.
But before I went, there was one last thing I could do.
“Compy mode, activate!” I shouted, and the voice recognition circuits chimed. Martin had given me the idea for this, back when we’d watched a schlocky movie about a dinosaur park gone awry. Bad science, good action. And little spitty dinosaur things that won my heart. Forget the raptors, those guys were awesome!
The acid that had failed to make Crusader flinch bubbled up from the neck of the Direnaut, and sprayed out of its ruined mouth at full volume as the tank emptied. The flames paused as liquid drenched them, and then the air was full of green steam.
Just before the last camera failed, I caught a glimpse of the last Eisenjötun staggering aimlessly as it sizzled and its stubby flamethrower barrels melted and sagged. It twisted as the legs gave, cables and gears melting and running like wax, sending the massive machine crumpling to the ground into the huge puddle of acid that the Direnaut had spewed.
The huge puddle which my mecha was mostly immune to, mind you. I’d treated the inner layers with a counteragent.
But that was neither reason nor excuse to hang about. I triggered the escape pod, hunkered down, and braced myself for ejection. Right now I was blind in a damaged shell, with most of my weapons either non-functional or unusable. Better to slip away in the confusion, reconvene with Timetripper, and figure out what the hell was going on someplace where people weren’t trying to kill me.
It was a good plan. It was a simple plan. It would have been nice if that’s how it had gone.
But no. Once I opened the ejection pod’s door, I looked straight up into the barrels of three Mauser pistols, with some angry faces looking down from behind them.
Behind them I saw two more soldiers rummaging through the fallen wreckage of the first Eisenjötun. Ah, right, I hadn’t aimed for the crew compartments, just crippled its legs. These were likely the surviving crew.
“What? A woman?” I assumed the one talking was an officer. He was wearing one of those peaked caps. Non of them wore the black coats, they were basically stripped to the waist, sweaty and grimy, and clad in stained brown trousers. Right, right, the Eisenjötun design was pretty much a walking sauna, with the diesel engine throwing off stupid amounts of heat.
“Some fun before we kill her?” another one asked, glancing to the officer. For his part, and to his credit, he glared back until the other one dropped his gaze and muttered an apology. But I barely noticed the byplay, I looked to the third one, the only one still staring at me.
“You’re bleeding,” I whispered to him in German.
He blinked. “No, I’m unhurt—”
I whipped my hand out from behind the door, taking the Colt forty-five army pistol from the holster on the back of it, and put two bullets into him before he could finish the statement. “Yes you are!” I insisted, as I let myself fall to the ground, and the officer’s shots missed me by a hair. No exaggeration! I literally felt my hair twitch as a ricochet whined off the pod inches from my head. But by then I had the gun shifted over to the officer and the still-staring crewman, and four more shots ended the matter.
When the echoes faded away, they were replaced by shouts from the Eisenjötun, as the remaining crew broke off their salvage to whip out submachine guns and charge toward me. Idiots! I crouched, half behind the pod’s door as I leveled the Colt. Automatic weapons chattered, sparks flew from around my cover, and I knew it’d be a long shot at this distance—
The crewmen fell. The automatic gunfire kept chattering, but the sparks around me stopped.
What was this?
I popped my head around, whipped it back just as fast, and analyzed what I’d just seen. Score one for perfect memory. Also score one for the cavalry, if this worked out.
“She’s going to assume that you’re American!” I shouted, as the gunfire died down.
“Who wants to know?” Came a deep male voice, with a slight New York accent.
“Somebody who wants to make sure Mister Tesla survives this,” I called back. That was the truth. He wasn’t supposed to die here, I was pretty sure of that. No telling how that would alter the world’s future.
“Alright. Come out slow, hands up.”
I slid the spare magazine into the Colt, tucked it into the pocket of my skinsuit, and raised my hands before straightening up and out of the pod.
Behind me, my Direnaut burned. Off to the side of the street, the fallen Eisenjötun smoked. Ahead of me stood a man in red coveralls. Two black letters, ’U’ and ’S’ were emblazoned on the front of his suit. His skin and hair were smeared black with ash, and piercing blue eyes considered me with wariness. He cradled a Nazi submachinegun in his arms, barrel pointing down. He’d been the one to mow down the Nazi crew that had shot at me a few seconds ago.
Behind him, Nikola Tesla lent his shoulder and support to a woozy Timetripper. The most important man of this century paid his charge no mind, ignoring Timetripper as he studied me, the pod, and the Direnaut with narrowed eyes.
“Another time traveler, I presume?”
I looked to Timetripper. The scraggly brown-haired idiot shrugged. “No names!” he called. “Just... no names. That always goes bad.”
“The hell did you do, you moron?” I growled, and stomped toward him. Mr. U.S. got in my way, and put up a hand.
“Not that I don’t appreciate the view, lady, but we need to get you and everyone else here off the street. Think you can work with us on that?”
The view? I glanced back at the burning Eisenjötun. Yes, I supposed it was good. “Very well,” I told him. “Lead on. She can’t promise she won’t take a lead pipe to Time— the moron over there.”
“Gonna assume you’re not talking about Mr. Tesla. I’d have to kill you for that. C’mon, let’s book it.”
The square was clear of Nazis, save for the dead. This was war, then... I’d never seen so many dead bodies in one spot. It made the battles I’d had with the Black Bloods seem like a schoolyard fight by comparison.
I made my way over to Timetripper, took his other arm to help haul him faster. “Why the hell are we in the middle of World War Two?” I hissed at him. Tesla looked at me with knowing eyes, excused himself, and moved back to let us talk in peace.
Timetripper stared at me with bloodshot eyes, and leaned in, practically stepping on my feet as we went. “Dude, what the fuck did you do?”
“What did she do? What did she do?” I sputtered. “You’re the one who took us back here!”
“No man, it’s... that glowy lighty thing you did. My powers didn’t like that shit. At all.”
“The escape teleporter?” It had interacted with Timetripper’s power somehow?
“Yeah. Drained me right the fuck out. Boop, gone. I mean, not the first time this shit has happened, but I’m tapped for a while.”
“So why World War Two? You run out of oomph mid-jump or something?”
“Naw, doesn’t work that way. It... uh, you know what the first thing you do when you get time travel powers is?”
“Misuse them horribly for selfish personal gain?”
“What? No! I mean, well yeah, but that didn’t count. Okay, so like what’s the second thing you do with time travel powers?”
I sighed. “She doesn’t know. Spill it already.”
“So I tried to kill Hitler.”
“Okay.”
“Like about fifty times or so.”
“What.”
“He’s really fucking hard to kill. There’s like a million dudes around him all the time. And costumes, and guns, and traps, and shit—”
“So you died fifty times or so.”
“Kinda. I lost track. High as balls for most of it.”
“That still doesn’t explain why we’re here now.”
He glanced back to Tesla, made sure the father of the mode
rn age was out of earshot, before he continued. “You know how a record gets like a groove in it when you play it too much?”
“No. Wait.” My brain supplied information. “A vinyl record, you mean? Okay, that makes sense.”
“Well all those different attempts, and deaths, and me using my powers kind of wore a groove in time. If time travel was a record player, whenever you tried to play the track labeled ’Hitler’, it’d kick you straight over to September thirteenth, nineteen-forty-two.”
“You broke time?”
“Only like Hitler’s timeline. Jesus, calm down.”
“Through sheer fucking stupidity you broke time. Unbelievable.”
“Hey, I was young and dumb and shit.”
“Still are.”
“Dude, c’mon. Like you never did anything stupid.”
I gritted my teeth. “Just tell her how to get out of here.”
“I’m depowered. But right now time powers don’t work too well anyway. So we’d have to paradox our way out.”
“Go on.”
“It’s set in stone that Hitler lives through this ’cause I fucked up so much.”
“Okay. So if we kill him...”
“...then there’s a paradox, history resets around him, and I probably get my powers back.”
“Probably?”
“I’ve never killed him. If I miss my window and he dies like he’s supposed to in a few years, I get my powers back then.”
“If you’ve never killed him, then how do you know you’ll regain your powers?”
“Older me came back and told me. Said I could maybe pull it off if the need was dire enough—” He frowned. “Shit! That asshole! Now I get it!”
I snapped fingers in front of his face. “Focus. So we’re stuck for several years if we don’t kill him early?” He nodded.
That didn’t appeal at all. The longer I was back here, the more chance there was that I’d screw something up in the modern day. Tempting as it was to meddle, I’d gone to great lengths to get the friends I did have, even greater lengths to keep them alive. I didn’t want them erased, or killed due to timeline shenanigans. We slowed a bit as Tesla stopped to confer with coverall guy. They gestured to a side-street, and we followed.
“Right,” I said. “Your powers are about the second most infuriating thing that Dire’s ever run into. Arbitrary, stupidly strong, entirely underutilized, and capable of doing unimaginable harm if the smallest thing goes wrong.”
“Shit, you’re telling me? You got no idea how much time I gotta waste setting things right when I fuck up.” He did a double take. “Wait. The second thing? What’s the first thing?”
“You are,” I growled. “This entire mess is your fault. Your stupid vendetta got us into this.”
“You're the one that killed me!”
“Not well enough, evidently! And not yet, anyhow,” I glowered.
“Look, can we argue later? I've got a real fuck of a headache.”
“This isn't over,” I snapped.
The side-street gave way to a row of shops, all closed. Sirens wailed in the distance, and that boded ill. I cleared my throat, gave Timetripper space to collect himself. He was moving more easily now, so I pulled my arm back and let him jog freely.
“Apologies,” I said, calling ahead to Tesla and Mr. U.S. “We had to figure out a few things.”
“Understandable,” Tesla said, voice barely audible above the sirens. I got the sense he was soft-spoken by nature. “You are hardly the first time travelers that I’ve encountered. By all means, say as little as you must. For all of our sakes.”
I blinked. Refreshing. Then again, the man was a genius. Nice to not have to explain all the little subtleties. I smiled at him, and he nodded back, before skidding to a stop. “Trouble,” he said, pointing up and behind me.
I jerked my head around just as a shadow passed overhead. Birds? A flock of black birds, swooping lower. Big black birds, as they grew, and grew, diving straight for us.
Of all the times to be without a mecha!
“Sturm Crows!” U.S. shouted.
I dove for cover, ran into Timetripper who was doing the same thing, and wasted a second cursing him out. Tesla raised his hands, electricity crackling out and arcing up, just as U.S. shouted “No!”
The bolt hit the lead crow, but instead of knocking it out of the sky it sped up, darted around the flock, and then it burst in an explosion of light. I felt every hair stand on end as I hugged the cobblestone sidewalk, trying to keep from being fried.
KRAKA-THOOM!
When I came to and shook the cobwebs from my mind and the afterimages from my eyes, I was alone. I blinked, stared upwards in time to see the red-suited man jab a combat knife into a screaming crow, riding it down, sending both of them crashing into a nearby building.
Well, that’s it then. I’m alone—
The man stood up from the feathery corpse, glared at his broken arm, and shook it. With an audible cracking sound it straightened out, and he flexed his hands a few times as he surveyed the skies... and the departing forms of four giant blackbirds, carrying two limp forms between them.
Mister U.S had survived, regenerating the damage. But the birds had escaped with their prizes.
In one fell swoop we’d lost both my ticket home and the most important man in the world.
CHAPTER 4: DIRE – AN ALLIED RESISTANCE
“After America started taking an interest in the war, the OSS ran a number of covert operations on the continent. Frequently they would call in assistance from other allied nations and local partisans, usually with mixed results. America could supply skilled operatives and the occasional metahuman, but rarely had experienced agents. Britain could help with the occasional magical talent, and experienced agents, but they were building their own metahuman battalion and usually couldn't spare any powered people. France could supply powers a-plenty, but given the state of the feuding warlords, it was pretty hit-or-miss as to whether their agents were more of a help or a hindrance. Still, the chaotic mix of each covert group ended up working in the Allies' favor, more often that not. The Nazis simply couldn't predict what they'd be trying to thwart on any given day.”
--1994 Interview with Theresa Gideon, former secretary employed by MI6.
“Through here. Let me go first, or you’ll probably eat a few bullets.” I nodded at Mister U.S. and made an ‘after you’ gesture. He headed down the stairs in the side of the small chapel, and I followed. I ached all over, a side effect of the near-electrocution we’d withstood earlier. He was unaffected, of course. Regenerators were lucky like that. Hell, even his costume regenerated. Not sure how he managed that, but powers are weird that way.
The only light in the small space seeped through the cracks of a door at the bottom. Small creatures shifted and chittered as our feet creaked on the stairs.
U.S. knocked at the cellar door, spoke a few muffled words and slipped through when it cracked open. I followed, raising my hands just in case and moving slowly.
Inside, the room was half-full of wine casks, and half full of people. A single light-bulb hung from the ceiling, with its own collector antenna. Inefficient, a pain in the ass to replace, and a firm reminder that I was a long time away from my own era.
Two of the people in the cellar stood around a small table. They seemed a total contrast to each other. The first wore an immaculate tailored suit, had a bronze-headed cane at his side, and a top hat perched on his bald head. He had no hair that I could see, not on his eyebrows or on his scalp. The second man was scruffy, with a barely-trimmed beard, thinning hair, and baggy eyelids that gave him a vague similarity to a basset hound.
Two more leaned against a back wall. One wore a priest’s collar and robes. He seemed young, and he fidgeted as he studied me, continually reaching up to slide overlarge spectacles up his face. The lenses were chipped, I noticed. The man next to him wore simple denim clothes, and ogled me openly, eyes sliding up and down my skinsuit. I shot him a glare, but he returned
a leer. I had little time for such nonsense, so I looked to the last inhabitant of the cellar. The only other female down here; she wore a faded blue dress, and had mousy brown hair tied back with a ribbon. The cellar was warm, but she was clothed in layers, it looked like, and sweating. She studied a small tangle of wires, string, and what looked to be crystals.
“Your face tells me that I’m not going to like your next words,” Dapper man said to Mister U.S.
“They got him. They got Mr. Tesla.”
Dapper man slammed his hand into the table, lips stretching back into a trembling snarl, all teeth and rage. He shook for seconds before he calmed himself, but there was menace in his voice that I’d rarely heard before. This was an anger that could shake nations.
“Dead?”
“No. Seized by Sturm Crows.”
“Sturm Crows?” The woman on the cask slid down from it, collecting her tangle of junk. “So the Thulites ware involved.”
“Not just them. The lady here took down three of those walking tank things before the Sturm Crows showed up.”
All eyes turned to me. The priest’s with disbelief, and the woman’s with shock. The eyes of the two men at the table held carefully measured coldness.
“It wrecked her D—” wait, Timetripper had said no names. “—Device in the process. She had a war machine that was superior to their capabilities.”
“Who is ‘she’?” Dapper man said.
I tapped my chest. “Her.”
“You?”
“She can’t use certain pronouns. Long story.”
“And your name is?”
“Can’t use it.” My eyes flickered to Mister U.S. “She’s a time traveler.”
Dapper man rubbed his face. “Fantastic. Just peachy. Just what we need right now. Another idiot trying to cheat by changing the time stream.”
“This happen to you a lot?” Bulldog face asked him. He had an accent to his words, and a deep, soft-spoken voice.
“I could tell you stories,” Dapper man said. “You have no idea how many of these fools we’ve had to fend off.”
“It wasn’t her choice to come here. The one who dragged her to this era was also snatched by the Sturm Crows.”
DIRE : TIME (The Dire Saga Book 3) Page 6
