The Milkweed Triptych 01 - Bitter Seeds

by Ian Tregillis

They emerged on the training ground. Klaus half pulled, half dragged Gretel toward the waiting transports. He was just about to grab her waist and hurl her aboard when a line of tanks burst through the tree line. Klaus glimpsed red stars on the tanks as they maneuvered into a semicircle that blocked egress from the field. Their treads churned up clods of earth as they advanced on the evacuees. The Red Army had arrived at the Reichsbehörde.

  Klaus swore. He pulled Gretel in a new direction. “This way! I have a truck.”

  The icehouse stood between them and Klaus’s truck. He grabbed Gretel’s wrist, invoked his Willenskräfte, 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 Reichsbehörde. 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 Reichsbehörde. 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 Reichsbehörde.

  23 May 1941

  Reichsbehörde für die Erweiterung germanischen Potenzials

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

  An eerie sense of déjà vu prickled Marsh as he sped toward the Reichsbehörde. 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?”

  “I . . . don’t . . .” Again, the slide into that unfocused stare.

  Marsh shook him again, as hard as he dared. “Gretel! What happened to Gretel?” But the boy shuddered, and then said nothing more.

  “Damn it.” Marsh wiped the blood from his face.

  Most of the Reichsbehörde staff might have died in the bombing, or been killed by the Soviets. Even Gretel. Perhaps she’d seen it coming, but it was inescapable.

  He kneeled next to the dead soldier, weakened by despair. He and Liv would carry the sorrow of Agnes’s death for the rest of their lives. And now he carried another sorrow, too. It was the shame of his inability to avenge her, to punish the people who had killed her. He’d tried, and failed, twice. What kind of a father was he? The kind that couldn’t do a goddamned thing for his daughter. He hadn’t even been there when she was born: he’d been with that raven-haired demon, Gretel.

  Marsh stood, sighing. The Jerries would arrive soon to assess the damage. He had to leave.

  I tried, Agnes. Lord as my witness, I tried.

  Marsh drove his stolen truck toward Denmark, and home. He didn’t look back.

  It took most of a week to secure passage back to Britain for the stolen files. Marsh spent that time holed up with the crates in the secret oubliette beneath a Swedish fisherman’s cottage. He passed those days thinking of Liv, sleeping, and reading the entire archive.

  The more he studied Gretel’s psychological profile, the more certain he became that she hadn’t perished in the bombing. He absorbed everything they’d written about her, scrutinized it, read between the lines: Gretel excelled at twisting everything that happened to her own personal benefit. If the Red Army had occupied the REGP, he could be confident she’d found a way to take advantage of that.

  The miserable bitch had gotten away with it. She’d killed his daughter, and then she got away with it.

  Marsh stayed with the crates throughout the journey, even riding in the cargo bed of the truck that carried them all the way from his landing site in the Scottish highlands to Westminster. The files went into the same vault that contained the Tarragona filmstrip, a cloven stone, a photograph of a farmhouse, and the charred pages of a medical report. Marsh also returned Gretel’s battery to the vault. He wasn’t sorry to be rid of it; the ache in his back wouldn’t subside.

  Liv could fix that. But first he had to do something.

  Stephenson wasn’t in his office. He wasn’t in Milkweed’s wing of the Admiralty building at all. But he was in the building, and in the middle of a meeting when Marsh barged in.

  Marsh recognized the lamps, the end tables, the smell of leather and tobacco. Daylight made the room much smaller than he’d remembered from his first visit. Back then when Stephenson had taken him here—Marsh’s first trip to the Admiralty, back in ’39, when the old man still held his position as the head of SIS’s T-section—the room had been cavernous, draped in shadows.

  He entered on a tumult of voices raised in heated discussion. He recognized some of those, too. The same voices had said that Milkweed was a fool’s errand.

  Perhaps they were right.

  Stephenson was seated at a wide oval inlaid table with six other men. Some wore suits, some uniforms. The discussion stopped immediately.

  The old man’s eyes might have revealed a hint of relief in seeing Marsh had weathered his mission. But he voiced nothing of the sort, not even a “welcome back,” which told Marsh something about the nature of this meeting.

  “Commander! If you please,” said Stephenson with a gesture encompassing the other men at the table. “This is not a good time.”

  “We need to speak. Immediately.”

  “It will have to wait.” With a dismissive wave, Stephenson added, “Find me tomorrow.”

  “Oh, you’ll want to hear this,” Marsh said quietly.

  Several of the meeting participants turned to study the brash interloper who didn’t know his place and didn’t acknowledge when he was excused. One of the military men draped an arm across the back of his chair in order to crane his neck and see the source of the disruption. He was a big man, with thick caterpillar eyebrows perched over dark eyes and a wide, flat nose.

  Marsh recognized his uniform. He’d seen several variations of it on dead Soviets at the Reichsbehörde.

  Ah.

  Stephenson sighed. “I believe most of you gentlemen are already acquainted with Commander Marsh. General-Lieutenant Malinovsky, may I please introduce Lieutenant-Commander Raybould Marsh of His Majesty’s Royal Navy.” Then he looked at Marsh. “Commander, please meet General-Lieutenant Rodion Malinovsky, who is here on behalf of our new allies.” The old man’s gaze hardened into flint as he said allies.

  Malinovsky nodded politely. In thickly accented English, he said, “Commander.” His voice was a deep baritone.

  Marsh returned the nod. “Welcome, General-Lieutenant.” Then he nodded to Stephenson, too, saying, “Tomorrow, then.”

  “Yes.”

  Marsh started to leave, but he stopped himself. He stopped himself because she’d killed his daughter. She’d killed his daughter, and now she was getting away with it. He turned back to Malinovsky.

  “Where is she?”

  Was there a pause, the slightest hesitation, before the Soviet officer cocked his head, frowning? “I, I do not understand your question, Commander.”

  Marsh locked eyes with him, stepping closer. “Where. Is. She.”

  The Soviet officer blinked, turning to address the rest of the table. “My friends, please. Who is this ‘she’?”

  “I truly couldn’t say,” Stephenson said. The flint in his gaze had been knapped into arrowheads, all aimed at Marsh. “I must apologize. Commander Marsh has been under great stress of late.”

  Marsh gripped the back of Malinovsky’s chair and heaved. In one quick motion, the chair and occupant slid away from the table and tipped over backwards before there was a chance to react.

  Stephenson leaped from his seat. “Raybould! Have you lost your bloody mind?”

  Marsh ignored him. He loomed over the Soviet officer. Quietly, he asked, “Where is she?”

  Surprise and anger played over Malinovsky’s face. He said nothing.

  Stephenson skirted the table and grabbed Marsh while the others helped Malinovsky to his feet amidst a cascade of profuse apologies. The old man’s single hand had a strong grip, which he clamped on Marsh’s forearm to pull him from the room. His voice was like the first rumble of thunder from an advancing storm. “With me. Now.”

  He waited until they stood alone in the corridor, the door closed solidly behind them. Then he rounded on Marsh.

  “What the hell has gotten in to you?” he demanded, his tone a shouted whisper. “Have you any idea whom you’ve just humiliated? Have you any idea the damage you’ve done?”

  “They have her.” Marsh paced, pointing back toward the meeting room. “They fucking have her.”

  “They have who?”

  “You know damn well who!” This came out as a shout. “The girl.” He pointed to his head, pantomiming wires and braids. “Gretel.”

  “My God. You’re still obsessed with her. You have to let it go, son.”

  “Let it go?” Marsh abandoned the pretense of being quiet. He didn’t care who heard him. “Let it go? She killed my daughter. I’ve seen the goddamned records.” He added an afterthought. “They’re in your vault now. Sir.”

  That caught Stephenson by surprise. He faltered for a moment. “The . . . Oh.” He cleared his throat. “Even if the Soviets have captured her—”

  “They did. I was there.”

  “—you seem incapable of grasping even the rudiments of thi
s situation. Times are changing. It is imperative that we cultivate good relations with those people. And we absolutely cannot afford to act like hooligans. You’ve done more harm than you know.”

  “I’ll do more than that,” said Marsh. He headed for the meeting room door, rolling up his sleeves.

  “No! You’ll do nothing.” Stephenson blocked his way, shoving him back with a firm hand to the chest. “Beauclerk was right. You’ve gone round the bend.”

  He shook his head. “You’re done.”

  “Not until I know why she—”

  “You’ve done your service to the country.” Stephenson’s tone was firm, if a little sad. His hand felt heavy against Marsh’s heartbeat. “But you’ve lost your objectivity. You’re no longer fit for this work.” He shook his head. “You’re out. Go home.”

  Long seconds ticked away while they stared each other down. Marsh swallowed down the rage, tamped down the urge to lash out. It left him feeling, for all the world, like a little boy caught stealing from a winter garden. He knocked Stephenson’s arm away.

  Stephenson returned to the meeting room. The door latched shut behind him, followed by the snick of a lock sliding into place.

  Marsh went home. He didn’t look back.

  epilogue

  That summer, the ravens of Albion returned to the Tower of London.

  Changing seasons brought longer days. Peaceful days. No more fire, no more rubble, no more shallow graves. The men and women of the island emerged from their shelters and rejoiced. The war was over. They had persevered.

  They rebuilt. Day by day, a brick at a time, they rebuilt their country and plastered over the scars of war. And the ravens, knowing the cycle of all things, returned to their old perches. Those still standing.

  At night, the cities and towns and villages and hamlets blazed with light. The nighttime world had become a wine-dark sea to the ravens, with nothing but darkness below and the stars and moon above. But no longer. Light and joy returned to the world.

  And the ravens, knowing the cycle of all things, returned to their old ways. They waited, and watched.