The Military Dimension-Mark II

by David Drake

  This much Arborson had provided: survival. He had never said that he was offering life.

  The intruder gave a moan that suggested returning consciousness. Singer set him down in the second of the four alcoves. There were oak leaves on the floor, and dust; and among them, a dog-tag that had been Abraham Cohen's. In the first alcove, grating slightly under Singer's feet, was another bit of nickel steel that time had proven was not stainless. This one gave Singer's name, his church affiliation—none then and less than none by now—a serial number in an army that had not existed for thousands of years, and the medical data, which had become pointless when Singer first stood in the transfer booth and died.

  "Ready, one and two," he said aloud and felt the disorientation, familiar by now, as the apparatus of the Citadel scanned his being and stripped it away from his body.

  The intruder in the second alcove fell silent, though his autonomic nervous system would keep his heart and lungs at work for minutes or even hours. What had been a man was brain dead, a machine running down.

  In the other booth was the form that the Citadel had provided for Singer's soul to don like a cloak. It could not be said to have died, because it had never been truly alive; it was a simulacrum of humanity supplied as equipment, along with the weapons and the armor. It would not be preserved. An equivalent, like this one, with no more of the smells and aura of life than a billet of firewood, would be supplied at future need—as had happened more times than Singer could remember.

  A titmouse hopped through the light curtain which it had learned was no real barrier. The bodies were of no interest to the bird however. It flew out again when its curiosity had been satisfied.

  "Glad to see you, man," said Pauli to Singer, truthful in that as in most things. "And who is it we've got here?"

  "Where am I?" demanded the intruder, wide-eyed and too shocked to be hostile.

  "What's your name, friend?" asked the big guard as he turned to the newcomer who had exited the transfer chamber just behind him. "I'm Singer, that's Pauli and—" Elfen nodded his tattooed forehead "—Elfen." Singer offered his hand, hoping the gesture would translate. Language, like his present body, was a construct to the computer of which the guards were a part, but physical actions here had no import but that which the 'watcher' supplied from his own culture.

  "My name's Kruse," the wiry recruit said, "but where am I?"

  "Where?" repeated Elfen. "You're in the guardroom, wherever that is."

  Elfen picked up the cards which lay stacked where he had left them. "Do you know how to play poker, Kruse?" he asked, holding the deck to the newcomer and rifling the edges.

  "What?"

  "Oh, don't worry," Singer said tiredly. "You'll have plenty of time to learn."

  The Last Battalion

  "Well, I'm sorry it stopped working," Senator Stone answered irritably over his shoulder, "but since the late news was one of the things I got a mountain cabin to avoid . . ."

  "Well, it is strange," his wife repeated. She was as trim-bodied at fifty as she had been when he married her just after VJ Day, the first time he could think of a future after three years of flying Mustangs into hostile skies. She was still as stubborn as the WAAF he had married, too. "It was fine and then the color went off in flashes and everything got blurry. And it's getting worse, Hershal."

  Stone sighed, closing a file that was long, confidential, and involved the potential expenditure of $73,000,000. The cabin's oak flooring had an unexpected tingle as he walked across it in slippers to the small TV. His feet were asleep, he thought; but could they both be? Not that it mattered. He slapped the set while Miriam waited expectantly. The screen continued to match colored pulses to the bursts of raw noise coming from the speaker. Occasionally an intelligible word or a glimpse of Dan Rather slipped through. "Some kind of interference," Stone said. He was six feet tall, with a plumpness that his well-cut suits concealed from the public but was evident in pajamas. His hair had grayed early, but it was still thick and smooth after sixty-one years, no small political asset. Stone was no charmer, but he had learned years before that a man who is honest and has the physical presence to be called forthright will be respected even if he is wrong—and there are never many candidates the voters can respect. Shrugging, he clicked the set off. "If you needed somebody to fix your TV, you should have married some tech boy," he added.

  "Instead of my hotshot pilot?" Miriam laughed, stretching out an arm to her husband. She paused as she stood, and at the same moment both realized that the high-pitched keening they had associated with the television was now louder. The hardwood floor carried more of a buzz than a trembling. Miriam's smile froze into a part of her human architecture, like the ferrous curls of hair framing her face.

  Earthquake? thought Stone as two strides carried him to the south door. Not in the Smokies, surely; but politics had taught him even more emphatically than combat that there were always going to be facts that surprised you, and that survivors were people who didn't pretend otherwise. He threw the door open. Whipsnake Ridge dropped southward, a sheer medley of grays formed by mist and distance. The sky should have been clear and colorless since the Moon had not yet risen, but an auroral glow was flooding from behind the cabin to paint the night with a score of strange pastels. The whine was louder, but none of the nearby trees were moving.

  "Miriam," Stone began, "you'd—"

  The rap of knuckles on the north door cut him off.

  "I'll get it," Miriam said quickly.

  "You'll stay right here!" the senator insisted, striding past her; but her swift heels rapped down the hallway just behind him.

  Stone snapped on the entryway light before unlatching the door. The cabin had no windows to the north as the only view would have been the access road and a small clearing in the second-growth pine of the Ridge, a poor exchange for the vicious storms that ripped down in winter. The outside door opened into an anteroom to further insulate the cabin, and that alcove, four feet square in floor plan, was filled by two men in black uniforms.

  "You will forgive the intrusion, Senator and Madame Stone," stated the foremost in a rusty voice more used to commands, "but we could not very well contact you in more normal fashion in our haste." The speaker was as tall as Stone, a slim ramrod of a man whose iron-gray hair was cropped so short as to almost be shaven beneath the band of his service hat. The dull cloth of his uniform bagged into jackboots as highly polished as his waist-belt and pistol holster. It was not the pistol, nor the long-magazined rifle the other visitor bore that struck the first real fear into Stone, though: both men wore collar insignia, the twin silver lightning-bolt runes Stone thought he had seen the last of thirty years before. They were the badge of Hitler's SS.

  "May we enter?"

  "You go straight to Hell!" Stone snarled. His left hand knotted itself in the nearer black shirt while reflex cocked his right for as much of a punch as desks and the poisonous atmosphere of Washington had left him. The second Nazi was as gray as the first and was built like a tank besides, but there was nothing slow about his reactions. The barrel of his rifle slammed down across Stone's forearm. Almost as part of the same motion the stock pivoted into the senator's stomach, throwing him back in a sprawl over Miriam's legs. The entranceway light haloed the huge gunman as he swung his weapon to bear on the tangle of victims almost at its muzzle.

  "Lothar!" the slim German shouted.

  His subordinate relaxed. "Ja, mein Oberfu[auhrer," he said as he again ported his rifle.

  With a smile that was not wholly one of satisfaction, the black-shirted officer said, "Senator, I am Colonel Ernst Riedel. My companion—what would you say—Master-Sergeant Lothar Mueller and I have reached a respectable age without inflicting our presence on you. I assure you that only necessity causes us to do so now."

  Stone rose to his feet. Riedel did not offer a hand he knew would be refused. Miriam remained silent behind her husband, but her right arm encircled his waist. Stone looked from the men to the rifle used to club
him down. It was crude, a thing of enameled metal and green-black plastic: an MP-44, built in the final days of the Third Reich. "You're real, aren't you!" the senator said. "You aren't just American slime who wanted something different from white sheets to parade in. Where do you hide, Nazi? Do you sell cars in Rio during the week and take out your uniform Sundays to look at yourself in the mirror?"

  "We are real, Senator Stone," Riedel said through his tight smile. He raised his left cuff so that the motto worked on the band there showed. It read "Die Letze" in old-style letters. "We are the Last Battalion, Senator. And as for where we hide—that you will know very shortly, for we were sent to bring you there.

  "Madame Stone," he went on formally, "we will have your husband back to you in days if that is possible. I assure you, on my honor as a true Aryan and before the good God and my Leader, that we mean no harm to either of you."

  "Oh, I'll trust your honor," Miriam blazed. Fifteen years as a senator's wife had taught her the use of tact, but nothing would ever convince her that every situation should be borne in silence. "How many prisoners did you shoot in the back at Malmedy?"

  For the first time, Riedel's chalky face pinched up. "It is well for you both, Madame, that Mueller does not speak English." He added, "You may trust my honor or not, as you will. But it is not in our interests alone that we have been sent to you, nor in those alone of the country you represent. If we fail, Senator, there may well in a short time be no Aryan life remaining on Earth."

  His hand gestured Stone toward the door. "You will please precede us."

  Without hesitation or a backward glance, Stone brushed past the two Germans. Had he looked back he would have called attention to his wife, erect and dry-eyed in the hall. He had known enough killers while he was in service to realize that Mueller's bloodlust was no pretense. The big man had been a finger's pressure away from double murder, and they would not have been his first.

  The outside door opened and dragged a gasp from Stone in the rush of warmed air. Instead of the clear night sky, a convex lens of metal roofed the clearing a dozen feet over Stone's head. The size of the clearing gave the object dimension: it was a two-hundred-foot saucer resting on a central gondola and three pillarlike legs spaced halfway between the center and the rim. Through the windows of the gondola could be seen other men, both seated and standing. An incandescent light flooded stairs which extended from the gondola to the ground, but the whole scene was lighted by the burnished iridescence of the saucer itself.

  Behind Stone, the Nazi officer laughed. "It is not heat so much as the eddy currents from the electromagnetic motors that make the hull plates glow so handsomely. But walk ahead, please, Senator. She glows as much on the upper side as well and we—we do not wish to attract close attention while we are grounded."

  Stone's carpet slippers brushed crisply through the ankle-high grass. The dew that should have gemmed the blades had evaporated under the hot metal lid. Stone always wore slippers and pajamas when he did not expect company, but it was one hell of an outfit in which to take the surrender of a batch of Nazi holdouts in a flying saucer.

  Except that Stone knew inside him that men like Riedel were not about to surrender.

  "This is Dora, the largest of our experimental models," Riedel said with pride. "She is sheathed with impervium—chromium-vanadium alloy, you perhaps know. There is no limit, nearly, to the speeds at which she may be driven without losing the strength of her hull, even in the thickest of atmospheres."

  Closer to the gondola, Stone could see that it rested not on wheels but on inflated rubber cushions that must have been heavily reinforced to bear the weight of the craft. There were small signs of age visible at a nearer glance, too—if Dora was experimental, it was an old experiment. The rectangular windows whose plane surfaces suggested glass or quartz instead of nonrefractive Plexiglas were fogged by tiny pits, and the stair runners appeared to be of several different materials as if there had been replacements over the years. All the men in the gondola were bald or as gray-haired as Mueller and Riedel. The colonel noticed Stone's surprise and said, "Everyone volunteered for the mission, but we Old Fighters, of course, had preference. Everyone here was of my original crew."

  The man who reached through the hatch to hasten Stone up the last high step wore gray coveralls from which any insignia had long been removed, though his air of authority was evident. He was not even middle-aged. His hands were thin and gnarled, their hairs gleaming silvery against the age-dappled skin, and the bright lights within the gondola shadowed his wrinkles into a road map through eighty years. His exchange in German with Riedel was quick and querulous. The colonel did not translate for Stone's benefit, but tones and the flash of irritation in the eyes of both men explained more than the bland, "Over-Engineer Tannenberg is anxious that we be under weigh. You will please come with me to the control room. We will have time to discuss matters fully after we have lifted off."

  All ice and darkness, the Nazi strode to one of the pair of latticework elevators in the center of the gondola. Flipping one of a bank of switches, toggles instead of buttons, he set the cage in smooth but squealing upward motion. Wholly fascinated, the senator stared around him.

  A bell pinged each time the cage rose to another level. Through the sides, Stone saw identical masses of copper and silicon iron, suggesting the inside of a transformer rather than the computer room the craft's gleaming exterior had led him to expect. Narrow gangways threaded into the mass, and twice Stone glimpsed aged men in stained coveralls intent on their hand-held meters. There was nothing subtle in the vessel's layout. It reeked of enormous power as surely as it did of ozone and lubricant. There were eight levels above the gondola, each of them nearly identical to the others, before the cage pinged a ninth time and grated to a stop.

  "Sit there, please," Riedel directed, gesturing toward a frame-backed couch that looked unpleasantly like a catafalque. Stone obeyed without comment, his eyes working quickly. They had entered a circular room fifty feet across. Its eight-foot ceiling was soundproofed metal, but the whole circumference was open to the world through crystalline panels like those of the gondola. The saucer, domed with more of a curve on the upper side than the lower, was a fountain of pale iridescence against which the grim SS runes stood out like toppling tombstones.

  A dozen preoccupied men shared the control room with Stone and Riedel. Sgt. Mueller was one of them, looking no less dangerous for having put aside his rifle. The others appeared to be officers or gray-suited engineers like Tannenberg. Three of the latter clustered in front of a console far more complex than those sprouting from the deck beside the other benches. One of the men spoke urgently into a throat mike while his companions followed the quivering motions of a hundred dials apiece.

  Riedel stood, arms akimbo, and snapped out a brief series of orders. The heavyset man nearest him nodded and began flipping toggles. All three of the engineers were now speaking intently in low voices. Lights dimmed in the control room, and the air began to sing above the range of audibility.

  Stone felt his weight shift. Trees climbing into the night slanted and suddenly shrank downward. Stone's cabin was below, now, visible past the glowing dome of the saucer. Lone in the pool of the yard light stood Miriam, waving her clenched right fist. Then the disk tilted again and Stone was driven flat onto his bench by a vertical acceleration not experienced since he had reached the age limit and could no longer zoom-climb a Phantom during Reserve training. The sensation lasted for longer than Stone would have believed possible, and by the time it settled into the queasiness of steady forward motion, the sky had changed. It was black, but less from the absence of light than the utter lack of anything to reflect light.

  Riedel was returning. "Not bad," Stone said with a trace of false condescension, "but can you outrun a Nike Zeus?"

  "The Russian equivalent, yes indeed, Senator," replied the German, capping Stone's gibe. "Each couch"—his gesture disclosed rubber lips edging the top of the bench—"can enfold a man like a
n oyster's shell and hold him in a water suspension. For the strongest accelerations we use even a fluid breathing medium, though of course"—and Riedel frowned in concentration at the thought—"that requires time for preparation that we do not always have."

  He seated himself beside Stone. The American blinked, more incredulous than angry at what seemed an obvious lie. "You expect me to believe that this—my God, it must weigh a thousand tons! This could outaccelerate an antimissile missile?"

  Riedel nodded, delighted with the effect he had made. "Yes, yes, the power is here—is it not obvious? That was Schauberger's work, almost entirely. But to make it usable for human beings took our Engineer Tannenberg." The colonel chuckled before adding, "Have you noticed that when men of genius grow old, they become more like old women than even old women do? Tannenberg is afraid every moment we are not aloft that the Russians will catch us."