The Daedalus Incident Revised

by Michael Martinez

  He might not have had his vision, but Frank still had the rest of his senses, and there were a few crucial things he knew. One: his hands were tied behind his back. Two: he was pretty sure he’d been lead underground. And three: wherever they were, it was a long goddamn way back to the bridge, let alone base. Then the sack was ripped off his head.

  He found himself in a surprisingly large, windowless room the size of a gymnasium, but with a dirt floor instead of planks. There were Nazi banners hanging on the walls, which looked like smooth stone or concrete. There were torches—actual, for-real burning torches—in sconces on the walls, and the smoke rose toward a small shaft in the ceiling. It was a long way up.

  In the center of the room was a large antique table, surrounded by six Nazis in uniforms of one stripe or another. There were another dozen people scattered throughout the room, mostly wearing civvies, but all armed. One of them shoved Frank to his knees . . . right next to one of his men.

  The young man looked right at Frank with desperation in his eyes. It was Petersen; Frank couldn’t, for the life of him, remember his first name. He was shaking like a leaf, and his pale, freckled face was streaked with dirt and tears. Blood had dried at the corner of his mouth; the Germans had taken a few swings at the kid on the way down here. The Nazis had a reputation through the war for beating the crap out of enlisted men, though they treated enemy officers better. But Hitler was dead, and this wasn’t a sanctioned German military maneuver. This was the last resistance against Allied occupiers, and Frank wondered how long the whole honor-and-glory thing would last.

  They were screwed, after all.

  “Keep your mouth shut and don’t do anything stupid,” Frank whispered. “We’ll be OK.”

  “Lieutenant, what the h—” the kid choked out, but before he could finish, one of the Nazis behind them whacked the kid with his rifle butt, sending him to the floor again. The guard—a big, burly man with blond hair and cold eyes— pulled Petersen back to his knees and slapped him on the side of the head with his palm. “Quiet,” he said in English.

  And Frank was kind of grateful, because Petersen swayed a bit but finally stared straight ahead, silenced. One less thing to worry about, for now.

  And there they stayed, kneeling and under guard, while the Nazis around the table continued to . . . Frank couldn’t tell what the hell they were up to. Several of the uniformed bigwigs in the center of the room were checking their wristwatches and pocket watches regularly. One was a generalmajor and another an oberst, with a third wearing the tell-tale insignia of the S.S. Frank knew the Nazi ranks and insignia by heart; they were posted all over the base, in the hopes that patrols might ID and capture a senior officer if they got lucky. Getting captured by one hadn’t been given much consideration.

  The Germans were waiting on something, Frank figured, and when they weren’t looking at their watches, they were looking down at something on the table—a map, maybe?— or fiddling with the knobs on a small radio set tuned to what sounded to Frank like a stream of gibberish. There was another, larger machine against the wall, about the size of a chest of drawers, with panels full of buttons, switches, dials and lights—a big, bulky thing emitting a low hum. What it was for, Frank couldn’t begin to guess; he’d never seen anything like it. But between that gizmo and the radio, it looked a lot like how top brass might stand around waiting for an incoming broadcast. Maybe Frank’s patrol got a little too close for comfort? He dismissed that idea out of hand; they were safely on the other side of the canal, and wouldn’t have been any wiser. And they were shot at first, after all . . .

  . . . and lured across the canal to investigate.

  Frank’s blood ran cold. Maybe the errant shot had been a trap to get them across the bridge. Maybe they were meant to be Guinea pigs for whatever strange crap the Nazis were working on.

  But again, where were the Russians in all this? Frank’s men had only been a couple of blocks from the Reich Chancellery when they were ambushed. There was a goddamn firefight out in the open! Sure, the treaty officially dividing Berlin was only a few days old, but the Soviets had gotten cozy quickly, moving into the few houses left standing and pressing the locals into service—with severe consequences for anyone who pushed back. It was a dangerous place for anyone not a Soviet to be. So what the hell was the Nazi resistance doing—Well, that’s what they were, right? Some kind of resistance force?—setting up shop right under the Russians’ noses?

  Maybe they’d taken back this neighborhood, Frank thought. Killed the Russians who were supposed to be at that checkpoint on the canal, scraped together a few blocks they could call home. Then it was guerilla warfare in the streets, no doubt. But why drag the Americans in?

  None of it made sense, and Frank knew the Germans didn’t even take a shit without a plan in triplicate first. Whatever they were up to, the fact that he and Petersen had been left alive was no accident.

  Petersen began trembling slightly. The air in the massive bunker had an unsettling chill to it, and they were wearing summer-issue fatigues. But Frank knew it wasn’t that kind of shiver.

  The kid wasn’t doing a good job of keeping it together, but he kept his mouth blessedly shut. Whatever the Nazis were doing, Frank wished they’d do it quick. He thought of home, his family in Boston, his fiancée Elizabeth. He tried to put those thoughts out of his head fast – he wanted to be sharp. But throughout all his battles in the waning days of the war, he’d never felt this sense of dread, of impending doom before. Maybe they’d be tortured for information. Maybe the Germans were hoping for a prisoner swap. Or maybe these crazy fuckers just wanted to make them die in unholy ways.

  The sound that erupted from the radio shook Frank to the core. At first it sounded like a big spike of static and feedback, but it continued . . . and continued . . . and it soon Frank knew without a doubt that it was a scream, utterly inhuman, laden with pain and terror. It was the single most unnatural and eerie thing he had ever heard, even during the worst of war.

  “What is that?!” Peterson shrieked. “Oh, God, what is that?!”

  The Nazis all either rushed toward the machine or circled the table in the center of the room. One of them—a tall, lanky bastard with a thin, cruel face—started furiously scribbling on a piece of paper in front of him. Frank overheard him addressed as “herr doctor,” and figured him for the man in charge. But given what had been discovered at Dachau, Frank had very little regard for any Nazi they called “doctor.”

  “Lieutenant?!” Petersen cried above the shouts of men and the piercing, otherworldly scream coming from the radio. Before Frank could respond, the private’s guard gave him another whack upside the head with his hand. The kid straightened in response, a wet stain spreading around his crotch. For the first time in all his long months at war, in a million awful situations with dozens of scared kids, Frank wondered whether trying to get Peterson home in one piece was going to get them both killed. The shame of the thought wasn’t as overwhelming as he wished it would’ve been.

  Then Frank went blind.

  A huge white light burst forth from the center of the room, turning everything around him into a blizzard of ill-defined movement, accompanied only by that infernal screaming still emanating from the radio equipment and the shouts and cries of the Nazis as they reacted—some of them sounding actually joyful.

  Frank doubled over in pain, his eyes screwed shut, his heart racing. There was something fundamentally wrong, a feeling in his gut that erupted inside him the instant that light exploded into being around him. The screaming through the radio increased and volume and slowly and began to . . . separate, somehow: a million different voices filled with pain and fear pouring into Frank’s ears.

  And then, inexplicably, everything abruptly stopped.

  Frank slowly opened his eyes. The Nazis were all standing stock still, looking upward at a point nearly six feet above the table, in the center of the room.

  Frank had no idea what it was, or how on God’s green Earth it could e
ven exist.

  It was about six feet around, a spherical white light that looked like it was was both swirling and hovering motionlessly at the same time. The edges trailed off into the air like mist, and the light was somehow present without actually shining or illuminating the room.

  It was utterly unnatural, and staring into it, Frank felt as if he went staring into some immense, unknowable abyss.

  The Nazis moved into action. Long metal instruments, roughly soldered together with long cords trailing out the back and across the dirt floor, were directed toward the hovering light. They began shouting readings at each other, their hands fluttering across the controls, while others quickly scribbled down their findings. And in the middle of it all, Herr Doktor was soaking it all in, a broad, wicked smile spreading across his face like a disease.

  Petersen choked out a ragged sob. “What is that? Dear God, what is that? What are they doing? What the hell is that?” the private said, over and over, a rosary’s worth of desperate prayer.

  Before Frank could respond, a pulse of blinding light filled the room and another scream—this one far clearer and horrifyingly non-human—ripped through his ears. Everyone in the room turned away; even some of the Germans looked horrified at this. But most of them continued to poke and prod at the light with instruments. Frank could see it was definitely swirling now, like water going down a drain.

  A spasm of pain rippled through Frank’s head. It was as if something had pushed its way into his skull and was somehow . . . writhing . . . inside his brains. He could practically feel ethereal fingers splitting the two halves of his brain apart and shoving something inside, something alive and unnatural that grafted itself to his mind and soul. It was a violation of his very being, his every sense becoming acutely aware and heightened. He pitched forward and fell onto his side, feeling each speck of dirt on his skin, the shouts from his guard echoing in his bones.

  He didn’t know the exact moment that the pain became bearable enough to regain control of his body. Frank unscrewed his eyes open to find the German doctor looking down at him.

  “You are not feeling well?” he asked in accented English.

  Another wave of pain pushed through Frank’s head. “What the hell is going on here?” he finally said through gritted teeth, his own voice sounding like a radio turned all the way up in his head. “Who are you people?”

  The doctor grinned, then pivoted away from Frank to bark out more orders in German. A moment later, probes and equipment were all over Frank as he lay on the ground, trying to control his breathing and somehow rein in everything going on his head, attempting to assume some sort of control over the thing that now resided inside his skull. When he was able to look up again, the doctor was back, a strange grin on his face.

  “It is your lucky day, it seems.”

  “I doubt it,” Frank gasped as he slowly pushed himself back up onto his knees. “What did you do to me?”

  “I can honestly say I do not know yet,” the doctor said. “But we will find out, yes?”

  Frank felt strong enough now to give the German a disgusted look. “You seriously think I’m going to help you, ‘Herr Doktor’?”

  The doctor shrugged. “No, of course not. But you’ll help your soldier, yes?”

  He then switched to German and barked something to Petersen’s guard. The man nodded and, without any warning, raised his rifle, and pulled the trigger.

  Frank didn’t even have time to shout. Petersen’s chest erupted in a bloody mess. The look on the poor kid’s face was one of mild surprise, as if he’d been told the soda counter was out of Coca-Cola. Then he fell face-first onto the ground as Frank managed to scramble to his feet—no mean feat with his hands still bound.

  “What the hell am I supposed to do now?” Frank screamed. “You killed him!”

  The doctor nodded in Petersen’s direction. “Save him if you can. Take revenge if you cannot.”

  Frank didn’t move for several seconds, uncomprehending, even as one of the other Germans freed his hands. Were they mistaking him for a medic? Was their English not as good as it seemed? “W-What?” he finally stammered.

  “Go! Save him! He has moments left!” the doctor shouted.

  That got Frank moving. He dashed over to Petersen’s side. “Kid? Kid! Can you hear me? Can you . . . ?”

  Frank grabbed Petersen’s shoulders and started rolling him over—and as he did felt the thing in his mind start to writhe excitedly, causing him to gasp and wince in pain.

  “Mike Petersen. Duluth.” Frank wasn’t sure where those words came from, and wasn’t even confident if he had spoken them himself, aloud, or if someone was giving him directions.

  The energy drained from him, and Frank collapsed on top of the dead man, then rolled onto his back. The Nazi doctor knelt down and leaned over him. “What is it? What is happening to you?” he demanded.

  “Basketball player. Daisy, oh Daisy, she’s going to be so sad.”

  The Nazi kept talking, but Frank couldn’t hear. There was too much else going on, and he pressed his hands to his head as if to keep his own thoughts from leaking out—or to keep other thoughts from coming in.

  “Mom and Pop and little Jimmy, too, they’ll be devastated. Letters every week, back and forth from Minnesota.”

  The Nazi looked up suddenly, fear on his face. Next to him, one of the armed civilians fell to the ground. In the back of Frank’s mind, the sound of gunshots registered.

  “That house, that was a great house over on Lake Avenue, but the family moved years ago.”

  People were running now. Frank rolled onto his stomach and tried to crawl away, but the images and sounds kept flowing uncontrollably through his brain. All he could figure out was that there were more people in the room now. And there was shooting.

  “Such drawing ability! A great future in art, or maybe architecture.”

  Frank looked up and saw another soldier, pale and seemingly malnourished. He had a red star on his uniform.

  Frank tried to get up, but managed only to roll onto his side as images and words flowed through his mind in a torrent. His body trembled violently, and he could no longer hold back the vomit that came out of his mouth.

  The last thing he remembered before falling into blessed unconsciousness was the emaciated Russian boy in uniform, looking at him as if he were a ghost.

  Visit MJ-12.net and michaeljmartinez.net for more information on the start of a brand-new series, MJ-12: Inception, coming Fall 2016 from Night Shade Books.

  Look for another excerpt from MJ-12: Inception in the forthcoming mass market edition of The Enceladus Crisis: Book Two of the Daedalus Series.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Michael J. Martinez is the author of the Daedalus trilogy and other works of speculative fiction, including the forthcoming MJ-12 series from Night Shade Books. A former journalist for The Associated Press and other outlets, he now works in marketing and communications by day and, like a superhero, comes out at night to craft adventures. (OK, maybe not exactly like a superhero. No capes are involved.) He lives on the Jersey side of the New York City area with his wife and daughter. He can be found online at michaeljmartinez.net and on Twitter at @mikemartinez72. Mike is a proud member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.