Black Chamber

by S. M. Stirling

  “Out!” Horst snapped. “They’ll be here any moment; this is an ambush.”

  He tried the door that led from the compartment to the outside, but the frame was jammed. Then he went down with his back on the canted floor, drawing his long legs up and slamming his boot heels downward and out into the door over and over again. The doors held for five impacts hard enough to rock the carriage and then screeched open with a sound of tearing metal.

  He really is Siegfried Fafnir’s bane come again, Luz thought. Only not stupid and not hip-deep in a sea of aunts.

  While Horst’s boot heels hammered, Luz was moving quickly; she slung her suitcase over her back by its strap, opened the Frenchman’s Gladstone bag, extracted the rifle, and fitted it together as Horst had demonstrated. It made a satisfying snick as the joints clicked together, and then she had four feet of automatic weapon, very much like the Colt-Brownings she’d used before. A moment and she pulled the operating knob on the side to the rear and pushed five rounds from a stripper clip into the magazine with her thumb and let the bolt drive the first into the chamber. The rest of the ammunition went into the pockets of her skirt, and two of the grenades into those of her jacket.

  By then Horst was helping von Bülow down the five-foot gap to the torn damp earth, making nothing of his weight.

  “Come along, Herr Privatdozent,” he said cheerfully. “The French are very determined to make your acquaintance, but this time I think they’ll settle for killing you rather than kidnapping you for the Sorbonne.”

  “Putting my stuffed and mounted corpse on display at the Sorbonne, perhaps,” von Bülow surprised her by saying. “Like that lunatic Bentham at London University.”

  Bright sun, Luz thought as she dropped through into a crouch with the rifle at port arms across her body and squinted around; it was bright for northern Europe at least. You forgot how much farther north Europe was than the parts of America with similar climates—without the Gulf Stream this would be like Hudson Bay.

  Just the time for the local climate not to be sodden and wet and misty and easy to hide in!

  There was a dirt road to the west, then a wooden fence enclosing a broad field of something bushy—potatoes—and then woods of oak and beech with a few hints of color in the leaves about three hundred yards from the tracks.

  A flicker of movement between the car and the one to its rear—more nearly upright—showed a man in rough laborer’s clothing climbing through with a shotgun in his hands, not more than thirty feet away. There wasn’t time for anything but reaction; Luz swung the muzzle of the rifle around and squeezed off three shots from the hip, the hard bam-bam-bam cutting through the chorus of screams and moans of pain as it bucked in her hands, shouts and the crackling crunch of metal contracting and buckling . . . and the growing crackle of fire from the coal truck and the crumpled lead wagon.

  The first round kicked up gravel from the track bed by the man’s feet, the second sparked off the frame of the crumpled rail car behind him with a wicked pinnng, and the third took him in the shoulder. He fell backward with a scream—she thought she heard merde! in it—and both barrels of the shotgun went off, with buckshot whining uncomfortably close.

  A few people noticed, several of them idiotic enough to point and exclaim rather than hit the dirt, but several others were running . . . and they’d inform the authorities fairly soon. There was a village named Stokkum south of them, just in sight across flat open country.

  Horst had slung the professor over his broad shoulder but was hesitating. Luz tossed the carpetbag with the rest of the grenades and the shotgun and its ammunition to him and snapped:

  “Horst! I can’t carry him!”

  Or at least not at any speed, she didn’t need to say. He nodded, the momentary irresolution leaving his face.

  “To the woods.”

  “I’ll cover you and then fall back.”

  He sprinted to the fence, hit it running, and vaulted over, with one board creaking dangerously as the combined weight of the two men went on it. Then he was running across the field of potatoes, which was easier said than done—they were in hills parallel to his westward run, which meant there were little furrows and ridges just right to catch the foot, concealed by the knee-high plants. He bounded across the field at a dead sprint anyway despite the carpetbag and a hundred and thirty-odd pounds of scientist, jinking irregularly from side to side as he went to keep from presenting a zero-deflection shot with what looked like an experienced infantryman’s reflex.

  Horst said I was one of a kind. I certainly hope he is, or Germany really will rule the world!

  Luz followed through the grass of the verge between the railroad right-of-way and the road and then over more grass to the fence; with European tidiness and reluctance to waste an inch of ground everything green had been grazed, probably by tethered sheep, which was good. The American equivalent would be a wild tangle of waist-high weeds only hacked back a couple of times a year at best. Her skirts were cut with hidden pleats that allowed a full range of movement to her legs, but they were still more likely to catch on things than trousers.

  There were situations where a woman could wear trousers without attracting too much attention these days—on a wilderness hunting trip, or in advanced circles when riding astride—but traveling on a respectable first-class train was not one of them. The only alternative was to dress and pass as a male, which she’d done when necessary; it was amazing what people didn’t see. That would probably have stressed Horst too much, though.

  She reached the fence—which was board-and-post and about chest high on her—hopped up and did a roll-over using it as a fulcrum, and let herself drop to the ground, cushioning it a little by leading with the butt of the rifle.

  “Ooof!” she said, as things in her pockets gouged her.

  The things included two grenades, and rough handling might dislodge a pin, but there was no point in thinking about that . . .

  There was a ridge of soil beneath the fence, thrown there over the years by plowing around the edge of the field, and it gave her a little cover. The dirt smelled damp, with the sharp dusty smell of mature potato vines over it, and the scent of things burning that shouldn’t from the train as wafts of smoke drifted by—the coal in the tender had all caught, for starters, and that would burn hot enough to make metal slump. She squirmed around to lie facing the train, licked her thumb, and wet the foresight of the rifle, which had a simple adjustable leaf backsight; she was about a hundred and fifty feet away now, and with a fast-shooting round like the 7mm that meant a flat trajectory or near as no matter. Assuming the weapon was properly zeroed in with the sights in the lowest battle setting . . . which she just had to assume.

  And die if it isn’t. Here I am, risking my life to defend a mass murderer from justice at the hands of people who’ll be American allies in a few weeks, she thought whimsically. And using their own rifle to do it.

  Though the Deuxième Bureau hadn’t hesitated to wreck a train full of neutral civilians. Still, compared to dropping poison gas on Paris . . . well, war was war. The train was still swarming with people, pulling the injured or trapped out of compartments, helping others away to lie still or groaning on the ground, or standing and talking to each other. A few pointed to Horst running across the potato field with an elderly chemist slung over his shoulder . . .

  Ignore details. Look at everything. Purposeful movement will catch the eye, or weapons. There!

  A man’s head and shoulders appeared over the edge of the roof of the rail carriage she’d been in. The way it was canted made it awkward for him, since he couldn’t lie on the top without sliding down; he was probably being boosted from below, and he braced his elbows on the roof and leveled a rifle like the one she was carrying at Horst’s fleeing figure. Still less than two hundred yards away, easy for a good shot firing from a brace. She came up just enough to rest the forestock of the rifle on the lowest boar
d of the fence, let the sight fall down on the triangle of head and shoulders, breathed out, held it, squeezed . . .

  Crack. Crack.

  Two more brass shells spun off to her right and the bolt locked back. The black silhouette—the man—jerked and toppled backward, probably with the ones below him trying to catch him; the rifle fell from his hands and slithered across the slanted top of the carriage and fell to the ground.

  Crack, and it fired as it landed, the bullet going who-knew-where; hopefully not into someone’s six-year-old Anneke off to visit her grandma, but things were as they were.

  Luz was already on her feet, sprinting west and trading safety for speed by doing it in a straight line. She managed to reload as she went, shoving the charger clip in and pushing down to strip the rounds out and into the magazine, but the bolt nearly mashed her thumb as it ran forward, and the potato bushes caught at her skirts.

  Meunier, you hijo de puta, why didn’t you use a detachable magazine like Browning when you designed this thing? Colt-Brownings have twenty rounds and you can just slap a new one in when you’re in a hurry!

  For thirty seconds there was only her own panting breath and footfalls and the rustle and catch of vegetation against the hem of her skirt, and Horst dwindling in front of her . . . was he powered by steam? Then a crack-crack from behind her, and a sound like ptow to her left and a ripping echo following it like silk parting, ptow again to her right.

  Those were rifle bullets going by, and far too close. She’d been bracketed, which meant the next one—

  Luz threw up her arms and collapsed forward, letting her body bounce flat with the rifle still loosely clasped in her left hand, and there was another ptow and the ripping sound right above her just as she fell.

  No scream, no thrashing, don’t overdo . . .

  More often than not a couple of hits to the center of mass just made someone drop down limp as the body cavity flooded and blood pressure dropped. Hidden by the potato vines, her right hand went into her skirt pocket; the suit she was wearing today was a russet tweed for the jacket and skirt, and it should fade into the background of slightly wilted potato vines and brown dirt well, disguising details. She let her bobbed black hair flop over her face and controlled her breathing by an effort of main will, the urge to gasp in air almost overwhelming—but that would make her move, and with the loose sandy dirt of the field so close it would mean breathing it in and then coughing, and the weedy scent of the crushed potato vines tickled her nose . . .

  ¡Madre de Dios! To die because I sneezed!

  She lay and pushed it out of her mind. Pushed out everything but sounds. The slow thick wind of this country through the rustling vines, the distant noises of the wreck . . .

  “Marcel! We’re getting in range of the woods, we should spread out. The rest will come in from the other side in a few minutes if we signal,” a sharp voice said, speaking with a nasal Picard accent, full of k-sounds at the beginnings of words where most French-speakers put sh.

  “Ta gueule, Pierre! I want to make sure of the Boche bastard I shot, the one who killed Etienne. And get that other Meunier rifle back, the shotguns are useless in open country.”

  Cinco, she thought. Cuatro . . . tres . . . dos . . .

  “¡Uno!” Luz spat aloud.

  She pulled the grenade out of her pocket, brought her left hand across and jerked the pin free with her thumb through the ring, came up to her knee and threw, and let the motion spin her flat again, shoving her face down into the dirt between two rows of potatoes.

  Pierre was right, she thought. They should have spread out. And Marcel is an idiot; he should have remembered we’d captured grenades with the rest of the snatch team’s gear.

  The three Frenchmen were standing about ten feet from each other, the one in the center with a rifle like the one she carried, the other two with shotguns, all of them in coarse workman’s clothes and flat cloth caps. The little clump was a hundred feet from her and she was fairly sure the grenade would land right where Pierre was standing with his rifle. Luz was good at throwing things—her father had been a baseball enthusiast since he’d grown up in the game’s New England home and had played catch with her as a girl, and she’d trained with grenades specifically since joining the Chamber and since the Great War had shown they were necessary. A field operative wasn’t an infantry soldier, but you needed some of the same skills sometimes . . . as in situations like this.

  The problem was that the Mills bomb was a defensive fragmentation grenade, meant to be thrown from places where you could duck down behind cover after you sent it toward the enemy; jagged shards of the cast-iron shell would almost certainly hit anyone standing within fifty feet of the point of impact and could go as far as two hundred. These miserable six-inch ridges of loose earth were a very poor substitute for a sandbagged trench, and she very much did not want a piece of cast iron pinwheeling into her skull.

  Someone started to shout grenade in French, getting as far as grena—

  There was a loud but unspectacular flat bumpf sound, followed by a pattering as dirt fell back to earth. In the same instant a man began to scream, a high wailing sound that didn’t end. Luz winced inwardly a little as she snatched up the rifle and dashed across the field; a single backward glance had told her she didn’t need to worry about those three Frenchmen again, though some of them might live.

  This is beginning to get ridiculous, she thought. I’m decimating the Deuxième Bureau’s operations in the Netherlands! And if I don’t get the information out of Germany, whatever it is, I’m helping whatever German plan this is succeed!

  Intelligence work was full of paradoxes and could astonish you with flights of what was supposed to be logic and wheels within wheels, but this . . .

  She didn’t stop when she came to the edge of the woods; they were open in the European style, tended like a garden, with none of the litter of deadfalls and outer screen of saplings and underbrush she was used to in the American equivalents. Instead she ran another twenty yards and plastered herself to the other side of a beech tree four feet thick. Luz was just trying to work up enough spit to whistle when Horst’s voice called from above her:

  “Very well done! You are welcome on any trench raid I lead! That was extremely impressive, meine Süsse!”

  “So was the speed you ran at, sweetie,” Luz replied.

  Luz felt a rush of relief mixed with paradoxical pride; he was an enemy, more or less, even if fate had put them on the same side in this fight, but he was also someone whose praise was worth having.

  “If they revive the Olympics after the war, you should enter the pentathlon,” she finished sardonically.

  Horst and von Bülow were on a broad branch more than forty feet up. The younger German pointed westward.

  “There’s a country road that way pointed toward the border, I can just see a bit of it,” he said. “This is the southernmost neck of these woods and it’s narrow.”

  “Probably a country road with Gabachos on it,” she said. “I overheard them before I threw the grenade and they were expecting help from that side.”

  “Ach, so!” Horst said, an all-purpose remark in his language.

  He had the coil of rope from the snatch team’s bag over one shoulder like a bandolier; now he undid it, put a loop he’d already tied under the academic’s arms, and lowered him effortlessly hand over hand to the ground, which must have been the way he got him up there. Luz steadied him, feeling the bird-fragile lightness of the elderly man, and sat him down so that he could lean against the trunk. Meanwhile Horst slung the carpetbag over his shoulder, dropped the rope, then dropped himself from branch to branch, agile as an ape. The last one was ten feet up and he caught it casually in one hand, slowing himself so that he could drop into a crouch, smiling and breathing deeply with a light sheen of sweat on his face and his neck where he’d torn off the tie.

  Suppress that impuls
e to rip his clothes off and throw him to the ground! she told herself; it was good to smile again amid the deadly tension.

  “I’ll scout the road and return,” he said. “When I do—”

  He whistled a tune; it was the opening bars of Ride of the Valkyries, which he’d also done in an intimate moment back at the Victoria, and an appropriate one. She had laughed so hard then that she’d almost done herself an injury in media res since things had just gotten to the point of no return for both of them.

  His jacket pockets bulged with the grenades. She handed him the rifle and the ammunition for that as well, and took the shotgun in exchange. Luz had no doubt Horst would do the scouting at least as well as she could, particularly in something close to his home environment; these probably weren’t exactly like the woods of Silesia, but they were closer to that than to California or Jalisco. With a nod he padded off westward, and Luz sank down into a crouch.

  On a thought she looked in the carpetbag and found one of the Codd-neck bottles of soda water still intact. She opened it, took a sip—her mouth and throat were paper-dry with reaction to the surge of action in her blood—and offered it to von Bülow before she went to one knee and braced the shotgun across it, trying to watch in every direction at once. That was mostly a matter of not looking anywhere in particular; you were trying to see and hear and feel things that didn’t fit the background and letting everything else flow through you. Patterns and gaps, gaps and patterns.