Live Without a Net

by Lou Anders

  I watched as they drove into a narrow street where houses leaned inward, took a sharp turn at the far end, were lost from sight.

  She’s been doing this, I told myself, for months.

  But even a long-established cover could be broken at any time.

  For the rest of the day, nervous in my attic and unable to go out, I drove myself physically: stepping up and down from an old sturdy apple crate, performing sit-ups and press-ups, chin-ups from the rafters, striking empty air as I worked through the killing techniques of Fairbairn’s system.

  And then, when the nerves were finally quiescent, I lay prone on the floor with an imaginary long gun held in my hands, and mentally rehearsed the shot I was going to take. This visualization, entirely serious, was the only practice I would get.

  When evening came and Laura climbed up to the attic, I took her in my arms, hugged her as though I could never let go, feeling the coldness of her skin, inhaling the faint laboratory scents clinging to her hair and clothes, too overwhelmed by her safe presence to speak.

  She kissed me then, an explosion of warmth, and I abandoned thought to the immediacy of the moment, when communion needed no words.

  It was on the fourth day, as I waited in the overfamiliar attic—dusty pale-amber collimated sunlight tracking the morning’s progress across gray knotty floorboards—that a door banged below, and I jumped.

  I waited for Elsa, the plump red-haired woman who owned this place, to call a greeting. Then softer footsteps rose upward from the ladderlike stairs, and I crouched ready for combat—

  “It’s me.”

  —then relaxed, recognizing Piotr’s voice. He was the team leader, whom Laura called Petya, but I used his proper name. The others—Zenon, Stanislaw, and Karol—I had scarcely spoken to at all.

  “Hello, Piotr. Everything okay?” My voice came out more stressed than I had intended.

  “So far.” His lean pale face betrayed little emotion: a face that had seen too much. “Everything is in place.”

  “Ready to go now?” My skin shrank.

  “In a few hours. You’re sure about the long shot?”

  I understood: Piotr and the others were hunters; they did not trust me to make the kill.

  “I placed second,” I told him, “in Bisley, before the war.”

  “Bis—?”

  “National rifle championships.”

  “Ah. Is good.”

  For Laura’s sake, it had better be.

  “You rest now,” added Piotr, “and I call you when ready.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  Later, as the summer evening’s sky finally darkened to gray, there was a knock from below, and Piotr’s voice again: “It’s time.”

  People moved warily in the quaint streets, where inward-leaning houses with uneven leaded windows appeared to stare down at dark gray cobbles. Hunched shoulders betrayed the locals’ awareness of constant observation: from spybats, from passing Waffen SS patrols, from each other. The landlady who wanted a new tenant; the disaffected pupil hating his teacher; the jealous neighbor bottling up resentment over the years: anyone might turn informer, spill out their suspicions to the Sicherheitsdienst, convince themselves of their countrymen’s disloyalty.

  And would they stand and watch afterwards, as their victims were taken away by stone-faced squads whose self-righteous force could not be denied? Or might they never stop to think of the suffering about to be inflicted on those who fell victim to the Reich’s internal guardians of pure Aryan thought?

  We’re all products of the culture we—

  I halted, just for a second, at the sight of gray uniforms ahead.

  Don’t stop.

  Piotr, walking ahead of me, continued without reaction: showing more professionalism than I.

  “Papiere.”

  I ground to a halt, my guts tightening.

  “Ihre Papiere.” Hand outstretched, impatience entering his tone. “Schnell.”

  But it was his comrade’s hand I noticed: flexing, itching to whip up the Mauser and squeeze the trigger for that momentary burst of flesh-destroying pleasure.

  “Bitte.” I handed over my ID.

  We used to say bad things, we agents, about Thomas Cook’s, and the fussy matrons and old men who ran the section, but the documentation they produced was usually—

  “Also gut.”

  He handed them back, and this was the greatest danger: that I would reveal overwhelming relief, as my protective facade fell inward, no longer shored up by fear tension; relaxation would be my downfall.

  For a moment I thought the other soldier was going to fire, and I prepared to claw at his eyes, to take some recompense with me to the grave—

  But they were walking on now, not quite in step, and the sickening realization of my own mortality was washing through me in waves. For now, I was safe.

  A scuffed footstep—Piotr, turning a corner up ahead—brought me back into reality. Here security was ephemeral, a guarantee of survival only until the next flashpoint, and I had better get a grip or we would be done for.

  That included Laura.

  Shards, on cobblestones—

  For Laura’s sake, I hunched my head forward, tucked my false papers back in my too-thin jacket’s pocket, walked on.

  From a thicket beyond the town’s edge, we stopped, stared back at armed curfew patrols heading into the alleyways, striding with a centered arrogance among ordinary people, knowing they could burst into homes upon a whim, always able to justify the violation of frail civilians in the name of the dark power that ruled their once-civilized selves.

  A soft rain, like silent weeping, began to fall as we turned into the darkening forest, moving quickly now.

  And then it was time for the long shot.

  Damp grass lay beneath me, but the cold faded as I pulled the hard butt into my shoulder, sighting the base of the tower that guarded the narrow defile, and began the breathing ritual. In the crosshairs, the sentinel was visible: a paler shadow inside his darkened booth.

  “The other sentries,” whispered Piotr, “are almost out of sight.”

  And breathe …

  Behind me, though I could not turn around, I could sense the warmth of the other three Polish fighters, crouched in readiness.

  “Three. Two. One. Gone.”

  I had twenty seconds exactly.

  And hold.

  Sweat on my finger, around my eye.

  Ignore.

  Centering the target’s image—

  Hold …

  A wavering … Then steadiness.

  Now.

  Squeeze.

  A shift in image, shadows in my sight, unable to tell if—

  “He’s down.”

  Success.

  It was an airclaw, silent and accurate: a sniper’s bullet. No ganglia to be disrupted by defensive sonic fields; no gunpowder whose crack would pull a thousand Wehrmacht troops and Waffen SS down upon our heads.

  The rifle’s weight lifted as strong hands tugged my shoulders.

  “Now go.”

  I was on my feet and moving.

  The five of us ran like wraiths, up the slope with lungs and thighs burning in the cool night air, fast and silent. Beside me ran Stanislaw, the tallest of the Poles, carrying the heavy rifle one-handed, keeping pace despite the Browning’s weight.

  When we reached the tower, Stanislaw dropped back and headed into the sentry’s booth. He would strip the body and don the uniform.

  “Two minutes,” Piotr reminded him.

  A change of guard had just occurred. From the info Laura had provided, the next perimeter patrol would not expect to recognize Stanislaw as the sentry on duty: from a different unit, newly posted to this place.

  “No problem. Just go.”

  We moved on, into the narrow defile, cloaked by darkness at the rock face’s base.

  Rumble. Stink of sulfur.

  Disgusting.

  Hot breath played across my skin as the bulky hyperkomodo sniffed, licked
my sweat with its reptilian tongue, then turned and lumbered away into shadows. Beside me, Piotr sagged: he had not been convinced the pherocipher would work; but we smelled like friend, not foe, to the ultrasensitive beast.

  Then a wide flatosaur transport came into sight, moving along the defile with its scaly hide almost scraping the rock on either side. Counting carefully, I took a breath and then rolled between two massive legs—it had twenty four in all—and whipped my hands up, hooking fingers desperately into ridged plates as it dragged me along the broken ground, and I swung up one foot—missed—then got the hold, pulled up the other, and then I was clinging on by all four limbs, like some desperate parasite hoping not to be shaken off.

  When I could spare a glance, there were three other primate shadows—Piotr, Karol, and Zenon—splayed against the underside with me, holding on while the lurching transport carried us out into the heart of the enemy’s installation.

  Through the internal checkpoint. Half hearing the driver’s chat with the guards.

  “—geht’s mit dir?”

  “Ausgezeichneit. Arnold hat ein neues Mädchen—”

  Then we were past, and I let go my hold.

  Drop.

  Stone thudded against my back. I timed the massive legs’ movement, counting—

  Now roll.

  In the small courtyard, a wooden doorway swung open, and a blue firefly glimmered for an instant before a small fist hid it once again.

  Laura.

  I was first into the narrow hallway, and I brushed Laura’s cheek with my fingertips, but there was no time for any other greeting as we moved inside. The walls were lined with polished mahogany, from what I could glimpse in the firefly’s blue-tinted illumination.

  Then, at the hallway’s end, we turned into a cross-corridor. This had been some landowner’s grand house, but as the corridor’s walls became bare stone and the air temperature dropped, it became obvious—even before the floor sloped downward—that we were heading into the low craggy ground, which splayed out, forming a headland, into the cold Baltic waves.

  There was a weapons area filled with soldiers, swarming across the equipment, while officers barked out commands and a black-uniformed Gestapo colonel oversaw the activity. Ducking low, we used a wide pipeline for cover, passing into the barracks area—more soldiers, dining—then through an internal pherolocked door which responded to Laura’s touch, into the cavernous pits.

  A small catwalk, of wet-looking black chitin, extended bridge wise across the pits, to an armored megarhino-hide door on the far wall. On either side of that door, in small recesses in the raw rock face, a big handle shone a dull, fluorescent red.

  Laura leaned close to me. “I’ll go first, my love.”

  Her lips brushed my cheek, and then she was moving across the catwalk, in plain view of any sentries who might make an appearance below.

  I held back, letting Karol and Zenon follow her—it would be their job to hold the deadman switches, keeping the armored door open—before making my own way onto the black chitinous catwalk, with Piotr close behind.

  Small phosphorescent cocoons, adhered here and there to ceiling and walls, provided a hellish light. Far better, despite the moans that rose toward us, to keep the pits’ poor dwellers hidden from human sight.

  It was worse than Kristallnacht.

  For the things that moved beneath me now, the once-human beings that fluttered and crawled and flowed in the cold pits, dragged slime-trails across broken rock or simply melded with it, were inflicted with something worse than agonizing death: a tortured ongoing pseudolife of glistening flesh and ever-raw wounds, of strange sprouting limbs—many-jointed protrusions, boneless ulcerated tentacles—and weeping, putrescent growths in an ongoing shamble of sickening flesh that could not die.

  Behind me, a sharp inhalation, and a whispered name: “Brigitte …”

  Piotr, ashen-faced, was staring down at that jumble of animated meat, where a few strips of cloth—there, just visible, a dirty yellow star—remained, caught in folds as the hypertumorous growths had split clothing asunder. On a liquid protrusion that might once have been a head, a stretched mask, like a face impossibly distorted, pulled down and to one side, opened its pseudomouth in a silent plea, or recognition.

  I caught Piotr’s arm. “The only thing we can do,” I told him, “is avenge her.”

  A tense nod, sinews standing out like cables on his pale neck, and then he followed me.

  But he looked back as he walked, keeping that tortured facsimile of life in view for as long as he could, until we reached the armored door.

  Karol went to the right, Zenon to the left.

  “Jeden, dwa, trzy—”

  Simultaneously, each leaned down on a deadman handle. The door puckered, then slowly furled back, revealed the steel-lined passageway beyond.

  Karol and Zenon would remain in place, for if either man released his hold, the doorway would close. It could be opened normally only from the outside. Unauthorized egress was possible, in case of emergency; but using the interior handles would set off every alarm and klaxon in the installation, shutting down our mission in a matter of seconds.

  “All right,” said Laura. “We’ve made the rendezvous.”

  Let’s hope Wilhelm manages the same.

  We moved into the steel passageway.

  Lab benches covered a factory-wide floor. Laura, Piotr, and I walked the length of one aisle, to the flight of pinewood steps at the far end, where we stopped. The steps led up to a glass-walled cabin on a raised level, but the cabin—an isolation lab, perhaps—was unlit, as deserted as the ghostly expanse of benches, unoccupied stools, and workplaces ranged across the wide, gloomy main chamber.

  On one wall, high, hung a scarlet swastika-emblazoned banner. Below it, the only other door into this place slowly swung open.

  “No …”

  And two blond-haired figures, white lab coats over their impeccable suits, walked inside and stopped.

  For a long moment, we stared at each other, locked in silence.

  The contact, via a cutout—a local schoolteacher with little knowledge of the Nazis who had contacted her, or of the resistance fighters with whom she engaged purely in writing, via a long-established letter drop—had evinced knowledge of the long-range dragon program, and the nucleic bomb payload that their nymphclusters were designed to deliver. Whitehall’s analysts had been certain that one or other Wilhelm was involved: no one had considered the possibility that both of them might be considering defection to the enemy. Especially now, as the Blitzkrieg was pulverizing England’s cities, now that jackboots marched throughout Europe, once-free countries having fallen like dominoes before the encroaching Reich.

  I don’t like this.

  It was too rich an offering to accept at face value.

  “Let me show you something.” The shorter of the two Wilhelms—Wilhelm One—gestured toward an opaque pearly panel upon the nearest wall. Speaking in English again, “Come here.”

  There was no point in shyness. I walked over to him, intending to offer my hand in greeting, but he turned away and dialed the panel into transparency.

  Automatically, I moved to one side, but the lab surrounding me was shadow-shrouded, while the great hangar chamber into which we looked was brightly lit with white incandescent arc lamps. If any of the ground crew looked up, they were unlikely to spot us.

  “Dear God,” muttered Piotr.

  For we were looking down upon the hugest dragons imaginable, their vast delta-wings filling the great shallow pits, stretching from wingtip to wingtip as wide as a row of houses. Nymphs, opalescent and spherical, their long tendrils neatly bundled up around great yolk sacs, were being loaded into the dragon’s cavities; once released over the target city, the ejected nymphs would blossom, shed their skins to become small adult dragons within seconds, swooping down in operant-conditioned precision to deliver their deadly payloads directly onto the soft civilian targets below.

  “The first test flights
,” said Wilhelm One in an even tone, “have proved satisfactory.”

  “What’s their range?” I asked. And, when he did not answer, “Was ist die Fliegweite?”

  “Zwei tausand Kilometer.” He shrugged. “Vielleicht mehr.”

  With a two-thousand-kilometer range, they could launch from here—would not even have to relocate their facilities to occupied France, as I had expected.

  Even without the nucleic bomb, if the Luftwaffe labs could spawn these hyperdragons fast enough, hatch them in sufficiently large batches to provide a dozen squadrons, maybe twenty, then the war against England would shortly be over, and Englishmen would be learning German in the same way our Saxon ancestors were once coerced into adopting Norman French. But the new regime would be something out of nightmare, such as the writers of medieval epics, for all their monsters and demons, could never have imagined.

  “And you.” I turned to face the other Wilhelm. “Just what are you hoping to get out of this?”

  They wheeled blackboards on casters into place, near the pinewood steps that led to the isolation lab. Quickly, Wilhelm Two scrawled equations in chalk while Wilhelm One, readying a glass dish upon an asbestos mat, gave a commentary.

  “From what I understand—” He waited until I nodded: I knew he was not a specialist in quantum molecular evolution. “—there are two problems. First is the bomb core itself, with self-replicating attractor-strands designed to cascade through the atmosphere.”

  I felt myself grow cold.

  “Second,” Wilhelm One continued, “is the vector trigger, which energizes the process and carries the spawn outward, enabling the cascade.”

  Even from party talk in Oppenheimer’s house, I could have verified this much: that the Nazis were a long way down the line, to have gained insights into the trigger mechanism, to have realized that it was as crucial to the weapon’s operation as the nucleic core itself.

  From the enzyme formulae currently growing upon the board—Wilhelm Two tossed one worn nub of white chalk aside, picked up a fresh stick—I could see, also, that they had at least the basics of core-construction techniques. Just as (contrary to Einstein’s instincts) characteristics like intelligence had evolved in the natural world too fast for strict Wallacian macroselection, so, too, could Wilhelm Two and his coworkers produce the necessary replicator strands in far less time than the millennia that ordinary evolution would require.