Minds of Men

by Kacey Ezell

  Lina said nothing. Smolenk smiled thinly and stared at her.

  “Fraulein Sucherin,” he said after a moment, and Lina could tell he meant his voice to be kindly. “I believe this work is taking a toll on you. Intelligence work...police work...these are no place for a woman. Your mind is not designed for such harsh realities. I think it would be best if you transferred back to Berlin for some time. There is much record keeping work to be done there. Perhaps you might find yourself more...suited to a more traditionally feminine task.”

  Lina still said nothing. Smolenk’s smile grew wider, his eyes sharper.

  “Yes. I think that will be exactly the thing. Neils, have one of your people purchase a train ticket for her in the morning. I feel certain she will want to return as soon as possible. We thank you for your brave work here, Fraulein. It is not your fault it did not work out. Please do not think that in the slightest.”

  I don’t, she thought, but still said nothing. Instead, she did something unforgivable. With the lightest of touches, the touch that even Evelyn Adamsen could barely detect, Lina reached out and pulled loose a single thread from the man’s psyche. He felt it, of course, for she saw him twitch. But he didn’t believe her psychic powers were real, so he could hardly accuse her of using them. His eyes went wide, and she finally gave him a smile.

  “Good day, Herr Smolenk,” she said and turned to leave without even acknowledging Neils’ presence. He had refused to help her when she needed it most. He might as well be dead.

  Behind her, she heard Smolenk start to say something and then stop, suddenly. Her lips started to curve in a smile. His psyche would start to unravel, slowly at first, but then faster and faster, like an old sweater. Nightmares, perhaps. Missing memories. Personality changes. All of these things were possible. She didn’t know what form his madness would take, but she had no doubt it would come, slowly, and it would destroy his world.

  Lina could be very patient where justice was concerned.

  As Evelyn Adamsen would learn...one day.

  * * * * *

  Epilogue

  February 1944: Big Week

  Colonel Ken Rizer stood in his office and watched out the window as the distant line of B-17 Flying Fortresses grew larger on the horizon. Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one...he counted as they dropped down out of the overhead cloud cover. On his desk, the telephone rang. He picked up the handset and brought it to his ear, his eyes never leaving the window.

  “Rizer,” he said.

  “Ken,” a voice said on the other end. “It’s Chucky Bates. It’s looking good, Ken. It’s looking real good from where I sit!”

  Colonel Charles “Chucky” Bates was the newly installed commander of the 364th Fighter Group over at RAF Honington. The 364th’s newly arrived P-51B Mustang fighters had provided the much-anticipated long-range fighter escort for today’s mission.

  “Here too,” Rizer said, and something in his chest eased as he counted three more Forts descending out of the cloud cover. Two of them were trailing smoke, but they’d made it home.

  “I told you my boys would take care of yours, Ken,” Bates said, laughter in his voice.

  “That you did, Chucky. That you did. Next pint’s on me.”

  “I’ll hold you to it, Ken. I better head down to debrief my boys. Be seeing ya!”

  “So long, Chucky,” Rizer said and replaced the handset in its cradle. He shook his head with a tiny smile at the flamboyant fighter pilot and continued watching until the last Fort’s wheels touched down on Ridgway’s runway with a puff of smoke.

  Only then did he turn back to the memorandum sitting on his desk.

  To: Colonel Kenneth Rizer, Commander, 381st Bombardment Wing

  From: Commander, 8th Air Force

  Colonel Rizer, with the arrival of the P-51B long-range fighter, I have decided to stand down General Durant’s secret WAC program. Please give my regards to your ladies and pass along my thanks and that of a grateful nation for the service they’ve rendered.

  Effective immediately, all psychic aircrew technicians will be returned stateside and mustered out. Their program, however, remains classified, and they should be reminded of that fact.

  Sincerely,

  Harold Rayder, Brigadier General, USAAF

  In the five months the WACs had been flying with his crews, Rizer had seen a remarkable uptick in mission effectiveness. However, of the twenty fresh-faced young women who had arrived back in October, only twelve remained. Seven of them hadn’t returned from the war-savaged skies over Occupied Europe and were presumed to be dead.

  That number had been eight, but the P-51B wasn’t the only newly arrived miracle in England. Evelyn Adamsen, missing since just before Christmas of last year, had returned with three of her surviving crewmen aboard a British ship only a week ago. The four of them had been through hell and were still debriefing in London with MI-9, the British department responsible for recovering downed and evading allied airmen.

  Rizer had talked very fast and pulled a little rank to do it, but he’d managed to bully his way in to check on his men and woman. What he’d found had surprised him and, frankly, made him slightly uneasy. Adamsen had apparently been linked to her three crewmen for so long she could no longer detach from them. There were additional extreme circumstances that had occurred, apparently, and he wasn’t sure of all the details, but it was very clear that Adamsen would never lead a normal life. She appeared to be developing a relationship with the only surviving enlisted man on the crew, the flight engineer, Sean Carrol. Ordinarily, that would be a problem in and of itself, but it got even more complicated when one considered that she also appeared to be in a perpetual network with the other two survivors, navigator Abram Portman and bombardier Paul Rutherford.

  He’d already made the decision the four of them would not fly another combat mission, not after what they’d been through. And truth be told, the cost of sending any of these women up with their precious gifts seemed extraordinarily high, even for the increase in mission success.

  So General Rayder’s order didn’t shock him. It came as something of a relief. He could do what he’d wanted to do in his heart since the first time the women had come home from a mission. He could tell them they didn’t have to go back out. He could keep them safe. He could protect them. He could send them home.

  Rizer just hoped that would be enough. After what they’d seen...and from what he understood, having seen it through multiple minds amplified the psychological effects of war. He could look at any of the women and see the truth of that on their thin, tired faces and their huge, shadowed eyes.

  Someone knocked twice on his door, jolting him from his reverie. It was time to head down to Operations. He grabbed the general’s memo. He’d brief it this afternoon and begin preparations to send the WACs home in the morning. Their crews wouldn’t like it, but unless he missed his guess, many of the men worried about their psychics just as much as he did.

  War never changed: you always protected the man next to you. Even if that man happened to be a woman. Especially if that woman had also protected you.

  Colonel Ken Rizer squared his shoulders and walked out of his office, head high, secure in the knowledge he could finally do the right thing.

  <<<<>>>>

  About the Author

  Kacey Ezell was born in South Dakota in 1977. Her parents joined the US Air Force in 1984, and she grew up around the world on various military bases. When she was seven, her mother gave her a copy of Anne McCaffrey’s Dragondrums, and shortly thereafter, Kacey decided that she wanted to be a dragonrider when she grew up. In 1999, she followed her parents into the “family business” and graduated from the United States Air Force Academy before going to pilot training. As dragons were in short supply at the time, she reasoned that flying aircraft was the next best thing. She earned her wings in 2001, and has over 2500 hours in the UH-1N and Mi-17 helicopters.

  From the time she was a small child, Kacey made up stories to tell to her friends and fa
mily. In 2009, while deployed to Iraq, she wrote the military-themed supernatural story “Light,” which was accepted for publication in the Baen Books anthology Citizens. She was asked to consult on John Ringo’s 2015 novel Strands of Sorrow, and wrote the cover story for the Black Tide Rising anthology set in Ringo’s zombie apocalypse universe. That story, “Not in Vain” was selected for inclusion in the “Year’s Best Military SF and Adventure Fiction” anthology produced by Baen Books.

  Kacey writes science fiction, fantasy, horror, noir, romance...she writes fiction. She lives with her husband, two daughters, and two cats.

  * * * * *

  Connect with Kacey Ezell Online

  Website: www.kaceyezell.net

  Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Kacey-Ezell/e/B0195040QU/

  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AuthorKaceyEzell/

  Twitter: @Sevillalost

  * * * * *

  The following is an

  Excerpt from Book Two of The Psyche of War:

  The World Asunder

  ___________________

  Kacey Ezell

  Available soon from Theogony Books

  eBook, Paperback, and Audio

  Excerpt from “The World Asunder:”

  Chapter One

  On a sticky summer day in June of 1948, Adalina Sucherin remembered who she was.

  She’d been walking home from work, but she hadn’t really been paying close attention to her route. There was no great reason for her to hurry home to her solitary flat. It contained only a creaky bed and the few meagre possessions she’d been able to scrounge after the war. Her neighbors, perhaps, might have looked for her, but they knew her habits, and it wasn’t unusual for her to walk for hours each night. There was solace in movement, in the illusion of action that exercise provided. Standing still provided the horror an opportunity to creep in, and so Lina preferred to walk.

  It was the sound that did it. She would remember that, later. That deep rumble, just at the edge of her hearing. It started in her chest and built to an audible roar...but distant. A sudden flash of fear brought her head up from her unseeing study of the broken concrete road. Bombers? An air raid?

  No. Stupid, stupid, she chastised herself. The war had been over for three years. Three years since the Reich had fallen, taking with it all of her illusions, all of her fire. Three years since the Soviet soldiers came ravening through the streets of Berlin, looting and raping everything in their path. Three years since she’d last torn a man’s psyche apart, watching him bleed from his eyes and nose as his brain hemorrhaged in response. Three years since she’d killed to keep herself and three little girls safe, then locked her power away behind shields thicker than concrete, stronger than steel. Three long, uncertain, fear-tainted years.

  Those weren’t bombers after all.

  She glanced around, looking for the hand-lettered signs that sometimes indicated the names of streets in this corpse of a once-great city. Wilhemstraße. She hadn’t realized she’d come so far south. She was next to the border of the American zone, just north of the airport. A glance at the sky showed her a line of aircraft darkening the horizon. She watched them as she continued walking.

  “I’m sorry, miss. You can’t go any further without a pass.”

  Lina blinked and focused on the man who spoke in harshly-accented German. She pressed her lips together and fought not to recoil in revulsion. A Soviet soldier, standing next to one of the borderlines the so-called allies had set up when they drew and quartered Berlin after the armistice. She gave him a nod (one must be polite, else one invited more attention!) and started to walk away, when a thought stopped her. These “allies” did have men with guns stationed on the borders of their claimed territories. That didn’t seem like a particularly warm alliance to her.

  “Sir,” she asked. “Why are there so many aircraft?”

  He gave her a smile, a sweet one. It made him look young.

  “Do not be frightened, miss,” he said. “The war has not begun again. The British and Americans are flying supplies into the other sectors of Berlin in an attempt to bribe the population with their decadence and corruption. But it won’t work. No ground transportation from the west is permitted into Berlin at all. No one has ever supplied a city this size by air alone. It cannot be done! The city will be reunited under the rightful rule of the workers soon enough. Have no fear.”

  “Thank you,” she murmured and stepped away. He touched the fingers of his free hand (the one not holding his rifle) to the brim of his cap and gave her another smile. She barely noticed, as thoughts began to tumble one over the other in her brain while she resumed her walk home.

  Berlin was cut off from the west. The Soviets were trying to starve the population of the British and American sectors out.

  The British and Americans were airlifting in supplies. Why? Did they know what kind of hell the Soviet occupation of Berlin had been?

  If they knew, why did they ally with such monsters?

  Lina did not like the British. The Americans were worse. During the war, the Americans had bombed her hometown and killed her family. Then, just when love had ignited in her life amidst the dreariness of war, another American, a woman, had destroyed everything she held dear. Lina had carried that woman’s name in her heart as a talisman against fear and as fuel for the fires of hatred she nurtured inside. One day, she promised herself, one day, Evelyn Adamsen would pay for what she had done...

  And then the world had ended, and the Soviets had come.

  Amid the fires and the screams, Lina had hidden with her neighbor’s three daughters in a cellar under a bombed out building. They had heard the cries and laughter, the crashing of glass, the sharp coughs of rifle fire, and the distant booming of the field guns. For three days and three nights, she’d hidden with those girls, drinking water from a leaky pipe, eating the crumbs from an old crust of bread. Until the night when a group of soldiers crashed drunkenly through the hidden cellar door.

  For the first time in three years, Lina didn’t flinch from the memory. She forced herself, instead, to examine it. To replay it in her head, just as it had happened.

  Something heavy hit the door. It cracked near the hinges, along the lock. Something hit it again, and it slammed open, banging against the far wall. The girls screamed and fled for the corner behind Lina. So young, all of them. Nine, seven, and barely three. Mere babies.

  Lina interposed her body between the girls and the soldier. He reeked of alcohol, sweat, and gunpowder. He leered at her, craned his neck to see behind her, his pig-like eyes glinting in the light of their single lantern. Behind him, two more crowded in, then stopped, drunk and confused.

  “Take the woman,” the first soldier slurred. Lina was fluent in Russian, and she barely understood him. “I’ll take the girls.”

  “No,” Lina said, her voice cracking like a whip.

  “Shut up, cunt,” he said with a laugh, “You’re too old and ugly, especially when there are pretty little girls--”

  Lina heard no more. She took two steps forward and jabbed her fingers into the man’s throat before he could marshal his drunken reflexes to react. The moment her skin touched his, she reached out with her mind, in the way she’d been taught by the Reich’s best scientists and theorists, and she ripped his natural, latent psychic shields away. And then she, the most powerful student to ever graduate from the Reichschule, stabbed her power deep into his brain.

  His cranial capillaries exploded. All of them. At once. Blood flowed from his eyes, ears, and nose. She watched him stumble toward her a step and then crumple to the ground. Then she turned and looked at the other men in the room. One raised his rifle halfway to his shoulder. She stared at him, wondering if he would do it.

  He didn’t. Neither did his partner. They just turned and left. The corpse of their friend stayed crumpled in a heap on the cellar floor.

  Lina blinked away the memory and looked skyward once more. She didn’t like the British, or the Americans. But they were crazy
enough to try and airlift supplies to her city rather than see it fall into the hands of the Soviets. Evelyn Adamsen had been an American aircrew woman. Perhaps...perhaps there was hope.

  For the first time in three years, Lina felt a spark of interest ignite in her mind, and the coals of her burning need for revenge began to smolder once again.

  # # # # #

  The following is an

  Excerpt from Book One of the Revelations Cycle:

  Cartwright’s Cavaliers

  ___________________

  Mark Wandrey

  Available Now from Seventh Seal Press

  eBook, Paperback and Audio

  Excerpt from “Cartwright’s Cavaliers:”

  The last two operational tanks were trapped on their chosen path. Faced with destroyed vehicles front and back, they cut sideways to the edge of the dry river bed they’d been moving along and found several large boulders to maneuver around that allowed them to present a hull-down defensive position. Their troopers rallied on that position. It was starting to look like they’d dig in when Phoenix 1 screamed over and strafed them with dual streams of railgun rounds. A split second later, Phoenix 2 followed on a parallel path. Jim was just cheering the air attack when he saw it. The sixth damned tank, and it was a heavy.