The Coldest War

by Ian Tregillis

  No further incidents interrupted his return home. Only later did he realize he hadn’t instinctively reached for the Götterelektron during the near miss with the newspaper deliveryman. His training and his old life were fading into the distance. That pleased him greatly. For the first time, his future was what he made it. He would never become a junk man.

  He entered the flat hungry and eager to cook his own meal in his own home. But as he set his groceries on the small countertop beside the refrigerator, he realized he had no dishes. No cutlery, no glasses, no pots, no pans. He ate the tomato like an apple, over the sink. The juice ran down his chin, sharp enough to sting a nascent cold sore at the corner of his lips. Klaus resolved to spend more of his Milkweed cash the next day, and to cook a real meal for himself the next evening. He would eventually have to find a job. But that could wait.

  He spent the night on a bare mattress, but let himself sleep in. That was also something he’d rarely experienced. At both the Reichsbehörde and Arzamas-16, his daily regimen had been tightly controlled, any opportunities for sloth ruthlessly chopped out and tossed aside.

  Klaus ran the hottest shower he could. As with so many other household necessities, he had no soap, no shampoo, no towel; the medicine cabinet was empty but for a rusty straight razor left behind by a previous resident. But that wasn’t the point. This was his shower. He filled his lungs with steam and stood under the pounding hot rain until it became a cold drizzle.

  The cracked gray tiles of the bathroom floor turned treacherously slick beneath his feet. Rivulets of water streamed out of his hair, pooling in the mildewed gaps between the tiles. Steam had condensed into a fine silvery mist across the mirror. Klaus wiped a hand along the cool glass, flicked the water into the sink.

  Mirror and morning light together showed him the truth: He was a fiftyish man with nothing to show for all those years, turning softer with every passing day, and eternally defined by the wires embedded in his skull. He thought back to his brief shopping trip the previous evening. The greengrocer, the butcher, and the newspaper vendor hadn’t seen Klaus the man so much as they’d seen a man with wires.

  It had been surprisingly easy to overcome his own reluctance to venture into public without a disguise. But it wasn’t enough. No amount of self-confidence, of forced goodwill, would ever put people at ease when faced with such ugliness. Gretel relied upon her manipulative charm.

  The wires were a tether, forever chaining him to his old life. He’d seen it three times in the space of a quarter hour.

  Klaus tested the straight razor with his thumb. The blade hadn’t been properly stropped since long before it was abandoned. But close to the hinge it still retained a cutting edge. Not sharp, but perhaps good enough for sawing through strands of woven copper.

  He used his fingernails to peel away several inches of insulation. Next, Klaus gripped the razor handle in one hand and flipped the blade backwards so that the dull side pressed against his knuckles. He clenched the wires in his free fist and pulled them taut enough to tug unpleasantly against the steel fasteners in his skull.

  Klaus held that posture while he studied himself in the mirror. The wires had been a part of him—part of his physical space, his body image, the way he moved through the world—for most of his life. He was as unconsciously aware of his wires as he was of his own fingers and toes. Was this self-mutilation? Self-hatred? He erased all doubts by thinking of Reinhardt, who scoured church rummage sales in search of a lost godhood, who sought to revive something long dead from broken radios and bits of scrap.

  Beads of condensation trickled along the gleaming wire. Klaus touched it with the razor. His tongue curled beneath the taste of copper. It became an overpowering stench of rotten eggs in the moment before a convulsion racked his arms and broke the connection.

  Klaus dropped the razor and retched into the sink.

  Stray electrical currents had triggered random pathways in his brain. How on earth did Reinhardt experiment on himself with substantial voltages? How did he stand it?

  A painful cramp twisted his gut. His empty stomach had produced only a handful of tomato seeds that lay sprinkled across the white porcelain. The hunger pangs returned with a vengeance.

  It took several breaths to clear away the sickening phantom odor. Klaus gathered up the razor, steeled himself, and tried again. This time the galvanic currents brought forth flashes of light bright enough to bleach out the room, like magnesium flares, and the sensation of a wolf gnawing on his foot. Klaus withstood the convulsions until the wolf’s fangs prized his ankle bones apart.

  He dropped the razor again and lurched against the bathroom door. The razor handle cracked on the tiles. He slid down to a crouch over the space of several shuddery breaths. Klaus ran a hand over his ankle, simultaneously surprised that it could hold his weight and that the hallucination had been so vivid. He shivered. All of the shower steam had condensed away, leaving something thin and chilly where the air had been.

  The mirror showed his wires dangling by a final few strands. Klaus felt the weight of the broken wires—his superfluous limb, his tail, his chains—jerking and swaying like a windswept pendulum. He gazed down at the broken razor, then back at the damaged wires.

  Cupping the plug in his palm, he gently wrapped the length of wire around his fist. Klaus stared himself in the eye, and counted aloud.

  “One.

  “Two.”

  On three, he passed out.

  * * *

  Some time later he came to his senses, sprawled on the cold tile floor with a length of loose wire coiled around his fist. Something wet and warm trickled through his hair; his fingers came back tinted red. At first he thought he’d opened a wound in his skull, cracked it like an egg by ripping out the implanted electrodes. But no. He’d knocked his head on the tiles when he passed out.

  Somewhere, somebody rapped knuckles against solid wood in a quick and emphatic staccato. Another hallucination?

  No. The straight razor still lay where he’d dropped it. And when he ran his fingers through his hair, he found a stub where the wires had been.

  More banging. Knocking. At his door.

  Klaus grabbed the sink and hauled himself to his feet, naked and shivering. The blow to his head had left him dizzy. He studied the mirror, and for the first time in memory he saw himself as himself, without wires or Willenskräfte. Just a man. Not a prisoner, not a spy, not a game piece, not a fallen god. Just Klaus.

  Finally. And after years too numerous to remember.

  The delay brought more pounding from the entryway. His aching head throbbed in time with the knocking. He gathered up his trousers, slipped them on, snatched his shirt from the hook behind the bathroom door, and padded woozily into the den. He buttoned the shirt while crossing to the door.

  He opened it just as Madeleine raised her fist for another flurry of knocks.

  A canvas sack hung from her elbow. Tall paper tubes bulged from one end of the sack.

  He stared, dumbfounded.

  Madeleine extended her arm, holding the sack toward him. “You forgot these,” she said.

  13 June 1963

  Milkweed Headquarters, London, England

  Pethick summoned Will back to the Admiralty two days after he and the children sprang Marsh’s trap. Had something gone wrong? Was he being called on the carpet?

  Will asked Roger, who once again played the role of taxi driver. But Roger shook his head. “Got a package. Figured you should be there to see it.”

  Will pressed him for details, but he wouldn’t elaborate. When they arrived, they found the others gathered in Marsh’s office—Will shuddered—formerly Pembroke’s office. Poor Pembroke. Murdered in his own home? Will could imagine it; what a terrifying way to die. A death he came very near to experiencing.

  Someone had wheeled in a film projector. An empty film canister lay open on Marsh’s desk. Pethick snapped a reel onto the spindle and threaded film into the machine while Marsh pulled the blinds and set up a screen.


  Will said, “Dare I ask what this is about, Pip?”

  Marsh tapped a finger on the canister. “This came by special courier tonight. Straight from Tehran.”

  Pethick finished with the projector. He rubbed his hands together. To Marsh, he said, “Very good. Let’s see if your plan worked.”

  Roger turned off the overhead lights. Marsh took the seat behind his desk; Roger took the other chair. Will leaned against the door, arms crossed.

  Pethick flipped a switch. The projector clattered to life. The film began with the Crown seal, and this notice:

  MILKWEED / JACKDAW

  MOST SECRET

  UNAUTHORISED DISSEMINATION OF THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS FILM CONSTITUTES TREASON AGAINST THE UNITED KINGDOM OF GREAT BRITAIN AND NORTHERN IRELAND AS DEFINED BY PARLIAMENT IN THE OFFICIAL SECRETS ACT OF 1951. PUNISHMENT UP TO AND INCLUDING EXECUTION MAY RESULT.

  MILKWEED / JACKDAW

  Will had seen this same warning once before. He didn’t find it so intimidating the second time around. Unauthorized dissemination? Treason? He lived on the other side of that boilerplate.

  A shaky camera panned across a distant desert plain. The angle put the camera at elevation; a mountain range bordered the desert. A plume of dust hovered above the desert floor like an enormous rooster tail. The camera zoomed in on the head of the plume. Extreme magnification rendered the view shakier and blurrier, but not so much that Will couldn’t make out the red stars marking the tanks and armored transports that sped silently across the plain.

  But the lead vehicle appeared to be nothing more than a cargo truck. The canvas covering had been removed from the cargo bed, and a handful of men and women stood on the back of the truck. They wore goggles and balaclavas to shield themselves from the dust.

  The camera spun, swaying across the empty sky for a moment before focusing on a trio of fighter jets streaking over the plain to meet the column. Will couldn’t identify the planes, but they bore the markings of the RAF. Quick cuts between the jets and the truck. The passengers stared at the oncoming fighters. Two of the planes erupted in white-blue fireballs. The third suddenly underwent a spectacular disintegration, as if it had slammed into an invisible wall. Flaming debris rained on the desert. The Soviet column hadn’t slowed one bit.

  The view cut back to the distant perspective. Time had passed, because now the column was miles closer to the camera. More debris littered the plain behind the Soviets; oily smoke rose from a line of burnt and mangled tanks. The Soviet column hadn’t slowed, hadn’t broken formation. It had been joined by half a dozen others. All pristine.

  And then the wind picked up.

  It was subtle at first, just a steady breeze that dissipated the smoke and stretched the rooster tail plume into long fingers of dust. But in moments the breeze swelled into a raging sandstorm. Hundred-foot dust devils spun like dervishes, dancing before a churning wall of wind and dust. The cyclones took impossible shapes, angular and misshapen, as they sped toward the Soviet formation. The camera zoomed on the weather front. It, too, was filled with non-Euclidean shadows. The center of the storm was black and lightless. The feeble sunlight that skirted the periphery of the storm oozed across the foothills of the mountains like crimson syrup.

  The sandstorm loomed over the Soviet column, like a wave on the verge of breaking. The figures in the leading vehicle gestured at the unnatural storm. The film blurred. Will suspected, based on the experience with the Twins, the Arzamas troops had provoked the Eidolons to greater rage. The Eidolonic weather front engulfed the Soviet forces.

  Another cut back to the original view of the desert plain. No plumes, no debris, no storms. Will thought for a moment the film had jumped back to the beginning. But then the camera zoomed and panned across the plain once more. The desert had been scoured clean. The camera paused on what appeared to be the barrel of a tank sticking out of the sand. Elsewhere, the sun shone on a handful of pale, sandblasted bones.

  Roger grunted in approval. “Take that, you bloody commies.”

  Pethick stifled something that might have been a laugh.

  Another cut, and the landscape changed. Another Soviet column, another unnatural weather front. This time it left the Arzamas troops encased in ice.

  And so it went. Variations on this theme spooled out before them for the next ten minutes while the atmosphere in the room grew lighter and lighter and Will’s disgust grew deeper and deeper.

  The projector spit out the last few inches of film. Stunned silence gave way to the flap-flap-flap of the takeup reel. The sudden glare of the bright white screen hurt Will’s dark-adapted eyes; he squinted and turned away.

  When Marsh turned on the overhead lights, he was grinning like the Cheshire cat. It was a ghoulish look on that ruined face. Pethick, Roger, and Marsh congratulated one another. They treated Will as though he were the hero of the hour.

  Pethick took his hand and shook it vigorously. “Excellent work,” he said. Roger did likewise.

  And it was Marsh of all people who actually clapped Will on the back. “Well done, Will. Very well done.”

  Their mood was nothing less than celebratory. Nobody noticed that Will had gone pale, or the way he trembled when he stood.

  * * *

  “Your tea must be quite ready by now.”

  Will jumped, startled from his contemplation of the moonlit garden. He turned in the silvery shadows by the window to find Gwendolyn silhouetted in the doorway.

  “Steeping it for an hour is a bit excessive,” she said, entering the lightless kitchen. “Unless your tastes have changed.”

  The teapot porcelain felt lukewarm beneath his fingers; a toe-curling whiff of Indian tea escaped when he cracked the lid. And the lemon he’d retrieved from the pantry still sat whole on the cutting board, beside a clean knife. How long had he stood here? The moon had moved almost a third of the length of the garden wall since he’d started the tea.

  He’d been thinking about the film from Tehran. And the fact nobody recognized its deeply troubling implications.

  “I lost track of the time,” he said. He frowned. “It can’t be an hour.”

  Gwendolyn said, “I’ve been waiting for you to return since you slipped out of bed.” She pulled her dressing gown about herself as she settled on a tall stool at the counter. She didn’t bother with the lights.

  “I woke you. I’m sorry.”

  The queasiness in the pit of Will’s stomach had banished any hope of sleep. He’d finally relented after midnight, and carefully eased out of bed so as not to disturb Gwendolyn. The warmth of her body beside him, the slow and measured susurration of her breathing—things he’d missed for so desperately long, yet now he couldn’t enjoy them, couldn’t relish them. His mind and heart were too unsettled. Ever since Marsh had dragged Will back to Milkweed, he’d been plagued by the sense of unseen currents swirling in the murky depths. Unseen and perilous. Uncharted hazards contriving to smash all comers against deadly shoals.

  Yes, the fear had begun when Marsh revealed Will’s deal with Cherkashin. But compared to what followed, that seemed almost quaint. For one, Gretel’s part in all of this had yet to become clear. Had she really killed Pembroke? Why? Why were the children acting so strangely? And then that film … It all fit together somehow. He knew it. They were hints of something bigger, like stray currents swirling together to spawn a whirlpool. But dragging them down to what?

  The dread and anticipation lay on Will just as heavily as they had early in the war. He felt much as he did after realizing Stephenson and Whitehall would turn a blind eye to anything the warlocks did.

  Gwendolyn scoffed. “Hardly. Our cozy little house is getting cozier by the day. A smart woman breakfasts at half three. To beat the rush. Any later, and there’s a queue for the ladies’ convenience.”

  She had a point. Gwendolyn shared a bathroom with four other women now that the Twins had arrived. Meanwhile the men’s bathroom saw less use after Klaus’s departure.

  Madeleine
had received the Twins at the safe house with forced good grace, although the crease at the bridge of her nose betrayed a faint irritation. She put the Twins up in the room recently vacated by Klaus. Will helped her wrestle a second bed from the cellar, while Gwendolyn gathered Klaus’s paintings and the supplies he’d left behind. Madeleine made a point of insisting this be done carefully.

  It was like living in a university dormitory. Or a barracks. But unlike those situations, there was no end in sight for this. Even worse was knowing that Will would never be able to take Gwendolyn back home, to their old life. Their real home, their wonderful Queen Anne town house with its humble breakfast table, had burned to cinders. The result of a long chain of Will’s terrible decisions.

  When Gwendolyn had first told Will (with uncharacteristic shyness) that she missed sleeping beside him, part of him had wondered if this were intended as a space-saving measure. A favor for Madeleine. But he’d been willing to take anything that would soothe the ache where her companionship, her partnership, had been. Especially if, as he feared, those unseen currents were to pull them apart sooner than later.

  He took the teapot and cutting board to the counter. “I am sorry, love. For all of this.”

  “I won’t be sorry to see the last of this house,” she admitted. “I’ve begun to feel a bit déclassé without a bit of copper dangling from my head.” Juice misted his face and stung his eye when Gwendolyn took the knife to the lemon.

  Will knew just how much she must have disliked the crowded safe house to prompt even the smallest concession of discomfort. She was, if nothing else, a proper British lady to the last.

  “Well.” He lifted a pair of chipped teacups from hooks under the cupboard. “It’s done now, everything Marsh wanted. I’ve met the conditions Milkweed set for me in lieu of incarceration. So we ought to have an answer soon, assuming Marsh doesn’t move the finish line.”

  And assuming, he didn’t add, fate doesn’t render Marsh’s intentions irrelevant. Which, as long as Gretel kept her true purpose hidden, it almost certainly would.