by Sean Wallace
Karl had met a few of them, and they had been fine men, nearly all of them aces of the highest order, and many of them dead or incapacitated by the age of twenty-two. Only Richthofen had died clean enough to recover. This heart-box had been a good idea, but Karl did not think it was as useful for returning soldiers to war as Steinfeld had promised.
“I am not going to give up,” said Richthofen. “You do not need to worry. I think if we were down to the last plane in Germany I’d still fly . . .”
In the silence that followed, Mueller appeared in the doorway.
“Dr Huber, an enemy fighter wing has been spotted and the men are scrambling. If you deem der Rote Kampfflieger healthy, his ground crew will be ready.”
“He is,” said Karl.
Mueller nodded and jogged off to relay the message.
“It is time to fly.” Richthofen stood, the smart and confident grin on his face completely at odds with how Karl had seen him only moments before. This was the hero, this was der Rote Kampfflieger that people believed in. “Seeing as Ostermann is not here, would you be kind enough to help me move my machine?”
Karl wrapped his hands around the handlebar of the cart and pushed as Richthofen carried the gathered tubes in his arms so there was no risk of running them over. They rolled out the door and down the short hall to the front door.
The ground crew was ready by the time they arrived. One of the men had Moritz under leash and Richthofen risked giving the dog an affectionate scratch on the head while someone else held his tubes.
Karl watched the crew hoist the heart-box into the plane, the tubes just barely long enough for Richthofen to stand on the ground while the box was fitted into the body of the Fokker, then the crew lifted the man himself. For a former gymnast, who would leap into his plane as easily as he would over a vault, it must have been agonizing. Karl remembered the pain in his bad leg and turned away as they lowered him in.
“Huber!” shouted Richthofen.
Karl looked up.
The crew was fitting the backboard of his seat between him and the heart-box. Richthofen leaned forward over his control stick to give them room, but he also looked over the edge of the cockpit at Karl.
“You’re still here!” said Richthofen, with a smile. “Usually you don’t stay.”
“I need to take the cart back when they’re done,” he said, waving at the heart-box’s erstwhile cradle. The crew had placed the toolkit for the machine back in the cart. “Since you had me come out instead of Ostermann or Mueller.”
Richthofen grinned as though he knew better. He seemed inclined to say more, but then the seat backing was set and his crew jumped down to get ready for flight. Everyone on the ground stepped back, and the moment passed.
Der Rote Kampfflieger settled back against his seat, the only time he could rest his back against another object without feeling the pressure of the tubes between them. The propellers spun, kicking up dust as the plane rolled forward. Moritz whined.
Then the plane lifted into the air, a bright red eagle taking to the sky to join the many colorful planes of JG 1, the hunting wing that their enemies called the Flying Circus. But it wasn’t a circus to Karl. There was nothing entertaining about the show they had to perform.
Late that evening, Mueller entered Karl’s room and said, “Richthofen has not returned. He is the only one unaccounted for from today’s sortie. The men think we’ve lost him. One of them spotted a red biplane landing in no man’s land.”
Another lucky landing. Karl grunted and said, “Then the army can send another detachment to retrieve him. If they hurry like last time they’ll have him in our bunker in time to hook him up to a new machine. If he’s still alive and the heart-box undamaged, it should keep pumping for a few more hours.”
And even if he died again, he might just be lucky enough to be resuscitated again.
But though they waited, no rescuers came.
Perhaps the war is ending, thought Karl, and so High Command had decided they no longer needed der Rote Kampfflieger. Why throw good lives away after one that had already ended, when there was no longer a purpose to fighting?
He should have been pleased that High Command would be so sensible. Instead he found himself outside in the cold September air, smoking a cigarette in the dark where no one would see.
Days later, Jagdgeschwader 1 moved on without them. Days after that, the battered remains of Richthofen’s plane were carted over to the empty airfield. Karl counted no less than forty bullet holes on the left side alone. The heart-box was still installed behind the pilot’s seat, but Richthofen himself was gone. Karl was told that his concern was the box, not the man, and that the body was no longer worth looking at for research purposes, given the time that had passed.
He did not believe that.
Karl did not know enough about planes to tell whether this shot or that would have brought the eagle down, but he knew the heart-box. Mueller and Ostermann removed it for him and he found it almost entirely intact. Certainly it was scuffed and battered about its protective casing, which was only natural given the roughness of combative flight, but the mechanics on the inside were no worse for wear. The heart-box was no longer running, certainly. The batteries would have drained within hours once fuel from the plane stopped coming, but he saw no reason the heart-box shouldn’t work the minute they refueled or recharged it.
But then Karl held up the tubes that had led from the box to Richthofen’s body and frowned. There was blood on their ends, of course, as the blood circulated from his body to the machine and back again, but . . .
“Mueller, did you say the army only retrieved his plane after JG 1 had moved on?”
“Yes, Doctor.”
Richthofen’s blood should have congealed long before the time the army retrieved him, so why was there blood on the outside of the tubes unless Richthofen had been separated from them while he was still alive?
He stood up and climbed the ladder beside the plane, leaning over to peer inside the cockpit. It didn’t appear as though any bullets had penetrated the interior. There were no perforations, no blood.
Richthofen had likely been alive, possibly bruised, but not bleeding, when he landed.
Karl looked down at the seat back, which lay on the ground where they had placed it after removing the heart-box. There was a tiny splash of blood right where Richthofen’s back would have rested, but no damage.
He jumped from the ladder to the ground, pondering. Could Richthofen have been so unlucky that a bullet had shorn the harness that held the tubes to his body? It would explain a hasty landing, and the outside blood, but the odds of that happening were astronomical.
And the army had taken his body.
Had Richthofen himself disconnected the tubes? Was that why they had taken him? For Germany’s highest scoring ace to commit suicide . . .
Karl could well imagine the frustration of being trapped between enemy and allied lines, unable to move, realizing that help would never come. But he frowned, unsatisfied.
“Did you find something, sir?” asked Mueller.
“By any chance did anyone say whether Richthofen’s body was found inside the plane?”
“Do you mean whether he fell out?” Sometimes in the violent death spirals of a plane, the pilot would be ejected. “I don’t think that would have been possible. The ground crew always straps him in tight before letting him go, and his seat-belts seem to be fine.”
So they were.
Karl tried to remember if Richthofen had been wearing them when he had taken off, but he knew he had not been paying attention.
“Yes, you’re right,” he muttered. “Richthofen would have been in his plane when he landed.”
They had denied him a body.
But Richthofen would not have killed himself. No. Karl could not believe that. If he had disconnected himself, there had been a reason, and if he died perhaps it had been with the anticipation that he would be found and revived again.
Karl wanted t
o believe that.
But all he wrote in his report was that the heart-box had survived intact, and did not appear to have been a contributing factor in the pilot’s death.
In another two months, the war was over. Karl would be heading home, and he could give up on thinking about the heart-box and waiting for a suitable young candidate to land on death’s door. His family would be waiting. It was almost his eldest’s birthday, though he knew with the country’s food supply so low he could not afford to give her the kind of dinner she really wanted.
Karl carefully packed his tools and his few personal possessions in preparation for his journey home, among them a simple black-and-white commemorative postcard, in memory of der Rote Kampfflieger.
He stared at it before placing it in his bags, until he no longer saw the man in the photo at all. Karl could not help but remember his own time as a boy in gymnasium, when he would practice on the horizontal bar. Release. Twist. Catch. Release. Flip. Catch. Every catch he missed he risked pain and agony below, but nothing would have stopped him from letting go. All he could think of when he took to the air was: this must be what it’s like to fly.
Acknowledgments
“Rolling Steel: A Pre-Apocalyptic Love Story” © 2009 by Jay Lake and Shannon Page. Originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine. Reprinted by permission of the estate of Jay Lake and by Shannon Page.
“Don Quixote” © 2012 by Carrie Vaughn, LLC. Originally published in Armored. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Little Dog Ohori” © 2015 by Anatoly Belilovsky. Original to this volume.
“Vast Wings Across Felonious Skies” © 2015 by E. Catherine Tobler. Original to this volume.
“Instead of a Loving Heart” © 2004 by Jeremiah Tolbert. Originally published in All Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Steel Dragons of a Luminous Sky” © 2015 by Brian Trent. Original to this volume.
“Tunnel Vision” © 2015 by Rachel Nussbaum. Original to this volume.
“Thief of Hearts” © 2015 by Trent Hergenrader. Original to this volume.
“In Lieu of a Thank You” © 2008 by Gwynne Garfinkle. Originally appeared in Strange Horizons. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“This Evening’s Performance” © 2015 by Genevieve Valentine. Original to this volume.
“Into the Sky” © 2015 by Joseph Ng. Original to this volume.
“The Double Blind” © 2015 by A. C. Wise. Original to this volume.
“Black Sunday” © 2011 by Kim Lakin-Smith. Originally appeared in Cyber Circus. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“We Never Sleep” © 2015 by Nick Mamatas. Original to this volume.
“Cosmobotica” © 2015 by Costi Gurgu and Tony Pi. Original to this volume.
“Act of Extermination” © 2011 by Cirilo S. Lemos (translated by Christopher Kastensmidt). Originally appeared in Dieselpunk. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Blood and Gold” © 2015 by Erin M. Hartshorn. Original to this volume.
“Floodgate” © 2015 by Dan Rabarts. Original to this volume.
“Dragonfire is Brighter than the Ten Thousand Stars” © 2015 by Mark Robert Philps. Original to this volume.
“Mountains of Green” © 2015 by Catherine Schaff-Stump. Original to this volume.
“The Wings The Lungs, The Engine The Heart” © 2014 by Laurie Tom. Originally published in Galaxy’s Edge. Reprinted by permission of the author.
About the Contributors
Born in the Caribbean, Tobias S. Buckell is a New York Times bestselling author. His novels and over fifty stories have been translated into seventeen languages. He has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best New Writer. He currently lives in Ohio.
Jay Lake was a winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and a multiple nominee for the Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. He lived in Portland, Oregon and lost a six-year battle with colon cancer on June 1, 2014. Jay was a prolific writer and editor, and blogged regularly about his cancer at his website jlake.com. His books for 2013 and 2014 include Kalimpura and Last Plane to Heaven from Tor Books and Love in the Time of Metal and Flesh from Prime Books. His work has been translated into several languages including Czech, French, German, Hebrew, Japanese, and Russian.
Shannon Page is the author of several dozen short stories; her first two novels were Eel River, in 2013; and Our Lady of the Islands (co-written with Jay Lake), named a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2014. She also edits and proofreads at home in Portland, Oregon, and her website is shannonpage.net.
Carrie Vaughn is the author of the New York Times bestselling series of novels about a werewolf named Kitty. She has also written a handful of stand-alone fantasy novels and upwards of seventy short stories. She’s a graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop, and in 2011 she was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Short Story. She’s had the usual round of day jobs, but has been writing full time since 2007. An Air Force brat, she survived her nomadic childhood and managed to put down roots in Boulder, Colorado, where she lives with a fluffy attack dog and too many hobbies. Visit her at carrievaughn.com.
Anatoly Belilovsky is a Russian-American author and translator of science fiction with over twenty-five publications in UFO, Nature, F&SF, and other markets. He was born in a city that went through six or seven owners in the last century, was traded to the US for a shipload of grain under the Jackson-Vanik amendment, and learned English from Star Trek reruns. He blogs at loldoc.net.
E. Catherine Tobler has been a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Award. Her fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, Strange Horizons, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. And her first novel is Rings of Anubis. Follow her on Twitter @ECthetwit and her website is ecatherine.com.
Jeremiah Tolbert is a writer and web developer living in Northeast Kansas with his wife and son. His short stories have appeared in magazines such as Lightspeed Magazine and Asimov’s.
Brian Trent’s science fiction and dark fantasy has appeared in numerous publications. He is a 2013 winner in the Writers of the Future contest and his work regularly appears in Analog, Daily Science Fiction, Apex, Clarkesworld Magazine, Escape Pod, Cosmos, Strange Horizons, Galaxy’s Edge, and much more. He lives in New England.
Rachel Nussbaum is a young writer and artist living on the Big Island of Hawaii. She enjoys experimenting with different genres and has previously written science fiction, urban fantasy, and horror stories. Currently, Rachel is attending university, studying English, art, and animation. One day she hopes to write and illustrate her own novels and comic books.
Trent Hergenrader is an English professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he teaches creative writing workshops as well as courses on literature, media, and games. His short fiction has appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Weird Tales, Best Horror of the Year: Volume 1 and other fine places.
Gwynne Garfinkle lives in Los Angeles. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in such publications as Strange Horizons, Interfictions, Mythic Delirium, Apex Magazine, Shimmer, and Goblin Fruit. She is working on a couple of novels, as well as a book of poems inspired by classic films, TV, and pop culture.
Genevieve Valentine’s first novel, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, won the 2012 Crawford Award. Her second, The Girls at the Kingfisher Club, is out now from Atria. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, Strange Horizons, Journal of Mythic Arts, Lightspeed, and others, and the anthologies Federations, After, Teeth, and more. Her non-fiction and reviews have appeared at NPR.org, The A.V. Club, and io9.
Joseph Ng is a contemporary writer of stories. He has written in multiple genres for the page, the screen, and the stage. His ebook, Death and Other Things, was published in early 2013; and his short story, “Prose and Koans”, was featured in Esquire (Malaysia) magazine’s March 2014 issue. He currently resides in Kuala Lumpur, and can occasionally be seen wandering its stree
ts in search of inspiration, meaning, and really nice cheesecakes.
A. C. Wise is the author of numerous short stories appearing in publications such as Clarkesworld Magazine, Shimmer, Year’s Best Weird Fiction Vol. 1, and Imaginarium: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing (2012 and 2014), among others. In addition to her writing, she co-edits Unlikely Story. Find her online at acwise.net.
Kim Lakin-Smith is a science fiction and dark fantasy author of adult and children’s fiction. Kim’s short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. Her diesel-punk novel, Cyber Circus, was shortlisted for both the British Science Fiction Association Best Novel and the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel 2012.
Nick Mamatas, the son of a diesel mechanic, is the author of the novels The Last Weekend and I am Providence. His short fiction has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories, The Mammoth Book of Steampunk, and many other anthologies and magazines.
Tony Pi is a Canadian writer with many short story credits in fantasy and science fiction, including translations into Polish and Chinese. He was a finalist in the Prix Aurora Awards and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.
Costi Gurgu’s fiction has appeared in Canada, the United States, England, Denmark, Hungary and Romania. He is the author of three books, Recipearium, a novel, and short story collections The Glass Plague and Chronicles from the End of the Earth, and over fifty stories for which he has won twenty-four awards.
Cirilo S. Lemos was born in Nova Iguaçu, Rio de Janeiro, in 1982. He dedicates his time to writing, teaching and preparing his children for the inevitable machine rebellion. Author of the novel O Alienado, about stories, realities and bureaucracy, he likes horrible dreams, predictable realities and family photos, almost all the time.
Erin M. Hartshorn lives in Pennsylvania with her husband, two kids, and English cocker spaniel. A member of SFWA and the Garden State Speculative Fiction Writers, Erin has had fiction published in Clarkesworld Magazine and Daily Science Fiction as well as in various anthologies. She blogs at erinmhartshorn.com/blog and is on Twitter @ErinMHartshorn.
