The Maids of Chateau Vernet

by Steven Landry

  “Are you sure Barbara and Maxime have the weapon?” Deborah asked. “Charlotte said Team Bravo left the warehouse headed south. What if they took the device?”

  “They’re moving too fast to be carrying anything that heavy,” he said.

  “Hiram.” He waited for more, but she said nothing.

  He turned to Deborah, her face white as she stared at the display. Her mouth moved as if trying to force words out. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “I – I think Barbara activated the weapon.”

  “What?” He took the C2ID2 display from Deborah. “It’s counting down! Six minutes, forty-nine seconds.” Without the PAL code now in Barbara’s hands, he couldn’t stop the countdown.

  Hiram activated the portal in his backpack. He slid down the ladder, the impact on the floor of the pod bringing him to tears. He grabbed a small guided missile launcher and passed it up through the portal and went back for a parachute. He slung the RediChute over his shoulder and hopped up the ladder.

  “Three minutes, thirty seconds,” Deborah said as he emerged.

  He tossed the parachute on the ground and grabbed her by the shoulders. “Take the bike and head back east. Don’t stop for any reason, don’t turn around. Shoot anyone who tries to stop you. Go now!”

  “I’m not going without you,” Deborah said. “From what you’ve told me about this weapon, I’ll never make it far enough in time. So, tell me what you are going to do so I can help.”

  “I’m going to reset my pack to open an aerial portal directly above us. I can lock the missile on the C2ID2 signal. If I know Barbara, she’s not going too far from that weapon. We’ll knock out her C2ID2 and destroy the bomb too.

  “You’re down to two minutes,” Deborah said.

  “Go!” Hiram said.

  “You can’t possibly orient and control the chute, program the missile, aim, and launch before the people on the ground start firing at you. I can help,” Deborah pleaded.

  “You have to get out of here!” Hiram shouted.

  “No! You need my help.”

  He stared at her for a few seconds, waiting for another idea to pop into his head that might save her. He had no more time.

  “Fine.” Hiram reset the portal, then got to his feet and pulled the parachute onto his back. “Take this.” He thrust the missile launcher into Deborah’s hands and spun her around. He pulled off her backpack and replaced it with his own. With Deborah strapped to his chest and the parachute on his back, he couldn’t carry the pack that carried the portal himself.

  “This probably won’t hold, and the chute is too small anyway.” He hooked his parachute harness to the D-rings on her new backpack with a pair of snap links. “We’ll both fall to our deaths.”

  “Nonsense,” she replied as he ran a rope between her legs to finish off the harness. “The Germans or French will shoot us out of the air before that happens.”

  Hiram tapped the C2ID2. “Jump on three. One, two, three.” Hiram and Deborah disappeared through the milky white portal in his pack.

  65

  1530 hours, Wednesday, August 19, 1942, London, England, United Kingdom

  “Tea, Ms. Mendelson?” Lord Mountbatten said. The British delegation at Camp Griffiss took a break for afternoon tea daily, and today Lord Mountbatten invited Sarah to join him. They sat at a thick wooden table in a quiet corner of the camp cafeteria.

  “Yes,” Sarah said. “Thank you, my Lord,”

  He filled her cup, then his own, and placed the teapot on the silver tray. “Please, call me Monty.”

  “As you wish, Lord Monty.”

  Mountbatten smiled, though she wasn’t sure he appreciated the quip. Sarah had always addressed individuals in office by their appropriate title and the idea of calling this man anything less than Lord discomforted her.

  He offered her milk, which she refused. Sarah added two cubes of sugar to her tea and stirred it well. Sweets had been few and far between before she arrived in London.

  It had been a hectic day. Aerial surveillance had detected a detonation – a very, very large detonation – in Vichy around 7:40 a.m. Reports came in from French partisans describing the devastation, including the destruction of an SS brigade. Sarah was shocked that Hiram used another nuclear weapon on French soil, let alone in a place that offered so little in the way of tactical advantage. She had spent the last hours alternately trying to contact Hiram, with no luck, talking via C2ID2 to her friends that had made it to Switzerland, talking by radio with Captain Trembley, and discussing the implications with the Allied High Command, trying to make sense of it all.

  Four scones sat on a plate between them. Mountbatten picked one up and reached for the margarine as his aide burst though the cafeteria door and hurried to their isolated corner.

  “My Lord, Miss Mendelson, you’re needed in operations immediately,” the man said.

  “Surely it can wait until we’ve had our tea, William,” Mountbatten said as he smeared margarine on his scone.

  The major’s eyes darted from Sarah to Lord Mountbatten, breathing hard. “My apologies, sir, but it is most urgent.”

  Mountbatten hesitated as if he considered dismissing the man in favor of Sarah’s company. “Very well, William. Miss Mendelson, if you please?” They followed the aide out the cafeteria door and across the cobblestone street to the Operations Center, European Theatre of Operations, United States Army. General Eisenhower greeted them.

  “I have good news,” Eisenhower said grinning from ear to ear. “And better news.”

  “Tell us for heaven’s sake,” Sarah said.

  “We’ve learned, with high reliability, that Hitler and Reichsführer Himmler were visiting Vichy when the bomb went off.”

  “Oh my God,” Sarah said.

  “Jolly good news,” Lord Mountbatten said.

  “And,” Eisenhower continued, “a group of Wehrmacht generals and important industrialists seized power in Berlin. They have proposed an armistice. I think the war in Europe is over.”

  66

  Midnight, Thursday, December 31, 1942, Chicago, Illinois, United States of America

  Music and laughter drifted out of the Jewish Community Center across the street from where Sarah Mendelson stood alone hugging herself in the cold. The New Year’s party was well underway inside.

  For the first time in weeks, she had made it out of the lab early enough to attend any kind of social event and still she managed to arrive late. After her relocation to the United States, Sarah had been recruited by the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi to assist in the work taking place in a metallurgical lab, Chicago Pile-1, hidden beneath Stagg Field at the University of Chicago. Her knowledge of the events that took place in Saarbrücken and Vichy earlier in the year awarded her a strong recommendation by General Groves, the general in charge of the Manhattan Project, as well as General Eisenhower. She had been on-site, standing beside Fermi, when the world’s first nuclear reactor attained criticality just a few weeks ago. The research and documentation effort that followed had kept her contained on campus ever since. And, she loved it.

  “Happy New Year!” Sarah shouted when she found the familiar faces she had been longing to see.

  “Happy New Year!” Emma echoed in English with a thick French accent.

  “Glad they let you take a few days off from Rock Island,” Sarah said.

  “She’s still learning English,” Trembley said, switching to French. “I think Happy New Year’s the only thing she’s really learned.”

  “Happy New Year!” Emma shouted again in English as she mingled with the others nearby.

  “She’s been heading the team to reverse engineer a few of Hiram’s weapons with the American munitions experts. I heard she’s too good at her job and the weapons teams can’t keep up,” Trembley said as he sipped his drink.

  “Sounds like Emma,” Sarah said in French.

  Trembley smiled. “I believe Congratulations are in order for your work with Fermi.”

  “Fer
mi’s the genius. I’m thankful for the opportunity to work with him,” she said.

  “He’s the one who should be thankful,” he said.

  Danette pushed her way through the group. “Hey, my turn.” She spoke loudly, the glass of champagne in her left hand obviously not her first drink of the evening. Silas trailed along behind her. She put an arm around Sarah and kissed her on the cheek, careful not to spill her drink.

  Emma stepped in with an extra glass of champagne that she handed to Sarah. “Almost time.”

  Rosette had followed her. “Good to see you, Sarah.”

  “I’m so glad to see you all,” Sarah said.

  Behind them, the host of the celebration stood up on the small stage and began to count down to the New Year. Sarah and the others counted down with him. “…Three, two, one. Happy New Year!”

  Beside her, Major Joseph Trembley kissed Emma and Rosette. He said, “Happy New Year!” and pulled Sarah in for a kiss too.

  Irene was locked in an embrace with her husband, Ephraim. He had been one of the survivors rescued from the train.

  “A toast,” Trembley said as he held up his glass. “To those we saved.”

  “And to those we lost along the way,” Sarah added.

  “Here, here,” said the assembled survivors of Rivesaltes, most of whom had settled in Illinois.

  Everyone drank deeply. An odd yet appreciated quiet followed.

  “I wonder what happened to Deborah and Hiram,” Rosette said. Her children, Leverette and Sophia, slept on a sofa in the next room. Sarah guessed they had been too sleepy to stay awake for the midnight celebration.

  “Depends on where they were when the bomb went off,” Sarah said.

  Epilogue

  45°25′41″North Latitude; 4°35′12″East Longitude; 4,104 Meters Altitude

  Hiram tightened the grip on Deborah’s makeshift harness, praying she wouldn’t slip out. He held his breath as he pulled the ripcord. The chute deployed with a hard jerk. Deborah’s body tried to jump free, but the D-clips kept her anchored to him.

  “That’s not Vichy,” she shouted after a moment.

  He expected to see the haphazard gridwork of buildings and roads that made up the capital city of Vichy growing as they approached the ground. Beneath them, a forest grew from the shattered ruins of a city, and they were speeding toward the treetops. Towering hardwoods blanketed the floor of the valley below, springing up between the broken foundations of absent buildings. It was an old forest.

  “We’re falling too fast,” Hiram said. “Drop the missile launcher and your rifle. We can find them later.” Hiram dropped his own rifle, then turned his attention to finding a safe spot to land.

  “Look, a road.” Deborah pointed to a north-south track off to the west.

  “Too narrow. Let’s try for that area a little farther west, looks like a meadow. I think we can make it.” Hiram tugged on the left riser, steering the chute toward the small glen. They continued falling at an uncomfortable rate.

  They passed over the road. Rows of men marched south.

  “Hiram, where are we?”

  “I don’t know,” he shouted. But we probably shouldn’t have dropped the weapons. He looked a little closer as they passed over the marching columns. A thousand identical faces turned toward them. They weren’t the faces of men. Alien, yet familiar. Optics glinted in the sun.

  “What the hell are they?” Deborah yelled, horror in her voice.

  Hiram couldn’t take his eyes off of the mechanical things. The faces reminded him of combat robots. He closed his eyes, squeezed them tight for a few second before opening them. The optics caught the light of the morning sun and threw it back at him. “Robots,” Hiram said. The ground was coming up too fast to speculate more on the subject.

  “They look like mutilated relatives of the combat robots,” she said.

  “We’ll find out what they are soon enough.” Hiram wrapped both arms around Deborah. He closed his eyes and took in a deep breath, preparing for another rough landing on his bad ankle. “Remember to bend your knees and roll when we hit.”

  At least I’m not alone this time.

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Steven Landry is a husband, father, soldier, engineer, and consultant. He is a retired U.S. Army officer, a former FEMA training and exercise planner, and a risk management consultant specializing in weapons of mass destruction. He holds degrees in Chemical Engineering and Business Administration from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University. Steven lives with his family in Maryland. His first novel, The Legend of Indian Stream, a science-fiction based alternative history novel of the Civil War, is available on Kindle and in print at:

  https://www.amazon.com/dp/1545487561

  Steven is also the editor and co-writer (with Kate Lashley, Dan Cassenti, and Larry Garnett among others) of the comic science fiction anthology Old Farts in Space which is available on Kindle and in print at:

  https://www.amazon.com/dp/0692187790

  Steven is on Facebook and The Legend of Indian Stream has its own Facebook page.

  Katie Rae Sank lives with her husband and daughter in Maryland and works as an IT project manager in the Finance industry. She focuses her creative energy on reading and writing science fiction and wrestling with the characters living in her head that all think they deserve the lead role in her next literary project.