Dragon Sword (11 page)

Somehow they didn’t seem especially
surprised that a girl and lizard man should be stepping out of a
flying time-craft. But then, they didn’t look prone to surprise:
They were caked with dirt, emaciated. They looked like slow pox
victims laid hurriedly to rest in Alexandrian catacombs, then
somehow brought back, if only partially, to life.

One of them spoke to me. I believed
it to be a woman, but intending them no disrespect, they were all
so worn down it was hard to tell. “So it’s true? The Nazis have
been to the moon and back? Is that where you’re from?” The others
remained silent. “Have you come to kill us?”

I did not answer. I was still too
stunned by the whole situation. Who were they? How did they get
there?

And why were we brought
there?

That haunted group of people may
have had the same questions for us. They looked at K’lion,
motioning to each other, slowly pointing. When they whispered, the
lingo-spot couldn’t pick up their language clearly, although I
recognized it as Teutonic in origin — some northern tribal dialect.
The woman who appeared to be their leader spoke up again, pointing
at my lizard friend.

“
Is he a genetic
experiment?”

“
Must be,” one of the others said.
“Yet he’s smiling.”

There was silence between us,
filled by the cold. “Well,” the leader finally decided, “if you’re
not going to kill us, we’ll keep going over the ice.”

They turned away. “You’ll freeze,”
I said to them.

They stopped, but they didn’t
understand me. “What language is that?” I heard one of them
ask.

Without hesitating, I took a little
of the lingo-spot from my skin. I could spare only enough for the
leader, but if she understood me, she could tell others. I reached
for her — and she looked terrified. I touched her behind the ear. I
don’t know what she thought I was going to do, but she shook, then
dropped to her knees and started sobbing.

“
Don’t cry,” I told her. “What’s
wrong?”

Startled, she looked up at me,
wide-eyed. “I understand you,” she whispered. Then, croaking, as if
she wasn’t used to talking loudly, she said to the others, “This
one’s an angel. Our misery is over. We’re not on Earth
anymore.”

I hoped that we still were. “I’m
not an angel. My name is Thea. What’s yours?”

“
Hannah,” she said simply, then
looked away, as if she’d decided she couldn’t have direct eye
contact with me.

I liked her name. It reminded me —
a little — of “Hypatia,” my mother’s name.

“
Where are we, Hannah?”

“
If we are still on Earth, then
we’re in its coldest hell.”

“
Where?”

“
Peenemünde.” She pointed through
the fog, through the mist coming up off the ice. I could barely
make out low mountains. “There. In the distance. The Germans’
rocket base. Right now, you’re in the middle of the Baltic Sea. But
it’s December. It freezes.”

“
And what are you doing out here,
Hannah?”

“
Escaping. Or dying as we
try.”

“
Escaping what?”

She turned to look at me again, not
in amazement, but something else. A touch of scorn?

“
You must know. You’re an angel.
You’ve been to the moon.” She tilted her head back slightly, in the
direction of the mountains, but declined to look there. In the
wisps of fog and cold I now saw smoke. A handful of modern
chariot-like vehicles, the horseless ones, were heading toward
us.

“
Let them come,” Hannah
hissed.

“
Are they the ones who did this to
you?” I asked.

She nodded.

“
On purpose?” K’lion
asked.

“
They’re Nazis,” she replied. I
didn’t know what a Nazi was, but already I dreaded meeting
one.

Behind me, the ship — the ship
itself — began a low humming, as it did during the search for
K’lion. Hannah’s eyes widened a little bit.

I took the
sklaan
from
around my shoulders and wrapped it around her. “Go,” I told her.
“Go. This will keep you warm.”

“
But the Nazis —”

“
We will stop them.”

“
How?”

“
Just go.” Hannah touched the
sklaan
—“Like angel wings,” she murmured — then took it off
her
shoulders and wrapped it around a little
girl.

“
Thank you,” Hannah said. “Make
sure you find out about the Hammer Cave. Please.” The request was
in her eyes, too. Then she turned back to her group, and they
shuffled off across the ice.

For the first time since I had the
honor of knowing him, I could not detect a smile on K’lion’s
face.

Moments later, the Nazi vehicles
arrived. The ship kept humming.

Uniformed men disembarked from the
vehicle. But the particular uniform scarcely mattered — soldiers
are almost always the same. They reminded me of Romans.

They unsheathed their weapons. In
my short time in Earth’s future, I had learned quickly about
guns.

The small regiment surrounded the
ship. They looked at K’lion and me, and seemed a little less sure
of themselves. “A flying disk,” one of them said. “So it’s
true.”

“
Is this von Braun’s?” another one
asked. They didn’t know I could understand them.

“
There are so many secrets here.
Even from us,” the first one replied. Then he pointed to Hannah in
the distance, reaching for his weapon.

“
No!” I commanded. “No!”

It wasn’t in their language, but
the meaning was clear. They stopped. “What if they really are from
under the Earth?” the first one continued. “The Over-Beings the
Fuehrer always talks about. Especially the dragon man. Didn’t
Hitler say creatures like that appear to him in
visions?”

“
Hitler says a great many things.”
From the others’ reactions, it appeared the soldier who said that
had just put himself at risk.

“
What about the
escapees?”

“
This is more important right
now.”

It occurred to me the best thing
would be to get back on the ship and leave. That thought was
interrupted by the
click
of their guns.

We were prisoners now, too. Hence
we’d need to create the illusion of as much strength as
possible.

“
Von Braun,” I said to them. “Von
Braun.” It sounded like he might be the one who over-saw the
operation here. “The Hammer Cave,” I added. I said it the way
Hannah did, in her native tongue.

The soldiers looked at one another,
then motioned for us to get into their chariots, their
land-ships.

“
A truck,” K’lion said, in their
language. A couple of them visibly jumped.

They gave him his own seat in the
rear, and kept their rifles pointed at him all the way back to
Peenemünde.

Chapter
Thirteen

Thea: Hammer Cave

Early 1940s C.E.

We were escorted back across the
ice to the island of Peenemünde, to the place Hannah and her
companions were trying to escape — the Hammer Cave. It was actually
a whole complex of caves linked together by tunnels.

Most of the occupants appeared to
be slaves, and I could see why they’d risk their lives to leave: It
was like Hades — mostly dark, and either chillingly cold or
savagely hot, depending how close you were to the massive furnaces
that burned in the center of the complex. There was a large network
of metal roadways —“railways,” K’lion called them — leading toward
the interior, where it appeared the main labor was to build
“rockets,” long, tapered vessels intended for…exploration?
Destruction?

Perhaps both.

As the self-propelled chariot, the
“truck,” drove deeper into the cave, men, women, children, all in
the barest rags, mostly skin and bones, listlessly stepped out of
our way. Except for one older man, who couldn’t move fast enough.
The truck knocked him down and drove over his leg.

We could hear the crunch of
snapping bones as we left him behind.

Our captors — our “hosts”— didn’t
even slow down.

But neither could any of the
worker-slaves afford to stop and help him. Their faces were hollow
and haunted; they may have been too worn-down to offer aid. Or to
risk it. They all had numbers tattooed onto their arms, and I
imagine they were carefully tracked.

Numbers. In this future, then, even
having a name was an act of defiance.

Some of the slaves, the prisoners
(or even, worst of all, the “guests,” as I heard one soldier joke
about them), were forced to push or pull wagons along the railways,
hauling heavy parts for the further construction of the rockets.
Others worked on the tunnels themselves, digging farther into the
earth to make this complex larger and, presumably, more useful for
its masters.

But to what ultimate
end?

When slaves grew fatigued, they
were beaten or otherwise punished. We saw one young man get hit
savagely in the stomach by one of the guards when he couldn’t keep
lifting. He crumpled over, tried to throw up, then lay
still.

For sustenance, they seemed to be
given crusts of bread and thin soup. Twice I witnessed family
members forcibly separated, in what appeared to be the processing
of new captives.

On several occasions, K’lion was
about to jump from the truck and help these poor souls, but I
tugged his tail to communicate that he shouldn’t move. I knew they
would harm my friend as well.

“
Somebody
tktt!
has to
rectify the bullying,” he whispered to me.

“
I know.” The truck stopped, and
our hosts gestured with their weapons that we were to walk the rest
of the way.

Some of the slaves stared at K’lion
as we passed, but most did not. Even their sense of wonder had been
stripped from them.

We were eventually led toward
quarters that seemed to be the working precincts of the military
commanders. They certainly weren’t comfortable enough for actual
living.

I overheard the soldiers who
brought us in saying to the others that we were to wait for “von
Braun.”

“
Von Braun will know what to do
with them.”

“
Perhaps. If von Braun even knows
what or who they are. Maybe they crash-landed. Maybe we weren’t
supposed to find them at all. I told you this mountain’s full of
secrets. Even for us.”

One of their leaders walked in, a
man introducing himself as a “kernel.” I didn’t know what that
ranking meant, but his military bearing reminded me of a Roman
praefectus
— the man who leads the horse troops.

The other men all deferred to him,
even seemed a little frightened. When he walked over to me, I met
his gaze.

“
Just some spoiled little girl,” he
said loudly, for the others. “Not even Aryan.” Then he turned away,
dismissing me with his hand. “Why was she brought here? What’s this
I hear about spacemen?”

They tried to tell him about the
ship. They pointed to K’lion, who now had guards clustered around
him. The
praefectus
examined him for a long moment. “A very
interesting freak,” he said. “We shall have to cut him up and
examine him.” I think he chose those words as a kind of test — he
was watching K’lion’s eyes.

“
That
k-t-kh!
would be
rudeness extreme!” K’lion replied. But he said it in my language,
not theirs. I had never seen him choose not to respond to an
Earthling in his native tongue before. It meant he’d lost trust in
them completely.

“
He speaks,” the
praefectus
said. “He almost sounds human. So these two came from a flying
disk, parked somewhere on the ice?” he asked the soldiers
skeptically. They told him someone had gone to make recordings and
images of our vessel, but they swore, yes, it was true.

“
Well, keep your guns on them.
We’ll let von Braun look them over, if the great Wernher ever
deigns to get here.”

“
He deigns, Colonel Middlekant, he
deigns.” Heads turned, and there was the man I assumed to be von
Braun, in a white tunic-like garment, covering what I took to be
civilian clothes from the era. It certainly wasn’t a military
uniform like the
praefectus
wore.

“
What is this claptrap about a
spaceship?” von Braun bellowed. The men pointed to me and then
K’lion. He walked over, looked at me carefully, ran a finger over
my forehead. And nodded.

Then, like the
praefectus
,
he walked over to K’lion but still didn’t say anything. Instead, he
took out a pencil and poked K’lion in the face.

“
Yaagh!
” K’lion
exclaimed.

“
Interesting,” von Braun replied,
scribbling something down on a small tablet. “We shall have to keep
him for observation. Perhaps the Allies are running genetic
experiments, too. In the future, you know, everyone
will.”