Bitter Seeds

He fumbled with the rifle. How had the strap become wrapped around his arm like this? He couldn't unsling it gracefully. He gave up and took instead the revolver from his belt.

He stood, squinting up in the direction of the lights. Somebody tackled him. His shot pinged off the metal light boom and went caroming into the woods.

Lorimer bellowed in his ear. “Don't! Stand! Up!” His hot breath cascaded over Will's face. “Unless you want your chinless head blown apart, you worthless toff.”

Somebody yelled, “Take cover!”

Will rolled over, facedown, covering his head and ears with his hands, just as he'd been trained to do. There was a crack and then the ground shook. Clods of earth pelted him. He rolled over just in time to see one of the light booms lean over with much creaking and groaning. It stopped after tipping a few feet out of true. But the night was just as bright as ever.

He realized that part of the chaos filling his head came from elsewhere, a cacophony of gunfire and explosions. And screaming.

Is this what you had planned, Pip? Is this how you imagined it?

Will crawled on his stomach behind the line of men who had taken position at the edge of the tree line. Those who had recovered their senses after the transit from London lay under bare bushes, or hid behind trees, the barrels of their rifles and Bren guns pointed toward the buildings.

But they weren't, he noticed, firing. They were waiting.

A wave of dread swept over Will. We haven't been attacked yet and this whole operation has already gone pear-shaped. Snow funneled into his collar as he pulled himself across the ground. Damn you, Stephenson.

Somebody tossed another Mills bomb. The tilted light boom toppled the rest of the way, crashing to the ground in an eruption of glass and sparks. But two spotlights still highlighted their position.

Will scuttled over to where Lorimer and Marsh were huddled together. “This isn't working,” said Marsh. “We have to move out.”

“The pixies will make short work of those lights,” said the Scot.

Marsh shook his head urgently. “They know our position. Tell the men to move out.”

“Aye.”

Marsh crawled over to Will while Lorimer spread the word. “Where's your magic rock?”

Shit. Will cocked a thumb over his shoulder. “It's, uh, back there.”

“Don't you dare lose that bloody thing!”

Marsh was right. Without the stone, they couldn't get back. Will turned and crawled back to where he'd come from.

Closer to the tree line, Lorimer yelled, “Oy! You lot first! Then the pixies! Twenty meter—”

He crumpled up like a rag doll, shot into the air, and slammed back down again. The impact rattled Will's bones. Lorimer's body pounded the earth again before spinning off into the forest. It smacked into an oak tree, knocking snow from the boughs. What was left of Lorimer rained to the ground as an unrecognizable mass of bone and meat.

Marsh noticed, too late, two men standing in the center of the field. He recognized them from the Tarragona filmstrip. One wore a collar; the other stood behind him, yanking on his leash and screaming in his ear.

Marsh dived for cover. “Fire on those two!” He ordered the squad. “Aim for the battery,” he reminded the snipers.

They unleashed a volley. It achieved nothing. The rounds stopped in midair a few feet from the leashed man, and tinkled to his feet. The squad's cover started to disappear as trees and shrubs disintegrated explosively, showering them with splinters. The night smelled like sawdust and smokeless powder.

One man stood and lobbed a Mills bomb at the duo. It stopped a few feet over the leashed man's head, hovered, and then made a snap sound no louder than a Christmas cracker. The fragments of shrapnel fell unceremoniously to the earth.

Marsh reached for one of the phosphorus grenades on his belt. Just as he prepared to yank the pin, the man who had tossed the Mills got plucked from his hiding spot and rammed into the earth—headfirst—like a tent peg. Marsh opted to stay down instead.

Time for drastic measures. “Fire a pixie!”

Lorimer had designed the pixies for use in the heat of combat. Which meant that each had a bright red Bakelite panic button on its base, where it could be tripped by foot or hand, depending on the circumstances. A sniper rolled over to the pixie and kicked the button. “Everybody take cover!” he yelled.

The pixie emitted a high-pitched whine. The squad made a hasty retreat into the woods.

Marsh counted backwards. “Ten ... nine ...” He grabbed Will, who was sprawled on the ground clutching the stone to his chest. “Eight ... seven ...” Marsh shoved Will along in front of him. Trees erupted in their wake. “Six ... five ...” More than one man screamed as he got caught up in the destruction. “Four ... three ...” Marsh pushed Will down into the hollow behind a tree stump and landed next to him. “Two ... one.”

Somewhere in the bowels of Lorimer's machine, an electrical relay clicked shut. It caused a capacitor bank to discharge its hoarded electrical energy through a wire coil. This turned the pixie, ever so briefly, into an electromagnet. A microsecond later, as special circuitry shaped the time profile of the electrical current, a second relay clicked shut. This activated detonators at both ends of a high-explosive cylinder in the center of the coil. This created a pair of convergent shock waves that squeezed the coil and crushed the magnetic field.

The end result was an electromagnetic pulse tuned to the electrical characteristics of the battery that Milkweed had obtained.

Bullets sprayed through Klaus's insubstantial body, pattering harmlessly against the brick wall of the ice house behind him. He'd lobbied Doctor von Westarp for a new assignment, something real to do, for months. Now he had a new task, but it didn't fill him with pride as he'd hoped.

One of the attackers yelled, “It's one of them! It's one of them!” as he fired. He watched, unbelieving, as Klaus approached the submachine gun leveled at his chest.

Klaus stopped just short of the barrel. He shot the panicky, trigger-happy soldier in the forehead.

He advanced on the rest of the soldiers. Though they'd watched him kill their companion, they continued to try to shoot him. Klaus imagined it was panic making them dull. Until he heard one of the British order his colleagues:

“Disable his battery!”

Somebody yelled something about a “pixie,” but Klaus couldn't make it out over the noise of the gunfire directed at him. One man broke off and ran for a tall pillar of wood and copper wire that the British had apparently brought with them from England. He slapped a large red switch. The pillar started to whine.

Klaus pulled the pin and dropped the grenade he'd been carrying. It became substantial again when it left his touch. The grenade bounced in the slush at his ghostly feet. It had a four-second fuse.

The shooters dived for cover behind trees and underbrush. The man who'd gone for the pillar didn't see what Klaus had done. The concussion drove shrapnel through his chest and cracked the pillar in half.

A blinding flash erupted on the far side of the complex. It came from the east, like a sunrise, but Klaus knew it was Reinhardt blazing brighter than the sun. Klaus was too far away to hear the screams of the men he cooked.

He checked his battery gauge while the four remaining men climbed to their feet to renew the attack. The battery retained nearly 75 percent of its charge. That was more than enough to finish off these men.

First, he tried to goad them into shooting each other while he stood between them. To their credit, they didn't fall for it. He jumped through one man, spun, stuck his pistol through a second man's chest, fired at a third. The man through whom he'd shot dropped his gun, screaming incoherently as he stared at Klaus's arm protruding from his chest. Klaus withdrew and shot him in the back of the head. The two remaining men tried to empty their magazines into Klaus. He reached into one man's rib cage and squeezed. The dead man collapsed.

The lights went dead without warning, followed by the thunder of a distant explosion that shook the earth a moment later. A strange and painful surge from his battery left Klaus reeling. The sudden return of night disoriented him; his eyes had adjusted to the glare of the klieg lights.

The last man took advantage of the distraction and fled into the woods. Klaus tried to give chase by leaping