Authors: Victor Gischler
A servant in a white coat stopped in front of me. He bowed and held a tray toward me. I eyed the unfamiliar offering with skepticism. Neat rows of little pink squares, like samples of bubblegum.
Paige plucked one from the tray and popped it in her mouth, then chewed slowly.
“It’s a narcotic produced from natural plant life found on the planet. It retards the areas of the brain that produce anxiety and inhibitions. You’ll enjoy the party more if you have one or two. Trust me.”
When in Rome.
I popped one into my mouth. It was spongy, but dissolved quickly, making my tongue and gums tingle. At first, nothing happened, so I washed it down with the rest of the wine and filled the goblet again.
A moment later, I looked up.
The swirling lights above me had turned into some sort of bizarre living things, circling the dome like angels of liquid light. A second later I felt myself lift, lighter than cotton candy, and the lights spun around me, caressing my body, and I was light, too, and we all danced together in the sky and—
I blinked.
I was standing on the floor again, the party still unfolding around me. I was a dozen feet from where I’d started, but had no memory of moving. I looked around for Paige.
She stood, eyes wide, head tilted to one side, a dreamy expression on her face. Transfixed by the color show. A tall man with a neatly trimmed beard stood behind her, one hand up under her dress, snugged casually between her legs. Turner moved her hips in a slow circle in response to the man’s attention. Then she reached out to cup the breast of another woman standing close to her.
The nurse who’d tended me earlier.
I looked around. The entire party writhed like a single pulsating sex act, swaying to music, transfixed by the lights, hands and mouths roaming over whomever happened to be handy.
There was a soft pressure on my leg.
It seemed to take an hour to turn my head and look. I was in some sort of sweet foggy paradise. Harsh reality seemed light years away. There was nothing but this place in this moment.
The pressure against my leg was a handsome black woman with impossibly perfect cheekbones. Like all the women at the party she wore a dress of the same ephemeral material. It was golden against her onyx skin. She was tall and athletic and had straddled one of my legs, rubbing up and down like a cat wanting a scratch. As she gyrated, one hand went inside my shirt, long fingers raking through chest hair. She kissed my neck.
The colors overhead flared and billowed and I was lost in a sea of sensation, bliss blurring into bliss, a state of perfect contentment. Sight, sound, taste, smell, touch. All melted down into a new hot glowing element called pleasure.
I think a lot of this happened to sitar music.
* * *
It went on for hours or maybe only minutes. Time became meaningless.
Until suddenly it had meaning again. I blinked, and took stock of my surroundings. I still felt at ease, vaguely euphoric, but I was no longer lost to pure ecstasy.
I looked down to see that I had my pants around my ankles and was taking a short blonde from behind. She was bent over the food and drinks table, eating pudding from a bowl, using only her fingers.
Paige was suddenly at my side. “They pump an oxygen mix into the room to dilute the effects,” she explained. “It means she’s about to arrive.”
“She?”
Turner grabbed my arm to pull me away.
“
Her
.”
Then I realized who she meant. The daughter of the Brass Dragon. At last. I disengaged from the blonde and pulled my pants up.
“Apologies. Duty calls.”
The blonde turned and winked at me. “Next time.” She kissed me softly on the lips.
Butterscotch. The pudding was butterscotch.
Turner dragged me to where the crowd was gathering. I followed their gaze upward, and saw a balcony twenty feet above us. A banner hung from it, the swastika with the dragon perched atop it. I was eager to see her, finally, in the flesh. It was irrational. The woman I was fated to kill—and yet nothing seemed more important than finally glimpsing the mystery which had brought me so far across the galaxy.
Heavy velvet curtains parted and Mueller appeared on the balcony. A murmur fluttered through the crowd and died. Every eye in the place glued itself to him.
He raised both hands theatrically.
“Friends. We’ve come so far together. Sacrificed much and enjoyed much. We’ve seen dreams blossom and seen them dashed. We strive on, but now at last, it is our time. We are on the cusp of something incredible. The banners of the galaxy are changing day by day, and we lucky few are the ones to answer the call, the ones to hear the bugle finally sounded. Luck. Fate. Strategy. A combination of so many incalculable things has led us down a path, has set us in motion.”
He paused, turning his head slowly, seeming to meet every gaze. “If we don’t stand up, if we don’t seize this opportunity as it is presented, we are not just cowards. We are traitors.” He smiled. “But I know that the heart of every man and woman in this room is true.”
Abrupt wild applause.
“I know that we will all rise to the occasion,” Mueller continued. “The occasion has arrived. Destiny is upon us. We here are brave enough to admit that terrible things have had to be done. That the obstacle of the old Reich had to be torn down so we could step over the rubble on the path to a new horizon. And so we stand amid the ruin we ourselves orchestrated, among the bodies of strangers. We’ve ruined worlds. How could we do this? Only one answer suffices. The absolute faith that for centuries to come we will have set the Reich on the right path. The knowledge that we’ve taken the long view.
“
You
, my friends, are to be congratulated for this.”
More wild applause. After a night of drinking and drugs and uninhibited sex, they liked knowing that their sacrifice hadn’t gone unnoticed.
“But you don’t want to hear any more from me,” Mueller said. “I know who you want to see, and I know why. We live in a time in which blood has almost been forgotten—yet some of us remember, and we are a fortunate people indeed, for our leader can trace her heritage back to the originals. The blood of Gestapo Mars runs pure in her veins. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the daughter of the Brass Dragon.”
The applause this time was thunderous, and shook the dome like an earthquake. Mueller stepped aside, and the velvet curtain parted again.
Then she stepped out onto the balcony.
The applause redoubled.
The daughter of the Brass Dragon was nothing short of a goddess. Her skin was dark and golden. A glossy black braid of hair flowed so long that a tender bot rolled behind her to keep it from dragging on the ground. She wore a glittering silver dress that seemed to reveal everything and nothing at the same time. Her face represented every facet of humanity, almost as if emissaries from every possible gene pool had sent DNA as tribute. She was like no other woman, and yet she was every woman.
She said something, and there was more wild cheering. My mind has been conditioned for retention, to absorb even the tiniest nuance from every situation, but I couldn’t tell you what she said. Her words were the music of the cosmos, washing over me, seeping into every bone.
I was in love.
Some of that bubblegum narcotic might still have been in my system.
* * *
The festivities started up again, but Paige quickly spirited me away down a darkened side corridor on a sub level of the installation. Her demeanor had changed. She was nervous, constantly looking back as if she feared we’d been followed.
“Where are we going?”
“We’re almost there,” she said. “I’ve been preparing for a long time, waiting. You got here just in time. I wasn’t sure anyone was coming at all. It’s been so long since I’ve had orders.”
“Let’s not rush into anything.” My head was still spinning from the intoxicating image of the Brass Dragon’s daughter. I felt as if I’d witnessed some element of nature, instead of just a woman.
“If we’re spotted down here in the maintenance corridors, it will seem suspicious,” she said. “So yes, please, I’d like to rush. Here. This door.” She twisted a handle and I followed her into a room with some kind of giant pipes crisscrossing in every direction. I felt the hum of machinery through the soles of my feet.
“It’s a pumping station,” Turner told me. “Everything’s automated, so nobody comes in here unless something goes wrong—and nothing ever goes wrong.”
She dragged a dusty crate from behind one of the large pipes. It was marked
SPARE PARTS
and was padlocked. She quickly worked the combination, and the lock popped open. She threw back the lid, revealing a cache of weapons within.
“I didn’t know who was coming,” she admitted. “If it would be a single agent or a whole team. I wanted to be ready.”
I peeked over her shoulder at the contents of the crate. There was quite a selection of rifles and pistols—some military, others civilian. She selected a modest automatic and closed the crate.
She turned back to me, held out the pistol solemnly, like a Pharisee charging an assassin with the demise of a messiah.
I started to reach for the pistol, the training already assessing the pros and cons—12mm, fifteen-capacity clip, a bad bet against power armor, but good stopping power otherwise. A close range pistol best for—
—No.
I pulled my hand back, shook my head.
Turner frowned. “What’s the matter?”
“I don’t want it.”
“Look, I know you’re capable,” Turner said. “Maybe you plan to do it with your bare hands, like with a Jovian nerve pinch or something, but she’ll likely have guards around her. You’ve been invited to a private audience with her, but I don’t know the details.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“Do you want a bigger gun? Ammunition with exploding tips?”
“That’s not what I mean either!”
“I’m trying to help you, Sloan.” Irritated now. “Tell me what you need.”
“I’m not shooting her.”
“I don’t care how you do it,” Turner said. “Hit her in the head with a fucking hammer for all I care, but now that you’re here, things will move fast. The window for completing your mission is rapidly—”
“I mean I’m not killing her at all,” I said heatedly.
Turner gasped, took a step back from me.
“What?”
“Look, you haven’t been through what I’ve been through. You don’t know.”
“You said the order was to kill her. You told me yourself.”
“Fuck the damn orders.” As soon as I said it I felt the tickle of wrongness at the base of my skull. Every instinct said
obey, soldier on, follow orders
.
No. No.
“No!” I shouted.
Turner flinched, looked at me with fear in her eyes.
I held up my hands.
Easy.
“Listen to me,” I said. “Those orders have been changed so many times they don’t mean anything anymore. They were issued by people who are dead, then changed by their replacements, then changed again for God knows what reason, all from a million light years away. It doesn’t make any sense. I won’t do it.”
She stared at me for a long time, eyes wide, mouth hanging open only slightly. I just looked back at her without flinching.
“But… orders,” she said finally.
I took her by the shoulders and shook her. “Damn it, we’re not machines. We can think. We can feel and reason and resist.
We
are here—not the Gestapo. I’m not murdering another person simply because I have orders. I’m going to meet her. I’m going to try to understand. Then I’ll decide what to do. Now are you going to take me to her, or not?”
She trembled slightly, most likely wondering where her world had gone, if she’d ever return to a reality she recognized.
“Yes.” It was barely above a whisper. “I’ll take you to her.”
“Good. Then put that pistol back. I don’t want it.” She did so, and we left the pumping station.
F
irst we took an elevator up. There was no display to tell us which floor we were on or how far we’d come, but our destination was high above the ground floor. Turner explained that the elevator only went to one place. When the doors opened, we’d be there.
She took my hand. “I’m scared.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
“That would seem to be the most common state of the human condition,” I said, appalled at how intellectual I sounded. “You’re a psychiatrist. You don’t know this?”
“You think I’m exempt from normal human fears, simply because I’m an expert?”
“I guess not.”
“Knowing what I know makes it worse,” she said. “People come to me for answers. You know what the answer is? The answer is, ‘You’re fucked and it’s all downhill from there.’”
“You should put that in a self-help book.”
“This is your fault,” she said. “I wanted to obey orders.”
“We’ve been over this.”
“The single greatest cause of unhappiness is free will,” she told me. “Don’t you see how easy and satisfying it would be to give ourselves up to authority? Parents, God, the Reich. The blissful relief from responsibility, knowing that someone else, someone higher up the food chain, is responsible. Knowing that it’s all out of your hands, and therefore not your fault.”
“You’re not a very good therapist, are you?”
She shot me a dirty look.
“So far, you’re not much of a spy.”
The elevator doors opened. The hall was wide and bright and white—no surprise there. A red light blinked down the center toward the doors at the opposite end, leading us on like we were coming in for a landing. When we reached them a dulcet, androgynous voice seemed to come out of midair.
“Identify please.”
“Doctor Paige Turner. I.D. code 32B27G. I have Carter Sloan with me. He should be a recent addition to your databanks.”
“Voice pattern recognized. You and your guest are cleared to enter, Doctor Turner.”
The doors slid open, and we entered a small anteroom where Mueller waited for us. He’d changed out of his party pajamas and wore a black suit, a patch with the swastika and the dragon over one pocket. He smiled like a politician, and we shook hands.