Konrad
Konrad’s lab coat flapped around him, beating at him like grimy seagull wings as he ran for all he was worth after Reel. The tools in the pockets thumped at him painfully with every jolting step, and his broken ribs screamed at the exertion. A soldier crashed into him going the other way, hugging a wounded, bleeding arm to his chest and cursing, his face pale. The sight staggered Konrad, leaving him gaping, but the man took no notice of him, stumbling away towards the hangar. Don’t think about it, he told himself, forcing his aching feet back to a jog. Just get to Reel. Flogging himself back into a run, he stumbled on towards the pile of men on top of his friend.
He arrived just in time to see the soldier on Reel’s back rip the implant from her skull and thrust it aloft, clenched in his fingers.
Konrad stopped dead in his tracks, his mouth open in horror. The curved plate caught the sun, thinner than he’d expected it to be, with trailing wires that whipped in the breeze as the soldier waved it over his head. From beneath the pile of uniformed bodies, a thin, high-pitched keening emanated, like the sound of a wounded animal.
That was in her head, he thought numbly, staring at the shifting threads. They glistened wetly in the sun’s light, a couple drops of blood dripping free to splatter crimson on the concrete. In her very brain. The thought left him caught somewhere between horror and fascination. The idea of those fibers winding their way through a person’s gray matter…he wanted to look away, but couldn’t bring himself to do so.
The filaments writhed independently of the wind, twisting against it as much as with it. They cast about like the tendrils of a fern hunting for a trestle. Finding nothing but empty air, they drooped before rolling themselves up one at a time, drawing back into the casing clutched between the soldier’s fingers. The lights on the back glowed a bright, crimson red before fading out to black.
He swallowed hard. What did that mean? Reel had been worried about the lights…God, what had they done to her? He started forward again as the soldiers began to get up off her prone form. The screaming faded to a low whimper, and as he pushed through the uniformed men he saw that she lay limp, face down on the ground, the great bulk of her shell arching up into the air as high as a man’s thigh. The soldier holding the implant sat astride her prone form at the peak of her shell, the way a man might sit atop a horse. He was laughing, waving the device over his head like a trophy.
“Damn, but that was tough!” he roared in a rough voice. “Does that make me king now?” It took Konrad a moment to get the reference to Arthur, and when he did he scowled.
The other men laughed and jeered. “King of the space turtles, maybe!” One of them called.
Konrad ran over and snatched the device from the man, yanking it free. “Get off of her!” he demanded in a shrill voice, shoving clumsily at the man. The soldier slid off the other side, still laughing, and Konrad dropped to his knees by Reel’s head. “Reel, Reel, I’m here. Are you okay?” It was a stupid question. There was a gaping wound in the back of her skull where the implant had been, and her flesh was torn and bleeding. The gray, puckered scales underneath stank, a smell that wasn’t quite rot, and his mouth filled with sour spit at the sight.
She turned to look at him, her eyes dull and unfocused. There was no understanding in them, and when she opened her mouth the only sound that came out was a slobbering moan, devoid of meaning. Konrad recoiled in horror.
“Medics! Get the medics!” he shouted, stumbling to his feet. Hadn’t he just done this? “We need to get her back to the medical bay, immediately!”
A couple of the soldiers moved halfheartedly to obey, but were stopped almost immediately by Lusser. “Take her to the brig, if you please men. The medics can look in on her there, after they see to Franz’s arm.” Konrad’s face flushed as the man strutted over, his hands folded behind his back. He looked down his nose at the stricken Reel with an air of faint annoyance. “I was supposed to be told when she woke up. This is…regrettable.”
“Regrettable?” Konrad wheeled on the man, disbelieving. “Regrettable” was a word for a bad hand of cards, or a flat tire, and its use here enraged him. “You could have killed her!”
“And?” Lusser snorted, glancing disdainfully over to watch the soldiers hauling Reel away. They’d brought a stretcher, but it took four of them to get her on to it, and in the end they more rolled her into place than lifted her. Her head left a smear of bright red blood across the grass and the cloth of the stretcher, lolling with her eyes half closed. It took a man on each pole to lift her, and the supports bent ominously between them under her limp weight. Lusser watched them go with basilisk detachment. “She attacked one of our soldiers.”
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It was so ludicrous, such a thin excuse, that it was insulting. Yet Konrad found his protest dying on his tongue. Lusser was already turning away, snapping orders at the gawking technicians.
“Why?” he asked instead. It came out as a choked whisper as his anger guttered out, but Lusser still heard him. He looked over his shoulder at Konrad, the skin around his eyes tight.
“Because we’re not going to be able to learn to build their technology in time to make use of it. Not fast enough to affect the war. But what we’ve taken from her ship, we can make a difference. It might tip the scales in the Reich’s favor, it might just be enough to keep ten million screaming Bolsheviks from savaging our corpses. If you want to waste your time trying to do the impossible,” he spat towards the implant that Konrad still clutched, “then be my guest. Just stay out of my way.”
Konrad stared at the other scientist’s face. He’d been wrong. Lusser’s expression wasn’t detached; it was ice cold, and hungry as a deep winter night. “Does von Braun know?” Konrad asked quietly.
Lusser smiled. It was a tight smile, self-satisfied and cruel, and it sent a chill down Konrad’s spine. “He does. Ask him yourself if you don’t believe me. I had explicit permission for everything I did. Is it my fault that the alien reacted so poorly?”
“Can you blame her? That was her way home!”
“And it’s our way to win this damned war.” Lusser hissed. “Decide whose side you’re on, Konrad. Until you figure it out, go play with your toy.” And with that, he turned on his heel and strode off, resuming his shouting.
…
Von Braun sat slumped at his desk when Konrad entered, a glass in his hand, staring at nothing. Korad spared the glass a second glance; it was full, but Von Braun had left the uncorked bottle on the desk close at hand. The shades were pulled tight, and the only light came from the desk lamp, leaving the chief in a dim pool of darkness. He looked…older. Shadows clung to wrinkles in his face that Konrad hadn’t noticed before, and his hair looked dull and limp, his eyes hollow. The rocket models on the shelves cast long shadows, running up the wall and onto the ceiling. Konrad winced internally when he saw them; where he’d once looked at them as the pinnacles of engineering, now they seemed toys, the clumsy fumblings of children compared to the wondrous machine that Lusser was even now stripping down to its component pieces. They could achieve so much, so long as they didn’t throw it all away now! Konrad slammed the door shut behind himself, making Von Braun jump; the man had been so deep in his thoughts that he hadn’t even noticed Konrad’s approach.
“Konrad?” he said blearily. “What’s happened?”
“Lusser’s gone mad!” Konrad babbled. “He’s destroyed Reel’s ship, and he’s hurt her!”
“He did what?”
Von Braun gaped at Konrad, aghast at the news. Konrad spilled it all out in a rush, decorum abandoned. “You need to stop him, sir.” Konrad said when he’d finished, pacing from side to side in front of the desk. He felt trapped, powerless, like a caged animal. “This is a disaster, he’ll ruin everything!”
Von Braun put a hand to his head, the fingers splayed across his brow and the thumb massaging at one graying temple. “He had permission to start looking at the ship, but this...”
“Then order him to stop, and to let Reel go!”
“I can’t.”
“What?” Konrad stopped, poleaxed. “Why on earth not?”
“I’m...not really in charge anymore.” Von Braun sighed, touching an envelope on his desk that Konrad hadn’t noticed previously. A gold-leaf seal spread across the flap, a broad winged eagle tearing at the paper with its talons. Konrad shuddered. That was the Fuhrer’s Chancellery Seal; the letter had come directly from Hitler himself. “Lusser has been given general command of the station. The Fuhrer was...not pleased that I did not tell him immediately of our visitor.”
Konrad sagged into the chair opposite von Braun, staring at him. Lusser? In command of the whole base? By God, they’d have a better time of it with Lucifer himself in charge. “Can’t...can’t you do anything?” he asked, groping for any possibility, any salvation von Braun might offer.
Von Braun snorted into his glass. “No. I’d hoped to get a better handle on the situation before informing the High Command. I knew Hitler would order the ship seized immediately if he knew of it...which is exactly what he did.” He tossed back a huge gulp of his drink before going on with a grimace. “Sometimes I hate being right.”
Konrad swallowed the lump lodged in his throat. They’d probably hang von Braun as a traitor, when this was all said and done. Maybe him too, come to think of it. But that seemed a small thing next to what had just happened to Reel. “What are we going to do?” he whispered.
“I need to think. You should go…I don’t know, work on the computer problem, I suppose.” Von Braun said, but he didn’t sound convinced.
Konrad blinked at him, confused. “I thought you said you didn’t expect anything to come of that work?”
“Probably not.” The older man admitted, rising and coming around the desk. He patted Konrad on the shoulder. “But when High Command comes around asking questions, then you’ll have just been following orders. And really, what else would you be able to do?”