Arcturus, Konrad, Mark

“How bad is it?”

Arcturus rubbed at the scars on his knuckles and blew out a long, slow breath. “I couldn’t say; you’re blocking my light.”

“Oops.” Leaves rustled underfoot as Liliane stepped back, and her shadow shifted across the jerry-rigged tug engines. The last dying rays of the day’s sun poured in through the space she’d occupied, illuminating the steel frame that held the engines in place. “Is that better?”

“Yes,” he replied grimly, studying the makeshift mount. “Though I’m afraid I only have bad news. See there?”

She came closer, taking care not to block the light again, and squinted at the section of metal he was pointing out. “No. What am I looking for?”

“This crack right here,” he scraped over it with a single dull claw, feeling it catch.

She leaned over his shoulder and ran her smooth, pink fingertips over the same spot. “Just barely. It’s easier to feel it than it is to see it. Your eyes must be better than ours.”

He blinked, considering that for a moment. He’d never even thought about different species seeing things differently, though in hindsight it made sense. She went on, not noticing his moment of revelation. “So can we fix it, weld it back together or something?”

Arcturus wrinkled the scales on his nose up, considering. If that crack was more than superficial, if it ran down into the center of the steel, then slapping a weld on it wasn’t going to hold it for long, though it might help a little bit. On the other claw, if this was just surface cracking, then a patch weld was exactly what it needed. So the answer was to weld it either way and hope for the best.

“Yes, I think so.” Most likely it had just cracked because this was the engine that had been out of balance, and he’d already fixed that. It probably would be fine. Of course, if he was wrong then the next time they tried to fly, the whole thing could break away and they’d crash. Hopefully before they were too high up, but with his luck it would hold to the edge of the atmosphere. There was nothing Liliane could do about it, so he didn’t see any point in burdening her with the extra worry. She was already stressed out enough, with Mark’s late return from the camp. There was a noticeable trail building up in the fallen leaves where she’d walked from the ship to the edge of the trees and back again, watching for some sign of his return. He understood her nerves; if Mark failed to figure out where Reel and the ship were, he wasn’t sure what they’d do next. Maybe just fly straight into the camp and demand her return, or start using the lander to batter down buildings until they found her.

Leaves crunched underfoot at the edge of their clearing, and Liliane’s head whipped up, hopefully. The expression faded away again as Francois came into view around a copse of trees, his mouth a bitter twist. Arcturus already knew the answer, but he had to ask anyway.

“Any sign of him?”

“None.” The Frenchman shook his head, coming to stand alongside Liliane.

“He said he’d be back by dark,” Liliane said, throwing a glance towards the rapidly setting sun. “I knew this was a bad idea; I should never have let him go.”

Francois didn’t argue the point, though he didn’t contradict her either. He settled onto a stump alongside Arcturus and folded his arms over his knees. “Done is done, and short of tying him down I doubt you could have stopped him. All we can do now is wait. If he’s not back by morning, we’ll have to come up with something else.”

Arcturus ground his teeth together, turning away. If Mark didn’t return soon...Well, he was done waiting around. He was going to get his daughter back, come the Black or the Efreet themselves. He trundled back into the ship to grab the laser welder. One way or another, they’d need to be able to fly.

…

Konrad slumped in his chair in front of the workbench, exhausted. Combining the two plates had been challenging. They weren’t meant to be arranged as he had them, and he’d sweated to force them into the new configuration. Getting the mechanisms to spin in reverse had been a little easier. Now all that was left was to test it out. He put a twisted chunk of scrap metal on top of the upper plate.

Standing, he reached over to the dial that controlled the rotor mechanism and turned it to the lowest setting. As soon as it clicked into place, he retreated towards the door. He was pretty sure this would work as he intended, but just in case something went wrong…he’d rather not be standing right next to it. The motor, he’d found, took a few seconds to spin up to speed, and that gave him time to put some distance between himself and it.

He ducked behind a pile of boxes and watched, peeking over the top of them. The combined plates wobbled slightly as the rotor picked up speed. He held his breath, flinching slightly with every wobble, ready to drop flat at the slightest hint of something going wrong.

Someone started yelling in the room just overhead, and Konrad hit the floor with an undignified yelp, clutching his hands over his head. It took him several long moments to realize that the muffled shouting was angry, not panicked or scared. Coming to his feet, he glanced first at the plates, where the chunk of scrap sat unperturbed on the wobbling plates, and then looked at the ceiling. What was up there? A couple of offices, but who…

Lusser. He recognized the voice, even if he couldn’t make out the words. Some poor soul was taking the brunt of the man’s wrath, just overhead. He was shouting, demanding answers…Konrad glanced back to the chunk of metal on the shivering plate, returning his attention to the matter at hand. Apparently, the lowest setting wasn’t enough to counteract Earth’s natural gravity. Carefully, slowly, he dialed the power up.

The chunk of metal shot up and hit the ceiling with a solid thunk. Konrad winced, expecting Lusser to come storming down the stairs to come find him, but the angry yelling continued, uninterrupted. Either the petty tyrant hadn’t noticed, or he was caught up in berating whatever grunt had ignited his ire. Konrad caught the word “kneel” followed by a brief scuffle of feet on the ground.

During all of this, the chunk of metal started to tumble slowly back down through the air, as though it weighed no more than a crumpled piece of paper. Confused, Konrad cranked the power on the plates up, maxing out the dial. The scrap shuddered, its descent slowing but not stopping, until it hit the plates with a quiet clank.

Konrad stared at the plates in puzzlement, his brain foggy from lack of sleep. Why had it stopped working? The thought of having to take the whole damn thing apart again to solve the problem made him groan; he just plain didn’t have the energy for it. He was about to give up and leave for his bed when he noticed the power pack.

Of course. That’s the same power pack I’ve been using all night. As good as they were, they had to run down sometime, right? He unplugged it, picked up a spare, and plugged that in instead.

Too late, he realized his error. He hadn’t turned the power back down. Before he could get his hands on the dial, the machine started shaking violently, vibrating like a nest of angry hornets. The edge of the field hit him, knocking him back off his feet, and the metal he’d been using to test it flew up at tremendous speed to smash into the wooden ceiling. Somewhere up above, a man squawked in surprise as the wave of anti-gravity washed upwards.

…

Mark spat blood and a tooth onto the floor. The man questioning him had no idea how to punch, and he was doing as much damage to his own fists as he was to Mark. Not that it provided much comfort. Bound to a chair as he was, he could do little more than absorb the blows.

“Who are you working for?” the man in the lab coat demanded again, his voice deceptively calm as he rubbed at his knuckles. He had glasses, and a beaky nose over a cruel twist of a mouth. The soldiers had called him Dr. Lusser, and he had the same haughty pride as a schoolyard bully.

Mark coughed around the blood filling his mouth. “I already told you; the Führer sent me to check up on what was happening here.” The man already knew that was a lie, but the more time Mark wasted the more chance he gave his friends to arrive.

Lusser snorted, shaking his head. “Hitler is an idiot, but not so incompetent as to send a spy that doesn’t know his own rank.” The two guards he had brought with him shared an uneasy glance at that, but stayed silent. “Are you with the French Resistance? A British saboteur?”

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That’s a little too spot on, Mark thought to himself. “Polish partisans, actually,” he said, giving the man a bloody-lipped grin. “We’re everywhere.”

His captor snorted at that. “You’re insane.” His eyes flicked briefly down to the black triangle on Mark’s chest, and he grinned nastily. “At least you’re dressed appropriately.” He cracked Mark across the cheek with an open palm, sparing his knuckles. Mark rocked under the blow, and the beak-nosed man pressed on. “How many of you are there? Where are you hiding?”

“There’s hundreds of us! That man right there is my dear comrade.” Mark said, jerking his chin towards one of the guards. The slap had been painful, but it hadn’t knocked him silly the way another haymaker would have. “Or maybe it’s just me. But I’ve laid explosives all around your base already! They should be going off any minute now.” Absurd lies, but what else did he have?

The scientist was not amused. Glaring poison at Mark, he ran a hand through his hair, pushing it back into place. “One more chance to be useful. What were you hoping to find here?”

Mark looked him dead in the eye and let the smile slide deliberately from his face. “You want the honest truth? I don’t think you can handle it.”

A mad gleam shone in Doctor Lusser’s cold eyes. “Tell me.”

“We received credible reports of big…green…” Mark watched the man, gauging his reaction. On the word green, his eyes flashed behind his glasses, and Mark grinned triumphantly. So, you do have her. “…Leprechauns. You wouldn’t happen to have found any pots of gold here, would you? We need them to fund the war effort.”

A muscle twitched in the scientist’s temple. “Gentlemen,” he hissed to the guards. “I believe our guest is no longer useful. Kill him.” He turned away, his lab coat flaring like a cape.

Panic surged through Mark’s chest. “What, not interested in Leprechauns?” he called out to the Doctor’s back, fighting to keep his tone light. “Well then, how about aliens?”

That stopped Dr. Lusser dead, as though he’d run into a brick wall. He turned slowly back to Mark, his face as white as his coat. “You know,” he whispered.

Mark grinned at him. “We know. Thanks to you by the way, Doctor,” he went on, probing for another reaction “you weren’t very careful.”

The man studied him coldly. “Soldiers, I’ve changed my mind.”

Close one. Mark let out a relieved sigh; at least he’d been able to forestall his execution.

“I’ll kill him. Make him kneel.”

Shit.

Mark fought, of course, but all he could do was thrash in his bonds, tipping the chair over. Even when they cut him loose from the chair to force him to kneel, the best he could manage was a glancing kick at one of the men’s shins. A click by his ear stopped him short, and he turned his head to see a familiar barrel pointed at his head. It was the same Walther he’d taken in Paris, now back in German hands. Dr. Lusser clutched it in a white knuckled grip, finger on the trigger.

“Thank you, by the way. I’ve been wanting one of these, and they’re hard to get if you don’t strictly need one.” He caressed Mark’s ear with the nose of the barrel. “Anything else you’d like to share?”

“You hit like a girl, and your mum is a poxy whore.” Mark tried for defiant bravery, but his voice cracked, and he squirmed to get away from the gun. Panic gripped his heart, squeezing him like a vice.

“Pithy,” the man remarked. “Hold him.”

The guards braced their hold on him, and Mark squeezed his eyes shut. Sorry Liliane, Arcturus. He briefly considered a silent apology to Francois too, but stopped short of that. He was only dying, after all.

The Walther barked, someone yelled, and Mark pitched forward, struck by a tremendous force that sent him sprawling, head over heels, onto the floor. He landed hard on his back, looking up at the ceiling. Being shot in the head, he thought dully, felt a whole lot like being blindsided by an ornery cow.

He struggled up onto one knee and stared, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. Both of the guards had been knocked aside by the same force that had battered Mark to the ground, and they were just getting to their feet, confused expressions on their faces. As for Dr. Lusser…

The scientist was pinned on his back to the ceiling, a stunned expression on his face. He was struggling to stand, disoriented, his cheeks pushed back like a paratrooper in midjump. Dust swirled beneath him unnaturally, blowing into his squinting eyes from the floor as though driven by a tremendous fan. Where it hit, it stuck, driven by the same force that had Lusser trapped.

Mark stared at the scene, baffled. The two guards didn’t seem to be able to make any better sense of it. One of them made a jump for his boss, pinned to the ceiling, and yelped in surprise as the same strange force caught his arm. It flipped him end over end and pitched him headfirst into the cinderblock wall with a crack. He slid down bonelessly to the floor and lay still, facedown. His companion gaped between his boss on the ceiling and his unconscious friend, frozen with indecision.

A dull glint on the floor a few feet to Mark’s right caught his eye. The Walther, knocked free of the scientist’s grip, either by the recoil or by whatever fresh hell this was. MacDougal’s voice came to him again, unbidden: “You figured things would just work out, ‘cause they always do.” Mark dove for the gun.

The second guard caught the sudden movement, and jumped into action. He pulled his own sidearm in the same instant that Mark caught hold of the grip of the Walther and rolled. He landed, more by chance than by design, with the column of whatever-it-was between them. Mark brought the weapon up and squeezed the trigger, an instant after the guard fired.

For the second time in as many minutes, he flinched, expecting death, but the bullet cracked into the wall behind him, passing over his head. His own round went high as well, passing cleanly over the man’s shoulder to splatter against the cinderblocks behind him.

They stared at each for a second, baffled, but Mark recovered first. He aimed low, pointing the barrel of the Walther at the man’s groin, rather than his chest. The pistol jumped in his hand and the guard dropped, blood spraying from his chest onto the white washed wall behind him, his own gun flying out of his limp fingers.

For a moment, all Mark could do was lay there, panting and shaking. He should be dead. He should be dead twice over. Three times. He scrambled to his feet and patted himself, checking for bullet holes, and miraculously found none. He checked again. Not only was he not dead, but he was free. Free and armed again. A cackle of mad, relieved glee tore out of his throat while the scientist stared down at him through slitted eyes, a baffled glare on his contorted face.

He’d have taunted the man, but he couldn’t think of anything clever to say. Instead, he staggered over to the unconscious guard and stripped off his overcoat, slinging it on over his prisoner’s garb. It hung off him like a boy dressed in his dad’s work coat, but it would have to do; the other man’s coat had a hole in it. And it was covered in blood. He pulled the man’s boots off too, and…Wonder of wonders, the man had a single stick grenade too. To Mark’s eye, it looked like his mother’s potato masher. Mark relieved him of it, caressing the curve of the wooden handle with one finger.

Tightening the second man’s belt and holster around himself, he took both men’s side arms, slinging them next to the grenade, and turned to take one last look at the man pinned to the ceiling. Armed to the teeth and free, Mark felt...wonderful. Alive. The naked hatred on the scientist’s face was the cherry on top of it all, and Mark grinned and flipped him a casual salute.

“I need to go call the cavalry. Where’s your ammo dump?”

“I will tell you nothing, you damned saboteur.” The man spat down at Mark, but the gob made it no more than an inch before whipping back up into Lusser’s face. “Go to hell,” he snarled, trying to blink spittle from his eyes.

Mark shrugged, drawing and cocking the Walther in a smooth motion. “If that’s the way you really want it, then okay.” He pointed the gun up at the hapless German. Of course, Mark wasn’t going to shoot a helpless, trapped enemy. It wouldn’t be sporting. But Dr. Lusser didn’t know that. Mark grinned, a feral, savage, grin as the man’s face drained of color.

…

Konrad cowered in his makeshift workroom until the gunshots stopped, and someone stomped down the stairs in a rush of jackboots past his door. Silence fell, and still he huddled, waiting for Lusser or one of his cronies to come seize him. Long minutes passed, and when that didn’t happen, he cautiously straightened from his hiding place behind the boxes. Stepping around the junk scattered all over the floor, he carefully turned the vibrating gravity plates off, crawling to avoid the edge of the gravity field. They’d smashed down through the table and hit the concrete floor, thankfully stopping there. When he turned them off, there was a muffled thump from overhead, as someone or something in the room above hit the floor. The scrap of metal he’d used to test the plates stayed where it was; the rough edges had bitten into the wooden planks of the ceiling, holding it fast.

He had a suspicion that he might be in trouble, and he resolved to make himself scarce. He was gathering up his tools and the combined gravity plates when an explosion roared outside, loud enough to rattle the windows in their frames. He rushed to the window in time to see a huge tongue of orange flame licking the night sky and painting the surrounding buildings in shades of red. The air raid sirens wailed to life a moment later while he was still gaping at the spectacle, and men began to spill out of the buildings, half clothed, to try to fight the fires. This might have something to do with what he’d heard upstairs. Probably, even. If so, then he was at least partially to blame. Lusser would strap him naked to the next rocket launch for this.

Reel. The thought came unbidden to his mind. Her cell was well away from the conflagration, so she was in no immediate danger...but the base was in chaos. How many men could you spare to watch a prisoner when everything was on fire?

Not many, he guessed. He threw himself away from the window and snatched up the things he’d dropped. He’d promised Reel he’d get her out, and he doubted he’d ever get a better chance than this.