Gestapo Mars Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  The Final Chapter

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Available Now from Titan Books

  Coming Soon from Titan Books

  Gestapo Mars

  Print edition ISBN: 9781783297351

  Electronic edition ISBN: 9781783297368

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: September 2015

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2015 Victor Gischler. All Rights Reserved.

  Visit our website: www.titanbooks.com

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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  This book is for Anthony Neil Smith who taught me how to be awful and own it. We don’t do safe fiction up in here!

  ONE

  The first thing I did when they opened the chamber was puke on the guy’s shoes.

  “Son of a bitch,” the guy said, stepping back.

  Then I focused on him, all pencil-neck rage and a clipboard and a lab coat. Cryo-lab nerd. A dime a dozen, so I hadn’t made an enemy worth sweating. I put my hands on either side of the chamber, tried to pry myself out. No dice. I was weak as a kitten. A hung-over kitten after a triathlon.

  “You knew it could happen,” another voice said, connected to somebody I couldn’t see. “Most of them vomit.”

  “He moved faster than the others,” lab coat said. “I wasn’t ready.”

  “Wheel him to the recovery room,” the other voice said. “I’ll brief him when he’s lucid.”

  I tried to tell him a steak sandwich and a couple of pilsners would get me lucid in a hurry but the only words to spill out of my mouth were, “sdh glunmg snooj.”

  “They’re always floppy and retarded when they first wake up,” lab coat said. “Hard to believe the millions of credit that went into them.”

  “Just wheel him into the recovery room,” the other voice said. “On second thought, get him to wash down first, in case he shits himself, and make sure he’s hydrated.”

  * * *

  I did shit myself—pissed, too, and fell right into it, the room spinning, air going out of my lungs, legs like noodles. That hadn’t happened the other times, and I got worried, even as many soft hands picked me up, hosed me off, and in feminine tones told me it would be okay.

  Nurses. I liked nurses way more than I liked lab coats.

  Then I was in a set of clean scrubs. Sitting in a chair. My eyes focused a bit at a time.

  The recovery room looked just like the interrogation room and the debriefing room. Sometimes it was hard to know if you were coming out or going back in. The guy across from me wore a black suit instead of a lab coat. Ties were back in fashion, thin with a line of red glitter down the middle. He pulled his tie loose, leaned in, and squinted at me.

  “You okay?” It was the other voice from before. “Can you keep it together, or you need a little more time?” He reached into his jacket, and my body tried to flinch out of reflex, but it wasn’t happening. Too many of my muscles were still asleep. Anyway, he only came out with a pack of cigarettes, filterless Cosmics, and shook one loose and popped it into his mouth, the tip flaring orange as it self-lit.

  “Maybe a hypo,” he suggested. “Want us to juice you?”

  I shook my head. “How long?” I croaked. My voice felt rough. My mouth tasted like some creature had laid eggs in there and then the eggs had hatched and all the baby creatures had taken their first craps on my tongue. The first intelligible words out of my face probably should have been to ask for a glass of water.

  The tie and the cigarettes threw me. My muscles were only so much sleepy meat, but the mind was starting to process. Fashions come and go. A while back they created a tobacco additive to neutralize the carcinogenic effects, but then two decades later found the additive caused huge, bleeding hemorrhoids. The fact smoking was okay again meant they’d licked the hemorrhoids, and a chunk of time had passed.

  How long?

  “You’ll need to adjust, naturally,” Glitter Tie said. “We’ll help you through the process.”

  I cleared my throat and said very clearly and distinctly, “How? Long?”

  “Two hundred and fifty-eight years.”

  “Sons of… bitches.”

  “Hey, now.” Glitter Tie held up his hands, palms out, placating.

  “You fucker.” I spat the word at him again, strength flowing back into my body, into my voice. “Fucker!”

  “I can understand why you might be upset.”

  “Fuck you straight in your fuck hole,” I shouted. It felt good to shout. I was waking up all over. “Every two or three years, and then once for ten years, and then twelve years last time, and then two hundred and fifty-eight?”

  Training and maintaining a bio-engineered operative was expensive as hell, and the agency didn’t want us falling down manholes or choking on chicken bones in between missions. They kept us in stasis, and we were contracted for a certain number of missions. Once we did our tour, they cut us loose.

  I reminded Glitter Tie of this.

  “But it’s sort of tough to hit your quota when you’re in stasis for two and a half fucking centuries, motherfucker.”

  “I know, I know.” He flicked the cigarette butt into the corner, then immediately popped another, puffed it to life. “You need to calm down, and I’ll explain.”

  “The fact you’re still wearing your head shows that I’m calmer than you deserve.” This was bullshit. My legs still felt like rubber bands that had been doing shots of tequila all night, but it felt good to make the threat. Seizing opportunities was a key element in my personality profile.

  Glitter Tie ignored the bravado.

  “Operatives have changed a lot over the years,” he explained. “The game wa
s changing rapidly even as you got shoved back into the deep freeze after your last mission. Intense training and prenatal bio-engineering are only the tip of the iceberg now. Most operatives have extra hardware. Hell, I even have a micro-processor installed in my brain for office functions.”

  “What’s 467 times 231?”

  “107,877,” he said immediately.

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  “And I’m just a mid-level, government bureaucrat,” he said. “The operatives have systems like you wouldn’t believe. Built-in weapons. Crazy shit. You know how it is with new tech. Once they get the ball rolling, it’s like an avalanche. The agency blinked, and a whole bunch of you old timers were obsolete before you could say Harvey Bangswipe.”

  “I don’t get the reference.”

  “The point is, you kept getting moved farther and farther down the rotation until it was obvious you just weren’t going to be needed again. If it makes you feel any better, it’s not personal. A lot of operatives got stuck just like you.”

  “It doesn’t make me feel one iota better,” I said, “and as soon as I can make a fist I’m going to beat your face into pudding.”

  “Don’t you want to know why, now, all of a sudden, we’ve activated you when, as I’ve just indicated, the agency has a plethora of far superior operatives to choose from?”

  “It’s the single most pressing question of my existence.”

  “There’s a colony planet out past the rim,” Glitter Tie said. “Home of some naturalist-type cultists. They’d spot one of our modern operatives a parsec away, what with all the gadgets and implants. We need a man of raw meat to get in there and infiltrate the place. The exact nature of your mission will be revealed later, when your field handler briefs you.”

  “What makes you think I’m going to do a damn thing for you cocksuckers when you left me to rot in the deep freeze?”

  Glitter Tie sighed, and pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. They teach middle managers that move specifically to deal with dumb shits who can’t see the big picture. But for me the big picture was that I’d been screwed, and I was pissed. Anything beyond that was superfluous in my admittedly narrow view of the universe.

  “Listen,” he said. “We predicted your likely dissatisfaction with the current situation, and we’re prepared not only to compensate you in a monetary fashion, but to wave any and all further obligations you have to the agency. You’ll be a free man. All set up with the galaxy at your fingertips. No strings.”

  It was a damn fine offer, especially considering that if the chemical protocols were still in effect, they could basically turn me off with the flick of a switch—and yet I was still pissed. Still baffled and appalled that the universe had rotated around me while I lay there like some kind of half-assed popsicle. I opened my mouth to tell him to grab his ankles and fellate himself.

  The explosions in the next room rocked us out of our chairs, sent us sprawling across the floor. The lights flickered, and then went out. The emergency reds came on, bathing us in a dim hellish glow. I blinked and looked over at Glitter Tie, who seemed as betrayed as he was stunned.

  “Damn,” he said. “I thought we’d have more time.”

  He took a pistol out of his jacket and shot himself in the head.

  I’ll admit it. That caught me a little off guard.

  TWO

  And then the jackbooted thugs stormed the briefing room.

  Dressed all in black, knee-high boots, heels clacking on the tile floor. Black cloth caps with silver skull insignias, crossed curved daggers below the skull. They clutched little black automatic pistols in black-gloved fists, a half-dozen of them crowding the tiny briefing room, pointing the pistols, looking for something to shoot at.

  The lead thug with captain’s insignia on his shoulders put a boot heel on Glitter Tie’s chest and shot the corpse three times in the head.

  “Traitorous dog!”

  “I think he’s already dead,” I said, struggling back into my chair.

  “Now it’s official,” the captain said.

  “Me, next?”

  “Of course not.” The captain seemed offended by the idea. “We’re here to rescue you, Mr. Sloan.”

  Sloan. Yeah, that was my name. It didn’t even occur to me to wonder who I was until the captain said it. Then it was all coming back, faster and faster. The protocols were extremely goal-oriented. Little details like identity always snapped into focus last.

  Carter Sloan. Thirty-eight years old (subjective). Six feet tall without shoes, one hundred and seventy-six pounds. Hair: brown. Eyes: brown. Caucasian.

  “Come with us, Mr. Sloan. Our orders are to evac you to a safe location, where details of your situation will be revealed.”

  I stood, legs still wobbly. “I’ll come, but don’t expect me to set any land speed records.”

  I followed them through the cryo labs, but my knees gave out in the lobby. A pair of thugs flanked me, hoisting me up under the arms. The toes of my hospital slippers made drag marks in the dust as they dragged me down a long hallway toward the exit.

  Dust?

  I noticed it now. The outer rooms were a wreck—dust and cobwebs on the light fixtures, tarps thrown over furniture.

  “This place was mothballed?”

  “The rebels brought this facility back online specifically to resurrect you,” the captain said.

  “I’m flattered.”

  We took a service elevator up to the surface. When we came out of the dome that covered the entrance to the agency cryo facility, I gasped. The huge industrial complex surrounding the agency bunker had been flattened, and not recently. Rubble piled up all around us, rusted girders like the ancient bones of some gigantic tortured animal rising into the air. In the hazy distance, the capitol building looked like some hulking titan had taken a bite out of it. The sky was smoky and gray, the sun struggling to shine light through the thick haze.

  What the hell has happened?

  The captain must have read my mind. “DC was nuked. Along with New York, L.A., Chicago, Houston, Paris, London, Moscow, Cairo—too many to list. Earth was finished fifty years ago. Our capital is Mars now. We hold most of the solar system, although the rebels have bases on a couple of Jupiter’s moons. Their big strongholds are out of the system.”

  “Out of the system?” They’d only begun to colonize out-system when I’d last been sent back into deep freeze.

  “Translight tech made a huge leap a hundred years ago,” the captain said. “We’ve got a human presence on nearly four hundred worlds. Earth was on its way to being old news even before the nukes fell. There are still a number of functioning cities, and some good natural resources left to be exploited, but the hub of all empire activity is on Mars now.”

  The roar of anti-grav generators drowned out my next question as the armored transport touched down forty yards away, kicking up dust and debris. The gangplank slammed down and a dozen armored troopers spilled out and formed a perimeter to cover us as we boarded, but no enemies showed up to laser us into ash.

  Once aboard, they strapped me in across from an official-looking guy in a green suit. His tie and shirt were different shades of green, green glitter down the center of the tie. He smiled at me perfunctorily before turning to the captain.

  “Captain, make sure the pilot is following the evac plan we discussed,” he said.

  “Yes, sir.” The captain left for the cockpit.

  I felt the ship shudder as we lifted off.

  “Good to meet you, Mr. Sloan,” the man in the green suit said. “I’m Agent Armand with Empire Internal Security.”

  “Secret police,” I said.

  Armand smiled vaguely, then shrugged. “It’s a paycheck.”

  “Is this where I find out what’s going on, or do we do some more cloak and dagger bullshit first?”

  “What did the first man tell you?” Armand asked. “I’ll pick it up from there.”

  I told him, how I’d been selecte
d to infiltrate a naturalist cult, the whole shooting match. I related the conversation word for word. Operatives have good recall. It’s part of the job.

  “What he told you is essentially true,” Armand said.

  “Why did he shoot himself?”

  “To avoid torture, I’d imagine. As a high-level rebel agent, he likely had valuable information.”

  “You would have tortured him?”

  “Absolutely,” Armand said. “I mean, not me personally, but, yes, we would have knocked the shit out of him pretty good.”

  “What about me?”

  “That depends on what the captain tells me,” Armand said. “Ah, here he is now. Captain?”

  “It went just as planned,” the captain told Armand. “The pilot reports that he jammed a rebel distress signal before it left orbit. Under intense interrogation, one of the rebel lab techs gave up an identification code. We used it to transmit a message which was accepted by the rebel base on Europa. In short, the rebels believe their attempt to extract Mr. Sloan has been successful.”

  “Excellent, Captain.” Armand rubbed his hands together, a smile of genuine satisfaction on his ruddy puss. “Please pass along my compliments to all involved.”

  The captain bowed, clicked his heels and excused himself.

  Armand beamed at me. “We’re in the perfect position to insert you undercover into the naturalist cult, except now you will act on behalf of the legitimate galactic government, instead of for the rebels.”

  “I don’t even know what I’m supposed to do,” I said, “for any government.”

  “All of that will be revealed in due time,” Armand assured me. “What the rebel agent told you was true. One of our modern operatives would be detected in an instant. That’s why they raided the mothballed facility and brought you out of stasis. Stay patient. We’ll fill you in on the details. We’ll equip you and support you in every possible way to make sure your mission is a success. All we need to know at this moment, Mr. Sloan, is if you are still ready and willing to serve the Third Reich.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  Sieg heil, baby.

  THREE

  The ship docked with the imperial frigate Rommel, which was waiting for us in orbit.