Eudokia Tzitzinia (eudokia) wrote in lightning_war, @ 2009-03-15 23:03:00 |
|
|||
Current mood: | worried |
Early evening, Thursday 17 September 1942, somewhere in Helvetia...
Eudokia Tzitzinia stood in a small clearing, shifting from foot to foot, her back to the plane to which Rainer Pfeifenberger was still making adjustments. Her attention was evenly split between supervising their friends loading the plane with as much cargo as it could safely take—not much with so many passengers—and watching the lands around as best she could. She didn’t know how much time they had. It was increasingly clear from Halász Sharolt’s behaviour that someone or something dreadful had finally worked out how to find her, and Sharolt’s original rescue and Thierry Jeannot’s death as part of it had taught them all well that the only way to deal with the people who hunted Sharolt was to run from them, as fast and far as possible.
Of course, there was the question of what would happen when there was nowhere else to run, and Eudokia had no answer for that. “Are you done?” she asked Fife in German with an edge to her voice. “I can’t keep a good watch without you supervising this.”
Fife pulled his head out of the hatch and frowned. “She’ll fly,” he said somewhat doubtfully. “With luck. Which we don’t have.”
“We’re not getting anywhere tonight without luck, baby,” Eudokia said, momentarily amused despite herself at the reversal from their earlier conversation. “But that’s not something you can fix. Make sure they’re not overloading us,” she said, indicating the people coming up the hill with more boxes to stow. “If we can’t eat it or shoot with it, and the doctor can’t use it, we leave it behind. Or destroy it.”
“Most of the weight is precisely food and ammunition,” Fife pointed out.
“Then take the best and leave the rest,” Eudokia said impatiently. “You know better than I what our fuel situation is.” She walked away toward a low hill nearby to get a better view, leaving Fife to supervise the loading.
“I don’t care what you think, Fujiwara!” Halász Sándor’s voice cut through the air. “I have to sedate her or else we’re not going to be able to get her onto the plane. Maybe you should have thought about what you were doing when you were winding her up like that earlier!”
Fujiwara Kenjiro frowned; Sharolt was standing, but unsteadily, leaning on her brother’s arm. He didn’t see the sense in drugging her because she wasn’t sane enough to be useful. She had been known to snap back into lucidity in crises; but she wouldn’t snap back from being drugged. “And what are you going to do if the translation into arcane space fails? Or if there is some other problem with the engine? Diagnose it?”
Sándor bristled. “I don’t know. Maybe you can go back in time and save us. Like you should have done in the first place!” He shoved his hands in his pockets, thinking that maybe if Kenjiro had used his abilities properly—assuming they even existed, for real—he could have kept Sharolt from being hurt the way she was before it happened. And maybe then Thierry Jeannot would be alive. And Kostov, but he didn’t care about Kostov so much.
Jael Moody, who was still packing things that didn’t belong to her, overheard but didn’t understand the better part of this conversation. Tesla, she thought, probably had—but he looked so grey and grave that she thought better of asking him about it and concentrated on the loading.
“If she isn’t well enough to help, then we will have to do without her help,” Fife said to Kenjiro as he and Sándor came closer. He hoped to head this argument off before Eudokia overheard it, because this kind of squabbling at the edge of action would make her angry. “I don’t like it either, but if the doctor can’t do anything, there is nothing and nobody that can do anything for her right now except get her out of here. We know this.”
“Thanks,” said Sándor. “Look, I don’t want to knock her all the way out, and I won’t if I don’t have to. But I need to get her calm and something like lucid, or she’s not going to be any help with that kind of problem anyway, and we won’t like the decisions she makes.”
Kenjiro scowled. He knew this was all his fault, and if he were any kind of hero, anything like the one he had wanted to be, he would have known how to deal with this. He had failed to save the Raven, that was bad enough, and now he couldn’t even see if she lived or died, and neither could Sharolt. But if he couldn’t save himself or Sharolt… “Fine,” he said after a moment, although it wasn’t. He could do these things, but he didn’t understand what he was doing. Sharolt was the one who knew how it worked. Sharolt knew more about how the plane worked than any of the rest of them too, especially in arcane space; no-one could fly it like Fife, but Fife couldn’t fix it if something went wrong.
“Do what you can, doctor,” Fife said patiently. “Now, all right, foodstuffs over here, ammo over there,” he said, and repeated it slowly in what he hoped was passable English, for Jael’s benefit. “I need to make sure the load is balanced or we won’t need Sharolt at all, God help us, because we won’t get ten feet off the ground.” He stumbled a little in the dark walking over to inspect the labelling on one of the crates: the moon was only half-full, but they couldn’t create light for fear of attracting attention. He swore under his breath. “How much more has to come up?” he asked the others. “We can take a bit more than this, but not a lot.”
“Nothing,” said Jael in careful Latin. “Nothing more has to come up. I believe everyone who has personal items they need has packed them up.” She swallowed; she and Tesla had nothing at all, only the few small devices that Tesla had carried on his person and the clothes on their backs. “There is some food left, some ammunition; but the best of it has already come up. And there is probably nothing left down there that we can’t get again in Armorica; we just might not be able to get it easily.”
Kenjiro nodded his assent. Sándor and Sharolt’s personal items had already been packed. Nobody had much that was personal. Sharolt had almost nothing herself—just a few loose sweaters and floaty skirts and her coat, because no matter how cold it got it was almost impossible to force her into any garment she found rough or binding. And anything he had to leave behind, he could come back for. Going back for things was never Kenjiro’s problem; the problem was what he found when he got there.
Sharolt had settled down into her brother’s arms. “Sleepy,” she whispered. “But I can’t go to sleep. Tell Fife to stay in the noumenal. It’s coming through Q7 and it’s rolling out in all directions. It wants its mother back but it doesn’t know who she is because the angels broke her wings.” She swallowed. “The Queen is in the tower with the ravens. Ashes ashes, all fall down. Pretty Michel, she’s lucky, I never did get to meet him in person…” She slumped then, abruptly and heavily. “I hope we don’t all die,” she breathed out as her eyes closed.
“I tried to titrate the dose,” said Sándor, with a sigh.
“Consider me told, I suppose,” Fife said. “Very well then,” he said, more slowly for Jael’s benefit. “If this is everything that’s important, it’s everything we’re taking. Start loading those boxes in there, and those others there.” He put his fingers in his mouth and gave a low whistle, to let Eudokia know to return to the plane, and looked at his surroundings uneasily. The shadows of trees reminded him for a second of pools of blood: he’d seen more than enough of it at different times, but some of the enemy’s agents hunting Sharolt were far more efficient and methodical killers than even some of the creatures Eudokia and Thierry hunted. He patted his handgun in its holster, despite knowing perfectly well how useless it would be fighting the people he was thinking of.
“You stay with your sister and Dr Tesla,” said Jael to Sándor. In case they need you , she thought—she was worried about Tesla. “Mr Fujiwara and I can handle this.”
It was a few minutes before Eudokia re-appeared and she watched the final loading silently. “Sándor,” she said to him as they finished. “Maybe you and your sister don’t need to hear what I’m about to say.”
Sándor nodded and carried Sharolt up into the plane.
“Right,” Eudokia said, once they had disappeared and stood facing the three others, uphill from them very slightly. She didn’t make an especial effort to keep her voice down. Sándor could keep the sound from his own ears if he wanted, and she had no idea what it took to keep things from Sharolt, but a low voice wasn’t it. That went doubly for anything else that could hear. She spoke in English, which she spoke better than Fife did, although not as well as Latin. “I haven’t told you what we’re up against before. No point before. You had nowhere other than here, same as us.”
She took a deep breath. “You might be used to think of Axis forces as having no limit in getting what they want, and it’s clear that they want Sharolt very much, and undoubtedly Dr Tesla too. We’ve seen…some part…of what they are willing to send for her, what they are willing to do to have her back. Suffice to say, we do not want to be captured. If any one of us is, I expect that within five minutes at most that person will have told everything they do know, several things they weren’t aware they knew, and unless they are useful, they will be dead. If they are found useful, I do not expect that our enemies will find their death a significant obstacle to making use of them.”
She looked at Jael and Tesla seriously. “If we are in danger of being captured, I will kill you if I can,” she said easily. “And I will do my best to put you beyond their reach, but I make no promises.” She looked at them both and gave them a moment to speak. Unlike Sándor, she did not regard them as having to obey orders.
Tesla leaned on his cane. He was too tired for this, but it didn’t seem right to give up when these people were going to such an effort to help him. “A few days ago I was convinced my life was over,” he said. “Since then I have found that my life’s work, far from being in safe hands as I thought, has instead been stolen and turned to unthinkable ends. If the time comes that you must choose between my life and the chance to save yourselves, rest assured that I will not begrudge you the decision. I just ask that you do what you can to save Miss Halász, because I believe she can do what I could not and complete the Teleforce device, without which I am afraid there is no defence against the enemy’s perversion of my ideas.”
Jael swallowed. “Well,” she said softly. “I hope it will not come to that.” She bit her lip. She did not think anyone present would be very impressed by her prayers, but she believed, and she could only hope that was enough.”
Eudokia nodded. “I’ll give cover while you board,” she said. “Fujiwara, you’re in last, lock the doors behind you, let Fife know through the intercom when everyone’s properly secured. I’ll be upfront. If there’s decisions to be made and I can’t make them, Fife does, and after him Fujiwara.” Once it got that far Sándor would only be paying attention to his sister in any case. She raised a hand to let Fife know to begin the takeoff sequence and focussed as hard as she could on the darkness around them. She knew she shouldn’t risk herself giving them cover, but Fife was needed in the plane of course, and no one else was capable.
“Thank you,” said Jael in a soft voice. She wanted to let Tesla go first, but she was pretty sure he wouldn’t hear of it, so she boarded the plane herself and then tried to help him as best she could.
coiledlightning, fife, jael_moody, orvos, sharolt and eudokia