There Ain't Gonna Be No World War Three, Chapter 12

12. Jagdkameraden

"So you see, Saucer Drive wasn't developed by the Americans after discovering a crashed alien spacecraft at Roswell, it was developed by the Americans after copying a German spacecraft which had been copied from a destroyed alien spacecraft at Spitzenburg -"

Ant nodded. "We know all that, Richard. It came down on the Hunnenfeld, above Spitzenburg castle."

"What? How?" Turpin was incensed. "Now just hang on a minute, I didn't know this!"

"Cleo worked it out."

The van was speeding down two wheel trenches cut into snow which had become ice. The rest of the road was snow frozen solid as rock - if the van ploughed into it, Ant was convinced, paint would strip, and steel would buckle.

"Oh", said Turpin, hugely disappointed that this most precious of USZ state secrets had been worked out in advance by fifteen-year-olds. "Well, in any case, apparently there were suspicions the Germans had held something back when they handed over the Spitzenburg research to the Americans. In particular, there were stories about something called Wolfram's Shield. Once the wreckage of the Hunnenfeld ship was put back together, there was a circular cavity about the size of a dinnerplate that had clearly once contained something - there were connectors leading to a component that was missing. The Yankees suspected that Wolfram's Shield was the most important part of the design. Or the part of the design that the Germans had been closest to duplicating."

"Wolfram's Shield is a legend associated with Spitzenburg Castle", mused Ant. "It was supposed to make you undefeatable in battle."

"Gosh", said Turpin. "How old is this legend? More than fifty years?"

"More like a few hundred. It dates back to the wars with the Huns. The Germans probably just gave it that codename because of the legend. The codename meant something, allowed the enemy to guess what the thing was from the name. Codenames shouldn't mean anything." He shook his head violently. "Ye gods, I'm beginning to think like Alastair Drague."

"Drague's here?" said Turpin, alarmed.

"Oh yes. Stuck to me like bear poo to a rabbit. We managed to give him and his goons the slip today, but he'll be on to us again before long. And he's, uh, got a robosheep with him."

"Robosheep", said Turpin. He was growing paler than the snow.

"Made up to look like a dog. I don't want to know how they did that. Probably stretched a dogskin over a robosheep chassis, knowing Drague. It can track you over the snow. We're going to need to get you to a safe place."

"The safe house in Enfield'll do fine", said Quantrill. "Don't worry, Richard's in safe hands." He took his hands off the steering wheel for a second; the van wallowed instantly, and rasping sounds came from the van's onside wing. Quantrill grinned at them with wild eyes big as saucers. "Only kidding."

"Richard needs to get back in orbit", said Ant. "Get back to Gondolin."

"No can do", said Quantrill, shaking his head very quickly and repetitively. "He has to accomplish his mission Find Wolfram's Shield before Drague does."

"Drague isn't the only one who's looking for it", said Ant. "The blue goo, the men it's taken over. One of them came to visit the café, and we had to shock him, shock it to death with electricity. The old man who ran the café, the owner of Spitzenburg Castle, he seemed to recognized the man it...had been. And there was a young guy who looked very like the dead guy on a photo on the wall. A very old photo on the wall. From, like the Second World War, or maybe even earlier. And other men the old guy had known by name had been around the café earlier on."

"You think this man was a relative of someone the old man had known years earlier", said Turpin.

"Nice deduction, Einstein", guffawed Quantrill.

Ant's blood ran colder than the snow outside.

"Einstein", he said. "Oh my god. Einsteinian relativity. That's it."

"What's it, Ted?" said Armand. "Share it with the class. I ope you brung enough for everywun."

"He wasn't a descendant of one of the guys from the picture. He was one of the guys from the picture. Richard, when the Americans first started experimenting with Saucer Drive, they spent quite a few years trying to get the C Plus system to work. Before that all they could get ships to do was travel really really fast, but they couldn't break lightspeed, right? They couldn't make the transition into hyperspace."

Turpin's eyes narrowed. "You've been reading flight manuals. That is considered cheating in polite circles."

"Richard, all they could do for those first few years was get ships to zip along at point nine C, nought point nine times the speed of light. Or point nine nine C, or point nine nine nine. And when you go that close to lightspeed, time slows down. A man could make a hundred year journey at point nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine C and come back as if only a year had gone by and shake hands with his own great-grandchildren."

"Sure", said Turpin. "One of the Americans' test flights they thought they'd lost came back in 1970. The test pilot jumped down from the cockpit, told one of the technicians at the field she had nice pins, and asked her whether she'd like to go out to the pictures to see James Stewart in Harvey."

"What if the Germans hadn’t managed to perfect the C Plus system either? What if, in their prototypes, they’d also only perfected a method of travelling very, very close to lightspeed? And what if their commander realized the Allies were closing in on Spitzenburg, that Germany was defeated, and he decided to escape to somewhere else? Travelling at less than the speed of light, it might take him years to get to another star, but Richard, if his crew travelled fast enough, they wouldn't age. A journey of fifty light years might only have taken them six months. And what if they found something else, out there in the stars? What if something found them? And they agreed to some sort of...alliance with it? To defeat their old enemies. To come back to Earth and be the Master Race. To fight the same war over again, with better weapons, and win this time?"

Armand's hands tightened on the rail he was holding so hard that the metal creaked.

"World War Two, you mean, Teds?"

Ant nodded.

"My grandad were in World War Two", said Armand. "He were at Arras. His platoon got bombed. Stukas blew up their truck. He got them from Arras to Dunkirk", he said proudly. "He stole a car."

Ant nodded. It was plain that patterns of learned behaviour existed in Armand's family.

"There ent gunna be no World War Three", said Armand. "Om with you, Teds."

"There ain't gonna be no World War Three", repeated Ant. He turned to Turpin. "Oh, Cleo's an alien, by the way."

"WHAT?"

***

Jochen looked up at the classically handsome face, the face that had been deliberately wrecked by dragging a fencing sabre across it. To make it look more dangerous. More dashing. More of a warrior. On either side of that face were other faces only ever seen in black and white up to now, faces from an old and yellowing photograph taken in a time when all the surrounding country had belonged to the men who owned this castle. When the vast green forests of Germany had existed only for them to hunt in. Jagdkameraden. A face ten years older than Jochen's, and at the same time seventy years older.

"Great uncle Kurt, I believe", said Jochen.

"You are a smart boy", said Great Uncle Kurt. "I wish my little brother were as clever. How did you know?"

"Your little brother may outsmart you yet, uncle”, said Jochen. “It was the tattoo on the inside of Horst's arm. 'AB' was his blood type. It isn't a concentration camp tattoo - quite the opposite. Waffen SS troops had their blood type tattooed on the insides of their arms. Grandfather, of course, knew where you'd been and what you were. Otherwise he wouldn't have said what he did about the Venusberg."

"Tannhäuser", said Alastair Drague from behind Jochen. "One of Wagner's best operas, which isn't saying much in my opinion, but...I believe that, in the opera, the Venusberg is a cavern inside a mountain, the secret home of the goddess Venus."

Jochen nodded. "It is a very old German legend. There are many different versions of it. It is rather like your English Tam Lin. Tannhäuser is a minstrel who sings so sweetly that he becomes a companion of Venus, and is kept as her prisoner, until one day he happens to mention the name of the Mother Mary. When he does this, the spell is broken and he finds himself on a hillside below Wartburg Castle. When he enters the castle, he finds the love of his life, Elisabeth, who has been waiting for him all this time."

Drague shook his head. "I seem to remember an unnecessarily unhappy ending in the Wagner."

"And in the Spitzenburg version as well. In our local version, every day spent in the Venusberg is a hundred years outside. When Tannhäuser returns to the outside world, Elisabeth is long dead."

Great Uncle Kurt nodded sadly. "The Venusberg was the name of our ship."

"And the love of your life, great uncle? Is she long dead?"

"The love of my life", said Kurt carefully, "was named Ilse."

Jochen felt as if someone had tickled his spine with cold broken glass. "Ilse", he said, "was the name of my grandmother."

"Very convenient", said Kurt, "for Hermann. The fact that I had to leave. It left the field free for him. The life I could have had with Ilse was now his."

"My grandfather", said Jochen, feeling himself tremble, telling himself that it was in rage rather than fear, "made you leave, because of what you were doing to people. To human beings."

"Your grandfather marched his little army of old men and boys up the hill the night after we left, youngster. And he knew we'd gone. He saw the light in the sky, the light of the ship rising. And he never saw it return. So he knew it was safe to make himself a hero in the eyes of Germany's new masters. He was a coward then, as he has always been. He had got himself sent home with a minor wound rather than face the Bolsheviks on the Ostfront, and then he turned on his own side to curry favour with the Allies."

"My grandfather", said Jochen, absolutely sure it was rage now, "is one of the bravest men I have ever known."

Kurt looked down his perfect, aristocratic nose in contempt. "And what proof do you have of that? Has he killed many Russians while I was away?"

"He has turned up to work, every day, knowing his home might be taken away from him at any moment", said Jochen. "Since the castle has fallen into debt, he has swallowed his pride, his aristocratic pride, and put on a suit and gone cap in hand to visit bank managers descended from people whose ancestors used to work for his. He has worked like a skivvy, fetching and carrying for visitors, making them tea and coffee, smiling through gritted teeth at English and American customers he knows are insulting him in a language he speaks perfectly well. You do not have to kill Russians to be a hero, Kurt. And if you were old enough to be my uncle rather than just a pompous little Junker cretin, you'd known that."

Jochen knew at that moment that he had gone too far. He was not speaking to a twenty-first-century German, to a man who might lose his temper, shout, scream, maybe even lash out with his fists, but go no further. He was talking to a man who was used to being obeyed, respected, kowtowed to. And he was absolutely certain that he was talking to a man who had killed other men. Who had felt able to do so very easily, because he had not considered them to be men.

"What about you, Kurt?" he said, backing away. The door of the café was directly behind him. He could reach it at a run. "Have you done anything heroic recently? Have you shot any half-dead helpless prisoners in the back of the head?"

Unsettlingly, this did not send Kurt into a rage. Instead, his cold eyes remained perfectly calm, though they were now fixed on Jochen like telescopic sights. "Not recently", he said. "The prisoners were useless, I have to say - human garbage. None of them had done a day's hard labour in his or her life. Soft-handed lawyers, doctors, bankers. We should have shot them all on the first day and drafted in some good Soviet animals - dumb as oxen, but the other camps all used to say, a Russian peasant can be worked for a hundred days on nothing but bread before he dies. I have to say, I haven't been keeping my hand in recently with the prisoner-shooting, grand-nephew - though I'm sure I could make an exception in your case for old time's sake."

"I feel I really should interrupt at this point", said Drague.

Kurt's head swivelled round to point at Drague like a tank turret.

"Are you still here?" he said.

"I'm afraid so", said Drague. He turned to Jochen, keeping one eye on Kurt. "You see, Herr von und zu, I rather think I have a duty to tell you how I really came to be in this line of work. Jobs like mine are not advertised for in newspapers, you understand. They are handed out to people who the establishment already know can be trusted. People who already have a connection to events."

Drague almost looked embarrassed. He also looked as if he was just as angry as Jochen. Cleo had said quite clearly that Alastair Drague never became angry, and never showed emotion. Maybe this was a subterfuge.

"Most of the human garbage you kept in your concentration camp at Spitzenburg", said Drague, "were Jews and gypsies and so forth, of course. However, some of them were Allied prisoners of war who the Nazis had considered to be outside the bounds of the Geneva Convention. Commandos, paratroopers, special forces men and women. One of them was a young Englishman", he said, "who had been dropped into occupied France in 1944 to help the French resistance. He was captured when a collaborator betrayed his team to the Gestapo, and spent the next twelve months in concentration camps. He lost fingers to frostbite, and had a number of teeth knocked out by SS guards after making two attempts at escape. After his second attempt he was scheduled to be shot in the camp courtyard in front of the other prisoners, and it was only the intervention of a young SS lieutenant, who had been horrified by what was going on in Spitzenburg and marched his Home Guard unit up from the town to arrest the camp staff, that saved the Englishman's life."

"I remember the man", nodded Kurt. He looked almost bored. "I should have shot him myself while I had the time."

Drague nodded emphatically. "You should indeed, Herr von und zu. That was, in fact, one of the worst mistakes you ever made. That man's name was William Arthur Drague, and he was my father."

Kurt looked at Drague dumbfounded for a moment. Then, his dumbfoundment split into a grin. He threw back his head and laughed, loud and long.

"Der kleine Engländer! What a turn up for the books! So he lived to the end of the war! He deserved everything he got, you know - he was a spy, dropped behind our lines out of British uniform, and the Geneva Convention does not apply to spies. Well, little Englander, mark two - why exactly have I made such a big mistake? What is it that you propose to do to stop me from marching into my own home and claiming it as my legal right?"

Drague's two minders had already drawn guns, and were levelling them at Kurt and his associates. Unsettlingly, this did not appear to have worried Kurt in the slightest.

"You have no legal right to these premises", said Drague. "You are a war criminal. And out of your own mouth, you have just condemned yourselves. I believe you consider yourselves to be at war with all of Earth, and I do not see a uniform on any of you."

"Then come on", said Kurt, throwing his arms wide, moving towards Drague, his mouth wide in a brilliant grin. "Arrest me. Shoot me, even." He looked up the barrels of the pistols being held on him by Drague's grim-faced assistants.

"Herr Drague", said Jochen to Drague in English, "guns are useless against them."

"Quite, quite useless", grinned Kurt, his smile now dangerously wide, like a dog's grimace. "We are, you see, now more than simply men. We have entered into a symbiosis with the incredible creatures we encountered far, far out on the cold edges of nothing, in that dark place to which Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt exiled us. Those beings are intelligent and strong, and they are generous - they are willing to share their strength with others. With them inside us, we live longer. Wounds we would formerly have considered life-threatening knit back together. A shattered leg, a broken arm, will still continue to operate. In partnership with them, we are a community that acts as one, the perfect efficiency of the hive."

Drague nodded. "And without your bodies to live in, they are shapeless blobs of blue protoplasm."

Kurt's eyes flashed blue. Jochen wondered if a headful of blue goo could affect the colour of the eyes. "Do not presume to criticize what you cannot possibly understand."

"Where did you find them?" said Drague. "In puddles on the ground is where I'm betting, because of course, they didn't have much choice in that respect, did they? Of course, the first men who found them were probably uncooperative. They were members of the Master Race, of course, stepping down your ship's boarding ladder in their Mark One Wehrmacht space suits. They were in space to conquer it, not to have their minds invaded by things that couldn't even manage growing arms and legs and skin. They died, didn't they? Only the more tractable members of the crew survived. The ones who could come to an agreement with what was now inside their heads. A true superhuman would never have done that, Freiherr von und zu. He would have died first. You are not only a nazi; you are a coward and a hypocrite." At his side, his gigantic alsatian's hackles had raised like iron filings seeking a magnet, its jowls were drawn back and vibrating, and its armoury of yellow teeth were showing in grim detail as it growled low in its throat. On Drague’s other side, he was holding back his equally massive Pyrenean, which also had its teeth bared, with a hand in its collar.

Kurt's fists were balling, his knuckles whitening, and behind him, his companions were doing likewise. In seconds, Jochen knew, they would be at Drague's throat. "On the contrary; I and my companions are the dream of National Socialism made flesh. We are true superhumans. A thousand men like us could take this entire planet."

"Herr Drague", said Jochen urgently, "if you let go of that dog, you will only be killing it. At one single touch, they can stick to the skin of any living creature, and make their way to the brain."

"I am fully aware of that, thank you", said Drague. "That would tend to imply you have less than a thousand men, of course", he said to Kurt. "Your sort conquer everything you think you can conquer, and the last time I looked, this planet belonged to humankind."

"Not for long", said Kurt. "You see before us this world's future. You had better hold your other dog as well. I am fond of dogs. I would not like to see him injured unnecessarily."

"Yes, regarding that other dog", said Drague. "I'm afraid you're about to get something of a shock."

He held out his remote control, and pressed a big red button.

The alsatian leapt forward.

***

The flight of steps was long, wet and dripping with the condensation of decades. Occasional tungsten bulbs were fixed to the roof, glowing dimly. The majority of them had blown out over the years, and never been replaced. Only a few remained, well beyond the service lives their makers had designed them for. They had probably not been live since 1945. The old man going down the steps felt just like one of those incandescent bulbs.

Occasionally, picking his way downwards in the dark, he would cast a cautious glance up the tunnel behind him; nothing could be seen back up there in the intermittent patches of electric light, nothing at any rate that could be seen with human eyes.

At the base of the steps was a door. The door was massive, made of steel, like the door of a very old refrigerator. A blast door. The walls of the tunnel were now made, not of mediaeval masonry, but of concrete. This was where the fortress built to defend against black powder cannon stopped, and the fortress built to defend against air-dropped bombs began. The old man removed a key, an incredibly long key with three lobes to it, from his pocket, inserted it into the rust, and turned. The lock turned with it. The door shrieked open like a scalded cat being dragged down a blackboard.

The old man put the key back into his pocket and stepped through the door, making sure he propped it open behind him with a loose stone. Further up the steps, the figure that had been standing in the dark space between two working electric lights moved forward into a pool of light to follow.

***

Drague and his men stood back, keeping a respectable distance, as blue blood spattered stonework and gigantic yellow teeth shook human limbs with a sound of joints dislocating, bones breaking. Larry was tearing round the yard like a scalded, forty-kilogramme cat, striking sparks off the brickwork, corralling Kurt's men in a bleeding huddle in the centre of the courtyard.

"BAAAAAAA!!!"

"He's", said Jochen, casting about for the expression, "rounding them up. Like a - like a -"

"Sheep Dog", said Drague.

Jochen was now standing with Drague and his men. "Isn't that sort of, erm, contrary to his programming?"

"He's not a sheep", said Drague, "and he's not a dog. He's a forty-kilogramme antipersonnel combat chassis. Can you get us into that side door?"

"Hasn't your Sheep Dog got the situation under control?"

"For now", said Drague. "But I would still rather put a wall between myself and them."

He pointed at Kurt and his companions. The massive, ragged wounds Larry was ripping in the men's flesh were oozing blue fluid that brought both halves of each injury back together again like an aquamarine muscle. Larry, meanwhile, was covered in blots of moving Royal Blue, crawling over his fur, causing it to lie down and bristle by turns. Parts of his fur were peeling back from his endoskeleton.

"You were right. Whatever damage he's doing to them, it isn't permanent. Their symbiotes are constantly repairing them. And he", said Drague, indicating Kurt, who was speaking into a metal strap on his wrist, "is communicating with somebody, which worries me."

"Should I shoot, sir?" said the black man in English.

"Yes", said Drague. "I'd like to see what effect it has."

Grimly, Wise sighted up at Kurt and fired one, twice, three times. Kurt jerked and swore in German as the bullets tore through him. Then he looked up at Wise again.

"You", he said, "are going to regret that."

"Not much, it seems", said Drague.

"Do you believe in them now?" said Jochen. "Cleo said you refused to."

"My dear fellow, I always have believed in them. I merely disagreed with Cleopatra on where they came from. It seems I was mistaken."

Jochen stooped down, lifted a loose snow-covered brick on the ground next to the door, picked up a long brass key, inserted it carefully in the door, and turned it. The door swung open.

"Good grief", said Drague. "The places I forget to look. Inside, gentlemen, quickly."

"Couldn't that blue stuff follow us under the door?"

"Of course. But from that point onwards, it would be just that - blue stuff. Slow-moving and not particularly dangerous unless you encounter lakes of it. Without a human being to hide inside, it's slow-moving. But not stupid", he added. "Stick by me, and you'll be OK."

Snow shook off the battlements of the castle high above their heads, like cake frosting. Iron drainpipes were rattling on the wall. The empty-branched trees around the castle were shivering like concentration camp inmates. Drague looked up.

"Oh dear...I was afraid of that. They had to get here in something, of course."

A shadow had moved across the sun. A grey-and-black-blotched dart-shape was hanging in the sky above the courtyard. Jochen felt like a minnow that had suddenly been cruised over by a Great White shark. A black swastika clung round one side of the starship's fuselage like an arthritic spider.

A turret like a soup tureen turned in the device's underside and spat flame once; Larry collapsed in a tangle of limbs and wires, like a swatted spider.

The blue men looked back to Jochen, Drague, and Drague's bodyguards. Some of them spat out teeth before baring the ones that still remained to them.

"Into the castle", said Drague.

Jochen slammed the door just as someone hurled themself against it. He jerked back from the wood, fearing blue goo might bubble from it.

"The next target that ship fires at will be this door", said Drague. "Get away from it."

"I'm afraid I really do not know where Cleo is", said Jochen.

"How tiresome." Drague was pulling a mobile phone from his coat. "I wonder..." He tapped a sequence of keys.

Deep in the bowels of the castle, the Darth Vader theme from Star Wars sounded.

"Ah, Cleopatra", said Drague in satisfaction. "You cannot help leaving a trail of breadcrumbs. Gentlemen - with me, quickly."

He moved off down the entrance corridor, following the faint sound of John Williams.

"That's coming from the cellars", said Jochen.

"It appears to be", agreed Drague, listening to the echo coming from an archway at the end of the hall.

"They'll only follow us down there once they destroy the door", said Jochen.

"You have an alternative plan, perhaps? A way of dealing with men who are immune to gunfire?"

"As a matter of fact", said Jochen, "I do. Are any of you gentlemen carrying matches?"

***

Tamora and the remains of Team Salami were making their way through a gigantic kitchen, one-eighth of which was set for a dinner that looked like being Heinz beans on toast - hardly aristocratic food in Tamora's opinion. There were three plates. There were not many Heinz beans, and they were in a dish in the microwave. The toast was currently bread, in the toaster.

"Maybe this is where the servants eat", said Narinder over Tamora's shoulder.

"Ihr seid NICHT ERLAUBT hier", said the café lady. "NOT ALLOWED."

"This isn't German food", said Narinder. "It's beans."

"It is so German", said Sukhbir. "It's Heinz beans. Heinz is, like, a German name? So they're, like his beans."

"You are such a gadha, Sukhbir."

The kitchen was filled with places where Cleo, and an entire troupe of performing dwarves, might hide. It also, however, had a massive stone arch which held a massive steel door. The door could be seen to be as thick as a man's finger. This could be seen because it was hanging open - a heavy chain that had been wrapped around the handles was swinging loose without a padlock. Beyond, a cold stone-floored corridor led into a huge, stone-floored chamber.

The café lady was clearly surprised. Apparently the door was not supposed to be open.

"She's through here", said Tamora. "He came through here, and Cleo followed. Whatever he was doing in there, she wanted to be right behind him."

"Oh my god", said Sukhbir. "She's after it. Tamora - it's it she's after. It. You know. That thing we don't know what it is."

"Maybe that's what she wants us to think, though", said Narinder. "Maybe she's hiding in here right under our noses." She peered into a cupboard, and her hand was slapped away by the café lady. "Waiting for us to clear out so she can carry on, you know, going after it."

Tamora considered this. She knew her sister's mind. Although warm and fluffy and substantially transparent, it was also very complex, with wheels within wheels, not unlike a very large set of Rotastak hamster housing.

"You're right", she said. "She might be. It's just what she would do. Spread out. Search the room before we go on."

She leaned back against the table, sighing, as cupboard doors banged open and shut, the café lady carried on bleating in German, and the kitchen was searched. Faintly and distantly, she could hear brakes squealing. Someone had dared to drive up to the castle in the snow. The police, maybe. They had finally closed in.

Tamora suddenly heard a Nokia ringtone, louder than it should in the depths of the castle, through the open steel door.

"Cleo's got a Nokia", she said.

"And, loike, arf all the folk in the world", reminded Cubic Zirc gently. "My mum's got wun. I don't think that's my mum", she added.

"She's in there somewhere", said Tamora. "Unless she's managed to crawl up this chimney somehow."

"Owjoo know there was summat wrong with er, anyway?" said Cubic Zirc.

Tamora held up her mobile phone. It was still displaying the text Armand had sent. "Someone left this as a message on Ant Stevens' bed this morning."

"Oh", nodded Zirc. After a second, she said: "What's it say?"

"It's Jamaican patois", said Tamora. "There's no reason why you should understand it. But I understand it, because my family's Jamaican. 'De Haliens benwen get de a me head' means 'the aliens have got into my head.' 'Me fi go now' means 'I've got to go now'. 'Dem kom op ya' means 'they're coming'."

"So...oo wrote it, then?"

"I think Cleo did", said Tamora wearily. "I think she's been taken over by the Blue Goo, but maybe there are some times of the day when the Blue Goo sleeps, or when it's not paying as much attention as it should. Maybe it's like having a split personality. Maybe Cleo still gets to take over every once in a while." She squeezed the mobile phone hard in her fist. "She should have left it on my bed! Why didn't she trust me? I'm her sister!"

"But why did she write that in patois?" said Sukhbir.

"I think the Blue Goo's never taken over a Jamaican before. I think it could read her thoughts when she was thinking in English, but it was having trouble with Jamaican. After all, it's not been in control of her long. She's only been acting funny for the last few hours, after..." she nodded with grim certainty ...."after that little hole appeared in the dormitory window last night. That must be how it got in. It must only need the tiniest of cracks."

A hand landed on Tamora's shoulder. It was not a large hand, nor did it feel like a particularly strong one. However, it tangled itself instantly in the polyester of Tamora's raincoat, and she was horribly aware that it was not ever going to let go, not even if she bit it till her teeth met.

She turned to see Fräulein Meinck, who was clicking her mobile phone shut in her other hand.

"The Frowline's bin makin phone calls", said Zirc. "I did arsk her not to. Om every so sorry, Tazza."

Behind Fräulein Meinck, Herr Riemann, Herr Schieß, Anton and Stefan from the Freizeitheim clattered up out of the tower staircase leading in from the café. They were out of breath, and flakes of snow were melting on their jackets.

"Now, Zircönia", said Fräulein Meinck, "please tell Herr Schieß and the Freizeitheim staff vhat you häff just töld me."

Cubic Zirc blushed as red as a Communist fire engine. "Er."

"Half of outer space is Communist", summarized Tamora. "Half of it is American. The half that is neither American nor Communist falls into the category of 'The Good Guys'. Space travel was actually invented in 1951, after the Americans spent five years copying and perfecting Nazi designs. The Nazis, in turn, copied it off a flying saucer that crash-landed here in Spitzenburg during World War Two. Somehow, some of those Nazis seem to have survived the war - I'm presuming they grew false moustaches and took a U-boat to somewhere that digs the small men in big uniforms thing, like Spain or Italy - and have sent their goons back here to get hold of flying saucer technology. And they have blue alien mind control amoebas on their side as well. Any questions?"

"Thanks Tazza", said Zirc, giving a thumbs up.

Herr Schieß was staring at Tamora with an expression of murderous intensity.

"Häff you säid Nazis?" he said.

"I'm afraid I did", said Tamora. "I also said blue alien mind control amoebas, but you seem to be more bothered about the Nazis thing."

His face grim, Herr Schieß looked around the kitchen till he found a mop, whose head he removed. He began whacking the broom handle into his palm experimentally.

"Also, Jungens", he growled to Anton, Stefan and Herr Riemann, "bewaffnet euch."

Anton nodded, opened a drawer, and began rifling through it for meat skewers and carving knives. "Nie mehr."

"Bis zum bitteren Ende", muttered Stefan, shaking his greasy hair out of his eyes as he located a seven-foot window-closer with a metal hook at its end. Even Herr Riemann took up a rolling pin.

"What are they saying?" whispered Cleo to Fräulein Meinck, who was clearly swelling with national pride.

"Arm yourselves lads; never again; to the bitter end", said Fräulein Meinck. She herself picked up a fire extinguisher, and seemed to have every intention of using it.

"Also", said Herr Schieß, still making practice thwacks with his broom handle, “vhere are your Nazis?"

"Erm", said Tamora, pointing through the open steel door. "We think they might be in there. In the castle. Erm. They may be armed. And one of them may be my sister."

Herr Schieß's eyes narrowed. "I äm önly mäkink än ässumption here bäsed on ze ewidence immediately aväilable, but I vould guess your sister iss bläck, yes?"

"You are correct in your assumption", said Tamora.

"A bläck Nazi", said Herr Schieß.

"She's not been herself lately", explained Tamora.

"Off course. How foolish off me. Zät expläins everysink. Vorwärts!"

Herr Schieß led his improvised army into the castle.