Interference

Prologue

The enigmatic black box sat on the table.

Heinrich Himmler, newly appointed head of the Gestapo, the German secret police, and also chief of all German police outside Prussia, studied it with considerable interest, refusing to admit that he was baffled.  A touch opened the device, revealing a screen and a set of buttons marked with letters, but it meant nothing to him.  Himmler knew little about science and technology, preferring instead to delve into the mysteries of race and eugenics.  He touched a tiny pad below the keyboard and was delighted when it caused a tiny arrow to move on the screen, illuminating various icons as it covered them.  Despite himself, he smiled; the Fuhrer would love the device.

“It’s called a laptop, Herr Reichfuhrer,” the stranger said.  He sat across the table, smiling faintly as Himmler experimented with the device, as enigmatic as ever.  The documents that had attracted Himmler’s attention lay on the table below the laptop, forgotten about in the awe of the laptop.  “It was made by the Japanese, seventy years after your time.”

It took a moment for Himmler to understand the implications.  “You are claiming to come from the future?”

The stranger smiled.  “If you can produce that device here,” he said, nodding towards the laptop, “you can send me to a concentration camp for being a liar.”

“Of course,” Himmler agreed.  His mind, used to analysing opportunities when they arose, and yet tinted with an occult belief that had no difficulty in accepting the concept of people from the future, grappled with the prospects opening up before him.  Actual knowledge from the future…?  What could the Reich not do?  “The Japanese made it, you say?  How did the Reich fare in your world?”

The stranger looked suitably regretful.  “I fear it fared badly, Herr Reichfuhrer,” he said.  For the first time, Himmler picked out an underlying accent in the stranger’s German, an accent he didn’t recognise.  “The Reich’s existence came to an end in 1945.  You were scheduled to stand trial with other German leaders as a war criminal at Nuremberg, but committed suicide in Lüneburg before you could be hanged.”

Himmler shivered.  Somehow, it never occurred to him to doubt the stranger.  The words he spoke echoed with truth.  “Germany was divided into four parts, shared between the four Allied powers,” the stranger continued.  “West Germany ended up a toady of the western powers, while the east was ground under the communist heel.  The new Germany is a weak state indeed, unable to muster the determination to stand against a terrifying threat from racial inferiors, torn apart by religious conflict.  The end of Europe is nigh…and all because the National Socialist state failed in its mission.”

The laptop seemed to glow mockingly at Himmler.  “But it can be changed,” Himmler said.  “You’re here, in the past…”

“Yes,” the stranger agreed.  “Myself and my associates have travelled to ensure that Germany wins the war.”

Himmler showed no reaction.  There was one question that had to be asked.  The safest course of action would be to have the strangers arrested, held in a secure location, and interrogated, mined for information about the future, but would that be the best course of action?  Well-versed in internal politics, well-aware that Hitler could never be allowed to know that the future claimed that the Reich would be destroyed, the newcomers represented a valuable resource.  Doctors and scientists had to be treated gently for best results; he assumed that the same was true of time travellers.  Besides, if they were offering their help willingly…

He smiled.  “Destiny has clearly sent you here,” he said.  “What must we do to win the war?”

The stranger matched his smile.  “Perhaps I should explain…”

Chapter One

I don’t like Portals.  They’re just…not there.  It looks like a simple square of glowing white light, hanging in the air, but it’s actually a gateway to another time and space.  I won’t bore you with all the details behind the science – it reads like science-fiction to me – but if you step through one, you will know it.  Grandfather Time told me that a Portal was merely a place where two universes collided, but what do I know about that?  I'm just a soldier in the forever war.

“Good luck,” the operator said, as she ran through the final checks.  We don’t want people on the opposite side spotting the Portal – just imagine what could happen if they had an armed force waiting for me, or trying to burst through the Portal into our world – so the Portal actually exists in a kind of potential reality.  I don’t even pretend to understand that, but the basics of it is that the Portal is effectively invisible…until I step through.  “Just trigger the beacon when you want to come home.”

“Bitch,” I said, without heat.  The operator had never been on a field mission.  Like almost everyone like her, she had a tendency to idealise those who have, even to the point of hero worship.  It’s great for getting laid, but otherwise…it’s a pain.  It can’t be helped, though; she knows too much to ever be allowed to fall into Enemy hands.  “Jane?”

Online, the AI said, in my head.  Jane had been implanted into me when I first joined up with the Time Agents, back when Grandfather Time recruited me, and had somehow grown into an invisible web in my head.  There are some AIs that are thicker than most humans, even the ones who think that the world before technology was a comfortable and harmonic place to live, but Jane is as smart as they come.  All systems are good to go.

“Bye,” I said, and stepped into the Portal.  The lurch in my chest hurts worse than anything else and the fact that, we are assured, it is purely psychometric doesn’t help.  I’ve been on roller coasters that are less violent than the Portal; it’s not what happens so much as what doesn’t happen.  Jane helps to numb my body and diminish the disorientation everyone feels, but even so…it’s not good.  No one in their right mind would become a regular Portal user.

I stepped out into an alleyway.  For a moment, as I looked behind me, I could see the Portal shimmering amidst the bricks and mortar, before it faded into nothingness.  I was alone, as alone as anyone could be on a world that was probably full of humans.  There are several timelines where humanity accidentally wipes itself out – or is killed off deliberately by internal or external foes – but the smell of old-style cars, smoking and various unpleasant scents is all the confirmation I need.  The world is alive.

No trace of trans-dimensional or trans-temporal technology detected, Jane said.  I’m not too surprised; judging from the reports, the people behind the interference that we detected had had plenty of time to get their inference up and running before our benefactors even noticed the split in the timelines.  If we were lucky, it would just be some rogue group of revanchists intent on changing the course of history, rather than the Enemy.  If the latter, the odds were that correcting what had happened to history would be almost impossible.  

I stepped out of the alleyway and onto a street, packed with crude buildings in a poor state of repair, a handful of children running around listlessly.  According to the briefing, such as it was, I had been sent to London, in equivient-1960…but that meant nothing.  Anything could have happened to change history and not all of them ensured that London would remain the capital of Britain.  The children looked up briefly at me – just from looking, I could tell that they were malnourished and probably ill – and then looked away.  My clothing was fairly lower-class for Britain, the outfit of a labourer rather than anyone of importance, but judging from the tattered outfits the children were wearing, I was probably overdressed for the time.  I was tempted to talk to them, to try to learn what they could tell me, but then a woman opened the door of one of the flats and shouted for the children to come inside.

She might have been pretty, if she had been well-fed.  As it was, she looked disturbingly like some of the Afghani women I had seen back in 2001, before I stepped out of time; too thin and underfed to be attractive.  Her body looked thirty, her eyes looked sixty…and she was probably no more than twenty years old.  Her blue eyes met mine once, lowered themselves to the ground, and, once her children were inside, she fled indoors and shut the door.

Interesting, Jane said.  I knew that I was the only one who could hear her, but even so, it still worried me.  I had to sub-vocalise my responses and even then, some of my opponents had been able to hear it.  She was terrified of you.

“Yeah,” I growled, as I walked along the street, aware of eyes watching me from behind closed curtains…and blackout strips.  “I guess she thought I was the local child molester or something.”

It struck me, then, what was missing.  There were no cars on the roads, although there were a few dozen bikes chained to the walls, some of them clearly old enough to have been built before the war.  The map in my head said I was somewhere in South London and so I started to walk towards the centre of the city, thinking hard.  I’d been trained to pick up clues from what I saw, rather than asking questions that would be sure to rouse suspicions, but the only clue I had so far was that everyone seemed to be malnourished…and scared of strangers.  I passed a pub, packed with middle-aged men drinking themselves into an early grave, and then a pair of women sitting on a wall.  There was no mistaking their occupation; only prostitutes would show themselves off like that, awaiting men willing to pay for guilt-free sex.

“One pound for one time, two pounds for three times,” the younger of them said, as I passed.  Like the first girl I’d seen, she would have been pretty if she’d eaten more, although the makeup she’d splashed on her face was badly overdone.  She actually looked better-fed than her partner, who was clearly older and probably Hobson’s Choice.  “A time together…”

“No, thank you,” I said, politely.  It probably wasn’t their fault that they’d been forced into prostitution.  I’d spent more time in brothels than I cared to remember, but that had been before I was recruited.  “Perhaps…”

“Oh, he’s a Yank,” the older girl said, and jumped off the wall.  A moment later, she was running down the street as fast as her long and exposed legs could carry her.  I watched with flickering amusement as her buttocks, exposed for mere seconds as her skirt rode up, winked at me before she turned the corner.  I looked back at the other girl, only to see her give me a sidelong look, before jumping off the other side of the wall and disappearing.

“Maybe they don’t like Americans here,” I said, as I resumed my walk.  “Jane?”

Unknown, Jane said.  Older subject did not actually read out as scared; younger subject was clearly scared.  Reason unknown.

“Remind me again why I have you along,” I said, as I round a longer road leading off into the distance.  A line of trucks raced down it, each one covered and concealed, apart from the last in the row.  A group of men were standing in the rear, their faces unsure and nervous about the future…and their hands were bound.  I couldn’t see the links, but I would have bet a month’s pay that they were actually tied to the vehicle as well.  “Jane?”

I watched as the trucks vanished off in the distance.  I hadn’t got a look at the driver, or the guards I was certain was there, but the last group of men had clearly been prisoners.  Prisoners of who?  Were they police, soldiers, some version of the National Guard…or what?  I’d been in Britain a few times before being recruited and none of the British police I’d seen had done anything like that, even during the worst of the crisis.  It looked as if they’d been rounded up and shipped out of the city, perhaps to an internment camp…and nothing like that had ever happened in any Britain I knew.

Seventeen prisoners, twenty guards, Jane said.  She also controlled the sensors buried in my implants.  I was a little leery about using them with a cross-dimensional power active somewhere on this world, but there was little choice.  I needed information.  General observed tech base 1950s; no further information available.

I scowled and kept walking northwards.  One of the problems with a blind insertion into a new timeline is that you don’t have the slightest idea of what is actually going on.  You could discover, quite by accident, that local mores don’t allow you to talk to the women, or the men, or you have to prove yourself by trial by combat, or even that you’re expected to perform with a woman in the streets.  They keep telling us that there’s a dimension of topless dancers around, but personally I think our superiors made that up just to keep us exploring and not protesting our working conditions.  There were ways to find out information as quickly as possible, mainly through libraries, but if even they had been subverted…

The road twisted suddenly and transformed into a shopping area.  The contrast was so startling that I almost stopped dead.  To the south, there were vast estates filled with poverty and depredation, stalking the land like…well, two giant stalking things; to the north, there was wealth, music and laughter.  The crowds of people looked happy, and yet, I was sure I could detect a faint aroma of fear hanging over their heads.  I could see them glancing around when they thought they weren’t observed…and, on closer inspection, many of them were malnourished as well, or even wearing repaired clothes.  I passed a pair of boastful fat men, somehow fat despite the poverty all around them, and listened briefly to one of them bragging to the other about his latest set of contracts from the authorities.  Apparently, he worked as a Manpower Services Officer – and I didn’t like the sound of that – and had won the contract to supply the manpower for the latest set of Victory Projects.  His companion sounded suitably impressed.

Those schoolgirls are stupid, Jane said.  I glanced over at them and kept my face blank; they were chattering away, in no particular order, about boyfriends, weddings and children.  Their uniforms were more demure than most of the other clothes women were wearing, but still poorly designed, as if they had to buy them from cheap tailors.  I looked at them again, something nagging at the back of my mind, and then it struck me.  They were all white.

I was wondering when you would notice, Jane said. I bit down several different unhelpful responses and waited for her to continue.  There have been no non-whites recorded since we stepped through the Portal.  I have not even seen anyone confirming to a non-English stereotype.

“I’m starting not to like this place,” I muttered back.  The crowds were moving in front of me, stepping off the pavement and into the gutter, and I followed them.  It’s normally safer to go with the flow when in a strange place.  “What’s happening…?”

They were walking down the exact centre of the pavement, a group of nine men, wearing brown uniforms with the Union Jack affixed on their upper arms.  They looked like soldiers – I’m sure that that was the impression they intended to give – but they didn’t move like any of the British Army soldiers I’d exercised with.  They moved more like thugs, wearing uniforms they hadn’t earned, carrying only pistols and clubs.  The crowds gave them a wide berth – I heard some muttering, too quiet for anyone to pick up without special enhancement – and got the opinion that the Brownshits, their exact word, were unpopular.  They didn’t look very pleasant either.

The soldier-thugs marched off to the south and I continued to the north.  A little later, I realised what they’d been doing; a nude black body hung from a tree, swinging in the breeze.  The girl, for girl she’d been, had been brutally beaten and then hung, her eyes bulging out as she clawed, too late, at the noose around her neck.  The placard fixed under the body read, simply, IDEAS ABOVE HER STATION.  A handful of people were staring at the body; two older men looked sad and helpless, younger men looked almost gleeful.  I fought down the urge to activate my implanted weapons and blow them to bit, instead walking onwards towards the north.  It wasn’t a long walk to the Houses of Parliament and I was sure, by then, I’d have some idea of what was actually going on.

The level of pollutants in the air is increasing, Jane said.  I nodded to myself; I had already guessed that cars and other petrol-driven vehicles were actually in short supply in this version of London.  The soldiers and their mates probably had all their needed, the others probably had nothing, maybe not even buses and underground trains.  The level of damage is also increasing.

“True,” I agreed.  There were buildings, now, that looked as if bombs had hit them.  Judging from the soldiers, it was possible that bombs had hit them; Jane’s report on traces of old explosives only confirmed it.  I couldn’t understand why none of them had been repaired; it wasn't easy to tell, but some of them had clearly been left in ruins since the war.  “I wonder…can you pick up anything that might be useful?”

Negative, Jane said.  There are still no traces of extra-dimensional activity.

The number of soldiers increased as we walked on towards the centre of London.  They all wore the same brown uniform, carried side arms…and always travelled in numbers.  In Washington, at least my Washington, it wasn't unknown to see soldiers on their own, but here…here, the soldier-thugs looked scared to go out on their own.  Anyone would think that they weren’t well loved.  The absence of women near them only clinched it.  That only happened when the soldiers were well-known for rape.

It was another ten minutes before we reached the Houses of Parliament, but as soon as we turned the corner, we saw the answer.  The Houses of Parliament were shuttered up, sealed off to the public – and probably the MPs as well – and guarded by soldiers.  Proper soldiers.  Heavily armed soldiers.  I looked at their uniforms and saw, not British uniforms, but the black uniform and silver lightning bolts of the SS.  The German SS.  Hitler’s SS.

The Nazi Flag flying from the rooftops was a bit of a giveaway as well.

Chapter Two

If it hadn’t been for Jane, I would have stood there, staring at the warped Houses of Parliament, until the soldiers or the SS guards took note and dragged me off to some detention camp.  At her urging, I walked rapidly back into the side streets and vanished off into the distance.  I needed to think and plan.

“Those were Nazis,” I said, as soon as we were a comfortable distance away.  Now that I had some idea of what was going on, it was easier to tell that London was actually a city under occupation, although a particularly odd one.  The British thugs I’d seen had probably been raised by some Vichy-style government and denied heavy weapons to prevent them turning into a major threat.  “Jane, what the hell is going on?”

The Nazis obviously won the war, Jane said, her mental tone suggesting that I was stupid for even wondering.  I suggest you find a library and start researching.

The walk to the nearest library listed in her files took twenty minutes…and when I got there, it turned out to be a warehouse instead.  We searched for another fifty minutes before we finally located a library, one marked clearly in both English and German and covered with warning signs.  Jews and other guest workers were forbidden to enter, on pain of death, and women were only allowed to enter during specific times.  Instead, it was almost deserted; the only person at the counter, an old woman so old that she’d probably been born in the time of Queen Victoria, ignored me.  The bookshelves were sparse and in places almost completely barren, but as I looked, I saw what was missing…and why.

They’ve stripped out anything by the Jews, Jane observed.  She was right.  They’d also taken out Dickens – although he was no loss; I’d sweated through one of his works while I was a child and hated it – and almost everything relating to military tactics.  Histories of the time before the German invasion were almost completely missing, the only ones on the shelves seemed to concentrate on justifying the German invasion and blaming the entire war on a strange mixture of Churchill, Roosevelt and International Jewry.  Propaganda, in other words, and poorly done propaganda at that.  The only interesting book was entitled The Rise of the New Order and promised to be a history book, so I took it off the shelves and sat down to read it.

I read The Turner Diaries once, for a bet, and that book had been disgusting.  They had been written in such a style as to leave you convinced that anyone with the slightest fascist leanings would be impressed and convinced…and work towards the day of rebellion.  The Rise of the New Order was written in the same style and sounded almost like a hymn to Nazi Rule.  It was probably the most biased history book I’d ever read – and, believe me, I once spent months reading through everything produced on the Iraq War.  It was disgusting…and yet strangely fascinating.

Curious, Jane said.  There are definite signs of interference here.

I nodded.  She was, again, correct.  Everything was fairly normal, as I remembered, from Hitler’s rise to power until the birth of the war itself.  Britain and France had still declared war on Germany – a foolish gesture; they’d missed their best chance to stop Germany in 1938 – and the Germans had invaded France, Norway and Denmark in the following year.  And then everything changed; the campaign in Norway had been an unabashed disaster in both timelines, but I got the impression, reading between the lines, that it had somehow been worse for the British in the changed timeline.  It was hard to tell what was real and what was merely German boasting, but somehow they’d lost more ships and troops than they had in my world.  In the meantime, France fell as fast as I remembered…but there was no miracle at Dunkirk.

Shit, I thought.  Instead of the British recovering their forces, or at least as much of them as they could, from the beaches, the Germans had advanced and punched through the final defences, destroying the remains of the BEF after a desperate defence.  Hitler’s air force had then somehow decimated the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force through a precisely targeted aerial campaign – I saw more signs of interference there; Hitler’s goons hadn’t known enough about Britain to mount a really capable campaign and they hadn’t had the aircraft to carry one out anyway – and then the Germans had landed.  Once Panzers had reached the gates of London, the game was up and the British Government surrendered.

The book didn’t stop there.  In a tone that dripped eagerness for the future, it recounted the rounding up and transporting of British Jews to Europe, apparently to much better conditions.  I knew what that meant.  They’d probably been shoved in the gas chambers at once.  Anyone who was vaguely suspect, from communists to senior military leaders and politicians, followed them, while thousands of young British men were placed on notice that they might be called upon to serve the New Order.  The book made no mention of resistance anywhere in the country, leaving an impression that the British had just bent over and taken it, while Germany assisted the new-old king, George, to rule with an iron hand.  British colonies had been turned into sources of slave labour – that explained the black girl I’d seen, I guessed – and Britain itself had been turned into a base for the New Order.  The book said nothing about America, so I guessed that it was still free, but it spoke about a Japanese occupation of India and the crushing of the Russians in the following three years.  To all intents and purposes, Hitler had won the war, even though the book was remarkably unspecific about how he’d done it.

“The Enemy could certainly have done that,” I muttered to Jane.  They had all the advantages of peering down at the timelines from their lofty vantage point and knowing just where to concentrate to change the past.  They’d contaminated an entire timeline.  “Maybe we should report back; get a proper investigative team in here.”

No, Jane said softly.  We do not have enough data to conclude that there are definite signs of Enemy interference.  I agree that there has been interference, but it may not have been the Enemy.  There are other groups that have a motive to change history in favour of the Nazis.

“Yeah,” I growled.  I heard a rumbling from my chest and ignored it.  I could eat almost anything, thanks to the nanites running through my blood, but while I would have liked to eat in a proper café, I didn’t have any money.  I hunted through the book for further clues, but found nothing.  “There’s no political scheme or plan too dunderheaded that someone won’t go for it.”

Jane sounded the silent alarm in my head as five soldiers filed into the library.  They looked almost identical to the others I’d met, but instead of blank faces, they were twisted with an ugly anticipation I hadn’t seen since I’d served in Mexico.  The soldiers there had been thugs as well, using their power and authority to push the locals around…and this merry lot clearly had the same idea.  The German soldiers would probably be almost popular compared to them.

They might have been called here, Jane warned.  The lead soldier – I saw no rank badge – was talking to the librarian.  She looked defiant and scared at the same time, too old to be interesting to the soldiers, but at the same time hardly immune to their threats.  A handful of other people in the library – I hadn’t noticed them until now – including a pair of young girls tried to leave, only to be blocked by the soldiers.  They checked their ID cards, frisked them in a manner that should have earned them slaps, and then let them go with a parting grope.  The handful of men were also frisked…and then the soldiers were coming my way.  I kept my face blank; this was trouble.  I had no ID card.

“Your papers,” the lead soldier demanded.  His breath stank of stale cigarette smoke; at a guess, his rank brought extra rations as well as perks such as molestation and rape.  I’d seen it before.  “Your papers, now!”

I took a breath.  I might have to fight my way out.  “I left them at home,” I said.  I couldn’t fail to notice the way they shared glances between themselves.  Doubtless, I was about to be hit with a demand for a bribe.  “I’m sorry, I’ll…”

“Well, you’ll have to come down with us, won’t you?”  The leader leered.  He leaned forward, caught hold of my collar, and pulled.  “Unless you make it worth our while…”

I kept coming forward.  His eyes widened, too late, as I snapped out a chop to the side of his neck, sending him crashing to the floor.  At such close range, his men couldn’t draw their pistols, giving me a chance to knock them all out before they did for me instead and so I kicked the second one in the groin.  They were unused to resistance from anyone and the third tried to grapple with me instead of using his club or trying to get back out of range.  I broke his arm and hefted him up, throwing him into the fourth…

And then the fifth brought his club smashing down on my head.  It wasn't hard enough to crack my skull, but the pain was intense enough to stun me, long enough for him to bring it down again and send me crashing to the floor.  Only Jane’s assistance prevented me from passing out there and then; as it was, I felt rather unpleasant.  She helped dampen the pain as the four men – their leader was still out of it – took turns kicking my body, before finally remembering that they were supposed to secure me.  One of them drew a pair of handcuffs – I almost laughed as I saw them through Jane’s sensors; I’d been taught how to get out of better-made handcuffs in the training camp – and snapped them around my wrists.

I could generate a cutting field and get you out, Jane said.  My mind was recovering rapidly from the pounding; I wished that we’d had such equipment in Afghanistan.  I almost felt human again.  It would not be difficult to escape them…

“No,” I subvocalised back.  The thugs were searching my pockets and finding nothing.  We were never allowed to bring anything not strictly required on missions, even pictures of our wives and children, even through mine thought me dead.  She could hardly be faulted for that – the Time Agents had produced a most convincing body, capable of fooling the most advanced medical science in my world – but I still missed her.  “We’ll play along for the moment.”

Jane said nothing as two of the thugs picked me up, careful to bang my head against the table a couple of times, and then carried me out of the library, down the steps, and into an open-topped van that had probably been out of date in 1940.  A handful of people, mainly men, saw me being dumped in the back of the truck and attached to a chain intended to stop me escaping, but did nothing.  I didn’t blame them.  Anyone brought up in an environment of continuous fear and terror would be careful about risking their own lives for anyone.  The other two people in the van, an middle-aged rat-faced man with a dark moustache and a teenaged girl, her clothes torn and ripped, barely looked up as I was tossed in, lost in their own private hells.  A moment later, the van jerked to life and I found myself wincing as the driver, someone without any kind of proper training, lurched it along the roads.  The remainder of the guards hopped into a second van and followed.

You could escape, Jane said, as her ministrations helped dampen the last of my headache.  The guards would be horrified at how quickly I had recovered; the damage they’d caused would have been life-threatening to anyone in this time.  Somehow, I doubted that the mystery people behind the interference would have worried much about introducing advanced medical care as well.  Interrogation is a serious risk here.

“Not really,” I subvocalised back.  The Nazis had been fond of torture, very fond of it, but I could easily switch off the pain through the implants, or even use it as a chance to learn more about how this world worked.  If the interferers put in an appearance, and so far I’d done nothing to attract their attention, they might have a way of switching Jane off, but in that case automated systems buried in my head would kill me.  “We can learn more this way.”

Jane gave a mental sniff as the van turned around a corner and headed towards a massive blocky building, surrounded by armed guards.  It made the Green Zone look weak and puny; my guards, I was amused to notice, had to surrender their weapons before being allowed into the centre of the complex.  The sight of the building was the most encouraging thing I’d seen all day.  There was little point in having so many defences…unless there was a risk of being attacked.  There was a resistance out there somewhere…and if I could make contact, we might be able to help them.

“Out, now,” the leader snapped.  It was meant to sound intimidating, but the way his eyes flickered over me proved that he was just a little intimidated himself.  I’d certainly hit him hard enough for the effect to show.  If I’d been his Drill Sergeant, I would have bawled him out and kicked his arse; he’d been dreadfully careless and suffered for it.  “March, now!”

The three of us were marched down a long drab corridor into a holding cell.  The arrangement was neat and pretty difficult to escape, under normal circumstances.  The smelly room proved to be made of heavy stone, with one door and several guards defending it, leaving the three of us, still cuffed, alone.  It didn’t look like a permanent arrangement for us; if nothing else, we would have to answer the call of nature sooner or later.

The girl’s face fell still further.  She would have been pretty without the tears and some proper feeding, but instead she looked weak and malnourished.  On impulse, I smiled at her and saw her cringe still further; she looked terrified of me.

“It’s ok,” I said, as softly as I could.  Ten got you twenty that we were being bugged.  I would have bugged the cells.  “What did they get you for?”

“The…bastard wanted me and I said no,” she said, between sobs.  “My boyfriend was sent to Europe and I promised I’d wait for him, but he came along and demanded that I sleep with him, and when I refused, they arrested me and…”

Her voice broke off.  I could guess the rest.

“My name’s Dave,” the rat-faced man said.  His voice held a trace of Lancaster in it.  “It’s just a mistake; I’m sure they’ll release us soon, I’m sure.”

I doubted it, but I held my tongue.

“Sally,” the girl said.  “My name’s Sally.”

It took an hour for them to finally get around to deciding what to do about us.  A set of guards arrived, allowed us to use the toilets under supervision, before hauling us up in front of a German dressed in SS uniform.  He didn’t look particularly well himself, his face jaundiced and very sallow, but he made up for it in venom.  Sally almost fainted when he looked at her; there was, suddenly, no question about the verdict.

“Prostituting yourself without a license,” the German said.  He spoke English with a harsh Prussian accent.  “You are sentenced to the military brothel in Dover.”

Sally gasped and started to scream.  One of the guards slapped her and she fell to the ground, sobbing.  “Participation in the black market,” the German continued, looking at Dave.  I’d suspected something like that.  “You are sentenced to six years on a work scheme on the continent.”  Dave went very pale, but said nothing.  “And you.”

He’s looking at you, Jane said.

“You do not possess any identification, which suggests involvement in activities contrary to the benefit of the Greater German Reich,” the German said.  “You will be deported to the continent for life, working for the benefit of the Reich in hopes of redeeming yourself for what you have done to harm the Reich.”

The guards didn’t hesitate.  They dragged Sally up from the floor, taking the chance to have another grope while they pulled…and I took the opportunity to put a kick in one of their groins.  The remainder shook me, trying to hurt me without causing real damage – I was a valuable worker now – and then escorted us out to the loading bay.  I guess the aim was to get us out quickly enough that we couldn’t cause trouble; we were dumped into a truck, secured to the side of the vehicle, and then the truck rumbled into life.  This time, we couldn’t see out.

Sally’s leg brushed against mine.  “Thank you,” she said, softly.”

I said nothing as the truck moved out, summoning up the mental map in my head.  The judge had sentenced Sally to Dover, so the odds were that we were all going to Dover, maybe two to three hours away at most.  I sat back for the first hour and thought quickly; Jane’s scans revealed the presence of guards escorting us, so escaping into the shrubbery was going to be difficult.  I struggled to come up with a working plan…

And then shooting broke out all around us.

Chapter Three

I have seventeen unknown combatants, Jane said, into my head.  I am unable to determine allegiance or capabilities.

I rolled my eyes, cursing the restraints under my breath.  AIs aren’t very smart, despite their name.  Oh, Jane could have solved complex mathematical problems in a split second and computed a firing pattern that would have let me hit a target several miles away with a handgun, but she wasn't always able to solve problems though intuition.  Think about it; the unknowns are attacking our guards, so logically they’re opposed to the guards, right?  Not to Jane; all she knows is that there are around thirty people shooting and she can’t tell the difference between them.  No IFFs, no implanted transponders, not even distinctive weapons…

I heard that, Jane said.  There are AIs that get rather snooty about their capabilities.  Jane isn’t one of them.  The guards are hunkering down and…

An explosion cut off her words.  They hit the guard truck with a primitive RPG, she added.  I suggest that this is a perfect opportunity to escape.

“Not yet,” I subvocalised.  Dave and Sally were scared to death; a line of bullets, ripping through the truck, almost took Sally’s head off.  “I think that the shooting is dying down.”

A final shot rang out and then there was silence.  I doubted that it would last long; one lesson we’d learnt in Iraq and Afghanistan was that it was vitally important to get support out to any ambushed convoy as fast as possible.  Of course, there were times when the insurgents had ambushed convoys to bait traps for the reinforcing forces, which helped keep everyone on their toes.  Half the time we had the firepower to just blow through the traps and leave the insurgents dead in the dust, but no one wants to do that if they can help it.

A head thrust its way into the rear of the cab and Sally cried out again.  It was a friendly face, but covered in soot and something else, perhaps as a disguise.  It wasn't very effective, but I didn’t have the heart to mention it as the newcomer fiddled with the restraints and freed us from the side of the vehicle.  They kept us bound, which struck me as a sensible idea, but the newcomer helped us out of the truck…and into a scene of carnage.  The soldier-thugs had been ripped to pieces; the handful who had survived the shooting had had their throats cut by the insurgents.  They looked an unpleasant bunch, dressed in tattered clothes and carrying a strange mixture of weapons, but I was pleased to see them.

“Don’t quote me on this,” I muttered to Jane, “but I think we’ve just made contact with the Resistance.”

The fighters said nothing to us.  A handful led us rapidly away from the burning trucks, while a small team remained behind, searching through the trucks for anything useful and setting up a handful of booby traps.  I’d seem similar tricks back in Iraq; there was a British unit that lost a Scimitar once, recovered the remains and booby-trapped it, before the insurgents came back to claim their prize.  The explosion killed seven insurgents and the local Al Jazeera stringer they’d brought along to record their great victory.  I heard, later, that some asshole in London was screaming about violations of the laws of war, although I don’t know anyone who’s actually been there who thinks highly of the media.  The British Resistance probably got a much worse treatment from the local German-permitted newspapers.

Dave broke the silence.  “Where are you…?”

“Quiet,” one of the fighters snapped.  Dave took the hint and shut up, but his ratty face glanced from side to side, trying to look for encouragement or hostility.  I didn’t know what, if anything, to offer him; I was having enough problems passing into the forests without tripping over.  Sally, at least, was lucky; she had one of them holding on to her and helping her walk.  They paused in a clearing long enough to blindfold us and then marched us onwards, unaware that Jane was perfectly capable of plotting out where we were.  We weren’t that far from London and I wondered at the resistance’s ability to operate so close to the capital, but I guess that that wasn’t a surprise.  If the behaviour of the regime’s thugs I’d seen was typical, they probably had plenty of supporters in the city.

I won’t bore you with the rest of the details of the forced march.  I’d had worse in the Crucible.  At the end, they removed the blindfold and I found myself in a basement, watched by two men.  One was old, but still very fit, despite a balding head.  The other was younger, with a massive scar on his face; it was easy to imagine who might have given him that scar.  Jane ran through her history files, trying to identify the men, but found nothing.  I wasn't too surprised; a divergence in 1940 would have produced twenty years of change.  The younger man might even have been born after the invasion and never existed in my world.

“You’re American,” Old Man said.  There was no question of the authority in his voice.  At a guess, I was looking at a senior Resistance figure, maybe even the boss.  I doubted it – an insurgency with a clear leader is doomed if the opposition is competent enough to go after him – but you never know.  “Why are you here?”

I smiled to hide my confusion.  “Why would I not be here?”

“Don’t play games,” Young Man snapped.  “Americans are forbidden to enter Britain and the Security Zone.  The Jerries make certain of that.  Why are you here?”

“I can’t answer that yet,” I said carefully.  “Who exactly are you?”

Old and Young exchanged glances.  “We’re part of the underground,” Old said finally, “and that is all you need to know.”  Young, judging from his expression, was horrified that Old had even admitted that much.  “You were being taken to one of the death camps across the Channel, like so many others, when we rescued you and your friends.  Why are you here?”

I chose my words carefully.  I had one advantage; Jane.  She could read their bodies and tell if they chose to lie to me.  They could have been a Nazi sting against American spies, but she was convinced that they were telling the truth…and I had made contact with the Resistance.  There were also no bugs or other surveillance systems in the room, at least according to her sensors, and no 1960s regime should have been able to produce something that could hide from her.

“I represent a power that is…concerned about the Nazis,” I said carefully, and was surprised at their reaction.  Young barked out a harsh bark of laughter; Old smiled thinly, very thinly.  “We have some…problems with them.”

“The entire world has problems with them,” Old said calmly.  “Why did the Yanks send an incompetent agent here?”

That stung, although I had to admit that there was some truth in it.  I had been ill-prepared for the mission, although the limitations on Portal tech and inter-dimensional travel had made any real preparation impossible.  I was, after all, merely an expendable scout.  If I died – again – I was sure that some would regret it, but it wouldn’t change the course of the war.

“Our information on what is happening inside the Security Zone is limited,” I admitted.  It was true enough, after all.  “I need to know what happened here and what you know about the world.”

Old started to speak.  I wondered, at the time, why he told me so much, but then…it would be easy for him to have me liquidated if he so chose…and Young would be quite happy to do it for him.  I could have taken him if my hands hadn’t been cuffed, but the seconds it would have taken to free myself from the cuffs could have been fatal if he’d shot me in the head.  There are limits even to nanotechnology; a bullet though the head would have killed me, as much as it had the first time.  This time, death would be permanent.

He’d been, according to him, a garrison soldier in one of the newly formed infantry divisions in Britain when the war began.  He hadn’t served in Norway or the ill-fated British Army in France, something that had relieved him at the time, because the soldiers in France had either died or been marched off into prison camps.  None had returned to Britain.  He’d fought in the Battle of Dover, and later the Battle of Maidstone, where he’d been wounded badly by a German shell.  In the time it took him to recuperate, cared for by a sympathetic farmer’s daughter in the area, London had fallen and the remains of the British government had surrendered.

“The bastards didn’t give us anything,” he said, sourly.  It dawned on me that the resistance was fighting a class war as well as the occupying power.  “Hardly any guns, hardly any shells, hardly any aircraft once the stuck-up fly-boys got wiped out of the sky…I shot at the Germans with an old blunderbuss!  The colonel told me that if it had been good enough for Wellington, it was good enough for me…”

The Germans had occupied the south-east of England for a time, while they’d built their occupation government.  Lloyd George had become Prime Minister for a time – Oswald Mosley had been shipped over to Germany in 1940 and vanished there – and the new regime had taken form.  The aristocrats had been more than happy to accept Germany’s rule in exchange for maintaining their privileges, while the industrialists loved them because they broke up trade unions and communists.  The King had been forced to abdicate, replaced by Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, the American women he’d fallen in love with and abandoned his throne to marry.  Between them, they’d built the new Britain…

Old continued, his words dripping with disdain…and a carefully hidden despair.  The Britisches Freikorps - British Free Corps – had been formed, and while in my timeline it had never amounted to much, here it was the size of a small army, formed from men that the Germans hadn’t ‘volunteered’ for service in the Reich.  They got extra rations and immunity from justice, British or German, and – naturally – abused it as much as possible.  Theft, extortion, rape…compared to them, the Germans were much-loved.  Even the ordinary German soldiers thought that the Britisches Freikorps were too much and never hesitated to clip their wings where possible, but the SS and the Reichkommissioner GB loved them.  They kept the population under firm control, while the colonies were transformed into nightmares…

India had been lost to the Japanese in 1940, along with the remainder of the British Far East, apart from Australia.  African colonies had become hellholes, worked for their labour, like the girl I’d seen hanged.  Italy got a few scraps flung to them, but the Germans had taken most of the Middle East; first, they’d used the Muslims to exterminate the Jews, and then turned on the Muslims themselves, depopulating entire regions for the oil.  The only major free country left was America…and, with German positions in Mexico and Latin America, everyone knew that trouble was brewing.  It wouldn’t be long until there was a final war and then…either the Nazis would be destroyed, or much of the world would be laid waste.

“That can’t be right,” I subvocalised.  “What kind of American government would allow the Germans to take up positions in Mexico?  What about the Monroe Doctrine?”

They believe it, Jane reminded me.  I shrugged.  It was possible that they had simply been lied to, but even so…it was worrying.  If the Germans won the war quickly, the United States might remain out of the fighting, even go back into isolation until it was too late to prevent the Germans from gaining a toehold.  We know nothing about American politics in this timeline.

“True,” I agreed.  I looked over at Old.  “My mission was to make contact with the British Resistance and attempt to supply you with arms and support for making life difficult for the Germans.”

“You Americans are always naive,” Young growled.  “An hour ago, we heard that the Britisches Freikorps had destroyed a small village, on the suspicion that they were harbouring us.  A rebellion would be a certain failure unless you provided us with enough weapons to make a difference and prevented the Germans from flying or shipping in reinforcements for their own garrisons.”

Old interrupted and provided me with a general outline of the resistance, a very general outline.  Britain had been unique among the European countries that it had prepared a resistance network before invasion, but much of that network had been destroyed in the first five years of occupation, often betrayed by their new leaders.  The aristocrats didn’t want anyone disturbing their new world order and, having decided to suck German cock, ensured that everyone else had to do it as well.  The second network, the one that Old and a few of his fellow soldiers who had escaped the round-ups had formed, was more secretive, but it hadn’t prevented the Germans from breaking open a few cells and killing the fighters, while engaging in the occasional mass reprisal.  The resistance kept out of the way of the Germans and concentrated on harassing the Britisches Freikorps, at least as often as they dared, while shortages of arms and ammunition limited their effectiveness.

“We can ship in weapons and other supplies,” I said, after Old had finished.  There were things I needed to do, but never mind that at the moment.  “How ripe are the urban areas for revolt?”

“You don’t understand, do you?”  Old said.  He launched into a lengthy discourse about how hard it was to get more than passive cooperation out of people.  I wasn't too surprised; most people have a tendency to think of themselves and their families first, rather than in terms of the survival of the resistance.  There are too many people who would prefer to live on their knees – or at least that their children live – than die on their feet.  “They won’t revolt unless there is a real prospect of success.”

I nodded.  Something that puzzles the liberals is why people who live in oppressive regimes don’t revolt.  The answer is fairly simple; as long as the government looks strong, and resistance is crushed harshly, they won’t revolt unless there is no other choice.  The Chinese once had an idiot of a Mandarin who punished everything with death; his problem was that lateness – and rebellion – had the same punishment.  When a few labourers got late, they revolted; what other choice did they have?  I’ve known people who claim that people living under oppressive regimes want those regimes because they don’t revolt, something that is too silly for words.  I actually think that that is rather racist myself, but what do I know?  I’m just a jarhead with a string of earned medals to my name.

“We can give you that help,” I said, after a long moment.  That was true as well; I could ensure that they did get supplies through the Portal, even if it wasn't connected with this world’s America.  I could even insist that they help the Americans in the final war.  A Nazi-controlled world is just ripe for subversion by the Enemy, even if they’re not here already…and the jury was still out on that question.  “Where do you want the arms to be delivered?”

“We’ll think about that,” Old said.  I could sense their hopes – and doubts – and smiled to myself.  They would have problems understanding how we intended to get the arms in…and I couldn’t tell them.  It would have been way too revealing.  “What do you want in exchange?”

I ducked the question for the moment.  “What are you going to do with Sally and Dave?”

“I’m sure we could find a use for Sally,” Young said.  It was clear what he meant.  It wasn't uncommon among underground fighters either; being on the run from vastly superior firepower doesn’t lead to lots of babes, no matter what idiot students think.  We once pulled an American man – hell, a boy, barely a man - out of some godforsaken South American hellhole who’d believed some shit about how sexy it was and ended up a drug runner.  Idiot.

Old glared at him.  “We could probably hide her if she doesn’t want to join one of the fighting units,” he said tartly.  I understood his point; abusing the locals is a good way to get them to call in the Germans and start betraying the resistance.  It had helped us in Iraq, after all; there had been a gay Iraqi man who’d been raped by AQ members – yes, I know, don’t ask – and he’d responded by giving us the biggest bust of the month.  The Germans probably had similar breaks during their occupation.  “We can’t risk giving her any information if she doesn’t want to join us, but she’ll be fine.  Dave…”

He paused.  “Dave is another problem,” he said.  His face tightened.  He wasn't going to let me duck the question again.  “What do you want from us in exchange for the weapons?”

“I have to go on into Germany,” I said.  It would be fairly easy to impersonate a Nazi officer – Jane would ensure that I didn’t make any real mistakes – but I would need papers and other things I couldn’t obtain easily.  Replacing someone would be tricky; Jane could get me through standard things, but if I met someone who was supposed to know ‘me’ it would be disastrous.  “Perhaps you could help with that?”

“Maybe,” Old said carefully.  “Once the weapons arrived, then we’ll talk about that.”

And, believe me, you should have seen their faces when the weapons arrived.

Chapter Four

As it turned out, the Resistance hadn’t been looking for me.

Dave – or so Old told me, once he’d seen the weapons and ammunition – had been one of their fixers, the people who worked near the Germans and supplied the resistance with whatever they could that might be helpful.  I hadn’t thought that he’d had it in him, but luckily he hadn’t broken until the resistance had rescued him.  They’d been betrayed before by people who’d been sent to the work camps and rapidly weakened under the unpleasant regime and tended to do what they could to rescue or assassinate blown fixers before they broke.

The supplies were another puzzle to them.  I’d insisted that they left me alone somewhere isolated to call them in, much to their concern – and suspicion.  I couldn’t let them see the Portals – God alone knew what would happen if one of them worked, without even knowing it, for the Enemy – and they had to be a little worried about me.  I was probably too good to be true, despite whispering about stealth aircraft that could slip in and out of the Nazi air defences around Britain, and the pallets of weapons brought me some credence.  The resistance had never seen so many weapons free for the taking, even though they puzzled over some of the German designs in the set.  I couldn’t stop myself laughing; the design they were looking at was the trusty old AK-47!  The Interferers, whoever they were, hadn’t missed that particular trick.  I just wondered if they’d bothered to tell Hitler and his goons where the weapon had even come from.

“You are definitely determined to go to Berlin?”  Old asked, grimly.  He hadn’t liked the sound of it and he and Young had done their best to dissuade me.  Berlin was the centre of Nazi power, after all, and a single slip could prove disastrous.  “Are you sure that you know what you’re doing?”

“I can’t do much here,” I lied.  That wasn't true; us Marines get taught a lot about how to fight an insurgent war, along with dozens of other units so secret I wasn’t supposed to know about them.  My new masters knew all about them, of course; the American Special Forces was one of their best sources of recruits.  I could have happily spent the rest of my life in Occupied Britain, fighting the Nazis, but my duty led elsewhere.  We had to know who had interfered…and why.  “There will be others, I promise, but I have to go onwards.”

“Idiot,” Old said.  “I’ll see what I can do.”

When I found out how they intended to get me to Berlin, I had to force myself to stop laughing.  It seemed that there was an SS officer in Britain who was…how shall we put it?  Compromised?  You’ve probably heard lots about the SS, particularly their fighting arms; they were tough as nails, ruthless, brave to a fault, and never broke in the defence of their Fuhrer.  If you lived through a certain period, you probably even saw the Watch on the Rhine movie, the one they tried to ban in my Germany.  It didn’t last long; nothing encourages illegal downloading of anything than official fatheads trying to ban it.  It encourages the myth…but some of them were very human.  It seems that Hans, the only name I was given for him and so common I was sure that it was a false name, had stumbled into a relationship with a British citizen.

So what?  I hear you cry.  Sure, the SS was death on rape in the east, partly out of fears of contaminating the racial stock, but the west?  Hitler’s silly racial theories put the British, the Danes and the Norwegians at a level just below Germans; hell, some members of the British Army had even been offered a chance to integrate into the German Army.  Don’t believe all the nonsense you hear about how women in occupied countries turned away from the Germans; there were plenty, more than the French and the others ever admitted to, who fell in love with Germans.  It happens everywhere; I know several soldiers and more freelancers who ended up having relationships with Iraqi women.  If Hans had fallen in love with a British girl, Himmler might even have blessed the match personally…

Unfortunately, for Hans at least, the person he’d fallen in love with was a man.

The Nazis were death on homosexuals.  Why?  I don’t know; one theory I heard was that homosexuals, being attracted to their own sex rather than the other sex, removed themselves from the gene pool.  Several Nazi empires that survived the war went looking for a homosexual gene, although that struck me as counter-intuitive; if such a gene existed, but wasn't spread through the human race because homosexuals didn’t have children, wouldn’t we have bred it out of ourselves by now?  Another theory is that Hitler was suffering from repressed homosexual desires himself, but frankly…I rather doubt it.  The Fuhrer could have had a love harem of blonde blue-eyed SS men and no one would have cared.

But anyway, back to Hans.  The poor bastard wasn't regarded particularly highly by his fellows and so he got shuffled into a mid-ranking administration post in Britain.  Britain wasn't regarded as particularly important, not like the east, where careers were made and the chance for personal gain was high, and so Hans was more or less allowed to operate on his own as Himmler’s representative.  According to Old, the Nazi Elite had divided up chunks of Britain between them and the new government, and Hans was one of Himmler’s warriors for a particularly silly turf war.  Hans, perhaps unsurprisingly, had ended up spending most of his time doing nothing…and, secure in the belief that few would dare to watch an SS man, had talked a British homosexual into bed.  The resistance had gotten pictures, made Hans aware of their content…and, well, you can probably guess the rest.  It didn’t hurt that Hans was well aware of what would happen to him if he were discovered anyway; the resistance had even promised him a hiding place if his senior officers caught on.

Old made the arrangements.  The Germans had a program entitled with some ghastly German name that boiled down to taking a few of the provincials to Berlin and impressing them with the size and grandeur of the Reich.  The bomb damage I’d seen back in London when I’d first arrived hadn’t been repaired to rub in the point; Britain was on the way down, Germany was on the way up.  Schoolchildren were taken on field trips to visit Berlin and the newer cities to the east, even as they had their heads stuffed with crap about how the Germans were the master race, and older adults were also allowed to go.  I would be travelling as a trusted British citizen, one who was well-known for collaborating with the Nazis, with a full tourist visa.  I could go anywhere, but the secure zones.

“This is your Reichcard,” Hans said.  He proved to be a basically-overweight middle-aged man, far from the Aryan ideal.  The card itself was at least forty years ahead of its time and I examined it with care; anyone with the proper reader could swipe it through and instantly recover my details from the central database.  Jane had told me that the computers in Hans’s office were primitive, compared to her, but years ahead of their time as well.  She’d even scanned some of their programs and sworn that they had come from Microsoft.  That didn’t prove anything – there were plenty of timelines where Microsoft failed, or went on to found the first outpost on another planet – but it suggested that the interferers hadn’t had much in the way of resources.  “Keep it on you at all times and present it when ordered.”

I studied the picture of myself on the card.  I looked as if I’d died and had been dug up specially for the photograph.  “Do not attempt to enter a security zone,” Hans warned.  It wasn't in his interests to see me caught.  “If you pass a German officer, step out of his way and into the gutter until he passes.  Do not attempt to flirt with any German woman.  Do not…”

There was more like this and I listened carefully, warning Jane to record it all for future reference, and I was very glad when it was over.  The Germans might have decreed that the British were Aryans, but they intended to make it quite clear that they had won the war, and had therefore imposed a set of rules on any foreigners visiting Berlin to hammer the point home.  Some made a certain kind of sense – if seeing anyone arrested, say nothing, ever – and others were just plain silly.  I wasn't even allowed to visit the brothels to find relief.

I scanned the computer files, Jane said, while Hans burbled on.  His insertion work was perfect; they simply updated a file they’d stored on their central database with your data.  As far as they know, you are the real Alan Davidson.

I scowled.  Alan Davidson hadn’t been a nice piece of work when he’d been alive. He’d come to German attention through being caught in a certain act, one I would sooner have died rather than committed, and promptly sold out a few resistance fighters rather than face the penalty under German law for his crimes.  For once, I was on the Germans’ side; a bullet in the back of the head would cut down on the number of sick bastards who prey on children.  Since then, he’d worked for the Germans as a covert operative, uncovering other resistance cells, until one of the girls he’d taken had somehow killed him.  Hans had seen to it that the file remained on the computers and the death was never reported, allowing me to take his place.

The German network was both more and less sophisticated than I had expected.  More, because it was well ahead of its time, certainly as good as anything we could have done in 2000.  Less, because unlike our computers, it wasn't distributed; it was one single large computer in Berlin – with a handful more for backups – and all other computer systems linked into it.  There was nothing like the internet here; even in Germany, I’d been told, personal computers were only for the very rich or the very well connected.  I couldn’t say that I was surprised; the internet is really quite good for getting the word around about things the MSM would rather remain hidden…and few tyrants have hesitated to ban or censor it.  You want to know the truth about China’s government?  All you have to know is that they try hard to censor the internet.

But anyway…

“I’ve assigned you a passage onboard a transport travelling from Dover,” Hans said nervously.  I’d expected to fly, but instead Hans had told me that aircraft passengers received more scrutiny than anyone on a ship.  Some bright spark who should have been strangled in his cradle had invented 9/11 years too early and the Germans had responded with a security crackdown that made us look incompetent.  All right, it wasn't as if we could stamp on everyone’s toes and the Germans had done just that, but even so…we should have been able to do better.  “You’ll be going by train from London tomorrow, then sailing to Calais, and then proceeding on the Grand Sneer until you reach Berlin.”

Now that had to be a sign of interference.  It even suggested from which timeline the interferers had actually come – the Discworld books hadn’t existed in every timeline, after all.  It even made sense; the people having the honour of visiting the Reich would first get to see all the different nations under the Reich…and how inferior they were to the German Empire.  I could bet that I wouldn’t be allowed to see anything remotely suggesting that there was some value in France, at least not as anything other than a collaborative state.  Old had been furious about the French, blaming them for everything from the invasion to the death of his children, and it was hard to tell truth from fiction.  I’d have to look for myself to see the condition of France.

I wasn’t hopeful through.

I bid Hans goodbye and allowed him to call me a taxi to the nearest station.  It should have been Fenchurch Street Station, but according to Hans it no longer existed, if indeed it ever had.  Monopoly would be a different game here, if it had been allowed; I’d had a chance to read the Reich’s advice on bringing up children and found it sickening.  British boys were taught that they were inferior to Germans, but superior to everyone else, particularly people with the wrong skin colour.  Old had told me that there were a constant stream of assaults on coloured people, all unreported, and the only one that had ever been punished had been an assault on a Japanese businessman.  The Reich might not like the Japanese, but they still needed them as allies, for the moment, and until the day they turned on them, they had to watch out for their interests as well.  Girls, in the meantime, were second-class citizens; they had to marry, take care of their husband and children, and generally be good little slaves.  It wasn't quite as bad as in some of the countries we called our allies, back in my first life, but it was pretty bad.  The only profession open to women here was medicine.

The train station was just as I’d imagined it.  Britisches Freikorps soldiers hung around everywhere, taking the opportunity to harass anyone they thought they could get away with harassing, while a small group of German soldiers performed the real security work.  The station itself was disgustingly out of date, without even a trace of modern facilities, and the locomotive on the front of the train was an old steam engine.  It would have been fascinating under other circumstances – I’d been a bit of a railway nut in my youth – but now it was just another sign of the times.  They could have built electric or diesel trains with ease.

“Papers,” one of the Britisches Freikorps soldiers demanded.  I passed over the identification Hans had given me and had to bite down a smile as they read them and reacted.  The thugs were gone in a heartbeat, replaced by a sickening servility; someone with real ties to the occupiers could make life difficult, even for them.  “Is there anything we can do to assist you, sir?”

“Ja,” I said, in my best German.  “Escort me to my carriage.”

They looked at me blankly.  They had probably understood the first word, but nothing else.  I would have smiled, but instead I concentrated on looking down my nose at them; we’d had similar problems in Iraq.  We’d needed translators – you’d think that that was obvious – and, at first, we hadn’t had enough translators to go around.  I’d ended up learning enough Arabic to be useful. But even so…

“Escort me to my carriage,” I snapped, in English.  They bowed at once and hurried me on my way.  The first class coach, at least, was clean and quite luxurious, although I don’t know why that surprised me.  The rich like to travel in style.  It was all very old world, with gas lamps and tables that looked like something out of a museum, but it was surprisingly functional.  The damn trains would probably work better than the railways successive British governments had destroyed, mostly by accident.  The guards left me as soon as they decently could; I saw them taking their anger out on a black porter and winced.  Poor bastard.

I’d hoped that someone from the resistance would be able to accompany me, but Old had vetoed it and I couldn’t find it in my heart to argue.  Much.  Instead, I sat alone until I was joined by a small group of British upper-class women, who chatted away to themselves about absolutely nothing and flirted with me once they realised I had connections with the occupiers.  One of them even offered, as the train was gathering speed and chug-chug-chugging its way out of London, to take me into the sleeping car and show me something special.  She was most put out when I declined.

I didn’t really blame her.  She had told me she was twenty-one, but if she was less than thirty, I would have been surprised.  An unmarried women didn’t have much in the way of prospects in this world; a life of boredom was all that would be left to her.  Maybe a German officer would take her in, or maybe someone like me – or rather Alan; someone with a link to the occupiers – would find a use for her.  I didn’t have one and chatted to her, treating her as a real person, and found out just how much she knew that I didn’t.

Dover was occupied by the German Army directly and was, unsurprisingly, more efficient than London.  I was whisked through the checkpoints, loaded onboard a small troop transport and waited for nearly an hour before the ship finally cast off and headed over to Calais.  The French town had been occupied for years and it showed; there were hardly any Frenchmen around – there were plenty of French women, even though Hitler had decreed that the French were very definitely second-class citizens in the New Order – and Germans were everywhere.  They checked my pass, loaded me onboard a train for Paris, and that was that.  I don’t think that the logistics section of the United States Army could have done a better job of shipping one piece of human cargo, me, to the former capital city of France.

You remember how bad London was?

Well, Paris was worse.

Chapter Five

In my timeline, Paris was barely saved from destruction by the Germans as they retreated.  In others, Paris was shattered by fighting and German demolition teams, or destroyed by a nuclear warhead as the Germans turned it into their fortress for holding France.  I had thought that those were bad…

This was worse.

I’d been in Baghdad during the worst of the insurgency and even then, there had been hope in the air, visible to all, but the mainstream media.  (But then, those bastards were really on the side of the insurgents and didn’t even have to be bribed to put their point of view and propaganda on the air.)  Paris, after twenty years of German occupation, looked to be a city in terminal depression; it was dark, drab, and generally nothing like the Paris I remembered.  There was nothing in the air, but fear and terror; the only French people I saw in the centre of the city were girls – sleeping with the German soldiers, I presumed – and collaborators.  The remainder of France was held firmly under the control of the Germans.

My guide – a tough-looking German called Johan – boasted about it and I started to see how it had been accomplished.  Anyone with access to a good library, back in my world, would have been able to find out the movers and shakers of the French resistance and post-war history, from the leaders of the resistance to the Free French and even the handful in Vichy who had quietly prepared tools for a later resurgence.  The mysterious group that had interfered in German history and ensured that the nazis had won the war had done their homework…and wiped out anyone who’d been a threat in the original timeline.  Old, back in the United Kingdom, had never even heard of Charles DeGaulle; my guess was that the Germans had probably killed him in 1940, before he’d had the chance to flee to Britain.  Whatever else one said about him, he’d been the key to France’s recovery, and without him, history had definitely been changed.

I decided to pump Johan as much as I could.  It helped that he, like most Germans, had a tendency to brag.  “You keep the French under control, all right?”

“Naturally,” he boasted happily.  “The French know what side their bread is buttered on, don’t you fear.  There are plenty of French tarts out there willing to open their legs for one of us, maybe even one of you.  The ones who could cause trouble get deported to Algeria, where they happily work for us to bring Africa under our control.”

I looked up at the Efall Tower, with a nazi flag fluttering in the breeze, and said nothing.  Algeria had once been a French colony – and, in my timeline, they’d won the war to hold on to it…until their politicians surrendered and abandoned Algeria to the Arabs.  That would have been funny, except it had happened to us in Vietnam and nearly happened in Iraq.  Here, the French population of Algeria was much larger than in the original timeline and they were occupied in literally exterminating the Arabs, just to make room for themselves.  They didn’t have much choice.  If Johan could be trusted, the Reich had been making major inroads into France for years – living space, again.  

I’d allowed my accent to become more German.  “And they don’t try to fight?”

“Ah, the French are always cowards,” Johan assured me.  “They surrendered with ease in 1940 and never dared lift a hand to us since.”  I looked at him; somehow, I doubted that he’d been a soldier in 1940.  He didn’t look that old.  “There’s the occasional punch-up when a French boy discovers that his girlfriend has decided that a German is a better lover, or has simply been bribed into sleeping with him, but naturally if that happens, the Frenchman is to blame for failing to understand that girls are always out for the main chance and sleeping with a member of the master race is the best she could hope for.”

It all sounded very Nazi.  “And the French industry?”

That set him off into another round of bragging.  The French industrialists, like their British cousins, had been quick to understand the implications of German rule…and open their legs for their Nazis.  They worked to build up and support the Nazi war machine, and in exchange, the Germans helped keep their workers under control.  The workers had no rights; strikes and other forms of protest were severely punished – it helped that any Frenchman could be deported to a work camp at any time.  I would have expected resistance to form – cue the Chinese joke about the idiot viceroy – but the Germans had France wrapped up in a lock that was all too clear to the average Frenchman.  Resistance is pointless if there’s no chance of victory.  

I bought Johan some drinks in a bar – apparently, the Reich’s generosity didn’t run to beer and French wine – and asked a handful of questions about his life, some of them suggested by Jane.  He hadn’t been in the fighting, either in France or along the Eastern Front; his heart hadn’t been up to it.  Instead, he’d joined the administration as a low-level flunky and hoped to rise up to a position where he could loot more from France, apart from the virtue of the French girls.  The prospects, he told me, being more than a little drunk at the time, were great for senior Germans; the leadership didn’t care how much was looted from France, as long as they didn’t rock the boat.  Looting from the industrialists was a big no-no.

“Swine,” Johan bubbled.  His capacity for drink exceeded that of a Marine Sergeant, much to my private amusement.  I’d had a pint of beer from the bar and hadn’t been impressed; apparently, the Germans had forgotten how to make good beer.  The French wine had been cheap and nasty stuff; I suspected that the best was imported to Germany, where it was drunk by the lords and masters of the new world order.  “They think they’re Germans, the way they act towards us, and we can’t even beat them.”

Wise, Jane added.  I understood; the industrialists could do things the Germans couldn’t, at least at first.  Protecting them and even adopting them as honorary Germans was a smart move on the part of the occupiers, something that ensured they had a stake in the occupation’s permanence.  If they lost control of the tiger, their own people would almost certainly rip them apart, limb from limb…

But I couldn’t see any way the Germans could lose.  They dominated Europe, Russia as far north as the border with Japan, the Middle East up to Iran – which served as a neutral state between German-occupied Saudi and Japanese-occupied India – and much of Africa.  I’d hated the Saudis back home – almost everyone who’d spent time in Saudi ended up distrusting them, if nothing else – but did even they deserve a German occupation?  Most of their population had been summarily exterminated.

Something about that nagged at the back of my mind, but refused to come into the light.  The handful of independent states in Europe were tiny; they all knew that they only maintained their independence because Hitler willed it so – Turkey, for example, could be overrun by a hundred divisions within a month of the Fuhrer giving the order.  The Turks seemed to have an odd relationship with the Germans; they were both allies and heavily distrusted.  The odds were that they were on the list for future German attention.

And America, on the other side of the world, had problems of its own.

The remainder of the evening passed surprisingly pleasantly.  Johan knew – of course – where to go to have a good time, and insisted on taking me to a brothel.  By then, I think he’d forgotten that I was posing as a British collaborator – although my German accent did help with that; it’s amazing what people will overlook if you sound right – and took me to one run by the German military with Teutonic efficiency.  I was half-expecting to see German soldiers goose-stepping in – wham, bam, thank you, madam – but instead it proved to be a nice little parlour where a handful of girls, dressed in finery I hadn’t seen anywhere else in France or Britain – waited for us to choose our partners.  Jane made snide remarks in my head when I picked a pretty dark-haired girl – Johan picked two blondes and, judging from the amount of beer he’d drunk, probably wouldn’t be able to get it up – and allowed her to escort me upstairs into her room.

Afterwards, we talked; there was no sense of hurry, or forcing me along.  (She was, for the record, good.  Damned good.)  I asked her about her life and she responded, puzzled that I should show an interest, but she was happy to talk.  She'd grown up on a farm somewhere to the west, but she hadn’t wanted to stay there, not when the German pressure to improve French farming methods had been growing more and more blatant.  She’d allowed a German officer to seduce her and set her up in Paris for a few years, but the bastard had dumped her after a while – I looked at her naked and lovely body and wondered what he’d been drinking at the time; I wouldn’t have pushed her out of bed for singing, or even smoking – and she’d somehow ended up in the brothel.  The Germans were generally good to her, but she wanted to be in a proper relationship…

Poor bitch, Jane said, as we prepared to couple again.  It dawned on me that I didn’t even know the girl’s name and probably never would.  She’ll be dead before too long and never have a real chance at life.

I didn’t argue.  Jane was probably right.  She might meet a Frenchman willing to overlook her past, or she might meet an older German who needed a maid with strings attached, but the odds would be against her.  Once she lost her looks, she’d go downhill rapidly and that would be the end of that.  Poor bitch indeed.

“I trust you had a lovely time?”  Johan asked, the morning after.  We’d ended up spending the night at the brothel, something that hadn’t surprised me once I’d realised just how it worked.  It was set up to cater for men who might have had wives or lovers back home, but wanted – needed – female companionship while on occupation duty.  “You’ll go home and tell them how we keep the boot firmly on the frogs’ neck?”

“Of course,” I promised.  I meant every word.  My people would be very interested to watch Jane’s recordings and my own comments, although I’d edit out some of the more…interesting parts.  “You’re doing a grand job here and I hope you keep doing it until you die.”

Johan, perhaps fortunately, lacked the intellect to recognise the subtle jibe.  He drove me to the railway station – German cars and trucks were the only vehicles on the road – and assisted me in boarding the train.  This time, the only armed presence was German; it appeared that the French cops were not allowed weapons of their own, nor was there any French version of the Britisches Freikorps, something that puzzled me until Jane suggested that the French just weren't regarded highly enough to have a proper army, or even a bunch of clowns in gaudy uniforms.  French soldiers who wanted to fight probably ended up in Algeria, or aiding the Germans in the east; Johan had dropped hints that All Was Not Well in occupied Russia.

This time, the train was an electric train, several years ahead of its time, according to Jane.  It was another sign of interference…and a sign that the Germans were confident, very confident, that the French weren't a threat.  Any fool could damage an electric train line simply by cutting down one of the pylons, although my guess was that they kept enough non-electric rolling stock handy, just in case.  France went past in a few hours and I settled into my chair to sleep, until I was awoken by a pair of guards entering the compartment.  My heart started to race at once, as soon as I took in the black uniforms and the silver lightning bolts they wore – they were SS.  Both of them, I was amused to note, were blonde-haired and blue eyed; had they already started a cloning program?

Unlikely, Jane said, as the SS men approached.  They both wore Untersturmfuehrer rank badges, which made them the equivalent of Second Lieutenants, and looked grimly intimidating.  They carried pistols on their belts, along with a single silver dagger, and posed for a long moment before demanding my papers.  I had to order Jane to keep my face under control, even though I hated giving up any control to the AI; I didn’t dare laugh at them.  Any Marine who spends time posing will be a dead Marine pretty soon; I would have bet half my wages that the SS men had never actually seen combat themselves, but had just fallen in love with the uniform.

“Papers,” the leader demanded.  I said nothing, but passed over the papers Hans had given me, silently praying that they worked fine.  If they didn’t, I’d have to kill them and make my escape, which would be difficult.  I could take both of them, despite their weapons, but then escaping would be hard.  I didn’t know anything about what was around me.  The guard examined the papers quickly, running them through a scanner that was around twenty years ahead of its time, and then passed them back to me.

“We must search you,” he said.  His voice hadn’t changed an iota since he had started speaking; I realised, with a flicker of amusement, that he was bored.  A year in Iraq would have cured them of complacency, or perhaps it would have just gotten them both killed.  There was nothing too incompetent about the search, although they expressed some surprise at how little I had with me, but accepted my explanation that I intended to buy what I needed in Berlin.  Once they had decided I was clean, they left me to get dressed again – I realised, judging from the noises coming down the corridor in their wake, that they had strip-searched every girl on the train as well – and I pulled on my clothes with some amusement.  They’d let the most dangerous man in the world into Germany without even noticing!

Or maybe it’s a trap, Jane added, as I finished dressing.  They may have picked up on any amount of subtle clues that you were not quite what you seemed.  You are stronger and far better toned than the average Briton in this timeline, as well as better fed and in an excellent state of health.  Logically, they may believe that that is a result of your supposed collaboration, but a real soldier would be suspicious.

“True,” I subvocalised, as the train started to move again.  Germany didn’t look that different to France at first, until we were several kilometres into the country.  A soldier walks in a very distinctive way, even years after leaving the service, and I had had to learn how to walk like someone harmless.  A real soldier might have looked at me and known, deep inside, that he was looking at another of his kind.  “On the other hand, isn’t the bastard whose name I’ve stolen known for being a member of the Britisches Freikorps?”

Not a soldier, a spy, a sneak, Jane said.  If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought she was sniffing at Davidson…not that I blamed her for that.  If a German read the entire file, he might just shoot and swear blind that it had been an accident.  It would be hard to blame him.  I doubt that anyone would expect him to act like a soldier.

I said nothing as the train completed its long journey, finally entering Berlin’s main train station, one larger than any station I’d seen in America.  All train lines, it seemed, led to Berlin; it was the hub of a network covering the entire continent and reaching all the way to South Africa.  There was, quite literally, nothing like it in our world.  A man burst into my compartment and I opened my eyes; I’d been pretending to sleep for the last few hours, just to avoid my travelling companions.  They’d joined the train just inside the border, a fat man with his equally fat wife, son, and daughter, and I had been quietly considering homicide after hearing their conversation for a few minutes.  The brat had somehow been exempted from military service and just knew that that made him special.  The daughter would have been pretty if she hadn’t been so fat and spotty.

“You have to come quickly,” the newcomer burst out.  I barely noticed his SS uniform, or the complete absence of any rank badges, although I suspected that he wasn’t a real soldier either.  “The Fuhrer himself is going to inspect the Victory Parade!”

I’d wondered who the Fuhrer actually was.  Hitler couldn’t have survived fifteen extra years, although in the timelines where he'd become a successful painter, he did live longer, but who did that leave?  It wasn't a question I could have posed to anyone else I’d met, although my own personal money was on Himmler, and so I was eager to watch the Parade and see him.  I allowed the man to hurry us along – the Parade might not have been planned for us collaborators to see, but the Germans weren’t going to miss the chance to impress us – and we reached the massive parade site within minutes.  It had already started – a long line of Panzers and other armoured vehicles grinding past – but my attention was caught by the man standing on the balcony of the Reichstag, his hand held up in the Hitler salute.

It couldn’t be…

It was Adolph Hitler himself.

Chapter Six

No, Jane snapped.  Don’t even think about it!

I banished the crosshairs that had appeared in front of my eyes with an irritated gesture.  I could have shot the Fuhrer with an implanted weapon, maybe an invisible beam that wouldn’t have provided his bodyguards with any real target, but she was right.  Hitler might have been the most evil man in the world, but he wasn’t the real problem here, only their pawn.  The mystery meddlers would have known, even if the Nazi guards wouldn’t have had the slightest idea, just what had happened…and probably why.  And then they would have started searching for me…

“I don’t understand,” I subvocalised, taking care to ensure that I didn’t even speak a single word aloud.  “How can he be here?”

It is impossible to determine without further data, Jane informed me.  I watched grimly as a flight of heavy bombers flew overhead.  It wasn't easy to tell, because of all the insignias painted on them, but I would have bet good money that they were B52s, if not something very like them.  The Big Ugly Fat Fuckers, as we in the trenches called them, were wonderful aircraft, capable of bombing hell out of any insurgent stronghold and then bombing again when the first bomb failed to kill them all.  Naturally, the USAF decided to buy more fighters rather than bombers…but whoever had been doing the interfering had shipped the plans to the Nazis.

I redirected my attention towards Hitler and peered carefully at him through my enhanced eyesight.  The Fuhrer was a surprisingly normal-looking man, shorter than I had expected, with brown hair that was starting to go grey around the fringes.  His eyes were dark and cold, however, and I could almost read his thoughts as he stared down at the marching soldiers; mine, all mine.  Hitler’s ambition, in another timeline, had led him to disaster, but here…he was still a warlord in the prime of his life.

He was supposed to suffer from Parkinson’s Disease, Jane supplied, as the crowds roared their approval of their Fuhrer.  I joined in, hating myself, because standing out in this crowd could lead to disaster.  The condition was made worse by the intervention of the quack he had working for him as a doctor, Theodor Morell.  The drugs and treatments he prescribed made matters far worse, but someone with modern medical technology could have removed Theodor Morell and ensured that Hitler had access to the best treatment possible.  It would not be impossible for him to survive into his nineties given the right sort of care.

I looked into Hitler’s eyes and shivered.  “I think you’re right,” I said slowly.  I panned my gaze over the men standing beside him, their own arms raised in salutes, although I could tell that some of them were tired of standing there.  Himmler, looking almost like a sinister schoolmaster, watching the crowds with an expressionless face.  Goring, fat and generally unhealthy, shaking like a leaf every time the wind blew.  Joachim von Ribbentrop, Joseph Goebbels, Albert Speer, Rudolf Hess – obviously, he never made his flight to Britain - Sepp Dietrich and others.  There was no sign of Admiral Canaris, Karl Dönitz or Hans Oster – unsurprisingly, as all three would be anti-Hitler in most timelines, and Dönitz would even replace him.

The parade lasted hours and we were expected to watch with great interest as thousands upon thousands of men and hundreds of vehicles were driven past.  The Russians had once pulled the wool over our eyes by flying bombers around in a great circle, so ignorant military correspondents reported many more than actually existed, but Jane’s sensors insisted that they were all separate units.  I didn’t like the implications of the Germans possessing transatlantic-capable bombers; added to the German and Allied forces in Mexico, they could be turned against America sooner than anyone across the pond understood.  I didn’t know how large the German Navy was in this timeline, but if Hitler had had access to advanced technology, the odds were it was more capable than anyone on the other side actually grasped.

“Wait,” I said, as a new figure joined Hitler’s watching group.  “Who’s that?”

It wasn't a man; it was a woman.  She was tall, taller than Hitler, blonde, with a balcony one could perform Shakespeare from.  She was beautiful, in a severe Aryan ideal kind of way, but had a patrician expression on her face that seemed somehow to diminish her.  She stood behind Hitler, almost invisible to the people below him, but we could see her clearly.

I don’t know, Jane said, her voice perturbed.  She’s not Eva Bruan or any other known female Nazi…and she looks young, younger than Hitler.  She may be his mistress, but Hitler was known to keep his other romantic interests out of sight.  I cannot explain her presence.

I frowned.  “Perhaps she’s one of his most trusted people,” I speculated.  There was another possibility.  “Or maybe she’s the person we’re looking for.”

Perhaps, Jane agreed.  Hitler was, however, a known sexist; it is unlikely that she is a member of his trusted council, on those grounds alone.  If she is someone from another timeline, her presence may be more understandable, but standard Enemy practice is to keep their agents well out of sight.  I am at a loss to explain her presence.

“Don’t worry,” I subvocalised.  “I’m sure we’ll get an answer sooner or later.”

The parade finally dragged to a half and I, along with other collaborators like myself, found myself rounded up by a grim-looking SS officer, who turned out to be responsible for ensuring that we saw only what the Nazi Regime wanted us to see.  Our passes were checked – again – we were warned not to attempt to leave the city or speak to anyone without permission, and then he took us all on a long tour.  It was a brutally-backbreaking tour, visiting hundreds of Nazi-designed buildings, each one larger and more gothic than the last.  Speer, I recalled, had been an architect and Hitler himself had had an interest in it; between them, they had turned Berlin into the ugliest city on Earth.

It was also one of the strangest.  The Berlin I remembered was gone.  Indeed, it had never existed here.  Instead, the population looked…odd, both aware that they were the master race and at the same time scared, scared of the SS and of their future.  I saw thousands upon thousands of Slavic slaves, each one gelded and under the closest of supervisions, working for their masters; I wondered, vaguely, why they didn’t rebel.  The Nazis had broken them, broken the men who worked on the roads and expanding Berlin still further, broken the women who worked as housemaids for the German population…and the children?  There were no children.  I didn’t want to know what the occupation in the east was like, but my minder gave me no choice.

The Reich Museum was monstrous, a building larger than any other, and packed with tourists.  We wandered through displays celebrating battles that had never happened in my world, or had had a different outcome, and slowly I put together what had happened.  The Germans had been fairly mild to the easterners at first – they’d had Ukrainians and even some Russians fighting on their side – until the war was safely over, when they’d rounded up all the soldiers they’d trained and massacred them all.  The deaths of millions of men was portrayed as a necessity, men too inferior to understand that they were the tools of the master race, even as the displays extolled how the Germans had brought civilisation to the eastern parts of the world.  

A sense of dull horror rose up within me as I walked through the display.  The Nazis hadn’t even bothered to hide their crimes from their own people.  The breadbasket of the Ukraine was built on thousands upon thousands of slaves, from all over the world, people worked to death just so the German race could have enough to eat.  Moscow had been crushed and completely destroyed, once the records had been saved and used to prove how evil communism had been.  I read copies of records claiming that Stalin had fired the first shot and how his own soldiers, aware of their racial role and unwilling to fight the master race, had resisted.  I read about the first use of the atomic bomb, targeted on a Russian city just for shits and giggles – although they didn’t put it quite like that – and about how millions of Africans, trusting that the Reich would liberate them from their colonial masters, had been enslaved and worked to death.

I felt sick.  If it hadn’t been for Jane, I would have been sick.

And, throughout it all, there was no clue as to the identity of the mysterious women.  The Nazi elite had all had their pictures included in the displays, of course, along with some vainglorious boasting – I was sure that Himmler hadn’t served in the military and even if he had, heroics like they claimed he’d shown would have gotten him killed, and not before time – but there was no picture of her.  The only women shown as a single portrait was Hitler’s niece, Geli Raubal.  Rumour had it that she’d been Hitler’s lover, but the display mentioned nothing of that, not entirely to my surprise.  Instead, she was held up as the ideal of German womanhood and all women were encouraged to be like her.  The thought almost made me smile; if they had been like her, to the point of committing suicide, they would have exterminated the German race.  Maybe that wasn't quite what the Nazis had in mind.

It was an hour later when we stumbled across the first major clue.  The centre of Berlin was given over almost completely to the government; there were massive buildings, each one representing a different part of the German Government, from Hitler’s own apartments to Goring’s massive building for the air force.  Some of them were dark and oppressive, meant for the SS, others were much more welcoming…and one of them was a complete mystery.  It looked much smaller than the others, but there was a double guard on it and we were definitely not encouraged to go near it.

I looked over at the minder.  He looked more harassed than anyone else in the party, not that I blamed him.  Us collaborators were obviously an unpleasant task for him.  He thought of us as subhuman and yet he had to be polite to us; hell, we could even get him in real trouble just by complaining about the hospitality or lack of it.  If he hadn’t been a nazi bastard, I would have almost felt sorry for him; I’d hated supervising visitors to my Company myself.

“Hey,” I said, nodding to the mystery building.  “Please could you tell me what that is?”

“Classified,” he growled.  Obviously, politeness had its limitations.  “You could be shot just for looking at that building for more than a second.”

I’ll tell you something else about it, Jane said, as the minder stamped away to make someone else’s life miserable.  That building has advanced tech covering it as well as those guards.

“Advanced tech?”  I subvocalised.  “How advanced?”

I’m unsure, Jane admitted.  It reads out as 2010s levels, but I’m uncertain how much of it is actually passive at the moment; I suspect that anyone entering the building will trigger off several silent alarms.

I nodded, looking at the building through Jane’s sensors.  There was a wall, a courtyard, then a second wall, and then the building itself.  The guards were clearly not allowed to enter the building; hell, if the minder had been that brusque about it, I suspected he wasn't allowed to enter either.  The technology was something of a giveaway as well; if they had advanced tech, stuff well beyond the ability of the Reich to create or even duplicate, they had to be involved with the time travellers.  Either that, or there was a second time travelling faction involved…but that way led to paranoia.  The evidence suggested one group of meddlers and we would have to stick with it.

A nasty thought struck me.  “Jane,” I said, “was Hitler a Marked Man?”

I don’t believe so, Jane said.  It is difficult to identify a Marked Man before he goes active, but there were no traces of any Enemy influence surrounding him, not even a flicker in his quantum signature.  It might explain his unusual longevity, but there are simpler explanations for that before we consider the Enemy marking Hitler as their own.

“I think we’re going to pay that building a visit,” I said.  I looked back at the guards and frowned to myself.  It wasn't going to be easy.  I could spoof the security sensors, unless they had something from a timeline far more advanced than 2010, but the guards were another matter.  “I want you to start running through tactical scenarios while I spend the rest of the day enjoying myself.”

Jane didn’t bother to reply.

The minder finally allowed us to stop for an evening meal in a hotel.  I would have preferred not to eat, knowing the price of the food in lives and suffering, but there was no choice.  The meal was good, if simple, and there was as much of it as we wanted, which made a pleasant change from Britain.  The other collaborators ate as if there was no tomorrow – and, for a lot of them, tomorrow would only bring a return to their homes and rationing – and I put away as much as I could.  I was going to need the energy.

“I shall show you to your rooms,” the minder said finally.  “Do not attempt to leave the hotel until nine o’clock, when the curfew for foreign guests is lifted, or you will probably be arrested and detained.”

I guess you don’t get to sleep with anyone here, Jane said dryly, as we were escorted up the stairs to a room.  It was surprisingly luxurious, the room cleaned and prepared by a Slavic-faced girl who was clearly scared of me.  It was easy to guess how she’d been treated by other visitors to the hotel; the small cane in the room and the way she moved, wincing as she walked, proved that all too clearly.  The minder informed me that the girl – she never told me her name – was mine while I was staying in the Reich and that I could do what I liked with her.  The leer in his voice told me exactly what he had in mind and I made a mental promise to myself that I would kill him before I left.

Not until after you have penetrated the secrets here, Jane said firmly.  Now, get rid of her and sleep until it is truly dark.

I looked over at the girl, who fell to her knees in front of me.  “Tell me something,” I said, in careful German.  “Where do you sleep?”

She pointed to a side door.  I opened it, to reveal a small cupboard, barely large enough for her.  I looked back at her, wondering just how old she actually was; she couldn’t be much more than fifteen, if that.  She didn’t speak at all and I realised, with a moment of pure horror, why; they’d cut out her tongue.

“Sleep on the couch tonight,” I told her, and left her while I explored the apartment.  It was larger than I had thought, with a small room of food and drink, a second with a television screen and radio, and a third with a bathroom.  I filled the hot tub and spent thirty minutes just scrubbing myself, trying to get the Reich off my skin, but somehow it didn’t work.  I was going to be tainted for life.

Two hours later, the girl was asleep on the couch, after I’d convinced her that I wasn't interested in her, at least not sexually.  I hadn’t seen anything like it since we’d broken into a rape camp in Iraq, where the insurgents had used and abused Iraqi girls they’d snatched off the streets.  They’d been broken completely, turned into fuck machines, and the best we could do for them had been to give them medical care and some counselling.  At least two of them had been killed by their own parents, later, for having been raped.  It had been one of the reasons I’d been willing to accept Grandfather Time’s offer when it had been made…well, that, and being dead at the time.  I wasn't going to support anything like that.

It’s time, Jane said.  There are no guards outside the hotel, but there’s one outside every room.

“Time to go out the window,” I said.  I had changed into dark clothes and now I opened the window, leaning out into the darkness; Berlin was almost completely dark.  There was no reason to have a blackout drill now, but it seemed that the Reich had kept one anyway, just to keep the people reminded that there might be a war any second.  I climbed down the drainpipe with speed and skill, using Jane’s sensors to feel my way, and slipped through the streets until I located an SS officer on patrol.  The idiot was completely alone…

And then things got interesting.

Chapter Seven

I slipped up behind the German officer, neatly broke his neck, and dragged the body into an alley.  It was a matter of moments to strip the body, confiscate all of his possessions, and dress myself in his uniform.  I’d never worn a Nazi uniform before, even when taking part in other missions to other Nazi universes, but it fitted me well enough to go unnoticed.  It helped that the idiot was a Brigadefuehrer, a loose equivalent to a Brigadier General, and unless I was unlucky, I wouldn’t run into anyone senior enough to give him orders.  The guards at the gate might refuse to just allow him into the mystery building, but they wouldn’t shoot him on sight, I hoped.  I was pretty tough even before they started augmenting me, but a bullet through the head would kill me stone dead.

Jane scanned his identification quickly.  Brigadefuehrer Werner Schmidt, she said.  The name meant nothing to me and didn’t show up in Jane’s files either, although, judging by his face, he would have been in his teens when the Nazis lost the war in my universe.  Maybe he’d been a member of the Hitler Youth and killed during the war, maybe he’d been hidden from the draft, or…I shook my head.  There was no point in speculating and at least I wasn’t disgracing the American Army by posing as a known mass murderer.  

Silly, Jane informed me.  I’d known she could read my thoughts, indeed, she was partly composed of my thoughts, but it was still disturbing.  You’re a Time Agent now.  Your past no longer matters.

“It does to me,” I subvocalised, and walked off, copying the German marching style as best as I could.  It was a short walk to the mystery building and I was amused to note how the handful of patrols took one look at my uniform and carefully ignored me.  I guess the SS still had a reputation for taking its privileges seriously; any of them who got in my way might have found himself on the Eastern Border within a day.  Judging from what the displays had carefully not said, the area was still a hotbed of violence that made Iraq look like nothing.  I didn’t blame them; by now, the Russians had to know that the Germans intended to exterminate them all. We, despite the best slanders of the MSM, hadn’t gone into Iraq to commit mass slaughter.

The building rose up in front of me and I studied it quickly.  It would have been a bitch to penetrate under any circumstances; a main battle tank would have had problems getting into firing position – at least not without giving the defenders plenty of warning – and it would have been difficult for my old Marine Company to storm it.  Judging from the interior walls, the only easy way into the building was through the doors, and if they didn’t have that area secured, I’d eat my hat.  We could have simply bombed the building – I’d have loved to see the building that could stand up to a laser-guided bomb – but that would have destroyed the records.  It was the records that I needed to see.

I have completed my infiltration of the security systems, Jane informed me.  I smiled to myself; the time travellers hadn’t banked on anyone coming at them with equal technology, let alone vastly superior technology.  It added to my private suspicion about the entire affair.  You should be able to pass through the guards now.

“Good,” I subvocalised, and walked away from the building, around a second building, and advanced back towards the original building with a determined air.  The guards might have seen me, even in the near-darkness, wandering around the building and gotten suspicious.  A guard in the wrong place at the wrong time could really fuck up a plan, let alone one as vulnerable as mine.  “Here we go…”

The guards snapped to attention, holding their AK-47s at rest.  “Halt,” one of them said.  “Access to this place is strictly forbidden.”

“I have permission to enter,” I lied smoothly.  The guards, I suspected, didn’t know any more than anyone else about just what they were guarding.  I’d pulled such duties myself in the Marines, although the thought of having anything in common with the SS guards was enough to turn my stomach.  “This is my identification card.”

I passed over the stolen one and waited, hoping that Jane’s probes could prevent the systems from sounding the alarm.  Somehow, I doubted a lush like Schmidt had been would have access to the mystery building.  The man had been a walking security risk and I couldn’t even understand how he’d kept his rank.  The guard, puzzled, ran it though the scanner and relaxed slightly when it returned an ok verdict.  Jane had added a little to it, orders that I was to be passed through at once, and the guards obeyed, opening the gate for me.  I hadn’t realised that there were actually antitank traps between the first and second walls; it was overkill on a scale that astonished me.  There was also something very amateurish about it.  The second set of guards raised no objections, although they studied my card long enough to convince me that I should take them both out quietly and nip inside the building, just before they opened the gates and allowed me access.

“Bugger,” I subvocalised, as I entered the lobby and discovered a security precaution that hadn’t been visible from the outside.  A biometrics reader, almost exactly like the ones I’d used back in the Marines, sat there…and I was sure that it was attached to some really nasty weapons systems.  Inside the building, I could swear I could hear a strange humming running through the air, just on the edge of perception.  “Jane, can you deal with that?”

I sensed a flicker of amusement from the AI.  That’s not like the devices you would have used, it’s identical, Jane said.  I felt her reaching out with her probes, informing the device that it was fine and there was no need to sound any alarms, and touched the scanner at her command.  The device is from your timeline, if a little more advanced than a standard device.

“They’re from my timeline?”  I demanded.  It wasn’t impossible; I knew that my home timeline wasn't really territory – insofar as the War could have territory – belonging to either side, but somehow it felt…unpleasant to concede that people from my world could have plunged another world into a nightmare.  We’d had our own share of really unpleasant people – Saddam and Putin were only two – but would any of them have created such a nightmare?  Probably.  “Can you locate anything to suggest who they are?”

No, Jane said.  I suggest you search the building.

“I never would have thought of that,” I said, as I started to walk through the corridors.  Without Jane, I would have gotten hopelessly lost pretty quickly; the designer of the building, probably Bloody Stupid Johnston himself, had somehow created a maze that existed in three dimensions.  It didn’t take me long to realise that the building actually extended far below the surface – which made sense considering that Germany had the Bomb and America probably had it as well – and as I explored, I had the sense of whole vistas opening up in front of me.  I entered a computer room packed with computers from my time, each one linked into a system that seemed to control larges parts of the Reich, and I took a moment to leave a little surprise for the owners before continuing my explorations.

The second room I discovered was an armoury.  It was locked, but the time travellers had missed a trick and used another electronic locking system…and Jane was able to open it.  There were enough weapons stored there to fight a major action, from conventional AK-47s to explosives and grenades.  They’d probably been worried that one day the Nazis would turn on them, hardly something I could blame them for.  The Nazis probably would turn on them one day.

And then I stumbled across the library.

The minute I saw it, I knew I’d hit paydirt.  There were thousands upon thousands of books there, some of them dating back years, others newly published, although they were starting to show their age.  I recognised some of them – I’d even read some of them – and was impressed; the time travellers had definitely done their research.  The Road To Stalingrad, Hitler’s Empire, The Last Ditch, Eagle Against The Sun, Inside the Third Reich…the list went on and on.  The histories took second place to the technical manuals; some of them were focused on technology from the 1960s, others were focused on more advanced technology, worryingly advanced technology.  Someone working from such a history of the Manhattan Project, backed up by little titbits such as the locations of undiscovered ore in Africa, could get quite some distance along the track towards building an atomic bomb – and there was nothing inferior about German scientists.  Once the knowledge had been passed off as suitably Aryan – Hitler had believed, thank God, that atomic science was Jewish Science and therefore hadn’t been particularly interested – it would have been fairly straightforward to build a bomb.  Even knowing that something was possible was half the battle…

Other books were even more worrying.  I’d read some of them in the Marines and wondered.  America Alone was the only book I’d read twice, but others…others were truly disturbing.  If the person who’d collected the books had shown some of these to Himmler, it would have provided all the excuse he needed for the mass slaughters I’d read about in Saudi and the rest of the Middle East.  Himmler probably hadn’t needed the excuse, but hadn’t Hitler decided that the Iranians were Aryans as well or something?  The textbooks on genetics, on biological warfare, on a thousand different ways to make someone die…it clicked, suddenly, that we weren't dealing with who we thought we had been dealing with.

A polite cough from behind me had me jumping out of my skin.

I spun around to see the blonde-haired women I’d seen in the morning.  This time, she wore a simple nightgown, carefully tailored to show off her figure to best advantage, and held a handgun in her hand.  The Germans hadn’t produced that, I knew; it had definitely come from my world, a heavy man-killer designed for the feminine hand.  Her face was set in a strange expression, but there was nothing unsteady about the weapon she held in her hand, targeted on my face.

“How the hell did you miss her?”  I demanded of Jane, subvocalising as I thought quickly.  “You should have seen her coming!”

I’m not sure, Jane admitted.  She doesn’t show up on the security sensors at all.  I suspect they must have been programmed not to admit her presence.

I decided to play it carefully.  “Hello,” I said, in careful German.  “Who are you?”

“You’re American,” the woman said.  So much for my German.  Had I been observed from the moment I’d entered the Reich?  “When are you from?”

The question didn’t surprise me.  If I’d gotten this far, I was clearly from a time advanced enough to recognise and circumvent the security systems they’d built into the building.  “2004, originally,” I said, calmly.  Jane was running tactical simulations through my head, but I kept the urge to leap forward firmly suppressed.  “I died in Fallujah, during the second big battle, and was brought out of time and space.”

I remembered the IED.  I’d fucked up, missed it, and time had seemed to slow down as the blast wave raced towards me.  And then…time had stopped and Grandfather Time had made his offer, inviting me a chance to fight in a different war, rather than being blown to bits on the godforsaken streets of a godforsaken city.  I’d been told that there had been a very convincing body left behind for my comrades, although I’d never gone back to check it out…and my family believed I was dead.

“Curious,” the woman said.  There was no hostility in her tone.  “The Americans had time travelled technology that far back?”

“Not exactly,” I said.  “If you don’t mind me asking, how did you end up here and what are you doing?  And, coming to think of it, who are you?”

“My name is Gabi,” the woman said.  I listened quickly as she explained; she’d been the sister of a researcher in Germany – my Germany, although two decades in the future from my first life – who’d stumbled onto a way of displacing people back through time through brute force.  She had had the idea of using the device to go back in time and ensure that the Nazis won the war, as insane as it sounded, for a reason she was unwilling to discuss.  Jane ran through the equations in her processors and concluded that once they’d altered history, they’d lost contact with their original timeline, but by then it hardly mattered.

The likelihood of Enemy involvement is small, Jane informed me.  I had already concluded as much.  The Enemy, sitting outside the changed timeline, could have updated and improved their Nazi Empire as much as they wanted, just as they’d done it to the Draka and a million others.  Here, Gabi and her allies had changed time and then the ripples had gone where they would.  The Enemy hadn’t been involved, just a lone handful of people, determined to get revenge before the original crime had been committed.

“You’re mad,” I said finally.  Gabi had told me almost everything.  They’d made contact with Himmler, convinced him of who they were, and had aided the Germans to win the first stages of the war.  In the meantime, they’d burrowed into the Nazi state, slowly assuming control of the entire edifice, placing themselves in a position to rule the world.  They might even succeed.  “Nazi Germany is a dead end, completely.  You must know that!  You can’t fight evil by becoming evil!”

Gabi eyed me.  “But in this case, we are the evil ones committing evil,” she said.  “I find that something of an improvement.”

The light of a fanatic shone in her eyes and I knew that there would be no reasoning with her.  Whatever forces had shaped her still drove her.  “How did you manage to convince Hitler to trust you?”  I asked desperately.  “What do you do for him?”

“I’m his witch,” Gabi said.  She smiled the smile of the truly mad.  “Once we had convinced him of who we were, and what we could do for him, he didn’t want to let go of us.  I became his official mistress in public, and later his wife, and in private I was his closest adviser.  A proper diet and some proper medical care – Himmler had that quack Doctor of his tortured to death – ensured that he lived on into the 1960s, although it won’t be too long before we no longer need him.  Our people are everywhere within the Reich now and, in the chaos of the invasion of America, we’ll take over.”

She paused and took very definite aim at my forehead.  “Turn around and place your hands on your head,” she ordered.  “I don’t know who you’re working for, or what others you have with you, but you will reveal everything to us.  Move!”

I complied, grimly, and scowled as another man entered the room.  This one was a real soldier; he came up behind me, twisted my arms behind my back while holding a set of cuffs in the other, and cuffed me – again.  I allowed him to swing me round and move me towards the door, while Gabi returned her pistol to her holster…and I acted.  My enhanced strength broke the handcuffs and I smacked his head hard enough to cave in his skull, while turning at lightning speed towards Gabi.  Her eyes went wide with horror and she tried to get her pistol back out, but it was too late.  I hit her neatly between the eyebrows and saw her fall to the ground.

She’s barely out of it, Jane warned.  I wasn’t surprised.  It went against the grain to hit a woman, but we needed to know what she knew.  I picked her up and carried her through the door back to the armoury, where I rapidly rigged up some of the explosives to detonate in five minutes, and summoned the Portal.  The glowing square opened in front of me and I dived through, just in time to avoid the explosion as the explosions detonated and the chain reaction destroyed most of the building.  I doubted that most of the time travellers had actually been in the building, but maybe, just maybe, we’d been lucky.  Who knew?

***
Grandfather Time wasn't human.  I’d realised that long ago.  “They weren’t the Enemy,” he said, flatly.  He would have scanned Gabi’s mind relentlessly until she’d given up everything she knew.  I would have felt sorrier for her if she hadn’t been behind a scheme to create a Nazi world.  “They were just time travellers using a simple crude time machine.  They weren’t a real danger.”

I snorted.  “We are going to help them, though,” I said firmly.  He said nothing.  “They deserve better than just being abandoned, don’t they?”

“True,” Grandfather Time agreed.  “Would you be willing to return?”

I remembered.  I remembered Sally and Dave, back in Britain, and Old and Young.  I remembered the prostitute I’d met in France, and the poor girl I’d met in Berlin.  I remembered the fear sinking in all over Europe and the cold knowledge that one day, America would fall and then the Nazis would rule the world.  Gabi had had, in the end, human motives…but she’d created a nightmare.

“Yes,” I said.  “It will be my pleasure.”

Epilogue

(Two months later)

Arthur Faulkner studied the latest reports from Mexico with a growing sense of dissatisfaction.  The United States had known for years, ever since the Mexicans united their country and built an army that could defy the United States – or, at least, defy the United States Army as it had been – that one day it would face a challenge from the south, but none of the politicians had listened.  The smouldering conflict between blacks and whites in the south, labour unrest, communists and socialists in the workplaces…all had forced America to concentrate on home-grown problems.  The United States hadn’t cared when Germany had taken most of Europe, nor had they cared when China had finally been beaten to a standstill, or when the Japanese took India and the other European possessions in the Far East, or when the Philippines had thanked the Americans for their assistance and told the USA to withdraw their last remaining soldiers…

And now there was a German army building up in Mexico.  Mexico’s defiance had merely been the start of the toppling dominos.  Latin America had openly defied the United States, South America had slipped into the Nazi camp, and now the borders of the United States themselves were threatened.  The world’s most dangerous war machine was preparing to advance against the south and the United States wasn’t ready.  It would never be ready in time to stand off the Germans and their allies.  

There was a knock at the door.  “I’m sorry to disturb you, Mr Secretary, but there is a man here to see you,” his aide said.  “He claims to have information that is for your eyes only.”

Faulkner shrugged.  It might provide a moment’s distraction from the doom facing the United States.  “Show him in,” he said.  “And bring me a cup of coffee…and him too, if he wants one.”

The man stepped into the office.  He was a soldier, Faulkner could tell, with the firm gait of a man who’d seen combat and lived to tell of it.  That made his origins uncertain, but there had been several hundred Americans who’d fought in Latin America, trying to stem the tide of fascism.  They’d failed…and perhaps the man standing before him had a plan to change that.  He’d seen too many men with certain plans to win that had failed in the jungle…

“I believe that the United States has something of a problem,” he said, as he took his seat.  “I believe that I could help with it.”

He opened his briefcase, revealing a strange device.  Despite himself, Faulkner was fascinated…and his eyes went wide when the device lit up, revealing a screen that showed a picture of the world.

The words came before he could stop himself.  “Who are you?”

“Ah,” the man said.  “Perhaps I should explain…”

Never The End