Before Tomorrowland (27 page)

Rotwang tugged. Henry’s heart, a silver cylinder streaked with steaming tears of yellow acid, slid out of him. The surging currents of thoughts, memories, and sensations that once coursed
so vibrantly through his circuits were becoming mere wisps.

His final seconds passed in slow motion. He saw Rotwang walk away with the core. He saw him direct an apocalypse jumper toward Henry. He saw the man in the armor he helped build approach him and
raise a gauntlet to him. He saw the flap open and a nozzle emerge like an unfurling telescope. He saw a pair of sparks. He saw the tip bloom with flame. He saw the fire engulf him. He saw the black
smoke rising off from the parts of him burning below his head. He saw melting flesh dripping from his brow. Then he saw nothing.

The remainder of his awareness dimmed with the remainder of his electrical systems, like a movie fading to black. The last sensation he experienced was a sound, far away and small. It was a
woman’s voice, crying.

R
OTWANG WATCHED
the last bits of the HS1’s synthetic flesh burn away. The purifying fire left behind a clean,
streamlined, nickel-plated automaton, the smooth contours interrupted by an occasional set of perforations for exhaust or ball bearings for joints. He remembered when he’d first conceived of
the machine. He had been in New York for a conference on Cartesian dualism, and during a respite, he went to a gallery and saw a bronze cast of Brâncuşi’s
L’Oiseau dans
l’espace.
It was a sculpture of a bird that described not its body, but its movement. It was a sleek, light stroke of pure energy made manifest, liberated of flesh and bone, feathers and
face. Rotwang thought birds were ugly creatures. But this was beautiful. Beholding the HS1’s shell, stripped of its fabricated skin, Rotwang realized he liked it better this way, and he
decided that was how he would live the rest of his endless days, once he put his mind into it.

It nearly saddened him that the chase was over. After he and Duquesne had dealt with Lohman and returned to the
Dunkelstar
, Rotwang had pinpointed the HS1’s location at the
World’s Fair. What havoc it had wrought upon Plus Ultra! He delighted in that. Then came his gamble. As soon as the HS1 arrived at Wardenclyffe, Rotwang had ordered the
Dunkelstar
to
Long Island and radioed the Nazi base on Newfoundland to fly in reinforcements. By the time the HS1 had arrived in Faustus’s receiving room, the
Dunkelstar
was within ten miles of the
hangar, hidden in a megastructure fifty miles off the coast of New Jersey, invisible to radar and disguised by a hologram to appear as a monolith rock. It matched the blueprints Duquesne had leaked
to him months ago. They never would have found it without being able to track the HS1.

Rotwang marveled at the luck of nabbing two birds with one stone. He had regained the HS1 and seized the means to penetrate the other world. His plan for transcendence was near complete. His
destiny was calling. All that remained was to take the HS1 and his transfer equipment to the other side, and to shut off access to this miserable failure of a world.

Duquesne raised his jumper’s visor and retracted the flame-thrower he’d just used to incinerate the HS1’s outsides. He gave an admiring whistle. “That’s a pretty
piece of hardware, Doc. You want me to load it on your plane?”

Rotwang stepped close so only Duquesne might hear him. “Find the woman and her boy first. They may be useful hostages if Plus Ultra responds tonight.” Duquesne nodded and marched off
toward the jets. Rotwang appreciated the American Nazi’s help just enough to feel badly about betraying him: he had promised Duquesne a home for him and his harem in the other world. Rotwang
had no intention of fulfilling the vow. At the appropriate moment, he would shoot him through the back of the head.

Rotwang hustled as fast as his crippled body would allow him to the hangar’s central control room. Lieberman was there, supervising soldiers snapping photos of the sophisticated computers
and raiding the drawers for documents that looked important. “How long will it take for you to build our army, Doctor?”

“Once we secure Plus Ultra’s robot factory in the Bermuda Triangle, it should take me but a week to create the molds,” said Rotwang. “We should be able to manufacture 100
HS2s in the first week, and double the production by the fourth week.” Every word was a lie. There was no Plus Ultra base in the Bermuda Triangle, and certainly no intention to replicate the
HS1 for Hitler and his stormtroopers. “Are your men prepared to take flight?”

“When you are.”

“Then have them ready to board the planes. This should take only a minute.”

Rotwang worked the computers. He had gleaned from the blueprints provided by Duquesne that the Grid automatically responded to Plus Ultra planes when they flew over it. Rotwang needed to
initiate the system and tag the vessels to be snared and jumped. “I am deleting the tour programming in each of the planes and reprogramming the navigational systems with the coordinates for
the Bermuda base. You can fly the planes yourselves, or let the automatic pilot do the work for you.” He then removed the Luger from his holster and fired three bullets into the keyboard. No
one would be able to undo what he had done.

“Doctor…where did the stars go?”

Lieberman was looking through the window of the control room toward the open mouth of the hangar. The night sky was no longer discernable. It was obscured by an undulating dusky shape, like a
billowing flag, growing larger as it pushed through the hologram. Once it was completely inside the hangar, it slowed, and turbines whined as it reversed and hovered over the jets. The massive
thing glistened with sparks as it became fully visible.

It was the Plus Ultra zeppelin.

A single thought seized Rotwang:

The core.

He scrambled out of the control room and hobbled down the stairs to the hangar floor. The Nazis were screaming orders at each other and running to defensive positions. An apocalypse jumper leapt
over him to board the zeppelin. There was a flash and the sound of a shot. The jumper sparked and pinwheeled in midair, then plunged and crashed atop a jet. Three other apocalypse jumpers opened
fire on the zeppelin with their heavy machine guns; two of them crumpled in a blaze of electromagnetic energy fired from the rifle of a sniper inside the zeppelin’s gondola.

He was a fool, and he had been played for one. He understood that now. The joke of his fifty years was so perfectly told, the punchline so devastating, even Rotwang could appreciate it. He
laughed, harder and harder, until the shock of his failure finally wore off, and rage took hold and quieted him.

He remembered there was part of his dream that was not yet dead. He could still have that. He could escape. He could be free.

He remembered the other world, and he moved.

E
ARHART PRESSED
her back into the starboard observation deck and loaded four more EMP bullets into her bolt-action rifle.
She’d taken down three heavy metal Nazis; at least four remained. Machine gunfire pattered over the airship’s hull, snaking and spiraling. She popped up, aimed down her sights at
another suit, and pulled the trigger. Number four fell. She pulled the bolt, loaded, and aimed at the fifth. She missed. The mechanical suit used its hydraulic legs to jump sixty feet across the
hangar and take cover behind their jets. A dozen Faustus robots ran from beneath the
Pulsar
and swarmed over a Nazi mech. The armored suit batted and swiveled to shake them off. Everywhere
there was smoke, gleaming metal, and muzzle flashes.

The zeppelin shuddered from an attack on its opposite side. Earhart lost her balance and spilled her ammunition on the deck. She steadied herself, grabbed the ammo can, and sprinted through the
airship to the port deck. The ship pitched left and she fell to her knees, sliding to cover. Rocket streamers clouded the air and obscured her view of the hangar floor. She fired on another mech
once, missed, pulled the bolt, fired again, hit it, then ducked back into the vessel, breathing hard, praying the zeppelin’s armor would hold up against the barrage of artillery.

Maybe it was the thought of all that hydrogen gas next to her that caused her fingers to fumble and drop the ammo. She cursed, grabbed it before it rolled away, and shoved three rounds in her
gun’s chamber before another blast rocked the ship. She slid, kicking her legs to find a brace on the deck, but she kept tumbling. She dropped her rifle and flailed both arms for a hold, but
she didn’t find one. Earhart floated over the deck’s edge, her body lifting up and away from the zeppelin. Time stopped, and in a breathless moment, she saw every detail on the concrete
floor a hundred feet below her.

Her jacket had caught on the rail.

She clambered backward and unhooked herself, grabbed the rifle, rose, aimed, and fired. Armored German number five went down shooting its rocket launcher straight into the ground, blowing apart
a nearby Nazi plane. Earhart pulled her gun’s bolt, yelled, and fired at number six. Its right leg buckled. Number seven, the one covered in a swarm of Faustuses, took her last bullet. She
ducked, reloaded, and popped up again. Earhart swept her rifle back and forth, hunting for the one that had gotten away, number four, but the smoke was too thick.

She ran back inside the zeppelin, past the Faustus crew to the forward windows, and smashed one out with the butt of her rifle. She scanned the hangar. Amid the scattered smoke and gunfire, one
of the suits stood empty. She labeled it number eight and shot it for good measure. It sparked, but remained standing.

Between Earhart and number eight there was another thing standing in place: a nickel-colored robot surrounded by a circle of char. She cranked another bolt into the chamber and aimed down her
sights, but when the robot didn’t move, she swept her gun away. Suit number four must still have been taking cover somewhere in the row of jets. She lowered the gun and looked back and forth
across the hangar.

She made a move to run back to the starboard side when number four appeared, jumping straight up at her, sixty, seventy, ninety feet off the ground. Earhart felt pieces of glass bounce off her
as the machine burst through the windows and slid across the zeppelin’s bridge, taking out two or three Faustus robots in its path and smashing them against the back wall. Before the Nazi
mech could get to its feet, she shot it in the back. It collapsed on its face and sizzled with electric arcs.

Earhart shook the glass from her hair and jacket and snapped an order to the nearest silver robot: “Take us down, Faustus!”

Earhart swapped her EMP rifle for a stun gun and headed for the gangplank. Ten more Faustus robots awaited her, and when she charged for the hangar floor, they all gathered around her like a
living shield.

The Nazi soldiers’ gunfire sparked and clattered over their silver bodies, but the Faustus units didn’t slow. “Give those men some love!” Earhart shouted. She
couldn’t help but laugh as the robots ran over and wrapped their strong arms around their enemies, immobilizing them with the most awkward hugs she’d ever seen.

A bullet ricocheted off the concrete beside her. She jumped behind one of the fallen mechs and fired her stun gun blindly over the top. Where had the shot come from? She stole a glance around
the collapsed hulk. A rush of pressurized air blew out beside her, and next thing she knew, a man’s arms were wrapped around her neck. She dropped the stun gun, choking, hitting at the arm.
It was the mech pilot, still partly strapped into the metal suit. He tugged his strong arms tighter, and she flailed and saw his cruel face, grinding teeth, and waxy mustache. In that instant, she
recognized him.

“Why’re you so surprised?” growled Fritz Duquesne.
“Think I’ d take orders from a skirt?!”