Anno Frankenstein Read online

  PAX BRITANNIA

  ANNO FRANKENSTEIN

  By Jonathan Green

  “So God created man in His own image...

  And God saw every thing that He had made,

  and, behold, it was very good.

  And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.”

  (Genesis 1:27,31)

  Pax Britannia

  The Ulysses Quicksilver Books, by Jonathan Green

  Unnatural History

  Leviathan Rising

  Human Nature

  Evolution Expects

  Blood Royal

  Dark Side

  Anno Frankenstein

  The El Sombra Books, by Al Ewing

  El Sombra

  Gods of Manhattan

  For Adam -

  Congratulations!

  And for the Durston Dads -

  Didn’t wipe out on this one, but only just.

  An Abaddon BooksTM Publication

  www.abaddonbooks.com

  [email protected]

  First published in 2011 by Abaddon Books™, Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK.

  Editors: Jenni Hill & David Moore

  Cover Art: Mark Harrison

  Internal Illustration: Pye Parr

  Design: Simon Parr & Luke Preece

  Marketing and PR: Michael Molcher

  Creative Director and CEO: Jason Kingsley

  Chief Technical Officer: Chris Kingsley

  Pax Britannia™ created by Jonathan Green

  Copyright © 2011 Rebellion. All rights reserved.

  Pax Britannia™, Abaddon Books and Abaddon Books logo are trademarks owned or used exclusively by Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited. The trademarks have been registered or protection sought in all member states of the European Union and other countries around the world. All right reserved.

  ISBN: (ePUB) 978-1-84997-269-7

  ISBN: (MOBI) 978-1-84997-270-3

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  PROLOGUE

  All Quiet on

  the Western Front

  What luck for the rulers that men do not think.

  – Adolf Hitler

  YPRES, BELGIUM, 1941

  THIS PLACE HAD been a forest once, or so he’d been told. Eric Baer certainly wouldn’t have known otherwise. The occasional blackened stump remained, but on the whole the battlefield was now just a grey expanse of mud, a morass of crater holes flooded by the incessant rain. He could see right across the quagmire to the French lines, where soldiers could be glimpsed in uniforms reminiscent of the Napoleonic era. The French looked as miserable as Eric was feeling.

  The rain was a relentless barrage on the heads of the weary soldiers, whether German or French. It drummed against their helmets, blew into their eyes, blinding them, ran down the back of their necks and soaked into everything. Eric couldn’t remember the last time he had been dry.

  But it was nothing compared to the cold.

  Eric couldn’t remember the last time he had felt warm either. The occasional cup of milky coffee or tin of unidentifiable boiled meat did little to warm his cockles and snatched moments beside an oil drum brazier only brought life to his fingertips for fleeting moments.

  Days of inaction didn’t help. Days of sitting in freezing bunkers burrowed out of the earth, soldiers living as if they were some species of rodent. Days listening to the juddering crump and boom of the distant barrages while the walls of the dugout shook around you until you were either numb to the noise or your nerves were shot to shreds and you were never able to sleep again. Sleeping, grabbing what meagre warmth you could from a threadbare blanket, keeping your boots on in bed so as to keep the rats from your gangrenous toes.

  And the cold and the damp together were as bad as any form of torture the Gestapo could come up with for the Third Reich’s enemies to endure in the long run.

  It was the First Great European War all over again. They had said it would be different this time, but it wasn’t. Not as far as Eric Baer could tell, anyway. They might be fighting for the Führer now rather than the Kaïser, but the result was the same; hunkered down in trenches as the war ground down to a stalemate.

  There was talk of the automaton armies of Magna Britannia joining the battle on the side of Queen Victoria’s European cousins if Hitler threatened Russia’s borders. Eric Baer didn’t know if the rumours were true or mere campfire conjecture spread by war-weary men, like him, who had joined up to fight for the honour of the Fatherland and their families.

  They said that war was hell and Eric Baer was starting to believe them. He had seen enough of war to last him a lifetime. But there was never any consideration of desertion. That thought never entered his head, no matter how miserable the drudgery of the campaign became.

  And now here he was, two years after signing up – motivated by idealism, by an intention to avenge the Fatherland for the wrongs that had been committed by the imperialistic powers in the aftermath of Kaïser Wilhelm’s war. Cold and wet and miserable, and facing what was likely to be his last day on Earth.

  Today was the day of the big push, the day the German army unleashed its newest and most terrifying weapon on the enemy; but the grunts had little enthusiasm for it. The thrill of joining up and fighting for the Führer had long since withered to resignation after months of stalemate, living – if it could be called that – in the cold and damp of the trenches of the Besson Line.

  The stalemate had to be broken. The orders had come from the top. Perhaps the Führer was worried that the British might soon join the war; just as Magna Britannia had stepped in to stop the Kaïser’s bid at empire-building more than twenty years before. The Third Reich had to act now and act fast, to secure the rest of Europe and make any attempt by Magna Britannia’s automaton forces to halt its advance futile.

  Two years after Herr Hitler had occupied Czechoslovakia, the Nazis were advancing across the no man’s land of Belgium only to be halted here at Ypres, the site of another stalemate almost thirty years before. Much of Europe had already fallen to the inexorable march of the armies of the Third Reich, but a few pockets of resistance still remained. To date the Magna Britannian government had yet to get involved.

  To the east, the Nazis’ advance was currently contained by Russia. However, once the whole of Europe was under Nazi rule, it could only be a matter of time before the power-mad Führer set his sights on Russia or mounted an invasion of the British Isles. And if Magna Britannia should fall to the might of the Third Reich’s armies, then Hitler would become de facto ruler of the world. They were on the verge of a glorious dawn for Germany and the Third Reich, and it unsettled Eric Baer to the very core of his being. He wasn’t the only one.

  But here they were, following orders handed down from distant generals – warm in their procured castle strongholds, sitting before roaring fires, with hot spirit in their bellies – preparing to break the stalemate and, from there, march for Paris.

  If the Allies won today, the beleaguered French and Belgian forces might be able to hold out until their masters could persuade Magna Britannia to wade in at last. That knowledge lent them a ferocity and a determination that even the perpetual drizzle and sodden grey clouds couldn’t dampen.

  The Germans were fighting to conquer their enemies, but their enemies were fighting for survival, with a strength of will that few of the grunt
s among the German army possessed in the same measure.

  But then it wasn’t the average German soldier that was going to win this war for the Führer and the Third Reich.

  Eric Baer shivered, and this time it wasn’t solely down to the bone-numbing cold. The mere thought of them made his flesh crawl. The official line was that they would be the Fatherland’s salvation but to Eric Baer’s mind they were the unholy spawn of a science that was little better than necromancy. When a man died he should stay dead, that was the natural order of things; not be brought back as part of some horrific amalgam.

  Eric Baer gripped his rifle closely to him. It was the only thing that made him feel safe; and it wasn’t the enemy he was afraid of.

  An unnatural stillness had fallen over no man’s land. It was as if the combined French and Belgian forces had some inkling of what the German soldiers already knew; as if Mother Nature herself was holding her breath, aware that something contrary to the natural order of things was about to be unleashed upon the world.

  The dead should stay dead, it was as simple as that, and yet here was Man – in the form of the Frankenstein Corps, carrying on the work of the legendary scientist himself – about to commit the ultimate hubris without even giving it a second thought. Even God Himself had brought a scant handful of people back from the dead.

  Supposedly only the top brass were party to the top secret documentation; it hadn’t been passed on to the rank and file. All they had been told officially by their commanders was that today they would lead the offensive and that they would be supported by members of the mysterious Frankenstein Corps.

  But news like that couldn’t stay secret for long, threat of execution by firing squad or no. Eric Baer, like many others, had heard the rumours – the stories of the horrific, ungodly things that went on in the bowels of the castle overlooking the town of Darmstadt.

  A gust of chill wind blew across the grey, muddied wastes of no man’s land, carrying with it an eddy of dancing black leaves – remnants of the dead forest – and the anxious murmurings and disbelieving gasps of the French forces, half a mile away across the pot-holed field, ready to repel the German advance one last time. But then they could see what Eric Baer and his fellow German soldiers could not.

  Eric felt the tremor of their lumbering steps and fought to resist the urge to turn around and see for himself what the flesh-smiths of Castle Frankenstein had created.

  It was like an itch at the base of his skull, an unbearable need to know, no matter what the cost, but married to a fear that penetrated right to the very core of his being, a fear of that which should not be. There was a reason why the dead should stay dead after all. What the Führer and his supporters did for the good of the war effort seemed too high a price to pay. After all, if they were fighting for humanity in the face of oppression, following the First Great European War, what was the point if they only threw away what humanity they had left?

  Wasn’t there a saying along those lines? Just because you could, didn’t mean you should?

  Science was capable of many amazing and wonderful life-changing things, but could ensure Mankind’s destruction by its own hand.

  The ground shook under the thud, thud, thud of their advance, almost as if they were following Lovelacian algorithms like the automaton armies of Magna Britannia.

  Another gust of wind and the enemy lines were murmuring no longer, but shouting in shock and fear. The new battle company were already having an effect on the enemy and they hadn’t even engaged them in combat yet. Eric pitied them; but not as much as he pitied the things now bolstering the German lines, the monsters that were about to be unleashed on the enemy on this auspicious day.

  The top brass’s strategy was working. It looked to Eric like the French line was faltering, and the signal to attack still hadn’t been given.

  He could almost smell their fear – or was it, in fact, the Corps’ creations he could smell?

  That was it. The battlefield scents of wet mud and cordite had merged with another aroma; a mixture of formaldehyde, sickly sweet putrefaction and axle grease. But more than anything, it was the smell of death defeated, of overreaching ambition, of the hubris of Man.

  In the face of the terrified reaction of the French troops and the shuddering tremors of their massed lumbering steps, as they marched ever closer, Eric Baer could hold out no longer. He turned.

  His own gasp of horror caught in his throat as he laid eyes on the Corps’ creations for the first time.

  They were even worse in the flesh than they had been in the darkest corners of his imagination. In his dark dreams, they had been giants all, manufactured from stolen flesh.

  Now, he saw that they were in fact an amalgamation of man and machine. No two were completely alike in shape or form, but all were united by the scars they bore; marks that were testament to the nature of their unnatural creation.

  The Frankenstein Corps; dead soldiers re-united piecemeal, their lifeless flesh reanimated that they might fight again. A terror weapon, cannon fodder, soldiers who could never truly die, as long as there was someone to put them back together again once the battle was over.

  Eric Baer turned from his observations of the resurrected cyber-organic soldiers and caught the look in the eye of the trembling soldier standing next to him.

  “Hans,” he said, addressing the nervous wretch with the familiarity of men who have fought together, side by side, and seen their fellows fall in the same fashion.

  “I know,” the other replied. “They scare the hell out of me too.”

  “No, it’s not that,” Eric said.

  “What then?”

  “If I should fall today, will you promise me something? If I should die today, or, even if I’m only maimed, if I look like I’m going to lose my legs or something…”

  He broke off, watching the dead leaves pirouette across the churned grey sludge in front of him. As the wind carried the dancing debris away he turned back to face his friend.

  “Blow my brains out, would you? Shoot me in the head, my friend. I don’t want to end up like that.” He nodded towards the advancing monsters behind them. “If it’s my time to die, I want to stay dead. Do you understand?”

  Hans Richter smiled at him grimly. “Only if you do the same for me.”

  A shrill whistle pierced the air, sending a shiver down Eric’s spine. The signal had been given.

  “This is it,” he said. “Good luck, my friend.”

  Hans Richter threw him a sharp salute. “For Germany and the Third Reich!”

  “For the Fatherland! Charge!”

  Act One

  The Labours of Hercules

  “Through clever and constant application of propaganda,

  people can be made to see paradise as Hell,

  and also the other way around,

  to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.”

  – Adolf Hitler

  CHAPTER ONE

  An Unexpected Arrival

  DARMSTADT, GERMANY, 1943

  THE SOLDIER CAME to attention. The sharp click of his heels echoed the ticking of the ancient clock on the mantelpiece above the grand fireplace.

  Colonel Wolf Kahler took a moment to finish scanning the page of production statistics in front of him. Leaning back in his chair, he glanced up from the business of the day, and stared at the messenger with hawkish attention, eyes unblinking.

  “Yes?” he snapped curtly.

  “Herr Colonel,” the young man began, “a spy has been captured in the hills outside Darmstadt.”

  Kahler’s eyes and expression didn’t falter once as he addressed the messenger in return. “Fascinating. A spy, you say?”

  “A British spy,” the young man went on, “although his German is very good.”

  “Then how can you be so sure he’s British?” Kahler asked.

  “He told the commander of the squad that captured him.”

  Kahler blinked at last. “What else did he tell his captors?”
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  “That he wanted to see you, Herr Colonel. In person.”

  At this Kahler frowned. He didn’t like the sound of that. “His information must be very good; too good.” The facility, and all personnel operating within it, were classified top secret. “Where is he now?”

  “In a holding cell in D block.”

  Colonel Kahler got to his feet. “And you say he simply volunteered all of this information when he was captured?”

  “Actually, he wasn’t really captured, Herr Colonel.” To his credit, the messenger continued to meet Kahler’s stare, although his cheeks flushed.

  “What do you mean? You said he had been captured.”

  “I know, Colonel, but according to Captain Engelbrecht who brought him in, he more or less gave himself up. It was as if he wanted to be found.”

  “I have to admit I am intrigued,” Kahler said, taking his jacket from the back of the chair and pulling it over his starched shirt and blood-red braces.

  “Then you’ll come, sir?” the messenger asked, surprised.

  “I am intrigued,” Kahler repeated as he smoothly buttoned up the jacket. “I don’t suppose this ‘prisoner’ happened to tell anyone his name, did he?” He moved towards the door of the palatial study. His office was where the family must have once taken their meals, still adorned with the paintings and faded tapestries of another, nobler age.

  The messenger scampered to keep up with him as they left the office and moved into the stone corridor beyond, cold after the warmth of the office with its fire crackling in the hearth.