"They are the elite of my elite," said Kriegslieter. "Complete mental linkage.
They are sustained by my will. While I live, they cannot die."
He turned over a body with his foot. It was the War Lord, staring sightlessly at the sky. Kriegslieter looked at the other corpses, the ones that had not risen. "All the others are dead. Once again you have turned up to ruin everything, Doctor. Soon I too shall die. But not before I have seen you and your companion torn to pieces..."
The little army of corpses began lurching towards them.
"Quick, Ace, the tower," yelled the Doctor.
They sprinted across the courtyard and ducked inside. Ace helped the Doctor to close the great door and drop the locking bar.
"Wait here for me," shouted the Doctor. "And hold them off, whatever you do!" "How?" wailed Ace. "It"s no use shooting them, they"re already dead!"
"Try grenades," yelled the Doctor and disappeared down the stairs.
Ace remembered the grenade-on-helmet demonstration. She rushed over to the arms section, found the grenade box and lugged it across the floor to a position near the staircase. She saw a smoking line moving up from the bottom of the door. It moved up, across and down again, tracing the shape of a small door within the larger one. Kriegslieter"s laser cane.
When the door section was complete, it was kicked from the outside and fell inwards. A black shape blocked the hole, and Ace pulled the pin on her first grenade and lobbed it through.
The explosion blew the black shape away, but another took its place.
Another shape, another grenade, another explosion.
Ace lost count of the number of times the sequence was repeated. Soon the number of grenades in the box was getting low. She fumbled a grenade and one of the black shapes got through. The next grenade blew it to wriggling fragments, but another shape was through and another. As they lurched towards her, Ace grabbed the last few grenades and retreated towards the stairs. Somehow she knew she couldn"t bear it if one of them touched her.
They were all through now, Kriegslieter as well...
He raised his cane, Ace threw her last grenade, and something grabbed her arm.
It was the Doctor.
"Come on, up to the top!" he yelled.
Ace hared up the stone staircase after him, trying not to think of the dragging feet behind her. Suddenly she became aware that the whole building was shaking.
"What"s going on, Professor?" "They"ve got an atomic reactor down in the bas.e.m.e.nt. Can"t leave that sort of thing lying around in the late thirties. Far too anachronistic."
"So what did you do?" As if in answer to her question, the whole tower started shuddering.
"Threw it into overload," yelled the Doctor.
"How long have we got?" The Doctor opened the hatchway to the roof.
"Well, it"s hard to be precise, it"s a very primitive installation. But judging by the sounds it"s making - not. . . very . . . long!" He hauled Ace out on to the roof of the tower. Suddenly she realized the full horror of the situation.
"Hold it, Professor! We"re being chased to the top of a tower by a gang of zombies - and your solution is to blow the tower up with an atomic bomb?"
"That"s right. It seemed pretty neat to me. What"s wrong?" The whole tower seemed to be swaying now.
A crack appeared in the parapet and a chunk fell off.
"Professor!" screamed Ace. "We are standing on top of the tower. The one you are blowing up!" "Not for long," said the Doctor.
He produced a device like a keyring and pressed a control. Nothing happened. The Doctor looked worried. A huge crack appeared in the stone roof of the tower, and some more bits of parapet fell off. A deep rumble filled the air, and the whole tower was lashing to and fro like a ship"s mast in a gale.
"Well, Professor?" screamed Ace.
The Doctor frowned thoughtfully. He shook the keyring. Putting his fingers in his mouth he gave a piercing whistle. The TARDIS materialized in midair, hovering about three feet above the ground.
"Blast!" said the Doctor. "It"s always the little things. . . "Fishing out his key he said, "Give me a leg up, Ace!" Ace bent down, the Doctor put his feet on her shoulders, and she slowly straightened up. The Doctor reached for the keyhole and the ground rippled under her feet.
Ace staggered and the Doctor fell against the floating TARDIS.
"Keep still, girl," he yelled.
Ace tried but it was like doing a balancing act on a trampoline. Somehow the Doctor managed to get the key in the lock, open the door and scramble inside. He knelt in the open doorway leaning out at a dangerous angle, reaching down for her. Ace couldn"t quite reach his outstretched hand.
"I can"t do it, Professor," she called. You"ll have to go without me!"
"Jump!" shouted the Doctor. "Just grab my hand!"
"I tell you I can"t . . ."
Suddenly the hatchway burst open. It was Kriegslieter, zombie soldiers behind him. Ace leaped in the air like a terrified kangaroo The Doctor grabbed her wrist, hauling her up and through the door with amazing ease.
"Close the door!" shouted the Doctor once she was securely in. Ace turned to close the door and caught a glimpse of Kriegslieter emerging from the hatch. The vibration of the tower must have triggered off some of the conventional explosives. Suddenly a great tongue of fire belched out from the hatchway, engulfing him. There bathed in the flame, Ace saw, just for a second, a young man, tall, dark and satanically handsome, reaching up to her . . .
The door closed, the TARDIS dematerialized, and they were gone.
The Drachensberg Tower disappeared in a roaring pillar of fire. When the flames died down, a cloud hung over the area for days. People who stayed on after the catastrophe sickened and died. Eventually the local people said the place was cursed and they all moved away. Drachensberg became an abandoned ruin in a region of desolation.
15: LAST CHANCE.
Inside the TARDIS the Doctor was scrabbling inside a locker. He emerged with an old-fashioned storm-lantern, an ancient atlas and an enormous book.
"There"s one chance," he muttered. "Just one. . . "
Ace looked down at her tattered sacrificial robe. "Just don"t tell me anything till I"ve had a wash and change, okay?"
When she came back into the control room she found the Doctor had removed a small panel from the console. He was removing a small but complex piece of TARDIS circuitry and transferring it, with enormous care, to the interior of the big old storm-lantern.
Now back in a spare outfit of her usual street gear - jeans, boots, tee shirt, bomber jacket - Ace felt she was herself again. "Okay, Professor. You can start by telling me how you whistled up the TARDIS like that."
"The whistle was purely symbolic," said the Doctor. "It focused my mind while I sent out a powerful thought-impulse to the TARDIS"s telepathic circuits."
"So we could have got away from that ghastly place whenever we wanted to?"
"Well, not really. We were observed and under guard for most of the time, and I didn"t dare risk letting the War Lords get their hands on the TARDIS."
"But we could have escaped long before we did? When we were first on the tower for instance?"
"I didn"t want to leave till I"d sorted things out. As it is, I"ve made the most terrible mess of things."
"I thought we won!"
"A Pyrrhic victory," said the Doctor bitterly.
"Come again?"
"We found two kinds of temporal interference, remember? War Lords and Timewyrm. I managed to deal with Kriegslieter and the War Lord and their SS zombies. . ."
Ace nodded. "Pretty thoroughly, I"d say."
"Yes, but they were never the real problem."
Ace shuddered, remembering Kriegslieter standing over her at the altar, the dead SS men rising in the courtyard. "They weren"t?"
"Just a bunch of incompetent would-be supermen," said the Doctor dismissively. "Their second plan wasn"t much better than the first. Those SS zombies turned out to be pretty useless in battle - no sense of self-preservation, no initiative. Their atomic reactor was a botched-up ramshackle affair, it would probably have gone up by itself in time. They never really knew what they were doing -especially when it came to their dealings with Hitler."
"Because of the Timewyrm?"
"Exactly! The Timewyrm was looking for someone to use as a figurehead to manipulate human history. She chose Hitler, partly because of his rabblerousing potential, partly because he lived in explosive times. But Adolph"s mind had all the strength of madness, and the Timewyrm got trapped inside. She boosted Hitler"s powers in an erratic sort of way just by being there, but she couldn"t control him properly, and he couldn"t control her."
"Then the War Lords came along?"
The Doctor nodded. "Like the Timewyrm, they were looking for a human puppet to make use of - and the Timewyrm-boosted Hitler seemed to be exactly what they needed. They could see Hitler had unusual psychic powers, vast surges of energy.
But they never knew where they came from. They just stabilized him as best they could, and boosted his powers with some fairly crude psychic amplification. A bit like kicking a time bomb to keep it ticking."
"But you sorted Hitler out?"
"Oh yes, I did a wonderful job. In order not to change history, I tried to teach Hitler to cope with the Timewyrm. I overdid it and ended up teaching him to control her. I"d forgotten that megalomaniacs like Hitler have a colossal strength of will."
Ace was beginning to understand. "So Hitler gets to be a perfectly genuine superman?"
The Doctor nodded gloomily. "It"s a total disaster! Thanks to me, he"s strong, he"s magnetic, he"s confident and he won"t make any more loony mistakes. He could stay on top forever."
"Looks like you"ve set up a winning combo, Professor. So, what can we do?"
"There"s just one chance left," said the Doctor. "If I can intervene, just once more, at precisely the right place and the right time. . ."
"When and where?"
The Doctor consulted his book.
Ace looked over his shoulder at the t.i.tle. " The Day by Day Almanac of The Day by Day Almanac of World War II. World War II.
"We"re going to a place codenamed Felsennest," said the Doctor. "On a particular night in May 1940."
Ace counted on her fingers. "That"s what, about nine months after we left?
Can you time things that close?"
"I must," said the Doctor. "I must." He finished his work on the storm-lantern and snapped it closed.
Ace looked curiously at the lantern. "And where does that come in?"
"I shall use it," said the Doctor, "to light up the dark recesses of Hitler"s mind -and reveal the Timewyrm."
PART FOUR
1940 CRISIS.
In the first weeks of the war Adolf Hitler demonstrated the most extraordinary qualities of determination and decision. Immune to fatigue, extraordinary qualities of determination and decision. Immune to fatigue, showing little need for food or sleep, he launched the successful invasion showing little need for food or sleep, he launched the successful invasion of Poland, and soon afterwards prepared and carried out the Blitzkrieg, of Poland, and soon afterwards prepared and carried out the Blitzkrieg, the lightning conquest of Europe. the lightning conquest of Europe.
Led by the Panzer tank columns, his armies flowed over Europe in a seemingly unstoppable tide... seemingly unstoppable tide...
Reminiscences of World War II by General H. Popplewell.
Published London, 1946.
1: EXODUS OF EVIL.
Felsennest, the "eyrie on the cliffs", was close to Aachen, the ancient capital of King Charlemagne. It was Adolf Hitler"s command post at the beginning of the war.
The command bunker had been blasted from solid rock high on a heavily wooded mountaintop near the village of Rodert. It was a secure place, ringed with barbed wire and concrete gun emplacements.
It was late at night, and Adolf Hitler had dismissed his staff. He stood alone, in his uniform tunic, his "soldier"s coat", gazing out over the mountains and the forests, thinking of all the countries that were, or would soon be, his own. Holland, Belgium, France and soon, England.