Pulp Spycraft
Furio, descending the stairs first, shielded Houston’s actions from view. He saw two guards in plainclothes standing in the lower corridor, by the kitchen door they’d forced. Then, a whiiifff zipped by his right ear.
“Kiss El Paso!” shouted Houston as the improbably aerodynamic super-soldier shield SLAMMED into the first guard’s chest. The Nazi sympathizer bounced off the wall as the shield boomeranged back to Capt. Texas. Furio dove under its arc, his .45 rising. He prayed the weapon’s BOOM wouldn’t be heard –
-- but he had no need to fire it. The remaining guard had his hands raised already. From behind the villain stepped Nadia Tesla, a pretty little .32 pressed against the man’s temple. Some fop in tweed hovered behind Nadia, staring at the gun in horror. It was David McGregor, the engineer she'd met at the party. “Nadia, what , what is this –“
“Do be quiet, David, I barely have enough patience to continue explaining the subtleties of espionage to just one clod-footed dolt.” Nadia nodded to Furio. Furio picked up the unconscious guard, pulled him back into the shadows of the tower stairwell.
“Now see here, Miss Tesla, no need to speak about Furious that way.” Capt. Texas finished adjusting the arm straps on his shield. “He may be a foreign fella, but that’s the glory of the U. S. of A. Everybody can pitch in to make it a better place, even – in their own small way -- non-Texans.”
Nadia’s eyes narrowed. Could she get a shot off at Houston before he reacted? Probably not. With a sigh she shoved her hostage forward. “This corridor runs between the main house and the body of the monastery. I assume you’ve found a way into the inner sanctum?”
Furio pointed to the top of the spiral stone steps. “Door up there. Seems like a good place to kick in and start shooting.”
Nadia ‘s companion, McGregor, agreed to accompany them and remain quiet – Nadia didn’t trust his ability to play it cool back in the party. In single file they tiptoed up the steps until they reached a steel door anchored into the ancient rock. Houston grabbed the captured guard by the throat. “How exactly we get through this?”
“I – gurgle – knock and they answer – gack – my voice.”
Houston grew annoyed when the man’s eyes rolled back in his head. A few quick thumps against the stone wall and his cooperative spirit was renewed. “So get to passwording.”
“I don’t think that’s a verb,” whispered Furio.
“Sure it is,” Houston replied. “ I just said it, didn’t I? You can take any noun, make it a verb. ‘Prioritize.’ It’s an American thing.”
The guard knocked. A second later, a voice asked a question in German. The guard hesitated, but when Nadia hissed a few words in German he quickly realized he couldn’t bluff. Another phlegm-filled polysyllable later, and the door cracked open. Before the guard within could react, Capt. Texas SLAMMED through the aperture and tympanied the man’s skull off the far wall. “Ya see,” he drawled, “if this covert sneaky-business was always broken up by laying a beating every two minutes or so, I could get behind that.”
Furio quickly spun and backhanded their hostage into unconsciousness. When Nadia looked a question at him, he shrugged. “You wanted to hold a gun on him and sneak at the same time?”
Nadia couldn’t argue with that. Closing the door behind her, she took in her new surroundings.
The stairs had led them to an upper level, another corridor, this one built within the walls of the monastery some three stories high. The tower was a dead end, the corridor stretching away along the front of the monastery building. At the far end the corridor right-angled. She deduced that this hallway ran all along the outer walls of the ancient edifice.
She could also see light beaming in from the right side of the corridor, and could hear the steady hum of machinery and German voices. It seemed that just ahead, part of the wall was cut away, creating some sort of observation balcony. Furio, Nadia, and McGregor crept forward, with Capt. Texas guarding the rear. When they reached the balcony, they peered past the wall, looked through the metal rail. What they saw was beyond mind-boggling.
The entire interior of the monastery had been hollowed out into one, vast aircraft hangar-like space. Down below, legions of white-coated scientists labored at dozens of bizarre super-science projects. Among them fully-uniformed SS STORMTROOPERS patrolled, both down on the floor and up on the walkway opposite the heroes. One of the biggest projects was a nine-foot-tall humanoid robot. Nadia recognized the Mignola design from her father’s studies. Where the head would be was a series of electrodes and spikes, as if something was to be perched in the brainpan of the creature. Spread before them was a think-tank of Nazi superscience, creating weapons the likes of which the world had never seen.
“How did the Germans get so ahead of us?” Furio wondered. “We have DaVinci. They come to our beaches in tiny bathing suits and demand beer. This is impossible.”
Nadia pointed at the hellish object dominating the center of the room. “That. My God, they have … that.”
It was a Brain-puter.
A nightmarish tree, its silver trunk coiled with thick power cables rose to articulated metal branches. Those branches spun and whirled on individual orbits, arcane power sparking between contact points. Like a sickening fruit at the end of each of the hundred branches, a HUMAN BRAIN bubbled in a glassine sphere!
Behind Nadia, McGregor passed out. She traced the design with her own super-genius mind. They’d tapped into the raw computing power of human minds. The missing scientists’ brains were working for the Nazis – literally. These monsters had somehow figured a way to meld circuitry to synapses. Why, if they were able to tap even a tenth of the inherent brain power spinning in that bizarre electro-web, the processing power would allow them to rocket past the Allied scientists …
What Nadia realized then rocked her to the depths of her hardened soul. Those brains must somehow be alive – the personalities of those slaughtered scientists must still be intact, trapped forever in unending darkness, spiraling into immortal insanity!
Nadia wiped a single tear from her cheek. She looked up at Houston, saw that his eyes were damp, too. “I’ll be,” she thought. “Even this soldier is moved by the horror we witness here today.”
Houston wiped his eyes. He was indeed, crying at the sight before him …
… crying with joy. ”So .. many … @sses … to kick …”
