Title: And Seven for a Secret

Author: Aeshna

Disclaimer: Not mine, no matter how many DVDs and toys I buy! Everything here belongs to RTD and to Auntie Beeb, who already has my licence fee.

Notes: Written for the 2009 tardis_bigbang challenge on LJ. Thanks as always to Mimarie for sterling beta work, any remaining weirdnesses are all mine. Feedback of any variety is much appreciated but not compulsory - I'll post anyway! I've suffered for my art, now it's your turn....

CHAPTER 9

The stairwell was empty and utterly quiet as Howcroft heaved the heavy door open, the stark lighting throwing hard-edged shadows against stone. Bert cautiously followed Harkness out of the room, clutching his submachine gun close - he and Alfie were armed with both the automatic weapons and the Luger pistols; Harkness, taking the lead, carried only the sidearm and the dagger, while the others shared the remainder of the guns out between them. He had no idea how much ammunition they had - Gentner's gun, at least, had to be half-empty - but if things went as planned, then they'd hopefully pick up some more weaponry along the way.

Bert didn't think too closely on where they might pick it up from. He'd deal with that once they got there.

Harkness led the way down the stairs, moving with considerably more confidence than Bert felt. Down, down, the spiralling stairs threatening to play havoc with Bert's sense of balance, but then they were on a short landing facing another solid wooden door, this one marked with some German word in an ornate script that Bert couldn't even begin to read. Harkness glanced back over his shoulder with a grin - this, presumably, was what he had hoped to find - and rapped once on the door.

There was a pause, seconds seeming to last for hours, and Bert began to think that the room might be empty... but then the door was pulled open and a thin, balding man with wire-framed spectacles peered out. There was a brief exchange in German, Harkness's accent seemingly perfect, then the balding man shrugged and stepped aside, ushering Harkness into the room with a frown. Bert and Alfie glanced at one another and followed him in, the door swinging closed behind them.

There was a second man, more heavy-set than the first, reading through papers at a large and ornate desk. He looked up, frowning... then collapsed back in his chair with an expression of utter surprise on his face as Harkness's shot caught him square in the temple. Bert gaped at the suddenness of the attack, then spun around as the balding man shrieked, "Verrater!" and reached for his sidearm -

It really was quite amazing just how much damage a lightweight submachine gun could do inside three seconds. Bert stared down at the weapon in his hands, not quite believing what he had just done. "Bloody hell...."

"Good work, Fletcher." Harkness clapped a hand on his shoulder and moved to pull the door open, his sharp whistle calling in the others from where they had been waiting, just out of sight, on the stairs. "Okay, lads. Let's see what they've been up to, shall we?"

What the Ahnenerbe had been up to seemed to mostly consist of writing vast reams of reports, some handwritten, some typed, some containing photographs and diagrams. Harkness sat on the edge of the desk and immediately set to rifling through the paperwork, frowning and muttering to himself as he went. The rest of them, unable to read a word of German, began to poke around the chamber, always with one eye on the door. The room was the same size as their previous prison but far better appointed, with plastered and painted walls that held numerous bookcases and cabinets, along with a large and ugly portrait of Hitler that hung behind the desk. There was a wide, leather-topped table in the centre of the room, its surface covered in files and books, and four windows, tall and narrow, beyond which....

"Fuck me - what time is it?" Frank asked, staring out at the darkness beyond the glass. "No wonder I'm bloody starving!"

"About a quarter past ten," Howcroft said, pointing to the clock that hung by the door. "Lights'll be out back in the barracks."

"There'll have been a guard change at about the time Gentner came up to us." Harkness didn't look up from his papers. "We're still early in the shift - hopefully we won't be bumping into anybody on the stairs. If we do, we just -"

"Shoot them. We know." Bert glanced down at the bloody remains of the balding man and swallowed hard. "What do you want us to do now?"

"Now...." Harkness frowned, then pushed the papers aside and stood, pulling the silvery device from his pocket. His fingers danced briefly over the thing's surface, a flash of blue illuminating his face as he slowly turned in place. "Oh, yes. We've got some prizes in here, all right...."

"We do?" Alfie looked around the room. "Where?"

Harkness laughed, bringing the device back around, retracing its arc. "Their own little chamber of horrors, by the look of it." He tapped something twice, frowned, then slipped the tiny machine back into his pocket. "The cabinet up against the wall there. Would have gone for a dungeon store, myself, but that could just be force of habit...."

The cabinet in question was made of dark, polished wood, tall and wide, with fussily carved decoration adorning its edges. It seemed to contain an improbable number of drawers and doors, with three wide shelves in the centre, the upper two of which held a variety of jars and vases and boxes. The lowest and deepest of the shelves was empty, but to Bert's eye the unused space matched the size of the brainsucker's box. "They kept the scaly bugger here?" he asked.

"Looks that way." Harkness strode across to the cabinet, the rest of them gathering nervously around, and started throwing open doors. Bert could see the padded curves of velvet lining within, the material cradling objects that seemed utterly random - pieces of stone and ceramic, the occasional gleam of metal. Harkness was frowning, occasionally reaching in to examine something before abandoning it and moving on. At one point he drew in a sharp breath as he opened a drawer, a look of utter delight on his face... but then he lifted the item - long and thin, with odd-looking bulges at intervals along its length and what looked almost like a stock at one end - and his face fell. "Crap."

"What?" said Kimber shortly. The corporal had settled into a chair beside the big table and now sat there listlessly flipping through one of the files. "Not what you wanted?"

"What I wanted? Hell, yes. But it's broken - power unit's missing and the core's in pieces." There was an odd, tinkling rattle as Harkness shook the thing. "Shame - Tu'oth plasma cannon: we could have set fire to stone with one of these babies, along with anything else that got in our way...."

"But if we could, then so could they, right?" Alfie asked. "So it's probably just as well it doesn't work, or else they'd have already used it."

Frank rolled his eyes. "There goes our Alfie - always seeing the bright side of bloody everything."

Harkness smiled as the others laughed, resuming his search for whatever it was that he was looking for. Two more drawers, several of the wooden boxes, and then he tugged open a door and immediately snatched up what lay within. "Wow. Now this...."

Bert leaned in trying to see. "What is it?"

"According to the label here, it's a 'dark metallic sphere with runes and indentations; collected Saaldorf - origin unknown; ceremonial?'" Harkness chuckled. "They really do have no idea. Amateurs."

"So what is it?"

Harkness positioned the sphere - a matt black object a little smaller than a cricket ball - in the fingers of his left hand, balancing it just so as he stroked the etched patterns on its side and then tapped the top sharply. There was a sound like a high-pitched chirp, and a ring of brilliant green lights, as fine as pinpricks, lit up around its middle. "It's primed, is what it is, but you need to know how to handle one of these babies right in order to get it to do anything at all." Another tap, this time to one of the indentations on the side, and the lights went out. "Right, that's one...."

The remainder of the cabinet yielded nothing that Harkness considered useful. Bert watched as he took his mysterious prize back to the big desk, setting it down on top of a mug, then picked up a long roll of paper. "Okay, castle schematics." Harkness carried the roll across to the room to unfurled it over the table, knocking books and papers aside to give himself space and pinning the corners down with four heavy, leather-bound volumes. "Let's see where we are, shall we?"

There were several sheets, one atop the other, with the uppermost quite clearly depicting the keep tower and its levels, even if Bert couldn't make out a word of the handwritten text. With Harkness pointing out what was where, he could see that they were currently about halfway up the tower in the Ahnenerbe's office and library, sandwiched between Gentner's interrogation chamber and her quarters. The top levels were, as predicted, the domain of the gunners, while beneath Gentner's living area lay the castle's communications suite. Below that was the chamber they had first entered, with an administrative office attached. And below that -

"Bugger me," Frank said, bemused. "They really do have a dungeon?"

"It's a castle - some things are traditional." Harkness ran the tip of his finger along the neatly written labels, then released the top sheet to look the next page down. "Hmm. Seems we have the main armoury beneath the keep, but there are also holding cells - which would explain where they hid your Morrison-Bell the last few days - pantries, barracks for the guards, general storage, and passageways to the other parts of the castle. It's a positive warren beneath the courtyard." He paused, a slight smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. "Almost reminds me of home."

"That good or bad?" Howcroft asked, frowning as he tried to make sense of what he was looking at.

"Home? We all want to go home - reminders don't hurt. The warren part?" Harkness shrugged. "Could make things complicated, but we can't -"

"Bloody hell!" Kimber suddenly jerked back from the file he had been flipping through, stumbling as he all but leapt out of his chair. "That's... Jesus Christ." He looked away. "Who the fuck are these bastards?"

Harkness frowned and reached across to pick up the item that had so spooked the corporal. Bert caught a brief glimpse of a black and white photograph, the suggestion of human forms, but couldn't make out any details. After Kimber's reaction, he didn't much want to. "Ugh." Harkness winced. "Well, I did tell you that the Institut fuer Wehrwissenschaftliche Zweckforschung had a taste for human experimentation...."

"Yeah, but that's just, just -"

"Why we need to close this place down." Harkness held the photograph up, then tossed it down on top of the castle floorplan. "Anybody else want to take a look? See what we're fighting against? There's plenty more where this one came from. These might not have been taken here, but if the Ahnenerbe gets its way, it'll just be a matter of time."

Bert stared for a moment, then looked away, feeling sick to his stomach at the tangle of limbs, the flayed flesh and desperate eyes. He'd thought that Morrison-Bell and the French girl were bad enough, but this....

"We heard stories," Lissowski said, shaking his head and looking ill. "Many stories. Terrible things, but we did not see before."

"Christ." Alfie stepped back, his face pale. "How can they...."

"You'd be amazed at what ideology and the need to believe themselves superior will drive people to do." Harkness shook his head and turned the image over, hiding it from view and pushing it aside as he cast his eyes over the castle's layout once more. "Okay - let's finish up here and go take a look downstairs, shall we?"

"What about the gunners up top?" Frank asked.

"For now, we work down," Harkness said, in a tone that didn't invite argument. "At this point I'd rather empty the tower out, take advantage of the natural soundproofing, than invite attention by taking an exterior unit at the start. We can't afford to get caught in the upper levels."

"But we do take them eventually?" Howcroft pressed. "Those buggers can shoot in as well as out, from the looks of them - they'd nail any attempt to cross the courtyard before it even started. There could be grenades and other things up there that might -"

"Central armoury's downstairs. Main challenge is likely to be comms, but I think I can handle them." Harkness straightened up and looked around. "Under normal circumstances I'd be able to scramble radio transmissions directly but they've already got their own block in place, so they'll be on a hardwired link, probably going down to the town we passed through on the way here."

"Can you scramble that?" Kimber asked. He sounded rough, cradling his wounded arm as he hunched in his chair. "Or do you need to unplug it?"

"Unplug it or short it out. Or both." Harkness walked back across to the desk, taking the gun from the dead man still slumped in his seat. He pulled open a few drawers until he found some spare clips of ammunition, holding them aloft triumphantly, then plucked the odd metallic sphere from its perch on the mug. "This should be... interesting."

"I'll take your word for it," Bert muttered. The cloying scent of blood was beginning to turn his stomach, especially now that he'd seen that photograph. He cleared his throat. "So now what?"

"Now?" Harkness pocketed the ball. "Now we go take a look around the Hauptsturmfhrer's boudoir. I think we're done here for now."

"We're going to break into her bedroom?" Howcroft looked uncomfortable. "I mean, I know she's not there, but...."

"I think our need is greater than hers." Harkness grinned. "And hey, won't be the first time I've invaded a lady's chamber!"

They all caught the clear innuendo there. Frank frowned. "But I thought you were -"

"Queer?" Harkness chuckled. "I prefer 'human'. You guys really need to give up on trying to pigeonhole people. You miss out on so much fun that way." He winked at them. "Come on, let's go."

Bert crouched to pick up the gun that the man he'd shot had dropped, wiping the worst of the blood splashes off onto the ruined rug. Tucking the Luger into the back of his belt, he followed Harkness out into the thankfully silent stairwell once more, trying not to think about the spiral as they went down, down, the next short landing coming not a moment too soon. Again, the door was unguarded, and this time there was no response to Harkness's sharp rap. The handle didn't give way as they tried it, but Howcroft had hung onto the keys from the torture chamber and the lock slid smoothly back on their third attempt.

Bert hadn't been certain what to expect from Gentner's quarters, but what he found was a comfortable chamber, divided into several sections by screens. Harkness used his device to look for oddities again but apparently failed to find anything of any interest, and a more hands-on search revealed nothing but more papers that nobody felt particularly inclined to look through. It felt strange to Bert, seeing the pictures and other personal effects hanging on the walls and arrayed along the shelves, a small glimpse into the life of someone he had no great desire to think of as a human being. Somehow, knowing that Gentner had had a family, a life outside of her work, made her seem all the more monstrous.

"Aha!" Harkness emerged from the bathroom area with a box and a triumphant look on his face. "Here's something useful."

"What's that?" Bert looked up from where he and Frank had been rifling through the contents of a dresser - the Hauptsturmfuhrer had had interesting taste in underwear, it seemed. "Another alien gadget?"

"Better than that - a medical kit. Guess her pet could take more out of her than she wanted to admit. Hey, Corporal," he called to Kimber. "It's your lucky day!"

"What?" Kimber was lying back on the bed, his eyes closed and his jaw set, quietly bleeding onto the coverlet. "You found a way to fly me back to fucking Blighty inside the next ten minutes?"

"Been a while since that one was an option, I'm afraid." Harkness sat on the foot of the bed, making Kimber hiss in pain as his shoulder was jarred. "Okay, I have bandages, tincture of iodine, aspirin, morphine...."

"Just give me fucking everything!" Kimber ground out. "Morphine first!"

"That's my boy." Harkness looked around. "Anybody here know their way around a med kit?"

Lissowski stepped forward. "I can do," he said quietly. "I was training to be doctor, before."

Harkness nodded, and left Kimber to Lissowski's ministrations. "Right - Bert, Alfie, with me. The rest of you stay here until I come back for you, understood? You've got a good, solid stone floor here - I need you to stay on this side of it for the next few minutes."

"How come?" Frank wanted to know.

"Things are about to get nasty in the comms suite." Harkness held the dark metal ball up to the light, stroking and tapping and -

It chirped, the tiny green points shining brightly around its circumference. Harkness gazed at it for a few long moments, then tossed it lightly into the air, catching it in the palm of his hand. He quirked a small, humourless smile and turned towards the door. "Bert, Alfie, let's go."

"Okay, boys," Harkness said in a low voice as they descended the next winding set of stairs. "What I have here is a toy that is going to completely and permanently disrupt every electrical circuit within a certain range, and that includes the human nervous system. It'll penetrate wood but stone and glass will stop it, so I need you to hang back on the stairs out of line of sight of the door. Keep a layer of stone between you and it and don't even think about peeking."

"So it's like a grenade?" Bert asked. "You chuck it in, dive for cover...?"

"Not exactly." Harkness took a deep breath. "Has to be triggered directly - I'm going in with it."

"But won't that... oh, right." Alfie looked uncomfortable. "How long?"

"Give me thirty seconds, then come in and grab what weaponry you can." Harkness looked down at the device in his hand. "It's low-impact so I should be back fairly quickly. Which is more than can be said for anybody else in there - having your brain shorted out is generally regarded as being fairly terminal."

Bert swallowed hard. "Will it hurt."

"The dying won't." Harkness sighed. "It's the coming back that's the bitch."

They hid around the curve of the stairwell, listening to the sharp rap on the door; the brief, unintelligible conversation; the sound of heavy wood settling back against its frame. His back pressed hard against cold stone, Bert felt isolated and infinitely vulnerable, even with Alfie counting slowly beside him. It had been maybe fifteen minutes since they had crept out of the interrogation chamber, perhaps that much again since they had escaped their cell. So much had happened so fast, too fast, and he hoped to hell that he was going to wake up in a minute and find that it had all been a -

"...Thirty!" Alfie hugged his submachine gun tight against him, looking every bit as scared as Bert felt. "Ready or not, here we come...."

Bert didn't bother with knocking as he cautiously pushed the door open, not quite certain what he'd see as he peered into the chamber. What he found within was a quiet scene of destruction, some half dozen bodies sprawled across desks and telephone exchange boards and something that looked like a bastardised, paperless typewriter. Harkness lay in the middle of the room, collapsed in a heap with the dark sphere just beyond his outstretched hand. Bert looked at Alfie as they leaned over the unmoving body. "Think we should put him into a more comfortable position for when he -"

Harkness suddenly gave a loud gasp, drawing his legs up to his chest, and Bert jumped several inches into the air in sheer shock, his dignity saved only by the fact that he, unlike Alfie, hadn't shrieked. "Bloody hell, do you do that every time?!"

"Seem to," Harkness hissed between clenched teeth. He remained curled on the floor for a moment, then carefully unfolded his limbs and sat up, shaking his head. "God, that never gets any better...."

"They're all dead?" Alfie looked around the room as he and Bert hauled Harkness to his feet. "Just like that?"

"Oh yeah - people, machines, everything. Even this thing." Harkness picked the ball-like device, rolling it around his palm. "One shot wonders, these babies - they fry themselves same as they do anything else in range." As Bert watched, he dropped the thing to the floor and crushed it with the heel of his boot. Which rather brought something else to mind....

"What about your scanning thingie?" Bert said suddenly, pointing to Harkness's breast pocket. "Is that dead in the water as well?"

"Heh." Harkness retrieved the item in question and Bert was surprised to see its bright blue lights blink into life beneath quick fingers. "This was designed to survive far harsher transitions and environments than you can even begin to imagine - going to take a bit more than a small-scale pulse disruptor to kill it." He tucked the tiny machine away again and moved across the room, stumbling slightly as he went, to tug wiring out of the back of an exchange board. "Disconnect everything you can - it's all dead but I'd rather be certain there's no way for them to piggyback an auxiliary system onto the hardwired connections."

It took them five minutes to trash the various pieces of communications equipment to the point where Harkness was satisfied it couldn't be repurposed, working around the bodies of the dead or heaving them to the floor where necessary. The discovery of a fire axe made the work a little faster, and there was something oddly satisfying about smashing through the equipment and hacking at the huge cable housing that seemed to pass through one of the thick castle walls. That was four floors cleared now, most of the tower, and Bert was almost starting to let himself believe that they might just -

The door creaked as it was pushed open from outside and they all turned to see a young blond man in uniform step through, a piece of paper clutched in his hand. He blinked once, the familiar stern expression on his face dissolving into almost comical confusion and horror as he took in the scene of destruction, and then he turned and fled, bullets slamming into wood at his back.

"After him!" Harkness snapped, and then all three of them were chasing the sound of clattering footsteps down the stairs, Bert cursing the tight spiral that meant that it was all too easy for their prey to stay out of sight. The ground-level door was still swinging shut as Harkness slammed through it, firing twice and silencing one German voice even as a half-dozen others started shouting all at once. Bringing the submachine gun around on its strap, Bert barrelled through the door in Harkness's wake, Alfie hard on his heels. His finger found the trigger and he started firing as soon as he caught sight of a target, not letting himself think about anything but the need to get the hell out, to get back to Agnes. The gun jerked in his hands, the rhythm of the recoil jarring his bruised shoulder as eight men went down in a matter of seconds. Two more charged in from the short corridor that led towards the outside world but Harkness was ready for them, dropping each of them with a quick headshot before they had a chance to bring their own weapons to bear.

Bert could hear the roar of his own blood as the guns fell silent, could feel his heart hammering against his ribs. Somewhere in the background, he heard the sound of something clicking, a desperate German voice sounding from somewhere past a half-open side door, saying the same thing over and over....

"And that's why we pulled the plug on the telephone boards," Harkness said softly. He crouched to take the submachine gun from one of the dead guards, stepping over corpses to kick the door open and fire a sharp burst into the room beyond. "Okay," he said as silence descended once more. "We're clear."

"They must have heard that," Bert said nervously, glancing towards the outer door.

Harkness shook his head and looped the gun strap over his shoulder. "You missed the chime? Courtyard bell sounded half ten just as I opened up on Speedy here." He nudged the body of the soldier they'd chased down the stairs with his boot. "Whatever sound might have got through the door should have been covered by that. Our lucky night. Which is more than can be said for these guys...."

"Great, so now what?" Alfie asked in a shaky voice. His blond hair was matted dark with blood, Bert suddenly realised, crimson trails running down his neck and dripping onto the collar of his borrowed uniform, but he was still standing, his hands white-knuckled where he held his gun. "Can we go get the others now?"

"In a minute. Hold still." Harkness hopped back over the sprawled bodies and took Alfie's head in his hands, his fingers hunting quickly through the sodden curls as Bert tried desperately to not think about the man holding the French girl's face just so.... This time, however, he released Alfie a moment later, his smile relieved. "Like I said - lucky night. You just caught a scratch but even the smallest scalp wound tends to bleed like a stuck pig. You'll have the headache to match the mess before long." He patted Alfie's shoulder, leaving bloody fingerprints on his tunic, and glanced across at Bert. "Fletcher? You okay?"

Bert looked down at himself and nodded, feeling almost sick with relief. "Not a mark on me."

"Good lad. Let's go."

The others were looking more than a little twitchy as they got back to Gentner's quarters, although none actually fired on them as they came through the door. Bert was grateful for that - after all he'd just done and been through, it would have been the height of irony to get shot by his own mates. Kimber had been patched up, and was obviously in less pain, although he still looked far too pale for Bert's liking; his eyes widened as he saw them enter. "Bloody he- what the fuck happened to you, Arnold?"

"Just a scratch," Alfie assured him with a weak grin. "Must have caught a ricochet or something."

"Can someone get a bandage on him?" Harkness pushed Alfie across to Lissowski, who quickly set to dressing his head. "Right," he said, addressing the room at large. "Comms are down and the ground floor is clear; they've got no way to communicate between areas except by sending runners or shouting."

Frank snorted. "They're a bit bloody good at shouting, mind."

"Yeah, well - that's the SS for you." Harkness smiled. "At this stage, we're locked in, but the door to the courtyard is locked from the inside, so we have control over that. What we don't yet have covered is the door down to the dungeon armoury and beyond, and the heavy gun emplacement on the roof of the tower."

Howcroft nodded. "So which one do we hit next?"

"Both." The smile turned hard. "Corporal Kimber - you're in no fit state to be climbing anywhere. I want you, Howcroft and Milton to secure the ground floor, where they brought us in. Can't miss it - two floors down, full of dead bodies and lots of guns. Take whatever you need. Fletcher, Lissowski - you're with me. Alfie, you in any fit state to climb?"

"Yes, sir." Alfie nodded, then winced and gingerly laid a hand against his bandaged head. "I'm good. Just a scratch, remember?"

"Good. You're with me as well. Corporal," Harkness nodded to Kimber, "we'll be down as soon as we've disabled the gun emplacement. Good luck."

Kimber looked at him... then carefully levered himself off of the bloodstained bedcovers and snapped off a quick salute. "Right, boys," he snapped, "you fucking heard the man - let's go sort these bastards out!"

~ continued ~