“When do we make a run for it?” Shepard asked.
“When we’re done unloading, and everyone is going back. We cut the moorings and leap aboard. We’ll only ever have one chance. And we’ll have to make sure there aren’t armed Venusians aboard. I won’t know the best moment to do this ahead of time, but if I call for you, do not hesitate.”
The Venusians at my estate let us keep possessions, though the overseers ransacked through them on random occasions. I’d been storing cured meats that we’d been given and a kind of hard bread. A few water sacks hid the stuff that could get us in trouble.
Food, water, a handmade metal knife, some needles and thread that Maet kept hidden for herself, so she could mend her rough-spun clothes: this was everything we owned.
I hadn’t told her what we planned though I began to suspect she knew.
We would head for the northern swamps, near the foothills we’d crashed at. Hike over the nearest pass we could find, and if we made it, off into areas few in Kish cared to visit on the other side.
And, then, maybe, we could figure out what to do. Eric spoke of rescue and scanning the skies. I thought about hacking a small farm out of the wilderness. Shepard knew how to build traps.
Even if we died, we reasoned, we would die once again free.
We just needed the right airship, and a little bit more food to hide in our water sacks, and we could make the run.
The Nazis, though, destroyed our careful plans by arriving one uncharacteristically chilly morning.
The three Nazis had been captured ten days ago, the overseers told us, on an island to the west. They still wore muddied, but tattered German uniforms with Nazi insignia on the shoulders. “You should be excited to have more of your tribe here to work alongside you,” the proud overseer who had arranged the sale explained, and pointed at Eric and Shepard. “Just like these two.”
“But they aren’t like us,” I explained. “They’re from a different country, one we’re at war with.”
“War?” the overseer talking to me found that curious. “Well, there is no war for you here. Just more like you. You’re the same. So you will work the same.”
Left alone, we all eyed one another warily. I realized that Eric and Shepard looked to me for a decision.
I wanted to kill them, for blowing us out of the sky with a missile, but I knew that would only draw attention to us.
The Nazis took the first move, though, introducing themselves nervously. Their commandant, Hans, spoke in lightly accented English. “They captured us when we landed. We thought we were going to be the first Germans to liaise with their civilization, but instead they destroyed our rocket ship and captured us. They refused to believe we came from above the clouds and they put us and all our stuff in cages. They took us around by aircraft to manors and showed us off to royals and important people.”
“Like animals,” another Nazi, Yost, spit. “They put collars on us and chained us.”
“We escaped, once, but they hunted us back down. We killed a few of them,” Hans said, satisfied with himself.
“So they sold us off. We were too much trouble.”
I stood impassively for a while, then held out changes of clothes. Rough-spun fabric, just like the gray clothes we wore. “Well, it won’t be nice like that anymore,” I said. “Now you will be working.”
“That will give us more time to plan,” Hans said.
“To do what?” I asked.
“Gather what tools we can to fight,” the commandant said.
“It’s been tried,” I told him.
“What these creatures need is the right kind of leader. A decorated fighter, a strong strategist. I commanded a panzer squadron in Egypt,” Hans said, his chest sticking out.
“Get dressed,” I told him. “If you take any longer, the overseers will come at us.”
As the Nazis changed clothes, Eric whispered, “Are we going to let them join us?”
I shook my head.
“But they’re humans,” he said. “The only other ones. Surely we have an obligation …”
“We were shot out of the sky by a Nazi missile, Eric,” I whispered back. “What makes you think they won’t try to kill us again? Are you willing to bet everything on that?”
The Nazis would not speak around Maet and viewed her with suspicion. So I kept her close as we worked their first day.
“Will you run with me?” I asked her.
She showed me her scarred arms. “I was free once. They bound me to the pole and scarred my arms to teach me my lesson. But I would be free again, yes.”
I would have hugged her there, but there was work to be done. That night I snuck my blade between Hans’s blankets as he slept. Afterward we tiptoed over to a new place in the common house.
Before the Nazis woke up I found an overseer. The Nazis were enemy combatants, I told myself. Men who would see people like my grandparents eliminated from the world. That was what I had believed when I joined the army.
Yet, on some dark nights, I’d wondered. After all, what were the Nazis but the ultimate end point of European colonialism? Nazis were even white people who had told other white people they weren’t white enough. They were white people who had invaded and colonized other white countries to spread their concept of a master race. Much like those invaded Europeans had once colonized other countries and told the brown people there that they were the master race. Was what the Nazis did to Europe different than what Belgians did to the Congo?
My family had experienced things close to Nazi beliefs on our own home front. Enough that I could shiver and wonder what the point of the fighting was, in darker moments.
But, I reminded myself, Nazism was purified European colonialism. A heady alcohol to the weak beer of American colonialism that was somewhat more survivable; despite the lynchings, there’d been no total ethnic cleansing. So I’d joined the world war and fought, and to my bitterness, seen the war continue on.
Seen the war spread even into outer space as we raced Hitler to other worlds.
No, it would not leave me sleepless to do what I planned, I thought, as I woke the overseer to tell them about the knife.
We woke, hours later, to the sounds of human screams. The Nazis hung bound from three poles. Outside we found Hans slumped forward, dead, my crude knife sticking out of his neck.
The other pair wailed and wept as the colorful leeches sucked and tore into their skin. The overseers had questioned the other Venusians about knife-waving humans, and they pointed to the corner of the common house. One human looked like the other to them, and I’d moved my small group away from the Nazis, who were wearing our old clothes. I’d told Maet to sleep somewhere else.
“We take an airship today if the chance is there,” I said to my fellow remaining humans. “They’ll all be focused on other things right now.”
6.
THE NAZIS SCREWED THINGS UP FOR US. I’D HAD TO USE MY homemade knife, and now I didn’t have anything to cut the airship’s bowline with. So I stood by the tie-down point as casually as I could, a large sack of grain on my shoulders, and loosened the massive knot until it slipped free.
I left the line loose around the great sand-screw sunk ten feet into the ground. From a distance, I hoped it would look like it was still tied.
And then I nonchalantly returned after dropping the grain off.
I could hear Shepard swearing from inside as I loped back into the cabin. Two-thirds of the cargo had been shuffled out by the unloading crew. Six Venusians were inside with us, and one overseer lounged against the wall of the cargo bay, watching the unloading, shouting and smacking us with his club when he deemed us too slow.