The Coldest War Read Free Page A

his flat into a cave. Most of it he had purchased or scavenged, but some came from the work he did repairing televisions and radios. It was demeaning work, but even gods had to eat. Sometimes he lied, claiming the device was beyond repair, and then kept the parts.
    Reinhardt stored his journals in a hollow behind the gurgling radiator. When he had first come to England, he’d had no training in electronics, nor in the scientific method, for that matter. He’d been raised by one of the greatest minds of the century, but he’d never bothered to pay any attention to how Doctor von Westarp worked. And for that, he cursed himself frequently.
    The journals contained hundreds of circuit diagrams accompanied by lengthy annotations describing Reinhardt’s experiences with each. But none of those circuits had elicited anything like the tingle of the Götterelektron. Reinhardt retrieved the latest journal, opened it to a new page, then settled down at his workbench (a discarded wooden door laid across two sawhorses).
    Hours passed.
    It was some time after midnight when Reinhardt, bleary-eyed and exhausted, abandoned his efforts for the evening. He brushed his teeth. Then he brushed them a second time, and his tongue, too, trying vainly to scrub the odd taste from his mouth.
    A metallic tang.
    Reinhardt had all but forgotten it: the copper taste, that harmless but annoying side effect of godhood.
    He tossed his toothbrush in the sink and rushed back to the bench, where the evening’s final experiment still stood. He worked backwards through everything he had done, searching for the combination that had coated his tongue with the taste of metal. Beads of sweat ran down his forehead, stung his eyes with salt as he trembled with the exertion of calling up his Willenskräfte. Nothing happened.
    But then—
    â€”a blue corona engulfed his outstretched hand, just for an instant—
    â€”and died.
    Strive as he might, he couldn’t call it back. But it had happened . He had felt the Götterelektron coursing into his mind, fueling his willpower. He tasted copper, and smelled smoke.
    Smoke?
    Reinhardt thought at first he had inadvertently started his flat on fire owing to rustiness and a lack of finesse. But no. A faulty condenser had shorted out. Reinhardt realized that as it had died, its electrical characteristics had changed in some random, unpredictable way. Changed in a way that had, just for a moment, returned his power to him.
    Children called him Junkman. But he had been a god, once.
    And would be again.

 
    one
    1 May 1963
Arzamas-16, Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, USSR
    Gretel laid a fingertip on Klaus’s arm.
    â€œWait,” she whispered.
    Several seconds passed while she consulted some private time line that existed only in her head. He recognized the look on her face: she was remembering the future, peering a few seconds ahead.
    Then she said, “Now, brother.”
    Klaus pulled the merest trickle of current from his stolen battery, just enough of the Götterelektron to dematerialize his hand. It was a gamble, one Gretel had assured him would work. But he’d practiced for weeks.
    His hand ghosted through ferro-concrete. He wrapped his fingers around one of the bolts that sealed the vault. Klaus concentrated, focusing his Willenskräfte like a scalpel, and pulled a finger’s width of steel through the wall. Gretel caught the slug before it clattered to the floor and gave them away.
    They repeated the process twice. Klaus severed all three bolts, and the alarm circuit, in fifteen seconds. But the damage to the door was strictly internal; a passing guard would see nothing but pristine, unblemished steel.
    It would have been easier for Klaus to walk straight through the wall with his sister in tow. But that would have tripped sensors and triggered their captors’ fail-safes before he was halfway through. The entire facility, this secret city the locals called Sarov, bristled