Free Stories 2018

by Baen Books

  With painstaking care, Father Avenir dressed himself again. Even his stiff and dirty clothes could not take away the new feeling of purity inside him.

  With his pack and his furs, the priest trudged away from the valley of the steaming geysers. He needed several days just to think about what he had experienced, to accept it, and to assess the new understanding—the new powers?—that he had acquired. The epiphany made him different. He was not just a priest from the white man’s world, but he was also fundamentally a part of these arcane territories. He was now, as he’d been at birth, both Native and European, both wild and civilized. But for the first time, he accepted both. He was Pierre de Toussaint D’Avenir and he was Tatanka. He wanted to tell the shaman Dosabite everything that had happened. Perhaps Dosabite could only perceive part of it, but even that would help.

  Father Avenir made his way through the mountains, camping each night, finding food for his supper or going hungry when he found none. One day in the long shadows of late afternoon, two riders came upon him in the forest. He recognized the long-haired warriors instantly as Cameahwait and his companion. The warrior chief looked strained and saddened, not at all the cocky raider who had first met him some weeks before.

  “You are the Catholic priest,” Cameahwait said. “We have searched for you.”

  “Yes, you know me. I am Father Avenir.” He paused, and then added, “I am Tatanka Pierre de Toussaint D’Avenir.”

  The warrior nodded. “Sacagawea sent me to find you. Her husband has been struck down by the great wizard. His spirit is gone, and she has requested a priest for the last rites.”

  Father Avenir brushed off the front of his furs. “I will accompany you. That is my duty as a priest. But, who is Sacagawea?”

  “She is my sister,” said Cameahwait, “taken from us as a child by raiders. She is back now, though. She travels on an expedition with a group of white men, led by Captain Lewis and Captain Clark.”

  “An expedition?” Avenir asked.

  The second warrior was impatient. “There is no time for questions. Come with us. Make haste.”

  Father Avenir agreed and mounted up behind the second warrior. “Take me to them, and I will do my duty as a priest.” He understood more, but he also had many questions. Maybe his own revelations could be shared not just with the Native tribes, but with others back in the east. “I look forward to speaking with these Captains Lewis, and Clark.”

  Ghost Flotilla U-boats: Embarkation

  Susan R. Matthews

  Goond—for “Gunther,” Oberleutnant zur See Gunther Hols, First Officer on board the “Smoking Salmon”—leaned up against the railing of the gun platform aft of U-818’s bridge, enjoying the warm breeze in his face and smoking a rare cigarette. It was a beautiful day.

  The watch on the bridge had their jackets open to air out whatever they wore next to their skins. Two men of the crew were re-painting the boat’s maeling on the sides of the conning tower, the Smoking Salmon itself, shown curved into a relaxed arc—as if sitting in an arm-chair—and smoking a pipe whose rising smoke was meant to indicate the plume of oily black plume a tanker sent up as it sank.

  They’d sunk one off the Cape this cruise, but otherwise the pickings had been slim. They’d missed the latest Allied convoy from Freetown but Headquarters wanted them in place for the next one, so here they were, idling along, burning fuel if not at a very great rate and catching up on boat maintenance. They could afford it. U-818 was an IX-C/40, one of the longer-range boats, and they’d successfully refueled from U-459 south of St. Helena, and taken on torpedoes.

  “Sail?” one of the watch said, suddenly, binoculars fixed on a point on the far horizon to the east—Africa. He didn’t sound at all certain. “Masthead, no steam, ZweiVo.”

  It wasn’t Goond’s watch, but he was here. As Sclarvie—the second officer, “ZweiVo”—lifted his binoculars to search, Goond raised those without which an officer never climbed onto the bridge to see for himself. It took him a moment to bring the ship into focus: yes, sails. There were sailing vessels a-plenty in the coastal waters, though such things weren’t likely to be good wartime targets. Still—

  “We’ll have a look,” Sclarvie said. “I’ll tell the captain. EinsVo?”

  Their commander would be “Lieutenant,” in the British Navy. But on board a boat, any boat, there was only one captain, and theirs was Herr Kaleun Verricht Lachs—the “salmon” of their cheeky boat-icon. And Goond was “EinsVo, first officer.” Goond leaned over the open hatch of the conning tower to yell down into the control room.

  “Ship,” Goond called. “Under sail, unidentified, bearing two sixty-five. We dive?” A dark-hulled U-boat riding just above the surface of the waves would be much more difficult to spot from a sailing ship than vice versa, and of course a U-boat could get away much faster. But there was a line between confidence and recklessness, and while Lachs had pushed the line on occasion he generally avoided irrational risks. It had taken more than solely good luck to make U-818 a “lucky” boat.

  “Periscope depth.” That was their engineering officer—“Ellie,” for Leitender Ingenieur Vilsohn, who had been with U-818 since its construction training. “Close hatches.” No, not an emergency dive, and they wouldn’t go deep. But Goond and the watch cleared the bridge in expeditious haste anyway, in order to not get into a habit of dawdling. Goond was next-to-last man down, with Sclarvie securing the hatch behind him.

  It took a moment for Goond’s eyes to adjust to the relative dimness of the boat’s interior. Lachs was there in the Zentral control room, navigation periscope coming up as the boat gently settled beneath the surface of the water to minimize their profile. “I can’t make it out,” Lachs said, frowning a little in his concentration. “Closer, Vilsohn. It’s probably nothing for us.”

  The words were mild, calmly stated, unremarkable. And yet a sense of sudden dread and horror overtook Goond, for no reason at all. What was the matter? An attack of vertigo?

  It was gone as soon as it had come. The lights, Goond decided, nothing more. There seemed to be a bit of a haze in the control room that made the familiar surroundings just a little strange in his eyes. He blinked, and things were clear and ordinary once again.

  Time passed. Half an hour. Goond took over at the periscope, because he and Lachs had the most exposure to sailing ships between them. Navigator Rathke had their copy of Jane’s Fighting Ships out and ready for consultation, but it had little information on anything like the ship on scope; it seemed to have no smoke-stack at all. Completely unconverted. Remarkable.

  The closer they got the less threatening the ship appeared, but also of less and less value as a military target. “It appears to be a merchant ship,” Goond said. “It isn’t any one of our cadet ships, nor does it seem to be British.” Could such a thing even carry war materials? Yet almost anything could be classified as war materials, that was true.

  He felt an itch between his shoulder-blades, a little tension in his chest. There was no reason for alarm. They’d encountered British decoy ships—“Q” boats— before, but this one was nowhere near enticing enough a target to hope to lure a U-boat close enough to attack. Or was it? U-818 was approaching, wasn’t it? Goond shifted his feet irritably. He was only regretting the unfinished portion of his cigarette, he told himself. That was all.

  Lachs took the periscope for another moment or five, and came to his decision. “Surface,” Lachs said, ducking his head to call through the hatchway toward the radio room. The radio closet. Where Bentzien was keeping his ear on the hydrophones for any chance British submarines, Goond supposed. “Bentzien, any traffic? Can you make contact?”

  But Bentzien just shook his head. Why would there be radio contact? Goond asked himself. A ship of its apparent vintage might not even have a radio. A tramp. A relic. Perhaps it had a belly-full of grain, or perhaps it was even more useless than that, perhaps it was in ballast. There would be no torpedoes loosed on this one. If sinking was to be done the deck gun would do it,
but Lachs didn’t seem to be anticipating any such action, because the gun crew had not been called for, nor the ammunition train.

  By the time the hatch was opened and Goond clambered up onto the bridge they were close enough to see the ship without any need for binoculars, which was closer than Goond had expected. He didn’t recognize the flag the ship was flying, a private flag of some sort, no nationality identified; there was a boat in the water making for them, but going by the short distance it had put between it and its mother-ship they had only just started rowing.

  Sclarvie put the signaling flags away. Clearly a face-to-face was anticipated, clearly there was no immediate danger of destruction. Get away. There was a voice in Goond’s mind, his own voice, speaking urgently, with increasing panic. Go away get away get away. He didn’t understand it. So he ignored it.

  “Alle hagel schip,” the man in the forefront of the row-boat called. A niggling unease was worming around just outside of reach in the back of Goond’s mind: the clothing the speaker wore seemed archaic, somehow, the bloused trousers, the outdated pattern of that plain cloth coat. “Trensferlettrs let?”

  Goond didn’t understand. All hail ship, yes, that would mean heil Schiffe, hello boat. Transferlettrs, can you take letters. There was a square bundle perhaps twelve inches square in the bottom of the row-boat, wrapped in leather and tied up with thick twine.

  “Wait, we will bring a man up,” Sclarvie called back, because what the man in the boat was saying didn’t translate into good solid German. It sounded a little Dutch, to Goond. To the man nearest the hatch Sclarvie said “Call for Heimsat, yes?”

  Heimsat was one of the machiner’s mates. His people were from the borderlands with Denmark, if Goond remembered; maybe he would communicate more effectively. Goond didn’t understand the sense of panic he was feeling: as though he knew that something horrible was going to happen, as though it had already happened, as though he had to stop it from happening while at the same time there was nothing he could do to prevent the disaster that was almost upon them.

  “We zullen wachten,” the man in the boat said. We will wait. Goond could hear the meaning as clearly as though he actually spoke the dialect. There were plenty of cognate words. It was not a far stretch. Here was Heimsat on the bridge, calling down to the rowboat that was now bobbing in the water just beside the saddle tanks; “Hallo!” Heimsat said. “U letters? Geef hem aan ons door, wij zullen ze nemen voor zu.”

  It was clearly the right thing to say, because the man in the boat smiled—almost too eagerly, but why would that be?—and picked up the parcel. “Hier zijn ze, veel dank,” the man in the boat said. But Heimsat had squinted off into the distance at the other ship’s flag and gone pale, pointing.

  “Not right,” Heimsat had said, urgency and disbelief alike in his voice. “Dutch East Indies? Ancient history, Herr ZweiVo, impossible, we should get away from here—”

  And the alarm bells went off in Goond’s mind. Something was catastrophically wrong. They should not touch that parcel of purported letters, they should not, there was something badly amiss, why would any antiquated sailing boat be handing letters over to a U-boat, wrong, danger, warning—

  “Herr EinsVo!” Someone was shaking him by the shoulder, and Goond realized he’d been dreaming. He was not off the coast of Africa, three years ago. He was here in the safety of his own berth on U-818. They were in Arctic waters. They had left Hammerfest in Norway. But fast on his glad realization of his near escape from whatever he had feared from the encounter in his dreams came the memory of where he was here and now, and why it was a much more immediate peril. “We are ready. Herr Kahloin raises the boat.”

  On convoy duty from Hammerfest in Norway, hunting Allied supply missions to the Soviets by way of Murmansk. Surprised by bombers from an Allied aircraft carrier not five days out, because where was their air support? The same place it had always been. Functionally nonexistant.

  Sent down into the basement with damage to the diesels, damage to the ballast tanks, to the fuel tanks, to every gauge and meter on the boat. The electrics on emergency reserve. All nonessential personnel confined to lying down in their hammocks or their bunks breathing through the damned potash cartridges that were supposed to protect them from the inevitable build-up of carbon dioxide in the air as the available oxygen inevitably, unavoidably, deteriorated.

  Goond tore the respirator away from his face with a convulsive movement and struggled up out of his berth, his head as sore and tender as a burn wound or a boil. “How long?” he asked, but whether he meant how long they’d been down or how long it would take them to reach the surface rather escaped him at this moment. It didn’t matter. The man who’d awakened him—one of the sailors on the second watch, Dekert—was obviously as impaired as he was, and did not answer either of those questions.

  “You are requested in control room. With respect.” Goond was glad of the helping hand. He’d been dreaming. He remembered now.

  He’d felt no presentiments of dread or fear or panic at the time. It had been only at the point at which the rowboat had regained its parent ship, the point at which the packet of letters Sclarvie had accepted had disappeared, the point at which the ship had turned abruptly and hove away toward Table Bay at an angle and a speed that was impossible given current weather conditions, only at that point had Goond realized that there was no ship. There were no letters. There’d been no rowboat.

  Only then had Goond realized that they’d had intimate contact with a ghost ship, and were doomed.

  “Thanks, I am coming directly.” The lights were still dim. The atmosphere was heavy, the potash cartridge breathing apparatus heavy and burdensome. He was lucky he’d managed to keep it in place for however long it had been that he’d remained unconscious.

  He’d wanted to be awake, because his was the first watch: but it was the engineer who would save them, and up to a skeleton crew to stay out of the way and let the engine room and the technical people save their lives. Also Lachs had insisted. That had been unfair, perhaps. Lachs laid no such restriction on himself: but Lachs was their captain. So, Goond told himself, perhaps Lachs had a right.

  Goond stumbled aft to the control room. Ellie—Joachim Vilsohn—was there, of course, standing behind his hydroplane operators; and Lachs leaning up against the chart chest with his characteristic sangfroid and nonchalance, aware of everything, surprised by nothing, always that beat of consideration before he reacted. The boat was nose-up and rising.

  “Faster,” Lachs said. “Heinze?” This was called through to the radio operator, and Lachs apparently liked what he heard, because he nodded. “Yes, still good, all quiet upstairs, gentlemen. Just the way we like it.” So there was no sign of the enemy. That didn’t need to mean anything.

  There could be a destroyer topside, sitting in the water, waiting them out. There could be a regular bomber patrol, like the one that had almost sunk them, scanning the seas for them. But there was nothing actively moving in the water above, and they were out of time, because it had been surely more than twenty-four hours now since they had been forced down.

  Goond could hear Ellie issuing his instructions to the hydroplane operators, forward hydroplanes up fifteen, aft eight. The engines had started to hum a little more loudly: the boat was under active propulsion, not idling in place. They couldn’t have much battery power left, after this long. Lachs would be getting desperate, in his own laid-back fashion. Was it his imagination—Goond asked himself—or could he feel a change in the angle of inclination beneath his feet, as the boat climbed?

  One hundred and fifty meters. That was what the depth gauge said. The last Goond could remember seeing that gauge, the covering had been cracked to the point of unreadability; but it was whole and entire now. He didn’t know how many replacements the boat still carried, not exactly, but he suspected that there weren’t many left.

  The closer they got to the surface the less risk of the bends the crew would have if they had to make an emergency exit from
the boat while it was still underwater: but what difference did it make? Anybody who had to leave the shelter of their U-boat was dead anyway, because the waters of the Arctic Ocean were cold, very cold, and would kill a man inside of half an hour as surely as any more active measures could.

  One hundred meters. Eighty-five. Lachs pulled the speaking tube toward him and issued the warning order himself. “Prepare to surface,” he said, as though it was the most ordinary thing in the world, as though they had not been deep below and in fear of their lives for more than a day now. “First watch, crew to stations. Diesels, prepare to activate.”

  Maybe that was technically up to Ellie. But Ellie was busy. Goond could hear activity starting to pick up, through the open doorways in the bulkheads; people rousing themselves and being roused. It was time to return to the land of the living or make their final peace with the lords of the dead. One or the other.

  Forty meters. Thirty-five. Twenty-five meters.

  “Up periscope,” Lachs said, straightening up and away from his casual perch on the chart chest to take the navigation periscope for his own. Twenty meters. Fifteen. Any moment now the bosun would call all hands forward to bring the nose of the boat back into trim as it breached the surface on the rise—

  “Nothing,” Lachs said, but there was some hesitation there that Goond didn’t quite understand. Goond’s watch was assembling, struggling to fasten their anoraks and pull on their heavy fur-lined gloves. Fischer handed Goond his. Goond didn’t have to get into his thick boots and his two pairs of socks because he’d never taken them off. So they were ready. And the boat was on the surface. “First watch topside, gentlemen, and tell us what is what, up there.”