Free Stories 2018

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Free Stories 2018 Page 13

by Baen Books


  Heimsat nodded, as did some of the others. “In fact no rational explanation, Herr Kahloin, so it was said that errors had crept in to the story as it was told. But now we consider that U-728 had descended to an unknown depth as a result of an attack, and when it surfaced it was someplace very much else. That is what we have heard. That is why we suspect that the only way out of Lake Superior is to descend as deeply as we dare, and see where we are, when we come up.”

  Lachs took a deep breath. Then he let it out again. “Thank you for your report, men,” he said. “I will let you know when I have made a decision.”

  They made their salutes. He returned them. Then he waited while everybody left, the men, his LI, his ZweiVo; it was just him and Goond, and Lachs leaned forward to lean his crossed forearms against the railing to disguise his involuntary slump of indecision. Yes, he was the commander. Yes, it was his decision, and he had accepted the responsibility years ago.

  And still he was very glad to have Goond here to help him clarify his thinking, and would wait to see what Goond had to say about the problem that they faced.

  ###

  Now that the crew had made their report and gone away Goond stood with Lachs on the lake-facing rail of the porch that surrounded their cabin, looking out across the water. It was a nice resort, and if it was not entirely up to modern standards—the old man had made a remark about that from time to time, in passing—that only meant it was closer to their own time, which reduced the psychic strain of their situation a little.

  Closer to their own time, maybe, but still nowhere near to their own place. Goond felt farther and farther away from that with every reference article he read on the PC the old man had made available for their use—one in each cabin, some older, some newer, all technological marvels that had too much information on them to be grasped. Goond had done his best to stick to the essentials: it was 2005, “World War Two” had been over for sixty years, and U-818 hadn’t survived it.

  Lachs was leaning over the railing with his folded arms braced to the weathered wooden cap-board, squinting into the westering sun. He hadn’t had much to say about the old man. The old man kept clear of Lachs as much as possible, while at the same time offering every apparent courtesy. There was an old woman about the place, though Goond didn’t think anybody had seen her. He’d decided he had better things to occupy his mind than that. How old would the captain’s lady be, in 2005?

  “We can’t stay,” Goond said. “No matter how easy it might seem.” Yes, it was beautiful. Yes, it was pleasant, comfortable, safe, and they were alive. But they hadn’t any business being here. Goond wasn’t sure anybody wanted to go back—since that could well be going back to being dead—but what else were they to do? There was no role for a U-boat anywhere in this modern world. There were genuine submarines now, nuclear-powered. Goond had read up on the subject.

  “We have hypotheses, but no understanding.” Lachs’ voice was contemplative, with a subtle undertone of unwillingness to accept Goond’s remark, of wishing to stay safe and warm and comfortable. Goond understood completely. He agreed. “There is only the one thing clear, above all others. I can think of no other way around it.”

  Goond could think of several things that were clear. He waited. Lachs surprised him, time and again; they knew each other well enough to rely on each other’s decision processes, on each others’ actions, but not well enough to be able to guess each others’ innermost thoughts too readily. It kept the relationship from becoming boring, which was important, when men spent as much time together as they had in quarters as close as a U-boat. Friendships could be broken under such strains, as well as forged and strengthened.

  “Look at this lake,” Lachs said. “We used to own the oceans of the world. And now the lake has become our prison. We can’t get out, Goond. We’re trapped. Unless we abandon U-818, which I will not do, not if I am the only man remaining.”

  This was no Bay of Biscay. There were no enemy mine-layers between them and the Atlantic, no British bombers, no destroyers. There were only the locks. Gunther Prien—the first of Herr Hitler’s incomparables—had barely slid his U-47 into Scapa Flow and out again; there was no creeping through these locks from lake to lake, and there were how many, between them and their freedom? Did it even matter? One was enough.

  The world might be at peace. But locks were attended by their very nature, their fill-and-flush cycles carefully controlled, every close and open documented, and every ship as well. There was no hope that any fifty men could break in to the dockmaster’s control station and sneak anything through in the middle of the night.

  “I don’t think any of us really can leave U-818,” Goond admitted. “Though if someone wants to badly enough, I don’t know how we would stop them, short of tying them up in the torpedo room. Which could be bad for morale.”

  Disappearing into the local population could be done—at least for the short term, to go by the news. But they all had experience in wading through propaganda for underlying facts. They were undocumented. They had no money with which to purchase documentation. The boat had no registry. Nobody was licensed to own or operate.

  Lachs nodded. “We overstay our welcome, if we’re not careful. Then who knows what might happen.” An internment camp; one not likely to be as comfortable as the “Salmon Shore” resort. They could move the boat to Duluth, or any one of a number of smaller ports: but they’d just be postponing the inevitable. “The best escapes are made the closest to the point of capture. I personally see few better alternatives.”

  When they’d seen the Flying Dutchman, they’d seen a ghost. To see a ghost was to share the same liminal space as a ghost, between the worlds of the living and of the dead. To share that space was to become contaminated. They were in that space now.

  And the last thing that had happened to them before they had surfaced sixty years and four thousand miles from where they’d gone down was that they had been bombed into an emergency dive that had become an uncontrolled descent to an undetermined depth. At the time Goond had assumed that they were not at impossible depths, because the boat had not collapsed in on itself, because the water pressure forcing the water in through every minute crack or tiny fault did not have the force of a blow-torch cutting them into pieces.

  Maybe he’d been wrong. Maybe the boat hadn’t collapsed in on itself because something in the deeps had taken them out of their time, out of their space, and brought them here. Maybe it was the pressure itself that flattened them into a mote upon the wings of time and carried them through dimensional channels yet unimagined all the way to Lake Superior. Maybe there were sub-oceanic ducts beneath all of the world’s great waters. Stranger things were attested in the science of this modern age, or if not stranger, at least very strange.

  “Do I announce your decision, Herr Kahloin?” Goon asked. This was serious. It called for formal language. “Have you made one, and when do we leave?”

  Lachs seemed to consider this question. Suddenly, however, Goond found himself with no time to wait upon the commander’s word. “Yes, I understand,” Goond said. “Meeting of officers, then all-crew muster. I’ll just go right away to get that organized. Immediately yes? I’d better get started—”

  Because he saw something that Lachs had not yet spotted, lost in thought as Lachs was and staring at the lake. Goond was not staring at the lake. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the house up-slope at the head of the resort with its cabins and its little restaurant, where the store and the office was. The house where the old man lived, though the old man had gone on a drive today, to run some errands. The house where the old man lived with the older woman, about whom Lachs had said nothing at all, whom none of them had seen but at a distance.

  There was a woman coming now. She was thin like the branches of a hawthorn tree well adorned with its wicked sharp slender thorns. She was wearing the sort of a dress that might be worn by any respectable European woman within living memory, to judge from the TV, something long and pattern
ed blue and white, and she was striding with purpose and determination across the long lawn between the big house and the cabin at whose railing Goond stood with Lachs.

  Goond did not want any part of it, but she called out, her voice startling Lachs into the sort of whiplash-spin that was almost never good for a man’s balance. “You too, Goond,” she called, clear and strong. “The both of you. I will have words. No time to spare.” In German. And, oh, Goond recognized that determination in her voice. He hadn’t wanted to.

  Lachs had gone as green-white in the face as ever he’d been at the end of a long cruise, apparently stunned into paralysis. The woman climbed the two low steps up onto the porch. There was something in her hand. “You are not the only U-boat that has found itself in strange waters,” she said, holding the something out—papers, papers with notes. “There is traffic. Goond. You look well. Has my husband been eating his breakfast?”

  She’d gotten old. Well, of course she had, “Charlie” was an old man, older even than he looked to Goond; and Emrys had been only two years younger than Fergie when they’d married. She was wearing her hair short, in iron-gray curls; without make-up her features were sterner than Goond remembered, but she had always had that hint of unfathomed strength in her eyes.

  Fergie had turned away and put his hand to his forehead. The look Emrys gave his hunched shoulder blades was one of infinite compassion; Goond felt uncomfortably like he was peering through someone’s bedroom window. “He is my commander,” Goond said. “And nobody tells him to eat his breakfast. Except you. How did you know he was him?”

  A foolish question, really, and Goond wished he could call it back. “You and Charlie quarrelling in the store-front, when you came,” she said, to Fergie’s turned back. “Do you think I would ever forget your voice? My love. —But Charlie is not the only ham radio operator in our family. There has been an incident near Rio de Janeiro in Brazil that should concern you, because we may be the only people with any idea of what might be happening, and what could happen if something is not done.”

  Goond scanned the papers she’d given him. Notes. A cruise ship, yes, he’d seen ads for cruise ships on TV and then he’d had to look them up on the computer and study them in sick fascination. There were three times as many people on some of those ships than had been lost when the Bismarck had gone down. The news Emrys brought said that there had been very few casualties; these things were built with phenomenal redundancies in their survival gear, and besides the ship had stayed afloat. That was a very great blessing: but it also wasn’t the point.

  There were the official reports, and then there were the fringe elements. Some of its passengers insisted that someone had tried to sink them. There was gossip about torpedoes, a periscope, the conning tower and bridge of submarine. Someone claimed that someone had a photo, howsoever blurry, and was holding out for a fat enough offer from a tabloid magazine.

  Someone had seen a cartoon on the conning tower of the supposed submarine that someone was supposed to have seen. According to Emrys’ notes the media discounted any such sightings, but gossip spoke of a big white fish. Moby Dick. The White Whale.

  Which to anybody who knew anything pointed exclusively and immediately to U-797 Dietsch. Goond knew that ship, or at least he knew U-797 Dietsch. VII-F. A monsoon boat, one of possibly only four VII-Fs as far as Goond knew, tasked with bringing fresh torpedoes into the Indian Ocean; so they’d rounded the Cape of Good Hope: and could have seen the Dutchman.

  This changed things. Over the past few days he’d realized, he thought they’d all truly realized, that the war was over. It would take a certain amount of willful blindness to look at one of those huge floating hotels and see a troop transport, even off Allied Rio de Janeiro. There hadn’t been a threat to commercial shipping since 1945, and a cruise ship had no conceivable protections. But Raimond Dietsch had never been quite right in the head.

  “I’ll go speak to our officers,” Goond said. It was more than something that had to be put into motion right now. It was also a good exit line. Raimond Dietsch meant trouble. Someone needed to reach out to him, somehow, and put him straight.

  Goond left Emrys Lachs to say what she had to say to her husband—her husband, to say to her—and went forth with concentration on the emergency that would impel them to their grand experiment sooner, rather than later.

  ###

  By the time Charlie got back from his errands it was past dark. He came in through the back of the house, as he always did; that meant the kitchen door. So comfortably familiar was the sight of his mother sitting at the kitchen table with her old-fashioned drip coffee pot sitting on a trivet in the middle that he didn’t think twice about her being there, and started talking as he turned to secure the screen door behind him. He hadn’t taken it down for the winter, and it was too late now, because summer would be here soon.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he said. “Bad traffic on the road past Benson. Need to put a light on some of those cross-streets, and soon.” He heard the clink of her mug against her saucer. Always a saucer, even with a mug. And always picking up her mug, taking a sip, and setting it back down again, even when it was only to pick it up again for a second sip immediately.

  There was another chime of mug against saucer, and Charlie realized that she wasn’t alone.

  He turned around. That man. He sat beside Charlie’s mother, not across from her, the chair drawn around to sit at the diagonal so that he’d been partially screened from view. He wasn’t looking at Charlie. He was wearing the jacket he’d had on the first time Charlie had seen him, and there was a pile of cabin-keys in front of him on the table.

  “So you’re leaving, then,” Charlie said. If he’d been paying more attention the fact that the cabins were dark would have tipped him off; they’d been fully lit for three, four days now, he’d been getting used to it. Someone had noticed he’d had company. He’d claimed there was paint drying.

  “It’s time,” the man said. “Your mother and I have just been going over our accounts.”

  And that could be taken two ways. Each of them had an envelope on the table in front of them, inscribed; with their name across the front, Charlie realized, of course. Once upon a time he’d seen his mother’s stack tied up with a black ribbon, one for each time Charlie’s father had gone off on a war cruise. She’d told him. He’d never asked about them again. “All settled and satisfactory, I presume?” He hadn’t decided what he was going to call the man, yet. It had only been a few days.

  The man looked up at the kitchen clock above the stove. “Eight o’clock,” he said. “Time to catch my ride back.” He stood up, tucking the envelope with his name on it away inside his jacket. Inside pocket, Charlie presumed. “Thank you for the use of the facilities, Charlie Montrose. It’s been of invaluable help to us.”

  Charlie’s mother hadn’t moved. She turned her face up toward the man as he moved past; the man stooped and kissed her mouth with a sort of businesslike tenderness that erased the apparent difference in age between them. Suddenly Charlie was desperately worried: was his mother ever going to see this man again? She certainly took him for exactly who he claimed to be. Charlie couldn’t let this happen.

  “Well, you’re welcome to come back and see us again,” he said, trying not to notice the startled hunger on his mother’s face that she turned to him as he spoke. “We get busy during the summer, but we’ll find some way to manage. Any time.” And Charlie stood aside, so that the man could leave through the kitchen door. The store would be locked up. It would be dark all the way down to the dock, and nobody to see what might be waiting for its captain out there on the water.

  “Be good to your mother,” the man said, in German now, and held out his hand. “Until I can get back to you both. You’re a good boy, Pieter. I am so proud to have you as my son.”

  Charlie couldn’t move.

  Those were the words. And in that voice. And the hand-shake. He only barely managed to shake himself loose from his paralysis in time to ge
t his own hand out, to clasp that of his father. “I will,” he promised, because those were the words, though he hadn’t thought of them for decades. “Safe journey, swift return, sir. We will await the day.”

  Now, only now, he believed that the man was his father. Only now that the man was leaving. But his mother knew. And his father had known all along, after their first meeting. His father was gone, and Charlie remembered this emotion, the brave front for his mother’s sake, when all his nearly-six-year-old self had wanted to do was cry.

  “Your coffee will get cold,” his mother said. He could hear the sound of a mug filling. “Sit down, Charlie. There’s nothing to be done.”

  He wasn’t six years old. His heart had not been broken. His father was gone, but it was because Charlie Montrose senior had died of cardiac disease just seven years ago. Nothing to do with Verricht Lachs.

  So as inexplicable events went, it was one. “I’ve got to get the groceries,” Charlie said. “Ice cream will melt.” But he sat down anyway and reached for his mug, because she’d told him to. The ice cream wouldn’t melt very quickly. He could take another ten minutes for his mother’s sake; and go see to the cabins in the morning.

  ###

  Once Lachs was back on board they’d run on the surface for as long as it felt safe—the lookout finding no aircraft, no boats on the water. They kept underwater for the daylight hours, so it was near dawn on the second day after they’d left the Salmon Shore—thirty-six hours, more or less—that they reached their target position. Maybe nobody was up in the sky looking for a U-boat, specifically, and they were a small boat in the grand scheme of things. But U-boats didn’t survive by making assumptions.

 

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