by Baen Books
They were making one assumption: that the vague reports—rumors—conspiracy theories, outlandish though they were, were founded on fact: another U-boat displaced in space and time; and a specific U-boat, whose commander had been gossiped about. The entire crew of U-818 Lachs were the only ones with certain knowledge that such a thing could happen.
If nobody got to U-797 in time to warn them that the war was over, a catastrophe might occur. One of the gigantic cruise ships torpedoed, with no time to evacuate all of the passengers and crew. The safety redundancies on those cruise ships were impressive: Goond had studied up on them. But nobody had prepared a cruise liner in 2005 to be attacked by a war machine from sixty years ago. U-797 was a torpedo resupply boat. Who knew how many torpedoes it might have on board?
How long would it take the world’s navies to realize that there was what amounted to a terrorist-by-default on the loose? How many torpedoes would it take the White Whale to sink a cruise liner, how many cruise liners would U-797 sink before it was tracked down and destroyed, how many thousands of people might be killed? What if U-797 fired on a British Navy ship, a United States Navy ship, a Russian war-ship, in the current political environment?
For the last hour and a half everybody on the boat got their chance to come up to the bridge for a few minutes, breathe the air, look at the horizon. Goond wanted to linger on, but it was getting lighter and there was no sense in drawing things out. There would be plenty of time to wonder whether they had made a terrible mistake once they started down.
One last look around at the night sky—at the stars—one last breath of the beautiful pure fresh air—and Goond climbed down into the conning tower to secure the bridge. Into your hands, oh Lord, do we commit our spirits, he said to himself. “Tower hatch closed, Herr Ellie!” Goond called down, firmly, decisively. Did they not commit themselves to God every time they closed the tower hatch? Was this really all so very different?
Yes. It was. There was no way to tell whether diving past three hundred meters would reproduce the physical displacement they’d experienced between the Arctic Ocean and the Salmon Shore resort, even for a boat that had been contaminated by contact with the Flying Dutchman. And if it did, what if they were displaced in time once again, as well? What then?
But U-797 had come up in 2005. U-818 had come up in 2005. Maybe they were called to the same year by accident, but maybe once they were here they would stay. They had to try something, and there was simply nothing else to try. They were fifty-three; a single passenger cruise line carried thousands. It had to be done.
Goond descended into the control room, where Lachs already stood—back to the periscope housing—watching the depth gauges past Vilsohn, over the shoulders of the men seated at the hydroplane stations. “Take us down,” Lachs said. “U-818 into the deeps.”
The diesels had fallen silent. Indicator lights went from red to green as air intake valves were closed and secured. The lights were already dimmed to conserve battery power, because even though they were fully charged, who knew how deep they would be able to go, how far they’d have to travel just to get to the surface again? Who knew how much power they would have to call upon, and for how long?
“Flood tanks forward,” Ellie said. Nobody spoke, except to repeat orders. They could do this in their sleep. That was a good thing. The air had been so thick, before they’d come up from the deeps that last time, that he had been all but sleep-walking.
The boat began to tilt, forward, driving down. Almost as quickly as an emergency dive, but it was just the weight of the boat that was giving them the extra impetus to sink. There was a delicate trade-off, Goond supposed, between the desire to get deep as soon as they could because only then would they know whether they would meet their doom there; and a natural reluctance to cling to the life they might be leaving, not so fast, take your time, there’s no hurry.
Nobody wanted to die. They wanted to live. That meant the risk of dying. Ellie Vilsohn floated his hands in the air, giving instructions for the hydroplanes, decreasing angle of dive, continuing to descend. Maintaining control of the boat as it went deeper. No steeply-sloping slides, no forgotten bits of crockery going flying; no.
Only the boat sinking, sinking, there was one hundred meters, there was the horrid creaking of the wood veneer panels over cabinet doors, there were the groanings and snappings which signified the reaction of the superficial elements of interior trim to changing air pressure—or the leaking, rupturing, fracturing of the pressure hull itself—or nothing.
Should he just go lie down on his bunk, and wrap the pillow around his head to cover his ears and muffle the sounds? It wasn’t as though there would be depth charges. He could have a nap, almost. No. He couldn’t go lie down. He had to watch, with fascination, as the boat continued its dive. One hundred and thirty. One hundred and forty-five.
He had heard the boasting stories in the officers’ mess between war cruises, who had not? But was all hearsay. The design specifications said that boat was meant to go to no more than two hundred and thirty meters with safety, but the boat could go to two hundred and fifty. The boat could go to two hundred and seventy-five meters.
Nobody had ever sat across from Goond and claimed to have been on the boat that had come up from two hundred and eighty-five meters. Goond had never been below two hundred and ten—that he could swear to—but how far down they’d been in the Arctic he did not know. “How deep do we go, Herr Kahloin?” Ellie asked, and Lachs stirred himself.
“We go down until everything breaks.” Perhaps not completely helpful, Goond thought, when “everything” could include the pressure hull itself. Clearly there was some sort of a guideline in Lachs’ mind; but nobody challenged him—because they trusted his judgment, not just because he was the commander. The Smoking Salmon was not that kind of boat. “Then we surface, and see what’s what. We don’t have to get all the way back to Norway. We only need to get out to the Gulf.”
So they went down. One hundred and thirty meters. One hundred and sixty. One hundred and eighty-five. Where would they be, when would they be, when they came up? Goond had a private suspicion, but it was too speculative, even with all of the unreality that surrounded them already.
Two hundred and thirty meters, maximum depth for the IX-C/40. Two hundred and forty meters, and continuing to dive. Why had U-818 surfaced in Lake Superior, of all places? Had nobody else wondered? Nobody had spoken of it if they had, not in Goond’s hearing. Lachs himself had confided no suspicions. Everybody knew, though. Everybody knew that Lachs had found his wife and child here.
His wife and his son would not have been foremost in Lachs’ mind when they’d gone down off Hammerfest: Lachs had had plenty of other things to think about. But Goond was certain that the issue had at least arisen in Lachs’ mind, as it did for many of them, during the long hours they’d lain in the depths of the ocean not knowing whether they would live or die.
Now Lachs had found his wife and child, although the boat had had to come to Lake Superior to bring them back together. Lachs had ways to keep in touch with his loved ones going forward, because Charlie Montrose himself had sat down with the radio-men to talk about things like amateur radio “repeater” stations, and “nodes,” and “inter-ties.” All of those ways were here and now, May, 2005.
And for that reason, if for no other reason than blind faith, Goond believed they would reach the Atlantic, and that it would still be May of 2005 when they did so. Because Lachs meant to find the White Whale. And what Lachs meant to do was what was going to happen.
Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. They would surface. Or they wouldn’t. And all of the other questions would simply have to wait, perhaps forever.
###
On the night her husband had left, again, after all of those long decades of being dead, Emrys had propped the note he’d given her up against the mirror above the dresser in her bedroom, next to the picture of her other dead husband—Charlie Montrose, from whom her son Charlie had a
dopted his name—and gone to bed, leaving it unopened.
She had an idea of what the note contained. It had been a tradition, if one of few years’ duration; still, they’d been young, in those days, and the separation of months had been as painful as that of years. He would tell her that he loved her. He would tell her that he had to go, he’d sworn his oath, and that he would not be worthy of her love if he did not show himself honest and true in the eyes of the world.
He would tell her that he would be thinking of her, that he would be cherishing thoughts of her as his guide and armor against the challenges he faced, that he would do his best to come back to her loyal and true. And he would tell her again that he loved her.
Hers were of similar tenor, and also similarly repetitive. She loved him. She would always love him. She cherished their son and hoped to cherish their son’s younger brothers and sisters as much, in time. She would pray earnestly and every day for his return. She knew that he would do his duty with courage and honor, but she wanted him back, to her house, to her embrace, to her bed. And she loved him.
When he came home on leave he would bring her last note back with him, and put it in a cigar box that he’d inherited from his grandfather in a drawer with his handkerchiefs and his other odds and ends. Pipe stems with fractured mouth-pieces. Cracked bowls of briars. Stubs of railway tickets. They’d all been lost in the bombing.
Next morning it was waiting for her there, but she didn’t open it. It was too soon. They meant to reach Lake Superior’s deepest waters before they tried their theory out; thirty-six hours, more or less, on the surface and beneath it. It was still there on the morning after that, two days after the Smoking Salmon had departed.
She lay down for a nap after lunch-time because remembering, re-living, grappling with the fact of her husband come back to her from across space and time—only to leave her again—was exhausting. The unopened note had yellowed, the ink on the envelope faded to a rusty brown. She left it where it was. They’d both known there was a risk.
She overslept. It was dark outside by the time she opened her eyes and sat up to go and see about some dinner, near midnight; the quarter-moon was rising north-northeast. She saw the envelope gleaming in the darkness from the corner of the mirror above her dresser, next to the picture she kept there of Charlie Montrose.
Her name was as sharp and crisp as though it had been written yesterday across against the clean white paper. Smiling, she reached for it, and opened it up to read.
###
U-818 had sustained damage. Some of the leaks, some of the creaking and groaning of the boat, that had been sustained earlier; there’d been no U-boat pens at Salmon Shore. They were going to have to find a shipyards before they tried this trick again, Goond told himself. Maybe they would go to Brest and ask for some maintenance: the Internet said that the German World War Two submarine pens at Brest were still being used for the same purpose by the French navy.
“The boat is lighter, Herr Kahloin,” Ellie said. “I’d swear on it.” They were on their way up. The boat had gone deep and this time they’d been able to tell, because the gauges had not blown out over the depth reader. Not at two hundred and fifty meters. Not at two hundred and seventy-five. At two hundred and seventy-five, Lachs had stopped. It would work or it wouldn’t. They could always go down deeper, next time, and try again. “Can you feel it?”
Lachs shook his head. “I will only imagine it now, Joachim.” Goond had thought it was his imagination. Maybe it hadn’t been. Ellie was the one who would know. If Ellie said the boat was lighter relative to its medium—if Ellie said that the boat was no longer in fresh water—
One hundred and forty meters, and rising. They were not dead, and that was the most important thing. For Goond, at least, and for the rest of the crew; for Lachs? Because if not being dead were more important than escaping Lake Superior, for Lachs, how would Goond be able to test his hypothesis?
“Do you get a signal, Bentzien?” Goond called back, quietly, to the radio room. But Bentzien shook his head.
“We are still too deep, EinsVo. Not yet.” Goond waved a hand in apology. He was just anxious. He had a GPS in his pocket. He was still sure there was a risk of trace-back, but Charlie had almost convinced him that there was so much traffic that U-818 would be lost in the noise. It would have to wait until they surfaced, one way or another.
One hundred and ten meters. One hundred meters. Ellie gave the hydroplane operators a correction, low-voiced. The boat was lighter. They needed to be sure the boat did not breach on surfacing, to be mistaken perhaps for a whale by some vacationer in a small boat. That would be unfortunate, though it would continue the whale theme of their problem, their mission to locate U-797 before “Ahab” Dietsch found his Moby Dick, like an ocean-going Don Quixote torpedoing a wind-mill. There were no whales in Lake Superior, any more than there were U-boats.
One hundred. Ninety. “What are you thinking, Herr Kahloin?” Goond asked Lachs. He tried to make it lighthearted, to give no hint of the importance of the question in his mind. He would find out. Very soon now. He would find out.
“Dietsch has always been a good warrior,” Lachs said. “But not a man so suited for peacetime. He lives to fight. He will keep on fighting. Now we may have to fight him, U-boat to U-boat. I hope it doesn’t come to that.”
So Lachs was focused on his aim, and that was a data point. The boat was at seventy-five meters and rising ever more quickly as it neared the surface, and Ellie made some more adjustments to trim. Seventy meters. Sixty. Goond did his best not to hold his breath. All around him, in the relative quiet of the electrical motors, he could sense the crew doing the same in their own ways, pretending nonchalance, trying to maintain their calm in the face of their relief at being on the rise and at not being quite dead yet. Fifty meters. Thirty. Twenty.
They seemed to be rushing to the surface, the closer they got, no matter how careful everybody knew Ellie was. Fifteen meters. Ten meters. Five meters—“Up periscope,” Lachs said, calmly. Goond knew Lachs was not calm. That wasn’t the point. The point that everybody knew Lachs was being calm for them, to hearten and reassure them as best he could.
They had not breached the surface. Ellie was once more in his familiar element—salt water—and he was in complete command of his boat, of the mechanical creature, of the machine to which they owed their lives. U-818 was a good boat. Goond had not been on a better.
Periscope up. Lachs took a first scan, then started talking as he scanned again. “I see no traffic,” Lachs said. “It is a dark night.” As it should be, based on ship’s chronometers—since they had gone east. If they’d gone as they hoped to. “If that is the moon, it is low on the horizon, and half-full. I see no lights. Surface, Ellie.”
So far there was little information, except for Ellie’s sense of the relative weight of the boat. In the Gulf of Saint Lawrence they might see much the same as they had on Lake Superior: no coastline; no particular traffic.
Goond passed his GPS to Lachs as Lachs passed, and Lachs turned it on with a decisive gesture, climbing the ladder up through the conning tower to wait at the bridge hatch for Ellie to give him the signal. It had been designed for use on a boat, Charlie had said. Waterproof.
When Lachs opened the bridge hatch the second watch followed him up, Goond bringing up the rear. Goond did his best to judge the quality of the fresh air being drawn through the boat by its fans: salt? Fresh? Climbing to the top the ladder, his head barely clearing the hatch, Goond waited. Lachs bent down close, his expression unreadable against the clear dark sky. It was warm. They were not on Lake Superior any more.
“We made it,” Lachs said. “We’re off the coast of Barbados. East-southeast for Brazil, according to this instrument. And Argentina. The GPS finds a date-stamp, it has been only three days since we left Salmon Shore. Tell the crew.”
Every U-boat man knew how to do a controlled fall down from the bridge through the conning tower to the Zentral, using the uprights of the ladder
to guide and brake them. Goond hopped down now. “We’re out!” he shouted. “Caribbean Sea. 2005. We’re out, we’re free, it’s worked!”
They would find U-797. They would find the White Whale. They would save Dietsch, and all he might encounter, from disaster. Goond knew they could do it. Because now he thought, he thought for almost certain, that whether or not Lachs himself understood what was going on, the ship—and the crew—would follow Lachs’ heart.
Fortunately for them all, Lachs’ heart was true.
Homunculus
Stephen Lawson
The yellow-orange tholin haze above Titan's surface whirled around the chassis of a lighter-than-air research drone. A tiny carbon-fiber humanoid robot sat perched on its support structure, dangling his feet next to the drone's camera as it took pictures of the rocky surface below. The dirigible, designed to carry sampling probes and communication equipment, barely registered the stowaway's mass. Folded aramid-fiber wings fluttered on aluminum ribs on the bot's back as the breeze swept over the drone's chassis.
"Man, this place really does have atmosphere," Gavin whispered.
He snorted at his own bad joke.
It keeps out the cosmic radiation though. They have to live underground on Mars, like moles.
Gavin watched the haze roil beneath his tiny carbon-fiber feet. It wasn't really him of course. Gavin and his wife Lori were hurtling through the space between Earth and Saturn in a Goshawk Heavy Transport. The winged avatars through which they interacted with Titan's small colony would've only come up to his knee if they stood side-by-side. Nonetheless, six hour virtual reality workdays in the bubble box made the homunculus's carbon-fiber shell feel very much like skin.