Black Chamber

by S. M. Stirling

  “And that the breathing tube must be?” Ciara said, in her fluent but clumsy German. “Oh, a streamlined faring of cross-section teardrop it has. Clever, clever!”

  “Yes, gracious miss,” Denke said. “That is the Schnorchel. With that, we can remain submerged and run on the diesels unless the weather is very bad indeed. The original two cargo holds were moved forward. Since this is a one-way mission, and the . . . cargo . . . is permanently installed, it’s fairly easy to keep the hull in balance. Though to be absolutely frank, she maneuvers like a pig on the surface! The covers over the hold are thrown off by pneumatic bolts, and then the launching tubes are fired in sequence with an automatic counterflooding mechanism to keep her on an even keel.”

  “By connections of electro-mechanical?” Ciara said. “And the trajectories would be preset from the point of attack wanted . . . no I say desired . . . desired dispersal pattern to get, to each boat special?”

  “Exactly!” Denke said, looking slightly sandbagged at Ciara’s terrier pursuit of detail. “The gracious miss has been well briefed?”

  “No, it logical solution only is,” she said. “One right solution, in concern of one problem, as great thinker Taylor says.”

  She frowned. “Of displacement tonnage, cargo is much? Sorry for my handle of German; cargo is what . . . amount of whole?”

  “Anteil,” Denke said. “Proportion.”

  “Ja, Anteil! Danke schön. Proportion of entire.”

  “About seven hundred and fifty tons available for the . . . special loads, not counting structural supports,” Denke said. “Since we didn’t need enough diesel fuel for a return voyage, which more than compensates for room and weight taken by the extra batteries.”

  And it’s some sort of low-velocity launch system, Luz thought, feeling something like a flush of heat followed by an icy chill over her skin. Mortar or rocket or some combination of the two. So the payload will be high in proportion to the total weight. Between fifty and a hundred tons of esa cosa horrible. And five parts in a million will kill. One tiny little invisible drop. I’ve seen that.

  Horst cleared his throat; he found Ciara’s artless charm amusing, but business was business.

  Denke came to himself with a slight start, clicked his heels, and half bowed them toward the gangway, where two grinning junior petty officers waited. He’d probably also delayed a bit for the muttered instructions to be carried out.

  “If you will accompany me . . .”

  The conning tower had a hatchway in its front, where the companionway from the dock ended. A breath of damp fetid air came out as it was opened, as if it were the door to a basement that gave on to a sewer. Denke called for a senior petty officer, then cleared his throat and said:

  “Show the gnädige Fräulein to their . . . accommodation, Obersteuermann.”

  * * *

  • • •

  U-150 moved away from the dock with a lurch, and began to pitch a little even in the calm waters of the harbor. Evidently Denke hadn’t been lying about her characteristics on the surface.

  “Let’s get settled in and see what’s what,” Luz said to Ciara.

  “Sure, and it’s not much worse than the Norwegian freighter I came east on,” she replied stoutly.

  That’s a lie, but a brave one, Luz thought.

  The Obersteuermann—the word meant a senior noncommissioned rank—hustled them through the control room of the submarine. That was directly below the conning tower, and rather larger than most, though very crowded; the rudder helmsmen and those at the engine controls were busy as Denke gave his instructions through the intercom. Evidently the diesel and electric engines lay behind it, and the crew quarters forward.

  Luz’s immediate impression was that the U-150 was insanely crowded, and foul-smelling to boot, what with the swampy bilge and diesel reek and the faint acid tang of the batteries added to by fainter odors of vomit—what went into the bilgewater never entirely left, and the submarine had had a shakedown cruise already—and backed-up heads, as sailors referred to toilets. And while Luz was two inches shorter than the American average man, and Ciara a little shorter still, they both nearly cut their scalps on the profusion of pipes and obstacles as they were shown to their bunk.

  The crew accommodation was forward of the control room, with a tiny cubicle for the captain opposite a nook for the radio operator, two two-bunk cubicles for the officers, and then the bunks for the noncoms and crew ahead of those and a tiny galley at the front. The bunks were stacked on either side of the passageway, three layers high with about two and a half feet between each and the lowest level a foot off the patterned metal plates of the deck; there were probably batteries in the compartment below.

  “The U-150’s hull is deeper than most, misses,” the man said. “Here, you are to have a petty officer’s bunk; on the lowest layer, larger, and with curtains of good thick canvas!”

  Someone had done a good job of stringing those, made easier by the fact that the frames were metal tubing. She stood for a moment considering it; with two good-sized women it was going to be cozy, or very crowded, depending on how you looked at it. They could take turns using it some of the time, of course. Luz stowed the suitcase in the netting that was attached to the bottom of the bunk above.

  “And no crates of provisions taking up space in the bunking area either,” the man noted proudly. “Not on this boat. The galley is forward of this, and we have an actual electric freezing box to keep food from spoiling!”

  First things first, she thought, and asked the man: “And the . . . head, I think you sailors call it, Obersteuermann?”

  The man looked slightly embarrassed; he was older than his captain, and built like a stump with battered hands like spades, though no taller than Ciara.

  “Gracious miss, you understand that . . . ah, we can rig a curtain as I have been instructed, as we did for your bunk, and perhaps a sign that you are using the . . . facility . . . but . . .”

  “We all have to make sacrifices in the line of duty, and I am sure you will do your best,” she said, and felt him reacting to the upper-class accent and manner.

  He barked gruffly at other seamen, who did almost comical double-takes when they realized who was following him, but jumped aside—which mostly involved pretzel-like contortions. The toilet was at least in a nook, and was fairly clean at the beginning of a cruise.

  “Ah . . . not behind a door,” he said. “And it is . . . tricky.”

  He used vigeliensch for that, which meant he probably came from Schleswig, but whether you said tricky or vigeliensch or schwierig the taps and valves around it showed that using it would require genuine technical skill. The petty officer began to stumble through an explanation—from what he mumbled she gathered you could literally sink the U-boat if you did it precisely wrong—but Ciara intervened.

  “After use has been, close this, then this valve, this, this, and this—in that order—and trigger this, correct?”

  The petty officer was startled out of his embarrassment. “Ja, miss!” he said. “You have been on a U-boat before?”

  “No, just familiar with hydraulics am,” she said. Then she smiled. “And pumps, engines, electric motors used to help my brother fix in workshop where he employment had.”

  “We are very sorry that security required our presence to be sprung on you as such a surprise, Obersteuermann . . .” Luz said.

  “Obersteuermann Göttsch, miss. And now if you will pardon me—”

  He took off at a fast scramble. The dim orange light of the bulbs used in the interior of the submarine gave everything a ghastly tinge as they made their way back to the control room, as if you were of the unburied, unquiet dead.

  The passage outward from the harbor was a slightly unnerving experience in itself; only Captain Denke and his assistants up in the conning tower could see a damned thing. His voice came down via the boat’s int
ercom system, and the submarine turned this way or that, but they could be about to pile into the side of a battleship for all either of them could tell.

  Or be rammed, and the first we’d know of it would be the ship’s bows coming through the wall. Pardon me, the hull.

  The crew thought this was a luxury liner, for reasons starting with the U-boat’s great size and adding in that she only had a basic sailing crew rather than a fighting one, and one intended for a single short voyage at that. The standard war sub needed men to reload torpedoes; man the deck guns; keep a four-man watch in the conning tower to detect vulnerable targets or dangerous warships, blimps, and aircraft, and others to relieve those people; and enough hands to maintain the complex machinery for months or repair it when long hard service wore it down. That meant squeezing them in like sardines and hot-bunking in relays, and sleeping on top of the torpedoes until they were fired off and left room for hammocks.

  All the U-150 had to do was keep its engines going for one trip across the Atlantic, during which it was strictly instructed to travel submerged during the day and avoid all contact with anyone whatsoever if it could. And since it had only had one training voyage before this and a thorough overhaul afterward, apparently the submarine smelled like a meadow full of new-mown hay or fresh lavender-scented sheets in a good hotel compared to the rest of the U-boat fleet, which averaged several months-long cruises each.

  Which makes me shudder at the thought of the usual sort of submarine, she thought. Small spaces don’t bother me, usually, but . . . You have to admit, these men are willing to suffer in the line of duty. Especially when you add in the continual risk of drowning in the dark. Germany would be a much less dangerous enemy if so many Germans weren’t able and hardworking and brave and patriotic. A formidable people. Then again, every third American has German ancestry.

  Kapitänleutnant Denke’s conversion from hostility to a rather condescending friendliness toward Ciara—he had more or less ignored Luz except for a few covert glances—extended to letting them into the control room below the conning tower, as long as they stayed strictly silent and jammed into one corner. His words to that effect came down when his executive officer, a thin dark dyspeptic-looking Rhinelander named Hans Roeckerath, called a query upward.

  The walls were like nearly everything else inside the submarine; covered in pipes, electrical and pneumatic cables, and control wheels—large wheels, medium-sized ones, small ones, grouped apparently randomly as far as she could see and not labeled. Between them were even larger numbers of dials and gauges, levers and switches. The crew’s hands and eyes went to the right places with practiced skill, their movements choreographed like a dance.

  And this is much less complicated than the usual U-boat, Luz thought, pressing her back into the corner, where things dug in through her leather jacket and the wool beneath. Of course, this isn’t a warship armed with weapons. It is a weapon, meant to be expended like a bullet.

  Cold condensate dripped down on her occasionally, but that happened nearly everywhere on board. She was already damp and she’d stay that way until they crossed the Atlantic and came ashore; it was also the closest she’d get to a bath. The only real warmth was Ciara beside her, and the younger woman’s eyes were virtually bulging with fascinated interest except for intervals when she couldn’t ignore that this particular weapon was aimed at the city where she’d been born and raised and that contained most of the things she valued in the world.

  And my period’s started, Luz thought.

  The cramps weren’t bad and could be ignored, but she always felt slightly depressed and irritable at this stage; her preferred response was hot water bottles or friendly cats and solitude with a good book.

  Oh, joyous voyage.

  Her eyes strayed to the front part of the compartment, past the pedestal of the periscope and the compass binnacle and the little navigation table and just to the right of the watertight door. That large metal box was about six on a side and five feet high, covered in yet more dials and levers, and it was the control mechanism for the weapon that was the U-150’s reason for existence. Two technicians did nothing but groom and care for it, and go over the electrical cables that ran in armored sheaths forward to the launching tubes.

  Those men had the doom of a city beneath their hands, priests of a very modern, twentieth-century God of Death born amid retorts and catalysts . . . and because of a dozen laborers in German East Africa dying in uncomprehending terror after one dropped a wooden crate full of glass vials that some white man had yelled at him to carry carefully in a language he didn’t know, or had only a few words of.

  Luz had a sudden feeling that the box was like the altar on one of the old pyramids you still came across in Mexico, overgrown and ruined, where you could see the blood gutters that had poured the red salt flood like rainwater. There the Aztec priests had slashed chests open with knives of black obsidian and raised the beating hearts in their fists to feed their monster gods, then tumbled the bodies down the steps to the waiting crowds to be ceremoniously devoured.

  I’d swear that thing has the same faint glow of evil about it. My imagination in both cases, but . . . Donde el diablo puso la mano, queda huella para rato. The means change and become more terrible, but the wickedness men do . . . not so much.

  After two hours of dead-slow maneuvering and pitching and rolling Denke came sliding down the ladder that ran up into the conning tower, and the man behind him dogged the hatch that separated it from the pressure hull.

  “We’re clear of the harbor minefields,” he said.

  Which is deeply reassuring, Luz thought. Except that this part of the world has broken out in minefields like an adolescent in spots. And speaking of breaking, sometimes the mines break free of their moorings and drift about killing people entirely at random. Just as dangerous in a surface ship, really, but this sense of being blind in a box makes it feel worse.

  There were types of danger she found exhilarating, almost pleasurable . . . and in fact by now as addictive as opium. But they all involved a degree of control—a sense that she was pitting herself against the peril and overcoming it by wit and skill. This purely passive waiting had none of that.

  “Take her down, Karl. Periscope depth, and up with the Schnorchel,” Denke said.

  “Periscope depth. Aye, aye, skipper,” the helmsman said, and he and his two assistants twirled some of the metal wheels.

  I’d heard that submarines were more casual than most of the German Navy, Luz thought. Nice to get first-hand confirmation. It certainly doesn’t seem to affect their efficiency. And of course they’ve got relatively small crews living in each other’s pockets.

  The buoyancy tanks hissed and gurgled as air went out and seawater came in. The strong pitching action combined with a corkscrew back-and-forth roll damped down to a slower rise and fall. Luz had a strong stomach, but she was still glad of it, and from the smell someone on board had given back dinner . . . possibly assisted by a lingering hangover, given the way sailors usually acted in port. The U-150 was evidently one of those craft that could pitch and roll on wet grass when it was on the surface. The world beneath the waves was its true element.

  “Up periscope,” Denke said.

  The instrument tucked up under the ceiling descended smoothly, and presumably the upper portion was doing the reverse, poking up through the surface. Denke reversed his cap so that the bill wouldn’t interfere and put his hands to the twin levers and his eyes to the padded viewpiece.

  “Almighty Lord God, what a wealth of targets!” he said, and his executive officer chuckled like a malicious skeleton while the men all grinned. “Too bad they’re all Imperial German Navy. All ahead three-quarters. Report speed.”

  “Schnorchel on,” the man at the engine control panel said. “Diesels feeding normally. Full fuel tanks, batteries at one hundred percent charge. All ahead three-quarters.”

  The rumble of
the engines had continued without a break; now their sound became louder as he pushed on a set of throttles. Evidently the controls for the engines were managed directly from this control chamber, rather than being relayed to a separate engine room as on a conventional ship. Since they were electrical anyway, there was no reason not to do it that way except inertia from the days of steam, and it would reduce the lag between order and action. She made a mental note of it, since the U.S. Navy might want to try it out too.

  “Eleven knots,” another petty officer said.

  “Come about to 315, I say again, 315,” Denke said from the periscope.

  “Jawohl. Changing course to 315,” the helmsman replied, and the deck canted beneath their feet as the U-150 went into a curve and then straightened out again. “Course is 315.”

  “Steady as she goes,” Denke said. “Hans, you have the deck. Maintain course and speed.”

  “Aye, aye, skipper. I have the deck; maintaining present course and speed.”

  Horst was standing near him; if Luz craned her head, she could make out the map that Denke turned to and the course he outlined.

  “North of Scotland and the Orkneys,” the U-boat skipper said. “A little longer but better than trying to run the Channel minefields and patrols. Then along this curve to the northeastern U.S.”

  “Haven’t the English put up mine barriers?” Horst asked.

  Thank you, Horst! Luz thought. Elisa wouldn’t have heard about that but I did and I’d been wishing I could ask.

  “They’ve started on one this summer. It’s supposed to be eighteen lines of mines right across the North Sea from the Orkney Islands to Norwegian territorial waters when . . . if . . . it’s ever finished. That would be four hundred kilometers long and twenty-five wide and need something like four hundred thousand mines . . . in water three hundred meters deep. Of course, they only have to mine the top sixty or seventy meters, which makes an area four hundred kilometers long by twenty-five wide and seventy meters deep.”