Black Chamber

by S. M. Stirling

  “Off with diesels,” Kapitänleutnant Denke said, head moving like a turret.

  The throbbing of the powerful engines stopped. They drove generators that charged the big packs of batteries; it was quiet electric motors that actually turned the U-150’s twin screws, and they went on regardless.

  “Down Schnorchel. Engines ahead dead slow. Charge reading.”

  Luz hadn’t really been conscious of the sound of the electric motors; they were quiet. It was the absence that she noticed, as they slowed to the point where the screws were barely keeping steerage-way.

  “Three knots. Batteries at ninety-nine point eight charge,” the helm replied.

  One of the great advantages of the Schnorchel was that the U-150 could run fairly fast submerged and charge her batteries at the same time. She had many more batteries per ton than a regular boat, too; this was one of the first submarines designed to spend most of its—admittedly brief—lifetime underwater. The hydrophone man turned dials on his apparatus and concentrated, closing his eyes and putting a hand to one earphone again, his blunt-featured whiskery face blank as a corpse in the dim lights. The others were keeping half an eye on him, until a petty officer hissed at them and they returned full attention to their own jobs.

  “High-speed screws, skipper, warship signatures,” he said after a moment, his apparatus hearing much more clearly now that the submarine itself made less noise. “Multiple high-speed screws. Destroyers, and heading our way. Closing fast, I estimate at better than twenty-five knots.”

  “Yankee destroyer screen,” Denke said. “They’re doing a sweep.”

  The U-150’s executive officer came through the watertight door at the rear of the compartment; he was tall enough that he had to be very careful of his head when he did that. The black stubble had turned to a dense beard on his thin face now—he was one of those men who had to shave twice a day.

  His eyes turned upward. “Could be bad luck. Or an air patrol might have spotted the Schnorchel and sent our location in by wireless,” he said. “It’s not absolutely invisible if the observer’s lucky and catches a patch of exhaust against a whitecap or something like that. And the American semi-rigid scout airships patrol this far out—their C-class have over twenty-four hours endurance and they’re stable enough to use binoculars from their gondolas.”

  Denke shrugged. “The destroyers are here now at any rate. And they will conduct a naval exercise,” he added, as if the word Marineübung combined obscenity, scatology, and bad taste.

  Luz hid her smile for a moment. The U.S. Navy had been conducting anti-submarine exercises for some time now, as American neutrality wore thinner and thinner. Those exercises often coincided with the location of actual U-boats and involved dropping live charges, and complaints from Berlin were met with bland statements that putting submarines in the western Atlantic was reckless endangerment.

  Which was exactly the same phrase the German foreign ministry had used about Americans taking passage on ships like the Mauretania.

  She let the grin out, thinking how Uncle Teddy must have enjoyed reading the wording . . . if he hadn’t been the one who’d come up with it. Across the control room Horst had a seat near the machinery that controlled the missile launch. He took her expression for a fighting grin in defiance of fate, which wasn’t altogether wrong, and echoed it in kind; she knew he’d been feeling as useful as an udder on a bull.

  “Silent running, pass the word, Hans,” Denke said to his number two.

  “Aye, aye, skipper.”

  The skinny dark-eyed Rhinelander slipped out. Ciara came in just after he left, and she saw Denke think of ordering her back to her bunk and then reconsider. The men had made her something of a mascot-cum-younger-sister, especially after she’d helped capably with several repair jobs. Luz greeted her with a smile and an arm around the waist, giving thanks to—

  Nobody in particular, but feeling thankful.

  —as she did that women weren’t held to the same standard of stoic undemonstrativeness that men inflicted on themselves, but doing it sincerely. And it was good to have someone who was a real ally there. A spy operating undercover, particularly a double agent, was usually alone in a spiderweb of deceit where you had to tie a string around your finger to remind yourself of who you actually were now and then. They both looked up at the ceiling, then at each other with irony in their gaze.

  Ciara made a side to side motion with her head, as if to say:

  Who should we be cheering for?

  Luz shrugged very slightly and raised a brow:

  We’ve got a good patriotic reason to hope they miss! ¡Verdad!

  “All ahead one-quarter,” Denke said. “Come about to heading 220.”

  “All ahead one-quarter. Heading 220,” the engine and helm replied.

  “Take her down. Forty meters,” Denke said, his face like something carved out of wood—if there had been a type of wood that sprouted a brown beard with orange tints; the lights brought them out.

  “Aye, aye, skipper, forty meters,” the depth helm replied.

  More water gurgled into the ballast tanks. The U-150 banked downward and curved to the side as the hydroplanes at bow and stern bit the water and the rudder pushed. Creaks and groans came from the pressure hull itself as water pushed inward, trying to crumple it like an old tin can under a boot, but the Krupp steel held firm. Somewhere in the depths of the vessel there was a metallic pop and a wet hiss and muted cursing as the damage-control crew stopped a minor leak.

  “Level at forty meters,” the helm said. “Six knots.”

  “Skipper, the destroyers are maintaining course. Distance opening.”

  Then a new sound, through the sea and the steel of the hull itself:

  Ping.

  A metallic sound, vibrating through the hull of U-150 as if it were a bell and had been struck with a hammer.

  Luz knew what it was; she’d never heard it, but she’d heard it described. It was an Echels, an echolocation system, mounted in the bows of a U.S. Navy destroyer.

  Everyone else in the control room of the submarine seemed to know too. She had only a rough idea of how it worked—the details were deeply, deeply secret; she only knew anything at all because Uncle Teddy had mentioned it, one of his naval enthusiasms. You made a sharp sound, it bounced off underwater objects, and you measured their direction and distance by timing the return sounds through hydrophones. In theory it should make submarines instantly detectable; in practice there were so many unknown details on how sound propagated through real water with all its currents and temperature gradients, and so many technical difficulties in making the receiving apparatus work, that the first sets had only reached working prototype status this summer despite the desperate-haste priority.

  Uncle Teddy took war in all its aspects seriously and thought about it deeply; he’d been a very good soldier himself, disgusted at the mass chaos of the war with Spain in which he’d won his spurs. He really thought about naval warfare. He’d written a history of the naval side of the War of 1812 that had become a standard in the U.S. Navy long, long before he became president, or even went into national politics, and he’d helped lay the foundations of the modern fleet as Assistant Secretary of the Navy and the real power there behind the pleasant old duffer who’d held the titular power.

  Luz had heard that a scientist’s offhand comment had resulted in the Institute being told, in no uncertain terms, to make the Echels system work, especially when it was discovered that the British had something similar under development.

  I wish it worked much better, so that we didn’t have to rely on what I’ve got tucked into my brassiere, she thought. But I also have to hope it doesn’t work well enough to destroy U-150, my personal desire not to be crushed and drowned completely aside, and the fact that Ciara’s here, which has—¡maldición!—become very important to me too. Because the sets we have now aren’t good e
nough to get them all and even if it gets this one most of the others will get through. So the great movements of history turn on little things!

  Ping. Ping. Ping-ping-ping!ping!ping!

  “Ships closing again, flank speed, thirty knots or better. They’re going to pass over us, skipper—at least some of them. They either know we’re here, or suspect.”

  “For what we are about to receive . . .” someone said.

  Now the thrashing screws of the destroyers were audible through the hull, a drumming roar less than two hundred feet away.

  “. . . may the Lord make us truly thankful.” A voice completed the invocation.

  The man at the hydrophones barked, managing not to make it too loud: “Splashes! Depth charges in the water!”

  Luz and Ciara used their free hands to grab pipes and wedge themselves more tightly. Depth charges weren’t a sophisticated weapon, and they’d been in use for about eighteen months: just metal barrels like the ones used to carry oil, packed full of cheap ammonal explosives with a simple pressure detonator that could be set for any depth. So far rolling them off the rear end of ships that had—or thought they had—a submarine beneath them was the only effective way of killing submerged U-boats anyone had found, though teams were working on better ones at full speed in all the Great Powers with significant navies.

  Kapitänleutnant Denke had one hand above his head on the ring of brass tubing that surrounded the base of the periscope. His face was calm, but there were runnels of sweat on his forehead, and he blinked as they ran into his eyes and stung.

  Everyone waited; Ciara’s arm held Luz more tightly.

  BAM!

  The U-150 shuddered and jerked as if it were an automobile that had gone into a massive pothole at speed, throwing them backward painfully into the irregular metal surfaces, then nearly jerking them free onto the deck. The hull plates groaned again, far more alarmingly than they had before. The lights flickered, and one popped with a tinkle of broken glass. Thin, hard jets of water sprouted from the joints of pipes, and several gauges burst. Damage-control teams sprang into action with tools, closing valves with wrenches and stuffing pads into leaks.

  BAM!

  Another jarring jolt, and the U-150 lurched.

  BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!

  “Course 210, all ahead full,” Denke said.

  “Aye, aye, skipper. 210, all ahead full.”

  The U-150 banked and leapt ahead with a surge of speed. The growl of the destroyers’ screws faded.

  BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!

  The next series of explosions was loud, but the U-boat shuddered rather than writhed. Denke grinned like a shark.

  “The explosions deafen their hydrophones, and they can only use that damned sounding device in front of them,” he said.

  Ping. Ping. Ping . . .

  “Moving away, skipper. They guessed wrong.”

  “Engines all ahead half,” Denke said after a few minutes, as each successive volley of depth charges was a little fainter. “All they’re doing now is killing fish.”

  “Aye, aye, skipper. Six knots.”

  “That will do. Come about to 300, I say again, 300.”

  “Aye, aye, Captain. 300. Course is 300, depth forty meters, six knots.”

  The executive officer came back. “Outguessed them, skipper!”

  Denke shrugged. “Or they guessed port and I guessed starboard,” he said. “Thank Almighty Lord God or the luck of the devil that that echo sounder of theirs is short-range and only works in a fan ahead of the bows. We’ll keep this course and speed until we make our final approach to the target.”

  The Rhinelander’s brows went up, and he stepped over to the map table. “On batteries all the way? That will bring us in at . . . no more than twenty percent charge, skipper. Maybe fifteen percent.”

  Denke turned a hand up. “Which matters exactly . . . why, Hans? We’re driving away from the target in automobiles, not sailing.”

  His subordinate froze, blinked, and then smiled ruefully. “You’re right, skipper. We’re shooting off this boat like a torpedo, but it’s still . . . unnatural to think about it that way.”

  Luz looked at the control console for the Breath of Loki. ¡Es absolutamente correcto! Unnatural is just the word! she thought.

  * * *

  • • •

  All ahead one-quarter,” Denke said a day later.

  “Aye, aye, skipper. Ahead one-quarter.”

  The tension in the control room was dense enough to slice; worse, she thought, because none of the men could smoke . . . and they’d been submerged for a long time now, longer than any other class of submarine on Earth could have managed.

  The air was thick with the scent of male sweat too, and of a particular and familiar type that didn’t depend on how hot it was, strong in these meat-fed men: throttled fear and tightly held aggression ready to burst into lethal violence, a peculiar rank musk. That was how an ambush party smelled as the enemy approached, or an assault group about to rush a strongpoint. It was the smell of the most dangerous thing in the world. She was used to it, though not in a sealed chamber with recirculated air, but she could sense it was adding to Ciara’s nerves. She’d lived mostly among women or a few sedentary men until recently. And she was getting closer and closer to the home where she’d lived all her life, carrying mass death. That must be wearing at her too, but she was making an excellent stab at controlling it.

  I admire this girl, I really do. I don’t know if I could have done as well at her age or with her background.

  Denke spoke, perhaps taking pity on his men: “I’m following a big harbor tug,” he said. “She’s got something like a corvette in tow—probably a minelayer with engine trouble. Take a look, Hans.”

  The executive officer briefly stepped in, stooping so as not to disturb his commander’s setting of the instrument.

  “Right you are, skipper,” he said. “Moving slowly, too! I hope U-148 had as nice an escort through the minefields.”

  Denke resumed his position. “Now we just have to hope the tug’s map of the minefields is properly updated,” he said. “The Americans can be sloppy about details.”

  Ciara started as Luz joined in the hard snicker that went around among the sailors and Horst.

  “It’s times like these you need a laugh most,” Luz whispered to her.

  Ciara nodded. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said softly.

  “Y yo también, querida,” Luz whispered back. “Good not to be alone.”

  Tense silence fell again, except for Denke’s brief commands to the helm and their precise echoes. Luz glanced down; Ciara’s eyes were closed, but she thought she knew what was playing out behind them. The approach to Boston by sea, the narrow entrance between the Navy Yard and South Boston, the golden gleam on the State House topping Beacon Hill, the Custom House, the church spires that were the tallest things, always coming into sight first to welcome the traveler . . .

  Luz didn’t dislike Boston; there were good bookstores and some lovely galleries and museums and a couple of really good trattorias in the North End, though she would never have lived there by choice. And she had no single place where she’d spent nearly every day of twenty years; even the house in Santa Barbara had been a base to return to, despite her being born there. For Ciara the sensation must be much stronger, as if she were riding with the Four Horsemen to the doom of her world.

  At last Denke sighed and relaxed. “We’re in.”

  Nobody cheered, they were far too well disciplined for that, but backs were slapped and fists rose in exultation and a few bawdy jokes rang changes on Denke’s phrasing. Luz felt something different, a hunter’s keenness, as a wolf might after following a long difficult trail and seeing the prey at last in sight.

  Now Denke did something with a lever on the side of the periscope. “Reference point number one in sight.
Distance is . . . four point two-seven kilometers, bearing 177.”

  “Target distance is three point one-four kilometers, bearing 150,” the exec said from the plotting table.

  Silence except for the almost imperceptible whine of the electrics as the team went into their stylized dance of order and response. Luz felt her own sweat running down her spine, despite the dankness of the U-boat. She felt sticky with it, but she’d been places where staying clean was impossible before; it was probably harder on Ciara’s morale. The dialogue between the two men went on until—

  “Distance is—down periscope! Engines stop! Harbor patrol boat!”

  Luz saw one of the petty officers biting his finger to keep from saying anything aloud; she sympathized deeply and swallowed acid at the back of her throat. Everyone waited in utter silence . . . either for enough time to pass, or for the bow of one of the ships in the busy harbor to slice into them as they waited blind and helpless.

  “Up periscope,” Denke said. He did a three-hundred-sixty-degree scan. “Distance to reference one is two point nine kilometers, bearing 160.”

  He began calling orders again in the same calm monotone. Twenty minutes later:

  “Distance to reference three is three point eight kilometers, bearing 281.”

  “I confirm the plot,” the second-in-command said.

  The hitherto-silent Bootswain, who was also a navigator and had been running the calculations in duplicate spoke:

  “I confirm the plot. We’re where we’re supposed to be, skipper.”

  “Down periscope. Vent trim tanks,” Denke said, his eyes on the compass binnacle. “Take her down to the bottom.”

  Air gurgled out of the tanks and the U-150 settled. The sensation was familiar . . . until the submarine grounded on the mud of Boston’s harbor. First by the bow, then with a long slithering sound and a thunngggg as the stern dug in. The deck canted to starboard and settled at about fifteen degrees off vertical. The sensation beneath their feet altered, too. Even the steady level swim of the submarine when far below the surface had a subliminal motion to it. This was stillness, the feel of solid ground.