Königstiger: Odin's Warriors - Book 3

by Aeryn Leigh

  Amelia swallowed. The voice in her head had the same overtones of her mother, when she used Amelia's full name. Amelia Frances Gruder! When your mother used your entire name, you knew you were in trouble. The voice in her head held the same incredulous anger.

  "Nein," she said in German. "I will not hurt it, it is injured, and my new friend." Behind the rotating turret, Amelia saw the screen full of stars, before tipping down, the edge of Elysium appearing in view. They were now in orbit around the planet, realised Amelia.

  One hundred and six point four kilometres above the surface of the planet, Amelia Gruder and the heavy gunship Aries locked mental horns and fought. One heartbeat later for Amelia, and what felt like an eternity for the ship, it relented. Maybe it could be interrogated after all, concluded the gunship, unable to accept the Valkjur's stated reason. But Valkjurs always played with riddles wrapped inside enigmas stuffed within paradoxes. This was obviously one of those occasions. Must be.

  The turret withdrew back into the ceiling of the cockpit. The pack of dogs, uncharacteristically silent and still for that brief encounter, got up from the drop position and began sniffing and investigating the entire cockpit. Skippy however, sat on her haunches and looked at Amelia, feeling once more, safe.

  Amelia walked around to the cockpit's chair, and with a grunt hoisted herself up into the high seat. On the right-hand side of the armrest, a weird typewriter keypad of controls, not to similar to the ones she'd seen adults use back on earth, and a small depression, the same shape to hold the stone in her right palm. She placed the stone in. More knowledge exploded within her mind now.

  Valhalla-class inter-planetary heavy gunship, Aries configuration and name. A crew of three. Lines upon lines of weapons readouts appeared in the top right of her vision, and before her, a three-dimensional map of Elysium, and its orbiting moon. Pulsating flashes of red dotted the map here and there. The enemy, informed the gunship, is multiplying. Yet concentrated in one area, a red mass formed. She felt the pull of the ship, its murderous drive, the clarion song of battle.

  Amelia shook her head. She was already getting tired of saying no all the time. Mummy. Show me. Amelia experienced the briefest sensation of falling, vertigo looming, as the map zoomed in, remembering that that she was safe standing on the bridge of the gunship.

  On the eastern side of Elysium's biggest mountain range, a symbol appeared, and Amelia knew it was her mum. Threat projections flashed up in a mind. Viking longships, a lot of them. That must be Hellsbaene, she thought. Something was spiralling up from the cluster of Viking ships and one old warship, some kind of aircraft. She willed the zoom optics further inwards. Skippy barked behind her, urgent. Laurie.

  Without thinking, acting purely by reflex, tied to the gunship’s neural wetworks, Amelia made it so.

  LAURIE TUMBLED OFF THE EDGE, arms flapping. Of all the ways he expected to die, falling off a frictionless landing strip wasn't one of them. Well mate, it's been a good innings. The others are just gonna have to carry the torch now.

  And the last thing he saw was the longships and the shoreline far below as he closed his eyes, at peace with himself. The wind rushed past, shrieking in his ears, and he thought about all his dead mates, and his parents, and how finally at last he would get to see them again.

  He suddenly jolted. One more heartbeat. Laurie opened his eyes. So bloody close above the rocky shoreline, a giant telescopic metal claw held him. He looked out and up, blinking furiously, to the stonking, great big fucking aircraft somehow hovering, suspended right in midair, and through the forward cockpit windows, his mind in sheer disbelief at the figure of a certain small child and his bloody dog, waving and tail thumping furiously at him through the forward hexagonal window, happy as fucking Larry.

  Chapter Twenty

  SHADOWS

  THE MIST CLUNG to their faces like the clammy embrace of the dead. Visibility reduced to half a mile in any direction. What remained of the Seventh's troop ships were at least now all facing in the same direction, thanks to the use of fog horns and signal flags. On the Akira's bridge, Wolfgang stood, projecting calm, a beacon of indomitableness, as the ship's engineers tried to fix the myriad problems plaguing the SS Akira and by the look of it the other ships. Entire electrical systems failed, then came back on, only to fail again. Bursts of wireless chatter punctured those moments of silence, as electrical systems came online allowing enough frenzied, panicked chatter to occur before being sliced off mid-word.

  Wolfgang could feel the responsibility of command settle down upon his shoulders. The SS Mustavo had on board the general and the Seventh's regimental headquarters staff. All lost. Just the few dozen souls they'd manage to pull out of the warm, ocean waters.

  The chain of command was clear. Or more to the point, the complete spread of command, the leadership of the Seventh neatly decapitated. Eight other battalion commanders, the same rank as Wolfgang, would have to assume temporary control.

  But only one of the eight had jumped all in a decade earlier, playing with simple farming tractors in the middle of the 1930s, with no less than Heinz Guderian himself, spiritual father of the Panzer doctrine, involved in its birth. Only one commander had charged across Poland in 1939 alongside Rommel, and only one of them held Iron Cross with diamonds. In those horrible minutes when the destroyer T-boned the command ship, after the last remaining survivors were pulled from the waters, Wolfgang made a snap decision to assume temporary control of the fleet.

  And here they were, deep in the bowels of shit.

  The captain of the SS Akira, himself not an inexperienced seaman, picked up the engine speaker tube and bellowed. "Engine room! What's happening with those klugshiessen engines?"

  The muffled, echoed reply answered right back. "We can't explain it, Captain. The diesels glow plugs seem to be sparking one minute then dead the next."

  "Just give me your best, Frank," said the captain, hanging up the tube. The captain regarded Wolfgang. "We can't drop anchor. There's bound to be U-boats and air patrols."

  They both looked at the ship's compass. It spun and spun clockwise, then randomly spun in the opposite direction in a logistical manner, before returning once more to spinning clockwise.

  Both men looked out the porthole windows. A twenty to twenty-five knot wind blew directly from their astern, pushing them forward. The current seemed also strong. With no anchor, no propulsion, the 501st and the Seventh were at the utter mercy of Poseidon.

  A sudden burst of light. Sunshine. Then screams of terror. Focusing a wide, natural spotlight in the slap bang middle of the convoy, they could see two suns.

  Everything went to hell.

  Those veterans of the Seventh did their best to keep order, remaining calm, even as their own hearts beat a war tattoo upon their chests. Wolfgang ran to the signal officer and gave orders for all crew to go beneath decks.

  Sergeants ordered their men below, junior officers shouted commands, lieutenants yelling, all trying to not look upwards, but even that did not help, for through clearing clouds and mist cast two distinct shadows upon every object and man. Terror cleaved those less experienced in the Seventh better than a week-long barrage of hells-spawn Katyusha rockets.

  Wolfgang's hands gripped the guardrails next to the signal officer as the NCO fired off burst after burst of the Morse signal gun, the minutes dragging like hours. Muffled pops. Gunshots. An engine trying to start.

  Wolfgang focused in on the sound. The sounds were coming from the troopship right on their port side, a mere eighty yards away. The ship carrying mostly brand-new recruits, tanker boys in their teens.

  In the silence of lapping water, and shouts of anxious men all around, his ears registered the faint whine of servo motors. A turret moving. More small-arms gunfire, screaming from the ship, but the screams of the injured, the dying.

  Silence.

  An explosion tore a hole in the side of the ship's hull, right in front of Wolfgang, the 75 mm high explosive shell bursting steel forged thirty years ear
lier, salted with rust and corrosion. The sound of a Panzer IV engine trying to start. Silence. Then starting, and keeping steady as the blast dissipated. Revving loudly, and now through the open hole he could hear the sharp retort of Schneissers and pistol shots.

  Wolfgang breathed slowly out, forcing himself to remain calm as the Panzer IV Ausf. D burst out of the jagged hole it had made with its engine at full throttle in first gear and it fell into the ocean, tumbling, its motor still revving, then sunk like a stone beneath the warm, blue waters.

  Wolfgang deliberately, methodically, pulled out his hip pocket watch, a gift from his grandfather, a souvenir from the Prussian war, and looked at the time. 2:22 a.m. They'd hit the storm at approximately 1:09 a.m. A little more than one hour later, now was the middle of the afternoon. The open clamshell of the watch cast two distinct shadows across Wolfgang's scarred palm. He slowly closed the lid, and looked directly over at the men peering through the jagged steel of the open wound, pointing downwards.

  Another cry, this time from the Akira's lookout tower. "Land!" Wolfgang made his way to the lookout tower and climbed up its short, stubby rungs and joined the petty officer. He raised his binoculars.

  His right eye twitched, just ever so slightly. At their current rate of drift, if they couldn't get the engines back online. And operating for more than just a few seconds, for in little under half an hour, the convoy would run aground.

  THE SCREAMING and arguments somewhat stopped, as fear swallowed the convoy whole, spreading like the Black Death, a funeral shroud of silence.

  From the swirling mists the shore rushed up to meet them. Wolfgang had no idea where they were. No Baltic coastline looked like that. It seemed tropical. The air had a fresh, lush, rainforest-rich tang to it. Invigorating. The pressing urge to get up and do manly things in the sake of being manly.

  The Major turned to the Akira’s captain. "What are our choices captain?"

  Captain Siegfried Hume chewed the end of his pipe. "It's either anchors Major, or we run aground." Wolfgang considered his options. They could drop anchor, and pray like hell that whatever mechanical gremlins that had been plaguing the five transport ships could be fixed, all the time hoping they wouldn't become victim to a sudden U-boat or air attack. The other option was becoming a permanent resident on the island ahead, but the section of beach looked reasonably flat. And flat enough, thought Wolfgang, they could crane the military assets off. With the destroyer gone, down to just two minesweepers, and even they wouldn't be much good against the U-boat attack, or for that matter, any prowling Allied aircraft, the protection of the Luftwaffe a long-distant memory.

  The coastline looked about a thousand yards out, and the current and wind were taking them in at a fairly quick pace. "Do you think the other captains will drop anchor?" said Wolfgang.

  "They might," said Captain Hume.

  "Given your choices Captain, would you prefer to take your chances marooned out here, or upon land?"

  Captain Hume, a stalwart veteran of the German merchant navy, had been only eighteen himself when the Great War ended in humiliating defeat. He loved the sea, this was where home was, yet the last five years on board the Akira doing convoy runs had been brutal in showing him how the might of the German Navy was no match for RAF bomber squadrons or Allied hunter U-boats. "I think all five transport ships Major, could fit on that beach if we coordinate well enough."

  Major Wolfgang Mauss turned to the signal officer. "Pass on the following. As temporary commander of the Seventh, these are my orders. We shall try and do our best to offload on that beach. Our chances of survival are much greater onshore, than on these boats. Any ship, that does lower anchor, I will personally destroy with my Königstiger once I am on that beach. Make no mistake." The click-clack of the Morse gun being fired. He waited for the man to finish. "There is a rational answer for all this, but now is not the time for indulgences. Now is the time to act." He smacked his fist into his left palm. "Pass it on please, and get acknowledgements from the other four captains and the battalion commanders."

  Once the Major, now commander of the Seventh left the bridge, after receiving all affirmatives, going below deck to help preparations for the emergency beaching, the XO of the Akira turned to her captain. "He wouldn't dare fire upon the other ships, would he?"

  Siegfried dropped a pinch of new tobacco into his pipe, and lit it. "You got a lot to learn son, you've got a lot to learn."

  Chapter Twenty-One

  LANDFALL

  AS FALTERING systems came back on for seconds at a time, before disappearing, in those fleeting moments available, the five ship captains did their best to make every sliver of mechanical time count. Rudders shifted, diesel engines ran either in forward or reverse, at full throttle or none, ropes tethered together, or let loose, until all five ships started scraping against each other, lined up in the best row they could manage. Three of the five had big enough cranes to lift the tanks and mechanised units off, the other two having smaller cranes only big enough to handle a dozen-odd tons, not the forty tons of Panzer IV or the seventy tonnes of a Tiger II.

  Six hundred yards to shore.

  Back up on the bridge of the Akira, Wolfgang kept barking order after order, signals flashing, coordinating the emergency beaching of all five seacraft, and purely as a coincidence, or not, keeping everybody so busy there wasn't enough time to focus on the pair of suns shining right down through breaks in the cloud, or for that matter, Wolfgang scarcely believing his eyes himself, the medieval fortifications lying on the tall cliffs either side of the eight-hundred-yard wide cove. He dialled his binoculars closer. Castles?

  No signs of life anywhere. Where were the defenders? Scouts? Observers? The beach seemed to go for a few hundred yards inland, before the land sloped up to meet the high cliffs either side. The path up from the beach ran in a serpentine fashion; long straights, and hairpins.

  The thin jetty, jutting four-hundred yards out into the surf missed the transport ship on their right, but the bow of the Akira hit, timbers snapping, as the five ships continued towards the beach, yet to hit any sandbars. There seem to be a decent draft for a ship. Probably why it was chosen in the first place. A lucky break indeed.

  The bow of the Akira snapped each section of jetty, the sound almost rhythmical in time as every passing plank and pole splintered, spaced apart evenly as they were, with the forward momentum of twenty-nine thousand laden tonnes of metal.

  With all five ships lined up, and the beach only three-hundred yards away, the final part of Wolfgang's plan activated. The SS Akira regained power. Sigmund leaned on the great brass throttle housing and the two diesels below decks roared in response, the metal below their feet vibrating.

  Wolfgang inadvertently crossed his fingers. Just a few more seconds of power. Just a few more seconds. The heartbeats were excruciating. The SS Akira thronged with power, pulling away from the other four vessels, five yards, ten, twenty, second after second of power, fifty yards, and then the power failed. It would be enough, would be enough. Wolfgang fired the flare gun. One by one the other ships dropped anchors, forming one continuous chain of metal, able to crane equipment from one ship to the next, a daisy chain to shore.

  Wolfgang raced down the metal gangway, down to the deck of the Akira, companies of panzergrenadiers at the ready, MG 34s and MG 42s setup in defensive firing positions, covering their landing. The SS Akira was one of the three troopships carrying a big crane. Suspended over the front bow of the Akira, swinging right over nothing but ocean, a Sd.Kfz. 251 Hanomag halftrack swung left to right like some crazy, swaying wrecking ball. Major Wolfgang kept it in his peripheral vision as he started clambering up the crane latticework, boots on alternating girders, until he reached the top.

  He thumped the crane operator on the back, gave him the thumbs up, and shuffled sideways along the length of the arm, coming to the coming to where the three steel chains hooked on to the wide metal crane. He looked down, and saw Haplo grinning right back up at him, and Hans sitting
in the halftrack's drivers chair. The squad of panzergrenadiers tucked in the rear of the halftrack, his gunner Hans next to the meat-chopper, the quad-linked 20mm autocannons. He slid down the chains, feet and hands bumping all a down, until his feet rested upon the edge of the half-track.

  He jumped down, took the proffered helmet, and buckled the strap under his chin. The company sergeant tossed his Stg 44 assault rifle. One hundred yards to shore. The halftrack swung over the jetty from left to right, as the sections of wood splintered moments later on the bow.

  They were coming in out what looked like the tail end of high tide. They all heard the faint, ever so discernible scratchings of sand slowly hitting a ship’s hull. Seventy yards. Sixty. Fifty. The whine of sand became a torturous screech, as multiple thousands of tonnes fought the resistance of densely packed sand, both losing, neither of them winning, and the speed slowly washed off. Thirty-five. Thirty, twenty-five. Wolfgang looked over and Haplo gave him the thumbs up. Please start. Haplo tried the halftrack motor, it caught, and started revving it. Clouds of blue smoke washed back behind them over the bow of the SS Akira.

  The transport ship on the far left had already slowed considerably. There was okay. Daisy chaining all the cranes should leapfrog the division's supplies right up onto the beach.

  Still no signs of life, or for that matter, sea life. The sand however did hold footprints, men running this way and that by look of it, and all around those footprints, hard circular depressions in the wet sand, no bigger than a golf ball, like tent spikes. All the footprints led in the same direction, uphill.

  The halftrack swung again from side to side, as the Akira finally started to beach herself, the sudden jerk swinging the half-track forward as well as left to right and they swung in a wide oval shape.

  Wolfgang looked back at the crane operator, and held up his right arm, his heart pounding, his blood singing, and even with all the unknowns and the death and the maddening pair of suns, Mein Gott was it a good day to be alive. The halftrack's tread spun in midair, as Haplo held the throttle down, and Wolfgang took a deep breath in, and a deep breath out, and going back to all those times swinging on the playground, closed his eyes, felt the air, the excitement and terror of men all around him, and dropped his arm.