by David Drake
The earlier name had snagged Stone's attention. "Schauberger?" he repeated. "Sure, I remember him. In the fifties he was touting an implosion motor or some damned thing. I remember a major from Wright-Patterson telling me about it. But then nothing came of it."
"But then your FBI questioned poor Viktor with, shall we say, a little too much enthusiasm," Riedel corrected with a tolerant smile, "and he was reported beaten to death by Chicago hoodlums. The implosion motor was only a smokescreen though, for the electromagnetic engine he had already developed for his Fu[auhrer. Think of it, this craft and these mighty engines that you see filling it—able to draw fuel from the Earth, from the very fabric of space itself!"
"If that were true," Stone said carefully, "I frankly don't see why you would need me." He chose his words to deny what he feared, that the story was as solid as the steel floor beneath his feet. To admit that aloud would gratify this colonel whose arrogance only slightly increased the disgust Stone already felt for his uniform.
The implied question reminded the Nazi sickeningly of his mission. He sighed, wondering how much to tell the fellow now. Stone was the only man short of his unapproachable president who had enough power with military and political leaders to act with the necessary swiftness. Without his willing cooperation, more than the whole Plan was a ruin. "At first we were based at Kertl," Riedel began, "where the airframe had been fabricated." He was avoiding a direct answer partly in hope that it would somehow become unnecessary if he explained the background. Riedel owned to few superiors, but there was One—and of late, with age and the pressure He bore most of all of them, that One had displayed an ever-lowering acceptance of failure. "The engines arrived by train, at last, from Obersalzberg, and we worked all night to unload them before the bombers came."
Riedel laid his service cap beside him and scrabbled the fingers of his left hand through hair that for thirty-seven years had been cropped to between five and ten millimeters' length. While everything else had changed, that precision had not. "There was no time to do what was required—you have seen the engines—but we did it anyway. It was like shifting mountains with a spoon to emplace them in the airframe using the equipment we had, and all the work underground as well. But in those days the impossible was normal, and we were Waffen-SS. The time that we had was being bought for us with the lives of our comrades on the front lines, fighting tanks with hand grenades."
Of the men in the control room, only Sgt. Mueller was openly watching Stone and Riedel; but the inattention of the others was the studied sort, that of jackals waiting for lions to end their meal. All of the crew understood the importance of their mission.
"The final order came by courier from Berlin, an SS major with an attache[aa case in the sidecar of his motorcycle. It had been chained to his right wrist, he told us, but the shell that killed his driver had taken that arm off at the elbow. With teeth and one hand he had tourniqueted himself before retrieving the case. The orders were not those we expected, but in the face of such dedication we could not have refused them."
"You ran," Stone interjected flatly, knowing that truth would twist the edged words deeper than any emphasis he could give them.
"We took off in three hours," the German said, his face a block of gray iron. "It was the first time, as soon as final engine hookups had been made. All of us were aboard, even the kitchen staff. Everything worked. I could not believe it—five years of design and construction, and then no flaws. But again, there was no choice. From the air we could see British tanks already within three kilometers and nothing but the forest itself to slow them. Had we left fifteen minutes later, they might have captured our base before the demolition charges exploded."
"What you seem to be afraid to admit," Stone pressed, "is that a single plane—saucer, whatever—isn't worth a damn no matter how advanced it is." He stood, a commanding presence again now that he had recovered his poise. The mass and smooth power of the vessel made its speed a matter of only conscious awareness. "It's only a bargaining chip, to be sold to one side or the other since you can't develop it yourself. And we and the Russians both will soon have equipment in the air that will match it, so you're running out of time to deal."
"You are incorrect to assume we are alone," Riedel said, as careful as the American to avoid theatrical emphasis that would only give truth a false patina. "We escaped alone, but there were fifty-three submarines of Type XXI—no, I do not exaggerate—that could run submerged all around the world with their snorkels. They carried above 3,000 persons, couples and young people, out before the Russians captured Danzig; and in Norway they picked up . . . some who had flown by jet out of Tempelhof just at the end."
Stone licked dry lips but his voice was firm as he insisted, "Even then they couldn't go anywhere. I've heard about the money Himmler was spreading around in South America, but even so there wasn't a country there that could have hidden such a fleet without word leaking out. A fleet needs a base."
"It has one." It was time for the final hammerblow of truth. "In New Swabia, where we met them."
"Huh?" grunted Stone, surprised and uncomprehending.
"Imbecile!" snarled the Nazi, seeing all his preparation threatened by his listener's ignorance. "In Antarctica, Queen Maud Land as you and your Allies call it! Kapitan Ritscher explored it in 1937 and we have held the interior since, no matter what color the coast is painted on a pretty map. And there is one other place we have been for twenty years, my good Senator," Riedel said, loudly now and wagging his finger like a pedant's pointer, "though others seem to believe they were the first there."
He paused, breathing very rapidly. "This vessel is not limited to the atmosphere, Senator; indeed, we are above it now to all intents and purposes. We have a base on the Moon where we have manufactured a hundred ships of this design!"
But as Stone's jaw worked in stunned silence, Riedel's pride too dissolved in despair. "We had a hundred, yes," he repeated, "but the Russians have a thousand, and they are destroying us. You must help us fight them, or Aryan man is doomed."
The sky was an emptiness that would have been violet if it had color. Pits on the crystal windows prevented the stars from gaining any real body, but a slight course correction brought the Moon in sight to port. It was gibbous and the gray of fresh-cut lead. "I don't believe that," Stone insisted. "I've made it my business over the years to know about Russian strength. Our intelligence people trust me. They aren't lying to me, and notwithstanding all the nonsense my colleagues and the media like to spout, the Russians aren't fooling our people either. Besides, if the Reds had a whole fleet like this, we'd have learned about it the hard way long since. Unless there's more to de[aatente than I've ever believed."
Riedel shrugged. " 'When one has eliminated the impossible . . . ,' " he quoted, then paused to consider how he should continue. Stone's logic was impeccable, its only flaw being Russia's unfathomable, senseless subtlety in not showing an apparently pat hand. Riedel had not believed it at first, either, but facts were facts. "At the first reports in 1947, we thought rumors of our Dora, here, were being retailed in garbled form," he explained. "At the time, we had only the one ship—no others had been completed before the final holocaust, and the Antarctic base was not suitable for manufactures this major. It was not until we could process aluminum on the Moon that we could expand, and that was five years later.
"There were too many reports. We were very careful with Dora, you must understand; and though we had our contacts with the world outside, no one beyond the Battalion knew anything except our Plan, to control the balance when at last East and West joined in Go[autterda[aummerung." Riedel's face gleamed with the sweat of earnestness. He brushed at his face and extended both thin hands toward Stone. "Our rocket scientists, you and the Russians had captured; but we thought all but the least word of the Diskus Projekt had been hidden. Now we began to fear that the other sightings were more than imagination, and that our secret had escaped."
"You never saw them yourselves?" Stone asked.
"The other UFOs, I mean?"
"I did," Riedel said, pride warming his words. "We had completed the first disk to be built on the Moon and I was flight-testing it. Because we expected fleet maneuvers in the future, Engineer Tannenberg had coupled a locator to the engines to display other users of the spectrum—our own vessels, we intended. But as we began our first atmospheric approach—" and Riedel lived again the moments as he described them to Stone:
In a voice as wizened as his face, Tannenberg had announced, "Colonel, there is another ship within a kilometer, at five degrees to our heading and a little lower."
"Nonsense!" Riedel snapped. At thirty kilometers altitude their test craft could have encountered only Dora, and she would have been a bright dot on their radar screen.
A bead glared suddenly against the screen's green background. It was near them, much closer than it should have been before being picked up in the radar's fifteen-second sweep. "Navigation!" he called, his temper that of a wounded bear looking for a victim. First trial of the new hull in the pressures and powerful magnetic fields of Earth was a tense enough business without having unknown vessels slip through undetected.
"S-sir," said the white-faced technician at the main radar display, "it just now appeared."
"Colonel," Sgt. Mueller said, his hair-spined forefinger pointing downward into the blue-white haze into which their craft was descending. Metal winked, a reflection with no definable color.
"It's off the screen again!" the fearful radarman was bleating, but Riedel's voice cut through his junior's without hesitation: "Attention! All crewmen to acceleration couches! Sergeant Mueller, arm the rockets and stand by." Disconnecting his throat mike, for he spoke to himself rather than his men, Riedel added, "They think to play with us, do they? Well then, we will play with them."
Only Sgt. Mueller heard, and he grinned a wolf's grin as he ran his hands over the switches of his console.
At 300 meters, the black, portless hull of the foreign disk was stark against the sky-curve beyond. It bore no marking. Both craft were steady at a little over 1800 kph, far below the capacity of Riedel's engines. This was not his Dora, though, he thought with rage. Impervium hulls were beyond their ability to forge on the Moon—or on Earth without arousing the interest of the nations who had to be lulled into forgetfulness. Aluminum was cheap, given lunar ores and abundant power, but the new hulls could not stand the friction heating of 4,000 kph or more in the atmosphere.
"Unknown craft, identify yourself," Riedel ordered in German. He was broadcasting only on eleven meters, but with a 10 kw transmitter driving his beam, even the light bulbs on the other craft would be repeating his words.
There was no response. He tried again in English, for they were over northern Canada. All his subordinates but Mueller had slipped into their clamshell couches, taking their information from the gauges slaved into the panels over their faces. Riedel started to rebuke the sergeant, then realized that with the enemy able to evade radar, only visual control could be used for the rockets.
And there seemed little doubt that the black disk was an enemy. "Does anyone aboard speak Russian?" No one answered. Besides, what did they have to discuss with the conquerors of Berlin? "Fire one, sergeant," Riedel said evenly.
Mueller's finger stroked a 20 cm rocket from the ventral weapons bay. Its hundred kilos of explosive could be wire-guided 5,000 meters, but the gap between the two ships was point-blank range.
The charge went off scarcely halfway to the black vessel.
The spurt of red on black smoke, half a second early, was a greater surprise to Riedel than the howl of air through the fragment-riddled panels before him. The missile's own fuse should not have armed at so short a distance. Something invisible surrounding the other craft had detonated the weapon while it was almost as dangerous to its user as its target, and the target was diving away. Riedel followed, ignoring for the moment the stresses to which he was subjecting his ship and his own unshielded body. Sgt. Mueller had yanked down a whole handful of switches and four guidance flares leaped together after the black craft. It wobbled under the multiple shockwave, but a beam as pale as an icteric sclera needled back from its dome. Riedel saw the hull directly in front of him boil away as the laser struck it. His instant course change bagged his cheeks and flattened his eyeballs. The black vessel did not attempt pursuit.
The executive officer in his acceleration couch had taken over when Riedel regained full consciousness. They had resumed their planned course toward Antarctica, flying below 2,500 meters because of the gashed hull. Sgt. Mueller was clenching his hands in fierce frustration. "We need something better to kill them with," he kept repeating.
"And we got it," Riedel concluded, affect raining out of his voice. "Tannenberg said his detector could easily be modified to cause a surge in other electromagnetic engines, to cause them to vaporize. For twenty-three years he was right and we hunted the Russians throughout space. There were losses, since their lasers could very quickly slit the hulls of the ships we built—not a bad weapon, lasers; we might have fitted our bases with them sooner had not Tannenberg's induced overloads left so little of their targets." He paused in an aura of satisfaction, looking out over the clean, black sky but seeing something very different. "From a pip of light the disks we destroy become great expanding balls that are all the colors of the rainbow. In atmosphere even the copper burns, so intense is the energy released."
"You bastards," Stone said with utter conviction. "I wonder if you'll find it so pretty when they come up with your gadget?"
"Colonel, we are closing with another vessel," broke in one of the crewmen.
"It may be ours. We were to have an escort when we reached open sea, if the situation permitted it," Riedel replied on his throat mike. To Stone he continued, "The Russians are an ignorant people, able only to steal from their betters. In all that time they have not duplicated the weapon."
He took a deep breath, adding, "But six months ago, they found a defense against it. And since then only the few lasers for which we have been able to buy components have kept them from our bases."
"You can't be serious," Stone said. But Riedel's mind was like his body—gray and honed and rigid. He could no more accept the superiority of an "under race" than could a computer which had been misprogrammed to deny it. That quirk has caused Riedel and his men to ignore the obvious. "Look, lasers—I don't know how long we've had them, but they weren't weapons back in 1950. And this detonator screen or whatever, we damned well don't have it now. If—"
"Colonel! The ship is not one of ours. It is closing!"
"Couches!" Riedel ordered. He stood, pressing as he did the switch that turned Stone's bench into an enveloping cushion. "Raise your legs and lie down, Senator. The television will show you what occurs, and we will release you as soon as possible."
The hull curve, a smooth violet as Riedel strode to his station, suddenly blazed white in a meter-long knife edge. The impervium alloy held, but Dora's evasive action in response to the laser thrust hurled the slender officer to the deck. He gripped a chart table, then let skewed acceleration fling him in the direction he wanted to go. He was safely within his couch before the third zigzag snatched at him.
"Riedel," he announced, "taking command." His fingers caressed switches they knew by touch. The enemy craft was an eddy in the frozen blue swirls of Earth's magnetic fields pictured on the detector screen. Riedel set the television cameras to track the detector anomally though he would not need the picture. By the time Dora had been retrofitted with television, he was used to being guided to battle by the detector alone. And even with their surge weapon ineffective, there would still be a battle with Riedel at the controls. He knew his Dora.
The other craft was within two kilometers now. It fingered Dora's hull with another short burst, probably unaware that its target was more refractory than earlier victims. The Nazi commander's face was a grinning death's head within his couch as he cut forward thrust and flipped Dora to spin like a coin toward the
icecap twenty kilometers below. The blue eddy danced around the center of the detector screen and the TV began to flash images of a black disk seeming to approach at a thousand angles. Fluid-filled membranes clamped down on every surface of Riedel's body, but still the maddening spin worked on his ear canals and the colloid of his brain itself.
The eddy was almost in the center of the detector. Riedel's fingers acted more through instinct than by conscious calculation. On the television, the spinning edge of the black vessel froze and expanded. There was a terrible, rending crash as Dora's impervium edge buzz sawed into the unknown material of her enemy's hull. A sheet of white fire enveloped both craft as the chrome-van alloy proved tougher than what it impacted. Objects vomited from the spiraling gash in the hostile craft. One of them tumbled almost against Dora, now motionless as her enemy fell away from her. The thing was momentarily alive and quite visible on the television screens. It was about nine feet tall, with four limbs that looked like ropes knotted over a thin framework. Its mouth was working and its eyes glittered fear of death through each of their facets.
"You butchers," a voice rasped through Riedel's earphones. His anger awakened him to the fact that he still had Dora to pilot, and the anger faded when he realized it was the American who had spoken and not one of his crewmen. "It wasn't enough to fight the whole rest of the world. You Nazis had to start an interstellar war."
