Black Chamber

by S. M. Stirling

  From the quality of his laugh, Denke didn’t think much of the idea. “Good luck to them making that many, and the reserves they’d need, and still keeping up their shell production.”

  “The Americans could do it,” Horst said. “Fairly easily. And much else. Fortunately, we’re taking preemptive action about that.”

  Denke nodded. “Hence our course. Which is not so very different from a great-circle plot from Wilhelmshaven to the target, allowing for the British Isles being in the way. Mind you, they patrol vigorously there, and their Grand Fleet’s base at Scapa Flow is not all that far away. Destroyer squadrons, armed whale catchers, flying boats, and those semi-rigid airships. But if we keep submerged in the daytime . . . which with the Schnorchel we can do and still travel at a reasonable speed . . . it should be fairly safe. Since we’re not there to fight.”

  “Not to fight there,” Horst said with a grim smile.

  Denke nodded. “The Englanders have the devil’s luck with maritime geography. They’re perfectly positioned to keep Germany bottled up while they have the run of the world ocean. That’s how they stole whole continents in the Americas and Asia and the South Pacific, shooting down Red Indians and walloping wogs and niggers who melted away before them, taking their land to settle. While we ended up fighting century after century over the same miserable scraps before the Wars of Unification, all over some stinking pig farm or what language we prayed in or which petty prince collected the taxes and then groveled to the Sun King or Napoleon.”

  Horst nodded agreement in turn. “But the geography is less important, now that we’ve beaten Russia, and now that railroads make it so much cheaper and faster to ship goods and troops by land,” he said. “Still, that’s what allowed them to settle the Americas, as you say. Even if the Englanders let the Yankees break away politically, they still speak the same language in more senses than one. We can beat the Tommies; beating whole continents full of Anglo-Saxons coming at us from all over the world is another matter.”

  Both men’s eyes went to the control box for the Breath of Loki. “Well, we’re going to do something about teaching them to keep on their own side of the ocean,” Denke said cheerfully. “And then the Russians can be our Red Indians.”

  “And our wogs,” Horst said, chuckling. “Once we get east of Rostov-on-Don . . . and one of our columns is due there soon. Really before the snow falls this time.”

  His eyes narrowed in amusement, and he made his voice diplomatically unctuous for a moment:

  “Purely to assist the independence movement in the Ukraine, of course, and to secure order, protect property, and put down anarchists and Marxists and other revolutionary scum.”

  “Oh, of course, our altruism astonishes me. And aren’t the Turks our wogs?” Captain Denke replied, chuckling with a mocking carnivorous grin.

  “No, they’re our honored and well-respected allies . . . until the war is over. Then they’re our wogs, like the Bulgarians, since there won’t be anything they can do about it,” Horst said, with a matching expression. “Or our boss-boys over the other wogs.”

  His smile grew more wolfish still: “And in a generation . . . or two or three . . . when we’re really ready . . . then our sons or grandsons will have a reckoning with the Yankees. By then we may have weapons that make this”—he jerked his chin forward—“look like a spray of French perfume.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Over the next few days most of the sailors were as decent as possible about the privacy of averted eyes, and in things like the complicated business of passing one of the women in the narrow companionways; one who hadn’t been when Luz went by had given a short smothered scream and completed his journey in a crouch that made him safe from bumping his head, to the amusement of his shipmates, and nobody had tried that again.

  Particularly after the grilling he got from his captain, and then a briskly administered set of lumps from Göttsch and several other petty officers, who’d fully grasped how much all their lives depended on the two women acting as guides and contacts on the other side of the ocean. U-boats were far and away the most dangerous branch of the Kaiserliche Marine to start with, and the one with the worst living conditions, and then these men had volunteered for a very, very dangerous special mission, knowing only that it was even worse.

  Every one of them was ready to die. That didn’t mean that they wanted to die if they didn’t have to. Luz understood the attitude perfectly; she’d alerted the U.S. Navy to the U-boat attack, and in a way she had to hope they’d use it to sink every one of Project Loki’s vessels, including this one. That didn’t stop her from really hoping things went the other way, the one that left her and Ciara alive and the heroes of the hour.

  Four days later Luz and Ciara were on the forward hull of the U-150, in the early hours of the morning. Everyone in the fat metal cigar was cut off from the normal cycles of night and day, and there wasn’t anything for the two women to do on the submarine but sleep and read and play chess most of the time. Though Ciara had made herself useful on minor repairs to the amusement of the crew, and Luz had taken to helping in the galley to their profound thankfulness.

  Nobody thought it was strange that they had turned their sleep cycle around so that they were awake at night. That was when they’d be performing their part of the mission in Boston, after all. What they hadn’t been able to do yet was talk frankly; too many of the crew could speak English, and they didn’t know which ones.

  They both wore a harness with safety lines running back to the door—

  Hatch, since we’re at sea, Luz thought.

  —at the front of the conning tower. As Kapitänleutnant Denke had warned, the modified cargo submarine handled like a pig, and particularly swinishly on the surface, but by now their feet and stomachs had adapted. Fortunately the gray-blue surface of the North Atlantic was fairly calm, long smooth swells rather than white-crested chaos. Water purled away from the round bow of the submarine, and ripples flowed over the riveted steel plates about halfway back from the bow to the tower. Occasional stinging spray struck them when the bow dug a little deeper than usual.

  Most U-boats had slatted decks built over their hulls, for men to work on when they were running surfaced. This one didn’t, nor railings on either side, though there was a smoothly fared raised section forward of the tower. Members of the crew did get time to come out at night and breathe fresh air and stretch a bit and have a smoke, and so Denke had been persuaded to let the two women do likewise . . . though he had insisted on the line.

  The cold air was intensely clean and full of the salt of the sea; there were wisps of cloud overhead but a sky full of stars as well, and a fingernail sliver of waning moon. Ciara looked up at it, and then down at the deck beneath their feet. The diesels’ steady throb as they drove them along at fourteen knots and the chuckle and rush of water along the sides meant that nobody in the conning tower could hear a normal conversation.

  “Luz, I’m frightened,” Ciara said quietly. “This thing beneath our feet . . . there’s a hundred and fifty rocket shells down there.”

  Luz nodded. They hadn’t actually had to pry; the crew and the officers with whom they dined talked shop quite a bit, and the occasional casual question got them going on specifics. The U-boat would come into harbor submerged and dead slow. Then it would find its precise position by taking distance sightings through a coincidence range finder built into the periscope, aligning on various known points, mostly church steeples and the five-hundred-foot spire of the Custom House Tower that had been completed last year. They’d drop to the bottom then and place anchors that would keep the boat properly aligned.

  If all the equipment functioned as designed, then they’d set the automatic controls and leave the submarine by an escape tube and rubber boats. If there was a problem, the two technicians would remain behind to do it manually. Ciara’s Clann na nGael contacts would meet them at a
warehouse that they’d rented with German funds, and there they’d find automobiles—good American Fords—and everything else they needed to make their getaway.

  Meanwhile, a precise and rugged chronometer would be ticking away in that altar to chemical death in the control chamber. When it reached the preset point, a series of perforated metal cards would activate the U-boat’s own systems in a precise order. Compressed air would blow the ballast tanks, and it would bob to the surface, held in position by the anchor cables. Pneumatic bolts would throw the deck covering that she and Ciara were walking on now off and to port. Below it was a set of sealed tubes with domed tops built into the hull.

  Each held a stubby finned projectile, like the spigot mortar they’d seen at the grisly demonstration at Castle Rauenstein, but much larger. The base charge would produce enough high-pressure gas to blow the end of the tube out and loft the missile up a few dozen yards; then a rocket motor would push it in an arc a thousand feet or more into the air, higher than any building in Boston, spanning the sky to beyond the State House and the Common. Some would reach as far inland as Cambridge if they functioned perfectly—universities were a deadly weapon of war, in this new century of steel and fire and machine men as hard and cruel as either.

  They would spin as they flew, and internal pressure would blow out hundreds of small precut holes in the outer casings. That pressure and heat and centrifugal force would disperse the Breath of Loki as a plume of tiny aerosol droplets along their whole path. Droplets just slightly heavier than the air in which they floated, a thousand pounds in the warhead of each rocket.

  Drifting down across acres of Boston, down onto upraised faces and heads turned away, onto desperate hands trying to protect against the invisible death and arms holding children beneath bodies that were no protection. Sinking down ventilator shafts into office buildings and hospitals and schools, basements and subways, waiting on every surface for the unsuspecting hordes who’d rush out into the crowded streets when the screaming began.

  Waiting for anyone who ventured in afterward, waiting in spots and hollows for day after day, month after month . . .

  They’d told Ciara that the U-150’s load was aimed at the Boston Navy Yard on the north side of the harbor. That was even the truth . . . partially. The right wing of the great fan of destruction would fall over those docks and dry docks and ships. The rest of it would come down on Boston proper, how far depending on the winds that day, and her sister U-148’s load would cover the rest of the central city, the old tangle of colonial streets, the waterfront and South Boston’s docks . . . and most of its tight-packed residential areas as well, the row houses and tenements of those whose strong backs and skilled hands made the city function.

  Between them the two U-boats would turn the whole half circle that made up the central part of the harbor and the densely built areas to the north and south of it into a poisoned wasteland, where the untouchable bodies of a hundred thousand dead would lie rotting. Men would die, and women, and children . . . and the pigeons and sparrows and crows, the cats and dogs and dray horses and the mice. Even the rats that tried to eat the bodies would die with them.

  The reign of the creatures of warm blood and thought and feeling would be done there, the rule of all the things that loved their young and their mates. It would be a kingdom of flies and cockroaches and maggots, and then an empire of silence and of bones.

  Or more than a hundred thousand, depending on the wind and weather, Luz thought grimly. And tens of thousands around the edges will be mad or writhing in fits or paralyzed or crippled for the rest of their lives. And everyone within fifty miles will run for their lives and never come back . . . or at least not for a long time. A whole great city of humankind, three centuries of history, of work and thought, joy and sorrow, life and death, wiped from the map in a few hours of horror as if it had never been at all. Who will recall that John Adams wrote there, or Sam Adams conspired with the Sons of Liberty and Revere made his ride, or that they fought for freedom on Bunker Hill?

  The only thing anyone would really remember of Boston was how it had died. And the other cities likewise.

  “And it’s my—” Ciara’s anguished cry began.

  “No!” Luz snapped.

  She seized the shorter woman’s shoulders in both hands and shook her a little. “Ciara! Look at me! Look at me!”

  Luz waited until their eyes met, then slid her hands up until they cupped the other’s chin. “Look at me. You didn’t invent this. Isn’t that true?”

  A nod, though the bright eyes were full of tears. “Say it!”

  “I didn’t invent this.”

  “You didn’t build it; you didn’t bring it here; you’re not going to launch it.”

  “But I went and—”

  “Helped me! Spotted that electrical alarm and saved my life and the mission! If you hadn’t been there, if it had been someone else, I couldn’t have gotten the information out of Nicolai’s office. This U-boat would still be right here and there would be no chance of stopping this!”

  Shuddering, Ciara fought for control. After a while she nodded and they gripped each other in a fierce embrace for a moment. Ciara whispered:

  “Luz . . . I think I could . . . sabotage the . . .”

  “No, querida, no. We have to stop them all, and to do that we have to get off this submarine without them suspecting us until it’s too late to stop us. If this were the only one, yes. Even if it killed us, yes. But it’s one of many. Two for Boston. There are six of these nightmare things headed for New York. We have to string them along and then get loose and turn the package over to the Navy.”

  “I’m . . . I’m so frightened. I feel sick at what might happen and how it depends on me. How can I stand it for day after day? How can you?”

  “It is sickening,” Luz replied. “And knowing it depends on you is like carrying an anvil. We can hope the Navy gets them all . . . but submarines are just too hard to find to rely on that. They may not get any.”

  She drew back and looked down into the shadowed face. “But you can stand it because you must. I know you’re brave. You showed me you were brave when you saved my life, and you showed Colonel Nicolai, too—even if he doesn’t know how brave. Now show me again. You’ve braved danger; now brave the pain. Push it down. You can’t make the fear and dread go away, but you can . . . not pay attention to it. Right now we’ve got too much to do, too much for fear or even anger. You pay for that later . . . we both will . . . but we can deal with that then.”

  Even now her omnivorous curiosity woke. “Pay for it?”

  “Nightmares, mostly. When it’s very bad, flashes of waking memory that leave you sweating or enraged or vomiting . . . that’s how it hits me, at least. They . . . get a bit better over time. Being with friends helps too, and doing things that need all your attention. We are going to do this and we’re going to win, and that’s all that matters for now.”

  “Yes!” Her face firmed.

  With a glare like a charioteer shaking her spear aloft and calling on the Morrigú, screaming her war cry as the scythed wheels beneath her rumbled toward the foe.

  Her voice was firm: “We’re soldiers, now, for our folk and our homes. Soldiers for America.”

  “We are!” Luz agreed. “And we’ll be victorious soldiers, too.”

  SIXTEEN

  Aboard U-150

  Western Atlantic

  SEPTEMBER 23RD, 1916(B)

  Skipper,” one of the crewmen who rated a stool in front of his working station said.

  He looked up with a hand to one of the headphones on his ears, face underlit from the display lights of the dials.

  “Ship detected. Ahead, and closing.”

  The U-150 was—in conventional terms—unarmed and intended for only one mission, but the Kaiserliche Marine hadn’t stinted her of anything that might help that mission, even though self-destruct charg
es would turn it all into scrap once the missiles were launched.

  Glad I’m here and hadn’t turned in yet, Luz thought.

  She slept as much as she could, but this wasn’t likely to be something you wanted to wake up to. Luz doubted that all German submarines had hydrophones yet, but this one most certainly did, a Siemens set at least as good as anything the U.S. Navy could boast. Sound usually traveled well through water.

  Maybe we shouldn’t have publicized those experiments with long-range underwater sonic telegraphs, she thought dryly, trying to be invisible in the corner of the cramped control room, inhaling the smells of ozone and foul bilges that she scarcely noticed anymore.

  Boasting about how advanced our hydrophone listening stations were, that they could not only hear the telegraph signals but ships miles away . . . that might have given the other Institute ideas.

  The submarine sonic telegraph had been one of the National Advanced Research Projects Institute’s first coups, back in 1913 when NARPI hadn’t learned that the letters also stood for keep everything secret, stupid! Those easygoing days before the Great War—before even the Intervention had started to bite deep into the nation’s life and the newly organized Party got a firm grip on things—seemed like another world now. Sometimes she wondered uneasily what the future would be like, if the empires kept butting heads for another generation.

  The bit about hydrophones had stuck in some German scientist’s mind, or in a naval officer who’d passed it on, and a U-boat with hydrophones could often detect prey far before they’d be visible on the surface.