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The Farpool: Marauders of Seome
Von Philip Bosshardt
Buchaktionen
Mit Lesen beginnenLänge: 538 Seiten8 Stunden
- Herausgeber:
- Philip Bosshardt
- Freigegeben:
- Sep 22, 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781370169078
- Format:
- Buch
Beschreibung
The Ponkti have sent mercenaries and agents through the Farpool and wound up in mid-20th century Earth... in the middle of a great war...in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. They witness a U-boat attack on a convoy off America’s East Coast. This intrigues them. Ponkti are always intrigued by conflict and combat...they are an aggressive kel and they believe the combatants have technology that will help them dominate their home world of Seome. Not only that, they are looking for any advantage they can gain on this new world, because their world is doomed...their own sun is dying.
A great emigration must begin soon and the water clans of Seome are jockeying for position and advantage to secure the most favorable places and times. Chase Meyer, now a long-term hybrid resident on Seome misses his girlfriend Angie Gilliam, back on Earth, and uses an official mission from the clan he has joined to find her and coax her to come to Seome. He soon learns that the entire emigration effort—to send thousands of Seomish through the gateway to the oceans of Earth—is imperiled because the Ponkti have made alliance with the Nazis in a different time stream...World War II. The Ponkti have brought German U-boat technology back to Seome and threaten to disrupt the Farpool and the emigration effort for everybody, in their efforts to dominate their doomed world.
Only Chase and Angie, and their unlikely accomplice, German Kriegsmarine officer Werner von Kleist, can stop this alliance from preventing the emigration. If they don’t succeed, all of Seomish civilization will be obliterated when their sun goes supernova. And if they do succeed, thousands of Seomish will soon appear in the oceans of Earth, refugees from their lost world. For Chase and Angie, two teenagers separated by six thousand light years and different ideas on how to make a life together, the decisions they make will affect the survival of two worlds and the fate of millions of people.
It will be the hardest decision they’ve ever made.
Informationen über das Buch
The Farpool: Marauders of Seome
Von Philip Bosshardt
Länge: 538 Seiten8 Stunden
Beschreibung
The Ponkti have sent mercenaries and agents through the Farpool and wound up in mid-20th century Earth... in the middle of a great war...in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. They witness a U-boat attack on a convoy off America’s East Coast. This intrigues them. Ponkti are always intrigued by conflict and combat...they are an aggressive kel and they believe the combatants have technology that will help them dominate their home world of Seome. Not only that, they are looking for any advantage they can gain on this new world, because their world is doomed...their own sun is dying.
A great emigration must begin soon and the water clans of Seome are jockeying for position and advantage to secure the most favorable places and times. Chase Meyer, now a long-term hybrid resident on Seome misses his girlfriend Angie Gilliam, back on Earth, and uses an official mission from the clan he has joined to find her and coax her to come to Seome. He soon learns that the entire emigration effort—to send thousands of Seomish through the gateway to the oceans of Earth—is imperiled because the Ponkti have made alliance with the Nazis in a different time stream...World War II. The Ponkti have brought German U-boat technology back to Seome and threaten to disrupt the Farpool and the emigration effort for everybody, in their efforts to dominate their doomed world.
Only Chase and Angie, and their unlikely accomplice, German Kriegsmarine officer Werner von Kleist, can stop this alliance from preventing the emigration. If they don’t succeed, all of Seomish civilization will be obliterated when their sun goes supernova. And if they do succeed, thousands of Seomish will soon appear in the oceans of Earth, refugees from their lost world. For Chase and Angie, two teenagers separated by six thousand light years and different ideas on how to make a life together, the decisions they make will affect the survival of two worlds and the fate of millions of people.
It will be the hardest decision they’ve ever made.
- Herausgeber:
- Philip Bosshardt
- Freigegeben:
- Sep 22, 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781370169078
- Format:
- Buch
Über den Autor
Philip Bosshardt is a native of Atlanta, Georgia. He works for a large company that makes products everyone uses...just check out the drinks aisle at your grocery store. He’s been happily married for over 20 years. He’s also a Georgia Tech graduate in Industrial Engineering. He loves water sports in any form and swims 3-4 miles a week in anything resembling water. He and his wife have no children. They do, however, have one terribly spoiled Keeshond dog named Kelsey.For details on his series Tales of the Quantum Corps, visit his blog at qcorpstimes.blogspot.com or his website at http://philbosshardt.wix.com/philip-bosshardt.
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The Farpool - Philip Bosshardt
The Farpool: Marauders of Seome
Published by Philip Bosshardt at Smashwords
Copyright 2017 Philip Bosshardt
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Chapter 1
The sea is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence.
Jules Verne
Earth
Off the coast of North Carolina
November 20, 1942
4:30 pm
It was the Julie Lane’s second officer, Alonzo Henry, who first spotted the funnels of the waterspouts. They were a curious, even foreboding sight, to the fatigued crew of the old beam trawler. Since sunup that morning, the Lane had been trawling for tuna, snapper, drum, anything they could find. Pickings had been slim for days and Henry had blamed the Navy, the Coast Guard, German U-boats, bad weather, the moon, anything he could think of for why this trip had been such a dud.
Now it was late afternoon, the sun shining in shafts through scattered clouds and this…funnels? Waterspouts? What else could happen?
Captain Curt Klamath stood against a door on the forward weather deck of the Julie Lane and tried for the fifth time to light his cigarette. Fortunately, his first mate, Gallagher, was nearby and came to the rescue, cupping his hands around Klamath’s stiff fingers.
All three men were still shaken from what they had just witnessed.
Never seen a spout like that, Lon…quite a sight that was.
Alonzo Henry agreed. He lit his own cigarette. Never this far north, eh? Like something out of the tropics. Sky split open, crack of lightning. It’s a wonder that whole school of tuna didn’t scatter to the winds. They got up a good frenzy but they seem to be settling down. Shall I put the nets further out? Otter boards are flapping like there’s not much inside the net.
Yeah, give the order. She’s probably a small school but we might have some good ones in there. Run the bobbins out as far as they’ll go, though. This is some fierce chop.
It was just then that first mate Gil Gallagher, of the trawler Julie Lane, out of Okracoke, North Carolina, lead ship of the Robson Line and always loaded to her gunwales with good meat after a run, saw the ghost, the apparition, the pulses of light climbing down the waterspouts like fireflies on a ladder, for that’s what he would insist on calling it in all the reports and debriefings that would follow.
"What in name of Neptune’s hair is that?" he pointed to the flickering lights.
The men studied the phenomenon for a moment. Half a dozen waterspouts danced across the wavetops miles out to sea, like slithering ropes dropped down from heaven. That in itself wasn’t terribly unusual; all the officers had seen stranger things than that in twenty- two years of trawling and shrimping off the Carolina coast. But the largest of the spouts flickered like a string of Christmas lights, as pulses of reddish-white light coursed down her length, ending in the sea somewhere beyond the horizon.
The apparition ended almost as soon as it started.
Klamath tugged at a pipe and rubbed bristly stubble on his chin. Lightning, most likely. Chain lightning. Heard of it, but I ain’t never seen such.
St Elmo’s, maybe?’ suggested Henry.
But climbing down that spout, now that’s a sight. Nobody’ll believe it. Maybe we should—‘
But Henry’s ruminations were suddenly interrupted by a shout from the first mate. Gallagher was leaning on the railing, starboard side, gesturing at something.
Look out! She’s a rogue wave, coming this way--!
And that’s when the deck and forecastle of the Julie Lane was suddenly filled with shouts, curses and scurrying men, trying to lash down everything they could reach.
Turn her into the wind, Bryan!
Klamath yelled over the roar of the building surf. Secure those hawsers too! I don’t want to get broadsided!
Henry, Gallagher, Munsey, everybody was thrashing and sliding across the wet foredeck of the Julie Lane as the chop worsened and the first waves crashed over her bow. Something groaned, then cracked…it was the portside beam, now bent down at an impossible angle—Lane was already listing badly to port, and gear careened around the deck, slamming into knees and legs and faces as the trawler tried to answer her helm.
Henry’s voice strained over the howl of the wind as he grabbed Klamath by the arm and spun the captain around. We got to cut the lines, Curt! Cod end’s still hung up thirty fathoms down, she’ll drag us right into that wave—
Klamath shook his head, cried out, No way, Lon! We’re worked too hard for what we’ve got. We’ve got to show something for all this effort—
The waves built steadily, Himalayas of water rising up out of the troughs and slamming and hammering Lane from all sides. The trawler had barely enough way to get herself turned bow into the waves, when the front slopes of the monster lifted them fifty feet into the air. For a split second, Klamath, Henry and Gallagher had a glorious view beyond…mottled gray-green surf like a puckered sheet marching off to the horizon, and behind it, more waves, bigger waves and a strange swirl to the ocean, like they were caught in God’s own blender.
And that’s when they saw the lights.
In the days and weeks that followed, Curt Klamath would remember this moment as if it were branded into his brain for all time. The puckering of the ocean in the troughs of the waves, the swirl of the water and the flicker of two lights, just below the surface, devil’s eyes, he called them to anyone who would listen, including his long-suffering wife of thirty-one years Suzanne. The glare of Neptune’s revenge. Sea monsters. Dragons. Words failed Curt Klamath at times like this, for there were no words to describe what the crew of the Julie Lane had witnessed, in those fateful seconds, before the monster wave hit.
Klamath yelled at the top of his voice. Belay the nets…unlash the life--!
But his words were lost in the unearthly howl of the rogue as the full force of the wave hit them at quarter-bow. The Julie Lane upended bow to stern, standing like an uncertain child just learning to walk, before tipping backward, slamming into the water upside down with enough force to split her hull, smash her deckhouse, splinter her gunwales and scattering men and debris like so much kindling. The lifeboats—there were two nicknamed Abbot and Costello—were ripped from their davits and splintered in pieces, then tossed fifty yards into the foam and froth of a boiling sea.
Klamath found himself tugged down by the undertow of the wave’s back side and stroked for all he was worth to avoid the falling beams of the dragger mounts, plummeting out of the sky like broken swords. He thought he heard cries before he ducked under, but he couldn’t be sure. It was every man for himself now and he had no idea where Alonzo Henry, Gallagher, Munsey or any of the others were. Chairs, tables, splintered paneling, snatches of netting and assorted gear fell like rain out of the sky and floated on the white-topped crests of the wave.
With all his breath, Curt Klamath snagged something in the water…it turned out to be a broken piece of wooden board-- and held on hard as he could, looping some kind of rope around his arms and body so as to lash himself to the only thing floating he could reach.
Then, in the last moments before he passed out, Klamath saw the lights again. Two glaring eyes, seemingly not connected, yet traveling in unison, dull yellow-white, coursing just below the surface, in the trough of the rogue wave and those that followed.
Klamath puzzled over the sight, as consciousness slipped away. Lanterns torn loose from the Lane, perhaps? Midget U-boats? The Germans had been hunting in these waters for months now and many an unsuspecting tanker or freighter had been caught in their crosshairs and torpedoed to the bottom off the Carolina coast. Strange phosphorescent fish, stirred up in the freak storm that had overturned them?
Klamath had no answers. And a long black tunnel quickly overcame any last thoughts.
A loud horn kept blaring and bleating and Klamath fought his way back to something like a dull stupor. His chin hurt, and there was dried blood—he could taste it and feel it as he wiped his face. He sat up, wobbling around as the waves bounced the little board back and forth. A big wall blocked out the early evening sun, now setting to the west. The wall had a big red stripe on it.
With a start, he realized he was staring at the gunwales of a Coast Guard cutter. He could dimly make out the words Diamond on her sides.
Klamath bobbed in a daze while a small boat circled closer and closer. Soon enough, hands reached in, strong hands, and hoisted him in. Voices filled his ears, questions, comments, orders. He understood nothing save one thing: he was safe, for the moment. He was dimly aware as heavy cloth covered him and made him comfortable, that the rogue waves had passed and the sea was preternaturally calm. The sun was gone but the sky was lit with a soft pearly light and the first stars were already out.
Klamath wondered briefly if he had died and this was fisherman’s heaven, but a burly, bearded face appeared in front of his and offered him something. He drank. It was coffee, hot, rancid, but still it tasted good and it warmed him well. He dozed off as the boat circled back and approached the cutter, making herself fast in Diamond’s aft well deck.
Crewmen secured the boat and helped Klamath out. He stood wobbly on the deck for a moment, then made out a familiar face: it was Alonzo Henry, cut and bleeding, but alive. The captain and first officer of the Julie Lane embraced.
Jeez, Lonnie, you look like hell.
Then, they were whisked above decks to a sick bay crammed with beds and equipment. Corpsmen checked them out, head to toe.
After the examinations, Klamath and Henry were escorted by two bearded yeoman to a room along a narrow passageway on the Diamond’s main deck. It turned out to the captain’s stateroom.
Stay here and don’t try to leave,
one yeoman told them. Cap’n will be by in a few minutes.
They shut the door. Klamath tried the lock—it was unlocked—but he could hear movement just outside. They were under guard.
Klamath and Henry glared ruefully at each other. Klamath spoke up in a rattling voice, still coughing up salt water, sipping Coast Guard coffee like it was champagne. Lon, I seen monster waves before. I seen spouts before. I even seen ball lightning and St. Elmo’s before. But those lights under the water—
Alonzo Henry shook his head, ruffled his wet hair with towels. Subs, Skipper, had to be some kind of U-boats—
That’s when they both realized the door had been opened and a face appeared. It was Commander Wilcox. The Diamond’s skipper came in, shutting the door behind him. He was tall, with a buzzcut and gray temples. A faint line of moustache arced over his lips. The moustache twitched like a mouse.
What about the rest of my crew?
Klamath asked. He rubbed a hot thermos of coffee against the stubble of his cheeks, then took a few sips. Something about Coast Guard coffee—
Wilcox scanned both men with suspicion. We only found the two of you. How large was your crew?
Klamath mentally ticked off names in his mind. Seven in all.
The realization that four of them had been lost in a freak storm weighed heavily on his mind. And it wouldn’t go down well at Robson Line offices in Wilmington either…there would be hours of questions, investigations, paperwork.
Wilcox shrugged. We did what we could. Corpsman said you two will be okay…mind telling me what you were doing out in such rough seas? There were all kinds of weather warnings this afternoon.
"Well, we are fishermen, Commander. Julie Lane was out trawling for drum and snapper. And the fishin’s none too good around here anymore what with you and your ships carving up the waters day and night."
Wilcox forced a thin smile. There’s been U-boats sighted around here, you know that. Tanker went down just twenty miles north, off Nags Head…day before yesterday. Fifteen men too. The Coast Guard can’t keep you out of these waters but you’d best watch yourself. Stay inside the ten-mile line. We and the Navy are pretty busy further out…U-boat pickets and the like.
Alonzo Henry shook his head. She was a freak storm all right, Commander. But it wasn’t the waves or the spouts that spooked us.
Wilcox snickered. Fishermen were all alike, superstitious as all get out. Ghosts, I assume?
Lights,
Henry said. Weird lights. And it wasn’t no lightning either.
That made Wilcox’ face harden. What kind of lights?
Henry glanced over at Klamath, who nodded silently. Tell him, his eyes said.
First the big spout had lights, like Christmas lights. They came down out of the clouds…little blobs of lights, at least two of them, kind of slow, like a bomb maybe, but I didn’t see an explosion.
Klamath took up the story. "Then when Julie Lane capsized and we were in the water, we saw ‘em again, under the water. Below the surface."
How many?
Wilcox asked, now more concerned. How far away, what bearing?
Henry took a deep breath and shrugged, pulling long on the thermos of coffee. It tasted like bilge water. "Hard to say. I only saw two. Steady yellow white lights, maybe a few feet below the surface. They passed between us and the Lane, then circled us for a few minutes. Thought they might be shark, but we don’t get shark up here very often."
You think they might be U-boats?
Klamath asked. The prospect made his heart race. German midget subs, maybe?
Wilcox backed out into the corridor and conferred with someone else for a second, then stuck his head back in the cabin. I don’t know, fellas, but the Navy needs to know about this. We’re putting in at Fort Macon in an hour. I want you guys to speak with the Navy boys when we dock. Tell ‘em everything you saw or heard about those lights.
Henry made a fist. It’s the Germans, ain’t it? They got some kind of weird U-boat and you need to investigate, don’t you? Sure thing, Commander, we can tell ‘em what we saw.
Wilcox started to withdraw. Get dried off, men. And don’t say a word of this to anyone.
He backed out of the cabin and shut the door. Both survivors heard the lock click.
Klamath shivered, tested his own coffee. "Guess were stuck here, Lonnie.
The Diamond put in at her dock at Ft. Macon Coast Guard Station forty minutes later. Escorted down the gangway, Klamath and Henry spotted Coast Guard beach patrols on horseback gathering at the end of the wharf. The ship’s executive officer was a jolly, barrel-chested nearly bald officer whose name plate read Dennison. Lieutenant Dennison was mainly interested in food, from his description of what awaited them.
Oh, you’ll love it,
he told them, as they headed across the dock area to the stationhouse. "This time of night…wow…doughnuts, bagels, sandwiches, Coast Guard coffee, that’ll grow hair on your chest…just follow me—"
They wound up at the Security shack, a small cabin just inside the main gate off Spencer Road. Lieutenant Melvin Betters was the base Security Officer. Just as Dennison had said, a table full of sodas, coffee and cookies and sandwiches occupied one corner of the conference room. Klamath wondered if everybody rescued got the same treatment.
That’s when they saw the Navy commander in the corner, flanked by men with M-1 carbines.
Thirty miles northeast of the Ft. Macon Coast Guard station, two Ponkti lifeships settled to the sandy bottom of the ocean in strong currents. A large underwater vessel was coming. They had sounded it from miles away, then circled the splintered wreckage of the eekoti ship that had just sunk to observe this strange vessel of the Umans.
Loptoheen tu kel: Ponk’et studied his instruments. "Still two beats away, Kolom. Coming this way. It’s big too…bigger than any kip’t I’ve ever ridden, bigger than this ship too."
Kolom le was jammed in the lifeship directly behind. He could hear the sound of the strange vessel’s screws, multi-bladed, powered by some clunky apparatus that made no sense to either of them. "Loptoheen, are you sure you navigated Opuh’te correctly. This doesn’t seem like—"
But Loptoheen waved his colleague quiet. Hush! Listen…just listen, okay? I’ll take measurements when the beast goes by. Klindonok too. The other lifeship’s just in position to get a good angle. These Umans have things we never dreamed of.
The two of them rested quietly inside the cockpit of their ship while the U-95 rumbled ever closer, making barely eight knots at a keel depth of eighty feet. She was a boisterous thing, rumbling, hissing, bubbling, composed of some outer material hard and nearly impenetrable by the Ponkti as she approached. Pulses couldn’t penetrate. Over two hundred feet long, with a beam of twenty feet, massing some eight hundred tons, the Type VII submarine had been stalking and prowling the shoals and waters off Cape Hatteras and Okracoke for days now, having already sent two tankers and a bulk steamer to the bottom.
Now she was upon them and all the Ponkti travelers were impressed with the Uman machine. A great wall of steel passed slowly between the two lifeships, carving the water with her bow waves rocking the lifeships roughly as she went by, wallowing awkwardly in the currents but possessed of a power that made Loptoheen’s head swim with ideas and ambitions. He knew it was pointless, but he opened the lifeship cockpit for a moment, just cranked it barely open, to feel the power of the submarine waves wash over his beak, hear the thrum of her screws, feel the pure power of the beast. It was better than a whole herd of seamothers, for that’s what Kolom had called these beasts…metallic seamothers.
Then the U-95 was gone and dwindling in the distance, the turbulence of her wake thrashing the water like a pack of half-crazed tillet.
Loptoheen lowered the hatch and sealed the cockpit firmly.
Magnificent, Kolom…just magnificent.
Kolom was sour. Instruments don’t lie. Look at the readings: the sounds and scents are all wrong. You didn’t navigate the Farpool properly. We’re not where we’re supposed to be, are we?
"We don’t know that. It’s still the world of the Umans, that’s all that matters. I want to follow that big metallic seamother. See where she goes. Maybe we can communicate with these eekoti, find out how they built this thing. By Shooki, if Ponk’et had such a vessel, we could drive the Omtorish from every sea in the world."
Loptoheen didn’t know it and never would have admitted it, but his colleague and passenger Kolom le was right. They had entered the Farpool just beyond the surf line and seamounts of Likte Island on their own world and crossed the wormhole bridge through the Notwater as always, but somehow the computations and the maneuvering was wrong. They had come out of the Farpool above the western Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of North Carolina but the time calculations had proven inaccurate.
They had a mission and the metah of Ponk’et, Lektereenah kim, had been quite firm about it: test this Farpool, and travel to the world of the Umans…reconnoiter their seas and waters and learn what you can…the Omtorish can’t monopolize the Farpool forever.
So two lifeships, ot’lum in the Ponkti vernacular, had been built, right from plans stolen from the Omtorish, and equipped for the journey. Loptoheen commanded one, and Klindonok commanded the other. Both were made tekmetah, arms of the metah, bound to Lektereenah to complete the mission or die in the effort.
Loptoheen intended to give Lektereenah no reason to doubt them. And if he could bring back some Uman weapons and technology to help in the unending struggle with Omt’or and the other kels, a struggle to decide who would dominate the seas of Seome, then so much the better.
But Loptoheen had made a slight miscalculation coming through the Farpool. And that miscalculation had landed the two lifeships in the western Atlantic Ocean, in the earliest days of a great conflict among the Umans. Research showed that their own historians would come to call it World War II.
Chapter 2
I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast, for I intend to go in harm’s way.
John Paul Jones
Earth
Twenty Miles off the coast of North Carolina
November 21, 1942
6:30 am
Doenitz had named it Operation Paukenschlag, or Drumbeat, when the U-boats had received their sailing orders and Korvettenkapitan Horst Muhler, skipper of the U-115, figured that was about as good a description as any. The U-115 had been stalking the rear of the convoy—intercepts had termed it SC-108—for two days now, just trying to evade a few scattered escorts and maneuver in close for a quick snapshot from her forward tubes. Already they had closed enough to one juicy target for Muhler to risk raising the periscope for a quick look and bearing before final target calculations were made.
Raise periscope,
he commanded. The boat’s conning tower shuddered as the ‘scope hissed up her sealed tube and poked just above the light swells rocking the ocean surface. Muhler turned his greasy cap backwards and affixed tired eyes to the rubber eyepiece, silently mouthing the name emblazoned on the forehull of the nearest freighter, now barely a thousand meters away, early morning sun glinting off her funnels.
Bentham Cole.
Range, nine hundred fifty meters,
he called out. Angle on the bow twenty-two degrees. Make tubes one and two ready.
Standing behind Muhler was the First Watch Officer, Joachim Wechsler. Voices called out from somewhere forward.
Wechsler reported. Tubes one and two ready.
Set your angle and fire.
The firing command was given and the U-115 porpoised a little as the first G7 torpedo slipped out of her tube, motoring away on high-pitched screws.
"Watch your buoyancy, Eins WO. Flood four and five. And give me the count."
The boat trimmed out the loss of the torpedo’s weight. Wechsler checked his stopwatch, counting down the seconds. The time seemed to last an eternity, then….
BOOOM!!
The explosion sent shock waves that shook the boat. A great cheer erupted in the control room.
Sound man, what do you hear?
The sound man turned at his desk, holding ear phones tight against his head, his eyes shut to concentrate. It was Genzbach, fresh out of the training flotilla at Trondheim, head full of black hair and a cockeyed grin on his face. "Bulkheads collapsing, Kapitan. Boilers crumpling…I hear the steam hissing…she’s going down fast."
Stupid Americans,
Muhler decided. No escorts, no protection at all. They never learn. Helm, plane up to periscope depth…I want to take a look.
The U-115 rose slightly and leveled off a few dozen meters below the choppy surface of the Atlantic. Above, it was still dark, early morning, but the horizon was aflame with a red-orange glow. Muhler rotated the scope, seeing boats and arms and men adrift, while the sea surface burned with flaming oil patches. Beyond, backlit in the glow, more funnels, more freighters and tankers, more targets.
Surface the boat,
Muhler commanded. Gun crews, standby. We’ll make our next attack on the surface with our eighty-eights.
Muhler, Wechsler and the rest of the control room crew hung on as the planesmen made a smart up-angle maneuver to bring the U-115 to the surface. Topside, the water was choppy, slick with burning and dying men floundering in the freezing water.
The Germans referred to it as "die gluckliche Zeit." The Happy Time.
For the next four hours, Muhler and the U-115 prowled among the hapless tankers and freighters of SC-108 like a wolf in the sheep pen, picking off several with close-in torpedo shots…four hits in four tries!--, then finishing off two more with her deck guns. The last one had been the tanker Harriston, so fully riddled with eighty-eight millimeter fire that her superstructure burst into flames, setting off her interior fuel tanks in a terrific, sky-scraping explosion that blew her hull completely apart. Flaming debris rained down on the Atlantic for ten minutes after that.
Secure the deck!
Muhler announced over the voice pipe. "Eins WO, prepare to dive. Sound man, what contacts do you have?"
Genzbach concentrated on his signals, adjusting knobs, adjusting his earphones. "Mostly bulkheads collapsing, explosions, boilers erupting. But Kapitan, there was something before—"
It was the quaver in Genzbach’s voice, an uncertain lilt—he was practically a boy, barely a year out of the Marineschule Murwik –that caught Muhler’s attention. The Kapitan came over.
What is it? What did you hear?
Genzbach looked up. "Perhaps another sub…there was a faint kind of whooshing sound…while we were maneuvering, mostly astern, I think. I heard it several times. Unlike anything I’ve ever heard. Maybe sea life, Kapitan. "
Bearing, Genzie. What was the bearing and range?
Hard to say, sir. It came and went. It sounded like air or water rushing, like you hear when a faucet’s going in the next room.
Okay, sound man, okay.
He patted Genzbach on the shoulder. "Maybe it was just a few dolphins humping, after all. It has been pretty exciting around here. Just keep listening on those earphones. Any destroyers, any escorts come our way, I want to know immediately."
"Yes, sir, Kapitan, of course."
The deck inclined as U-115 slid beneath the waves, turning east to exit Diamond Shoals and its shallow waters and bays. Muhler checked with the Obersteuermann, Breightmann, on their course.
Steer east, make it heading zero eight five. Set turns for eight knots. We’ll go an hour or so this way, check contacts, then surface again if she’s clear topside.
"Zero eight five, aye Kapitan," repeated Breightmann. He bent to his plot board and quickly penciled in their new course and speed.
Muhler left the conn in the hands of the Eins WO, Wechsler, and headed aft to his stateroom, itself little more than a closet with a curtain shielding it from the corridor. He plopped into his bunk, pinched his eyes shut and tried to relax.
No escorts. Five ships sunk. It had been easy, too easy. When would the Americans learn? They still had two torpedoes left, but Muhler wanted to save those for defense against destroyers if any were encountered. That was just good tactics, he told himself, though there were some at the OKM who didn’t see it that way, the worthless paper pushers. Muhler snorted.
Happy time, indeed.
Five hundred meters behind the U-115, as she slid through the trackless pre-dawn black of the western Atlantic, the Ponkti lifeships followed at a respectful distance.
Loptoheen pulsed ahead, sounding the shape and contours of the Uman vessel.
Just like a seamother,
he told Kolom. She’s a magnificent beast, this one. No musculature that I can pulse. She moves under power of that small propulsor at the rear…hear how it rotates, chops the water. I’ve never seen anything like it.
Just don’t get too close,
Kolom advised. She has teeth like a seamother too. She spits death with those armored fish and destroys other ships with her guns.
Loptoheen was mindful of Lektereenah’s orders: reconnoiter, study, gather specimens, and learn. The world of the Umans may become our world, if the Omtorish are right. Shooki sends a great ak’loosh someday and we have to be ready to emigrate.
Loptoheen scoffed. Surely that was just so much p’omor’te, so much blather. The Omtorish used tales like that to scare their midlings and hide their real purpose: to monopolize the Farpool and dominate Seome with whatever they could steal from the Umans, from the strange Tailless beings of the Notwater who seemed to be the most intelligent life on this bizarre world.
The two lifeships followed U-115 all the way across the Atlantic, noting that most of the voyage, the Uman vessel stayed at the surface.
Understandable,
noted Kolom. They’re creatures of Notwater…it’s their environment.
Loptoheen used those hours to bring his lifeship closer for a better look at the curious vessel. Klindonok was bolder, even surfacing briefly off the submarine’s port side into a bright blue ocean sky one day. In the commotion that followed, the crewmen of the U-115 scrambled to their deck guns, peppering the surface with dozens of rounds. None struck Klindonok’s ship, but the litorkel’ke thought it advisable to dive quickly and disappear beneath the foam and spray.
That earned him a rebuke from the tukmaster himself, Loptoheen.
Stay at a safe distance, Klindonok ka. We don’t want to alarm the Tailless unnecessarily.
His partner’s voice came over the voice circuit, full of grunts and clicks and squeaks. "Apologies, tukmaster. How long do we follow this vessel?"
Loptoheen gave that some thought. Perhaps he will come to a base of some kind. I’m looking for something we can use, something we can take back and use against the Omtorish. That’s what Lektereenah really wants.
So they followed the German U-boat on her zigzag course for several thousand kilometers, sometimes drifting closer, to pulse and sniff her screws and fittings, sometimes laying back to wallow in her wake, occasionally darting off to investigate something else, a shipwreck, a mound of volcanic smokers—just like Sk’orkenkloo Trench,
observed Kolom, hot plumes of turbid water...maybe similar in origin…we could use it for energy, Loptoheen.
Sometimes, darting ahead to measure the U-boat’s speed and maneuverability, creating a brief obstruction in the water that Genzbach, the sound man, alerted Kapitan to and forcing the boat to veer sharply away.
It was Klindonok who even played games with the boat’s sound sensing apparatus. As soon as it was learned, or suspected, that the Tailless were listening carefully to what went on around them, Klindonok created a cacophony of different sounds, trilling up and down the vocals of the Ponkti tongue, narrating soliloquys, speaking as if on a roam with an army of repeaters, telling bad jokes.
Even Loptoheen had to laugh at what he imaged the Tailless would make of the symphony Klindonok created.
The U-boat pens at St. Nazaire had only recently been opened for operation when Muhler finally guided the U-115 gingerly into her slip at Number Four dock. The dockmaster and a small crew awaited them on the pier.
Dock crews made the boat fast and the men of U-115 began climbing topside and making their way across the gangways. Muhler was one of the last and as he crossed the gangway, the dockmaster, Wegener, stuck out a hand.
Welcome, home, Kapitan. Good hunting, I presume?
Wegener was sandy-haired, plump, a former burgomeister in a small Bavarian village.
Muhler grunted. Good enough.
He started to explain why they had taken such a zigzag course back to base, trying to dodge spurious sound contacts, but decided not to. Wegener was a clerk and little more. He’d never understand.
Then there was that encounter on the surface…or maybe they had dreamed the whole thing. The odd little pod-shaped craft. Perhaps the Allies had come up with something new to harass the U-boats. Muhler signed off on some papers and shoved through a small throng of applauding dock workers. He wanted to hunt down the Intelligence chief and find out if any other boat had encountered something similar.
The dock area was lined with machine shops, an optical shop, more workshops, a munitions bunker, well-guarded by the Marine Strosstrupp Abteilung, and offices. Just as Muhler barged into the dock office, a commotion erupted from alongside the pier, somewhere aft of the boat. Muhler stopped in the door, then stepped back out.
The waters at the entrance of the pen seemed to be boiling and foaming. Something was surfacing…Muhler’s stomach did a backflip when he realized it was the same tiny craft they had seen at sea several days ago. The Americans had followed them somehow, after days of playing cat and mouse with Genzbach the sound man. They’d even shot at the thing.
It had to be the Americans. Or the British. And they had been followed right into the submarine pens at St. Nazaire.
Muhler shouted. Shoot! Fire! Drive them off!
Wechsler, the boat’s Eins WO, grabbed a pistol from a yeoman, and started peppering the water with shots. Others joined in the fusillade and soon the sub pen echoed with weapons fire. Men yelled. Sailors and marines and dock hands scurried along both sides of the pier, raking the water with fire, seemingly with no effect.
The craft submerged again but didn’t go far. It glided further into the pen, looking just like a small whale, dorsal fins, stubby forward flukes, its supple body whipping back and forth.
Muhler had a thought. Maybe it was a whale, confused, hungry, lost.
The craft or whale paused at a small diving platform, suspended over the edge of the dock. Already, inside the dive shop windows, two men half-clad in dive gear had poked their heads out; they would have been inspecting the outer hull of the boat in another hour, looking for leaks, dents, loose fittings, mangled valves. Now, they ducked back into the shop amidst the volley of rounds flying around the pen.
The water around the dive platform foamed vigorously and two heads poked above the water’s surface. The heads were beaked, rounded and plated as if armored.
Muhler saw them. Froschmann, he decided. American frogmen, combat divers, carried to St. Nazaire to sabotage the boats. They had to be stopped.
Others saw the frogmen. They scurried to the side where the dive platform was suspended, momentarily stunned at the sight of the divers hauling themselves up onto the partially submerged platform.
Only when the first diver was fully in view, standing erect, did Muhler realize this was no American frogman.
Mein Gott…was ist das?
What the hell--?
The diver was much taller or longer than any human Muhler had ever seen. Easily three meters, if not more. The dive suit resembled a dolphin from its mid-section up, complete with beak, eyeholes, forelimbs and odd appendages he had no idea what they were. Below the mid-section, were two legs, seemingly mechanized, for they moved with a jerky, mechanical action that belied the natural look of its forebody. One of the forelimbs held some kind of device. It was cylindrical with a horn-shaped opening at one end. The diver aimed the device at the startled men.
A shot rang out. Then more shots, and soon the gunfire was continuous. Marines crept along the ladders and scaffolding, trying to get into better position. But the shots seemed to have no effect. The frogman was armored, it seemed and the impacts were visible, as the diver twisted and turned to evade the fire, but he continued scaling the dive platform. And another head was emerging from below the water next to him.
Then came a brilliant flash of light, followed by several deafening sound pulses. Muhler staggered back, blinded, instantly nauseated, vomit rising in the back of his throat. He pitched forward onto the deck, barely caught himself and shuddered and shivered as more booms reverberated around the pen. Windows rattled and shattered and there was a momentary stillness around the dock. Men lay sprawled everywhere, groaning, their ears bleeding, clutching their faces and eyes.
The Ponkti travelers, Loptoheen and Klindonok, emerged fully from the dive platform and surveyed the carnage, climbing up onto the deck. Klindonok had a slight leak in his suit, the result of scores of rounds from the Tailless weapons, but was otherwise unhurt. Loptoheen was unscathed. They tested their mobilitors and found they could maneuver in this odd world of Notwater, kicking and shuffling along step by step. Both trundled forward along the edge of the pier.
Ahead of them, a door opened. The door sign read Oberkommando der Marine. Two men stepped out, instantly startled at the sight of the Ponkti visitors. One was Fregattenkapitan Werner von Kleist, gray white buzzcut hair, with sandy gray sideburns, thinning on top and a trim graying moustache. Von Kleist had just arrived from Berlin, a fact-finding and inspection mission from the OKM. The other was Wegener, the dock master, who had ducked into the nearest office when the fusillade had begun.
Now, the two Germans and the two Ponkti stared at each other for a long moment. To von Kleist, the visitors looked like dolphins with legs, somehow thrown up on land and seeming to be lost. They looked around nervously, checking everything. The OKM officer had no sidearm, though instinctively he reached for the holster that he had left in his office. Wegener was also unarmed.
Klindonok pointed the sound suppressor at both men and their hands went up quickly. The Germans started backpedaling, but Wegener stumbled over a ladder and went down hard, then slid flailing off into the water with a loud splash. He scrambled to find something to grab onto, but Klindonok handed his weapon to Loptoheen and dropped into the water beside Wegener, grabbing the Tailless under his arms. The Ponkti flippered them back to the dive platform and deposited a coughing and gagging dockmaster over the railing. Wegener coughed up water violently and sucked in huge gasps of air. Then Klindonok climbed back to the deck.
Von Kleist noticed a small pod-shaped device that Loptoheen was removing from a belt around his midsection. He flinched, started backing…another weapon?
But Loptoheen beckoned him to stop, using the gestures he had learned from the eekoti Chase many mah before. The Ponkti withdrew the device and held it out, offering it to von Kleist.
The OKM officer slowly put his hands down. "Was? You want me to take this…is that it?"
Loptoheen shuffled forward a few steps on his mobilitors, earning another flinch from von Kleist. Cautiously, the German reached out and took hold of the pod.
It was a small fist-sized object, oval, rounded at the top. The sea creature had extracted it from a small pouch in his belly; neither of them had seen that. His hands had six fingers, delicate fingers, and they grasped the object with a dexterity they could hardly believe.
"Kapitan…watch out…please, don’t—" But he had already taken possession of the object. He stood up and examined it. The dockmaster came up and squinted at the thing in his hand.
"What is it? Is it a bomb?
I don’t know—
von Kleist shook it slightly, then nearly dropped the thing when it started to glow…a dim red glow emanated from within. The outer case was almost translucent and a single red light shone from within.
The sea creature—von Kleist still thought of them as froschmann—frogmen-- suddenly became agitated, flapping the air with its arms. He clicked and chittered and screeched, slapping the air again and again. The other creature soon joined in. The fracas lasted half a minute.
What’s wrong with them? What are they doing?
It seems upset—
then von Kleist heard it. Something, a whispering susurration, began issuing from the object. He almost dropped the thing. What the--?
He shook the can again, brought it up to eye level. Now the red light had grown stronger and sharper. He peered in, seeing nothing, then brought it to his ears. He could clearly hear something.
Sounds like gibberish to me,
he said. Similar to the clicking the froschmann were doing, the can emitted a steady stream of sounds: clicks, whistles, grunts and chirps. He shook his head, then noticed the taller creature trying to mimic his head shakes. The creature waved his forelimbs, hands extended and von Kleist somehow knew that the creature wanted the object back. Cautiously, he approached, still hovering on the edge of the deck.
Maybe it’s a grenade…it sounds like it’s ticking,
Wegener decided. We ought to get out of here right now—
I’m not so sure.
Gingerly, von Kleist handed the object back, placing it carefully in the froschmann’s outstretched hand. The fingers, they seemed so—
The creature seemed to nod and took the can. The other creature joined him in examining the object.
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