Robert Williams - Ice Fortress

“But that’s just a theory. Nobody’s ever travelled at the speed of light,” Jack challenged.

“True,” Leah agreed, “but it’s more than a theory. The GPS satellites that orbit the earth rely on precise synchronization between their onboard clocks and clocks on the ground to provide accurate navigation data. The speed at which they travel in orbit and the effect of gravity on the satellite mean that the clocks onboard the satellite have to be calibrated to ‘tick’ at a different rate in order to sync with earth based clocks. Relativity isn’t a theory, it’s a real thing,” Leah concluded.

“And that explains the U-Boat in the ice pack, how exactly?” asked Sam, his eyes glazing over in confusion.

Leah’s eyes blazed with enthusiasm as she continued her lecture, “NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer satellite was launched in the 1980’s to measure the speed at which we were hurtling through space as a result of the big bang theory.”

“Like the TV show?” Sam asked excitedly.

Jack leaned over and cuffed him on the back of his oversized ginger head.

“Over eight hundred and seventy thousand miles an hour.” Leah paused to let that sink in. That’s how fast we are travelling, in addition to the speed we travel around the sun on our annual orbit plus the speed the earth rotates on its axis every 24 hours.”

Blank stares greeted her as she surveyed her audience.

“Don’t you get it?”

Plainly nobody got it .

“If that U-Boat went into the future back in 1945 and if the other end of the wormhole spat it out in 2017, then the earth would not be in the same place that it was when the U-Boat went into the wormhole, so it’s not surprising that it ended up where it did. In fact, where it ended up more or less proves that it actually did travel through time.”

The faces surrounding her looked totally confounded.

“The Nazi’s actually created a machine capable of time travel and they sent the device and the U-Boat it was housed in, into the future which is right now, and they did it way back in 1945!”

Jack had only one question.

“Why?”

But nobody heard him over the screams that echoed through the ice fortress and the sound of automatic gunfire hitting the hull of the Barracuda.

A worm of blood escaped Kapitänleutnant Helmut Sohler’s nose, falling onto a faded black and white photograph with well-worn edges. The small wedding photograph was all he had to remind him of his beautiful bride, Helene who he had married in a rushed ceremony the night before receiving his orders to report to the U-2532.

With a baby on the way, Sohler insisted on doing the proper thing by both of them but now he was seeing the chances of holding his son or daughter in his arms slipping away by the hour.

He wiped away the blood with the back of his hand and spat the foul taste of copper from his mouth. Whatever that thing was discharging, the lead walls the shipyard had been ordered to fit to the compartment weren’t enough to stop it. Half the crewmen were dead already and the other half not too far behind.

Yet Kammler appeared totally immune to the device. The man wasn’t human. Day after day he worked on his machine in the lead box. Every so often he’d order all of the generators to be started and he’d man the control station on the dock which was tethered to the device with a myriad of thick electrical cables.

Nothing seemed to happen but they were all too sick to care one way or another. Hair fell out in clumps, blood hemorrhaged from every orifice and flesh sloughed from their bodies at the slightest touch, leaving gaping, oozy wounds that refused to heal. For many, death didn’t come soon enough.

Sohler felt blessed to have stayed away from the compartment as much as he was able. That probably bought him some time. Time enough to finish his log entries before trying to stop the madness.

No, Kammler wasn’t human at all. He was a monster, the manifestation of the vilest evil. The madman beamed with pride when he’d explained his grand plan to restore Germany to its rightful place on the world stage. His death camps were no more than a small scale experiment. A few million prisoners were nothing compared to the scale he envisaged with his huge ethnic ‘cleansing’ factories.

If the general’s madness went unchecked and if his hideous plan were allowed to succeed, the world would plunge into blackness and never recover. The Thousand Year Reich they had all proudly dreamed of at the start of the war would be defiled and corrupted. If Kammler had his way, it would become a thousand year pandemic, destroying the world as he knew it. His wife and child…

The lunatic had to be stopped.

Of course, like so many others, Sohler was convinced that Kammler intended to turn the tables on their enemies with the use of a weapon everyone thought couldn’t be built — an atomic bomb.

What he didn’t know was that the truth was even more chilling and horrific than that.

“How many men up top?” Jack yelled to Captain Jameson over the cacophony of shouts and screams of the three terrified civilians.

“Six,” he replied sharply, one military man to another.

Jack turned to the XO, “Weapons?”

“A few SIG-Sauer handguns and some ammunition. We weren’t planning on being attacked on a scientific voyage.”

Jack pointed at the captain and the XO, “You two break out the weps locker. Take the civilians with you and get them armed.”

Leah and Jack caught each other’s gaze for a moment. Jack gave her his best impression of his you’ll be fine face. But his eyes said otherwise.

Durand snatched the U-Boat captain’s log and shoved it into his waistband, then made his way to the corridor leading to the weapons locker. The three civilians trailed in his wake and Captain Jameson brought up the rear. Jameson wanted to ask Jack what his plan was but thought better of it. It might be his boat, but right now, he was out of his depth with a team of land based armed hostiles closing in on them.

Jack stabbed a finger in Sam’s direction, “Combat packs and weapons?”

Sam reached under the table with both hands and pulled out a 60 pound combat pack in each, like they weighed nothing at all. To each pack was secured a short barreled LWRC ‘stow and go’ Individual Carbine Personal Defense Weapon or IC-PDW as it was known.

Jack’s face lit up. He’d left his pack and weapon behind in his haste to get out of the U-Boat but Sam had come through for him, again.

“Good man, Bluey. These’ll stop those bastards farting in church,” said Jack as he unclipped his ultra-compact, automatic weapon and tested that the unique collapsible stock had survived the rough treatment they’d been dealt.

“You couldn’t find us anything smaller?” Sam had wrapped thick, sausage like fingers around his weapon and it looked ridiculous given his proportions.

“Body armor penetrating 5.6mm NATO rounds that’ll punch holes through steel, eight and a half inch barrel, weighing in at less than six pounds.” Jack’s eyes blazed with delight. “These bad boys are the weapon of choice for confined environments and if that’s not where we are now—”