Тим Пауэрс - Bugs and Known Problems

Only then had Goond realized that they’d had intimate contact with a ghost ship, and were doomed.

“Thanks, I am coming directly.” The lights were still dim. The atmosphere was heavy, the potash cartridge breathing apparatus heavy and burdensome. He was lucky he’d managed to keep it in place for however long it had been that he’d remained unconscious.

He’d wanted to be awake, because his was the first watch: but it was the engineer who would save them, and up to a skeleton crew to stay out of the way and let the engine room and the technical people save their lives. Also Lachs had insisted. That had been unfair, perhaps. Lachs laid no such restriction on himself: but Lachs was their captain. So , Goond told himself, perhaps Lachs had a right .

Goond stumbled aft to the control room. Ellie—Joachim Vilsohn—was there, of course, standing behind his hydroplane operators; and Lachs leaning up against the chart chest with his characteristic sangfroid and nonchalance, aware of everything, surprised by nothing, always that beat of consideration before he reacted. The boat was nose-up and rising.

“Faster,” Lachs said. “Heinze?” This was called through to the radio operator, and Lachs apparently liked what he heard, because he nodded. “Yes, still good, all quiet upstairs, gentlemen. Just the way we like it.” So there was no sign of the enemy. That didn’t need to mean anything.

There could be a destroyer topside, sitting in the water, waiting them out. There could be a regular bomber patrol, like the one that had almost sunk them, scanning the seas for them. But there was nothing actively moving in the water above, and they were out of time, because it had been surely more than twenty-four hours now since they had been forced down.

Goond could hear Ellie issuing his instructions to the hydroplane operators, forward hydroplanes up fifteen, aft eight . The engines had started to hum a little more loudly: the boat was under active propulsion, not idling in place. They couldn’t have much battery power left, after this long. Lachs would be getting desperate, in his own laid-back fashion. Was it his imagination—Goond asked himself—or could he feel a change in the angle of inclination beneath his feet, as the boat climbed?

One hundred and fifty meters. That was what the depth gauge said. The last Goond could remember seeing that gauge, the covering had been cracked to the point of unreadability; but it was whole and entire now. He didn’t know how many replacements the boat still carried, not exactly, but he suspected that there weren’t many left.

The closer they got to the surface the less risk of the bends the crew would have if they had to make an emergency exit from the boat while it was still underwater: but what difference did it make? Anybody who had to leave the shelter of their U-boat was dead anyway, because the waters of the Arctic Ocean were cold, very cold, and would kill a man inside of half an hour as surely as any more active measures could.

One hundred meters. Eighty-five. Lachs pulled the speaking tube toward him and issued the warning order himself. “Prepare to surface,” he said, as though it was the most ordinary thing in the world, as though they had not been deep below and in fear of their lives for more than a day now. “First watch, crew to stations. Diesels, prepare to activate.”

Maybe that was technically up to Ellie. But Ellie was busy. Goond could hear activity starting to pick up, through the open doorways in the bulkheads; people rousing themselves and being roused. It was time to return to the land of the living or make their final peace with the lords of the dead. One or the other.

Forty meters. Thirty-five. Twenty-five meters.

“Up periscope,” Lachs said, straightening up and away from his casual perch on the chart chest to take the navigation periscope for his own. Twenty meters. Fifteen. Any moment now the bosun would call all hands forward to bring the nose of the boat back into trim as it breached the surface on the rise—

“Nothing,” Lachs said, but there was some hesitation there that Goond didn’t quite understand. Goond’s watch was assembling, struggling to fasten their anoraks and pull on their heavy fur-lined gloves. Fischer handed Goond his. Goond didn’t have to get into his thick boots and his two pairs of socks because he’d never taken them off. So they were ready. And the boat was on the surface. “First watch topside, gentlemen, and tell us what is what, up there.”

It was always a rush of adrenaline, climbing the ladder through the conning tower, opening the bridge hatch. Because they never knew quite what was waiting for them. Goond went first: it was his privilege, as well as his responsibility.

The onrush of stale contaminated air from the interior of the boat boosted him up and through onto the bridge so persuasively that he knocked his head against the hatch while still in the process of opening it. Bad air out. Good air in. Below they would be crowding around the air-well, and drinking that clean fresh sweet cold oxygenated air in greedily. Even from the bridge Goond could hear the interior ventilator fans that had been switched on, but his watch were the lucky ones. They got first crack at it all.

Goond hurried on up and out, his head spinning from the blow it had taken against the hatch, stumbling forward to fetch up against the high wall of the bridge and hang there, sucking the air into his lungs. His confusion started to clear. But not quickly enough.

There was something wrong. What was it? The seas were calm, the stars outside the halo of the full Moon’s gracious white-pearl light were bright and beautiful. Pushing the hood of his anorak back and away from his face Goond turned his face to the sky, guzzling the air. Visibility was excellent all around; no fog rose on the horizon to disguise a destroyer, no clouds gathered overhead to conceal the approach of a bomber until it was too late to avoid being spotted. What could be wrong about that? What did he smell that was so out of place?

The merciless wind did not whip the exposed portions of his face raw within an instant of its first exposure. His gloved hand did not freeze to the cowling of the bridge when he steadied himself against the bulwark. It was cold, but temperately so, cold like Christmas at home in Germany, not cold like northernmost Norway; barely freezing. The Moon was full. It had no business being any of those things. It was all wrong.

“Herr Kahloin,” Goond called down the narrow hatchway, forcing the words out past the knotted fist of perplexity in his throat. “Your presence requested on the bridge, please.”

Lachs clearly knew it, too, or at least part of it; that was what Goond had sensed in Lachs’ voice. Lachs had seen the light: that of the full Moon. Lachs knew as well as Goond did that they’d set out from Hammerfest in the dark of the Moon with only the Northern Lights to betray them on the cold black choppy sea, and even those obscured by fog and rain. The Arctic waters were never so warm as this, not in February, maybe not ever. Nor was that the whole of it.

Lachs came up the ladder with deliberation, as if reluctantly; perhaps he was afraid the moonlight he’d seen through the periscope had been a hallucination—but if it was, it was a shared delusion, because Goond and the men of his watch could see it too. Goond waited. Lachs tasted the air; then Lachs took off one glove and dipped his fingers into a little pool of water that had puddled in a dimple in the rim of the bridge cowling, bringing a few drops to his mouth, tasting of it, raising his eyes to meet Goond’s waiting gaze with wonder.

Yes. Goond nodded. The air was not salt. The water was not salt. That was the final thing that was wrong about this, they were not even at sea, they lay in fresh water. There were rivers in the world as wide as the many miles from horizon to horizon that stretched all around them, yes, that was so, but they were all in warmer places than this—the Amazon, the Indus, the Ganges, and all of them with current.