Torsten Breitkop's office, same time
The sound of the alarm bell was muted by thick walls and double-pane windows. The German engineer would not have heard it anyway, his mind was too taken by the letter before him.
It was from the Witch King Malekith himself and it frightened him worse than nearly anything else that he had witnessed during the last decade that he had spent in Naggaroth.
"We have been more than pleased with the reports about your new creations on the battlefield. You have indeed given our warriors the arms needed to best those DawiZharr. We need more of these, enough so we can protect any part of our realm.
Requisition what you need to make more of them. Ask for whatever you need and if the Druchii have it, it shall be yours. Be it gold, slaves or ores, you will have it for the price of asking. Help us to defend our realm and the rewards will be beyond your imagining."
Torsten Breitkop had a decent idea about the numbers the Druchii needed. They needed hundreds, if not thousands of Flak cannon and nearly the same numbers of anti-tank weapons. They needed a five-digit amount of rifles and at least a few thousand machine guns, plus the ammunition and ancillary parts to make them work. They needed them now and there was no way that Neustadt could make them in the time they had.
Torsten had one project that would cut these numbers to acceptable proportions, but that one had to work. If he could not make it happen or the Druchii were unable to use it correctly all of Naggaroth would pay for it. While he could not care less for the Druchii his charges in Neustadt were indeed dear to him. And they would be among the first to suffer.
MV Palena, close to Lustrian Coast
300 meters long, 77000 hp, 6500 20" Container capacity, 74000 GRT, 25 knots. One 105 mm cannon, four heavy machine guns, active sonar with Stinger and active denial system. The latter were additions to the sonar and an extremely powerful loudspeaker to frighten off sea critters or would-be pirates. 38 crew, one captain.
For the world the Germans had left behind she was nothing special, a middling sized container ship. On this world for any power outside Germany she was a giant of the seas, a marvel of technology, able to haul the riches of a kingdom to any harbor around the world with speed and ease. She was no warship, but only a handful of vessels posed any threat to her, allowing Palena to travel without escorts. Her load was a treasure by itself, even the steel used to make her was a fortune beyond imagining for most parties.
Jörg Seitz stood at the back of the bridge and watched, trying to be unobtrusive. The current Officer on Watch was still a bit green and having an eye on him might keep his ship from disaster. His ship, he had made captain three years ago after serving as the ship's first officer for five. As many German captains he had to work with relatively inexperienced officers as the German mercantile fleet still expanded rapidly and flagging out to use crews from low-wage countries was no longer feasible.
It had added to an already nasty work load, especially when combined with learning the new realities. When he was still traveling the seas of Earth he never had to worry about monsters that could harm his ship, about having artillery pieces on board or looking at maps where "there be dragons" was to be taken literally.
In the old days maybe three people would be on the bridge during a watch, now there were more. On Earth Palena had sailed with a crew of 18, now the need for a security complement and enhanced self-maintenance meant that 38 people were at sea. The bridge held six people currently, two of them were monitoring the sea around them with old-fashioned binoculars, while another one monitored both radar and an active sonar suite. All of them talked to the OoW who had to acknowledge and Seitz suspected he would be slightly hoarse by the end of the watch.
The captain followed the many reports that flew around the bridge, dealing with water depth, the ships in the vicinity, the wireless traffic and the state of the ship. And while Palena was far from home and a bit of a well-ridden horse these days none of what he heard was dangerous.
S-647 Minerve, 80 meters below, close to Lustrian coast
"Planes up 10, turns for five knots, bring her to periscope depth"
Lieutenant de Vaisseau Andre Fauve steadied himself without conscious thought when the submarine's bow rose, he listened to the many sounds of his rising submarine without any concern. The hull creaked as the pressure on it diminished, pipes gurgled as water was moved from one ballast tank to another, the pumps that made it so could be heard and the electric motors that drove two screws made a low-grade noise that travelled the length of Minerve. All of these sounds were known to him, one was missing. Before there would be the quiet murmur of his crew who would go through their business. Now they had different methods to share information, sound waves no longer a part of it.
The submarine leveled off well enough, no parts broke the surface. Fauve's hand had creaked minutely when he pushed the button that caused the periscope to rise from its shaft. He bent down to meet the eyepiece and did a fast 360 as soon as the periscope broke the surface. There was nothing he recognized as threatening that he could see and the target was much closer now.
"Target bearing 82 range…make range 15000 meters. Down scope."
Stepping to the plot Fauve found this to be a tricky target. He had misjudged the ship's size before, it was freaking huge. He had derived its range from the perceived height in his periscope and that had obviously been wrong. The freighter was huge, he could not remember any of this size. And remarkably it was one of the newly-fangled container freighters, he could not remember they were built that big. It did not matter, it was a target and needed to be sunk.
He nodded when the new positions were marked on the map, he saw the course and speed derived from that when his men pushed and pulled on their rulers and calculators. He did not like what he saw. Fauve had listened in to the contact when his sonar team had detected it. It was obviously diesel-powered and single screwed, which had led him to believe that the ship had to be small. Not knowing the type, he had been as unable to derive a speed from the propeller turns as his men. Now that he had two positions and the time, he had speed and course, but also a problem.
This freighter was doing 18 knots, which was considerably faster than his boat could do. He had a very limited window for an attack, if he missed that he would have to let this one go. One torpedo or two? This thing was huge, normally he would have used two at the very least, but something he could not quite fathom told him that torpedoes were a very limited commodity. One would cripple the target at the very least, he could fire a second one if needed with a better hit probability.
He watched his First Officer work with pencil, map and parallel ruler and both nodded without a single spoken word.
"Course 92, depth 50, flank speed."
Fauve heard the electric motors which were strained to their maximum, smelled age-old insulation that was heated past spec and felt vibrations going through his submarine. The vibrations and the noise indicated that his screws started to cavitate, making them less efficient and above all making too much noise. This was bad practice and unavoidable at the same time. It was unlikely that anybody would hear this ruckus and he was not going to let such a juicy target go.
Both captain and first officer watched the hands move around the timer they had started at the beginning of their sprint. This was their only way to control their attack as sonar would not be able to hear anything above the flow noise and the periscope would not take such speeds well.
"Batteries I0?"
"65% and dropping fast."
"Can't be helped. Five more minutes."
"Make turns for 7 knots, take us up to periscope depth."
"Periscope depth aye."
Nearly two minutes later Minerve had slowed down to the point where the mast could be raised without too much vibration or plume.
"Up scope"
The quick turn revealed nothing new, and the target was more or less where it was supposed to be.
"Target at 89 degree, 8.000 meters. Flood tube one and open outer doors."
"Tube one flooded, door is open."
"Firing point procedures. Match bearings and shoot."
A deep "whoosh" went through Minerve when a great blast of pressurized air forced the E-12 torpedo from the tube.
"Down scope, take us to 50 meters. Turns for seven knots, course 180."
Everybody in the small control center had a job to do. Still all managed to sneak looks at the clock that had started to run when the torpedo had hit the water.
MV Palena
"Captain, I have an intermittent radar contact at 272, range about 8 kilometers, speed 7 knots, very low return."
"Very well. Lookouts, anything?
"Nothing on that bearing captain."
"No sail ship then, Sonar, I want a sweep from 220 to 320 degree, crank up the juice and warm up the Stinger. Maybe Cthulhu's niece wants to play."
"Captain, we have a faint sonar contact at 270, range about 8 kilometers."
"Keep it locked up and if it closes give it a couple of blasts."
"Yes Captain. Uh, we have another contact, very faint, closer and very fast."
"What?"
"Bearing is 271, range 2000, no bearing change."
"What the bleeding….Helm, full port rudder, bring us to 90 degree. All head."
Palena was a giant of the sea, having nearly twice Bismark's tonnage. Built to civilian standards she was about as maneuverable as an iceberg.
750 meters from Palena
The E-12 torpedo was about to fail. Its batteries were close to being depleted and its course meant that it would miss the target by some 400 meters.
And then a set of hydrophones in its tip detected sound in the frequencies they were calibrated for. The ones on the right had a stronger signal, so the rudders were adjusted and the torpedo changed course minutely. And it kept changing course as it was unable to predict the target's course. Instead of heading for an intercept the weapon followed a curve that pointed its nose at the target at all times. This lengthened the way and wasted even more of the precious electricity stored in batteries which should not work in a sane universe.
Even when supported by energies from the Empyrean the old batteries stopped providing power before the weapon reached its target. It coasted on momentum and was about to sink to the bottom when another detector sensed that the magnetic field it projected around it was disturbed. Another one realized that the water pressure around it fluctuated in ways foreseen by its designers. When both sensors agreed they sent a trickle of electricity into a detonator.
330 kilograms of a really nasty mix of explosives and aluminum burned in a thousandth of a second, converting themselves into a lot of heat and high-pressure gasses. They were joined by the release of whatever had made a weapon that should have been an assortment of corroded stuff work, adding warp energies into the mix.
When the weapon detonated no part of it touched Palena's hull. Instead it converted the water around it into steam, producing a huge bubble that expanded in all directions. On its way up, it met the ship's keel, pushing it violently upwards and bending it way past spec. In the next second the bubble left the mess hanging above empty space until the sea could fill it again. For that period of time Palena's middle was unsupported, hanging from bow and stern. It was certainly not made for that.
Bridge, MV Palena
Jörg Seitz was missing a few seconds of his life. One moment he had been commanding his ship, sensing the increased vibrations of an engine on its way to full power and feeling the list of a radical course change. The next he way lying on his back, watching the ceiling above him while something hot ran down his face. There was a ringing in his ears and anything he heard seemed to come from a great distance.
He had lived on Palena for nearly a decade, knew her like the back of his hand. Now she and the crew made noises he had never heard before. The engine sounds were no longer among them, replaced by a tearing and groaning of steel, by the sound of inrushing water and the screams of his crew.
Someone lent him a hand and pulled him upright. His view whitened out from pain for a moment when his right foot tried to bear any weight. Cursing and leaning on the shoulder of the helmsman he hopped towards the windows.
His breath went away for a moment when he saw the rows of containers before him. Some rows were already missing, no doubt sinking on Palena's sides. It could neither hide the gap that grew between two rows nor the fact that the bow rose without pushing the back down. Whatever had attacked his ship had broken her back. In some ways it made things easier, it allowed him to make a hard decision without second-guessing.
He picked up the microphone that connected him with the PA system and wondered what parts of the ships were still connected to it.
"All hands abandon ship, repeat all hands abandon ship."
S-647 Minerve
The periscope offered enough magnification to reveal every detail. It showed the funny boat that looked like a small fat submarine that dropped off the target's back. It rendered the inflatable life rafts that dropped from other places in great detail, the oil slick that surrounded them and the men who swam through it to reach them. It showed that some made it while others surrendered to their injuries, the oil and the cold sea. Fauve saw the small boat trying to pick up as many as possible and he saw the flag that still flew from the ship's mast. Black-Red-Gold, Germans. Funny, the Germans were allies these days, why was he asked to sink them? And who was giving his orders?
Lieutenant de Vaisseau Andre Fauve lifted his hands before his eyes and saw them as if for the first time. The skin was leathery and offered a landscape of crags as if the tissues below them had shrunken. There were missing parts, revealing dried muscles and ligaments moving fingers while he opened and closed them in horrid inspection. And then he turned and gave clean, crisp orders to his crew while what had been Fauve could just watch aghast, unable to change anything about that.
Doppelstorch, 300 meters AGL, close to Chebokov, Kislev
The Doppelstorch was like no other plane that Jukub General had ever flown. It was much smaller, flew closer to the ground and was subjected to every eddy the capricious Kislevian sky could cook up. So far, he had managed to keep his food, but it had been close a couple of times.
The small plane lacked any kind of inflight-entertainment and the pilots of the Deutsche Luftfracht SRL were quite unwilling to engage in conversation besides platitudes. The landscape that rolled under the plane made up for it, being an interesting mix of steppe, endless forests and tundra. The plane flew far lower than anything the engineer had used before and allowed him to see details usually hidden.
When the plane departed Erengrad the changes that went through Kislev had been quite obvious. A free harbor had replaced Erengrad's old one and a huge terminal for ores had replaced what had been at least two residential quarters and a fishing village. There was not one train station, but two as they had to handle both Kislev's exports and the needs of the Army of Light at the same time. The airport was still rather basic, but a lot more airport than Kislev had in all the days of its existence. Electric lighting could be seen throughout the city and modern prefab buildings surrounded the old city like an architectural siege.
It had been quite a sight, one that dropped away to nothingness once the bush plane had flown for 20 minutes. Roads were no longer paved, if they existed at all, huts made up 90% of all housing and transport was taken up by horse, oxen and human backs. An hour later Jakub flew past people who looked like they had never seen a plane before. Finally, the Doppelstorch flew on past forests that had never felt the ax, past tundra that might have never supported a human foot.
And then they reached a cove, something that looked like it could serve as a very nice natural harbor if there were any settlements around to take advantage of it. There might not be any permanent settlements around, but a substantial one had sprung up recently, made up from tents, containers and other temporary houses. It was all centered on what must have been the biggest hole ever dug in Kislev.
Given that it was very close to the sea and that there was only a dam between the waves and the hole it looked a bit like a dry dock. But the hole was easily a couple of hundred meters long and nothing indicated the heavy industry that would allow building ships of that size. He was really curious as he still did not know what he was supposed to be consulting about. Whatever it was, it had the official approval of the Kislevite government and it paid very, very well.
