Space Dreadnoughts

THE LAST BATTALION David Drake

“Well, I’m sorry it stopped working,” Senator Stone answered irritably over his shoulder, “but since the late news was one of the things I got a mountain cabin to avoid …”

“Well, it is strange,” his wife repeated. She was as trim-bodied at fifty as she had been when he married her just after VD Day, the first time he could think of a future after three years of flying Mustangs into hostile skies. She was still as stubborn as the WAAF he had married, too. “It was fine and then the color went off in flashes and everything got blurry. And it’s getting worse, Hershal.”

Stone sighed, closing a file that was long, confidential, and involved the potential expenditure of $73,000,000. The cabin’s oak flooring had an unexpected tingle as he walked across it in slippers to the small TV. His feet were asleep, he thought; but could they both be? Not that it mattered. He slapped the set while Miriam waited expectantly. The screen continued to match colored pulses to the bursts of raw noise coming from the speaker. Occasionally an intelligible word or a glimpse of Dan Rather slipped through.

“Some kind of interference,” Stone said. He was six feet tall, with a plumpness that his well-cut suits concealed from the public but was evident in pajamas. His hair had grayed early, but it was still thick and smooth after sixty-one years, no small political asset. Stone was no charmer, but he had learned years before that a man who is honest and has the physical presence to be called forthright will be respected even if he is wrong—and there are never many candidates the voters can respect. Shrugging, he clicked the set off. “If you needed somebody to fix your TV, you should have married some tech boy,” he added.

“Instead of my hotshot pilot?” Miriam laughed, stretching out an arm to her husband. She paused as she stood, and at the same moment both realized that the high-pitched keening they had associated with the television was now louder. The hardwood floor carried more of a buzz than a trembling. Miriam’s smile froze into a part of her human architecture, like the ferrous curls of hair framing her face.

Earthquake’! thought Stone as two strides carried him to the south door. Not in the Smokies, surely; but politics had taught him even more emphatically than combat that there were always going to be facts that surprised you, and that survivors were people who didn’t pretend otherwise. He threw the door open. Whipsnake Ridge dropped southward, a sheer medley of grays formed by mist and distance. The sky should have been clear and colorless since the Moon had not yet risen, but an auroral glow was flooding from behind the cabin to paint the night with a score of strange pastels. The whine was louder, but none of the nearby trees were moving.

“Miriam,” Stone began, “you’d—”

The rap of knuckles on the north door cut him off.

“I’ll get it,” Miriam said quickly.

“You’ll stay right here!” the senator insisted, striding past her; but her swift heels rapped down the hallway just behind him.

Stone snapped on the entryway light before unlatching the door. The cabin had no windows to the north as the only view would have been the access road and a small clearing in the second-growth pine of the Ridge, a poor exchange for the vicious storms that ripped down in winter. The outside door opened into an anteroom to further insulate the cabin, and that alcove, four feet square in floor plan, was filled by two men in black uniforms.

“You will forgive the intrusion, Senator and Madame Stone,” stated the foremost in a rusty voice more used to commands, “but we could not very well contact you in more normal fashion in our haste.” The speaker was as tall as Stone, a slim ramrod of a man whose iron-gray hair was cropped so short as to almost be shaven beneath the band of his service hat. The dull cloth of his uniform bagged into jackboots as highly polished as his waist-belt and pistol holster. It was not the pistol, nor the long-magazined rifle the other visitor bore that struck the first real fear into Stone, though: both men wore collar insignia, the twin silver lightning-bolt runes Stone thought he had seen the last of thirty years before. They were the badge of Hitler’s SS.

“May we enter?”

“You go straight to Hell!” Stone snarled. His left hand knotted itself in the nearer black shirt while reflex cocked his right for as much of a punch as desks and the poisonous atmosphere of Washington had left him. The second Nazi was as gray as the first and was built like a tank besides, but there was nothing slow about his reactions. The barrel of his rifle slammed down across Stone’s forearm. Almost as part of the same motion the stock pivoted into the senator’s stomach, throwing him back in a sprawl over Miriam’s legs. The entranceway light haloed the huge gunman as he swung his weapon to bear on the tangle of victims almost at its muzzle.

“Lothar!” the slim German shouted.

His subordinate relaxed, “Ja, mein Oberfiihrer,” he said as he again ported his rifle.

With a smile that was not wholly one of satisfaction, the black-shirted officer said, “Senator, I am Colonel Ernst Riedel. My companion—what would you say—Master-Sergeant Lothar Mueller and I have reached a respectable age without inflicting our presence on you. I assure you that only necessity causes us to do so now.”

Stone rose to his feet. Riedel did not offer a hand he knew would be refused. Miriam remained silent behind her husband, but her right arm encircled his waist. Stone looked from the men to the rifle used to club him down. It was crude, a thing of enameled metal and green-black plastic: an MP-44, built in the final days of the Third Reich. “You’re real, aren’t you!” the senator said. “You aren’t just American slime who wanted something different from white sheets to parade in. Where do you hide, Nazi? Do you sell cars in Rio during the week and take out your uniform Sundays to look at yourself in the mirror?”

“We are real, Senator Stone,” Riedel said through his tight smile. He raised his left cuff so that the motto worked on the band there showed. It read “Die Letze” in old-style letters. “We are the Last Battalion, Senator. And as for where we hide—that you will know very shortly, for we were sent to bring you there.

“Madame Stone,” he went on formally, “we will have your husband back to you in days if that is possible. I assure you, on my honor as a true Aryan and before the good God and my Leader, that we mean no harm to either of you.”

“Oh, I’ll trust your honor,” Miriam blazed. Fifteen years as a senator’s wife had taught her the use of tact, but nothing would ever convince her that every situation should be borne in silence. “How many prisoners did you shoot in the back at Malmedy?”

For the first time, Riedel’s chalky face pinched up. “It is well for you both, Madame, that Mueller does not speak English.” He added, “You may trust my honor or not, as you will. But it is not in our interests alone that we have been sent to you, nor in those alone of the country you represent. If we fail, Senator, there may well in a short time be no Aryan life remaining on Earth.”

His hand gestured Stone toward the door. “You will please precede us.”

Without hesitation or a backward glance, Stone brushed past the two Germans. Had he looked back he would have called attention to his wife, erect and dry-eyed in the hall. He had known enough killers while he was in service to realize that Mueller’s bloodlust was no pretense. The big man had been a finger’s pressure away from double murder, and they would not have been his first.

The outside door opened and dragged a gasp from Stone in the rush of warmed air. Instead of the clear night sky, a convex lens of metal roofed the clearing a dozen feet over Stone’s head. The size of the clearing gave the object dimension: it was a two-hundred-foot saucer resting on a central gondola and three pillar like legs spaced halfway between the center and the rim. Through the windows of the gondola could be seen other men, both seated and standing. An incandescent light flooded stairs which extended from the gondola to the ground, but the whole scene was lighted by the burnished iridescence of the saucer itself.

Behind Stone, the Nazi officer laughed. “It is not heat so much as the eddy currents from the electromagnetic motors that make the hull plates glow so handsomely. But walk ahead, please, Senator. She glows as much on the upper side as well and we—we do not wish to attract close attention while we are grounded.”

Stone’s carpet slippers brushed crisply through the ankle-high grass. The dew that should have gemmed the blades had evaporated under the hot metal lid. Stone always wore slippers and pajamas when he did not expect company, but it was one hell of an outfit in which to take the surrender of a batch of Nazi holdouts in a flying saucer.

Except that Stone knew inside him that men like Riedel were not about to surrender.

“This is Dora, the largest of our experimental models,” Riedel said with pride. “She is sheathed with impervium— chromium-vanadium alloy, you perhaps know. There is no limit, nearly, to the speeds at which she may be driven without losing the strength of her hull, even in the thickest of atmospheres.”

Closer to the gondola, Stone could see that it rested not on wheels but on inflated rubber cushions that must have been heavily reinforced to bear the weight of the craft.

There were small signs of age visible at a nearer glance, too—if Dora was experimental, it was an old experiment. The rectangular windows whose plane surfaces suggested glass or quartz instead of nonrefractive Plexiglas were fogged by tiny pits, and the stair runners appeared to be of several different materials as if there had been replacements over the years. All the men in the gondola were bald or as gray-haired as Mueller and Riedel. The colonel noticed Stone’s surprise and said, “Everyone volunteered for the mission, but we Old Fighters, of course, had preference. Everyone here was of my original crew.”

The man who reached through the hatch to hasten Stone up the last high step wore gray coveralls from which any insignia had long been removed, though his air of authority was evident. He was not even middle-aged. His hands were thin and gnarled, their hairs gleaming silvery against the age-dappled skin, and the bright lights within the gondola shadowed his wrinkles into a road map through eighty years. His exchange in German with Riedel was quick and querulous. The colonel did not translate for Stone’s benefit, but tones and the flash of irritation in the eyes of both men explained more than the bland, “Over-Engineer Tannenberg is anxious that we be under weigh. You will please come with me to the control room. We will have time to discuss matters fully after we have lifted off.”

All ice and darkness, the Nazi strode to one of the pair of latticework elevators in the center of the gondola. Flipping one of a bank of switches, toggles instead of buttons, he set the cage in smooth but squealing upward motion. Wholly fascinated, the senator stared around him.

A bell pinged each time the cage rose to another level. Through the sides, Stone saw identical masses of copper and silicon iron, suggesting the inside of a transformer rather than the computer room the craft’s gleaming exterior had left him to expect. Narrow gangways threaded into the mass, and twice Stone glimpsed aged men in stained coveralls intent on their hand-held meters. There was nothing subtle in the vessel’s layout. It reeked of enormous power as surely as it did of ozone and lubricant. There were eight levels above the gondola, each of them nearly identical to the others, before the cage pinged a ninth time and grated to a stop.

“Sit there, please,” Riedel directed, gesturing toward a frame-backed couch that looked unpleasantly like a catafalque. Stone obeyed without comment, his eyes working quickly. They had entered a circular room fifty feet across. Its eight-foot ceiling was soundproofed metal, but the whole circumference was open to the world through crystalline panels like those of the gondola. The saucer, domed with more of a curve on the upper side than the lower, was a fountain of pale iridescence against which the grim SS runes stood out like toppling tombstones.

A dozen preoccupied men shared the control room with Stone and Riedel. Sgt. Mueller was one of them, looking no less dangerous for having put aside his rifle. The others appeared to be officers or gray-suited engineers like Tannenberg. Three of the latter clustered in front of a console far more complex than those sprouting from the deck beside the other benches. One of the men spoke urgently into a throat mike while his companions followed the quivering motions of a hundred dials apiece.

Riedel stood, arms akimbo, and snapped out a brief series of orders. The heavyset man nearest him nodded and began flipping toggles. All three of the engineers were now speaking intently in low voices. Lights dimmed in the control room, and the air began to sing above the range of audibility.

Stone felt his weight shift. Trees climbing into the night slanted and suddenly shrank downward. Stone’s cabin was below, now, visible past the glowing dome of the saucer. Lone in the pool of the yard light stood Miriam, waving her clenched right fist. Then the disk tilted again and Stone was driven flat onto his bench by a vertical acceleration not experienced since he had reached the age limit and could no longer zoom-climb a Phantom during Reserve training. The sensation lasted for longer than Stone would have believed possible, and by the time it settled into the queasiness of steady forward motion, the sky had changed. It was black, but less from the absence of light than the utter lack of anything to reflect light.

Riedel was returning. “Not bad,” Stone said with a trace of false condescension, “but can you outrun a Nike Zeus?”

“The Russian equivalent, yes indeed, Senator,” replied the German, capping Stone’s gibe. “Each couch”—his gesture disclosed rubber lips edging the top of the bench— “can enfold a man like an oyster’s shell and hold him in a water suspension. For the strongest accelerations we use even a fluid breathing medium, though of course”—and Riedel frowned in concentration at the thought—“that requires time for preparation that we do not always have.”

He seated himself beside Stone. The American blinked, more incredulous than angry at what seemed an obvious lie. “You expect me to believe that this—my God, it must weigh a thousand tons! This could out accelerate an antimissile missile?”

Riedel nodded, delighted with the effect he had made. “Yes, yes, the power is here—is it not obvious? That was Schauberger’s work, almost entirely. But to make it usable for human beings took our Engineer Tannenberg.” The colonel chuckled before adding, “Have you noticed that when men of genius grow old, they become more like old women than even old women do? Tannenberg is afraid every moment we are not aloft that the Russians will catch us.

The earlier name had snagged Stone’s attention. “Schauberger?” he repeated. “Sure, I remember him. In the fifties he was touting an implosion motor or some damned thing. I remember a major from Wright-Patterson telling me about it. But then nothing came of it.”

“But then your FBI questioned poor Viktor with, shall we say, a little too much enthusiasm,” Riedel corrected with a tolerant smile, “and he was reported beaten to death by Chicago hoodlums. The implosion motor was only a smokescreen, though, for the electromagnetic engine he had already developed for his Fuhrer. Think of it, this craft and these mighty engines that you see filling it—able to draw fuel from the Earth, from the very fabric of space itself!”

“If that were true,” Stone said carefully, “I frankly don’t see why you would need me.” He chose his words to deny what he reared, that the story was as solid as the steel floor beneath his feet. To admit that aloud would gratify this colonel whose arrogance only slightly increased the disgust Stone already felt for his uniform.

The implied question reminded the Nazi sickeningly of his mission. He sighed, wondering how much to tell the fellow now. Stone was the only man short of his unapproachable president who had enough power with military and political leaders to act with the necessary swiftness. Without his willing cooperation, more than the whole Plan was a ruin. “At first we were based at Kertl,” Riedel began, “where the airframe had been fabricated.” He was avoiding a direct answer partly in hope that it would somehow become unnecessary if he explained the background. Riedel owned to few superiors, but there was One—and of late, with age and the pressure He bore most of all of them, that One had displayed an ever-lowering acceptance of failure. “The engines arrived by train, at last, from Obersalzberg, and we worked all night to unload them before the bombers came.”

Riedel laid his service cap beside him and scrabbled the fingers of his left hand through hair that for thirty-seven years had been cropped to between five and ten millimeters’ length. While everything else had changed, that precision had not. “There was no time to do what was required—you have seen the engines—but we did it anyway. It was like shifting mountains with a spoon to emplace them in the airframe using the equipment we had, and all the work underground as well. But in those days the impossible was normal, and we were Waffen-SS. The time that we had was being bought for us with the lives of our comrades on the front lines, fighting tanks with hand grenades.”

Of the men in the control room, only Sgt. Mueller was openly watching Stone and Riedel; but the inattention of the others was the studied sort, that of jackals waiting for lions to end their meal. Ail of the crew understood the importance of their mission.

“The final order came by courier from Berlin, an SS major with an attaché case in the sidecar of his motorcycle. It had been chained to his right wrist, he told us, but the shell that killed his driver had taken that arm off at the elbow. With teeth and one hand he had tourniqueted himself before retrieving the case. The orders were not those we expected, but in the face of such dedication we could not have refused them.”

“You ran,” Stone interjected flatly, knowing that truth would twist the edged words deeper than any emphasis he could give them.

“We took off in three hours,” the German said, his face a block of gray iron. “It was the first time, as soon as final engine hookups had been made. All of us were aboard, even the kitchen staff. Everything worked. I could not believe it—five years of design and construction, and then no flaws. But again, there was no choice. From the air we could see British tanks already within three kilometers and nothing but the forest itself to slow them. Had we left fifteen minutes later, they might have captured our base before the demolition charges exploded.”

“What you seem to be afraid to admit,” Stone pressed, “is that a single plane—saucer, whatever—isn’t worth a damn no matter how advanced it is.” He stood, a commanding presence again now that he had recovered his poise. The mass and smooth power of the vessel made its speed a matter of only conscious awareness. “It’s only a bargaining chip, to be sold to one side or the other since you can’t develop it yourself. And we and the Russians both will soon have equipment in the air that will match it, so you’re running out of time to deal.”

“You are incorrect to assume we are alone,” Riedel said, as careful as the American to avoid theatrical emphasis that would only give truth a false patina. “We escaped alone, but there were fifty-three submarines of Type XXI—no, I do not exaggerate—that could run submerged all around the world with their snorkels. They carried above 3,000 persons, couples and young people, out before the Russians captured Danzig; and in Norway they picked up … some who had flown by jet out of Tempelhof just at the end.”

Stone licked dry lips but his voice was firm as he insisted, “Even then they couldn’t go anywhere. I’ve heard about the money Himmler was spreading around in South America, but even so there wasn’t a country there that could have hidden such a fleet without word leaking out. A fleet needs a base.”

“It has one.” It was time for the final hammerblow of truth. “In New Swabia, where we met them.”

“Huh?” grunted Stone, surprised and uncomprehending.

“Imbecile!” snarled the Nazi, seeing all his preparation threatened by his listener’s ignorance. “In Antarctica, Queen Maud Land as you and your Allies call it! Kapitan Ritscher explored it in 1937 and we have held the interior since, no matter what color the coast is painted on a pretty map. And there is one other place we have been for twenty years, my good Senator,” Riedel said, loudly now and wagging his finger like a pedant’s pointer, “though others seem to believe they were the first there.”

He paused, breathing very rapidly. “This vessel is not limited to the atmosphere, Senator; indeed, we are above it now to all intents and purposes. We have a base on the Moon where we have manufactured a hundred ships of this design!”

But as Stone’s jaw worked in stunned silence, Riedel’s pride too dissolved in despair. “We had a hundred, yes,” he repeated, “but the Russians have a thousand, and they are destroying us. You must help us fight them, or Aryan man is doomed.”

The sky was an emptiness that would have been violet if it had color. Pits on the crystal windows prevented the stars from gaining any real body, but a slight course correction brought the Moon in sight to port. It was gibbous and the gray of fresh-cut lead. “I don’t believe that,” Stone insisted. “I’ve made it my business over the years to know about Russian strength. Our intelligence people trust me. They aren’t lying to me, and notwithstanding all the nonsense my colleagues and the media like to spout, the Russians aren’t fooling our people either. Besides, if the Reds had a whole fleet like this, we’d have learned about it the hard way long since. Unless there’s more to detente than I’ve ever believed.”

Riedel shrugged. “‘When one has eliminated the impossible… ,’” he quoted, then paused to consider how he should continue. Stone’s logic was impeccable, its only flaw being Russia‘s unfathomable, senseless subtlety in not showing an apparently pat hand. Riedel had not believed it at first, either, but facts were facts. “At the first report in 1947, we thought rumors of our Dora, here, were being retailed in garbled form,” he explained. “At that time, we had only the one ship—no others had been completed before the final holocaust, and the Antarctic base was not suitable for manufactures this major. It was not until we could process aluminum on the Moon that we could expand, and that was five years later.

“There were too many reports. We were very careful with Dora, you must understand; and though we had our contacts with the world outside, no one beyond the Battalion knew anything except our Plan, to control the balance when at last East and West joined in Gotterdammerung.” Riedel’s face gleamed with the sweat of earnestness. He brushed at his face and extended both thin hands toward Stone. “Our rocket scientists, you and the Russians had captured; but we thought all but the least word of the Diskus Projekt had been hidden. Now we began to fear that the other sightings were more than imagination, and that our secret had escaped.”

“You never saw them yourselves?” Stone asked. “The other UFOs, I mean?”

“I did,” Riedel said, pride warming his words. “We had completed the first disk to be built on the Moon and I was flight-testing it. Because we expected fleet maneuvers in the future, Engineer Tannenberg had coupled a locator to the engines to display other users of the spectrum—our own vessels, we intended. But as we began our first atmospheric approach—” and Riedel lived again the moments as he described them to Stone.

In a voice as wizened as his face, Tannenberg had announced, “Colonel, there is another ship within a kilometer, at five degrees to our heading and a little lower.”

“Nonsense!” Riedel snapped. At thirty kilometers altitude their test craft could have encountered only Dora, and she would have been a bright dot on their radar screen.

A bead glared suddenly against the screen’s green background. It was near them, much closer than it should have been before being picked up in the radar’s fifteen-second sweep. “Navigation!” he called, his temper that of a wounded bear looking for a victim. First trial of the new hull in the pressures and powerful magnetic fields of Earth was a tense enough business without having unknown vessels slip through undetected.

“S-sir,” said the white-faced technician at the main radar display, “it just now appeared.”

“Colonel,” Sgt. Mueller said, his hair-spined forefinger pointing downward into the blue-white haze into which their craft was descending. Metal winked, a reflection with no definable color.

“It’s off the screen again!” the fearful radarman was bleating, but Riedel’s voice cut through his junior’s without hesitation: “Attention! All crewmen to acceleration couches! Sergeant Mueller, arm the rockets and stand by.” Disconnecting his throat mike, for he spoke to himself rather than his men, Riedel added, “They think to play with us, do they? Well then, we will play with them.”

Only Sgt. Mueller heard, and he grinned a wolf’s grin as he ran his hands over the switches of his console.

At 300 meters, the black, portless hull of the foreign disk was stark against the sky-curve beyond. It bore no marking. Both craft were steady at a little over 1800 kph, far below the capacity of Riedel’s engines. This was not his Dora, though, he thought with rage. Impervium hulls were beyond their ability to forge on the Moon—or on Earth without arousing the interest of the nations who had to be lulled into forgetfulness. Aluminum was cheap, given lunar ores and abundant power, but the new hulls could not stand the friction heating of 4,000 kph or more in the atmosphere.

“Unknown craft, identify yourself,” Riedel ordered in German. He was broadcasting only on eleven meters, but with a 10 kw transmitter driving his beam, even the light bulbs on the other craft would be repeating his words.

There was no response. He tried again in English, for they were over northern Canada. All his subordinates but Mueller had slipped into their clamshell couches, taking their information from the gauges slaved into the panels over their faces. Riedel started to rebuke the sergeant, then realized that with the enemy able to evade radar, only visual control could be used for the rockets.

And there seemed little doubt that the black disk was an enemy. “Does anyone aboard speak Russian?” No one answered. Besides, what did they have to discuss with the conquerors of Berlin? “Fire one, sergeant,” Riedel said evenly.

Mueller’s finger stroked a 20 cm rocket from the ventral weapons bay. Its hundred kilos of explosive could be wire-guided 5,000 meters, but the gap between the two ships was point-blank range.

The charge went off scarcely halfway to the black vessel.

The spurt of red on black smoke, half a second early, was a greater surprise to Riedel than the howl of air through the fragment-riddled panels before him. The missile’s own fuse should not have armed at so short a distance. Something invisible surrounding the other craft had detonated the weapon while it was almost as dangerous to its user as its target, and the target was diving away. Riedel followed, ignoring for the moment the stresses to which he was subjecting his ship and his own unshielded body. Sgt. Mueller had yanked down a whole handful of switches and four guidance flares leaped together after the black craft. It wobbled under the multiple Shockwave, but a beam as pale as an icteric sclera needled back from its dome. Riedel saw the hull directly in front of him boil away as the laser struck it. His instant course change bagged his cheeks and flattened his eyeballs. The black vessel did not attempt pursuit.

The executive officer in his acceleration couch had taken over when Riedel regained full consciousness. They had resumed their planned course toward Antarctica, flying below 2,500 meters because of the gashed hull. Sgt. Mueller was clenching his hands in fierce frustration. “We need something better to kill them with,” he kept repeating.

“And we got it,” Riedel concluded, affect raining out of his voice. “Tannenberg said his detector could easily be modified to cause a surge in other electromagnetic engines, to cause them to vaporize. For twenty-three years he was right and we hunted the Russians throughout space. There were losses, since their lasers could very quickly slit the hulls of the ships we built—not a bad weapon, lasers; we might have fitted our bases with them sooner had not Tannenberg’s induced overloads left so little of their targets.” He paused in an aura of satisfaction, looking out over the clean, black sky but seeing something very different. “From a pip of light the disks we destroy become great expanding balls that are all the colors of the rainbow. In atmosphere even the copper burns, so intense is the energy released.”

“You bastards,” Stone said with utter conviction. “I wonder if you’ll find it so pretty when they come up with your gadget?”

“Colonel, we are closing with another vessel,” broke in one of the crewmen.

“It may be ours. We were to have an escort when we reached open sea, if the situation permitted it,” Riedel replied on his throat mike. To Stone he continued, “The Russians are an ignorant people, able only to steal from their betters. In all that time they have not duplicated the weapon.”

He took a deep breath, adding, “But six months ago, they found a defense against it. And since then only the few lasers for which we have been able to buy components have kept them from our bases.”

“You can’t be serious,” Stone said. But Riedel’s mind was like his body—gray and honed and rigid. He could no more accept the superiority of an “under race” than could a computer which had been misprogrammed to deny it. That quirk has caused Riedel and his men to ignore the obvious.

“Look, lasers—I don’t know how long we’ve had them, but they weren’t weapons back in 1950. And this detonator screen or whatever, we damned well don’t have it now. If—”

“Colonel! The ship is not one of ours. It is closing!”

“Couches!” Riedel ordered. He stood, pressing as he did the switch that turned Stone’s bench into an enveloping cushion. “Raise your legs and lie down, Senator. The television will show you what occurs, and we will release you as soon as possible.”

The hull curve, a smooth violet as Riedel strode to his station, suddenly blazed white in a meter-long knife edge. The impervium alloy held, but Dora’s evasive action in response to the laser thrust hurled the slender officer to the deck. He gripped a chart table, then let skewed acceleration fling him in the direction he wanted to go. He was safely within his couch before the third zigzag snatched at him.

“Riedel,” he announced, “taking command.” His fingers caressed switches they knew by touch. The enemy craft was an eddy in the frozen blue swirls of Earth’s magnetic fields pictured on the detector screen. Riedel set the television cameras to track the detector anomally, though he would not need the picture. By the time Dora had been retrofitted with television, he was used to being guided to battle by the detector alone. And even with their surge weapon ineffective, there would still be a battle with Riedel at the controls. He knew his Dora.

The other craft was within two kilometers now. It fingered Dora’s hull with another short burst, probably unaware that its target was more refractory than earlier victims. The Nazi commander’s face was a grinning death’s head within his couch as he cut forward thrust and flipped Dora to spin like a coin toward the icecap twenty kilometers below. The blue eddy danced around the center of the detector screen and the TV began to flash images of a black disk seeming to approach at a thousand angles. Fluid-filled membranes clamped down on every surface of Riedel’s body, but still the maddening spin worked on his ear canals and the colloid of his brain itself.

The eddy was almost in the center of the detector. Riedel’s fingers acted more through instinct than by conscious calculation. On the television, the spinning edge of the black vessel froze and expanded. There was a terrible, rending crash as Dora’s impervium edge buzz sawed into the unknown material of her enemy’s hull. A sheet of white fire enveloped both craft as the chrome-van alloy proved tougher than what it impacted. Objects vomited from the spiraling gash in the hostile craft. One of them tumbled almost against Dora, now motionless as her enemy fell away from her. The thing was momentarily alive and quite visible on the television screens. It was about nine feet tall, with four limbs that looked like ropes knotted over a thin framework. Its mouth was working and its eyes glittered fear of death through each of their facets.

“You butchers,” a voice rasped through Riedel’s earphones. His anger awakened him to the fact that he still had Dora to pilot, and the anger faded when he realized it was the American who had spoken and not one of his crewmen. “It wasn’t enough to fight the whole rest of the world. You Nazis had to start an interstellar war.”

There was an air leak between compartments F-87 and F-88; a bulkhead had crumpled but the outer skin, though indented, was not seriously torn. Riedel touched switches. As his acceleration couch withdrew into itself, Dora plunged down as smoothly as an elevator and swiftly enough that her passengers neared the weightlessness of free fall.

“Murderers! Criminals!”

Riedel ripped out the jack of his headset. In two steps he had snapped the outside latch on Stone’s couch, effectively silencing and isolating the senator. “Lieutenant Wittvogel,” he ordered, “raise the base. Secrecy is no longer necessary.”

“No reply, sir,” the tall communications officer called across the room. “Not even to the emergency signal.”

“We’re within fifty kilometers,” Riedel said, but he spoke under his breath. “Keep trying,” he ordered.

With an atmosphere to scatter it, sunlight and its reflection from the ice below blazed through the windows. The computer installed three years earlier—a massive thing, not a sophisticated “black box”; but Dora was not a volume-starved turbojet—was guiding them back at 3,000 kph and there was no need for Riedel to stare tensely into the rippling whiteness they skimmed. Beside him stood Sgt. Mueller, as silent as a bored sentry. He had been out of his couch before his commander. When Stone had been locked in, Mueller’s responsibility had ended and he had relaxed with a grin. Even so, it was his ease rather than Riedel’s stark anticipation that caught the first sight of the base.

“Sir, there’s something ahead there that glows!”

Riedel took instant manual control, cutting speed and raising Dora to a kilometer’s altitude. They circled the glow, banked inward for observation rather than flight necessity. A hole had been blasted in the ice, four kilometers across and of a depth obscured by the boiling lake that snarled at its rim.

“The Fuehrer,” Sgt. Mueller whispered. He jackknifed and vomited across the deck plates. Lt. Wittvogel had hurled away his microphone and, like several of his fellow crewmen, was openly weeping. Riedel himself was the least visibly affected, but as he unlatched Stone’s prison he muttered, “I wonder if we taught them about the Bomb, too. They were such bad fighters, no instinct for it at all…”

Riedel was back at the controls, following at full speed and a kilometer’s altitude the brown rim of beach against gray-green water, when Stone touched his shoulder. “You’re done now, aren’t you?” the American said softly.

“‘He could have escaped. He could be at the Moon base now—perhaps they had only one bomb. He—” Riedel’s throat choked him into sudden silence.

“He?” Stone echoed. His face went as white and cold as the ice below. “I fought three years for a chance to kill—that one. If these others have done that, they have my thanks. Whatever else they intend.”

On the horizon was a small freighter static in the shadow of shear, snow-browed cliffs. Inshore of it were a huddle of Quonset huts set in a splotch of snow dirtied by human habitation. “I swore an oath to your wife,” Riedel forced out through tight lips, “and I would prefer to keep it. But if you say another word, Senator, you will go out at a thousand meters.”

The landing legs squealed while Riedel’s practiced fingers brought the disk to a hover over the Quonsets. “Wohlman,” the colonel ordered abruptly, and his executive officer took the controls with a nod.

“What will you do now?” Stone asked as he stepped to the elevator in anticipation of a command.

“The Moon base will need us,” Riedel said, his black and silver chest separated from the American’s by an invisible wall of grief.

“If it’s still there. They would have hit it first, wouldn’t they?”

The cage ground to a halt in the observation gondola. The four men there were tense, hands close to their sidearms. “Inform your people, Senator,” Riedel said. He riffled a worn, mimeographed book, then handed it to Stone. “Our maintenance manual. Perhaps your experts can construct their down disks from it. I have nothing better to offer you here.”

Men in furs were running out of the huts. A blast of dry, chill air hammered the compartment as the hatch opened and the stairway extended. “These are Argentineans. At this time of year you should have no trouble getting a swift return to your country.”

“But what are you going to do?” Stone insisted, the rubberized treads warm under his feet though the wind was a knife across the rest of his body.

Riedel’s eyes, colder than the ice, thrust the American down the gangway. “Do?” he repeated. “We are SS, Senator. We will continue to fight.”

Dora was rising again even before the stairs had fully retracted. A dozen startled Argentineans clustered around Stone, their parka fringes blending indistinguishably with their bushy facial hair. Around them all a huge disk had been etched in the powdered snow by the radiant metal above it.

The Antarctic sky was clear, except for a speck that vanished even as Stone’s eyes followed it upward.