As if answering his prayer the probe’s speaker screamed into life. Horst Wessel, the Nazi anthem blared, its volume painfully loud within the confines of the little vehicle. Petersen pawed at the panel, hoping to cut off the ghostly song, but the song continued, the singing and music distorted with static and feedback. Then, as quickly as it began, the Nazi martial tune shut-off to plunge the interior of the probe into silence again. At the same time, Petersen’s controls stiffened in his hands. One by one, he slowly pulled his fingers from the grips, and to his amazement, he watched as the controls angled and turned on their own. Was the hand of the Überführer at work here? Was his guiding hand saving him, guiding the probe and taking it to safety? Was he witnessing a miracle?
The probe moved forward, the clouds speeding past the window. As it accelerated, the g-forces started to push Petersen further and further back into his seat. He should have felt scared, but he was calmness personified. Petersen even had time to gaze at the medal, a content smile forming.
Out in the gloom a pair of lights appeared distantly. They hovered like stars, drawing the probe towards them.
Petersen continued to pray, his words sustaining the miraculous actions that had apparently taken hold of the craft. A modicum of hope infected his invocation as the lights bloated in front of him.
‘Thank you, my Führer,’ Petersen gasped. ‘Thank you.’
Then the terrible truth dawned.
Petersen realised that the miracle that had supposedly saved him had turned out to be a cruel joke as the clouds in front of him parted like the gates of Hell to reveal his own probe’s lights reflected in a vast polished wall that loomed before him. He desperately yanked at the controls, but they remained immobile like stone, their course permanently locked upon the black structure. He screamed briefly as the probe crashed into the towering wall, the small man-made object exploding and plunging into the swirling clouds. The glow of the fireball soon disappeared, its bright colours submerged by the shades of black and grey.
After a few moments, the smouldering remains of the probe crashed into the black, cinder-like soil. Petersen’s charred corpse still sat strapped in its overturned seat, his limbs drawn up like a defeated boxer, while a final gruesome grimace dominated the cadaver’s blackened features. This grimace was a silent recording of his last moments when he was confronted by the structure that robbed him of his life – the spire.
The vast tower stood alone within the caldera. The structure’s walls stretched far into the distance, and such was its size and scale that its true shape was lost in the swirling dust which was now starting to blanket the smoking wreckage and give Petersen, at last, some sort of dignified burial.
The probe’s destruction seemed to trigger something deep within the sinister structure as unseen machinery, which had perhaps lain dormant for aeons, groaned and creaked into life. The mechanical stirring which gripped the spire was soon accompanied by a more organic sound, a primeval vibration that coursed through its walls like the first breath of a child. But this sound would have been totally alien to human ears as it was without comparison to any earthly sound. Its sense of being, indeed, the sense of purpose that the sound bore was unmistakable. A great force was stirring, its strength and intensity growing with each passing moment.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The holding pen that housed Konrad was eerily like the cramped containers that had transported him around the various prison-camps around the Reich where he had served his sentence. First it was a camp situated in the mammoth oil-fields of the Caucasus. Here he had worked in one of the refineries ran by the conglomerate Deutsche Oil, then when labour was required on the colony of Neu Berlin located on the Jovian moon of Io he was transported there. For just over a year, Konrad endured the nightmarish conditions of the sulphur harvesting operation there. In almost medieval conditions, he dug out the noxious yellow soil. The containers that had taken Konrad to these diverse outposts of the Reich’s prison system were always devoid of natural light and either bone-numbingly cold or overwhelmingly hot. They were carried inside the bellies of freight-trains that trundled across the hinterland of the East, or the holds of space-going vessels, and his current location was no different.
Removed from the sterile hibernation areas of the vessel, Konrad and the prisoners were now housed within the Odin’s central shaft. This giant horizontal corridor connected the cerebral structures at the prow to the muscular engineering sections far off in the stern. A small section of the tunnel had been cordoned off into a makeshift holding pen. As a result, the prisoners’ bunks were slung beneath giant pieces of ducting and bulbous power-cables which ran along the length of the seemingly endless tube. Konrad sat on his own cot, his legs swinging child-like over the edge of the filthy mattress. If he had known that millions of volts surged through the cabling at his feet he may have been reluctant to continue. In fact, his greatest concerns at that moment were the fresh cuts and bruises that covered his face.
The effects of emerging from hibernation: his erratic body-clock, the tiredness and nausea all started to take their toll upon Konrad. He slumped down on the mattress and peered through the barred wall at the head of his cot. The barred section sealed the male prisoners from the females, and for once, Konrad understood the Nazi’s actions with this metallic partition. He had heard of a similar situation that had arisen during an infamous prisoner transfer some years before. A consignment of prisoners, both male and female, were being transported to a new camp in the shadow of the Ural mountains. Their journey started at the Reich’s main penal handling centre situated at Danzig. At the huge sprawling complex, the different sexes were normally kept well apart, but the transport situation meant that the different inmates would be in close contact. The train-carriages were divided between the sexes, however the Nazis underestimated the lust and ingenuity of the male prisoners. During the first night of the journey the male inmates like a pack of rabid rats worked the locks loose on their carriage and broke into the female prisoners’ compartments. Every woman inside was raped; some of them were even killed before the shocked Nazis took action. At first, truncheons were used to fend off the male prisoners, but such was the determination of the men to satisfy their pent-up desires that the Nazi guards were eventually forced to resort to fire-arms and even more blood-shed to quell the shocking sexual-insurrection. And so to prevent a similar situation aboard the Odin, not only was the barred wall deemed to be prisoner-proof, but as an extra precaution, the heavily locked gate that connected the two sections had an electric current running through it.
Through the bars Konrad could see in the gloom beyond the indistinct shapes of the female prisoners. They spoke quietly and moved rarely as if they were mindful of alerting the male inmates of their presence. After a few moments, he closed his eyes and tried to relax, hoping that a good sleep would bring equilibrium to his disrupted system, and after a few moments, it appeared to be succeeding as sleep took hold of him. Then something unexpected and pleasantly surprising happened. A hand reached through the bars and gently touched Konrad’s forehead.
He instantly opened his eyes and saw Elsa staring back at him from the other side of the bars. A friendly smile gleamed in the semi-darkness. For a few seconds, Konrad assumed he was still asleep and the vision before him had been conjured from yet another dreamscape. But when she spoke, he realised that the woman wasn’t some temporal apparition that would tease him before disappearing once again.