All around him, Stahl saw the wounded and the bodies of the dead. One of the wounded, spotting his SS uniform, reached forward like a leper desperate for a blessing from Christ. He pawed at Stahl’s boots with his blood-smeared hands. ‘Help me, Herr Sturmbannführer,’ the wounded man cried. He clung to Stahl’s jackboots refusing to let go. Stahl was unmoved by the desperate plea for help. He shook the desperate fingers from his boot and moved on without once looking at the wounded man. Once again his SS persona was steeling him to the horrors that surrounded him. His job was to lead, not to show empathy. Empathy and compassion would be left to the likes of Chaplain Lang and Doctor Blomberg, who even now, worked amongst the crew. Lang was scurrying amongst the wounded, blessing them and listening to their final confessions. The wounded men who could respond clung to his dangling swastika, kissing the shining Nazi symbol as their lives drifted away in the hope of salvation. Meanwhile, Blomberg was busy setting broken arms and legs, stitching up gaping wounds and treating burns. But despite Blomberg’s best efforts, the pile of corpses continued to grow and grow and chillingly, not all the corpses had died from their wounds. Those crew-men whose wounds were considered by the doctor to be too severe and beyond the meagre facilities had been put to one side in a secluded area of the wrecked room. Here, Blomberg quietly used a syringe filled with cyanide to quickly end their suffering and free up his stretched resources. The process he used to select those for this extreme remedy was strangely reminiscent to the selections that he had performed back at Neu Magdeburg when he had chosen the prisoners for the mission and those to be disposed of inside the colony’s gas chambers. He believed that brutal experience had toughened him up; giving him the dispassionate façade to choose which of his comrades would live and die. In a perverse way it pleased Blomberg that he could be so ruthless and not succumb to emotional weakness. In his eyes this crisis was becoming his finest hour. At the same time, his actions also masked his own pain – his grief for his wife and family. Their loss still scarred him deeply and his sense of injustice at his exploitation by his superiors and by the Party still burned, but these feelings were swamped, for the moment, by this unerring sense of power he was experiencing. Blomberg’s warped sense of compassion would have been applauded by Stahl.
Stahl climbed onto what remained of a ladder attached to the room’s central-column. He clambered up towards his station and onto the distorted gantry. Here he spotted Admiral Bauer amongst the wreckage. The Admiral, unsurprisingly, given his injuries, remained where Mesler had left him. A film of sweat covered his pale face, while his eyes remained closed. For a moment, Stahl looked down at his commander and thought he was dead, but the Admiral’s shallow breathing indicated that he was still alive. Stahl also noted the broken arm across Bauer’s chest and the smashed mechanical stump of the artificial arm.
‘Admiral Bauer?’ Stahl whispered as he knelt down beside the stricken officer.
Bauer wearily opened his eyes. ‘So you survived.’
‘The Überführer appears to have blessed me during our troubles. I appear to have survived our landing without so much as a scratch, Admiral,’ Stahl said with a note of slyness in his voice. It pleased him to see the cowardly officer suffering. Perhaps it was the will of the Überführer to punish Bauer so. ‘Unlike you.’ Stahl pressed his finger into the Admiral’s swollen arm. ‘I’m no medical expert, but it’s safe to say you have a broken arm.’
Bauer nodded as coils of pain shot through his body. ‘I have to agree with your prognosis, Stahl. The amount of pain I’m in would suggest so!’
‘Now both sides of your body match!’ Stahl said slyly. Bauer ignored him. ‘You know, Admiral,’ Stahl continued, ‘if you had shown the courage that was expected of you by me, by the crew, and by the Party, I suspect we would have avoided this unfortunate accident that has befallen us.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean, Stahl?’
‘I know it’s not really my place to question your integrity, but we should have landed when we first arrived at Vanaheim.’
‘You know the reasons why we couldn’t land,’ Bauer replied. ‘Petersen’s probe was destroyed down there. We still don’t know why.’ He winced with the pain again as he grew more agitated. ‘And the likelihood is that it would have taken us days, perhaps, even weeks to find out. We couldn’t afford to linger in orbit for that amount of time. Our resources are finite, so I, as a good officer of the Astrokorp, put the safety of my crew above everything else. Political or otherwise.’
‘Your sentimental talk makes me sick! I have a different opinion of your decision, an alternative theory, if you will,’ Stahl said. He appeared to be enjoying this strange debate between himself and the Admiral. ‘It was cowardice that drove your decision. You decided to hitch up our skirts and run away at the first sign of trouble. Imagine if the Wehrmacht had that same attitude when invading Poland, or when we crossed the steppes to destroy the Bolsheviks all those years ago. You lack the steel, even the stomach, required to command this mission.’
‘I did what was in the best interests of the ship, and most important, the mission.’ Bauer turned to face Stahl, his obvious pain forgotten for the moment. ‘You saw what happened to poor Petersen. The other officers agreed with my decision.’
‘Your cowardice apparently infected them too. It’s like a disease! A disease I thought we Germans were long cured of.’
‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, Stahl.’
‘If I had my way we would have landed regardless.’
‘Don’t talk stupid. Such recklessness would have killed us all, Stahl!’
‘As opposed to your cowardice which has only killed half of us and lost us our ship,’ Stahl said.
‘I don’t have to justify myself to anyone, least of all, you. I am answerable to the Führer alone,’ Bauer cried as another wave of pain washed over him.
Stahl then looked down at his own injured hand. ‘You are blind. We were destined to land on this planet. The Führer himself willed it.’
‘It’s you who are blind. Can’t you see it? The mission’s fucked! We’re fucked! You’re fucked! Look around you, Stahl. Things have changed. We’re under no obligation to follow any orders now, no matter who issued them, even if it was the Überführer himself! Now spare me the sermon and leave me in peace.’
‘There is one other thing to consider, one other thing that compounds your failure, Admiral. We were invited to land.’
‘Invited?’ Bauer frowned. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’
Stahl leaned in closer to the Admiral. ‘Yes, an invitation. An invitation I intend to honour. But I’m afraid this invitation only applies to me, and not to you!’
Stahl pressed down on top of the helpless officer. He then turned Bauer’s face to one side. Directly below the Admiral’s throat was a jagged piece of metal. It reared from the broken deck like a miniature version of the spire itself. At the sight of the terrible spike, Bauer screamed, but his cries were muffled by Stahl’s iron-like hand across his mouth. Then like a lover, he gently pressed the Admiral’s throat into the knife-like metal. Bauer’s body quivered horribly beneath Stahl. He watched coolly as Bauer’s eyes widened pitifully as he silently screamed and gurgled, his blood spluttering from between Stahl’s fingers. Eventually, Bauer’s sickening spasms ceased as the make-shift blade punched its way out the other side of his neck.