Paul wanted to be the last to leave his ship. He wanted to hold to that tradition, even in the midst of their destruction.

It should not have happened. For a freighter traveling in secrecy, the sailing conditions now could only be described as perfect. A midsummer gale surrounding them, with dawn still a few hours away. The new moon above them offering nothing except an invisible vigil to the storm clouds that cloaked the whole sea for kilometers in all directions. None of their external lights had been lit, blackout curtains had been strung up for the ones inside. In conditions like this, whoever had actually seen them must have had eyes to put a hawk to shame.

None of Paul’s own lookouts had seen anything. Nor had any of the bridge crew. Paul had been on the bridge, though not technically on watch. The desperation of their voyage had necessitated the sacrifice of some creature comforts, and so a few cots had been arranged for the crew to nap, ready to be roused back to duty stations at a moment’s notice. Paul had been dozing in one, cap pulled down over his eyes, his right palm resting on his chest also covering the end of the length of beard he had accumulated during the trip. The rest of the crew sported varying amounts of the same sort of facial hair. Not one razor would touch one jawline until they reached home. A unanimous decision. Noted in the ship’s official logbook, no less.

The first explosion had thrown him from his cot. Knocked most of the rest to the floor. The whole ship heeling to starboard, away from the pain, that hell-almighty roar heralding the end. The second explosion coming about ten seconds later, the amidships section bucking upwards from the killing strike, the groan of sundering steel lost in the echo reeling through their heads.

Every bridge window shattered. Glass covering the floor, the crew, reflecting nothing in the darkness.

Even amidst the hot whirl of confusion, Paul knew, right at that moment, that his ship was lost. A vessel like this would only twist in such a manner if her keel had been snapped. No ship on the open sea could survive with a broken spine.

The order to abandon ship rang from his mouth with the authority ingrained from his years of command experience upon three different oceans. To his own ears, though, Paul thought it sounded like someone else spoke it. Some stranger in a sea on the far side of that new moon above.

The ship rocked back to port, listing, covering her wounds, an alarm klaxon now wailing from her topmost decks to her deepest innards. Even with the new and deadly urgency, Paul’s every last intention now focused on an orderly and total evacuation.

Even so, his intentions mattered not a jot in the face of the coming reality.

Only about five minutes had elapsed since the initial blasts. Paul and the rest of the bridge crew had made it to the main deck, joining with both a few of the surviving engineering crew and some of the other ratings, cold rain slicing across their exposed skin, when the third detonation happened. Not external, this time, but from deep inside the ship. Either cold water claiming the searing hot boilers, or a spark in a cloud of coal dust in the ship’s fuel bunkers, either cause producing the same effect. As the sea heaved around them, the ship’s weary hull finally broke in two.

The deck heaving beneath them. Pitching down. Paul shouting an order, even in his own mind he could not really say what he was ordering the remnants of his crew to do. Get to the boats. Probably. A wrenching of steel high above behind him and hands shoved him hard over the railing just as the ship’s funnel smashed down on the spot where he, others, had stood. Paul the only one falling. His words devolving into a scream as he dropped into the onyx sea.

Water swallowing him, filling his ears and nostrils. His white cap, the mark of his profession, his authority, snatched off his head. A darkness below him so absolute he felt his bladder release at the sight of it. No warmth from any of it at all.

He kicked towards the surface. His descent had not taken him far from the scene of the disaster. Paul’s head stuck up out of the water, the rest of him working furiously to keep from going down again. The waves would swamp him in moments.

He saw a lighter patch, moving up and down with the swells, to his left. Turning, he could see it now as a lifeboat. Empty, but upright. If any of his other crew still lived, they would be making for it right now. The new objective gave Paul’s mind the best sense of clarity it had had since the first explosion had awoken him. Even with the first bit of numbness beginning to settle into his nerves, he kicked off again. Making for a thin wooden salvation.

The sea cooperated with him, bringing the lifeboat closer and, in a brief moment of calm, enabling him to grab on to its side. His muscles burning as he pulled himself out of the icy water and into the boat. Looking up, he saw no one else inside, but a second later, he saw another pair of hands grasp the boat’s gunwale, and he quickly lunged over to help the other man out of the water. This proved to be his ship’s doctor, their only acknowledgement of each other’s situations being a quick, grateful nod to one another as they turned to look for other survivors.

In a little over a minute they had managed to pull three others out of the water, his ship’s boatswain and two of the stokers. Paul looked around, trying to see anything at all as the doctor checked the other men for any serious injuries. Trying to find anything all but impossible in the dark. Even his own wrecked ship, if any part of her were still afloat, as invisible as the sky above the clouds.

Light came.

First as a beam striking out of the blackness, low above the water, and finally as a pair of white flares arcing higher into the storm. Paul saw them, their brightness obscuring their source, and whipped his head around, seeking his ship. Finding her fast.

Spray slashed across Paul’s face, the midsummer storm commanding the waves to mayhem. He held on to the lifeboat’s gunwale as it rolled, threatening to spill its handful of occupants back into the sea. Not half a kilometer behind him, the capsized stern of their ship ascended, the single propeller still turning, the severed bow already flooded, tumbling dead and unseen into the deep. They all looked at her in her final throes. Most in the lifeboat had called that ship home for the better part of six, seven years. For Paul, it had been over a decade.

Even as the other four watched her, Paul looked back towards the light. Squinting, hands cupped around his eyes. The flares still high up, the beam moving across the surface of the sea. Searching. As it swept, he could finally make out the source of it all. Of the light, of the destruction, the death. At last, he saw it.

As he recognized it, a realization swam through Paul’s mind:

Sea monsters really did exist.

They did not come rising high out of the water, broaching in majestic horror. Instead, they shambled into the topside world, squatting low to the sea’s surface. They did not hoist a web of seizing tentacles into the air, but maintained a narrow, trim appearance. They were covered, not in a sleek layer of scales and spines, but in steel plates dotted with openings for their ballast tanks.

Using the searchlight as a guide, Paul saw another lifeboat, this one overturned, floating in the sea about maybe a few hundred meters off their attacker’s starboard bow. Even at this distance, he could see other members of his crew clinging to its sides. At least ten, maybe about fifteen, total. Paul turned back to his group of survivors, issuing orders to get the boat’s oars out and to start rowing towards their comrades.

As astute as Paul’s observation was regarding the nature of their assailant, he had, unfortunately, arrived at his conclusion too early

Only now would the real monstrosity of the night arrive.

As those in the lifeboat moved to prepare a rescue, Paul could see other movement. Hatches opening on the conning tower of their attacker. Figures in rain gear emerging. A flag being run up the staff attached to the conning tower, a flag bearing the familiar and contemptible cross of their enemy. Their attacker remaining stationary except to launch another pair of flares to replace the ones flickering out above. The searchlight tracking across the sea again, briefly settling on Paul’s boat before returning to the overturned lifeboat and fixing upon it. The enemy crew struggling with something. As Paul got his boat turned towards their shipmates, he could see, a little more clearly, that the crew on board their attacker were setting up some piece of equipment on the lip of the conning tower’s bridge.

A chill, not from the sea, but from within Paul’s stomach, started to flow into his blood. From the light, it had looked like something that had no business being set up to rescue shipwreck survivors. Their enemy could be cruel, sure, but they were still what would be described as a decent sort, they would not do something like –

The machine gun opened fire. The weapon, its water-cooled barrel pointing like some demon’s finger at the helpless, roared into the upturned wood and the men clinging to it. Every fifth round a tracer. Accuracy at that range being child’s play, even with the sea conditions.

They watched it happen. One of the stokers screamed, the ship’s doctor putting his fingertips to his open mouth. Paul, mind first blanked out by the shock of their audacity, lunged forward into the bow, falling on hands and knees and his eyes not wavering from the massacre. He did not scream. Face set taut and sharp, his voice locked out by a fury such as he would never know again singing out of his heart. After a moment, his voice returned and he bellowed to turn away, to get some distance on their attacker, try to use the sea action to lose them.

The overturned lifeboat foundered in an expanding crimson slick. As Paul’s boat came about, so too did their assailant. An increased churning from her stern indicating her engines had restarted, propellers spinning once more. Her searchlight still piercing the gloom. An occasional burst of fire from the machine gun as it found a single survivor or two still struggling in the icy sea and goddamn murdered them.

Paul bellowed again to row hard, clambering back to take the rudder as the others worked the oars. The waves could hide them. The darkness, too. Some miracle could still happen. However infinitesimally thin the chance, the chance still existed, and Paul would seize it with both rawboned calloused hands and use it to get the few of them home alive and use it to tell the whole world what had happened out here and use it to make sure the animal responsible would hang from the neck until dead and use it to –

The light, one final time, found them.

Oar power could not match diesel engines. The growing wave along their attacker’s bow showing her growing speed. They could not outrun her guns. Machine gun or deck gun. The thin chance disappearing into the same dark where they would all descend.

The light covered them. A moment’s last reprieve as another ammunition belt was loaded into the gun and the bolt racked closed.

They all watched it coming.

A few shrank back. A few others could only be still. Could only stare.

Paul, sorrow and terror streaming down his crumpling face and into the sea, stood in the heaving boat and raised a fist, a middle finger extended in the universal suggestion. His final act of defiance, in honor of his crew whom he had failed so close to home.

From his viewpoint, his finger ran over the flag whipping from the staff on the conning tower. Covering that infernal cross.

The Union Jack.

The Vickers gun roared a five-second stream into the lives in the boat. Fire ceased as the beast’s steel bow smashed through the little craft, reducing it to flotsam, leaving the pieces churning with the brine and blood in its wake.

A few hours later, dawn came, a thin strip of light squeezed between the receding storm clouds and the anxious horizon. The beast remained on the surface, sailing along in calm indifference on a southwesterly course away from what they had done. Fire at all of their backs.

[hr]

New York [i]Times[/i] article, 10 July 1918:

[quote][center][b]FUGITIVE GERMAN STEAMER
SUNK BY ROYAL NAVY

[i]Conflicting Accounts Emerge of
Survivors’ Ultimate Fate[/i][/b][/center]

OSLO, July 8 (via Amsterdam to London, July 9)—A report from Norwegian naval authorities has confirmed an earlier statement by the British Admiralty that the German steam merchant Regenfels has been sunk with all hands lost. Wreckage from the ship, along with the bodies of some of her crew, washed ashore on Jan Mayen Island on July 3.

The 6,000 ton vessel, owned by the German Steamship Company Hansa, had been interned in the city of Barranquilla, Colombia since January 1915. With the war situation of the German Empire growing desperate, the Regenfels’s captain, Paul Braunwald, delivered a letter to the local consul, announcing his intention to return his ship and crew to their fatherland. After receiving supplies and coal from unknown local sympathizers, the Regenfels escaped internment in early June. Despite a joint Anglo-American naval effort to trap her, she managed to exit the Caribbean and disappeared into the North Atlantic.

The ship’s whereabouts remained unknown until July 2, when the British Secretary of the Admiralty issued a statement that one of their submarines had reported sighting the Regenfels in the northern Norwegian Sea. An attempt was made to force the ship to halt and take her into custody, but the German steamer opened fire with a hidden gun. The submarine was then forced to launch a single torpedo which broke the Regenfels in half. Afterwards, approaching inclement weather forced the submarine to withdraw without looking for survivors. The initial Admiralty report stressed their condolences for the lost merchant seamen, and expressed their wish that more could have been done to save them.

However, the Norwegian naval report issued on the matter brings a more disturbing aspect to light. According to medical personnel who conducted examinations on the bodies recovered from Jan Mayen Island, many of them show signs of having been wounded by gunfire. Furthermore, some were wearing lifejackets, indicating that such an action likely took place after the crew had already abandoned ship. A private comment made by a ranking Royal Norwegian Navy officer indicates the belief that, if the crew were indeed fired upon in the water, it may have been in retaliation for the atrocity committed last month against the Canadian hospital ship Llandovery Castle, as well as similar acts of barbarism against the hospital ships Glenart Castle and Rewa.

A brief statement issued by Grand Admiral von Holtzendorff, chief of staff for the Imperial German Navy, offered his condolences to the families of the crew and concluded by calling for an investigation into a possible war crime. This was rebuffed by the British in another statement, this time issued by a special representative of the First Sea Lord, who declared: “It is not the policy of the Royal Navy to engage in unrestricted submarine warfare, nor is it standing naval policy to treat shipwrecked mariners in any manner other than with decency and civility. Any other accusations of impropriety are groundless. Englishmen would not do such a thing.”[/quote]