Challenge #04678-L294: Strange Submarine Staccato

Things have not been going well for Ludwig and U-634. An English depth charge knocked out the water pumps, the radio is on the fritz, pumping out static in strange, rhythmic bursts, and there are strange scratches and taps on the sub the Skipper swears is the hull scraping against ice. Yet the bizarre patterns, almost like arcane writing he finds when they surface for air, hints at something deeper, and those noises only grow more insistent by the hour… -- Deathshead419

[AN: The actual history - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_submarine_U-634 ]

Ludwig had to admit - even if it was just to himself - that they might be in deep trouble. Separated from the pack. Depth-charged halfway to oblivion, having undertaken a lot of significant damage... and surrounded by ice. Worrying, too, were the odd scratches on the hull. As if something had been scrawling graffiti there with sharp knives.

They had said it was due to the hull scraping on the ice or on stones underwater. If those scratches were from ice or stones, they wouldn't look so squiggly or deliberately shaped. If it was from scraping along anything, it would look like straight lines. Not like some barbarian script from the impure countries.

Ludwig shivered as he examined it, almost hypnotised by the swirls and curves. Heart pounding at the alien nature of the sigils.

There was something in the water.

Something other than the expected things in the ocean. Something glimpsed between sunlight flashing in his eyes from the waves. Whatever that was, down there, it was the wrong shape to be a seal or a dolphin. And it was gone too fast to properly identify.

They couldn't stay up like this for long. The enemy could find them and shoot them out of the water. On the other hand, they needed to fix the pumps before it got truly terrible.

Maybe he was tired. Maybe the air filters needed cleaning and changing. Maybe he'd had too many of the little awareness pills. He still had the evidence of the strange sigils, all the same, and made notes in his journal about them,

The crew managed to get the pumps working, though it was a shaky fix. It just needed to last long enough. Long enough to relocate their pack. Long enough to get back to the fatherland, and thereby get proper repairs.

Long enough to get the hell away from this area of the North Atlantic.

Fixed enough, they prepared to submerge. The radio was broken, and the hydrophone delivered weird signals. The fault was not electrical, they'd gone over every wire and fuse in the whole system. The compass was also going crazy. Leading them astray from their intended course.

And, of course, the instant they were deep enough, the scraping and tapping began again. Sounding like it had a purpose.

It put his teeth on edge and his hackles straight up.

The crewman on the hydrophone jerked the headset off. "Sir! I can't do it any more. I swear... they're talking to us."

Ludwig took over the headset and heard... undermench language. Garbled syllables that, while definitely foreign, sounded like speech. Like... singing.

The chill from his upraised hackles trembled down his spine and somehow found its way to his loins. There was something waiting. Wanting. Something he needed.

Ludwig never knew what made him gave the orders for the heading, or the angle of their dive. All he knew was that the song had a source, and the source had something that would give him more glory than the Fuhrer himself. A thousand years of glory, prosperity, and life as a new king of the world.

And in the depths of the North Atlantic, the Undine pod soon feasted on the crushed bodies of Nazi submariners...

[Photo by Shino Nakamura on Unsplash]

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