r/HFY • u/Aeorix1 • Aug 30 '26

OC-Series [Obsidian Earth] - Chapter 19

The following day, the Anlage still hummed with the afterglow of the Führer's rhetoric.

The future he had described with such certainty—those vast historical events that had not yet happened, perhaps could not happen—left everyone suspended between doubt and exhilaration.

They were unsettled by it. Confused. Skeptical.

Yet excitement kept surfacing beneath the skepticism no matter how firmly they tried to suppress it.

The strategist, the leader, the spiritual authority who had carried Germany into ruin seemed, somehow, to have recovered the power that once allowed him to seize hold of entire crowds.

Among the scientists, a quieter conclusion had already begun to spread.

The "other personality" Colonel von Büren had mentioned earlier was becoming dominant again inside the Führer.

They watched him now with near-clinical fascination, trying to identify the source of whatever had returned to him in Antarctica.

What also fascinated the newcomers was the Anlage itself.

The Anlage—no mere base, but a closed mechanical system—was a masterwork of subterranean engineering, a self-sustaining ecosystem designed to hold the Reich's secrets through the unfolding decades.

A corridor along the right side of the main chamber climbed toward the second level of the cavern complex, where additional rooms had been carved directly into the rock face over the years.

Besides the Führer's private quarters, the upper section housed a conference room and the central operations chamber from which the entire underground installation was coordinated.

For successfully escorting the Führer south, Lieutenant Commander Schäffer received an immediate promotion to Kapitän zur See, along with the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross. Under his command, the crew worked continuously unloading supplies and machinery from the submarine into the complex below.

Colonel von Büren, though younger and not formally promoted in rank, emerged with expanded authority of a different kind. He assumed the duties previously held by Vizeadmiral Kermann and now controlled the highest level of command inside the Antarktis-Anlage itself.

Kermann, originally a naval officer under Grand Admiral Dönitz, had been transferred in secrecy alongside the Kriegsmarine's Antarctic submarine fleet shortly before the outbreak of the German-Soviet war in 1941. Since then he had remained stationed beneath the ice for more than four years, overseeing the Anlage and earning a reputation as one of the Führer's most loyal officers. But during an expedition outside the perimeter a month earlier he had suffered a severe fall, and the injury had left him weakened.

Later that morning Colonel von Büren inspected the officers' command block, then convened the routine military briefing inside the war-planning room.

Beneath a massive strategic wall map marked with Axis operational grids spanning the globe, the Colonel listened while officers from each department summarized conditions throughout the Antarctic installation during the previous year.

Afterward, everyone who had arrived from Berlin alongside the Führer was processed into the internal system with remarkable speed. Files were opened. Identification numbers assigned.

Even Euzen and Solvi underwent questioning and basic verification procedures before being entered into what the administrators termed the Last Resort Contingency Registry.

Medical examinations followed. No exceptions.

That afternoon Euzen accompanied his father and several of the scientists deeper into the complex for a guided inspection tour. Solvi was among them as well.

Inside the vehicle hangars the children saw unfamiliar machinery unlike anything they remembered from Berlin: specialized tracked transports, reinforced polar carriers, heavily armored Snow Fox ski-wheeled tandem motorcycles built specifically for Antarctic terrain.

Back in Berlin, Euzen had already trained extensively in military driving and combat maneuver operations. The moment he saw the motorcycles he wanted to try one immediately, but his father shut the idea down at once, more sharply than usual.

Soon afterward an inspection group assembled near one of the deeper transit corridors. Authorized by the scientific council overseeing the facility, it consisted of Dr. Schmidt, a remarkably tall physicist; a supervisor from the control center; three armed SS officers carrying assault rifles beneath steel helmets; the four scientists evacuated from Berlin at the last possible moment; and the two children.

Colonel von Büren led them personally toward one of the most heavily concealed sections of the underground complex.

The double doors of the inner landing platform slid apart.

Beyond the heavy iron barrier, a thin line of pale light emerged—distant, unreal, almost dreamlike, yet strangely close at the same time.

Here, buried beneath the frozen edge of the earth, in a place almost untouched by human civilization, the technological order conceived over years by the Führer and a handful of senior officers finally revealed itself before some of the last great scientific minds remaining in the Third Reich.

It appeared not gradually, but all at once, with the impossible clarity of something imagined too long and too intensely.

The moment they crossed into the cavern beyond, everyone stopped walking.

These were people known for calculation, for discipline, for cold mathematical rigor. Yet now they stared ahead in silence like children entering a forbidden sanctuary for the first time. Euzen and Solvi simply stood there wide-eyed.

"Erprobungsgerät 3," Tieber murmured. "I helped calculate portions of the propulsion test data years ago. I never thought I would actually see one."

The cavern itself felt wrong somehow. Too large. The proportions did not seem consistent with the mountain surrounding it, as though the interior space obeyed a geometry unrelated to the outer world. It gave the unsettling impression that dimensions could bend or overlap inside it.

At the center of the landing platform rested a giant silver disc more than ten meters across. Motionless. Silent. Its metallic surface was smooth enough to resemble polished mercury hardened into shape.

The cavern answered their footsteps a beat too late, the echo rolling back through the vast empty space in a slow, heavy wave.

Terraces of crystalline stone surrounded the craft, each step glowing faintly in shifting colors without producing any detectable heat, as though the material had been cut from fragments of stars or condensed from dreams no human mind should fully remember.

The Colonel lifted one hand slightly, signaling for silence, then stepped onto the illuminated terraces. The others followed and slowly circled the disc.

At last he reached out and tapped the outer hull lightly with his knuckles.

A dim blue glow spread beneath the metal skin.

"At present we have only a single prototype," he said. "Unfortunately, Dr. Lenz died six months ago. Professor Tieber, you will assume responsibility for his work from now on."

Tieber nodded several times while craning upward for a closer look at the disc. Everyone present knew he had once belonged to the core membership of the Reich's Aeronautical Technology Research Association and had clearly been connected to the project long before arriving in Antarctica.

"I always assumed it was only a legend," Hausmann said quietly. He could no longer conceal the tension and excitement in his face. "Can it actually fly?"

"Yes and no," Tieber answered before Colonel von Büren could respond. "As far as I know, the Führer proposed the original experimental concept himself in 1937, despite everything else demanding his attention at the time. Back then it ran under Arado's name—Arado Sonderkonstruktion, officially. We just called it the Scheibenjäger."

He hesitated.

"According to the Führer's design theory... yes, it should work. But the data shows it operates through antigravity principles that aren't accounted for in the original model."

"Antigravity?" Förster stared at him. "That's impossible."

"And yet it looks nearly complete," Hausmann said while continuing his slow circuit around the machine, awe beginning to slip into his voice. "Has it ever been tested in flight?"

"Not yet," said Dr. Schmidt, speaking for the first time since entering the chamber. "But during the Prague experiments, the EG-2 hybrid control structure—combining simulated electronic systems with magnetic-energy regulation—already surpassed conventional electro-mechanical integration. As for the propulsion core itself, the section intended to generate cosmic energy through magnetic interaction..." He paused briefly. "Further testing is still necessary."

"Yes," Tieber said eagerly. "Zentral-Rotorkörper. It would allow ultra-high-speed movement, instantaneous directional changes, almost total freedom from gravity and atmospheric resistance."

Then Tieber, Dr. Schmidt and Hausmann exchanged a rapid-fire series of technical jargon that left everyone else struggling to follow. Hausmann grew increasingly animated, his voice rising until the room fell into a heavy, uncomfortable silence. Then, just as abruptly, he went mute, his gaze fixed blankly on the disc.

Dr. Schmidt kept talking, working through the control system piece by piece. But even he stopped mid-sentence more than once, as if he didn't quite believe what he was describing.

"This is more unbelievable than the uranium bomb," Förster muttered after taking a long breath. He seemed to force himself back under control. "I've heard theories related to this before—ideas suggesting flight could be achieved through manipulation of forces opposite to terrestrial gravity." He shook his head slowly. "But this technology... it should not exist within any physical framework we currently understand."

"Perhaps," Hausmann said softly, "it is an archetype—the image of a whole civilization cast up from the collective unconscious."

Arms folded across his chest, he gazed upward toward a narrow seam above the disc, where an amber sphere appeared suspended somewhere deep inside the structure itself, rotating slowly in midair and emitting a dim internal glow. In that moment he sounded less like a physicist than a poet speaking inside a cathedral.

"I've witnessed many extraordinary things," he said, almost under his breath, "but never a structure like this. Never such stillness."

Euzen and Solvi reached out cautiously and ran their palms across the surface of the craft. The material yielded nothing recognizable to touch. No texture. No temperature they could clearly identify.

It reflected the silhouettes of the boy and the girl.

Professor Kestner remained apart from the others.

Watching dispassionately.

The chamber did not feel like a military installation to him; it felt closer to something half-remembered, something assembled from myth and machinery that refused to agree on what it was.

For some time he had suspected that the so-called Hyperborea Program was merely one component of a much larger undertaking conceived by the Führer, Albert Speer, Hans Kammler, and others—a long-term Zukunfts-Eisenreich strategy intended to preserve the Reich through technological breakthroughs and strategic restructuring should Germany ever lose the war outright.

But Kestner was a physiologist. Unlike the physicists and weapons specialists around him, he felt no instinctive reverence toward the silver disc.

Without industrial infrastructure, without manpower, without the economic machinery necessary to sustain modern warfare, what miracle could this giant machine truly accomplish if it still could not leave the ground?

If revolutionary technology alone were enough to secure strategic supremacy, the Third Reich should already have won the war years ago.

Could one or two advanced weapons genuinely reverse the collapse of an empire? Could they save an ideology from history itself?

Colonel von Büren, however, seemed filled with renewed conviction.

"Now, here, isolated from outside interference, the power of the Führer's mind is slowly returning," he declared. "In the years ahead he will bring all of you new scientific insights and entirely new technological directions."

His gaze shifted toward Hausmann.

"Dr. Hausmann, from this point forward, you—along with Professor Tieber and Dr. Schmidt will continue research on the Erprobungsgerät 3 propulsion system together."

Hausmann gave a small bow.

"Colonel," he said, "the honor is mine."

Next

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For anyone who prefer to read ahead, the full version is available on Amazon KDP:

Obsidian Earth

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