Message-ID: <45829asstr$1071364205@assm.asstr-mirror.org> Return-Path: From: Carlos Malenkov X-X-Sender: grendel@localhost.localdomain Reply-To: cmalenkov@linuxwaves.com X-Original-Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8BIT X-ASSTR-Original-Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2003 14:21:39 -0700 (MST) Subject: {ASSM} The Ice Maiden (MF, rom, military-WWII, alt-hist) Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2003 20:10:05 -0500 Path: assm.asstr-mirror.org!not-for-mail Approved: Newsgroups: alt.sex.stories.moderated,alt.sex.stories Followup-To: alt.sex.stories.d X-Archived-At: X-Moderator-Contact: ASSTR ASSM moderation X-Story-Submission: X-Moderator-ID: newsman, dennyw THE ICE MAIDEN by Carlos Malenkov Copyright (c) 2002 by Carlos Malenkov Word Count: 1190 This is my first attempt at Alternate History. Consider it the first installment of a novel. The background of the story is true. For more info, look up "Habakkuk Pyke" on Google. German submarine wolf packs were slaughtering Allied shippping in 1942. An effective way of escorting convoys to and from England was desperately needed. There just weren't enough destroyers available, and there was a critical shortage aircraft carriers. What to do? Project Habakkuk. Inspired by an inspiration of mad inventor Geoffrey Pyke, engineers built and tested ship-like prototype ice structures in lakes in Alberta, Canada, in 1943. The idea proved feasible, more or less. Ships made of solid ice, with suitable reinforcing members made of more conventional materials, would be effectively unsinkable by torpedoes or shellfire. However, such vessels had a couple of major drawbacks. They would have been extremely expensive to build, the equivalent of $100,000,000 or more each, a fortune by 1943 standards. They also had an unfortunate tendency to gradually melt away or even vaporize in warm weather. By early 1944, the Allies had won the Battle of the Atlantic, and there was no longer a need for unsinkable aircraft carriers. The Habakkuks never sailed. At a stately six knots, the H.M.S. Indefeasible plowed through the rolling swells of the Arctic Sea off the coast of Norway. She was an experimental ship, one of the first of the new Habakkuk-class aircraft carriers carved out of chunks of the Greenland icecap. She was an iceberg shaped into the semblance of a ship's hull by jets of superheated steam. An iceberg stiffened and reinforced with inventor Geoffrey Pike's miracle material, "Pykrete" -- really only a frozen mixture of water and sawdust, but which boasted many of the useful properties of construction steel. An iceberg fitted out with triple 2,500 horsepower Liberty Ship engines. A fighting and freight-carrying iceberg. Her crew called her the Ice Maiden. Tromsö lay ahead, about 152 miles to starboard. It was March of 1944, and there were a thousand newly-built up-gunned Sherman "Firefly" tanks and 600 Lend-Lease P-40 fighters aboard -- destined for Stalin's armies, by way of Murmansk. The weather forecast called for blustery winds, with a possibility of heavy snow later in the evening. It was sleeting lightly and visibility was down to 50 feet. Jud Kirsch unbuttoned his military parka as he stepped indoors and muscled the door shut against the resistance of a frigid wind gust. Straight from the North Pole that damn storm must be blowing. At least they had issued cold-weather headgear with fur earflaps, rather than those less-than-useless Army Air Force regulation billed caps. He stopped at his commanding officer's desk and languidly saluted. "Captain Judson Kirsch reporting as ordered." "I'm an engineer, not a flipping soldier," he repeated for what must have been the twentieth time. "Sure, I know more about the P-40 and what keeps her in the air than any of those glorified flyboys and jumped-up mechanics at the Curtiss Wright plant in Burbank. But, damn it all, why did they have to stick me on this motorized ice cube?" "You sure as hell aren't much of a soldier, flipping or otherwise," Colonel Smythers snapped back. "We requisitioned you for your mechanical knowhow, not your military skills, that's for damned certain. Now, shut up your whining and enjoy the 36-hour furlough topside. I understand you've been making eyes at that nursey broad, Malice something-or-other. She has to be as frigid as the superstructure of this damned ship, if my information sources are correct, and they usually are. Lots of luck with that one, and don't freeze your pecker off. Dismissed." Kirsch gave a sloppy salute, nonchalantly pivoted, and walked out the door of the drafty administrative building. Imagine, living and working in Quonset huts on the deck of a tossing and heaving iceberg. Then stomping your way through snow-drifted paths toward the holds and workshops. Ice caverns, really. Well, at least it had one major advantage. There were plenty of hidden places for a tryst or rendezvous, assuming you could find a willing partner, that is. Well, there was always Major Paige, commander of the on-board nurse contingent. Mary Alice was too big a mouthful for her close friends, what few of them there were, and "Malice" was perhaps more apt anyhow. She did have a coldly imperious manner, not to mention a rather sharp tongue. As well as dangerous curves. "Close the damned door!" The coal-fired stoves in the aft mess hall didn't quite manage to compensate for the frigid blasts of arctic air that slammed in every time someone entered. "Sorry, mates," he apologized. He looked around. There was Malice herself, in all her icy majesty, sitting by herself in the officers' section. Five-foot eleven of sculpted femininity, and a scowl that could give Medusa a run for her money. Scowl, what scowl? She was looking in his direction and smiling. Motioning him over. "Major Paige?" "My friends call me Malice, not that I have a malicious bone in my body, ha, ha. Grab a seat, Jud, old fellow, and plop your skinny behind down." With a negligent gesture of her hand, she indicated an open spot next to her. Had she been drinking on duty? That might account for her jolly familiarity. But Nurse Malice, the Snow Queen, the resident Ice Maiden of the Ice Maiden? Could it be? Someone was stuffing the jukebox with coins, and the jumpy, discordant sounds of Spike Jones' "Ve heil r-r-right in der fuehrer's face" began rasping from the loudspeaker. "Sarsaparilla soda for the lady," he told the server, a sergeant by his insignia. "Coffee for me. Bleak. Sorry, I mean black." "I've been so lonely," she said. Sometimes one thing really does lead to another. They walked out of the mess hall into an arctic gale. Her arm snaked around his waist in a distinctly non-comradely fashion. A squeeze led to a kiss. Then a cold, cold hand found its way down into his pants. "Just checking if you like me," she said as she inventoried his equipment. There was a storage bunker off the beaten path. It was actually just a hollowed-out space in a snow bank with a lockable wooden door mounted on fence posts rammed into the ice -- really only a cave of sorts. But it did provide shelter and privacy. He fumbled for the key. She had stepped out of her skirt, and he managed to tug her military-issue underwear down several inches . . . but she was in tears. "I can't, I just can't. I want to so badly, and heaven knows I desire you, but I can't go any farther. Please, please just hold me." He hugged her to him, and tried to make her goosebumps go away by caressing her mostly naked behind. What a hell of a time for her to freeze up. It was, in fact, freezing in there. Time to blow the joint. "Walk me home." By "home," she meant the women's Bachelor Officers' Quarters, he presumed. He gallantly offered her a bent elbow to hook onto. There were distant booms as they stepped out into a driving blizzard. A sudden brilliant flash illuminated the sky. "Gunfire and star shells. Damn! Looks like the whole bloody German navy found us. We're in for it now." There was a strange look on her face. She pulled him back into the shelter, then quickly unbuttoned his fly and took him into her mouth for a moment. Damn! She turned around, and shrugged out of her skirt, then slipped off her underwear. Facing away, she bent over and presented her bare posterior to him. "Do me, Jud. Now. I'm so hot. Hot! The heat inside me! The heat of battle!" He held onto her hips as her icy marble buttocks rebounded against his crotch and her inner fire clutched desperately at him. She screamed out orgasm after orgasm as the klaxons wailed General Quarters. The freight train roar of 15-inch shells passing overhead momentarily drowned out all other sounds. A wash of frigid water from the waterspout of a near-miss rattled icy rain on the corrugated tin roof of their makeshift shelter. The dragon herself, the battleship Tirpitz, had snuck up on the Ice Maiden and it was going to be a death match. -- Pursuant to the Berne Convention, this work is copyright with all rights reserved by its author unless explicitly indicated. +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | alt.sex.stories.moderated ------ send stories to: | | FAQ: Moderators: | +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+ |ASSM Archive at Hosted by | |Discuss this story and others in alt.sex.stories.d; look for subject {ASSD}| +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+