by Peter Tonkin
Eleven
Situation
Mark Robertson was standing at the periscope when the nightmare began. He had been made aware of problems with the early designs of the British Upholder class, of which this was the fifth and the last, but much work had been done to overcome them, especially since the Canadian navy had bought them and renamed them the Victoria class. The further modifications Quebec had undergone to fit her for under-ice work seemed to have reawakened some gremlins, though. There had been loss of power to propulsion several times before. The diesels were like his teenage kids at home: they went through expensive spares like there was no tomorrow and once they were asleep they were the devil’s own job to wake up. But nothing he had been briefed about and prepared for had warned him that the unplanned crash-stopping of the screw would short out power, light and life support into the bargain. The systems might overlap; might share some significant elements. But the simple fact was that if the diesels went down, auxiliary power should have guaranteed that everything else stayed on. What Quebec was facing now was a situation unlike anything any of them had been led to expect.
But in that horrific moment of revelation when the nets screamed tight against the acoustic tiles of Quebec's outer skin, Mark intuitively knew what was going on. Even as the drive shaft whirled to destruction caught between the power of the spinning motor and the stasis of the tight-bound screw, he knew that he had never been briefed for anything like this. But things all too rapidly became worse than he could ever have suspected - had he been given the leisure to speculate.
The periscope at which he was standing was wrenched away from him as though some giant hand on high had torn it from its fixings. It slid down out of its housing and the crosspiece against which he had been leaning to look upwards crashed to the deck with utter finality. The whole useless tube was only held vaguely erect because it was too long to fall out of the tower completely. Mark staggered forward and came within an ace of falling to his knees. That probably saved him from serious injury, for a storm of metal suddenly cascaded out of the opening up into the conning tower immediately above his normal command position. He only saw the first of it smash down on to the deck before the lights went out, and even in the sudden, shocking darkness the sounds up there continued, as though someone had released King Kong with a jackhammer in the fin.
There was a huge noise from aft, somewhere between a grinding and a clanking, rising to a penetrating scream. Then there was a detonation. Mark, stunned though he was, was put in mind of a bulldozer full of teenage girls falling off a cliff - that would make a series of noises just like that. The deck shuddered violently, though Quebec's stately progress did not seem to slow at once. The whole of his command gave a kind of a howl and then everything within it closed down, as though it had been the victim of a heart attack or stroke.
Or, given the situation, a victim suffering from both heart attack and stroke at one and the same time.
Then there was silence, except for the gurgling whisper of water all around them. A kind of stasis, as though Quebec were an interstellar spaceship drifting down on an undiscovered planet. Like the doomed star freighter Nostromo in Alien, for instance. And absolute darkness; darkness so complete that for a moment Mark wondered if he had been struck blind.
‘Are all of you guys all right?’ asked Mark into the lightless, water-whispering void. His voice was rusty and slight - almost a whisper - overcome by the enormity of events.
‘OK, Captain,’ came the first reply after an instant, in an equally awed whisper.
‘I think I may have gone blind,’ came another whisper almost at once.
‘No,’ said Mark with some relief, his voice gathering strength and command again. ‘The lights have gone down. That’s all.’
‘I think I may need to change my shorts,’ came a third voice, stronger and full of wry laughter.
‘Me too,’ came a fourth.
‘Don’t bother,’ came the fifth and last, drawling, chilled, laid-back. ‘With the air-con down, no one’s ever going to notice.’
There was a little silence after that as they all sat letting the situation sink in. No air-con might be an inconvenience. No power meant no light or heat: that was a great deal worse. No power meant no pumps: and that could be simply fatal. Suddenly the mindless whispering chuckle of the water gained a new and terrible significance. Even Mark, who felt he was handling the burgeoning crisis in the best traditions of his service, began to suspect that the water noises were not just coming from outside Quebec. They seemed to be coming from inside her as well.
And, abruptly, it seemed to the stricken captain that the almost balletic movement he could feel, that slow-motion spaceship drifting through the liquid element as though through interstellar space, could just as well be heading downwards as forwards. Ballistic, perhaps, rather than balletic after all. And then he remembered that the after hatch was open while Bob Hudson tried to get the last survivor aboard out of the life raft in the ocean.
The walkie-talkie crashed against Mark’s mouth with such force that it split his lip and chipped his tooth. ‘Bob!’ he snarled, literally spitting blood. ‘Bob, are you there? Over?’
There was a brief silence. Then the little instrument came to life. ‘This is Master Seamen Dumas, Captain. It’s a mess down here. The lieutenant is still outside, but he ordered me to secure the hatch, which I have done. We saved both of the survivors, Captain, a man and a woman. Both unconscious but stirring. Both in the infirmary now. But we lost Leading Seaman Faure. Well, we lost half of him...’
Mark was just about to demand some explanation of the last remark - something that the automatic logs would certainly not cover - but Chief Engineering Officer La Barbe forestalled him. ‘Captain, it is Commander La Barbe. Perhaps, when you are at leisure, you would meet me in my office. At your earliest convenience, in fact. Chief Engineering Officer Over.’
Mark frowned, suddenly glad of the blackout. The tone brooked no delay, as they say in old-fashioned stories. And that was very bad indeed. La Barbe certainly preferred to be referred to as Chief; for he was old-fashioned and rather regarded his naval rank as irrelevant to his actual work. So his formal message, ranks and all, was yet another reason to worry. There was a volume of hidden communication in that one short broadcast, and Mark wanted to be certain that he understood every word and nuance of it, at his earliest convenience, as Commander La Barbe had said.
‘On my way, Chief. Captain Out.’ He lifted his thumb off Transmit. ‘Has any of you guys got a flashlight handy?’
The quickest-thinking of the control operators reached unerringly through the velvety blackness and pulled a torch out of its clips. He switched it on and Mark was able to pick his way carefully across the command area towards the light. Long before he actually relieved the crewman of the suddenly vital light source, all the others had found theirs too.
As soon as Mark had the torch he felt more secure and in control himself. He swept the beam across the deck, noting ruefully the drunken disposition of the periscope, the pile of indeterminate metalwork on the spot where he normally stood. A pile that looked big enough to have incapacitated him; perhaps to have killed him. The good fortune of his escape buoyed him up. He crossed to his near-death experience at once and shone the beam up the cavernous shaft immediately above. That was where all these deadly bits and pieces had come from, after all. The bright beam should have revealed the regimented perspective of shaft and rungs reaching up towards their vanishing point, which lay, after various trapdoors and safety features, at the hatch in the cockpit. Instead there was a twisted mess of agonized metal closing off the gaping throat as effectively as a hangman’s noose.
Mark brought the bright beam down with a shiver of apprehension. ‘Sit tight, men,’ he ordered. ‘And let’s ration the light, if you please. One flashlight only for the time being. I’m off to engineering now. I may be some time.’
Mark followed the torch beam along the deck, careful of his footing. It might have
been raining ironwork down here as well. But it soon became clear that he could just as well have followed his nose or his ears. For, although the deck was reassuringly clear, there was a sinister smell of burning that got stronger and stronger as he went aft, deeper into the chief’s domain.
Here, at first distantly and then more steadily as he proceeded, there were fireflies of brightness that danced up and down, coming and going amid the massive shadows without apparent logic. As he approached, the wraiths steadied into torch beams and the muttering gurgle of watery silence was joined by a mutter of conversation. He began to focus not only on the words but on the people speaking them, as a distraction from his increasing nervousness if nothing else.
‘In the early days a crash back would generate more than sixty thousand amperes.’ That could only be Lieutenant Chen, La Barbe’s right hand. She had gained her engineering qualifications in Vancouver but seemed happy enough in the Atlantic Fleet. Indeed, in the Arctic Fleet. ‘Sixty thousand would fry more than an egg, you know?’
‘But that was in the early days,’ Sub-Lieutenant Gupta answered, every bit as much of a techno nerd as she, and not to be outdone by her knowledge of the motors’ history. ‘They fixed that.’
‘Like they fixed the little fault that opened the torpedo tube slide valves at the same time as the rear doors, allowing free passage into the forward sections to whatever ocean you were under at the time...’ Chen countered derisively.
‘Yes, they fixed that. And it’s not relevant here, is it? This is everything fried, not flooded.’ La Barbe himself tried to pull his warring underlings back to the immediate problem.
‘Everything fried when Chicoutimi flooded, and she’s our sister boat,’ observed Chen waspishly.
‘Indeed. But there was water involved there too. And less waterproofing than specified in the design. Here it is just the power surge generated by the destruction of the propulsion...’ insisted La Barbe.
‘Is it true that the diesels were actually designed for locomotives?’ demanded Gupta suddenly.
‘Yes,’ answered La Barbe shortly. The question was also irrelevant to the matter in hand.
‘They would be better in the French TGV or a Canadian Pacific locomotive,’ sniffed Chen.
‘Anywhere, in fact, but here!’ agreed the captain, entering the conversation at last. ‘What have you to tell me that you don’t want to say over the walkie-talkie, Chief?’
The three engineering officers looked at one another almost guiltily. At last, as his duty dictated, it was the commander who answered, as though addressing a class at the academy. ‘Well, Captain, when the screw stopped spinning the motors were still running. I was not here. I was looking at the aquaplane servos in the bow. No one shut the motor down. No one disengaged the shaft, the motors themselves or the electrical circuits that they feed. The result of course was a catastrophe.
‘The screw stopped. The end of the shaft attached to the screw stopped. The motors did not stop. The end of the shaft attached to the motors did not stop. The shaft twisted in the middle like a length of play-dough and tore itself apart. The motors immediately went into uncontrolled overdrive, for there was no resistance now in the broken shaft. The amount of power they were passing into the system jumped incontinently. They burned themselves out almost instantly. But not before the extra charge of their uncontrolled running burned out almost all of the fuses, relays and circuits aboard.
‘Thus this process not just caused the motors to overload, but generated such a surge in the electrical system between the motors and the batteries that everything seems to have fried. We are very fortunate indeed not to be facing a major fire...’
‘Like they did in Chicoutimi,’ added Chen feelingly. As well she might, thought Mark. For Chen’s opposite number, Lieutenant Chris Saunders, had died from smoke inhalation after fighting the fire on Chicoutimi.
‘OK,’ said Mark patiently. ‘The question is this: How long will it all take to fix?’
‘To fix it all,’ answered La Barbe slowly, ‘will take a long time...’
‘Well, let’s get started...’
‘A long time in a dry dock. With a full team of engineers doing an effective electrical refit,’ completed La Barbe with just a little more emphasis than was strictly necessary.
‘And of course replacing the motors - or the vast majority of the parts...’ added Chen, her voice prissy and dead.
‘Not to mention the screw, the shaft, the gears, the couplings, the...’ continued Gupta with some relish, every bit as lugubrious as the Provencal Dumas.
Mark just gaped at them, his mind racing. ‘Can you fix any of it?’ he asked at last. ‘Enough to give us back light and heat. And power to the pumps?’
La Barbe looked at his young acolytes. ‘If we cannibalize some of the unnecessary circuitry...’ he began.
‘Take it as read that we’ll not need to even try restoring propulsion and see what we can take out of those systems...’ Chen took up the idea and began to run with it.
‘Prioritize pumps, then light and heat,’ insisted Mark, already looking to the future.
‘Air-con and maybe galley’ added Gupta, not to be outdone.
‘And the infirmary. We’ll not get through this without someone somewhere aboard getting hurt or worse,’ insisted Mark. ‘And communications if it can be done...’ He realized he hadn’t even mentioned the state of the conning tower to the chief. And he opened his mouth to do so now.
Before Mark could say a word, however, his walkie-talkie started calling. ‘Captain. Captain, are you receiving me? Over...’ He didn’t recognize the voice, but the tone made his short hairs stir in a way that they hadn’t in the crisis so far. There was bad news coming. There was very bad news coming.
‘Captain here. Over.’
‘Captain, this is Petty Officer Watson in the infirmary. Over.’
‘Yes, Watson? Over.’
‘Captain, we have a death here. Over.’
‘Leading Seaman Faure? I know he was accidentally killed earlier. Over.’
‘No, Captain. It’s not Faure. And it wasn’t an accident. I think we may need some backup. Can you come here at once?’
Mark was in action at once. ‘Do what you can, Chief,’ he ordered and turned on his heel like a guardsman on sentry duty. Petty Officer 1st Class ‘Doc’ Watson was the man in charge of the infirmary because he was the most level-headed, down-to-earth unflappable man aboard. No malingerer or shirker could get past him. No wide-boy or double-dealer could get anywhere near his meticulously catalogued supplies. And no physical damage, wound or ailment in the voyage so far had fooled him or found his medical knowledge wanting. When a man like Doc Watson called for backup he got it post-haste.
‘Talk me through it, Doc,’ said Mark as he retraced his steps towards the crews quarters in the bows. ‘Who’s your casualty?’
‘Ordinary Seaman Annie Blackfeather. Neck broken. Face beaten in.’
‘God Almighty! Do you know what happened?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Doc Watson. ‘I know that. Though I doubt it’ll do us much good in the short run. I know what happened. How it happened. And who did it, come to that...’
Twelve
Jonah
Paolo Ursini woke from one nightmare into another that was infinitely worse. To be fair, he didn’t really wake at all. There was only the most fleeting instant of horror-filled consciousness between one state and the other.
Paolo’s nightmare dream was a mixture of the last conscious observations he had made, floating on the restless surface above the lost La Carihuela, as the submarine came up at him. It had looked so strange that he had not understood what it was to begin with. He had seen it - and experienced the full horror of it - like some unimaginable shark wrapped in its shroud of ghastly netting. The simple terror of the sight had engendered a kind of soul-deep panic in him. That in turn had caused the strange half-waking sensations that had taken him like a sleepwalker through the water, up the nets and aboard the monst
er itself to attack the fair-faced man who stood above the gaping hatch. And to collapse into a coma when the sensations - and the terror - proved too much for his reeling sanity.
But with the coma had come the dream.
It was a dream in which he had been eaten by the monstrous shark. He had felt his bones shatter in the grip of its terrible jaws. He had known that his organs were crushed to soup and jelly within him. He had felt himself sliding helplessly down its gullet, head banging on the cartilage that formed its whalelike throat. He had felt himself huddling in a foetal ball deep in its abyssal belly as first cold saliva and then other food - fish this time - and finally the scalding blood and broken bits of some other victim had all showered down on him.
And in the dream Paolo had passed from the belly of the beast into the thudding, pulsing passageways of its gut. Had felt the clothes dissolving off his body. Had felt the acid scrubbing at his skin. Had heard the monster screaming for more victims with an overpowering bellow that was everything he understood of naked terror.
Or rather, everything he understood of terror until the fatal instant that he had opened his eyes, woken by that terrible, feral screaming.
He had opened his eyes to utter blindness. That had seemed as insanely logical as all the rest, as he passed from one state to another - for if his clothes and skin were dissolving in the gut of the leviathan, how could the soft jelly of his eyes have withstood the digestive corrosion? His nose and mouth were burning now as well, though the digestive juices consuming him smelt and tasted strangely of electrical fires. He drew in his breath to howl with the howling of the monster but the burning in his throat filled up his lungs and he choked into silence after all. Then the brightness came. Frail and dim as the luminosity on the lure of an angler fish down in the abyssal deeps it swam through the stench and agony towards him. And it showed him things that were even more terrible than a dream where he was blind and naked being dissolved in the belly of some monstrous fish.