The Divine Firmament was renamed the Curtain of Flames and became the first Destiny III class. And the unit performed admirably, if expensively. The Destiny III was matched against various Destiny II-class ships in exercises. The Two-class crews were literally fighting for their jobs; to lose an exercise against a Three class would signal the admirals that the time had come for the computer to replace manned crews. Unfortunately, although the manned crews invariably came out on top in combat, the MSDF leadership had still decided on committing the fleet to the Three class. Perhaps it was all the promises they had given the government, or the men standing to make a profit from the computerization. Whatever the reason behind the decision, the MSDF admirals had decided on the Destiny III, spending the next two years building nothing but Three-class ships, neglecting even to maintain the Two-class vessels.
The result had been disastrous, Toyoda thought. The intelligence message on his personal pad computer told the complete story. The Three-class computer-driven ships had triumphed in sinking the enemy surface fleets, but in the process they had been sunk, smashed to bits by the fleet-escort submarines. After spending the time and resources to build more than a dozen Three-class ships, they were now gone, not responding to their orders to transmit their locations to the Galaxy satellites. And now the defense of the Home Islands was left to the Two-class submarines, which were capable but neglected for two years by the shipyards of Japan.
There were dozens of American submarines sailing for the Home Islands, and only a limited number of torpedoes on the Destiny II-class ships deployed to guard Japan. What would happen when those torpedoes were gone? Less capable American submarines would survive to fire overwhelming numbers of torpedoes at the Two class. The American torpedoes were small and slow and relatively ineffective, but ten of them together could certainly sink a Two class, double hull or not.
If the leadership had built more of the Two class and less of the Three class. But there was no sense thinking that way.
Toyoda got up, put on his shoes and took his evening walk through the ship, going first into the control room, where his first officer Ryunosuke Kusaka presided over the modified battlestations section watch. Toyoda waved Kusaka over to the forward door of the room, where the other officers in the watch section couldn’t hear their conversation. “Any contact?”
“No, Captain. You know I would have called you if there were.”
“It just seems odd. The computer files — are they set correctly?”
“Sir, the Second Captain is scanning the sea for the known characteristics of all flights of American 688 class, with a secondary scan in action for any units of the British Royal Navy or the French Navy. There has been nothing, nothing at all.”
“Maybe our job is over, maybe the enemy will pull back.”
“I think there will be more action. Captain. I feel it.”
“I feel it too, First. They are out there and they’re coming for us.”
“Yes, sir.”
There seemed little more to say. Toyoda left and took the stairs to the middle level and the messroom. He was amazed at the officers awake in the messroom, some of them studying for the next rank, some writing haiku, some in a lively discussion that died when he came in.
Toyodo thought of the loneliness of command, that he had no one to confide his own thoughts to. He smiled at the men, wondering why these off-watch men didn’t sleep. In another six hours they would be on watch with him in the control room. Probably they were awake for the same reason he was — tension. He spoke a few words, wondering if Toshumi Tanaka — the lead commanding officer of the flotilla and a flaming maladjusted martinet — ever took time to speak to his men. Not that it mattered, Toyoda thought. He said good night to the men and returned to his stateroom.
He shut the door behind him, deciding to take a last look at the Second Captain’s sonar displays. The computer-filtered data was empty. He scanned the raw unprocessed data, realizing there was too much to examine and what there was was random. He was reminded of a time in his youth when he had been in love with the television set and his parents were gone and a thunderstorm had knocked out the cable system, but he had not accepted that, and in his desperation to watch television he went through every channel, looking for a show. He flipped through channel after channel, seeing nothing but snow, but sometimes seeing a shadow of a face, a hint of printing, a glance at people walking, but then the snow would prevail, leaving him wondering if he had just imagined it. The raw sonar data was like that, all random noise of every frequency and tone and duration.
Looking for the noise made by a machine in that mess was like looking into a rainy jungle for a camouflaged soldier. He snapped off the console and got back into bed.
SS-808 ETERNAL SPIRIT
Comdr, Soemu Toyoda pulled his uniform off, draped it on his chair and climbed into the bed wearing only his shorts. Back in the control room the first officer had orders to continue to patrol the waters offshore until contact was gained on the next enemy sub. Toyoda’s Eternal Spirit had already put three enemy vessels on the bottom, each of them easily detected on sonar, but since then the sea had been empty. Completely empty. Toyoda wondered why, if there were no more enemy ships, there had been no word on the radio command and control circuits about what was going on. It seemed odd, but then so had this entire mission. He turned off his reading lamp, feeling tense and nervous. There was something not right about the situation but he couldn’t put his mind on what it was.
He shut his eyes and tried to think about the woman he had met just prior to sailing. Her name was Suni Ariga and she was half his age and beautiful, vital in a way he wasn’t, mysterious and sexual. She had made it very clear from the start that she wanted him sexually, and it was strange — her generation was so different from his own, so willing to say what they wanted. The young women were entering the work force and threatened to knock on the door of the military someday. But it was the women’s sexuality that was so difficult to accept, centuries of courting rituals being washed down the sewer pipe with other Japanese customs as the television set homogenized the world, the Western influence spreading more by the hour. He returned his thoughts to Suni, seeing her face, remembering how her eyes had looked into his, how her mouth had moved on his chest. He could feel himself getting hard and tried to ignore the feeling, one welcome in the company of an aroused woman but very unwelcome alone inside a ship filled only with men at war.
USS PIRANHA
Bruce Phillips came into control, his cotton poncho flying in the breeze of his passage, his boots clumping on the deckplates, coming to a halt in front of Meritson.
“Man silent battlestations!”
Meritson snapped his fingers at the chief of the watch, having anticipated Phillips’ next action.
There was no circuit-one announcement. The word went out on the phone circuits to the watchstanders in the spaces, each of them wearing cordless phones that put them in touch with the control room. The forward compartment phone talkers woke up the section’s duty messengers, who went through the berthing compartments and woke up the crew. Men jumped out of their coffinlike racks, curtains sliding aside. They climbed into their coveralls, grabbed glasses, shoes, all in the tight dimly lit spaces that were a challenge just to walk through much less dress in. In twenty frantic seconds seventy men rocketed out of the berthing rooms, coverall uniforms wrinkled and stale with sweat, hair spiked from sleep, eyes puffy, all business.
Those seventy men dispersed, some heading aft, others forward or below. In the control room two dozen watchstanders came silently in. Phone talkers strapped on headsets. Plotting officers took their stations at the plot tables snapping fresh sheets of tracing paper over the flat panel displays. The row of consoles of the BSY-2 attack center filled with officers, each trained to manipulate his panel in a unique way, each dancing with the computer to a different song but on the same dance floor. The arriving helmsman waved out the watch section’s helmsman, the new arrival the ship’s best, t
he regular watch helmsman getting up and muttering what the ship’s course and depth were, the battlestations helmsman sliding into the control seat, the yoke of the controller slipping into his hands.
On the conn Scott Court, the navigator, took over the officer of the deck watch from Meritson. Their conversation was short as Meritson gave a rapid data dump in Court’s ear: “Target One confirmed Destiny II bearing two zero six on towed array narrowband’s 154 Hertz, bearing ambiguity resolved, own ship on one four five, depth eight hundred, speed all ahead two-thirds with turns for eight, ship rigged for ultraquiet, we’ve got a layer at 110 feet with a good sound channel between seven hundred and nine hundred. We’ve got weapons one through four up and warm, outer doors open, target solution programmed but weak. The Mark 50s are backups to the Vortex battery. We’ve got Vortex unit two coming up to speed now, gyro readback due in forty seconds.”
“I’ve got it, get the hell out of here. I relieve you, sir,” Court said to Meritson.
“I stand relieved, sir. Helm, Quartermaster, Commander Court has the deck and the conn.”
“This is Lieutenant Commander Court, I have the deck and the conn,” Court announced to the room, his voice quiet.
Meritson slipped into the seat at position two in the center of the attack center. He had already configured the display for dot-stack mode on Target One. He leaned back in the leather seat, looking at the upper and lower display, his fingers resting on the two circular knobs and the fixed function keys, feeling the fit of his function. He was a biological link in the submarine’s machine, the best man for this job. He was plugged into the tactical situation, the pos-two battle stations operator one of the most prestigious positions on the ship. He and the BSY computer were a two-brain team charged with finding the target, predicting exactly what he would do in five minutes’ time in the face of uncertain and conflicting data. Without his work, the captain would be helpless.
Meritson smiled to himself, his mind becoming one with the BSY system, his senses reaching out into the sea with the sonar gear, the target in the palm of his hand.
Roger Whatney, the Royal Navy lieutenant commander and executive officer, walked quickly into control, strapped on a one-eared headset and tested the phone circuit with his south-of-England accent. Whatney was the firecontrol coordinator, the owner of the “solution” to the target, the output of Meritson’s pos-two console meshed with the manual plot’s backup solution.
Whatney would function as the captain’s auxiliary brain, a sounding board, fully empowered to disagree with the commanding officer where the target’s motion was concerned although the captain could override him with a gesture.
Next to Meritson, on the console further forward, position one, Joe Katoris seated himself and put on a headset.
Katoris would back up Meritson, doing his own dance with the computer, trying to outdo Meritson’s solution, and in place to track the secondary target should another Destiny or other hostile target appear on the scene. His other function was to return the console to geographic mode so Phillips could see a God’s-eye view of the battle zone, then toggle back to his dot-stacker mode when Phillips no longer needed the geo plot.
On the console next to Meritson aft, position three, was Ensign Braxton, his display a hybrid, able to stack dots or do a line of sight mode on friendly contacts, if Piranha had had a wolfpack partner or surface action group to be careful of. He was the safety man, there to remind Whatney and Phillips of friendly ships and keep the torpedoes away from them. And if a hostile ship surprised them he would track it for a quick reaction shot.
Aft of Braxton in the fourth console Lt. Tom McKilley, the weapons officer, was at that weapons-control console, a larger version of the first three units, this one with a full computer keyboard on the lower section on the right. The upper display was filled with colored windows that displayed weapon status, one window for the torpedoes, another for the Vortex units. The lower part of the console to the left of the keyboard was dominated by a large stainless steel gleaming lever with a suicide knob on it, a semicircle engraved onto the surface of the console, the word standby written at the nine o’clock position, the letters spelling fire at three o’clock. The lever was the firing trigger for the torpedoes and missiles. At one point Dynacorp had experimented with a simple covered square soft-feel function key for the firing mechanism, but the submarine captains had complained bitterly, the firing trigger dear to them, the wimply fixed function key an insult to John Wayne macho submariners who tested it. They demanded their World War II trigger back and soon got it.
McKilley brought up the Vortex window and monitored the gyro spinup and data readback for unit number two, the forward upper missile on the port side. He jettisoned the missile cap forward and the blast cover aft of the missile tube, the tube now open to the sea fore and aft. He went through the software screens, testing the missile, finally satisfied.
On the conn Scott Court in his starched and creased coveralls turned to scruffy Bruce Phillips in his cowboy boots, still wearing the flat-brimmed leather hat with a headset crammed underneath it, his dingy poncho covering his chest, the revolver handles protruding from the hip openings. “Sir, battlestations are manned.”
Phillips leaned over the conn rail, squinted his eyes, put out the cigar. He looked down on the watchsection. “Attention in the firecontrol team. We got ourselves a bad guy at bearing two one zero and we’re going to kick him in the tail. You cowpokes got all that? Firing point procedures. Target One, Destiny II class. Vortex unit two.”
“Ship ready, Captain,” Court said. “Weapon pending, sir,” McKilley said. “Solution pending, sir,” Whatney said. “Recommend maneuver to course three zero zero to get a range to the target.”
“Status of the weapon, Weps? Why are you pending?”
“Sir, I need the solution range.”
“Why?”
“If he’s too close the detonation takes us out with it. Remember the icepack, sir? This thing has a kill radius of about two miles.”
“Oh, hell, Weps, he’s way the hell out there, and besides, that’s my problem. Solution status, Coordinator?”
“Sir,” Whatney said, “I’ve got a bearing, but that’s it. It’s not a firing solution.”
“Okay,” Phillips said, loud enough to stop all talking in the room, “listen the hell up. The next man in this watchsection who tells me we need the range to Target One gets a spur in his ass. Straight up the hole. Goddamnit, men, this isn’t like shooting a ridge, this is a fucking… Japanese… submarine. Okay? You got that? Now, dammit, firing point fucking procedures. Vortex two. Target Goddamned One. What’s the status?”
“Ship ready, sir,” Court said. “Weapon ready, sir,” McKilley snapped. “Solution ready. Skipper,” Whatney said. “Shoot on generated bearing!”
“Standby,” McKilley announced, pulling the trigger to the left. “Fire!” Phillips called.
The noise of the missile launch was deafening, but this time Phillips had his fingers clamped into his ears for the thirty seconds it took the unit to clear the immediate vicinity. He looked up at the sonar screen watching the track of the missile, wondering if he were about to go up in smoke himself. Even if he were too close, inside the blast zone of the missile, there was something satisfying knowing that he would at least go down scoring a major hit on one of the Destinys, but then he thought of Abby O’Neal and regretted the thought. He wanted to live through this, and knew only his ship, his crew and his instincts could hope to win this fight.
He waited, one second running into the next, the noise of the Vortex missile long gone. As the silence lingered he wondered if it had been a dud, a dud that had provoked a Nagasaki counterlaunch. Even if it did, he decided, he would not run. He would stand his ground and keep firing Vortex missiles until one hit the target. Hell, a Vortex missile might even target an incoming Nagasaki — wouldn’t that be a trick, a weapon that homed in on and destroyed the enemy’s weapon. Still he waited, and still he heard nothing.
* * *
The Vortex missile blew through the water at terminal velocity, over 300 knots, the waves high above flashing by in a blur. The solid-rocket fuel burned rapidly, the missile getting lighter with each passing second. The unit’s blue laser seeking device scanned the water ahead in a wide cone, the need for last-instant depth and course corrections vital to success.
When the target appeared in the blue light shining through the water, the computer realized the target submarine was far below it, deeper by some three hundred feet. The aft nozzle rotated and sent the missile into a dive as it corrected its course by a few tenths of a degree.
The target size grew from a speck to a huge blur in milliseconds, and the missile’s warhead of seven tons of high molecular density Plasticpac detonated and ignited the sea around it to a temperature approaching the surface of the sun.
* * *
Toyoda in the Eternal Spirit was’still in his bunk thinking of Suni when the missile arrived. The hull ripped open, and the Eternal Spirit became a huge teardrop-shaped mass of vaporized iron and steam rising toward the ocean surface above. The steam formed smaller bubbles, the ocean condensing the steam into smaller bubbles and eventually collapsing them from the pressure and near-freezing ocean temperatures, the sea boiling with loud noise for the next thirty hours.
* * *
“We’re ready to go active. Captain,” Gambini’s voice reported from Piranha’s sonar.
And just then the ship shook to a violent earsplitting explosion as the Vortex missile detonated on target. On the sonar screens, all screens of the broadband system went completely white, the sonar blue-out complete, so much noise in the ocean that there was nothing to hear.
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