Polaris

by Todd Tucker

  “There’s a war on,” said the captain. “That’s the world we live in. And we’re all beholden to the needs of the Navy.”

  “The needs of the Navy?” asked Ramirez. “Or the needs of the Alliance?”

  “Tell yourself whatever you need to tell yourself to keep this submarine running and to fulfill our mission. I personally don’t give a shit if you do it for the Alliance or if you do it for the Navy.”

  “Did you have to promote her, Captain? Did somebody tell you to?”

  There was a long pause as the captain considered his answer. “Yes,” he said. “It’s been encouraged for some time now: they want Alliance officers in command positions. But the guidance was widely ignored. So they formalized it. Every boat gets a Number Two from the Alliance.”

  “So Moody is a token.”

  “Would you rather have Frank Holmes as your XO?”

  They paused for a moment; Hana pictured them drinking their coffee, the easy camaraderie they would never share with her.

  Ramirez finally spoke. “To think, they told me an engineering degree would be good for my career.”

  “Yeah?” said the captain. “They told me I’d be fighting Russians.”

  * * *

  “Commander Moody?”

  She was snapped awake by the appearance of Frank Holmes, that muscular, dogmatic, slightly dense incarnation of the Alliance officer stereotype.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I think I fell asleep for a second.”

  “About earlier…”

  “Forget it,” she said with a wave of her hand.

  “Do you want a relief, ma’am? Hit the rack for a few minutes?”

  It was incredibly tempting, but her eyes drifted down to the screen in front of her, where they had inched closer to the degaussing range, and their shadow had stayed, maddeningly, the same distance away.

  “No,” she said. “No time. Find Hamlin. I sent him to medical a few minutes ago to get fixed up. Tell him to slap a Band-Aid on his head and to meet me in the wardroom so we can talk about what’s next.”

  Frank snapped to attention with ridiculous precision. “Aye, aye, Captain.”

  He spun on his heel and walked down the ladder to find Hamlin.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Two miles away, on the Typhon submarine, Commander Jennifer Carlson listened to the recording from sonar. Her second-in-command, Lieutenant Banach, stood next to her. She pushed a button, and listened again.

  “Any ideas?” she asked Banach.

  He shrugged. “It’s loud.” He spoke with the thick accent of his native province, and he’d learned to speak in short direct sentences to avoid confusion.

  She nodded back. “Thank you for that penetrating analysis, Lieutenant.”

  Carlson was the purest killer Typhon had, in any branch of the military. On the first day of the war, three long years earlier, she’d sunk two Alliance warships in the South China Sea: a guided missile cruiser, and a destroyer that was sent to destroy her. Afterward, she’d steamed among the wreckage, taking photographs through the scope, looking at what they’d done with their two torpedoes, and acquired a taste for killing that had never been sated. She didn’t believe in politics, diplomacy, or anything that Military Intelligence told her. She wasn’t even all that fond of nuclear power, which kept her highly engineered killing machine moving through the water. She believed only in torpedoes, missiles, and, when thing got really tight, bullets. She believed in angles of attack, ranges, and keeping her baffles clear. Because she was pure, the crew adored her.

  She hit play again.

  “You’re right,” she said. “It is loud.”

  In fact, for them to hear noise from an Alliance submarine with their crude sensors, it had to be deafening. “I hear hatches slamming shut, depth changing, alarms. Maybe even a gunshot.”

  “Impossible,” said Banach. “They carry no small arms onboard Polaris-class boats.”

  “Well, they also say that Polaris-class boats are silent, so I guess you can’t believe everything you read.”

  “Do you think our man onboard is taking over? Giving us a signal that the mutiny is complete?”

  “No,” she said, “unfortunately. They are still submerged, still cruising. Maybe it was a failed attempt.”

  “Such weakness,” he said. “Our crew could easily overpower us if they chose to mutiny.”

  “True, they are armed to the teeth, and extremely bored.”

  “What shall we do?”

  “Stay on it,” she said. “Same range. They don’t seemed inclined to shoot us at the moment. We should have some contact soon from our spy; if he’s still alive, maybe he’ll fill us in.”

  “Aye, Captain.”

  She put the headphones on and listened again, let her imagination go to work on the noise. Banach hadn’t learned it yet, but on a ship with no windows and very limited sensors, an imagination was a vital military asset. She pictured the submarine in front of her, and tried to picture the chaos within. She badly wanted to shoot them, and they were there for the taking. But she’d learned from her experience with the airplane; it was better to shoot somebody on their return from Eris Island, not on their journey there. Take out the vessel and their precious cargo.

  The temptation was great because she needed to kill an enemy submarine; it was a gap in her résumé. She’d come close once, very close, in an episode that was now taught to midshipmen in her home country, and celebrated on military holidays.

  * * *

  It was in those early days off Eris Island, one year into the war, when they were watching the drones take off endlessly through the scope. Initially they’d tried to count them all, but it proved impossible. Instead they tried to count how many took off in an hour, and then counted the hours. A few times the drones had seemed to notice her scope, and they quickly submerged, moved to a different sector, and resumed their surveillance of the island. Other than the drones, they had the ocean around Eris to themselves. No Allied ship came anywhere near them.

  Carlson sent messages to fleet headquarters. They replied indifferently, asking pointedly if she had plans to surveil any targets of military value. Then the drones began dropping their little bombs on their surface ships, and the commodore asked her why she hadn’t sent more thorough reports about the drone menace.

  At some point, a daring Allied submarine commander decided to take a peek at the waters around the island as well—perhaps looking for her, perhaps just equally curious about the business at Eris Island. He was able to completely sneak up on them. The Allied submarine service had made a cult out of silence, and her primitive sonar couldn’t have detected a submarine that was twice as loud. Her submarine was designed to be durable and cheap, so they could manufacture them in vast quantities and overwhelm the enemy. This might have been helpful to the commodore, who commanded twenty-six boats, but it did little good to Carlson, who had only one. Banach was in control when the enemy attacked.

  “Torpedo in the water!” he shouted into the intercom. By the time she ran into control, Banach was already turning sharply toward the unmistakable sound of muzzle doors opening and a torpedo hurtling toward them.

  “Launch the countermeasures!” he said, and suddenly the sound of the screaming torpedoes was replaced by a wall of noise pumped in the water via their noisemakers, shot out of both signal ejectors, one on each side of the Typhon boat.

  Carlson looked at the sonar display while Banach tried to save the ship. Their countermeasures appeared to be working; the torpedoes were peeling away.

  “Ready bearing and shoot!” he said, sending a bearing to fire control. The enemy ship, of course, far more sophisticated than theirs, remained silent. The only datum they had for her location was the sound of the torpedo being launched. They were two people shooting at each other in a dark room, firing at the muzzle flash.

  There was a rumble beneath her feet, a loud whoosh of air, and her ears popped as her submarine fired her torpedo.

  “Torpedo is in hig
h speed!” said Banach.

  “Very well,” said Carlson. That left them just four torpedoes.

  She looked at sonar. The enemy torpedoes were behind them now, drawn to the noise of the countermeasures. But the Alliance weapons were steerable and could turn back, as long as there was a man alive on the Alliance boat.

  “Fire another?” asked Banach.

  She was contemplating just that when they heard an explosion to starboard.

  “They’re hit!” said Banach. Carlson watched the display.

  For a few moments, they listened for the telltale sounds of a submarine dying: tanks exploding, the gush of flooding, the desperate roar of an emergency blow system. But nothing came.

  “They’re still alive,” she said. She heard something, though, hull popping as the enemy ascended. “But she’s going shallow. They must be hurt.”

  “To fight the flooding,” said Banach. “Shall we finish her off?”

  Carlson nodded. “Not now,” she said. “We might not have to.”

  The wounded ship was noisy, undoubtedly busy trying to save herself. Carlson maneuvered them away from her, to disguise their position, but the Alliance boat seemed like the fight, at least temporarily, had gone out of her. “Take us to PD,” she said. “Let’s see if we can take a look.”

  Banach complied and drove the ship carefully upward. Carlson raised the scope right on the bearing of the Alliance submarine. She was making so much noise now, she was impossible to miss, the pumps working to get water off her, men hammering on pipes trying to staunch the flood. She took a quick sweep around, verified there were no drones on top of them. It was clear, for the moment. The drones were like that, they had learned, could come and go with the randomness of a rain squall. She trained the ship’s single eye back on the bearing where she knew the enemy ship was fighting for her life.

  “I see her,” she said. “I see the scope.” There it was, like a pencil sticking straight out of the water, a small V behind it as it moved slowly forward.

  “Why aren’t they surfacing?” said Banach. “Do they think we don’t know where they are?”

  “That can’t be it,” said Carlson. “They’re making too much noise. They really should surface if the flooding is as bad as it sounds. Of course, I’ll shoot them if they do.”

  Suddenly a drone caught her eye on the horizon, sweeping lazily across the water, searching.

  “I see,” she said.

  “Captain?”

  “They’re afraid of the drones, just like we are.”

  “Drones will attack their own?”

  “They will attack anything, they are the dogs of war.”

  “So what shall we do?”

  She had an idea. “Tell me, Banach, how many of those inflatable lifeboats do we have?”

  The question startled him, and he had to think. “Three.”

  “And what is the direction of the current?”

  Banach went to the chart, did some calculations, and told her. “Just three knots, running southwest.”

  “Tell our sergeant to prepare to launch one of those life rafts from torpedo tube number three.”

  “Can I explain to him why?”

  “I’d rather not say,” said Carlson. “In case it doesn’t work.”

  * * *

  She positioned the boat carefully so the wounded enemy with its periscope was down-current. She thought about timing, watched the random drones that were still in the sky, not having spotted either scope. She wanted to be close enough that by the time the drones spotted the raft, it was directly on top of the enemy, right on its scope ideally. If the drones got to the raft too early, it would be a waste. And then she would have to leave because the drones would eventually spot her scope. Doing the rough math in her head, she crept to about six hundred yards until she finally gave the order.

  “Deploy the boat,” she said. She heard the clank of the hatch, the rumble of the torpedo tube ejecting its contents.

  “The lifeboat is deployed,” said Banach, taking the report on his headphones as she watched through the scope.

  A few seconds later it popped to the surface, a bright orange bundle. Immediately it began to inflate and unfold, growing to full size in seconds. It appeared motionless, but Carlson could see that it was in fact moving with the gentle current toward the enemy’s periscope. It looked almost comical, a big orange tent bobbing happily upon the sea. Triangular panels on the outside had a metallic sheen—radar reflectors, designed to make it highly visible to rescuers. She couldn’t take her eyes off it.

  After all, it was designed to be seen.

  And soon enough the drones saw it.

  The first drone flew directly over it at high speed. Carlson panicked for a moment; it was too early. But the drone didn’t drop its bomb; instead it flew high into the sky. Alerting its brothers, she realized.

  A swarm of four came in, flying at high speed and in a direct line. By now, the bright orange boat was directly against the enemy scope.

  When the first bomb landed, the lifeboat simply evaporated, like an exploding balloon. Tiny pieces of orange fabric littered the ocean around them like confetti. The more substantial parts of the raft remained afloat, in a pool around the scope, and the drones poured their bombs upon them.

  Whether a drone targeted the scope, or it was just a lucky shot that missed the life raft’s detritus, Carlson didn’t know. But the bomb landed directly atop the scope, shattering it, sending smoke and sparks into the sky. Too late, the enemy captain lowered it, undoubtedly with new fires and flooding to combat.

  “Shall we finish her off with a torpedo?” said Banach.

  “No,” said Carlson, although it pained her. She wanted to preserve her remaining four torpedoes. “They are damaged beyond repair. She is out of the fight. Even if she doesn’t sink.”

  “Very good, Captain,” he said. The enemy ship was making a racket as she pulled away, damaged and clinging to life. Carlson could hear alarms onboard from her ship’s hydrophones—the enemy’s overworked pumps—and she imagined the screaming of burned men inside.

  * * *

  “Everything OK, Captain?” Banach had caught her in her reverie.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You look angry.”

  She nodded. In fact, she was. She knew she’d done the right thing in not finishing her off, in conserving those last four torpedoes, not using another on a ship that was already crippled beyond repair. They were the same four torpedoes that she still possessed, and it was looking like they might very well need them for the fight ahead. But it galled her that the Alliance submarine had gotten away with her life. Galled her that somewhere a submarine captain was sitting in an officers’ club, telling the story of his close call, his escape, his survival.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Pete walked away from the control room, still trying to gain his bearings—and to recall some memories of what had happened to the Polaris, and his role in it. He climbed down a ladder as he headed aft to avoid McCallister, locked in a steel cage one level above.

  Exiting the forward compartment through a watertight hatch, he stepped into the missile compartment: two parallel rows of missile tubes stretching into the distance like a forest of steel trees. There were few signs of the mutiny in here, save for a wisp of smoke that followed him from the forward compartment and the darkness caused by the partial power outage. But there were signs everywhere of a ship that had been stretched to its limit. A shower room, wedged between two missile tubes, was taped off with a sign: OUT OF COMMISSION. The floor was dusty and the stalls had no curtains. Next to it were two nine-man bunk rooms that were dark, their metal racks bare of any mattresses. It looked like the ship had been designed to carry far more men than she had now, and that she had been reduced, even before the mutiny, to the bare minimum complement. The few lights that remained energized blinked and buzzed, and the air smelled dank, like somewhere below him a bilge needed to be pumped. The Polaris, like her crew, had been at sea far too long
.

  He reached the end of the missiles and came upon two massive machines that were covered in indicators and dials. One had a large red tag hanging from a breaker that read OUT OF COMMISSION. Its twin looked functional, but wasn’t energized. Pete looked it over for a minute and found a small sign: OXYGEN GENERATORS. Behind the amnesia, his engineer’s mind went to work, looking at the dials and indicators, and soon enough put together a rough picture of how the machines functioned. They took the one natural resource that the submarine had access to in unlimited quantities: water. They placed a large voltage across that and tore the water molecules into their constituent parts: hydrogen and oxygen.

  While the machine was turned off, a monitoring panel remained lit—a small diagram of the ship with a digital indicator for each of the three main compartments: forward compartment, missile compartment, and engine room. A selector knob allowed him to choose different attributes to measure: oxygen, carbon monoxide, and carbon dioxide. The oxygen level of the engine room and missile compartment was 20 percent—the number was in green, leading Pete to believe that was in the acceptable range. The forward compartment reading was lower and in bright red: 14 percent. Perhaps a result of the fire? The panel showed an open valve between the oxygen banks and each compartment, and Pete pictured an outlet somewhere dispensing the invisible, odorless air that they all needed to survive. But the oxygen banks, he saw, were severely depleted. One was completely empty, and the second was at less than one-quarter capacity. Could anyone onboard make that machine run and create new oxygen? Anyone who wasn’t locked in an escape trunk? He continued aft.

  Pete surprised himself by arriving at medical. It seemed like a lot of his memories were like that, trapped right below the surface. If someone had asked him how to find medical, he never could have described it. But wandering through the ship, thinking about everything else, he had found his way there.

  The door was unlocked. He found a light switch but it did nothing when he flipped it. In the darkness, he could see locked glass cabinets containing gauze and bandages. He tried the doors, hoping he might procure some industrial-grade painkillers, but they were all locked, and despite the chaos that seemed to have descended upon the Polaris, he was reluctant to break into them and violate the thin glass and tiny locks that guarded them.