Polaris

by Todd Tucker

  To counter this, the Polaris would try to erase her own magnetic signature, or “degauss.” This was named for the “gaus,” a scientific unit of magnetism, and was accomplished by steering the ship between two giant electromagnets. The electromagnetics would temporarily erase the field of the Polaris, making her, for a time, invisible to MAD detection. This was the first step of Hamlin’s mission, getting the Polaris through the range. But first he had to see the drones.

  Looking through the scope, Hamlin could tell the instant the drone had sniffed them out. It was close enough by then that Hamlin could see the glint of the sun on its solar cells, its power-giving wings. Suddenly its graceful, lazy swooping changed. Its wings tightened up from the ninety-degree angle to its body into an attack posture, pointed and fast. It dived until it was just above the surface of the water, corrected its course slightly, and flew directly overhead. He swung the scope to watch it pass by as ESM alarms shrieked in the control room.

  “Flyby!” Hana shouted, cutting out the alarms.

  “Confirmed,” said Pete calmly.

  “Want me to go deep?!” said Holmes.

  “Not yet,” said Hamlin.

  “Why didn’t it bomb us?”

  “A sub at periscope depth, with just a single drone in the area—it doesn’t like its odds. Every algorithm is designed to optimize its chances for a kill, and a single shot at a periscope isn’t good odds. They’re designed to work best in swarms.”

  “So now it’s going to get its friends?”

  “Exactly,” he said. But still he waited, and watched.

  The drone flew high into the sky, almost straight up, twisting as it soared, a motion designed to attract its comrades. An upward-looking sensor on the head of the drones was designed to look for exactly this behavior. Pete found himself curiously pleased at how well the system functioned.

  “Drones approaching from all bearings,” said Hana.

  Pete had no intention of allowing a swarm to get on top of the Polaris in attack formation, but at the same time he couldn’t help but stare at their deadly, beautiful efficiency. The lead drone, the one that had spotted them, banked sharply away from them, and came down to just a few feet above ocean level. The others soon aligned behind it, in a delta formation, pointed right at the Polaris. It had all taken just minutes.

  “Emergency deep!” he ordered.

  Ready for the order, Frank immediately pushed forward on his control yoke, and the ship took a steep downward angle. Pete lowered the scope and braced himself against the angle as they dived. Within seconds, they were at two hundred feet.

  “Make your depth six hundred thirty-two feet,” he said.

  Frank acknowledged the order and drove them deeper, to a point just a few feet above the ocean floor.

  “Will they drop their bombs?” asked Moody.

  “No,” said Pete. “We’re too deep and they know it. They won’t waste their bombs, won’t drop unless they register a ninety percent chance or better of a hit. Like bees with stingers: they only get one shot, and they want to make it count.”

  “So what’s the point?”

  Pete shrugged. “They know we’re here, that’s now stored in their memory; they’ll increase their concentration around us, in this whole sector, ready to pounce if we surface again. They’ll shift the priority of this area, intensify the search patterns. There are thousands of them, and only one of us. They know that time is on their side if we show our heads.”

  “Which we won’t,” said Moody.

  “We will,” said Pete. “In just a few minutes. But if everything goes according to plan, we’ll be invisible.”

  He sat back down at the command console, switching it back from ESM to sonar. Just as planned, they were pointing right at the two bright, parallel lines of the degaussing range. “Right five degrees rudder,” he said.

  Frank repeated the order and eased the ship right.

  “Steady as she goes,” said Hamlin, reaching down to change the scale of the display as they approached.

  While the sonar display just showed two bright green lines, vivid visual images of what lay in front of them came to Pete. First, he saw the degaussing range like an engineering diagram, the spirals of electrical coil, the parallel lines of switches, the banked symbols of the massive batteries that powered it. A remotely activated magnetic switch and a sensor at the entrance, the ship’s magnetic signature activating the range even as the range would soon erase it. This textbook diagram in his mind then gave way to a photographic image, a memory of an underwater survey, stark white lights trained on coral-covered walls, the coils of wire protected by heavy conduit, impermeable to the sea but completely transparent to electricity and magnetism. In this mental movie, a recovered memory from somewhere in his training: a lonely crab skittered across a horizontal beam encrusted in coral.

  “Approaching Point Alpha…” said Moody, jerking him from his reverie. “We’re at the entry point.” It was like trying to pull a car into a one-car garage blindfolded.

  “All stop,” said Hamlin.

  “All stop, aye, sir,” said Frank, immediately ordering the bell.

  He and Moody stood over the display and watched as the giant ship slowly drifted between the two bars on the screen, perfectly centered. In a box on the right hand of the screen, Pete saw the ship’s acceleration in all three dimensions, and watched carefully to see if he would need to add a small rudder angle to counteract a stray current.

  “Nice driving,” said Moody, looking at him with a smile.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” he said. The back of Frank’s neck turned red.

  There was a moment of concern as they drifted inside the range and nothing happened. Pete worried that it had been disabled, either by the relentless destructive power of the ocean and nature, or by an act of war. But then suddenly, the lights in the control room dimmed, and a dozen new alarms went off as the ship was engulfed by a powerful magnetic field.

  “The range is active!” said Moody. “It’s working!” Frank was leaning forward, cutting out the alarms that had sounded as a result. Pete could almost feel the effect upon them, stretching the magnetic field of the Polaris into line with brute, electric force, making them invisible in at least one, crucial way. Frank ably managed their depth as they continued to drift through, no easy feat as the ship’s speed continued to decrease, making ship control difficult.

  “We’re clear of the range,” said Moody as they passed beyond the two bright lines on the console. Their speed had dropped to under three knots. Pete confirmed on the screen in front of him that they had drifted completely through.

  “Ahead one-third,” said Hamlin. “Make your depth eight-five feet.”

  They repeated the process of going to periscope depth. As the scope broke through, Pete immediately turned the ship’s single eye upward.

  A dozen drones swooped around them in circles, their electronic brains excited by the recent sighting. They swooped, dived, and circled around, many of them virtually buzzing their periscope. But none of them attacked.

  “Captain,” said Hamlin, “the ship has been successfully degaussed.”

  “Very well,” she said. “Take us deep and report to my stateroom for debriefing.”

  * * *

  Carlson and Banach watched the Polaris slow and go deep in front of them, immediately after her strange, short trip to periscope depth. They’d done nothing at PD, didn’t shoot trash or broadcast a message. The only thing they seemed to accomplish was attract a swarm of drones, which quickly developed attack formations, forcing the Polaris underwater just in time.

  More precisely, they listened, as they heard the hull popping of a ship descending and the slowing of the ship’s main reduction gear.

  “What are they up to?”

  Carlson shook her head. “I have no idea. They are very deep. Almost to the bottom.”

  Banach took the two strides necessary to get to the other side of the control room, checked the chart. “Are they trying to
lose us?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “They seem to have other things on their mind.”

  “Can our friend onboard tell us anything?”

  She shook her head, frustrated. “Haven’t heard from him lately. That would make this entirely too easy.”

  She walked over to the cramped corner of the control room where Banach stood, where the chart was spread out. In the lower corner of the chart was Eris Island. They’d followed the Polaris up here, to the opposite corner, to a spot that was strangely featureless on the chart, devoid of geological marks or even soundings.

  “Stay at this depth, and slow,” she said. “Let’s see what they are up to.”

  They drifted closer, staying about a mile away, waiting to see what happened. She tried to visualize what they were doing as they slowed almost to a standstill, drifting forward at a speed of just a few knots. She thought about their man onboard, wondered if he was still alive. Maybe he’d been discovered in the ruckus that they’d overheard, exposed, perhaps even executed. No, she thought again, the Alliance prized themselves on their civility too much for that.

  Suddenly, a noise spiked on their sonar. She could hear it right through the hull: a dull ka-chunk.

  Before she could say anything, a delicate alarm sounded next to the chart, a rarely heard alarm that took her a moment to recognize.

  “Captain,” Banach said, “the inertial navigation system is failing.…”

  She looked up at the central panel in front of the dive chair, where a number of other alarms had sounded. Some of the smaller circuit breakers on the ship had opened, and the electrical system was busily resetting itself into a safe mode.

  Meanwhile the Polaris continued drifting slowly forward.

  “Is it some kind of weapon?” asked Banach. “An electric pulse? Are we under attack?”

  “No,” said Carlson. “I don’t think so. But we are at the edge of some kind of electrical field … a powerful one.”

  They waited a few more minutes and then the ka-chunk sound repeated, and the alarm for their navigation system cleared. Breakers continued to reset around them, and she realized that the sound was similar to the one that had come to them on the bearing of the Polaris.

  Once again the Polaris sped up and changed depth, ascending to periscope depth.

  “Let’s follow them up this time,” she said, heading for the scope. Banach climbed into the dive chair and efficiently brought the ship shallow.

  She raised the scope as they came up. Soon they were at periscope depth, and Carlson squinted at the bright equatorial light through the scope. The Polaris was a mile or so away, too far for them to see the scope.

  But she could see the drones everywhere, attracted by their earlier trip to the surface. They were swooping overhead, many of them directly above where she thought the Polaris was sticking up her nose. They were no longer in the tight pattern of attack that she’d seen earlier. The drones were swooping and searching.

  “Captain?”

  “They’ve made themselves invisible to the drones,” she said, the solution suddenly dawning on her. “At least at periscope depth.”

  “How?”

  “Degaussing,” she said. “They must have passed an underwater degaussing range.” It made sense, in a way, this close to Eris Island, probably the outcome of another, earlier research product. She grudgingly respected the Alliance and its technology; it always seemed to work when they needed it. Her leaders, on the other hand, couldn’t provide her ship a microwave oven that would work without bursting into flames.

  “So the drones use MAD?”

  “Apparently,” she said, watching the drones fly obliviously over the Polaris. “At least for shallow boats.”

  “Well!” said Banach. “That is good news for us!”

  She took her eye off the scope and smiled at him. “Yes, it is, Lieutenant. Very good news.”

  Her submarine, like their entire fleet, had been designed with coastal warfare in mind, where mines might be concentrated at strategic chokepoints. And while her government might not be able to make a decent microwave oven, they did control 90 percent of the world’s titanium supply. And if they couldn’t make a decent microprocessor or a clever movie or a decent rock-and-roll record, they could, better than any government on earth, marshal the huge labor forces necessary to mine titanium ore from its inevitably difficult locations, smelt it, and refine the metal. Titanium was a complete pain in the ass to work with. Every weld on her big boat had to be conducted in an inert atmosphere, a blanket of argon or helium to prevent the introduction of oxygen. But that was exactly the kind of laborious process at which her people excelled, and her boat was entirely crafted out of that difficult, rare metal. The Polaris, made out of strong American steel, had to subject itself to an ancient and clever degaussing range to make itself magnetically invisible. But her titanium boat had been born that way.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The ship had limited exercise equipment, but Frank Holmes diligently used it all. He bench-pressed every free weight they had, 220 pounds total, and now he could do twenty-five reps at that weight. He would then curl 100 pounds at a time, five sets of ten, and finish by squatting the full 220 pounds. He felt he was capable of squatting maybe twice as much, but those were all the weights they had, so that was that.

  On off days he did bodyweight exercises: push-ups, pull-ups, dips, and hundreds of crunches. He’d run on the ship’s lone treadmill to chisel off the tiny amount of fat left on his body, and punch the heavy bag that he had diligently repaired over time until now it was virtually constructed of duct tape. Most guys got soft on submarines, he knew, but he’d put on fifteen pounds of pure muscle since deploying on the Polaris two years earlier. Two inches on his chest, an inch on his arms. He would be even bigger, he thought, if the ship had any decent food, but the animal protein his body craved was hard to come by. He’d hoarded some beef jerky, but the last of the real chicken and eggs had long since been consumed, and the next trip to the tender could be months away. As often as he once dreamed about sex with the soft, sweet girls he’d grown up with in Katy, Texas, he now dreamed about protein. He was a proficient masturbator after two years at sea, but there was no equivalent way to satisfy his primal need for meat. Visions of ribs, cheeseburgers, and T-bone steaks filled his dreams. Still, he was enormously strong.

  So moving Ramirez’s dead body was easy once he got past a small, initial burst of squeamishness that came with the sight of all the blood.

  The torpedo room was directly below the staterooms, the lower-most, forward-most compartment on the ship. Frank dragged the corpse to the ladder and briefly tried to think of a more dignified option before simply dropping him down the hatch. The body landed with a thud on the steel deck below. Frank climbed down after it, then dragged Ramirez to the front of the torpedo room, past the racks of indexed Mark 50 torpedoes, and caught his breath before proceeding.

  The torpedo room had always been one of his favorite places on the boat. Filled with forest green torpedoes, it seemed more military than any other place on Polaris, full of manly, menacing firepower. There were four firing tubes in all, two port and two starboard, with the control panel between them. It smelled dank, both because of its low position on the ship and because the torpedo tubes were often filled, drained, and filled again with the sea that surrounded them. When he had volunteered for submarine duty, Frank had a picture in his mind of what a submarine would be like. The torpedo room was one of the few places on the boat that somewhat looked like that picture.

  He had fond memories of the torpedo room as well: during his walk-through for his qualifications, the torpedo room was where Captain McCallister had brought him his final task: to line up the system and shoot a water slug—basically a tube full of water, although the actions would be nearly the same if firing an actual torpedo. Captain McCallister had been patient as he plodded through the procedure, and had given him a few key hints along the way when he was stuck. But he had succee
ded, finally pushing that red button and ejecting a thousand pounds of seawater back into the sea with a satisfying whoosh. He still recalled the subsequent ratcheting and hissing of valves that returned to a firing position, the popping of the ears as the pressure changed with the expulsion of the compressed firing air. Later that night, after dinner, Captain McCallister had pinned gold dolphins on his chest, Frank’s proudest moment aboard. So he fancied himself as something of an expert.

  The memory gave him a brief stab of guilt about the captain. The man had always been good to him, and he obviously knew the submarine better than any man aboard. Hell, he had designed the thing. But Moody said that he was a traitor, and he’d seen it himself. Somebody was giving them away, and with an enemy boat behind them, this wasn’t a time to screw around. He was taking his orders from Moody now, and he was comfortable with that.

  He reached for the bound yellow book of torpedo room procedures, thumbed through it until he found the correct one, and reviewed it carefully, a thick index finger pointing to each step as he slowly read it. He remembered the way Moody had raised an eyebrow at him in the wardroom, the doubt in her voice: he was determined not to screw this up.

  Three of the four tubes had small signs hanging from their breech doors: WARSHOT LOADED. The lower port tube was empty; that would be the one he would use. Everything on the submarine, Frank knew, was controlled by switches and valves. Therefore switches and valves were everywhere, and, amazingly to Frank, every one of them had a specific purpose, a reason for being. He went through the initial lineup in the procedure, verifying the positions of valves and pushing buttons until he thought he was ready. But when he tried to open the big breech door of the lower, port tube, it wouldn’t move. He knew from his practice down there that when things were properly aligned, everything moved with a liquid, well-engineered ease. But when something was amiss, the strongest guy in the world couldn’t make it budge. He studied the panel, trying to figure out what was blocking his progress. An interlock prevented it, he saw, because the muzzle door was open; the ship’s designers logically made it impossible to open both the muzzle and the breech simultaneously. Somehow he’d skipped that step in the procedure, so he backtracked, pushed a button to close the muzzle door, and tried again. Still the breech wouldn’t open.