by Todd Tucker
He sat down and reread the procedure again, starting to get nervous. He was stuck in the middle of it, and if he had screwed something up, he didn’t know how to recover, how to back out, how to start over. He remembered Captain McCallister talking to him two years earlier as he nervously attempted the procedure. “You can’t sink the ship from here, Holmes,” he said. “Don’t worry. Torpedo tubes have been around for over a hundred years, and they’ve pretty much idiot-proofed them.”
But Frank wasn’t worried about the quality of the ship’s idiot-proofing. Rather, he was worried about the ship proving that he was an idiot. He imagined telling Moody that Ramirez’s body was still cooling away on the torpedo room deck. Or stuck in the breech door. Or jammed in a tube. No, he couldn’t face her with that kind of news.
Reading the procedure for the third time, he noticed a warning on the bottom of a page that cautioned not to open the breech door until the tube was fully drained. In fact, yet another interlock prevented it, so that a thousand gallons of seawater wouldn’t gush from the tube onto the deck of the torpedo room. He eagerly found the drain valve for the port tubes and opened it. At first he was alarmed to hear so much water draining from the tube. Submariners were conditioned to worry at the sound of gushing water. But the noise soon diminished as the tube emptied, a yellow warning light went off on the console, and he approached the breech door once again.
As if he had spoken a magic spell, the locking ring turned smoothly, and the door swung open with barely a tug. He bent down and looked inside, peering into the tube with the small flashlight he kept on his belt. It was polished smooth, still damp, and smelled of the sea. He rejoiced for a moment, the battle seeming half won. Now he just needed to get Ramirez inside.
The tube was, he remembered randomly from his qualifications, twenty-one inches in diameter. Seemed like a lot, and Ramirez wasn’t a big guy, but as Frank lifted him up and tried to shove him inside, he saw that it would be difficult. He decided put him in headfirst, because it seemed like the right thing to do. He grabbed him from behind, around his waist, and tried to flop him inside. Frank winced as he heard Ramirez’s teeth crack on the edge of the tube. One of them broke off and fell to the deck. He continued pushing, got Ramirez in up to his hips, where he became stuck. Of course, thought Frank, he probably has a thirty-two-inch waist, and this is a twenty-one-inch tube. But wait—that would be the diameter, whereas the thirty-two-inch waist was a circumference.… He was certain there was a formula he could use to convert one to the other, but even if he remembered it, he wouldn’t be able to do the math in his head. Rather, he just kept shoving, with all his considerable strength, until he could move Ramirez no more. His lower legs stuck out of the tube, the thick soles of his heavily worked engineer’s boots dangling in the air.
So close, thought Frank. He saw the tooth he’d knocked out of Ramirez’s head, kicked it across the deck and into the bilge in frustration. He’d be all the way in the tube if he were just five pounds skinnier. Or one inch.
And then he realized what he needed to do: he would have to undress him.
He sat down on the floor and braced his feet against each side of the tube, grabbed one of Ramirez’s feet with each hand, and pulled. It took all his strength to reverse the work he’d already done, but at last he got him out of the tube.
He untied the boots and pulled his pants off. Then he unbuttoned his shirt, threw it on a pile with the pants and the boots. Ramirez was down to his undershirt and his Jockeys, and Frank prayed that he had reduced the man’s diameter enough; he couldn’t bear the thought of stripping him naked. It already felt increasingly like he was doing something wrong, something close to desecrating the dead, with possible legal and moral consequences. For all of Ramirez’s sins, Frank didn’t want to shove his naked body into a torpedo tube.
He lifted Ramirez again, and shoved him inside headfirst. Undressing him had worked, and this time, he went in all the way, until the toes of his feet touched the inside of the tube. It was tight, which made Frank worry, but he remembered how completely those green torpedoes filled the tubes, each weighing many times what Ramirez weighed, and the system hurled them effortlessly into the sea. He closed the breech door, deeply grateful to be no longer looking at the feet of his dead engineer.
Now he found himself in the procedure again, determined for things to proceed smoothly from that point on. Flood the tube. He pushed the button and heard the valve open, heard the movement of water from the tank into the tube. He tried not to picture Ramirez’s dead body in there, now surrounded by seawater inside the brass tube. Pressurize the tube. He opened the pressure valve, allowing the pressure of the tube to equalize with the sea, so the muzzle door could open. He opened the muzzle door, and the light on the console turned from an amber line to a green O, indicating success.
Now nothing remained but to shoot him out. The tube was a loaded gun, and Ramirez was the bullet. Frank paused for a moment. The Navy had a ceremony for burials at sea, he knew—rituals that had been handed down for hundreds of years, rituals older than the republic. They’d done one when he first got to the boat, fulfilling the request of an old retired submariner, and he still remembered the somber announcement Captain McCallister had made on the 1MC, “All hands bury the dead.” But they didn’t have a procedure for this, disposing of a traitor. Frank sighed, just wanting it to be over.
He pushed the FIRE button, and a pressurized air bank forced a slug of water into the tube, instantly ejecting its contents. The machinery reset itself in a way that Frank remembered, the sliding of hydraulics, the hissing of compressed air, the popping in his ears.
Frank shut the muzzle door and reversed the process he had just done until he could once again open the breech door.
Slowly, he opened it. He sighed with relief to see that the tube was completely empty again. Ramirez was gone.
He shut the door and locked it, noticed the pile of Ramirez’s clothes at his feet. He was excited again now, eager to report his success to Moody, and the clothes gave him an idea. He searched the pockets, hoping to find evidence of some kind, notes about the conspiracy, maps, codes, who knows? In the back pocket, he found a standard-issue green notebook.
He flipped through the pages until he found the most recent entry. It was a neatly kept table of handwritten data, in two rows, with “PH” at the top. He got excited—Pete Hamlin? Was this some record of their communications? A table of codes that they used?
He looked at it further until he realized that it wasn’t “PH,” it was “pH”: a measure of the water chemistry of the primary plant, one measurement for each day of the last two weeks. The numbers meant nothing to Frank—he could see that they were drifting downward, but he didn’t know if that was bad or good.
Frank was disappointed at that, and all the rest of the routine engineering data that filled Ramirez’s notebook. It wasn’t very compelling evidence of a conspiracy. In fact, it was downright boring.
He gathered Ramirez’s clothes and threw them into a trash can in the back of the torpedo room. There was a shredder back there, too, so Frank dropped the notebook in it as he passed.
There, Ramirez, he thought with a smirk as the shredder whirred to life. I deleted it.
* * *
After the degaussing, Pete followed Moody down to her stateroom, which was immediately adjacent to the captain’s. In a passing glance, he saw pictures of Captain McCallister’s family, a wife and two kids, smiling from the wall. They looked familiar to him, he thought, like maybe he had met them, or maybe they just looked familiar in the way that all happy families do, like Tolstoy said. The bed was made with military precision, but at the foot of it was a comfortable-looking striped blanket.
Moody’s walls, in contrast, were bare of personal effects. A few professional decorations, pictures of herself from her training class, a citation from the Alliance. Files and binders neatly arranged, Navy procedures sharing a shelf with binders of Alliance doctrine. It looked so much like an office that
the neatly made bed seemed out of place.
“Nicely done up there,” she said as they entered. She reached behind him to shut the door, close enough in the small room that Pete could smell her shampoo. “I guess you’re starting to feel like yourself again.”
“I guess,” he said.
“So now that we’re degaussed, we’re ready to begin the high-speed run?”
“You’re asking me?” he said. “I thought you were in charge.”
“I am now,” she said. “And keep in mind that your friend up there—” She pointed upward, in the direction of the escape trunk where Finn was locked. “—he tried to destroy it all.”
Destroy what? he thought, but kept his mouth shut.
“You know that in a very real way, the fate of the world is in our hands,” she said. “In your hands.”
“That’s what they keep telling me,” he said.
“Things have gotten worse out there. We rarely get any radio transmissions from land anymore … haven’t heard from command in weeks. We used to hear surface ships up there, occasionally. They’re all gone, driven away. Before long, we’re going to need a tender, and I’m not sure there is one out there anymore. Without our radio room, we can’t even ask.”
“So what do we do?”
“We complete the mission at hand. That’s all we can do.”
Pete cleared his throat and waited for her to indicate what was next. “So what is our mission?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Don’t be a smart-ass. McCallister never saw fit to share it with me, as you well know. But I have my guesses. I think it’s something to do with the illness. The epidemic, whatever you want to call it. I think that’s why you’re here.”
“The illness?”
“Here,” she said. “Take a look at this.” She pulled a book off her shelf and opened it to a page that she had bookmarked. It was an aerial photo, stamped SECRET, of what looked like a massive refugee camp.
“This is outside Los Angeles,” she said. “The disease was killing a hundred people a day, everybody was streaming out of the city—the government built this place for a thousand people out in the desert. Currently it’s holding five thousand, and there’s a tent city being built outside the fence, a shantytown, people waiting to get in. Cities like this are going up on both coasts.”
“Just the coasts?”
“They seem to be hardest hit,” she said. “Which is contributing to the rumors that this whole thing is some kind of biological weapon planted by Typhon. Some of the rumors say the virus is delivered by submarines.”
“Jesus,” said Pete. The photograph was startling, Americans looking up at the sky with real dejection in their eyes. The camp was a jumble of unfinished wood and barbed wire. But he noticed, curiously, that about every fifth building had been constructed from thick concrete and had what appeared to be a heavy plate of metal for a roof. A strange defense against a disease.
“That’s what we’re fighting for, Pete,” she said, taking the book away. “The people back home.”
“And what can we do about it?” said Pete.
“I’m assuming you’re about to tell me,” she said.
“I am?”
She fought to hide her annoyance. “I understand your hesitation,” she said. “Your orders were highly secret, and the captain shared them with whom he saw fit. Whatever. But I am in command of this ship now, and you need to share them with me.”
“What if I can’t?”
“Then you might be sharing that escape trunk with McCallister, Pete.”
She reached into her desk—Pete thought momentarily that she was reaching for her Taser. But instead she pulled out a large brown envelope and handed it to him.
It was sealed with a small electronic keypad.
“I took these from McCallister’s office. I would have opened them earlier myself—no offense. The situation called for it. But I think they would auto-destruct with one false entry. So I’d like to ask you, as your commanding officer, to share them with me.”
Pete hefted the envelope in his hand and could feel that a small tablet computer was inside. Perhaps a tablet with all the answers he needed.
“Open it, Pete,” she said.
He hesitated, but in fact, the curiosity was more than he could bear. Pete wiped his thumb across the locking device. A light turned green, and he opened the envelope and pulled out a small tablet computer. When he touched it, the screen came to life, and three icons appeared. One icon said BACKGROUND, another said SERVICE JACKET: HAMLIN, PETER, and the third said PATROL ORDERS.
He reached for the background icon.
“Haven’t you already reviewed these?” she said. “Let’s look at the patrol order.”
“I thought you wanted to see everything?”
She sighed impatiently, but let him touch the icon.
A computer animation launched, showing the earth’s oceans rising several years in the past. Low-lying cities and islands were wiped out.
In the second part of the video, the more recent past, populations became more concentrated as people moved inland. Food supplies, shown in yellow, began to dwindle. Regional conflicts broke out, and soon global war did as well. Typhon formed, and the Alliance followed in short order. Looking at the timeline on the bottom of the screen, Pete saw that this brought them to the present day.
A new wave of color began to spread across the global map, the time now projecting into the future. Pete understood it to represent the spread of an epidemic of some kind, brought on by the war, the rising waters, and the concentration of the population. According to the video, the epidemic would soon decimate the world’s population.
It ended five years in the future, as the formerly bright-red population centers dimmed and turned black.
“Jesus,” said Hamlin.
“I can see why these projections are so classified,” she said. “It would cause a panic. People might turn against the war effort.”
Hamlin turned to her. “Maybe they should.”
She smirked at that. “You’re still an engineer at heart, Hamlin. Which is why I’ll let that go. But the good guys are going to win this one, and you are one of the good guys. Now, let’s see what’s in your orders that I don’t already know about.” She reached over his shoulder and touched the PATROL ORDERS icon, but it didn’t work: the tablet was keyed to Pete’s fingerprints alone. Frustrated, she tapped the screen with her fingernail and handed it back to Pete.
Reluctantly, he tapped the screen, and a document came to life. It was all text, with a number of embedded coordinates on it and a few interactive colored charts. In the first section of the orders was a chart that Pete instantly recognized as the degaussing range. He scanned it quickly as Moody read over his shoulder.
“Complete, right?” she said.
Pete read that section and saw that she was right—they had orders to degauss, which he had done completely. He scrolled down and saw a block where he was to verify completion with a swipe of his finger.
As he did so, a new section of orders immediately came to life. Hana inhaled eagerly as the screen changed. She looked over his shoulder, staring at the chart that came up first.
“There!” said Moody, pointing, excited. “I knew it!”
Pete scanned the text section. Top secret … vaccine at hand. Locate and deliver to global medical command … critical importance to war effort … Engineering Research and Implementation Station.
Moody, on her feet now with the excitement, put a hand on his back. “It makes perfect sense! I told Frank this is where we were going. All those eggheads out there—and I knew you’d been stationed out there! Plus, I’d heard what happened to your wife.…” Pete looked up at her quickly, a stab of heartbreak going through him at the mention of a wife he didn’t even remember.
Moody quickly changed the subject. “At ahead flank—” She looked at her watch and did a quick mental calculation. “—we can be there in two days.”
Pete swiped the screen
with his finger, expanding the small chart of their destination. A tiny spot of land became visible. Several bands of dotted lines surrounded it with the words RESTRICTED ZONE. It was the research station, he could see. And on the chart its name had been abbreviated.
ERIS.
Pete touched the map, and the image of the island expanded.
It was a navigation chart that looked deeply familiar to Pete, in the same way the control room felt familiar, something borne of thousands of hours of studying. A TOP SECRET label adorned it on top and bottom.
He tapped a button on the screen, changing it from a map view to a satellite image. The island was roughly kidney shaped. At the north end of the island, right up against the shore, was a tower. At the far other end of the island were two small buildings, also facing the sea. The roofs were darker in color, worn, conveying a greater age, and seemed disconnected from the work on the other side of the island. The center of Eris was taken up almost entirely by an airfield, with a few scattered maintenance buildings in between.
Pete used two fingers to change the scale of the chart, zooming out, and changing it back from a satellite photo to a nautical chart. Two concentric rings circled the island, both colored in red to convey danger. The innermost ring was a perfect circle with the tower at its exact center, a five-mile radius. It was labeled EXCLUSION ZONE. Pete noticed hash marks on the outside of the circle … it seemed to indicate that safety lay inside.
Farther out was a more irregular dashed red line, about seven miles from the island. This line was jagged and imperfect, unlike the inner circle, and seemed to be a product of nature. Pete could see the italicized soundings indicating the depth of water around it: it was shoal water. Serious shoal water, as shallow as ten feet in some spots, a superb natural barrier to the island. And it had been there eons, Pete could tell. All around the perimeter were the dotted-line profiles of wrecked ships, the chart symbol for the vessels that had wrecked themselves upon the shoals over hundreds of years. There were a few shallow breaks around the shoals where a careful surface ship might approach, but no submerged submarine ever could. And that meant a two-mile stretch between the two circles, some kind of no-man’s-land … Pete traced the circle with his fingers until he found one tiny spot in the shoal line where the water was 120 feet deep. If the tower was the center of a clock, the break in the shoal water was at about seven o’clock.