Polaris

by Todd Tucker

  “There,” he said, tapping the break. “We could get through right there at periscope depth.”

  Moody suddenly pulled him to his feet, turned him around, and kissed him hard upon the lips.

  He jerked backward, almost falling over his chair, and dropped the tablet with his orders to the deck.

  “What?” said Moody, clearly annoyed. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s … my head,” he said. “It still hurts.”

  She looked him up and down. “You haven’t been the same since the mutiny,” she said.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Go get some rest,” she said. “That’s an order. But the next time I see you, be ready to work.”

  “Aye, aye,” he said, grabbing the tablet and backing out of her stateroom.

  WELCOME ABOARD THE USS POLARIS

  A Legacy of Freedom

  THE POLARIS-CLASS SUBMARINE

  The Polaris-class submarine is the latest advancement in submarine technology. It is well equipped to accomplish its assigned mission, providing significant advances over previous classes of submarines. Specifically:

  • Each Polaris-class submarine carries 50 percent more missiles than its predecessors (36 compared to 24).

  • Ease of maintenance has been designed into the class, minimizing maintenance requirements and extending the period between lengthy shipyard overhauls. Polaris-class submarines are able to stay on patrols for longer periods with shorter time between patrols.

  • The increased range of the C-6 missiles enables the Polaris to operate in ten times more ocean area than previous submarines.

  • The central command and control system of the Polaris allows significant automation and reduction of crew size. For example, Trident submarines, the workhorse missile submarine of the Cold War, carried a crew of over 150 men. The Polaris will go to sea with just 18, and can operate with as few as 6.

  • The total system was designed to ensure that the United States and her strategic allies have a modern, survivable deterrent system in the 2020s and beyond.

  • The Polaris is vital to the Alliance submarine force. Her mission is to maintain world peace.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Instead of heading to his rack, Pete turned toward the escape trunk where Finn McCallister was being held prisoner.

  He saw the bottoms of McCallister’s feet against the grate, motionless. It looked like he was sleeping, his head hanging, his mouth open. His face was somewhat hidden in the shadows inside the trunk, but Pete could see that he looked haggard, exhausted. His uniform had been ripped, like Pete’s. The captain awoke with a start.

  “Pete!” he said, overjoyed to see him. He jumped down on his hands and knees so his face was against the grate. “Are you alone?”

  “I am,” he said.

  “I knew you’d be back,” he said. “You’ve got to get me out of here.”

  “I’m trying … to figure out what’s going on.”

  “Do that,” he said. “Keep your head up. You can’t trust anyone right now.”

  “Can I trust you?”

  Finn looked stricken. “Of course,” he said.

  “How much do you know about my orders?”

  The captain looked confused. “Everything that I could read,” he said. “And what you told me after I read them, when you came on board. You said the Alliance had identified this epidemic as a massive threat, not just to the war effort, but to humanity. I also saw in your service jacket that you’re an engineer, not a doctor; that’s why I brought Haggerty in the loop. We’re the only ones aboard who know the full patrol order.”

  “How much do you know about the epidemic?”

  He shook his head. “Not much. We’ve been at sea so long … but I know everything has changed up there since we left. You showed me the projections, though, showed me what it was doing to the civilian population. And…” He hesitated.

  “What else?”

  “Your wife,” he said. “You told me your wife was killed by the disease.”

  Pete was rocked by a real sadness, a profound sense of loss. A memory of her flashed in his mind, blond hair, blue eyes. The death of his wife, he knew, was what had put him on the boat somehow, the event that set him on a path that ended onboard a nuclear submarine. And while it made him tremendously sad, he was grateful to Finn for sharing this information with him, to give him a real memory that he could build upon. He decided at that moment to trust McCallister.

  “There’s a lot I don’t remember,” said Pete.

  “About?”

  “The mutiny.”

  McCallister shook his head, still angry with the memory.

  “Moody has gone completely crazy,” he said. “It all really started when that shadow boat showed up. With your orders, and that boat tailing us, she just started getting increasingly paranoid. Frank—that idiot—convinced her that someone had been giving our position away somehow. We had a huge fight in the control room; none of us had slept for days. She wanted to shoot the shadow boat, I ordered her to stand down, and then Ramirez ran out of the room. Alarms started going off, fires broke out—it looked like someone was trying to sabotage us.”

  “Ramirez?”

  “That’s sure what they thought. And they assumed we were in on it together—the two Navy guys aligned against the two Alliance officers. So she snapped, and here I am.”

  Pete hesitated for a moment. “I think I killed Ramirez,” he said.

  “Jesus, Pete, really?”

  “I woke up with a gun in my hand, and he was dead.” He looked at his feet, unable to face the captain. “I guess that means that one of us, me or Ramirez, was a traitor.”

  McCallister shook his head again. “I don’t know what happened, Pete. But I do know this: those two maniacs are the only traitors. And god help us with them in charge.”

  Pete looked into Finn’s eyes, and believed him. “I’ll get you out of there,” he said.

  “Please do,” said McCallister. “But don’t let it get in the way of the mission.”

  “The mission?”

  “We have to get that cure,” he said. “Whoever finds it first will control everything. We have to make sure we get to it before anyone else does. I have no idea what’s going on up there,” he said, pointing upward. “Eris Island may be the last piece of land the Alliance holds. It should be—it’s a goddamn fortress surrounded by ten thousand drones. But if we can get the cure, and secure it for the Alliance, then we win.”

  “I’ll get you out of there,” Pete said again. He started looking around for whatever implement had been used to bolt the grid in place at McCallister’s feet.

  “It’s in that locker…” said McAllister, sticking a finger through the grate and pointing.

  Pete opened it and saw a large wrench. He started to get it out.

  There was a sudden whoosh below their feet.

  “Are they shooting torpedoes?” asked the captain, recognizing the sound, alarm in his eyes. “What are they shooting at?”

  “No,” said Pete after a moment, realization setting in. “Getting rid of Ramirez’s body.”

  Their ears popped as pressure changed in the boat as a result of the shot. Then they heard footsteps on the forward ladder, and locked eyes.

  “I can wait,” said McCallister.

  “I’ll be back,” whispered Pete, returning the wrench to the locker.

  “Hold on,” said Finn. “Before you go,” he pulled a key from around his neck, “take this. It’ll give you access to everything in memory on the central computer. There’s a key slot in the deck right by the main console in control. No one even knows it exists, it’s unique to Polaris submarines. I designed it myself.”

  Pete took the key and looked at it. It was a simple, flat steel key with no identifying markings. “Old-fashioned,” he said.

  “Yeah, old-fashioned. Like me,” he said. “Now, get out of here before anyone sees you talking to your traitorous captain.”

  Pete walked away qui
ckly and hung the key around his neck. As he did, he was surprised to find another key already hanging there, this one painted red.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Pete walked forward, distracted by all the new information, and found himself at the door to his stateroom.

  Ramirez’s body was gone. A large red stain streaked against the bulkhead and trailed out the door. Pete had walked through it, he saw to his revulsion, and the soles of his shoes were now stained by his friend’s blood. Holmes had dragged the body out of the room, pulling him across the floor like a hyena dragging a carcass across the plain.

  Trying to avoid the blood, Pete sat down on the small chair at the stateroom’s desk and pulled out the tablet computer that he’d gotten from Moody. He turned it on, hesitated, and then opened the file that contained his service jacket.

  Doctorate in engineering. Cum laude from Georgia Tech. A list of military commendations. Marital status: widower. No children.

  He scanned backward in time, flipping through the years with the tip of his finger, going further back into his own, unknown history. He saw that he had been an overachiever, but not one without a blemish. He’d been reprimanded lightly for a bar fight in Tokyo. Worse: he’d been demoted for a time for another altercation, this one with a superior at Eris Island. Clearly, his talents had been desperately needed by the Alliance, or they never would have tolerated him.

  At the thought of Eris Island, he skipped ahead to that tour of duty, which had lasted for almost a year. When he got to that part of his biography, though, he reached an electronic dead end. The tablet read CLASSIFIED and wouldn’t let him proceed any further.

  He sighed and looked around his stateroom for additional clues about who he was. He identified the desk that was his—it was mostly filled with military documents, but there were a few personal items. A worn novel by Stephen King. He flipped it open and saw an opening passage that had been highlighted:

  Sometimes human places create inhuman monsters.

  He picked up a digital music player, but the battery was dead; even his own taste in music remained a mystery to him. Above his desk there was a coconut that had been carved into a woman with obscenely large breasts. On the bottom of the coconut-woman were etched the words BEAUTIFUL HAWAII. Someone had drawn onto its chest with a black marker, like a nametag on a uniform: POLARIS.

  He inventoried the information he had assembled about himself: it wasn’t much. He searched his mind for more than what the paltry artifacts in his stateroom and the scant information in his service jacket gave him. The effort soon exhausted him.

  He stood and climbed up into his rack, needing to lie down even if he couldn’t sleep. There he found something that contained more information about his life than everything he’d seen since regaining consciousness.

  Taped directly above him in the short distance between his mattress and the overhead was a photo of a woman: he knew instantly she was his wife. Her name came back to him suddenly with a power that took his breath away. Pamela.

  She was blond and athletic, with a smile that electrified him. In the picture, she was dressed in hiking clothes, laughing at the camera, her hair tied back in a ponytail. A green tropical forest closed in behind her, not another person in sight. She was standing by a sign at a trailhead that read: KEALIA TRAIL. Pete knew he had taken the picture; he could remember the moment. He could smell the sweetness of the flowers, the tang of the rotting mangoes, the cleansing sea air. He felt an incalculable sense of loss.

  Soon he couldn’t look at it anymore, the pain was too great. He turned over and fell into deep sleep.

  He had a vivid nightmare about the mutiny. He was fighting in the stateroom, and he knew he was fighting for his life. It was dark, and the quarters were so close that he could barely see whom he was fighting as they struggled. His opponent was strong and fast, but Pete soon had the edge and began to wear him down. Finally he got behind his adversary and put him in a choke hold, just as he had done to the doctor. But this time he didn’t let up. He held his grip until the body beneath him slackened and died.

  He rolled the dead man over, and looked into his own face.

  He awoke with a start. A piece of paper, folded in half, had been placed on his chest while he slept. He opened it.

  MEET ME IN SHAFT ALLEY—0600

  He looked at his watch: he had ten minutes. He didn’t know whom the message was from, or what it meant, but the rendezvous might provide more answers. He took a final glance at the photo of his wife, and slid out of bed. He tried not to walk in blood as he exited, but there was too much to avoid.

  WELCOME ABOARD THE USS POLARIS

  A Legacy of Freedom

  THE NUCLEAR PROPULSION PLANT

  The propulsion plant of a nuclear-powered ship is based upon the use of a nuclear reactor to provide heat. The heat comes from the fissioning of nuclear fuel contained within the reactor. Since the fissioning process also produces radiation, shields are placed around the reactor so that the crew is protected.

  The nuclear-propulsion plant uses a pressurized water reactor design that has two basic systems: the primary system and the secondary system. The primary system circulates ordinary water and consists of the reactor, piping loops, pumps, and steam generators. The heat produced in the reactor is transferred to the water under high pressure so it does not boil. This water is pumped through the steam generators and back into the reactor for reheating.

  In the steam generators, the heat from the water in the primary system is transferred to the water in the secondary system to create steam. The secondary system is isolated from the primary system so that the water in the two systems does not intermix.

  In the secondary system, steam flows from the steam generators to drive the turbine generators, which supply electricity to the ship and to the main propulsion turbines, which in turn drive the propeller through a reduction gear. After passing through the turbines, the steam is condensed into water, which is fed back to the steam generators by the feed pumps. Thus, both the primary and secondary systems are closed systems where water is recirculated and reused.

  There is no step in the generation of this power that requires the presence of air or oxygen. This allows the ship to operate completely independent of the earth’s atmosphere for extended periods of time.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Pete walked aft, guided by that interior autopilot that seemed to know the layout of Polaris. Darkness and silence were everywhere.

  He passed through a watertight door into the missile compartment once again and found himself wandering in a forest of missile tubes, two rows of eighteen missiles each. Numbers were etched on each tube, and he saw the numbers decreasing as he continued aft: even numbers to port, odd numbers to starboard.

  The noise level increased as he walked, which he found somewhat comforting, a sign of life in the otherwise ghostly ship. He arrived at the watertight hatch to the engine room, and opened it.

  He stepped into a warm, white tunnel that was, he knew, a heavily shielded passage through the reactor compartment. Once on the other side, he was in the engine room, surrounded by the machinery that made the voyage of the Polaris possible. He felt the power of the place, the rumble of the deck plates starting a vibration that coursed through his whole body. He was in the middle of a symphony of machinery, an orchestra of turbines, valves, and pumps that had been exquisitely engineered to make a ship move and a crew survive: “the lights burning and the screw turning,” as Moody had said. It thrilled him.

  He remembered some of the specifics, at a rudimentary level. He sensed that while he was comfortable with machinery in general—Hana had called him an engineer—he had never been an expert on the inner workings of the submarine. He walked past the giant evaporator, the machine that turned salt water into pure water that both they and their thirsty propulsion plant could drink, water that was now a thousand times more pure than anything available on the surface. But like the oxygen generators, this life-giving machine wasn’t running. Just
as with their oxygen, they were drawing their water from their reserves. Reserve feed tank number one, Pete saw, was empty. Reserve feed tank number two was down to 15 percent. As he stared at the indicator and breathed in the engine room’s humid air, it dropped to 14 percent. The ship was slowly suffocating, and also dying of thirst.

  He continued into the turbine room, where steam turned the giant machines that made their electricity. Their twins turned the main engines, which in turn made the screw move, and powered them through the water. He was close to his destination now.

  Down a ladder, where it got darker, quieter, and cooler, away from the throbbing power of the turbines, he saw where the main engines connected to a giant set of gears, which in turn connected to the screw. Suddenly, it was there, the enormous shaft that penetrated the back of the submarine. It turned slowly, steadily, and silently, the most primal expression of the engine room’s immense power. He was as far as he could go from his watchers in control. He realized that’s why this location had been selected.

  No one was there.

  He looked around, increasingly apprehensive. He felt the gun in his pocket and felt some comfort in that. He looked at his watch: 0610. He wondered how long he should wait around.