Polaris

by Todd Tucker

  While it was quieter in shaft alley than it was near the turbines, it still took Pete a while to recognize the electric crackling that was periodically sounding near his head. It was regular and rhythmic, as if a signal. It was also a contrast to the mechanical noises of the engine room. He followed the noise to an alcove along the bulkhead, and reached in. He pulled out a small handheld radio.

  A red light was blinking on it. He pushed the button and spoke. “Hello?”

  “Pete! Jesus! Where have you been?” It was a female voice, unfamiliar to him, with a slight accent he could not place. The voice was electronically scrambled and delayed in reaching him. He had an inkling that it was being sent from outside the boat.

  “Who is this?” he said.

  “Carlson,” she said. “Commander Jennifer Carlson.”

  “Where are you?”

  Even through the electronic noise of the radio, he could make out an exasperated sigh.

  “I’m about two miles directly behind you,” she said.

  Pete almost dropped the radio as he realized what she meant. She was communicating with him from the shadow submarine.

  “Report,” said the radio.

  “Who are you?”

  There was a pause. “What do you mean?”

  “Are you with the Alliance? Or are you the enemy?”

  “We’re not your enemy,” she said. “Now, make your report. What’s going on in there?”

  “I’m not telling you anything,” he said angrily.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she said. “We’ve only got about five minutes on this link, and you need to tell me what’s going on. We heard the noise, heard the torpedo tube cycling a few hours ago. We almost fired at you then until we realized there wasn’t a weapon in the water. Who is in control of the ship?”

  “I am an officer on an Alliance submarine,” said Pete, his face getting hot. “I’m not telling you a thing. I will help them blow you out of the water.”

  “Pete, I don’t know what’s gotten into you. But you need to get your head on straight. We’re running out of time. You were supposed to disable the boat completely after the degaussing. We kept waiting for your signal, but then you disappeared.”

  “Why would I help you?” said Pete.

  “Why?” She was getting angry. “Because it’s your sworn duty. Because it’s the plan we worked on together for months.”

  “Bullshit…”

  “Because of Pamela,” she said, stopping him cold. “To avenge Pamela.”

  “Avenge her?” he said. “I thought she died in the epidemic.…”

  “Bullshit,” said Carlson. “The disease killed her because the Alliance won’t release the cure. They’re saving it for military purposes, sacrificing millions of lives in the process, including your wife’s.”

  “I don’t…”

  “It’s bad out there,” she said. Despite the distortion of the radio, Pete could hear real fear in her voice. “Every day we get new reports of whole cities that are quarantined. Whole boats have been wiped out after one person gets infected—no one has been off my boat in over a year. If one person gets sick—”

  The radio made a beeping sound, and the red light began to blink rapidly.

  “We’re almost out of time. Do your duty, Pete. Do what you know is right. We’ll be waiting for you, we’ll know when you’ve disabled Polaris. But don’t wait much longer or it will be too late. We can, and will, proceed without you.”

  The radio clicked off, and the light turned dim. Pete glanced around, and then placed the radio back in the alcove where he’d found it.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  McCallister awoke from a quick, shallow sleep, never deep enough to escape his small prison even in a dream.

  He looked over the small egg-shaped cell in which he found himself, and once again saw no possibility of escape. Ironic, inside a system that had been expressly designed to give the crew a chance to escape a doomed submarine.

  The escape trunk consisted of three hatches. One below his feet, which was now covered by a steel grate and represented his only window into the ship he once commanded. The second was directly over his head, and was designed to mate up with a rescue vehicle. The third was at his knees, and represented the “swim out” hatch that would be used to escape the submarine with no rescue vehicle present. For either of the escape hatches to work, the trunk had to be flooded with seawater, until the pressure inside the cylinder was equal to the surrounding sea pressure. At that point, the outer hatches could swing open easily and allow egress. That’s why the trunk made such an ideal prison—if it could withstand thousands of pounds of sea pressure, it could withstand the worst that a recalcitrant prisoner could throw at it.

  Even with sea pressure equalized, escape from a crippled submarine was fraught. In a locker below the trunk, in the same locker that held the wrench that had bolted him in, were exposure suits and hoods that filled with air and helped pull submariners to the top. As they ascended, the air in their lungs would expand with the decrease in pressure, requiring that they exhale forcefully the entire way. Generations of submariners had learned to shout HO! HO! HO! on the way up. In an earlier era, the skyline of every submarine base was dominated by a cylindrical dive tower in which submarine crews practiced the procedure to escape a submarine, which was usually the capstone of training, a rite of passage, the ultimate skill of a submariner. Doctrine stated that the procedure could work at depths up to six hundred feet. In the nuclear age, new submariners were often shocked to learn that they nearly always operated in water much, much deeper than that.

  McCallister stared at the flood valve and contemplated opening it. Water would pour into the trunk, then into the ship through the grate at his feet. He’d be discovered immediately, of course, the roar of flooding at this depth would sound like a freight train. And sinking or crippling the ship wasn’t his goal anyway. He’d been accused of being a saboteur; he wasn’t about to become one. He assumed that’s why Frank had left the valve unlocked when he put him in there: he knew it wouldn’t do McCallister much good to open it up. Or, more likely, he just didn’t understand the ship well enough to worry about it. When McCallister had qualified on the Alabama, all those years ago, he had to draw every system on the ship from memory, know the location of every valve, breaker, and fire hose. Every man with dolphins on his chest, from the captain down to the cooks in the galley, was an expert on his boat. Gradually, as the technology on submarines became more complex, they required less and less of that, block diagrams and black boxes becoming acceptable substitutes for real physical knowledge. The introduction of nuclear missiles sealed it. The goal was to launch missiles, not to repair them. If a part was broken, swap it out. No one considered it possible, or desirable, for a sailor to know how to build or repair a nuclear weapon.

  His first boat had a crew of 125 men. The Navy, understandably, had staffed submarines like ships, making them self-sufficient cities that could make their own air, water, and repairs to every system, keeping them at sea for as long as the food and spare parts held out. It was the dream of nuclear power: a “true” submarine that never needed to rise to the surface to take a breath. Steadily, however, automation took over, and crews got smaller. The Navy, in its wisdom, made them more like the crew of an airplane now than the crew of a battleship, a few specially trained men and women riding on a mass of high-priced technology. The Polaris required a crew of thirty men in the initial design phase, a crew that seemed revolutionarily small at the time for the United States, although the Soviets had for decades been sending out similarly sized crews in their small, rickety submarines. They pared this down to eighteen, which was what he first went to sea with. With attrition, however, and the losses the Alliance was taking, the number kept getting smaller and smaller. There was a joke in the fleet, before things got so serious, that the Navy was using the Polaris as part of an experiment to see how small a submarine crew could get before things fell apart. They seemed to have found the limit.r />
  He sighed and looked at the green bucket sitting on the small bench across from him; Frank had thrown it in there with him when he locked him up, it was his toilet. He’d actually watched the asshole check it off the procedure that he held in his hands and studied with furrowed brow. There was a thin layer of urine in the bottom, which did nothing to improve the smell in the escape trunk. But there was more, too. McCallister had been on submarines a long time, long enough to recognize when the air was going bad. Almost all the things that could poison a sub’s atmosphere were odorless and tasteless: hydrogen from the battery, carbon monoxide from combustion, carbon dioxide from their own lungs. But while odorless, the combination of those things, along with the depletion of oxygen, created a palpable staleness that McCallister was familiar with, a burning in the throat, a headache right behind the eyes, an overpowering sense of fatigue.

  “Wake up, McCallister.”

  Moody had appeared beneath his feet.

  “Moody,” he said, his throat dry. “What do you want?”

  “Wanted to take a look at you. Make sure you’re OK. See if you’re ready to cooperate.”

  “Ready to cooperate?” He laughed. “It seems you and Frank have already taken over the ship. What do you need me for?”

  “Not just me and Frank,” she said. “Hamlin, too.”

  “Bullshit,” he said. “I don’t believe you.”

  “He killed Ramirez.”

  McCallister hesitated at that, wincing at the dead man’s name. “I’m sure he had his reasons.”

  She snorted. “And you believe that? I saw him. He was standing over his dead body, the smoking gun in his hand. The only difference between Hamlin and me is that he doesn’t have the balls to tell you where he stands. He wants me in charge, but he still wants you to think he’s a swell guy.”

  “I don’t know what happened. Maybe Ramirez attacked him, maybe Pete got scared. That doesn’t make him one of your conspirators,” he said. But Hana could hear the doubt creeping into his voice.

  “Then consider this: we were just in my stateroom, reviewing his orders. He showed me everything. Unlocked the patrol order and read it in front of me.”

  “No,” he said, shock in his voice. “I don’t believe it. Pete’s a good man. He would never cooperate with you.”

  “Oh really? Let me review the patrol order with you: we’re going to Eris Island. Now that we’ve degaussed, we can approach the island at periscope depth and go ashore. Our mission is to collect the cure and return it to the Alliance. Pete showed me the projections of the epidemic, everything.”

  McCallister slumped against the side of the trunk.

  “Everything you wouldn’t.”

  McCallister looked down at her. “Jesus, is that what this is about, Hana? That Alliance chip on your shoulder? You took over the ship because you felt slighted?”

  “I was slighted!” she yelled. “You shared those orders with the ship’s doctor, for Christ’s sake, but not with me, your XO!”

  “Exactly,” he said. “I made you my XO. I trusted you.”

  “The Alliance made me XO,” she said. “But I made myself the captain. So now the Alliance is really running this ship, the way it should have been from the beginning. Guys like you and Ramirez—you’re mechanics. Drivers.”

  “Based on the atmosphere on this boat,” he said, sniffing the air, “you’re going to need a good mechanic soon. How’s the oxygen level, Moody? And by my calculations, we’re about out of water, too, right?”

  “You have no loyalty to the Alliance—”

  “And your life depends on machinery that you don’t understand.”

  “You have no sense of mission—”

  “No sense of mission?” He laughed loudly at that, the sound amplified and sharpened by the steel walls that surrounded him. “Moody, in my career I have targeted Trident missiles at Russian cities. I have launched cruise missiles at Tripoli and Tallil. On my first patrol, I had to fight a scram in maneuvering when the only light I had to read the procedure by came from a fire that burned in a main seawater pump breaker behind me. You think you’re the expert on the mission of this submarine? I’ve got more time eating ice cream at test depth than you’ve got under way.”

  He stopped, out of breath from his rant. Moody reached in her pocket and McCallister flinched, certain she was reaching for her Taser. Instead, she handed him two granola bars through the grate.

  “Here,” she said. “I’m sure you’re hungry.”

  “You brought me food?” he said.

  “Of course,” she said. “We’re not barbarians.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Pete walked briskly out of the engine room, through the tunnel, and into the missile compartment. He was greeted immediately by Haggerty.

  “Pete! I’ve been looking all over for you.”

  “I was … walking … touring.”

  Haggerty gave him a quizzical look. “Clearing your head, too, I’m sure. Completely understandable. The engine room is one of the few places you can find some peace around here. Nobody goes back there unless they have to.” He looked around. “Are you starting to remember anything?”

  Pete shook his head. “Bits and pieces,” he said. “Not really.”

  “What else do you want to know?” said Haggerty. “Maybe I can help.”

  Pete looked him in the eye. He had a million questions, wanted to know more about his mission, what was happening onboard Polaris before the mutiny. But one question overwhelmed him more than all that.

  “I’d like to know more about my wife.”

  The doctor shook his head sadly. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s do this in my stateroom.”

  * * *

  The doctor had done what he could to make his stateroom comfortable. There was an antique medical diagram of a skeleton on the wall, next to a calendar with nature scenes. The calendar, Pete noticed, was three years out of date. A stethoscope hung on a hook, next to an old-fashioned black doctor’s bag. He had a quilt covering his rack, and a shelf of well-worn novels.

  An object on the second shelf caught his eye: a Lucite block with bees trapped inside.

  “Honeybees,” said Haggerty, watching Pete closely as he picked it up. “At each stage of its life cycle.”

  It was fascinating to look at: some tiny relic of the natural world entombed in perfectly clear plastic, each stage numbered, one through ten. Tiny white eggs, almost too small to see. A slightly larger larva, then the pupa, which was starting to look like a bee, with tiny legs and wings. A mature worker bee, and a queen. A perfect cube of honeycomb. The queen’s cell, worker foundation, and finally a tiny vial of honey that poured back and forth as Pete tilted the block. He could have stared at it for hours.

  “Something we studied in Biology, back when I was an undergrad,” said the doctor. “Fascinating, don’t you think?”

  “It’s beautiful,” said Pete.

  “Here,” said Haggerty. He’d poured two small glasses of scotch from a bottle he had hidden beneath socks in a drawer. They clinked the shot glasses together cheerlessly and drank them down.

  “I never met Pamela,” said the doctor. “Your wife. But you talked about her all the time.”

  “What did I say about her?”

  “You met on the mainland. You had a whirlwind romance. You left her behind for your tour on Eris Island. You’d see her on leave, but honestly, Pete…”

  “Yes?”

  “You were plagued by guilt about it. Devastated, actually. We got your fitness reports before you transferred here, Finn shared them with me before you arrived—I’m the closest thing to a psychologist onboard and I guess he wanted my opinion. They all said the same thing—you were brilliant, had made vast contributions to the Alliance, but that after her death you were … a changed man. Said you’d been overheard blaming the Alliance for her death. Frankly, reading between the lines … it seemed like some of them were even beginning to doubt your loyalty.”

  The word hung in the a
ir, and the doctor and Pete looked at each other.

  “What about you, Doc? Do you doubt my loyalty?”

  The doctor shook his head. “I think, after all these years, after all the loss … any thinking man would begin to have doubts. About everything. Thank god we’re not all like Frank and Hana. Or McCallister, for that matter, all blindly giving ourselves to the cause without ever thinking about right or wrong.”

  Pete thought about his radio conversation in shaft alley. “I’m thinking about right and wrong,” he said. “I’m thinking about it all the time.”

  The doctor leaned in and put his hand on Pete’s shoulder. “Think about your mission now—you’re going to Eris Island to get the cure for this terrible disease. The disease that killed your wife. It’s a goddamn humanitarian mission if there ever was one. How could finding that cure be anything but good? I don’t care who is doing it.”

  Pete shook his head—the doctor’s words certainty felt good. “That’s true,” he said.

  “That’s why I want to help you,” said the doctor. “Let’s have another drink.”

  As the doctor poured his shot, Pete’s eyes drifted back to the honeybees in the clear plastic block. Trapped, dead. So light, you couldn’t feel their weight. And yet those tiny insects were part of a hive—a society, really—that was incredibly complex and captivating.

  “Still looking at my little friends?” said the doctor. “Those guys have kept me company awhile now.”

  “They’re all female,” said Pete, surprised with the suddenness of that knowledge.

  “What?”

  “All the worker bees in a hive are female. The males, the drones, they keep them alive only long enough to impregnate the queen. Then the workers let them starve. The bees in that block: all female.”

  The doctor shifted in his seat, uncomfortable with Pete’s hard stare. “Of course,” he said. “You know something about bees?”

  “I do,” said Pete.

  And he knew, suddenly, that the bees in that block belonged to him. The doctor was lying to him.

  “Thanks,” said Pete, putting down the honeybees and taking a second shot from the doctor. But this time Pete drank a silent toast to himself: Here’s to finding out the truth.