Polaris

by Todd Tucker

  Almost all blue-water shipping had been eliminated by the scourge of the drones, so other Typhon sub skippers had taken to the brown waters off the coasts, picking off an occasional cargo barge or garbage scow, or lobbing a cruise missile at a factory. She had stayed near Eris Island, certain that at some point, the war would turn on that tiny speck of land. This despite the fact that they hadn’t gotten a whiff of anything from the Alliance since she tried to kill that enemy submarine with a life raft.

  Once every two days, they came to periscope depth to shoot trash and receive the broadcast from command. Increasingly, those messages were from impatient admirals wondering what she was doing out there. She didn’t give two shits. Sooner or later, she knew, the Alliance would try something important at Eris Island. And she would blow it to hell.

  “Captain,” she said, picking up the phone as it buzzed a second time.

  “Captain, please come to the bridge.” She could hear the excitement in the officer of the deck’s voice. It was Lieutenant Banach, and he wasn’t prone to overreacting. She rushed to control.

  The ship was bobbing at periscope depth, the diving officer and the ship’s automated system doing an admirable job of keeping depth control in challenging conditions. They had come shallow as a matter of routine. In addition to shooting trash and transmitting messages, they ventilated briefly, bringing fresh air onboard. She was still wary of Eris and the medical work they did there, so she always insisted that the ship be upwind of Eris Island and at least ten miles away when they took a breath, lest they inhale some dangerous microbe invented by their enemies.

  They’d also been delayed slightly by the storm, not wanting to stick their nose up in rough seas. Coming to PD was always fraught with danger. Like an animal at a watering hole, the submarine was at her most vulnerable at periscope depth, slow and exposed. While their titanium hull made them invisible to the magnetic detectors of the drones at periscope depth, if they broached the surface, and the deck of the submarine came out of the water, they would be visible to the drones’ other sensors. The swarm would be on them in seconds in a frenzy. But periscope depth was also when you could see the world through human eyes, via the finely crafted lens of the periscope, a sensor far more deadly than any of the electronics they’d been entrusted with. When she stepped on the conn, Banach stepped aside immediately and yielded the periscope.

  “Do you see it?” he asked as she focused.

  She took a moment, waiting for a rogue splash that had fallen across the lens to fall. And there it was.

  “I do,” she said, although it was difficult in the early dawn light: a plane, flying close to the ocean and painted in dappled gray camouflage. Her officer of the deck was to be commended for spotting it. She automatically centered it in the scope, pushed a red button on the right handle, entering its position in the fire control system.

  “Alliance?”

  “It is,” she said. “A small transport plane, though, not a combat plane.”

  “What a fool!” said the OOD. “At that speed and altitude? In this part of the ocean? Permission to ready a missile, Captain.” He had already raised the surface-to-air missile mast, behind the scope.

  “Wait,” she said, smiling grimly even as she looked through the scope. She felt the roll of the ship in her feet, rare at this latitude, and it spoke to her. “His low altitude and speed are deliberate,” she said. “He’s trying to look like a drone heading for Eris. He wanted to land before sunrise, but was delayed by the storm, just like we were.”

  She heard Banach step to the chart and confirm it.

  “He’s smart,” he said. “An hour ago, it was completely dark, and we would have thought just that: that he was a drone, even seeing it on radar. But I saw the asshole.”

  “Hmmmm.”

  “Don’t we still want to shoot it?” he asked.

  It was tempting. At this range, with a clear visual, they would knock that plane right out of the sky. All she had to do was point the missile, and push a button. But something stopped her, a hunter’s instinct for a bigger prize, a risk worth taking.

  “No,” she said. “Let’s wait. If he’s going to Eris, he’s not staying there—he’s going to pick something up.”

  “You’re sure, Captain?”

  “I’d rather shoot down a full plane than an empty one.”

  “Aye, Captain,” said Banach. He stepped to the chart and began plotting a course toward the island. “When do you think he might leave Eris?”

  “My guess? Sunset.” She smiled. “To the island at ahead flank, on this bearing.”

  “Aye, aye, Captain.”

  * * *

  Dr. Manakas waited in the dark for the plane, but it was delayed by a rare bit of bad weather near the island. His mind created images as he stared in the darkness and worried; at one point he thought he saw a man over the hill, watching them. That was impossible, he knew; they were the last human beings on the island, the military detachment having long since left. But he kept staring, and when dawn finally arrived, the man (or mirage) was gone.

  The plane landed soon after. The doctors who remained on Eris, eight in all, cheered as it touched down and deftly dodged the pockmarks on the runway. The plane was smaller than Dr. Manakas had expected, painted with splotches of camo, barely bigger than the drones that investigated it curiously before darting away.

  They greeted the dashing pilot as a hero, even more so when they learned that he’d brought food: a cooler of steaks, two dozen eggs, potato chips, and real Coke. They’d been living on leftover Army rations and instant coffee for a month. They cooked on the charcoal grill that had been languishing for months for lack of real meat.

  “We were expecting you before sunrise,” said Manakas as they ate steak and eggs for breakfast at the picnic table outside the research building. He was careful to say it away from the group, not wanting to convey his concern.

  “Bad storm fifty miles east of here,” said the pilot. “Delayed me about an hour while I went around it.”

  “See anything out there?”

  “Nope,” he said, looking past him to the ocean. “Not a thing.”

  But Manakas could hear the note of resignation in his voice.

  * * *

  They were scheduled to leave the island at sunset; they had all day to prepare. But they had long since staged the small amount of personal gear they were allowed to take, stuffed into seabags and dusty suitcases. The results of their research were packed more carefully, in five tightly sealed watertight plastic containers. They were transparent, and you could see the rainbow of hanging files within some, hard drives and carefully swaddled vials and beakers in others. The five plastic containers made a small tower inside the plane, a monument to years of effort. The plane was loaded quickly, so they just sat and waited for sunset, and watched the drones.

  The medical team had learned every habit and sound of the drones, as they were the only type of life that could thrive on Eris Island. They knew the buzzing sound of an engine revving up prior to takeoff; they knew the difference in the engine note of an unarmed bird returning to the island and the more baritone sound of a drone fully weighed down by a bomb. They knew the sound of the dance they made in the sky, the herky-jerky noise they made as they moved rapidly back and forth. And they knew the cool, liquid clicking of a drone that was picking up a bomb. The pilot was fascinated as he watched, and asked for explanations from the researchers of drone behavior that they had long since become bored with.

  Dr. Manakas, the head of the detachment, was leaving behind a cache of personal effects in his small office; they’d told them that weight would be limited on the small plane. He had packed a few photographs, the ones of his wife and children that had sustained him. He had a shelf full of novels that he loved but would leave behind. A closet full of lab equipment that had served him so well would also be abandoned. He would even miss the view, he thought as he looked through the window behind his desk. It was starkly beautiful, in a way—rocks,
water, and sky—and looking in that direction, the view wasn’t too polluted by drones or their bombs. He hadn’t taken enough time to enjoy that view, he realized. Had been too busy trying to find the cure. But they had done that much, at least.

  “Are you ready?” It was his protégée, Dr. Sandra Liston, from Columbia, a brilliant doctor ten years younger than him, who did more for the cure than any of them. She was beautiful, with jet-black hair that had grown long during her two years on the island, and legs that were toned from the hikes she took up the island’s leeward hills every day before breakfast. In one of his books along the wall, Graham Greene had written about the “love-charm” of bombs during the blitz in London during World War II. As the noose tightened around Eris Island, Manakas knew exactly what Greene had meant.

  Inevitably, after a year on the island, he and Liston had begun sleeping together, a poorly kept secret in their tiny community and a failing that seemed to be largely forgiven by their peers despite their families at home. Somewhat more recently, he had fallen in love with her, and that, he knew, was a better kept secret and far less forgivable. He had told Sandra one night, as they lay on the bed in his tiny room, moonlight washing over them, the sound of surf coming through his open window. She hadn’t been able to say it back to him. They both knew that one way or another, the beginning of their escape marked the end of their affair.

  “I’m almost ready,” he said to her. “Go ahead. I’ll be right out.” She nodded and left him to say goodbye to his small office.

  He sighed and waited until he saw everyone board the plane—he had to make sure he was the last one to leave. What he was about to do might well be construed as treason, and he didn’t want to implicate anyone else, although he was at peace with it. He pulled out a thick manila envelope from his desk, one that was filled with a sheaf of papers that summarized their work and a flash drive that contained all the key findings and DNA sequencing. It wasn’t everything, but it was enough, a summary of the trickiest parts, and should be enough for a skilled team of doctors to replicate their results. He just could not, as a doctor and a man of science, see their entire body of work leave Eris Island on a small plane in the middle of a war zone. If what he left behind fell into enemy hands, then so be it. At least it might still cure somebody. He looked at the envelope and tried to think of a way to label it, so that anyone coming into the office would know it was worth salvaging. Finally he pulled out a red marker and wrote across it in large letters: THE CURE.

  He left it centered neatly on the middle of his otherwise empty desk.

  * * *

  Commander Carlson called the submarine to battle stations an hour before sunset, ordering the officer of the deck to stay on the scope continuously. They weren’t within sight of the island, but they were close enough to be wary of drones. If their scope was spotted, and attracted a swarm, that might be enough to alert a clever transport pilot. Carlson had positioned them right along the flight path on which the transport plane had come in, and there they sat, going in a slow clockwise circle, waiting for the sun to set. She’d checked; it would be nearly a full moon for them that night, a lucky break. And a curious decision by the Alliance, to fly any kind of important mission with visibility so good. They must be in a hurry, she thought. Or confident that no enemy subs would venture this close to Eris Island. The control room was blood red, all the regular lights turned off to aid the officer of the deck on the nighttime scope.

  She saw something, a glint of the dying sunlight on a wing. She blinked, and flipped the scope to high power to confirm.

  “Contact,” she said, pressing a button on the scope to mark the direction.

  “It’s on the bearing to the island,” said Banach, excitement in his voice.

  “Raise the missile mast,” she said, and heard the switch thrown behind her.

  She turned the scope and watched the mast rise up: a black, thick tube with concave oblong hatches on either end of it. It looked something like a nineteenth-century cannon, but was really just a watertight container for the three surface-to-air missiles inside. It looked wildly out of place, as if it had been bolted onto the submarine. Which, indeed, it had. Historically, submarines had always been vulnerable to attacks from the air, especially from helicopters, which turned the predator into prey. Choppers could dip sonar into the water, blanket the sea with sonobuoys, kill submarines with airdropped torpedoes and depth charges. A fast submarine went 30 knots; a slow helicopter could travel at 150 knots. Helicopters were the only natural enemy a submarine had.

  At their last refit, however, their boat had been equipped with a missile launcher armed with three pencil-shaped heat-seeking missiles inside. It rose from the conning tower just like a periscope. When they pushed the firing button, the missile would take off on a bearing they selected, looking for the infrared signature of anything that was generating heat. Ideally, the engine of an enemy aircraft. The system was originally designed to be a defensive weapon, to use in a counterattack against an ASW helicopter. But, what the hell, thought Carlson. If there’s a plane full of Alliance VIPs, she was going to shoot it down. You don’t get medals for playing defense.

  The weapon was useless against drones—their little solar engines didn’t generate enough heat to register in the missile’s homing mechanism. And the launcher came with only three missiles, so even if it did score a hit against a drone, it would soon run empty as the swarm came down on them. Once, Carlson had been part of a group that tested a variety of defenses against an earlier generation of drones. They tried every projectile, laser, and missile that Typhon could come up with. The most effective thing, to her amusement, was the most primitive: a deck-mounted Gatling gun. Hundreds of dumb bullets flying through the air actually did well against a few drones, shredding them to pieces. But the problem, everyone in the fleet knew, wasn’t one drone. Or even three drones. The problem was a dozen drones, or fifty drones, and all their friends.

  “Visual?” asked Banach.

  “Yes,” said Carlson. “Something.” She could just see it, a reflection of sunlight on the wing. “Ready the launcher.”

  The ugly concave doors on each end of the missile mast flipped open, and she could feel the dull thunk in the handles of the periscope. The launcher swung toward the bearing she was facing. It was getting dark fast; she hoped she would be able to see the target well enough to make the call. While every OOD had fired dozens of missiles in the simulator, they had fired only one real missile, on the range. She remembered the satisfying blast of flame from the launcher, the way the missile seemed to dip dangerously close to the ocean as it took off, the way it screamed toward the target on a bright, sharp triangle of fire. They had surfaced immediately after, and they could still smell the sharp tang of rocket fuel in the air.

  She blinked to clear her vision. The control room was silent as they waited for her command. Finally, the target came close enough that she could make out the cockpit. A cockpit with no windows.

  “Drone,” she said, disappointment in her voice.

  “Shit,” said Banach.

  “Lowering number one scope,” she said, turning the ring. “Lower the missile mast.” She kept her hands up on the ring as it went down, stretched her back and blinked her eyes. “We’ll go back up in five minutes,” she said. “After he passes. We’ll keep looking. All night if we have to. Let’s get some tea up here. Sooner or later, we’ll get our chance.”

  * * *

  The transport plane took off ten minutes after sunset. Only the drones remained on Eris, taking off and landing, ingesting their bombs and dancing for each other. It was dark onboard, but still Liston and Manakas didn’t hold hands, or even sit next to each other. They sat across from each other and pretended like nothing was wrong.

  Eris disappeared immediately as they took off; within seconds it was all water, in every direction. It was a long flight to the mainland, and Manakas vowed not to look at his watch at least for the first few hours. They’d chosen the small, slow plane del
iberately, he knew, to mimic the movement of a drone to anyone who might spot them on radar. But up in the air, the plane felt slow and vulnerable. It rumbled, but none of the research team spoke after the first few minutes. A few fell asleep immediately, and Manakas envied them.

  He stared out his window. Moonlight was glinting on the surface of the ocean, illuminating the interior of the plane with a dim, blue glow. They were flying into a vast nothingness, a tiny pod of doctors who had studied the flu a thousand miles from home. Home. He thought about what that even meant, what must have changed since he’d left. What had changed in him.

  Something caught his eye as he looked out the window; a flash on the surface. It was easy to see in the darkness. He saw two flashes, diverging, then realized that one of them was just a reflection on the ocean surface. His heart sank as he knew instantly what it meant. Thank god he’d left that envelope; he could take some solace in that. At least their work wouldn’t be in vain. The flash focused into a V-shaped jet of pure white flame, propelling a missile toward them at the speed of sound.

  Manakas turned and looked at Dr. Liston across the aisle, wanting her face to be the last thing he saw before he died. She saw the pure sadness in his eyes and forced a smile, trying to make him feel better.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Carlson surfaced her submarine among the wreckage, after verifying that no drones were in the immediate area. She kept the ship rigged for dive and took a minimum number of the crew topside, in case they needed to submerge quickly. But she wanted to see the wreckage herself, verify the kill, and pick up anything that would make for useful intelligence. Or a good trophy.