Polaris

by Todd Tucker

  At first, Pete didn’t see it, but she changed the resolution and it came into view. A bright spike at precisely the time the Typhon boat had turned toward them.

  “What the hell?” said the captain. “Something that loud would have traveled for miles!”

  “We didn’t stand a chance,” said Frank.

  Moody was still feverishly turning knobs on the central console. She threw a small switch and began playing the actual audio through the control room speakers.

  It sounded like a whirring, the universal sound of the ocean, an ear to a seashell. Then suddenly, there was a bright spike of noise. It actually made Pete wince. It sounded like a hammer on a steel pipe.

  She moved the cursor, turned up the volume, and played it again, this time staring at the captain.

  And then she played it again.

  “All right,” said McCallister. “Enough.”

  She played it again.

  “Knock it off, Moody!” he said.

  “Why stop now?” she said. “I think we’re finally getting somewhere here. Let’s narrow it down by hydrophone.”

  She clicked through a few more menus, and suddenly there was a small line graph for every one of the twenty-six hull-mounted hydrophones that lined the exterior of the ship. She pointed to the one where the spike was the biggest, twice as big as the adjacent sensor.

  “There!” she said. She tapped the number beneath the graph. “Hydrophone twenty-three.”

  “In the engine room,” said the captain. They all looked at Ramirez.

  “What?” he said.

  “Did you hear anything?” said the captain.

  Moody let out an exasperated sigh.

  “No … I was in maneuvering the entire time with the doors shut—”

  “Captain, I demand you arrest this man,” said Moody.

  “Fuck you!” said Ramirez. “I was back there keeping the ship running while you were developing your paranoid fantasies.”

  She slapped the screen so hard, Pete thought she might break it. “Fantasy!” she screamed. “What is this?! Somebody is banging on the damn hull, giving us away, and you’re the only guy back there!”

  She turned again to the captain, gathered herself, and stood up, almost at attention. When she spoke, her words had a formal steadiness to them. “Captain, I’ll ask you again: arrest this man for treason. For mutiny.”

  Ramirez locked eyes with Pete. His defiance had faded now; he looked genuinely worried that the tide was turning against him. The word “mutiny” hung in the air almost as jarringly as the sound spike on the twenty-third hydrophone.

  The captain stared Moody down. “I’m not arresting anyone.”

  “Then I’m taking command of this ship and arresting you both,” she said.

  Frank slowly pulled something from his pocket. Hamlin realized that they had planned this.

  Ramirez suddenly bolted from the control room. McCallister started to follow, but Frank pointed his Taser at the captain’s chest.

  Seconds later, alarms began wailing.

  * * *

  Moody and Pete jumped forward to the control panels and began cutting them out, announcing them out of habit.

  “Radio is disabled!” he said.

  “Fire in the four-hundred-megahertz generators,” said Moody, cutting out the alarm. They were almost right next to each other on the panel. “He’s sabotaging us,” she said, directly to him.

  “Ahead two-thirds!” said McCallister. “Rig for general—”

  Before he could finish the order, Frank Tased him. The captain fell to the ground, writhing in pain.

  Hana stood up and announced to Frank and to Pete, and to the recording of the deck log, “I am Hana Moody, and I am now in command of the Polaris. I have the deck and the conn.”

  “Aye,” said Frank. He was resetting the Taser and smiling as McCallister groaned at his feet.

  It had all unraveled so fast. Pete realized that Moody and Frank were now waiting to see how he would react.

  “I’ll find Ramirez,” Pete said. And before they could say anything else, he flew down the ladder and out of control.

  Radio was trashed, he saw as he sprinted by. The screens of the computers were caved in. A small fire extinguisher had done much of the damage, Pete could see, as it still jutted out of one of the shattered monitors. The small generator room for the 400 MHz machines was a soggy ruin. The fire-suppression system had put out the fire with a thick coating of foam, but the machines were destroyed. Lights shut off as he ran, the electrical system trying to protect itself from the carnage.

  Just before reaching the door to his stateroom, he heard a gunshot. The sound was deafening in the confined space.

  He burst through the door to see Ramirez slumped against the bulkhead, shot in the head. Leaning over him, the doctor was placing the old nine millimeter in his hand, trying to make it look like a suicide. He turned to see Pete standing in the doorway.

  Pete rushed toward him, but the doctor stood up and trained the gun on him.

  “What?”

  “Don’t move, Hamlin, or I’ll do the same to you. Which would be a shame because we need you.”

  “I guess you’re not really a doctor.”

  Incredibly, Haggerty looked a little insulted by this. “Of course I’m a doctor.”

  “Why did you kill him?”

  “He was going to try to stop their stupid little mutiny. And that wouldn’t do. This mutiny might be helpful to us. He and the captain were the only guys smart enough for me to worry about, and now they’ve both been neutralized. As for you, I still need you. I need your mission. I need your orders.”

  Pete suddenly lunged toward him, but the doctor was surprisingly fast. He brought the butt of the gun down on the top of Pete’s head, bringing him to his knees. He was now staring right into the face of his dead friend.

  He expected to hear a shot, ending it all just like it had for Ramirez. But instead, the doctor fished something out of the small, open safe. A minute later, he felt a needle sinking deep into his neck.

  “There,” said Haggerty. “This will make you forget just about everything.”

  * * *

  Haggerty moved fast, knowing he had only minutes before he was discovered.

  Almost everything in the stateroom belonged to Ramirez, of course, and while there were stacks of engineering documents that he was certain were classified, he had no way of telling which of the indecipherable tables and charts would be valuable to his masters at Typhon. They all looked the same to him. Deeper into the pile on his desk, he found a trove of pictures of Ramirez’s girlfriend, and he threw these to the floor.

  Hamlin’s desk was almost bare, he was furious to discover. But above it, something caught his eye.

  He pulled down a smooth Lucite block. Entombed inside it were insects. Honeybees, actually—each stage of life of a honeybee. It had to be Hamlin’s, he knew; he’d been in the stateroom hundreds of times and had never noticed it before. But what did it mean? Did the honeybees contain some kind of secret code? Perhaps inside them there was some kind of microchip, or memory card? He pocketed the block, the only thing he took with him.

  On the way out, he checked Hamlin’s pulse to make sure he was still alive, and placed the warm gun in his hand.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  A loud crash below their feet snapped Pete back into the present. He was back in the control tower on Eris Island, with McCallister and Admiral Stewart.

  “What was that?” said Stewart. Finn stepped to the glass and looked down.

  “Carlson and her crew,” he said. “They’re trying to shoot their way into the tower.”

  Pete joined them at the glass.

  “We don’t have much time,” said Stewart.

  “Can they get in?”

  “Eventually,” said Stewart. “It’s blast-proof and bulletproof, but they’ll shoot through it sooner or later.”

  “And we’ll never fend off that entire crew of marines once they g
et in,” said Finn.

  Pete’s head was spinning, trying to figure out a plan, even as all his memories came flooding back.

  Suddenly, the noise from below stopped. Stewart and Finn ran to the other side of the tower. Pete hesitated, then followed them to the glass.

  Carlson and her men had given up on the door. They’d climbed to the low rise of exposed rock toward the sea, the bluff that faced them. They began shooting at the windows. Each crack was deafening, and each strike made the windows crack and splinter. They dived to the floor and covered their heads.

  “That glass is bulletproof!” yelled the admiral. “But like the door—it won’t last forever against a sustained attack.”

  Sure enough, the window that directly faced Carlson was almost completely eradicated, the floor of the control tower covered with powdery glass. Bullets were now flying through the tower and hitting the opposite window from the inside, until it, too, was gone. Suddenly there was a pause in the shooting.

  The three men crept slowly to the window. Pete wondered if Carlson was pausing to accept their surrender. He also wondered if they should give it.

  On the bluff, another marine was aiming a different weapon at them—a much larger weapon.

  “Is that…?”

  “It’s a grenade launcher,” said Admiral Stewart. The man holding it had two bandoliers of grenades across his chest.

  Carlson was pointing at them, at the damaged window. The man with the grenade launcher took careful aim and fired. The grenade hit just below them, bounced off the tower, and exploded in the air.

  “They’re going to lob one in here eventually!” said Finn.

  “We can go below,” said Stewart. “Into the bunker. It’s more heavily armored down there, made to survive a missile strike. There’s food, water—we could live down there for months.”

  “No!” said Pete.

  “What choice do we have?” asked Stewart. “We’re sitting ducks up here.”

  “No more hiding beneath the surface!” said Pete.

  “Just until help arrives—”

  “We are the help!” shouted Pete.

  “Then what do we do?” shouted Finn. “Do we have any weapons? Any guns at all?”

  “Actually,” said Pete, “we do have a weapon. We’ve got the most sophisticated weapon system in the world.”

  They heard the curious noise of the grenade launcher again, and as if in slow motion, watched as a grenade passed all the way through the tower, in one shattered window and out another, exploding in the air outside.

  “Jesus Christ!” said Finn. “Let’s get below! We don’t have any choice!”

  Pete ran to the center console and entered codes that were rolling back into his memory. Soon, he had the display up that he wanted; an outline of the island, with a dotted line exactly five miles from the tower. He took the red key from around his neck, inserted it, and turned it. The display changed, the five-mile ring blinking. As an alarm rang in the tower, Pete turned a knob and shrank the circle to ten feet. Stewart saw what he was doing.

  “You’ll destroy everything!” he said.

  “I know,” said Pete.

  As he worked, he swore he heard laughing outside the tower.

  * * *

  “We’ve almost got them!” said Carlson. She was breathless with excitement. They were against the very door to the tower. She’d seen it in pictures a dozen times, grainy satellite photographs of it, and a few times through the magnified optics of her scope, when she dared get that close. But here she was. She slammed her fist on the door to the tower, more from excitement than from frustration.

  As she backed up, her marines kept shooting at it, but the bullets were having little effect, barely denting the door. The thing had been built to withstand a sustained attack.

  “We’ll get through it eventually,” said the sergeant as he reloaded.

  “Maybe,” said Carlson. “But how much time do we have?”

  Banach had stepped away and was looking at the rocky bluff that faced them. “Let’s go up there,” he said, pointing. “We can easily shoot at the tower from there.”

  “We’ll be exposed…” said the sergeant.

  Carlson thought it over. From the bluff, they could shoot out the windows—there was no way they were as solid as that door. Then, maybe lob a grenade into the tower. From their current position, while they might shoot their way through eventually, it could take hours. In the meantime, they could be summoning help, arming themselves, destroying everything of value, who knows?

  “Let’s do it,” she said. “I want to kill them quickly.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said the sergeant, already leading his men up the rock face of the bluff.

  She and Banach looked at each other. “Having fun?” she said.

  He nodded. “Nice to see these guys earning their pay for a change.”

  They scrambled up the bluff behind the marines. As she neared the top, she saw what was left of her submarine out at sea, a few floating scraps still being bombed by the relentless drones. Just in front of it was the wounded Polaris, badly damaged but untouched by the swarm. She felt a pang thinking about her lost boat. But it was balanced by the relief she felt at escaping with her life, and the thrill of the hunt.

  “Almost all the windows are out!” said Banach after a few minutes of shooting from atop the rise. The men inside had stopped showing their faces; they were hunkered down, panicked, no doubt, perhaps contemplating surrender. Banach had a small pistol out, but the commandos around them had the bigger guns, automatic rifles and a grenade launcher that Carlson had been only vaguely aware was onboard. She admired the efficiency of the marines as they worked, the sergeant barely said a thing as they took their positions, covered one another, and shot accurately at the windows. There was something medieval about it, she thought, besieging a tower on an island. And as in any siege, time was on their side. Soon, several windows of the tower had been completely shot out.

  The marines stopped shooting momentarily, and the sergeant addressed the man with the grenade launcher. She couldn’t hear his words, so deafened was she by the firing that had gone on all around her, but she knew what he was saying. The same thing she might say to a brash OOD who had a torpedo in the tube, the outer doors opened, and the bearing of the enemy. Take your time, he must be saying. Make it count.

  The soldier got down on one knee, squinted through the sight, exhaled, and fired. The grenade launcher made a satisfying BLOOP. The grenade flew directly toward the tower but hit low, bouncing off the side and exploding as it fell toward the ground. The sergeant leaned in and calmly spoke to the soldier again, who nodded and adjusted his stance. His second shot flew directly through one of the windows they had blown open with their bullets.

  And then it passed directly through a shattered window on the other side. It exploded harmlessly in the air.

  There was a moment of silence, and then they all burst out laughing.

  “What a horrible shot!” said Carlson, laughing with the rest.

  The sergeant put his hand on the shoulder of the soldier with the grenade launcher, moved him slightly to his left, so that his next shot wouldn’t pass all the way through.

  Before he could shoot, there was a sudden change that Carlson became aware of on a subconscious level. The drones that had been hovering all around them, watching their fun but not participating, suddenly jerked in their flight paths, as if jolted by a sudden and important set of new instructions. A large contingent of them formed into a V and flew directly toward the Polaris. The drones that had been directly over their heads dipped ominously, their buzzing engines deepening by an octave as they changed course.

  Almost immediately, the bombs began falling.

  The first one landed in the middle of the commandos, shattering their bodies, sending three of them rolling down the hill. The man with the grenade launcher was cut almost in half, leaving his weapon behind as he rolled into the sea. The gray rock of the bluff was suddenly red with
the blood of her men.

  Carlson was shocked to realize she wasn’t hit, even as the bombs continued to fall. She followed the dead bodies of the marines, rolling down the bluff, thinking that the drones might take her for one of the dead.

  Banach followed her down. They were in that slight crevice in the rock now, between the bluff and the rest of the island, but the drones weren’t fooled at all. An explosion went off right in front of them. She was turned away, but Banach lost an eye in the explosion; his face was covered in blood.

  Banach pulled himself upright, still alive, and dragged himself on top of her. At first she wasn’t sure what he was doing and started to get angry with him, could barely breathe from the suffocating weight of his body on top of hers. Then she realized that he was trying to protect her.

  It won’t work, she thought. The drones saw the concentration of bodies, alive and dead, as an attractive target and wouldn’t stop until they were obliterated. He might absorb the first blast, maybe the second, but the drones were relentless, and her death was inevitable. Banach was so close, the whole length of his body atop her, that she could feel his weakening, dying pulse through her uniform. Each explosion forced him down harder on top of her, as if he were a lover trying to tighten his embrace. A bomb exploded directly on top of them, and his heartbeat stopped. His blood poured over her face, and her arms were pinned by the rock walls, her hands unable to clear her eyes. His dead body absorbed another blast, and then another. How gallant of him, she thought. But she would have preferred to die atop the bluff in the first blast, she realized, looking out at the sea.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Moody watched from the deck of the Polaris as the three rubber boats zipped by her on the way to Eris Island; two from the Typhon boat, and one from the escape trunk of Polaris. The Polaris boat contained just Pete and McCallister, and no guns. The Typhon boats in contrast were crammed with men, all of them carrying weapons. She could take no satisfaction in the imminent, brutal deaths of those two traitors, because it would mean that Typhon would soon take Eris Island. And the cure.

  The drones continued to bomb the Typhon ship. It was sinking rapidly even as the boats escaped it. They zipped by Dr. Haggerty, who was pathetically waving his arms at all parties, seemingly shocked that no one wanted to save him. She didn’t understand it. She felt a creeping, familiar aggravation, much like she had when Hamlin had arrived with his secret orders. Once again, so many people seemed to know exactly what was going on, while she did not. Haggerty went under for good at about the same time the Typhon submarine did.