Back In Blue

by G R Matthews

  The first explosion was far enough away that I felt the sub shake before I heard it. It was followed by three more and the sound of something fizzing close by overhead. Out of reflex, I ducked over the console and cursed myself for the pointless action.

  Somewhere out there sailors were dying. The hulls of their subs cracking and coming apart like eggshells. A brief expulsion of air followed by the inevitable collapse and implosion. You hoped, morbid as it was, that the initial explosion or implosion killed you. Survive those and the ice-cold water would force its way into your lungs through your mouth or nose. Your eardrums would burst and every cavity of air would be crushed before being filled with water. You'd drown in agony.

  Worse still, you might get caught behind a bulkhead, trapped in an airlock, or some portion of your vessel that survived the decompression. It was rare, but not so uncommon that you never heard about it. On the one hand, there was the chance of rescue. There existed a slim chance that, at the end of the conflict, someone would be sifting through the debris and stumble across you, and the slimmer chance that they had a means to get you out.

  On the other hand, you might slowly asphyxiate as the air becomes full of exhaled carbon dioxide. A stinging headache which feels as though nails are being slowly hammered into your forehead is the precursor to blessed unconsciousness. An oblivion you've waited for, prayed for, knowing you were going to die and having nothing else to think about over the hours, days, or weeks, depending upon the lump of metal you were caught in, up until that point.

  I'd take the quick death over the rest. Anyone with any sense would.

  Fumbling at the seatbelt, I tried to keep my eye on my depth gauge, the sonar images overlaid upon my map, power consumption and my own noise profile. I was well aware that the engines were making more noise now than I'd made on the whole journey and that was announcing my presence to both sides. However, the number of active sonar pings which clattered through the hull of my small sub told me they knew I was here anyway.

  Dragging the earphones from their compartment next to the console, I shoved them in my ears and the raucous sounds of explosions, pressure waves, sonar pings and the imagined screams of the dying were cut off. Except for those screams, they filled my mind with all the horrors of the deep, but I shoved them aside the best I could and focused.

  The sea floor wasn't too distant, but the nature of it, a mostly featureless plain, gave me few places to hide. Worse still, it seemed as though my sudden appearance had caught both sides by surprise and both had come to the conclusion that I must be some sort of cunning plan by the other side. The number of pings hitting my hull increased in tempo. Targeting pings. Both sides getting a good fix on my location, speed and direction.

  They fired. My map showed torpedoes leaving both fleets on a trajectory to intercept me and the wail of my sub’s alarms filled my ears. Even with both other seats full of well-trained officers working to peak efficiency there was little chance of avoiding every torpedo or explosion. The image of Norah, unconscious, hurt, vulnerable rose in my mind and the temptation to struggle from the seat, to run back to my daughter, throw my arms around her and hold her till the inevitable end was strong. No one should die alone, not like this, Tyler deserved better. I should have been a better father.

  On the screen, the thin lines of the torpedoes closed in upon us. Our death would be quick. Small comfort.

  "Not again," I muttered. I wouldn't let my daughter down again.

  Not my daughter. Norah. I wouldn't let Norah down, or her parents down. She was my responsibility, my charge. No other parent needed to feel my pain, to live with it day after day. I'd held her body, a small, fragile thing robbed of life, of animation, of the spark which created the Tyler I'd loved more than life itself. If we were destroyed here, even that tiny, sharp, cruel mercy would be denied her parents.

  "Fuck it," I shouted.

  My hand slid up the console, dragging more power from the generator and flooding the motors with every last drop I could squeeze from it. There was no way to outrun the torpedoes, not in this sub or any sub for that matter. All I could do, my only chance, was to confuse them. Give them a target or better yet multiple targets and force them to decide which one to go for.

  I pulled back on the controls, lifting the sub from its collision course with the seafloor and drove it almost vertical toward the distant surface. On my screen the torpedoes changed course to match mine and all the other blobs and wavy lines which donated submarines, munitions, or were echoes of sound the computer couldn't filter fell away from my vision.

  Perhaps, maybe, there was a chance that the torpedoes would be as confused, if not more, than my computer. They'd mistake each other for me and go after each other. The explosions would likely destroy me too, but there was a chance that just a few torpedoes exploding would knock the rest out of the fight. It was also the case, I knew for a certainty, that no officer guided these torpedoes. In a battle like this they couldn't spare the crew or the attention from the main forces out there. Fire and forget torpedoes. My only chance.

  At the apogee of my rise, at the moment I guessed I'd done all I could, I fired the rest of the decoys toward the oncoming torpedoes. I'd set them to go off the minute they cleared my hull. Drawing more power from the generator, seeing its power bar go into the red and the word danger flashing above it, I pushed the propellers as hard as they would go. The dive planes were angled to their stops and the smell of electrical burning filled the cabin.

  The submarine pitched down and raced through the billions of bubbles created by the decoys. Like so much of piloting a submarine at depth, the mind created the images of the outside. Aided by clips shows and animations, by teachers at school, when I'd gone, describing the dangers outside the hull, the imagination was our true eyes on the depths. In those dreams and visions we saw the whole of the deep laid out before us, or the minutiae of the terrain in a way that headlamps and sub lights never could. Only in the shallows, in the photic zone far above, where the light of the sun gave clear views of coral reefs could reality match those visions.

  Right now, mine were full of fast-moving torpedoes, bubbles and the unconscious young lady in the cabin behind me.

  The first explosion sounded impossibly close, even through the protection of the earphones, and the sub rocked, yawed and pitched as the pressure wave caught it. With a presence of mind I rarely possessed, I cut the power from the engines, the propellers stilled and the fusion generator almost burbled with happiness. We still moved toward the sea floor, inertia and the pressure wave pushing us that way, but now there was less chance of a blade being sheared off and spearing through the hull, or the engines burning out, or the fusion plant exploding inside the hull. Any of those were death, and I wanted Norah to survive.

  A second explosion grabbed the sub and spun it around. The hull groaned and creaked alarmingly. Alarms sounded throughout the small vessel. Warning lights flashed and messages flew across the consoles, but there was nothing I could do. I was helpless. Every dice had been rolled and every last bit of Hayes luck used up for good or ill. Natural twenty or a one, there was nothing else I could do so I clung onto the sides of the console and closed my eyes.

  "Make it quick," I muttered.

  The third explosion was followed by a fourth and a fifth. If there were more, I didn't hear them or see them. The darkness which fell was absolute.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  When my eyes cracked open only a faint yellow light flashed in the corner of my vision. The air in the sub was still and no sign of a breeze brushed my face to dry the sweat I was covered in. I put a hand to my head, making sure it was still connected to my body. Trying to lift myself from the pilot’s chair was impossible. Every time I pushed with my feet against the deck I made little progress. Something was holding me down, crushing me into the chair. Thoughts of a collapsed ceiling, a dented hull, swamped my brain for a moment before cold reason reasserted itself. Seatbelt.

  I slapped the quick release an
d fell out of the chair. On all fours in the dark, I threw up. Hot, acidic bile and a thick, chunk filled mess splattered on the decking. I heaved twice, three times more until there was nothing more to come up and my ribs hurt as much as my head. It was an effort of will to keep myself out of the mess and crawl to the side, around the other chairs to find a blessed clean space of deck to collapse onto.

  The yellow light still throbbed in time with my pain, but there was no other light. Every second I got a flash of vision, enough to map the layout of the bridge and get a look at my predicament. All the consoles and screens were dark, but there were no cracks I could make out, no jets of steam encroached on the cabin which would indicate a broken pipe, and it took me too long to realise there were no more explosions or sonar pings ringing through the hull.

  Norah.

  I rolled onto my front once more and drew my knees under me, attempting to stand. If I could have seen the bridge it would have been spinning and tumbling like a child's toy thrown down the stairs. Luckily, over the years, I've had a lot of experience of dark rooms spinning wildly about and knew not to trust what my little balance nerves in my inner-ear were telling me. Instead, I held onto the back of a chair, letting the constancy of its presence, its solidity convince my brain I was still upright.

  After a few moments, or minutes, it was hard to tell, the feeling of constantly falling over subsided and my head felt still once more. Using the half-seen, half-glimpses of the cabin to guide my progress, I made it to the small corridor and edged down it, hands outstretched for the door to the sleeping berths.

  When my hand caught only open air, I flailed to find the edge of the door frame and used it as a guide, stepping into Norah’s room. The first aid screen was still on, beeping quietly and updating no one about Norah's condition. It provided enough illumination to see and I staggered over to her, collapsing to my knees by her bed.

  The screen, from what I could gather, was telling me she was alright. Unconscious but alive and still in need of medical attention. With my back against the wall, I sat for a few minutes watching her chest rise and fall, the screen echoing her breaths and the beat of her heart. The thought that I'd just condemned us to a long, slow death kept chiselling away at the corner of my mind, trying to find a chink in the wall which kept panic at bay.

  It seems, when push comes to shove, when the chips have all fallen, all the cards have been dealt and the other shoe is about to drop, I'd fought for a few extra minutes, hours or days of life. Even rationally knowing that they'd be uncomfortable, drawn out, immensely long with only the thought of eventual death to occupy my mind, I'd still chosen life.

  Stupid decision.

  Now, I needed to keep choosing life, for Norah's sake. For the sake of her parents. If I could get this sub up and running, we'd have a chance. That the air wasn't circulating was a bad sign, but I was Special Forces was I not? I'd piloted a Fish-Suit in war and peace. I'd destroyed but I’d also built boxes, domes, submarines, factories. We stood a chance, even though we were stood on a sharp arete with a steep plunge to oblivion on either side and the rock was crumbling away with each passing second.

  Move, Hayes.

  I gave Norah a pat on the arm which she wouldn't feel, but made me feel better, and staggered back to the bridge to collect the torch I should have remembered the first time. Flicking the beam on, I took care to circumvent the pool of vomit on the floor. Stopping by the kitchen station to get a quick drink of water I swilled it around my mouth and spat it out. No point in having to taste my own vomit while I fixed the sub, though I suspected the onboard food would have a similar flavour.

  Clambering into the cramped engineering compartment, and rather than waste an age trying to figure out what was wrong, I went with the plan which worked last time. I turned the computer off, unplugged it from the fusion plant for ten seconds and plugged it back in. Any moment now the thing would go through its boot-up routine. Once that was done, a quick internal diagnostic would tell me what was wrong and how to fix it or bypass it. A Submarine, even a small one like this, comes with a thousand backups, remedial systems, and other whatnots to make sure it can always be made to move or send a signal for help.

  Nothing.

  Absolutely nothing.

  The lights on the fusion generator blinked in various patterns. It fed the computer with the power it required, but the computer stubbornly refused to switch on.

  I hit it with fist. Nothing.

  I kicked it. Nothing.

  I smacked it with the torch. Nothing.

  Without the computer, my job just got a lot, lot harder. Almost impossible. I'd need to visually inspect the engines, the environmental systems, the Carbon Dioxide scrubbers especially, and the sensor systems too. That was a lot of ground to cover. A cracked board, a pipe, a cable I couldn't reach, or problem outside the hull and I'd doomed Norah and I to a slow death.

  Stupid.

  Inspiration struck. I had a computer. Alright, not as sophisticated or as powerful as the one which drove this sub, but it did operate and maintain the systems on a Fish-Suit. That was close. It might work. It was better than giving up or spending the next day or two, before the air was so bad I'd be unable to breathe and slowly suffocate in the Carbon Dioxide.

  I unplugged my Fish-Suit computer from the bridge console, hoping that its systems were unaffected, and scrabbled back into the engineering compartment. The designers of computers, submarines and other technology had long ago agreed on standard connectors so it was a second’s work to attach my computer to the sub's systems. I flicked the little switch on my computer and its screen lit up. Success.

  It took a long time for the Fish-Suit computer to read all the systems on the sub and during that time I picked up a kink in my back, a pain in my neck, and my left leg developed pins and needles. However, it wasn't like I had other things to do. The restaurant wasn't serving any longer, the bar had called last orders, the play was finished, and Norah wasn't much of a conversationalist. Just another day in the Navy.

  My computer let out a series of low beeps drawing my mind away from better times and whimsical thoughts. I'd have preferred to be back in those thoughts. The slow diagnostic report which scrolled past the little screen on the computer did not make for good reading.

  The fusion generator was working and there were no cracks or misalignments reported. Which is where the good news ended. The motors which drove the propellers weren't responding to any commands or queries sent by the computer which meant they were gone. The engines which powered the small manoeuvring thrusters, really just complicated and directional water jets, reported multiple fluid leaks and even in top working order could manage a velocity of about one knot. The environmental systems said they were in perfect working order, but the lack of any fan induced breeze hinted strongly that they were lying. To themselves or me, it amounted to the same thing. The microwave oven wasn't responding and the refrigerator reported that its temperature was slowly rising. Which, taking into account that we'd be dead before the food ran out or went rancid, wasn't high on my list of priorities. The rest of the report was just as bad.

  At the bottom of the report was the good, or bad, news depending upon the eventual outcome. When the sub had lost all power and no commands came from the computer or a human hand, it reverted to its safety protocol and was sending a distress signal at regular intervals.

  Someone out there knew we were alive. A fact brought home when, with no warning, the submarine rocked on the sea floor and a metallic, hollow thud sounded through the hull.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  "Shit."

  I struggled from the compartment and conducted a quick inventory of my defensive weapons. A cup of water, my fists, and some food that was going to be rotten in a few days but probably tasted horrible right now.

  The little computer from my Fish-Suit could access the submarines systems but so few were working that any clever plan would be a pointless delaying tactic.

  My best bet, it seemed, w
as to invite whomever it was securing their sub to my airlock in for a sit-down meal and a case of slow food poisoning. It wasn't a good plan.

  There was, of course, another option which I'd discounted the moment I decided to try and avoid the torpedoes sent to destroy us. Sub builders, even Health and Safety, recognised the fact that possibly, at some point, rare as it may be, a submarine may become disabled far from help. So far that there would be no chance of a rescue. At which point, it was expected, the pilot and crew would take the less painful option and hit the self-destruct button.

  Why they couldn't put the right combination of drugs on board to make the passing painless was something I'd never understood. Suicide is frowned upon. A hangover from our religious past, maybe. More likely the fact that despite our penchant for killing each other in pointless wars, there really aren't that many of us left. Each one is precious in some way. Even me.

  Nine billion folks had once walked the planet under open skies. Now we few crammed ourselves into artificial cities and boxes. To provide the drugs would be an acknowledgement of the deed. Better, we thought in some twisted logic, to be blown to bits by a vessel that could no longer support us. For some reason, we thought this more noble, more fitting. An act of bravery, not cowardice.

  When Tyler had been killed, I'd had the drugs, had formulated a plan, and stepped back from the brink of oblivion. Whether that was bravery or cowardice I couldn't be sure. I never would be and there were times, in the dark of a sleepless, tortured night, I regretted the decision.

  Which left a singular plan possessing the benefit of utter simplicity.

  I leaned back into the compartment and dragged the little computer closer to the door, checking the state of the airlock. It was closed. The computer could tell me nothing else which likely meant that the power systems were down. You could cycle an airlock from the outside, if you really needed to. It was a slow process but another one of those ever-thoughtful safety measures. I had no way to lock it from in here.