He sensed the pain before opening his eyes. Slowly he regained consciousness. It was dark and loud, his eyes stung from smoke, and his ears rang from the multiple discordant alarms that rang just outside the door. His face was pressed against a steel floor. He rolled over onto his back and looked upward, trying to get his bearings and let the splitting pain in his head subside, but there was nothing to see, just more steel, pipes, and cables. He felt a momentary panic, afraid that he’d been swallowed whole by a giant machine.
He sat up, felt something heavy in his hand. He was startled to see he held a nine-millimeter pistol.
He slowly pulled himself to his feet, waiting for the disorientation to pass. Where am I? He saw the sweeping arc of a yellow alarm light through the crack in the door. Several kinds of smoke combined in the air he inhaled: the sharp ozone of electrical fire, the sour tang of gunpowder. He shook his head, but the disorientation didn’t pass.
He made his way to a small metal sink at the end of the bunks. The sink was made to fold into the wall. Reluctantly putting the gun down, he pushed a button, and a narrow stream of cold water ran out. He filled his hands with the frigid water and buried his face in them, savoring the coldness that snapped him awake. For the first time, he looked into the mirror that was above the sink.
A bumper sticker, cracked and faded, had been pasted across the top: POLARIS: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM. The silhouettes of two submarines faced each other in the background, one very old, he somehow knew, with a flat missile deck and a boxy tower, and one very new and much larger. A big, modern submarine. The submarine he was aboard.
Focusing suddenly on his own reflection, he saw he was in the blue uniform of a submarine officer, a nametag embroidered onto his chest: HAMLIN.
Only then did he notice the gash above his left eye, caked in blood.
He heard hard, quick footsteps outside the door, hurried climbing down a metal ladder, but somehow sensed he wasn’t ready to venture outside the stateroom yet. He desperately wanted some idea of what was going on first. Taking the gun back off the sink, he turned and faced the darkness.
The bunks were made with military precision, a contrast to the papers that had been thrown around the rest of the room. Military documents stamped SECRET combined with personal effects on the floor: photos of girlfriends, of dogs, handwritten letters in pastel-colored envelopes. For the first time Hamlin became aware of movement, a slight rolling at his feet; the ship was under way. Where it was going, and where it came from, remained a mystery. At least to him. A battery-powered battle lantern was affixed to the overhead. He found the switch and turned it on. Its single beam of light crossed the room, landing on the form of a person, sitting, head slumped forward.
Pete raised the gun, startled. “Hey!” he said. No response.
He stepped forward just as the ship rolled again, and the body fell over, revealing a stark, lifeless face, a hole in the middle of his forehead. The light of the battle lantern reflected a thick streak of gore on the bulkhead where he’d been leaning.
Hamlin read his nametag: RAMIREZ. He felt a stab of sadness and knew somehow that Ramirez had been his friend, even though he didn’t remember him. He stepped back and felt a growing sense of horror as the dead man stared at him accusingly, and he felt the weight of the gun in his hand.
Someone grabbed his shoulder from behind.
He whipped around, gun raised.
It was a strikingly beautiful woman wearing a uniform like his, but with oak leaves embroidered on her collar. Her nametag read MOODY. She had a wound, too, a torn sleeve that revealed a gash on her upper arm, and she looked breathless with exhaustion. Unlike Hamlin, though, she seemed to know exactly what was going on. Also unlike Hamlin, she seemed exhilarated.
“Jesus, Hamlin, relax. It’s me.”
Slowly he lowered the gun.
She stepped past him into the stateroom and looked at Ramirez. Amazed, she looked back at Pete, and then back at the corpse again.
“Is he dead?”
Pete nodded.
She knelt down, searched his pockets, looked at the papers that had fallen from his desk onto the floor. “Good. You stopped him before he did any more damage.”
Satisfied with her search of the body, she stood and looked at Hamlin quizzically. “Are you okay?”
“I’m … really not sure.”
She stepped toward him and looked him in the eye. “I’m sorry you had to do this,” she said. “Truly. But you did the right thing. You might have saved the ship. And—you’ll never have to prove your loyalty to me again.”
They both looked down at the body a final time.
“Let’s go,” she finally said. “We’re not out of the woods yet.”