Pete walked aft, guided by that interior autopilot that seemed to know the layout of Polaris. Darkness and silence were everywhere.
He passed through a watertight door into the missile compartment once again and found himself wandering in a forest of missile tubes, two rows of eighteen missiles each. Numbers were etched on each tube, and he saw the numbers decreasing as he continued aft: even numbers to port, odd numbers to starboard.
The noise level increased as he walked, which he found somewhat comforting, a sign of life in the otherwise ghostly ship. He arrived at the watertight hatch to the engine room, and opened it.
He stepped into a warm, white tunnel that was, he knew, a heavily shielded passage through the reactor compartment. Once on the other side, he was in the engine room, surrounded by the machinery that made the voyage of the Polaris possible. He felt the power of the place, the rumble of the deck plates starting a vibration that coursed through his whole body. He was in the middle of a symphony of machinery, an orchestra of turbines, valves, and pumps that had been exquisitely engineered to make a ship move and a crew survive: “the lights burning and the screw turning,” as Moody had said. It thrilled him.
He remembered some of the specifics, at a rudimentary level. He sensed that while he was comfortable with machinery in general—Hana had called him an engineer—he had never been an expert on the inner workings of the submarine. He walked past the giant evaporator, the machine that turned salt water into pure water that both they and their thirsty propulsion plant could drink, water that was now a thousand times more pure than anything available on the surface. But like the oxygen generators, this life-giving machine wasn’t running. Just as with their oxygen, they were drawing their water from their reserves. Reserve feed tank number one, Pete saw, was empty. Reserve feed tank number two was down to 15 percent. As he stared at the indicator and breathed in the engine room’s humid air, it dropped to 14 percent. The ship was slowly suffocating, and also dying of thirst.
He continued into the turbine room, where steam turned the giant machines that made their electricity. Their twins turned the main engines, which in turn made the screw move, and powered them through the water. He was close to his destination now.
Down a ladder, where it got darker, quieter, and cooler, away from the throbbing power of the turbines, he saw where the main engines connected to a giant set of gears, which in turn connected to the screw. Suddenly, it was there, the enormous shaft that penetrated the back of the submarine. It turned slowly, steadily, and silently, the most primal expression of the engine room’s immense power. He was as far as he could go from his watchers in control. He realized that’s why this location had been selected.
No one was there.
He looked around, increasingly apprehensive. He felt the gun in his pocket and felt some comfort in that. He looked at his watch: 0610. He wondered how long he should wait around.
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.