Hamlin walked into the wardroom just behind Holmes. On the table was a pitcher of slightly gray-looking reconstituted milk and a dozen tiny boxes of cereal in a metal mixing bowl. Moody was waiting at the head of the table: the captain’s chair.
“Gentlemen,” she said. “We’ve got some time before we get to the degaussing range. Wanted to get a quick status update. Frank?”
“You’re looking at the entire crew. Not counting the doctor or the one locked in the escape trunk.”
“That’s it then? Three officers. And a doctor somewhere.” She inhaled deeply. “Well, it’ll be tough. The three of us can stay on the conn as much as possible. Use the automated systems when we can. We don’t have much choice. Autopilot is driving us now, seems like that’s working at least.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Frank.
“And how are our systems?”
“Everything vital is running, with the exception of radio. Propulsion is good, all combat systems are good.”
“Oxygen is low,” interrupted Pete. They both looked at him.
“How low?” said Moody.
“Fourteen percent in the forward compartment.”
“Christ, no wonder I was falling asleep up there. Can we increase the bleed?”
“One bank is empty,” said Pete. “The other is less than twenty-five percent.”
“And none of us can operate that oxygen generator,” said Moody. “We’ll just have to ventilate when we can.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said both Frank and Pete.
“One more thing,” said Moody, looking at Frank. “After the degaussing range, take Ramirez to the torpedo room—let’s shoot his body overboard as soon as possible. Before long he’ll start to … smell. Bad for morale. And we’ve already made an unholy racket—one body shot overboard won’t matter much at this point. Do you need help?”
Pete froze, filled with dread that he might have to help move the body of his dead friend, the friend he killed.
“No,” said Frank as he smirked and involuntarily flexed his arms. “I can get him down there.”
“That’s not what I meant,” said Moody, rolling her eyes. “Can you operate the torpedo tubes? Shoot him overboard?”
Frank bristled. “Of course,” he said. “I’ve operated those tubes a dozen times.”
“OK,” said Moody, doubt in her voice. “Just checking. Get help if you need it, just get it done. The sooner the better.”
“Do we want to do the whole burial-at-sea ceremony?” he asked.
“Absolutely not,” said Moody. “We won’t ring any bells for a traitor.”
Frank stood and snapped to. “Aye aye, Captain. I’ll do it right after we finish at the range.” He started to turn.
“Wait,” she said. “Grab a bowl.” She tossed a small box of cereal at him. “Let’s eat dinner first.”
* * *
After a silent, quick dinner of slightly stale cereal and thin artificial milk, the three of them headed to the control room together.
Pete stepped up to the command console and took it in.
Their own ship was represented right in the middle of the screen by a small green silhouette of a submarine. Behind them, about two miles aft, an upside-down V represented their mysterious shadow submarine. And directly ahead of them were two bold, parallel lines. From the scale on the screen, Pete could see they were about five miles away.
“The degaussing range,” said Moody. “I was privy to this part of your orders. I’m assuming for the drones…”
“Yes,” said Hamlin. “To reduce our magnetic signature.”
It came back to him with a powerful clarity. Not only the mechanics of the degaussing run, but the entire control room as well. It came, he realized, from a different layer of memory than the one that had been somehow erased. It came from a thousand hours of practice in this very room, etched on his brain like acid on glass. For the first time since he’d awoken on his stateroom floor, he knew what was going on, what he was doing. The feeling was intoxicating.
He stood on a small raised platform in the middle of the control room: the conn. On each side of him were the polished steel cylinders of the two periscopes, both lowered into a forty-foot well beneath his feet. In front of him, Frank climbed into a large pilot’s chair. At Frank’s knees was a control yoke that would actually drive the ship. To the left of the yoke was an old-fashioned brass engine order telegraph he would use to control the ship’s speed. Despite the gesture toward nostalgia with the brass control, Pete knew that it was an entirely automated system, channeling his orders for ship’s speed directly to the engine room. And while Pete would give the rudder and depth orders from the position of command on the conn, Frank would actually be driving the ship from his seat, his hands on the controls.
Directly in front of Pete was a console with several selectable displays. Currently it showed the sonar display: the two bright parallel lines that marked the walls of the degaussing range, and the shadow submarine behind them. He could turn a switch, and the same screen could display the status of the drone cloud, sensed via a floating wire that trailed behind and above them, registering each drone as it passed. If he turned the switch yet again, he could read reports on all the ship’s vital systems.
Where Frank could see them from the dive chair were the controls and indicators for the ship’s non-tactical systems: the hundreds of pipes and valves that kept the ship and crew alive. The panel was speckled with yellow warning lights and a few red alarms. Pete couldn’t read them from his perch on the conn, but he knew most of the alarms represented damage done by the mutiny. Of all the valves and controls, the most imposing were the two large yellow levers directly over Frank’s head: the “chicken switches” that activated the ship’s emergency blow system. They controlled a direct mechanical linkage that would fill the main ballast tanks with air and shoot them to the surface in the event of a severe emergency. It was the last-ditch safety measure they possessed, something they could use only once and only when nothing else would do, the submarine’s equivalent of a fighter pilot’s ejection seat. Both were designed to get vessel operators safely to the surface of the earth, albeit from different directions.
Pete flipped the switch back to the drone display. Hana looked over his shoulder.
“Medium density, undirected,” she said. “That’s expected given our proximity to the island. A flyover every ten minutes or so; doesn’t look like they’re actively seeking us or dancing each other in.”
“Very well,” he said. “Prepare to go to periscope depth.”
Moody looked at him, and Frank guffawed.
“PD?”
“I want to see the action of the drones myself, before and after. It’s the only way we can assess if the degaussing has been successful.”
“And?”
“And it’ll help us get away from our friend out there.”
“How’s that?”
“She won’t be able to do what I’m about to do.”
“That’s my boy,” said Moody, an intense smile on her face. Frank grimaced in disgust, and turned back to the controls in front of the dive chair. Hamlin hesitated for just a moment before giving the order. He thought about McCallister locked in the escape trunk, and Hana here in control. Who exactly was he working for now? He wondered if Moody and McCallister were wondering the same thing.
“Dive, make your depth eight-five feet.”
“Make my depth eight-five feet, aye, sir,” Holmes responded. He pulled slowly on the yoke in front of him. Pete felt the angle in his feet as the big ship began to drive upward.
“Ahead one-third,” he said.
“Ahead one-third, aye, sir,” repeated Frank. He reached down to the engine order telegraph to order the slower bell, and the automated system immediately answered with a ding. Pete and Hana watched the speed of the ship drop on a red digital indicator until it fell below ten knots. Any faster than that, and the scope could be damaged.
“Raising number one scope,” said Pete. He turned the orange ring over his head. He put his eye to the scope as it rose, and he began turning slowly around, looking through the optics underwater. Even though he knew their shadow sub was too far behind them to see, and too deep, he found himself pausing briefly on that bearing directly behind them, looking into the murky ocean for their invisible pursuer.
The darkness in the scope turned steadily lighter as they came shallow, from black to gray to green. Suddenly, the scope broke through.
“Scope is clear,” said Hamlin, exhilarated both by his sudden proficiency and clarity of mind, and by the view of the sky—for as far as he could see, glorious sunny blue sky. He didn’t realize how imprisoned he’d felt by the steel walls of the Polaris, and the gloom that pervaded her, but in an instant, through the pristine optics of her periscope, he could see for miles. “No close contacts.”
He twisted the right grip on the scope toward him, tilting the optics as far up as he could, looking into the sky.
“No visible drones,” he said.
He heard Moody from the console. “ESM shows the nearest drone about two miles away on a relative bearing of zero-nine-zero, heading this way.”
“Seeking?” he asked.
Moody turned some knobs on the command console. “Negative, not seeking, standard random search pattern but on our vector. Should be visible in five minutes.”
She stepped up to the conn. “And it’ll see us right after we see him.” She was concerned, but willing to let Pete execute his plan.
“Understood.”
Hamlin swung the scope around to the starboard beam and looked, and waited.
He saw it three minutes later, a tiny black dot on the horizon, barely visible even with the scope in high power. It looked almost like a big seabird, a cormorant, but Pete knew they were too far from land for it to be anything natural. And soon enough, he saw the sun glint on its metallic head. “I have a visual on contact Delta-One,” he said, pushing the red button on the scope to register the bearing in their fire-control systems.
The drone was flying near the surface, in a leisurely serpentine pattern that betrayed no urgency. It was hunting, Hamlin somehow knew, but it hadn’t seen them yet, as it swooped gracefully back and forth. While it was hunting, it was also conserving energy, flying slowly, its wings turned efficiently upward to soak up energy in its solar cells, its computer steering it to take advantage of the winds, gliding when it could. In good weather, it could stay airborne for weeks.
He also knew that the drone wouldn’t see their periscope visually—its cross section, about three inches, would be invisible among even the light waves at this distance. The only effective sensor the drone had for shallow submarines was its magnetic anomaly detection, or MAD.
As long as men had made ships out of metal, people had attempted to use magnets to detect and kill them. Everything made out of steel distorts the earth’s magnetic field as it passes through, and relatively simple sensors take advantage of this. It was a time-tested method—the Germans developed very effective magnetic mines in World War II. In short order, navies began using those same magnetic effects to detect submarines. A submarine could become invisible to radar by submerging, and invisible to sonar by silencing, but the way its steel distorted the earth’s magnetic field was a physical constant, seemingly impossible to mask. MAD was a big enough threat to submarines that the Soviet Union, during the cold war, had built an entire fleet of subs out of nonferrous metals, materials that were scarce and difficult to use but produced no magnetic signature.
MAD was also a very effective method for the drones—it worked well because the drones could sweep large areas of ocean as they flew, and with large numbers of drones they could cover vast swaths of the world. Submarines could avoid detection by staying deep, but this was tactically fine with the drone strategy—a submarine forced deep was a compromised asset, limited in what it could do.
To counter this, the Polaris would try to erase her own magnetic signature, or “degauss.” This was named for the “gaus,” a scientific unit of magnetism, and was accomplished by steering the ship between two giant electromagnets. The electromagnetics would temporarily erase the field of the Polaris, making her, for a time, invisible to MAD detection. This was the first step of Hamlin’s mission, getting the Polaris through the range. But first he had to see the drones.
Looking through the scope, Hamlin could tell the instant the drone had sniffed them out. It was close enough by then that Hamlin could see the glint of the sun on its solar cells, its power-giving wings. Suddenly its graceful, lazy swooping changed. Its wings tightened up from the ninety-degree angle to its body into an attack posture, pointed and fast. It dived until it was just above the surface of the water, corrected its course slightly, and flew directly overhead. He swung the scope to watch it pass by as ESM alarms shrieked in the control room.
“Flyby!” Hana shouted, cutting out the alarms.
“Confirmed,” said Pete calmly.
“Want me to go deep?!” said Holmes.
“Not yet,” said Hamlin.
“Why didn’t it bomb us?”
“A sub at periscope depth, with just a single drone in the area—it doesn’t like its odds. Every algorithm is designed to optimize its chances for a kill, and a single shot at a periscope isn’t good odds. They’re designed to work best in swarms.”
“So now it’s going to get its friends?”
“Exactly,” he said. But still he waited, and watched.
The drone flew high into the sky, almost straight up, twisting as it soared, a motion designed to attract its comrades. An upward-looking sensor on the head of the drones was designed to look for exactly this behavior. Pete found himself curiously pleased at how well the system functioned.
“Drones approaching from all bearings,” said Hana.
Pete had no intention of allowing a swarm to get on top of the Polaris in attack formation, but at the same time he couldn’t help but stare at their deadly, beautiful efficiency. The lead drone, the one that had spotted them, banked sharply away from them, and came down to just a few feet above ocean level. The others soon aligned behind it, in a delta formation, pointed right at the Polaris. It had all taken just minutes.
“Emergency deep!” he ordered.
Ready for the order, Frank immediately pushed forward on his control yoke, and the ship took a steep downward angle. Pete lowered the scope and braced himself against the angle as they dived. Within seconds, they were at two hundred feet.
“Make your depth six hundred thirty-two feet,” he said.
Frank acknowledged the order and drove them deeper, to a point just a few feet above the ocean floor.
“Will they drop their bombs?” asked Moody.
“No,” said Pete. “We’re too deep and they know it. They won’t waste their bombs, won’t drop unless they register a ninety percent chance or better of a hit. Like bees with stingers: they only get one shot, and they want to make it count.”
“So what’s the point?”
Pete shrugged. “They know we’re here, that’s now stored in their memory; they’ll increase their concentration around us, in this whole sector, ready to pounce if we surface again. They’ll shift the priority of this area, intensify the search patterns. There are thousands of them, and only one of us. They know that time is on their side if we show our heads.”
“Which we won’t,” said Moody.
“We will,” said Pete. “In just a few minutes. But if everything goes according to plan, we’ll be invisible.”
He sat back down at the command console, switching it back from ESM to sonar. Just as planned, they were pointing right at the two bright, parallel lines of the degaussing range. “Right five degrees rudder,” he said.
Frank repeated the order and eased the ship right.
“Steady as she goes,” said Hamlin, reaching down to change the scale of the display as they approached.
While the sonar display just showed two bright green lines, vivid visual images of what lay in front of them came to Pete. First, he saw the degaussing range like an engineering diagram, the spirals of electrical coil, the parallel lines of switches, the banked symbols of the massive batteries that powered it. A remotely activated magnetic switch and a sensor at the entrance, the ship’s magnetic signature activating the range even as the range would soon erase it. This textbook diagram in his mind then gave way to a photographic image, a memory of an underwater survey, stark white lights trained on coral-covered walls, the coils of wire protected by heavy conduit, impermeable to the sea but completely transparent to electricity and magnetism. In this mental movie, a recovered memory from somewhere in his training: a lonely crab skittered across a horizontal beam encrusted in coral.
“Approaching Point Alpha…” said Moody, jerking him from his reverie. “We’re at the entry point.” It was like trying to pull a car into a one-car garage blindfolded.
“All stop,” said Hamlin.
“All stop, aye, sir,” said Frank, immediately ordering the bell.
He and Moody stood over the display and watched as the giant ship slowly drifted between the two bars on the screen, perfectly centered. In a box on the right hand of the screen, Pete saw the ship’s acceleration in all three dimensions, and watched carefully to see if he would need to add a small rudder angle to counteract a stray current.
“Nice driving,” said Moody, looking at him with a smile.
“Thank you, ma’am,” he said. The back of Frank’s neck turned red.
There was a moment of concern as they drifted inside the range and nothing happened. Pete worried that it had been disabled, either by the relentless destructive power of the ocean and nature, or by an act of war. But then suddenly, the lights in the control room dimmed, and a dozen new alarms went off as the ship was engulfed by a powerful magnetic field.
“The range is active!” said Moody. “It’s working!” Frank was leaning forward, cutting out the alarms that had sounded as a result. Pete could almost feel the effect upon them, stretching the magnetic field of the Polaris into line with brute, electric force, making them invisible in at least one, crucial way. Frank ably managed their depth as they continued to drift through, no easy feat as the ship’s speed continued to decrease, making ship control difficult.
“We’re clear of the range,” said Moody as they passed beyond the two bright lines on the console. Their speed had dropped to under three knots. Pete confirmed on the screen in front of him that they had drifted completely through.
“Ahead one-third,” said Hamlin. “Make your depth eight-five feet.”
They repeated the process of going to periscope depth. As the scope broke through, Pete immediately turned the ship’s single eye upward.
A dozen drones swooped around them in circles, their electronic brains excited by the recent sighting. They swooped, dived, and circled around, many of them virtually buzzing their periscope. But none of them attacked.
“Captain,” said Hamlin, “the ship has been successfully degaussed.”
“Very well,” she said. “Take us deep and report to my stateroom for debriefing.”
* * *
Carlson and Banach watched the Polaris slow and go deep in front of them, immediately after her strange, short trip to periscope depth. They’d done nothing at PD, didn’t shoot trash or broadcast a message. The only thing they seemed to accomplish was attract a swarm of drones, which quickly developed attack formations, forcing the Polaris underwater just in time.
More precisely, they listened, as they heard the hull popping of a ship descending and the slowing of the ship’s main reduction gear.
“What are they up to?”
Carlson shook her head. “I have no idea. They are very deep. Almost to the bottom.”
Banach took the two strides necessary to get to the other side of the control room, checked the chart. “Are they trying to lose us?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “They seem to have other things on their mind.”
“Can our friend onboard tell us anything?”
She shook her head, frustrated. “Haven’t heard from him lately. That would make this entirely too easy.”
She walked over to the cramped corner of the control room where Banach stood, where the chart was spread out. In the lower corner of the chart was Eris Island. They’d followed the Polaris up here, to the opposite corner, to a spot that was strangely featureless on the chart, devoid of geological marks or even soundings.
“Stay at this depth, and slow,” she said. “Let’s see what they are up to.”
They drifted closer, staying about a mile away, waiting to see what happened. She tried to visualize what they were doing as they slowed almost to a standstill, drifting forward at a speed of just a few knots. She thought about their man onboard, wondered if he was still alive. Maybe he’d been discovered in the ruckus that they’d overheard, exposed, perhaps even executed. No, she thought again, the Alliance prized themselves on their civility too much for that.
Suddenly, a noise spiked on their sonar. She could hear it right through the hull: a dull ka-chunk.
Before she could say anything, a delicate alarm sounded next to the chart, a rarely heard alarm that took her a moment to recognize.
“Captain,” Banach said, “the inertial navigation system is failing.…”
She looked up at the central panel in front of the dive chair, where a number of other alarms had sounded. Some of the smaller circuit breakers on the ship had opened, and the electrical system was busily resetting itself into a safe mode.
Meanwhile the Polaris continued drifting slowly forward.
“Is it some kind of weapon?” asked Banach. “An electric pulse? Are we under attack?”
“No,” said Carlson. “I don’t think so. But we are at the edge of some kind of electrical field … a powerful one.”
They waited a few more minutes and then the ka-chunk sound repeated, and the alarm for their navigation system cleared. Breakers continued to reset around them, and she realized that the sound was similar to the one that had come to them on the bearing of the Polaris.
Once again the Polaris sped up and changed depth, ascending to periscope depth.
“Let’s follow them up this time,” she said, heading for the scope. Banach climbed into the dive chair and efficiently brought the ship shallow.
She raised the scope as they came up. Soon they were at periscope depth, and Carlson squinted at the bright equatorial light through the scope. The Polaris was a mile or so away, too far for them to see the scope.
But she could see the drones everywhere, attracted by their earlier trip to the surface. They were swooping overhead, many of them directly above where she thought the Polaris was sticking up her nose. They were no longer in the tight pattern of attack that she’d seen earlier. The drones were swooping and searching.
“Captain?”
“They’ve made themselves invisible to the drones,” she said, the solution suddenly dawning on her. “At least at periscope depth.”
“How?”
“Degaussing,” she said. “They must have passed an underwater degaussing range.” It made sense, in a way, this close to Eris Island, probably the outcome of another, earlier research product. She grudgingly respected the Alliance and its technology; it always seemed to work when they needed it. Her leaders, on the other hand, couldn’t provide her ship a microwave oven that would work without bursting into flames.
“So the drones use MAD?”
“Apparently,” she said, watching the drones fly obliviously over the Polaris. “At least for shallow boats.”
“Well!” said Banach. “That is good news for us!”
She took her eye off the scope and smiled at him. “Yes, it is, Lieutenant. Very good news.”
Her submarine, like their entire fleet, had been designed with coastal warfare in mind, where mines might be concentrated at strategic chokepoints. And while her government might not be able to make a decent microwave oven, they did control 90 percent of the world’s titanium supply. And if they couldn’t make a decent microprocessor or a clever movie or a decent rock-and-roll record, they could, better than any government on earth, marshal the huge labor forces necessary to mine titanium ore from its inevitably difficult locations, smelt it, and refine the metal. Titanium was a complete pain in the ass to work with. Every weld on her big boat had to be conducted in an inert atmosphere, a blanket of argon or helium to prevent the introduction of oxygen. But that was exactly the kind of laborious process at which her people excelled, and her boat was entirely crafted out of that difficult, rare metal. The Polaris, made out of strong American steel, had to subject itself to an ancient and clever degaussing range to make itself magnetically invisible. But her titanium boat had been born that way.