She hung on the metal rungs of the ladder just under the hatch set in the ceiling of the cramped control room of her submarine, and with one hand quickly screwed shut the squeaking wheel of the hatch seal before dropping to the deck. Hemi looked down at her through his small-framed spectacles.
“Down.” She gave the one-word command as she pushed the button on the wall that activated the dive alarm.
“Give me full speed forward,” said Hemi. He put one large hand on each of the shoulders of the two men who sat at the controls of the sub and instructed them to dive the boat. One of these men was a stick-figure of a man who went by the moniker Bastian. The other, “Handsome” Gregory, had a meaty square forehead that looked like a miniaturized version of his meaty square torso. Of the two of them, only Gregory looked like he belonged on a submarine.
Diving the sub required delicacy even in the calmest circumstances. Now Hemi and the two men at the controls carefully timed their movements. Their eyes scanned continually over the wall of dials, gauges, switches, and valves in front of them that reflected the red glow of the night lighting. This wall at the front of the control room told them the Prospect’s angle, depth, speed, systems settings, battery charge — the whole picture of the boat’s orientation and movement. Indeed, this wall, plus some of the panels situated to their right and left, was the only way to know the status of the boat while it was submerged.
Gregory and Bastian made adjustments according to Hemi’s instructions, choosing carefully which of the dozens of valves to open or close, or which switches to flip on or off. The submarine let out a long exhale: the air that had held it aloft on the surface being pressed out by an onrush of water from below into the flooding tanks.
“Flood the express dive tank,” said Hemi, his voice low since the tiny space of the control room did at least make it easy to hear one another.
“Right, Boss.” Bastian reached up and opened a valve and water thrust through thick old pipes into the deepest parts of the bow of the boat. The forward part of the boat pitched steeply downwards in response. Percy reached to grab cracked leather loops that hung overhead. She angled her feet against the incline and her eyes followed the needle of the depth gauge.
The ship-to-ship radio above Percy’s head lit up. From the radio’s speaker a recorded voice began blatting a warning that they were violating the territorial waters of someone they had never heard of, who was authorized by a series of treaties with titles that became acronyms that became words that contributed to further acronyms. The recording concluded by ordering all submerged submarines to surface and prepare to be boarded.
Percy punched the mute button on the radio.
“Only on the surface do these fucking territories and treaties matter,” she said.
Hemi nodded.
“What the fuck happened up there?” Gregory asked, his eyes never leaving the wall of dials and gauges in front of him.
“We were hit. Sub with a big ugly ram mounted on the front of it. Totally fucking insane thing for a submarine to have,” said Percy.
“Possibly some specialty-built Authority enforcer boat.” Hemi sounded unconvinced by his own hypothesis.
There was barely enough space in the control room for four people. They were all breathing each other’s air. Their breath condensed on the cold glass faces of the dials and gauges. Hemi took a rag from a hook and reached in front of the two seated men to fastidiously wipe each of the little round windows clean.
“One hundred meters,” said Gregory.
“OK. Level us off,” said Hemi. Gregory and Bastian spun closed some of the trim tank valves and rolled the dive planes back to align with the long access of the sub. The angle of the boat slowly eased upwards, bringing the deck level beneath their feet.
Hemi stood staring at the dials in front of Bastian and Gregory, his massive arms crossed in the rough wool of his tight-fitting tweed suit jacket. He tapped the thick fingers of one hand against the leather elbow patches while his other hand stroked his wiry black beard. He gave a few more instructions and got the boat moving slowly and silently, running level at depth. The idea was to sneak quietly away — the most routine tactic of all submarines. But the routineness of it did not reduce the sense that they were playing the role of prey.
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Percy pulled a new cigarillo from the crinkled pack in her pocket and lit it. She sucked at it, and then ashed into a tin cup wedged between the pipes running along the wall.
Being underwater meant they had to run on batteries. The diesel engines the submarine used while on the surface generated power that drove the propellers and charged the batteries. But those engines breathed far more air than humans, and so could not be used underwater. Running on batteries, with just the electric motors driving the props, made the boat nearly silent. The electric motors produced a hum that was audible inside the boat (Percy always thought it to be a pleasant, reassuring hum), but was barely detectable by another vessel. Eventually the batteries would run down though, and they would have to get back up on the surface to recharge the batteries with the diesels.
But Percy’s intuition was plaguing her again. “Something isn’t right,” she said aloud to no one in particular. Like when they had been rammed, the Prospect was again doing something that she had not felt before. But this time it was not a quick jolt. It was something so subtle, such a delicate change in the motion of the boat, that the others did not feel it at all. Actually, she was not even sure it was a change in the motion of the boat. Maybe it was something in the information she was getting from the gauges that was not making sense.
No single instrument was reporting anything amiss. But then, no single instrument on a submarine described the total status of the boat. All the instruments had to be taken together, internalized, and combined with what the physical movements of the boat that one felt. Percy typically held the depth in her head, while also taking into account the dive plane angle, the speed, and the overall feeling of the boat. Normally, she processed it all automatically, and she could just know what her boat was doing from a quick glance at the wall of dials combined with what her senses told her and dead reckoning from the accelerations she had experienced.
This feeling of internalizing what her boat was doing — something she did continually, to the point where it felt like the boat was part of her body — now felt inexplicably broken.
Her eyes scanned back and forth across the dials, but the information did not come together. There was no way to make sense of the dials. In this steel tube with no windows, perhaps for the first time ever, she felt blind.
“Hemi… what the fuck is going on…?”
“I do not know… we are within normal tolerances… though…” He reached past Gregory and turned the rudder. The boat came along, slowly. “Sluggish?”
“I need to go look my girl over. Let me know on the PA if something happens.”
Hemi nodded and Percy slipped down the ladder to the deck below. She stepped to the front of the navigation and sonar compartment and climbed down a steel ladder to the middle deck of the boat. This was crew quarters. The Prospect’s third deck-crew member, Owen Smalls, was off watch and snoring in his rack behind one of the moth-eaten old bed curtains. She continued through a hatch at the rear end of crew quarters and down another steel ladder to the lowest of the three main decks. If there were something physically wrong with her boat, this deck was the most likely place to figure out what it was.
She flipped on the lights. There was no red night lighting rigged down here, it was just bare white bulbs behind protective steel cages. The lights stretched off in a line on the ceiling, forward and aft of her. This particular lower-deck compartment was entirely full of batteries, strung together with a web of black cables as thick as her finger. The cables were grouped together with wire ties and slung along the racks in heavy bundles. The batteries were bolted with rusting steel straps to row upon row of steel shelves.
She got to her knees. The steel grating of the deck pushed through the knees of her leather overalls where they were cracked and worn. She put her fingers through the grating, lifted it up, and put it aside. She reached her hand down and felt the raw steel of the pressure hull. It was cold, damp, and greasy, but that was normal. She replaced the grate and went on to the next compartment forward.
More batteries here, though not as many as the previous compartment. They lined the walls, but not as deeply because there were trim tanks on either side within the pressure hull. She checked below the grating again, but here too everything had the normal amount of greasy dryness. She passed forward through a hatch into the main cargo hold.
The main cargo hold was one giant void occupying most of the front half of the boat. More than thirty meters long, and almost ten meters wide. The air was still and stale. It smelled of rust and petroleum, grease and oils. The overhead bare bulbs had a harsh jaundiced yellow color. The hold was mostly empty — they had been coming from their last cargo drop-off and were heading toward the depots in the north in hopes of getting another shipping run job. A few wooden crates, stippled green and black with mold, were stacked along the sides. In another nook were stashed a couple of welding rigs wrapped with chain and some bins of scrap metal piled up against a greasy grill used for cooking on deck. It had always bothered Percy that they could not find a more considered place to stash these sundries than the cargo hold.
She walked along the centerline of the space, the spine of the boat, listening carefully. It seemed to her that there was something wrong with the sound of her footsteps on the metal grating. As she neared the front of the compartment, she realized it was not the sound of her footsteps that was off, it was that she could hear water trickling faintly. She knelt and pulled up the grating. There was a pond of oily black water just under the deck level. In it swam a small school of old cigarette butts. Little ripples formed from resonance with the hum of the electric motors, their vibrations passing up the hull and encoding themselves on the scum of the surface here.
There should not be this much water. Now Percy knew exactly what was wrong with her boat: the ramming had cracked the pressure hull, and the Prospect’s cargo hold was filling slowly with water.