“Keep this depth, and course, I will be down at sonar listening for that sub.” Hemi climbed down from the cramped control room to the compartment below. If he turned and leaned back from the sonar station, he could almost see up into the control room just behind and above him, and could still instruct the men at the controls of the boat. Likewise, Gregory and Bastian could still give him reports on the Prospect’s status, albeit with a little more emphasis thrown into their voices so they carried below to Hemi.
Hemi did not bother sitting down at the sonar station. Instead, he stood behind the empty sonar operator’s chair and slipped the headphones with the worn ear-pads onto his head, covering one ear. He spun the control wheel for the sonar slowly, listening for human sounds out in the malevolent underwater darkness. There was nothing but silence.
“Hemi,” Gregory called down through the hatch, “I’m having trouble keeping the boat level. I find I keep having to give it more and more upward dive plane angle just to keep from gaining depth.”
“Let me come up and play with the trim tanks.” Hemi climbed the ladder back to the control room. He stood at the trim tank controls next to Gregory and the thick pads of his fingers spun one small steel valve-control wheel, then the next. Each was accompanied by the sound of water pushing through pipes, flowing from one end of the boat to the other. “How’s that?” asked Hemi after a few minutes of adjustments.
“Better, but still quite a bit more dive plane angle than I would expect just to keep the boat level,” said Gregory.
Hemi did not say what he was thinking: that they were sinking.
“Sweet fucking hell,” Percy said to herself. “Sweet fucking hell!” she repeated at a yell. She ran up the length of the cargo hold, her clomping boot steps echoing in the empty space. Back in the battery compartments, she pulled the heavy watertight bulkhead closed behind her with a loud metal-on-metal sound and turned the wheel to seal the cargo hold. It took all her strength; the screw-wheel seals in this part of the sub were rarely used, and they were planting themselves ever more firmly into a rusted stasis with the passing of time.
She climbed up a deck and crossed from the back of crew quarters, through the galley, and into the engine room. The only sounds there were the throb of the electric motors spinning in the next compartment, and a randomized clanking of tools from the deck below. She leaned over the open hatch to the lower engine room.
“Chips! Chips, come over here.”
The clanking sound stopped and the face of the Prospect’s engineer appeared below the opening a moment later, peering up at her. Chips’s hands were black with grease that had also created a grimy patch on the leather apron she wore. In her hands, as if she had been butchering some small game animal for dinner, she held the shell of a deconstructed piece of machinery about the size of a baseball.
Chips’s real name was Irene something-or-other, but Hemi had stuck her with the nickname “Chips” when she had signed on. According to Hemi, “Chips” was the traditional nickname for a ship’s carpenter, going back to antiquity. And even though there was little carpentry to be done on a submarine, the ship’s carpenter was generally responsible for any number of random jobs that were not already assigned to the deck crew. When she had first come aboard, Hemi had such a list of things that needed doing on the Prospect that he felt the name was appropriate to the new position. Also, he had always wanted a “Chips” on the boat — he was a fan of the classics.
“What the fuck is going on Percy?” Chips asked.
“There’s a leak.” These were words no submariner ever wanted to hear. But Chips had fixed leaks before. It would be the answer to Chips’s next question that Percy was loath to give her.
“I was wondering when one of you assholes would make their way down here and tell me that the fuck’s with all the fucked motions of the boat. Where are we leaking?”
“…In the cargo hold.”
“And it’s fuckin’ bad, eh?”
“Ah, pretty… fucking bad. An Authority sub rammed us on the surface, apparently split open the pressure hull.”
“Split it… in the fucking cargo hold, you said? So then we’re fuckin’ fucked, eh? Haven’t I always fucking said that cargo hold’s too fucking big, and it should have bulkheads? The fucking boat won’t float if it’s flooded, eh, Capt’ Percy? That’s what you’re fuckin’ thinking right now, ain’t it? You probably didn’t want to even fucking tell me because you know that we’re fuckin’ fucked!” She threw her piece of machinery at the wall, where the loose assembly separated and sent small parts flying far into the black corners of the lower engine room.
“For fuck’s sake Chips, yes, we’re fucked, but we’re not fuckin’ fucked, not yet… I need you to take one of the guys, go in there, and see if you can stop it and patch it so we don’t get to the point where we are fuckin’ fucked. Right?”
“Ah, fuck ya, Capt’.” Chips started climbing up the ladder towards Percy without looking at her.
“Your fucking attitude! Listen to me,” Percy held her arm. “Good or bad, I need regular reports. Get Owen up and get him helping you.”
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Chips wrenched her arm free. “A-fuckin’-OK.” She gave Percy a mock salute and pushed past toward the upper engine room.
Percy left Chips digging out hull patch kits from engineering storage compartments and returned to the control room.
Gregory’s square head came around and his beady eyes caught hers as her head popped up through the hatch in the floor of the control room. “Wish we had something to shoot at those fuckers who rammed us.”
“Someday, you handsome young man, I’ll refit the Prospect as the first merchant sub with a torpedo tube — just for you. Until then, our defense is the same as any prey animal’s: run and hide.”
“If you are back in the control room for the moment,” said Hemi, “I will go down to sonar to work on tracking that sub with the ram’s location. And how is our boat? Holding up?”
“We’re sinking. I put Chips on it.”
“If she can patch the boat with expletives and downright pissed-offedness, we will be in good hands,” said Bastian, without turning around.
Percy stepped off the control room ladder and yielded it to Hemi on his way down. She addressed Gregory and Bastian, sitting in front of her in their control chairs. “What’s the state of my ship boys?”
“Apparently we’re fucking sinking,” Gregory answered.
“Fucking apparently…” she agreed. She scanned the gauges. There was nothing immediate to announce their impending doom. It was written instead in subtle ways, spread across the dials, and only when the readings of the dials were taken together. The dive plane angle was too steep for the amount of forward drive they were giving the boat. The trim tanks too light. The depth deeper than she wanted.
“Since that sub is going to know where we are anyway, you might as well crank the bilge pumps up to maximum power. Making a bunch of noise is better than sinking.”
Gregory flipped some switches and another frequency of vibration was added to the regular background hum from the motors.
Percy lit a cigarillo from the rapidly depleting pack in her pocket and smoked it down, letting her mind sink into the ever-present hum of the machines that swamped her environment, ruminating on the gauges. “How’s she handling, generally?”
“The boat just doesn’t seem fucking normal, Cap. It doesn’t respond how I want it to,” said Bastian.
“Here, let me try the rudder.” She reached over him and turned the wheel hard over. The Prospect came about slowly but surely, leaning over slightly, as she should. But after a short delay the whole boat took on a sudden heavy list. Percy counter-steered and brought the Prospect back to the course they had been on.
“See? That doesn’t seem quite fuckin’ OK to me,” said Bastian.
Percy knew it was worse than that. The sharp list after the delay was the weight of the slack water in the bilge pouring over to one side and dragging the rest of the boat over with the weight of its movement.
A short while later, Percy had finished her cigarillo. “I… need to go check on Chips.” She slid down the ladder from the control room, passed Hemi, listening to the headphones at the sonar station, and continued forward until she got to the steep metal stairs down into the cargo hold.
Chips and Owen were working at the far end where, they had rigged bright work lamps. Owen was dragging one end of a fat, gray, grimy hose for an old mobile bilge pump from the pool of black water in the bow up the middle of the cargo hold toward the fixture set in the wall where a hose could be fed to the trim tanks. Chips had pulled out and stacked a whole set of the deck grates to expose the pond of scummy black water underneath. She was wearing thick rubber waders and standing directly on the inside of the pressure hull, in the fetid water which had risen above the grating level almost to Chips’ chest — a distressing sight, tempered in Percy’s mind only by the knowledge that Chips was not a tall woman. Chips wore heavy rubber welding gloves and a swim mask so she could see what she was doing under the water. Above the swim mask she wore another dark-lensed welding mask that could flip up or down as the work required.
As Percy walked down the cargo hold, Chips’ head disappeared under the surface. Percy stood on the grating above, watching. The welding rig next to her revved up with a hiss and a groan, and a stream of bubbles and flashing blue light pierced through the turbid water. When Chips lifted her head for air, water ran down her mask in rivulets and drained in a greasy gray stream from her matted hair. Percy asked for her report.
“Fuck you, ya dominating fuckin’ cow. This is delicate fuckin’ work here and you’re up on there in the control room sloshing the whole fuckin’ boat back and forth. And it needs fucking time. The hull’s got hundreds of tiny cracks. It’s split open the way ya might break off a piece of cheese — tiny cracks all the fuckin’ way along. If it were one big crack it would be much fucking simpler. Hand me that fuckin’ patch piece by your feet.”
Percy spat, and her spit tasted oily and gritty. She handed Chips the flat piece of sheet steel, which was coated with a slippery residue. Chips held it against the side of the hull and pulled a hammer from a loop on her waders. She hammered it against the side of the hull with heavy, ringing smacks, shaping it to the interior curve of the boat. Percy was sure she could hear the ring of the hammer traveling along the steel pressure hull all the way to the stern. She could imagine the sound going out into the water, which felt like a violation of her basic instinct to always keep her submarine quiet. It hardly mattered, though, since those their pursuers would already know their location anyway.
Chips took her now appropriately curved piece of patch steel and submerged herself in the filth again.
Percy watched her work for a quarter of an hour or so. Even in that short time she could see that the line of water on the hull had risen, crawling its way up the grated deck. Owen came back and started up the rattly old bilge pump, and with a whine and a rush of water that gave a serpentine life to its hose, it began a losing battle to reclaim some of the deck from the maw of the beast that was slowly consuming the boat.
It was hopeless though. The water level in the cargo hold was rising more slowly now that Chips had some patches in place, but it still rose, relentlessly. By the time Chips next brought her head above water, Percy had made a decision she did not want to make. “Keep working,” she told Chips. “I’m going to blow the tanks and bring us up to the surface.”
“Fuckin’ smartest thing ya said yet this fuckin’ day. This course we’re pursuin’ right now is on a fuckin’ trackway to the gates of fucking Hell.”