2. The Gnat
The Prospect rose slowly. It tilted a little on one axis, then the other, as Percy adjusted the trim of the tanks. But the boat rose straight up, more or less, since they did not have the motors running and it was being lifted by buoyancy alone.
Percy and Hemi watched the depth gauge slowly roll itself backwards, up past their test depth, up into what Percy would normally consider safe operating depth, then periscope depth, and then the sail broke through the surface. Those in the crew quarters could feel the boat bob like a cork to the surface, and they let out a small cheer that echoed to the control room from the depths of the boat. They arrived moments later at the bottom of the ladder to the control room, obviously expecting to go out on deck.
At first, Percy was not even going to think about allowing that. Years of experience had reinforced the routine that the first action on surfacing a sub was to scan around with the periscope, if not the radar. There was always a chance that the only safe move would be to dive right back down. But she fought back this instinct: there was nothing on the surface that could be more dangerous than attempting to dive her damaged boat again. She looked down at her crew — minus Chips — and waved them up through the control room.
Owen, with his scrawny youthful energy, led the way. He charged up the ladder, struggled with the tightly closed and somewhat rusted hatch-seal wheel for a moment before squeaking it open, and pushed the hatch up with a pop as the slight variation in pressure equalized.
Daylight poured down through the hatch into the control room below. With it came cool air in motion. It was air that smelled of the open sea instead of the stench of warm human bodies, oil, and diesel exhaust. The crew followed Owen out onto the bridge of the sail.
It was a cool, breezy day. Gray clouds hung low overhead, and there was a mild chop on the water. Owen hopped over the fairing and down the rungs on the side of the sail to the main deck, where he ran up and down, shrieking like a small child.
After a few minutes of just enjoying the surface air, Percy got back to the situation at hand. “Hemi, you were looking at the charts: who controls this part of the surface these days?” she asked.
“Hmm. Perhaps the Western Federated Provinces? At least, they did the last time I looked at a Territorial Authorities map. But that was more than a year ago.”
“Those assholes are bad fucking news, and have no tolerance for surface transports — even ones that have papers,” put in Bastian. “We should not stay here.”
“We would be on our way right fucking now…if we had any fuel or power,” Percy said. “That lovely sound you hear of gentle waves smacking against our hull is the sound of a ship not moving. We’re dead in the water, and we’re still a bit fucked, folks.”
“Owen!” she called down to the deck, “come back up here. We have to get back to work.” As he ran over and climbed back up the side of the sail, she laid out their next steps. “Hemi, get down to the navigation chart and see if there’s a hope of any place we could limp to with what little charge we have left on the battery.
“Bastian, get on the radio and see if you can raise anyone on the Independent Operators frequency. Maybe we’ll get extraordinarily lucky and find some help from someone who won’t ask too many questions.”
“Or try to sink us,” Bastian added.
“Ya. If you do raise anyone, for fuck’s sake don’t talk to them — don’t tell them anything. Just come get me and I’ll try to gauge their reliability myself.”
“Sure, Capt,” said Bastian.
“Gregory…I’m starving. Want to see if you can get something going in the galley?”
“Sounds good.”
“And put a new pot of coffee on too. The shit in there now has been on that burner so long it looks like bunker fuel.”
They climbed back down into the control room but left the hatch open, and for the next few hours a blessed breeze blew through, and occasional tendrils of sea air reached as far into the submarine as the crew quarters.
Inside, Percy joined Hemi at the navigation table.
“The most pressing problem,” said Hemi, not even waiting for her to ask, “is that the batteries are nearly entirely depleted. Even running extremely judiciously, we have a range of a few nautical miles at best.” He used a compass to draw a dotted line around their position, showing what was within range. It was a completely barren section of the chart in the middle of the ocean. It was nowhere.
“Not even close, huh? Well, that just leaves us with the less-than-ideal option of accepting help from someone.”
“Most folks who pass in these neglected waters are not much inclined to help those they do not know.”
“We’ll just have to hope we don’t meet most folks then.”
She took a couple of steps back to look up through the hatch into the control room and see how Bastian was doing with his effort to achieve that goal. He had one stick-like arm up in the air, adjusting some dials on the radio mounted in the ceiling of the control room. His other hand held the mic that was attached by a curling cloth-covered wire to the radio. He was giving out mayday requests on a couple of different frequencies known to be monitored by other independent shipping operators like themselves — both legitimate cargo haulers and smugglers. Those frequencies were also often monitored by Authority vessels that might be engaged in policing shipping and transport traffic through their territorial control areas.
“Anything, Bastian?”
“Fucking nothing. Nothing good or bad. This is one voided piece of open ocean you surfaced us in.”
“Alright. I’ll check sonar and radar. Maybe someone’s listening who just isn’t interested in responding.”
She stepped over to the sonar station and lifted the headphones over her ears. Without bothering to sit, she turned the directional control wheel with one hand, slowly, back and forth, scanning for the sound of anything made by humans. A minor benefit of being dead in the water was they were not making any noise themselves. She could hear even the small waves against the hull of the Prospect. It was a rare pleasure to have such clean and clear sound on sonar. But for all that silence, there was nothing to hear.
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The passive sonar was safer to use than the radar because it did not send out any signal that could be detected. You just listened with what were essentially underwater microphones for the sound any other vessel might be making. It also had the advantage that it could be used while submerged. Radar, on the other hand, could only be used while they were on the surface, and it sent out a big loud radio beacon that could be seen by any other ship with a radar unit — basically all of them. If there were any ships out there, the signal would bounce back to the Prospect and they would know its location. But any other ship in range could also detect their transmitted radar signal and know the precise location of the Prospect. Generally, when Percy used radar, her habit was to dive soon afterwards.
In this case, she thought turning on the radar was worth the risk. But the radar sweep rolled twice around the display, showing a completely empty scope. There was nothing for miles in every direction. She left it scanning, eased herself into the sonar station chair, and tried to get comfortable.
For the next few hours, she chain-smoked and listened to the emptiness of the ocean around them on the passive sonar. It was a mind-numbing task, trying to pick out a signal from the muted hiss and rush that came to her from the choppy surface. She swept the sonar mics in a circle, covering every direction out from the Prospect and back again. Having not found anything, she would then begin again. The continual effort at maintaining her attention on the search butted against the complete lack of any signal to focus on or track. She was beginning to think the best move might be to go check that they had enough food and water supplies to survive weeks of drifting on open ocean.
Except then, way off their rear port side, a soft throbbing came into her headset. She closed her eyes. It was faint and threaded, like the last heartbeats of a leviathan. She opened her eyes and glanced at the radar sweep, but it remained completely clean.
She called Hemi over. “Listen to this and tell me what you think it is.”
Hemi had exceptional ears for sonar. He stood next to her and put the headphones on, and his eyes lost focus as he listened. The tips of his thick brown fingers rested on the top of the directional control wheel and eased it back and forth across the contact’s heading.
“Very small surface craft, and moving…unusual though — and not just because it is tiny and in the deep ocean. It seems like it has almost no hull sound. I do not hear any wake running along it.”
“Can you calculate a range?”
“It is close. Let me see.” He looked at the dials of the sonar unit and scribbled some numbers on a scrap paper. “Two nautical miles, thereabouts maybe? I think you should be able to see it with the periscope.”
Percy nodded and climbed up into the control compartment. She raised the periscope up and spun it around to the bearing of the target. She rolled the scope barrel slowly back and forth along the horizon line, where the dark gray of the water press-fit up against the light gray of the sky. With the Prospect on the surface, and the scope up, she could see something like ten nautical miles on a clear day. This was as good as vision ever got on a submarine.
“Even if it were a fucking canoe… at two miles away I should be able to see it.” There was nothing but unblemished gray fields in her scope. She double-checked the bearing with Hemi, shouting down to the sonar station below.
She was pointed in the right direction, there was simply nothing there.
But she had a hunch. She felt confident about the sonar target. She was sure something was there, despite the fact that underwater sound can sometimes play tricks. The lack of any visual on the surface narrowed down the possibilities of what it could be.
“Hemi,” she called down again to the compartment below, “I want to motor over closer to it. Keep tracking it on sonar.”
Percy put Bastian back in the rudder-throttle control seat. She gave him a heading toward the sonar target and they put one of the electric motors in gear. Her eyes locked on the battery gauge, which waved slightly as the motor started turning, drawing the last amperage from the depleted battery banks. The needles on the battery gauges were deep in the red now. There was such a little gap of air between them and the zero mark. They would only get one shot at this.
They crept — two nautical miles an hour. After a quarter-hour or so, Hemi called up from sonar. “We got lucky, Sylvia. I am tracking something like an intercept course — the object is headed towards us at any rate. At our current speed there is no way we would ever have overtaken it if they were heading away from us. It is moving fairly quickly. But…” There was a gap, and Percy could hear him scratching a pencil on paper. “But…we need to go slightly faster. Can you do four knots?”
Percy sighed. It did not sound like much, but it was twice as much power consumption. “You heard the man, Bastian, give her a little fuckin’ gas.”
There was a burning cigarette between Bastian’s bony fingers as they wrapped around the throttle stick and eased it slightly forward.
A few minutes later, Hemi called up, “Good. We will be within a quarter mile of the object in a matter of minutes.”
“They must be able to fucking see us. They haven’t changed direction or speed?”
“No. Maybe nobody is looking, or they just do not care.”
Percy stayed on the periscope, slowly tracking across the bearing. Still nothing.
“Sylvia!” called up Hemi. “They are gone. No detectable signal on the sonar.”
“Stop the boat Bastian.” The electric motors were very quiet when running this slow, but she wanted Hemi to have total silence for listening. “What was the last range, Hemi?”
“About five hundred meters. They are close. I have to assume they are just sitting idle out there. We could ping them?”
“Ah, that would scare the fucking shit out of them. They might think we were armed and about to fire. We’re trying to make friends here. …I’m going to try ship-to-ship radio. We’re just close enough they might hear us, and the radio could be a little less threatening.”
Percy reached over her head and flipped on the ship-to-ship radio. A device that was not actually a radio, it just acted like one. It used the sonar rig to push sound through the water to talk to other ships nearby. Five hundred meters was just about the limit of its range. Real radio transmissions were supposed to follow a set of protocols and rules, potentially enforced by agents of Authorities in their respective territories. Ship-to-ship had no rules other than an informal argot that had developed partially to obfuscate meaning for any other ship that might be listening, and had partially evolved from nautical cultural habit.
Percy took down the mic from the radio and brought it to her lips. She pushed the transmit button, and the needles on the radio unit’s gauges jumped to show how much power she was transmitting with. She whistled a series of five randomish tones into the mic, and let go of the transmit button. The power needles died back to zero, and there was silence for a minute or two.
Then she repeated the transmission of the tones. Another minute passed.
Then a crackly male voice came over the radio, “I see you over there, you hulking ugly gray fuckin’ submarine. And I guess you know I’m here. Why are ya sittin’ on the surface, and what do ya want with me?”
Percy hesitated, and then transmitted back, “Well, first let me state flat out that we’re nothing but a cargo sub — and let me emphasize: un-fucking-armed. Second, we’ve been severely damaged, and swam through an icy hell to get back to the surface. We’re out of fuel and extremely low on power. Long and short is that we’re in some desperate need of help, and you are the only contact we’ve seen in these fucking desolate waters.”
Another moment passed. “Yeah. Well. These waters are empty because the Authorities running this territory right now are a bunch of tight-sphinctered class-A-holes who seem more interested in shooting down transports than letting any commerce commence. It’s a fucking bad place to be not moving and on the surface.”
“Not moving is hardly typical for us. What are you sitting on there? We don’t see any ship in the scope. Any assistance you can offer would be much appreciated.”
“Ehh, I’m not one who is much for offering assistance, so for the next few minutes here I think I’m not going to show ya what I’m riding. But if yer telling the truth, I don’t envy your dire-ass situation.”
“I absolutely understand your unwillingness to not tip your hand. Anything I can do to reassure you we aren’t anything other than what we say we are?”
“The territorial Authority motherfuckers around here generally just shoot first, check papers later. They’re not much for mind games. So the fact that you haven’t already shot at me says a lot.”
There was a long pause of radio silence. Percy held the mic off-angle in her hand while listening. She began to worry that she had lost their only chance for help.
The ship-to-ship crackled back to life. “Alright. I think I can risk pulling alongside ya, and poppin’ the hatch. Don’t send nobody onto my boat without my say-so, or I’ll dive straight out from under ya. Fucking’ got it?”
“We’ll look for you — for something — off the port side. Out.”