On board the Gnat, Shakes leaned his head down at a painful angle, looking up through the small viewport and trying to see exactly where he was in relation to the hulking gray wall slowly parting the waters above him.
“Fuuuuuck. They shoulda mentioned that this would be stupidly fuckin’ dangerous,” Shakes said to himself. “I walked right into this, I guess. Or maybe they are like a backyard bully in a pool, tormenting me — the scrawny kid — by holding my head underwater… Though I suppose some people must be into that sort of thing.” He glanced at the stacks of porn at his feet.
“Captain Shakes.” Hemi’s voice came over the ship-to-ship with all the bass notes stripped out of it. “Do not forget that since we are moving, you are going to have to give your boat a little more motor when you get within a meter of the Prospect or so. We are going slow enough that it should not be too dramatic, but you also do not want to get sucked back into the Prospect’s propellers.”
“Aye, fuck you all,” he did not bother to respond on the radio, his hands too busy with the controls of the Gnat. “This little boat weren’t built for this shit. Handles like a fucking beach ball underwater.”
He was pushing up from behind, moving slightly faster than the Prospect. Through the viewport, he could just see the little black circle of the mating collar he was shooting for. He realized now that he would lose sight of it when he got closer and the target slipped beyond his ability to crane his neck.
He squeezed the ballast blow handle in a short burst, and the Gnat popped up an entire meter closer to the underside of the Prospect. “Ugh, too fuckin’ much, too fuckin’ fast. Gently — was what Hemi said — gently…”
He was slowly gaining on the Prospect. When the Prospect’s mating collar disappeared beyond the frame of the viewport, Shakes guessed he was directly underneath it. He gave the Gnat’s small dive planes a modest amount of up-angle. Suddenly he was within a meter of the Prospect’s belly, and he could feel the push of water from the moving hull of the big boat driving the Gnat backwards. The push was also ruining his instinctive awareness of where he was. He felt a slight panic, until the mating collar popped into view again through the narrow viewport directly ahead of him.
He gave the Gnat a little more power to the electric motor, and it moved forward through the streaming water. He held close to the Prospect. The Gnat slowly gained ground until the mating collar disappeared over his head again. He angled the dive planes up a bit, and with a loud clang the mating collars of the two ships collided.
Shakes squeezed the ballast blow handle again — with as short a burst as he could possibly get. This gave the Gnat enough buoyancy to hold it firmly up against the bottom of the Prospect.
He visualized what was happening in his head: the two mating collars were pressed against each other, held together but not aligned. If Shakes could correctly guess which direction to move the Gnat, the mating collar would pop into place. If he guessed wrong, the Gnat would slip off the Prospect’s mating collar and crunch up against the bottom of the bigger boat. If that happened — and he was lucky enough that his welds did not rip apart and sink him — he would have to begin the whole maneuver over again.
He slowly eased the controls, a little rudder port, a little rudder starboard, a little forward power, a little off the throttle. He was moving the mating collar around in a circle, trying to get it to slip into the Prospect’s collar. There was the sound of steel ring grinding on steel ring, until with another clang, the small sub popped upwards. All he could see out of his viewport now was the long undistinguished gray hull of the Prospect stretched out in front of him. Either he was in the mating collar, or had slipped off the front of it.
But it felt right. Shakes gave a tiny further squeeze on the main ballast blow so that the Gnat would have good strong upward buoyancy against the bottom of the Prospect.
The way to know for sure if the two rings were mated properly was by using the docking clamps. He flipped the exposed switch he and Owen had installed. With a small blue spark, it connected the circuit that ran up the thick wires, through the holes they had drilled and sealed into the sail, to the mating clamps. He heard a third clang, and a green bulb next to the switch lit. If he had missed the mating collar, the clamps would not have closed, so he knew he was on. To be sure, he disengaged the electric motor to let the prop spin freely. When he did so, he could feel the bow of the Gnat bend downward a small amount in a way that slightly sickened him, but the speed indicator did not change. The Gnat was being dragged by the Prospect.
He pulled up the ship-to-ship mic toward his mouth, “Hemi, I think I’m fuckin’ on.”
“Yes. We can feel the drag up here. We are going to trim our tanks to adjust for the pull of the Gnat hanging on, and then shut down our engines to save our batteries. I think you can give a bang on your hatch now, and see if Chips can open up the junction between us.”
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
In the deepest part of the Prospect, in the narrow hall between the forward and rear battery rooms with heavy watertight bulkhead doors on either side, Gregory and Chips sat on the deck on either side of a well. Gregory had pulled up the steel grating that normally covered this well and set it to one side. The grating had been locked into place with a sliding mechanism that could only be opened with a key Percy carried. This was a precaution against anyone opening the hatch below without the permission of the captain, since, under certain circumstances, opening this particular hatch could sink the boat. Gregory had had to borrow the key from Percy to unlock the grating. Now they sat with their feet dangling down into the well. Gregory tapped the toe of his boot lightly on the still-closed hatch while they waited for the signal from Shakes.
“Ehhh, Chips, should we close and seal this watertight bulkhead door behind me here? Seems like if Shakes’ welds fail completely when we open this hatch — and worse case, say, the Gnat tears away or something — we’ll be flooding the whole Prospect from this hole we’re opening in the bottom of the boat, eh?” Gregory’s voice was tinged with nerves.
“Doesn’t fuckin’ work like that, so you can calm the fuck down. As long as they got the top hatch in the fuckin’ sail closed, there’s not enough pressure at this depth to drive in enough water to sink the boat. Still, I got my fucking bulkhead hatch closed and sealed on this side. If it starts flooding fast, we are going out your door and closing it the fuck behind us. There’s no fuckin’ way we’re sealing our fuckin’ selves in here and risking being fuckin’ heroes to save this ship.”
“Alright, I’m following you then, Chips.”
“Keep that fuckin’ portable bilge pump ready though: if there’s a small leak, then some modest fuckin’ heroics will be required of us.”
At this point they could hear the Gnat grinding against the mating collar of the Prospect, screeching metal-on-metal as it moved back and forth trying to find the docked position. And then there was the loud crunch of the two boats coming together.
“Sound’s like he’s on,” said Chips. “We wait till we get the fuckin’ OK from Hemi though.”
Gregory nodded.
They could feel the shuddering vibrations of the Gnat’s motor through the hull of the Prospect for a few minutes, and then that died away when Shakes shut it down. A few moments later the Prospect’s motors shut down too. They heard Shakes bang out a ringing shave-and-a-haircut with one of his wrenches on the top hatch of the Gnat, below the still-closed bottom hatch of the Prospect. Then it was quite silent until Hemi came crackling over the ship PA. “OK Chips, open it up.”
Chips nodded to Gregory and he reached down into the hatch well and cranked open the sealing wheel. He pulled up the hatch and water steadily flooded up around their boots. Gregory jumped up, as if bitten, and in a matter of seconds was on the other side of the bulkhead, ready to seal the hatch.
But Chips lay out flat on the grating and reached her hand down into the pool of water. She felt along the welds until she knew where the water was pushing in. “The welds are mostly — but not totally — fucking failing. You can see it’s leaking,” said Chips. “Get the pump hooked up Gregory, and let’s get as much of this fuckin’ water out of here as fast as fuckin’ possible. Then I’ll see if I can weld it decent-like.”
While Gregory got the hoses for the bilge pump connected, Chips got on the PA with Hemi. “We gotta fix these shitty fuckin’ welds or it’ll flood the Gnat when we open its hatch, Hemi. Tell Shakes to sit tight, and not to do a fuckin’ thing.” Hemi acknowledged, and she started putting her welding gear on.
It was cold, frustrating, cramped work. But such had been all of Chips’ work on this trip — maybe her whole life, she reflected. She let out a never-slowing stream of curses, attempting to damn down to a permanent watery hell not just all materials and work processes, but all the societal systems and turns of fate that had conspired to bring her to this particular misery.
Shakes’s welds were horrifically ugly, like stitch work on a revivified cadaver from a Gothic novel. As with the hull of the Prospect, she had to hammer metal sheet patches into place, and weld them until they no longer leaked. Chips felt nothing but lucky when the leaking started to slow without her having made the situation worse by cutting through the mating ring or the hull of the Gnat.
Eventually enough patching material had been welded into place that the leak slowed to a seep, and then finally stopped altogether. The pump sucked the last of the water out the well, leaving them looking at the domed top hatch of the Gnat down in the recess. The whole mess was holding, though Chips hoped she would never have to test it at any greater depth.
Chips tapped on the hatch with the end of the welding stick. “Eh, Shakes, ya fucker. You can open this fuckin’ thing up now,” she yelled into the empty metal well, her voice bouncing the curses back at her. There was the sound of the rusty sealing gears squeaking open and the hatch lifted up.
Shakes was grinning up at them as residual water rained down on him. “Who’s a fuckin’ angle-fish now, eh?”
“Don’t touch them welds when ya come through, the fuckers are still hellish fuckin’ hot.”
Shakes put his arms up through the hatch hole, found a place to grab that was not still warm from welding, lifted his foot to some protruding knob of steel in the sail of the Gnat, and stepped up into the Prospect. Gregory pushed the ship intercom button and told Hemi they had Shakes aboard.
“Right. Now the hard part,” said Hemi over the intercom. He got on the ship PA and asked everyone to meet him down at the hatch to the Gnat.