“So, basically we are going to suck the life out of the Gnat to keep the Prospect going,” Hemi told them when they were all assembled, standing crammed in on both sides of the open hatch to the Gnat below.
Shakes squirmed.
“I am going to set up some heavy jumpers between the Gnat’s battery banks and the battery rooms of the Prospect, where we are standing right now,” Hemi continued. “That should be pretty straightforward, and give us access to the Gnat’s remaining battery power — though that will not be much, in terms of the Prospect’s power consumption.
“Chips, I need you to do the harder part and figure out how to get the fuel that is left in the Gnat up into the Prospect’s engines. I am not sure if it would be better to try to pump it into the Prospect’s fuel tanks or run it straight from the Gnat’s fuel tanks to the Prospect’s diesels.”
“Be fuckin’ easier to just run a long hose up to the fuckin’ Prospect’s fuckin’ fuel pumps. Won’t require fuckin’ around with the trim as much,” put in Chips.
“If you think that will work, it sounds OK to me,” said Hemi. “Sylvia, you want to weigh in with anything?”
“This project is all you, Hem’,” said Percy.
“From this moment,” Hemi went on, “we need to shut down absolutely everything we are not using. We really should have done this already. We will need every bit of power we can suck out of the Gnat to get across the Authority line into those vaguely friendlier waters. I am even shutting down the lighting, so you will all need to carry a light with you. The good news is, if we get the diesels going, you can take some rotations in the rack, since there will be no power to do anything else but sleep anyway.
“Chips, take Owen and Gregory to work on fuel lines. Bastian, we will go dig up those jumpers. Try to stay out of each other’s way everyone,” Hemi finished.
Grabbing Bastian’s skinny arm, Hemi led him away to stowage, where he hoped to find the long heavy jumper cables he remembered seeing there sometime in the past year.
Chips took Owen and Gregory off to the engine rooms to get the fuel hoses they normally used for refueling down from their wall racks and rigged to the Gnat.
Percy looked down at the mess of patches and foul blackened welds that lined the passageway down through the hole in the bottom of her boat, and for a moment could not believe they were still afloat. “Captain Shakes,” she said to the only person left with her, “let me buy you a cup of coffee.”
In a couple of hours, they had a series of umbilicals running through the Prospect and down into the Gnat. The big submarine was parasitically sucking the small supply of nutrients the little sub had in reserve: the power was wired into the Prospect’s battery hold so that the Gnat’s batteries were now no more than an extra battery bank for the Prospect — conveniently, with a nearly-full charge. And the Prospect’ fuel pumps were also engaged and tuned to gently suck the fuel oil up from the Gnat’s fuel ballast tanks through the thick fuel lines running between the two boats.
To conserve fuel, they started only one of the Prospect’s two diesel engines, along with a single electric motor, driving only one of the Prospect’s two propellers. This continually pushed them to one side and they had to compensate with some angle on the rudder, but that was a minor annoyance compared with the task of compensating for the drag of the Gnat. Normally they would also be charging the battery banks while running on diesel, but they needed to put all the fuel they had into forward motion.
The whole setup was a filthy inelegant mess, but they were making headway.
Percy insisted everyone who was not actively doing something should be in the rack. Chips, Shakes, and Hemi did not argue when they were assigned first shift in bed. She had Bastian and Gregory, who were more experienced with the controls of the boat, at the helm seats. They shut down the sonar, since, with the diesel running, they would not be able to hear the approach of any kind of threat until it was too close to do anything anyway.
But as a safety measure, Percy put Owen on radar. It would be just stupid to run into a fleet of Authority surface-enforcement ships for lack of paying attention — especially considering they did not have the ability to dive or perform any other evasive maneuver. So Owen sat in the dark with his eye on the glowing radar screen, his mind turning to mush as he watched it circle around endlessly, reflecting back nothing.
Percy made everyone in the control room take a pep pill and drink a cup of coffee, which she fixed for them in the dark galley by the light of a penlight.
After a few hours of running like this — the ship humming and vibrating under them, the hull frame groaning with the stress of dragging along the Gnat, and the continual course correction necessitated by running on a single propeller — Percy was feeling the urge to calculate how far they had managed to travel. At the navigation table, she measured with the calipers and laid down a string of hashes from the x that marked the spot where they had mated the Gnat.
Their process was terrifyingly slow. With the calipers, Percy spun out the remaining distance to the line she had drawn that marked where they would move into the territory of a different — hopefully safer — Authority. She estimated they still had something like eight hours to go. And that was assuming the demarcation line was at all accurate. In addition to just being a rough mark she had laid down from memory, for all she knew, the Authorities might have battled or treatied the line into a totally different part of the ocean. They would not be truly safe until they were docked at the depot. And even then, who knew what the depot folks would be like? Somewhat friendlier to commerce, was about all one could hope for with any confidence.
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After six hours listening to the uninterrupted engine-drone in the darkness, Percy made another pot of coffee and brought it down to the crew quarters along with a few tin cups tied together with a small bit of wire. She used her flashlight to hunt her relief crew out of their respective racks and forced coffee into them. Chips strung curses at her, but as red as Chips’s eyes were, they were not even close to the bloodshot droop that Percy was swinging around in her own eyeballs.
“Chips, go up and relieve Owen at radar. Hemi, you’re with me at the controls.” Shakes had pulled the blackout curtain aside and was peering blearily down at them and their coffee from a top rack. “Shakes, you can go back to sleep.”
“Captain Shakes. And no fucking way. My boat’s on the fucking line here too. I can help y’all drive this fucking conglomeration of scrap.”
“I won’t insist otherwise. Have a cup of coffee, we’ll put you on throttle-rudder. With some luck, we can be at the depot in a few more hours, and maybe still with a few whiffs of fuel left to pump from the Gnat. We’re gonna owe you something large for this Captain Shakes.”
“Ya know, I’m a friendly fella. And normally I’d say I’m just happy to help, but fuck that,” said Shakes, “with y’all sucking the life out of my little boat. A little financial help when we get t’ the depot would be genuinely fucking appreciated.”
“It’s going to be something of a layout for us to get the Prospect repaired, refueled, and fitted up for our next cargo run. We’ll do what we can for the Gnat, but don’t expect a king’s ransom or anything. It ain’t like you rescued some fuckin’ Authority oligarch yacht out there.”
“Ya, fuck, I’ll keep that in mind next time I’m fuckin’ stupid enough to stop and to help folks in need — only help rich assholes. Lesson learned.”
When Percy felt more or less sure they had finally passed over where the Authority Control line might vaguely be, she climbed up to the bridge of the sail. Up in the light breeze, she scanned around the horizon with a pair of binoculars. She saw some aircraft off in the distance, but they were not coming towards the Prospect. She felt like the Prospect must surely be in the new Authority’s waters now. But there was no way to tell with any certainty.
They cruised easily on the surface with the diesel running for the next few hours. Hemi repeatedly made the trek down through the Prospect and into the Gnat to check the remaining fuel oil. Each time he diligently pulled the dipstick and, gripping it with an oily rag, noted the fuel level remaining by the light of his flashlight.
On one of these trips through the boat he found Chips asleep in her rack and woke her up. “Chips, I need you to tune that engine to absolutely maximize efficient fuel consumption,” he told her. She groggily got on her feet and marked the passage of the next several hours by keeping up a steady beat of oaths from deep in the ship while she carefully and continually trimmed the diesel engine’s fuel intake.
No matter how parsimonious they were with the power usage and fuel consumption though, the Prospect was so much bigger that it was eating through the Gnat’s remaining fuel oil at an insatiable rate. Back in the control room of the Prospect, Hemi calculated how quickly they were burning fuel oil by hand, and measured it against how far they had to go. He could not promise Percy that they would not be rowing the Prospect the last few miles.
Hemi, Shakes, and Percy were exhaustedly staring at the wall of gauges in front of them. Most of the gauges remained completely static, and the fuel gauge simply read empty, since it could not reflect the fuel they were sucking up from the Gnat. Other than Hemi’s occasional forays down to the Gnat to check the hard numbers, they were simply going on the hope that they had enough fuel to make it to the depot and not get left stranded once again over a deserted — and very deep — part of the ocean.
Hemi finally broke the bleary, hazy silence. “Something bothers me, Sylvia.”
“We’ve been scraping our way on our bellies under the razor-wire fencing of hell’s fucking perimeter for days, and now something bothers you Hemi?”
“I think that is part of it — we have been so on the edge of our capabilities that I have not had a chance to step back and consider things.”
“Well, what the fuck is it that’s eatin’ ya, my man-mountain?”
“The sub with the ram. It is such an unusual weapon for a modern submarine. Are you sure about it?
“Abso-fucking-certain. Lotta subs look the same, and that ram is something else under the sun. Some kinda custom job, without the sleek, expensive quality of gear ya see on military machines usually. Looks like it was worked up as some ancient siege engine, for storming a stone fortress or something. And then some crazy motherfucker bought it as scrap and welded the whole fucking heavy water-dragging thing onto the front of their submarine.”
Hemi nodded. “Then my primary question is: why did they ram us? I have no recollection that we ever had an interaction with such a distinctive boat before.”
“I had the same question,” said Shakes, “but I didn’t want to put my fucking nose into your business, just as I wouldn’t want you askin’ about mine. But since yer asking Hemi…”
“It does seem odd. We’re just a cargo sub,” Percy said, looking steadily at Shakes. “Of course, we’re always being harassed by various Authorities in general-like ways — that’s just part of the business. But usually it’s more of an ask-questions-first kind of interaction. And we’re fuckin’ small potatoes by any measure you care to put to it. They have wars to fight and borders to defend up there. They spend their concentrated long-term resources on their never-ending fucking conflicts with each other. Harassing commerce too much is bad for, well, business.”
“And we are the commerce,” Shakes said.
“Even if that sub with the ram was trying to hit us particularly,” continued Percy, “seems most likely they won’t follow us across fuckin’ Authority lines, and we won’t be seeing them again. We’ll just avoid coming back this way any time soon.”
“Leaves ya with a big fuckin’ mystery as to why though, don’t ya think?” asked Shakes.
“Indeed,” said Hemi, “though sometimes the pragmatic course of action is to leave the questions aside and move in a different direction.”
The silence settled back in on them. Percy pulled one of the few remaining cigarillos from the pack stashed against the wall and lit it. She puffed away steadily until she had filled up the small space of the control room with smoke. Hemi slid back down to the navigation chart with his flashlight, and a few minutes later called up to Percy. “Sylvia, by my calculations you should be able to see the depot island from the bridge now.”