A few hours later the clocks and sun charts coordinated to tell them that it was well after dark on the surface. Percy had the boat come up to periscope depth and she put the scope up to check the surface. Finding an empty black horizon in all directions, she had Gregory blow air into the main ballast tanks from the low-pressure system and raise the Prospect fully up to the surface.
Percy’s standard strategy for a cargo run was to stay underwater and run slow on the batteries during the day, and surface to run on the diesels at night. Running on the diesels meant moving much faster and recharging the ship’s batteries at the same time. Even with all the shipping traffic these days, the oceans were still mostly huge open spaces. A submarine running with no lights on the surface at night was a dark and tiny target, unlikely to be spotted by anyone. The main risk was being tracked by radar — on the surface they created a fairly strong radar signature. But at the same time, they ran their own radar receiver. If anyone else was tracking the Prospect with radar, the Prospect’s crew would see the signal and know they were there, usually with plenty of time for the Prospect to disappear underwater and change course.
The only other way they might be found is if an Authority ship heard the Prospect’s rumbling diesels on sonar. But to do that they would have to be within ten or twenty nautical miles of the Prospect. Not an impossible scenario, but somewhat unlikely on any normal night of a cargo run.
Percy also always kept one more ancient backup system for spotting trouble early: she put someone up in the lookout ring with binoculars. As soon as the deck was above the surface of the water, Percy and Hemi went up through the hatch in the control room and climbed to the bridge at the top of the sail. Percy had the radar mast raised, which had two lookout rings mounted to it, one on either side, and called Owen up. As he came up onto the bridge she handed him binoculars and pointed to the lookout rings. Owen kept climbing.
Percy looked at Hemi. “Be glad you don’t have to do fucking lookout duty anymore.”
“I am,” said Hemi. “I remember it well. At night, you are just standing up there in the wind, like you are swimming through pure blackness. Your mind starts to play tricks on you when you most need to keep your mind clear. It is a young person’s job.”
“Reliable young people, anyway,” said Percy. “Hey down there in the control room,” she shouted through the hatch, “you can start the diesels.”
There was a moment more of the quiet of the water sloshing down the length of the hull pushed by the electric motors before the diesels deep in the belly of the Prospect hissed, coughed, and fired. Black smoke streamed out behind the sail. The vibration of the engines carried up through the deck and shook the soles of their feet.
Hemi called down to ask for their new speed and to confirm the heading. He marked the answers down carefully on his ever-present clipboard.
“I heard that some boats like the Prospect are being fitted with snorkels now,” said Hemi.
“That’s what they’re calling those masts you can raise for feeding oxygen to the diesels while underwater, right?”
“Yes. The diesels exhaust out of them too. A boat with a snorkel never has to come up to the surface, you can recharge the batteries from periscope depth.”
“We should look into installing one at some point. Maybe after this job. It seems like it would be worth the investment. The nighttime surface runs are starting to require too much care and caution for me to feel safe.”
“The funny thing,” Hemi continued, “is I also heard that a snorkeling diesel is actually louder on sonar than one running on the surface.”
“You’re fucking kidding?”
Hemi looked at her incredulously — he was hardly ever kidding. “Apparently with the whole boat underwater, more of the sound of the running engines goes into the water. On the surface, some of it escapes into the air. Nobody expected that when they came up with the idea of the snorkel, but the boats out in the ocean were suddenly detectable forty miles off or so on sonar.”
“So once again the newfangled technology doesn’t solve a fucking problem, it just creates more fucking decisions for a captain,” Percy spat.
“It is certainly not a job I would ever want. I prefer a measure of certainty in my work.”
Percy lit a cheroot. Hemi looked up at the dark gray sky, mostly obscured by cloud cover.
“How’s the navigation going?” Percy exhaled a long stream of smoke that was caught up by the wind and braided into the diesel exhaust behind them.
“I have been keeping very close track of our time, direction, and speed, as usual. But you know my track is only as good as guesswork can be. If these clouds break up tonight, and we get some stars, I would like to fix our position on the chart. When is the rendezvous with Shakes?”
“At dawn. It will certainly be easier if we know where we are with some precision.”
“And if we can rely on Shakes to know where he is…”
The night ground on with the unvarying drone of the diesel engines always under the foot of any crew member on deck and relentlessly surrounding anyone below decks. Since the diesel engines of the Prospect were just generators that created electricity to charge the batteries that powered the electric motors that actually propelled the boat, they were always run at the same optimum-efficiency speed for spinning the generators. Even when the boat changed speed, the all-consuming hum around them never changed in pitch or amplitude. For the crew at the controls, with no depth to control while they were on the surface and a steady course, there was almost nothing to do. The needles of the rows of gauges all stood steadfastly at their marks.
Percy knew that this was the hardest part of the job — remaining always ready to take action when there was absolutely nothing to do. The crew had to stay focused on the job during hours and hours of virtually no sensory input at all. It was far too easy to fall asleep at the controls, or let one’s mind wander off to a place where everything was not just a grime-coated gray accompanied by a background of lush and never-changing noise that managed to be the exact auditory equivalent of the bland color that surrounded them.
She put the crew on rest rotations. Every three hours, three of them would get three hours off. This kept two people in the control room at all times, one on lookout, and one at the radar/sonar station. The off-duty crew were free to spend their time on deck if they wanted. But since there was little to see up there but a black horizon tapped firmly against a dark gray one, most of the crew came back down after a few minutes and ended up in their rack, sleeping. Except for Bastian: he wrapped his long thin form in a rubber foul-weather slicker to keep the wind off and lay out on the forward deck, apparently finding sleep there as easily as a warm puppy.
Hours later, sometime during the third rotation, Hemi found Cassandra in the navigation and sonar compartment, listening intently to the sonar with the headphones on and her eyes closed.
Hemi tapped her on the shoulder, and she jumped a little before smiling when she saw it was him and pulling back a headphone.
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“Aren’t you supposed to be in your rack?” Hemi said.
“I volunteered to take two rotations in a row — to keep the rotations even for everyone else…and since I’m new.”
“Are you hearing anything?” Hemi asked.
“No. I try to imagine my mind going out into the water to listen to what’s around us, but I can’t get past the sound of the diesels.”
“Sonar is extremely limited with the engines running. But…” Hemi flipped some filter switches on the sonar control board, and adjusted some tone dials. These were familiar settings he used when he was on sonar while the engines were running. “Try it like that.”
Cassandra set the headphones back into their comfortable position on her ears and listened for a minute. “That’s much better. It’s like the engines are at least not distracting my attention.” She made some notes on a pad of the settings Hemi had made.
“You are keeping an eye on radar too, right? That is actually maybe more important while we are on the surface.”
“Yup. Owen showed me what to look for. The radar…has not done anything at all.”
“That is good.”
“I didn’t realize when I agreed to come on board that this job would be so mind-numbing…and boring.”
“That is what makes it so hard, and why only a certain type of person makes it as a submariner. I think on land there is something of a perception that it is this glorious job, where you are out from under the thumb of Authorities, free to pursue your own career, and helping to make world commerce go around. The people on land know it is dangerous, and that gets mixed into the legend of who a submariner is. But in reality, the people who make good submariners are the ones who can handle being in a cramped space for days on end with no changes in their environment at all and still manage to keep their mind sharp enough to snap into action when a situation presents itself. It is not a job that is an expression of physical acuity. It is a job that puts your mental toughness to the test.”
“I certainly don’t have much to offer in physical strength…” said Cassandra.
“People on land think it is a job for tough guys. We are always getting men looking for jobs on submarines. Men who look like, well, like me. Hefty guys with a lot of muscles. And some of those guys are fine. But Captain Percy and I have realized over the years that the mental toughness we need is not correlated to physical toughness. We hire people who we anticipate might have that mental fortitude, at least when we have an option in who we can hire. And we find that mental toughness in all kinds of people. It is not just me and Percy; most of the people who actually work in the submarine cargo industry these days look for that quality in all types. The Authority subs are still full of big men, but the commercial subs are a pretty diverse crowd of workers.”
“The depot was full of big men…”
“You know how that happens? Those men go looking for work on submarines thinking it is a good job for a strong fellow. But they find out they cannot handle the mental strain, and they wash out. They end up working the next job out from the center of what they went looking for: servicing submarines instead of working on them.”
“Ah…” she said, her eyes widening as a large piece of her world that didn’t quite make sense before fell into place in her mind.
“Unlike work on land, there are few regulations or rules controlling our work out here. The job has pure evolutionary forces in play. The only people doing the work are the ones who can. Everyone else goes home, back to their Authorities, and policies, and networks of contacts. On land you get a job based on what you look like, and who you know. Out here, you get a job if you can do the job. We do not care who you know, where you came from, or what you look like.”
A smile cracked across Cassandra’s face. “That’s why you hired me?”
“No, no, no. Captain Percy hired you because she was desperate for someone to sit on sonar. But you should know that you have just as good a chance at doing this job well as any other person. And…you have done well on your first day working.”
Cassandra nodded. “I want to learn as much as I can.” She paused, thinking about her future. “What are you up to at this hour of the night, Hemi?”
“I am catching up on navigation. I have to do this every few hours. Come over here and look at the chart.”
Cassandra hung the sonar headphones on the hook and joined Hemi at the navigation table. She looked at the big chart, and the dotted line marking their course from the depot island, and the little x marking their current position. “How do you know where we are?”
“Honestly, it is mostly just a guess. I keep track of our speed and direction very carefully. Then I just plot that onto the chart based on how long we have been traveling. That is called dead-reckoning. If the chart is accurate and there are not too many mitigating factors, like, say, a strong current that I cannot account for, then we know roughly where we are and that we will not run into anything.”
“What happens if there is a strong current that pushes you off course and you don’t realize it?”
“That is why we need to sometimes fix our position. If we pass by an island or other feature that we see while on the surface or with the periscope, and that feature is on the chart, then we know where we are. Sometimes there are undersea features that we can hear on the sonar, or we know are there by changes we read in the gauge that measures how far down the bottom is. If those are on the chart, we can fix our position that way. Normally, we do not have to be super-precise — the ocean is large and mostly empty water. It is also easier this early in a run — I know exactly where we started from at the depot, so our position should not be too far off. But we need to rendezvous with Shakes at dawn, and being precise about our location will help that go more smoothly. So I am going up on the bridge to get a fix by the stars. Want to join me? If the stars are out, it might be worth the trip up the ladder.”
“Is it OK for me to leave the radar?”
“Just for a few minutes. Make sure to check it as soon as you come back down.”
They climbed up through the control room and up the interior ladders of the sail to the bridge. Owen was back in the lookout ring above them and greeted them when their heads shadowed the red light coming up from the open hatch, happy to have something to break the monotony of being on lookout.
Overhead the clouds had blown off leaving a clear night sky with no moon. Hemi often remarked that it occurred far more often than seemed statistically probable that the Prospect surfaced and he came out on deck to find a low, blanketing cloud cover. He could hardly recall the last time they surfaced to a clear sky, and his deeply rational self was challenged by the sense that being on the open surface was in fact nature’s opportunity to oppress them. He had begun to prefer being submerged, where instead they had control over the pressure and depth of the atmospheres laying upon them.
But not this night. The sky was clear from one horizon to the other, and the stars glowed in their visible tens-of-thousands, their appreciable numbers a heuristic suggesting the reality of the uncountable multiples of billions of other stars that existed invisibly in the universe above them. With no light over the horizon, the stars came right down to the surface of the water in every direction, infinity compressed to a perfectly smooth dome that lay over them.
“Wow,” said Cassandra.
“Yes, that’s the mariner’s privilege,” said Hemi. “And the lucky submariner occasionally gets to dip in as well.”
Hemi took out his sextant, clipboard, star charts, and graphs. He took sightings on three or four known stars, measuring their precise height above the horizon. He scratched a number of notes onto the clipboard with a pencil.
“How does that thing work?” Cassandra asked.
“This is a sextant. It measures how far above the horizon a particular star or the sun is. That will let me fix our position on the chart. If you are interested, I can train you how to use it. But not tonight.”
Cassandra nodded.
“Unlike mariners, the submariner does not often have the luxury of visual references to find their place in the world,” Hemi continued. “We wander under the ocean, feeling our way by sound. And every once in a while poke our head up to secure our location in the swirling mass by judging ourselves against the stars.”
“That’s poetic,” said Owen, listening to their conversation from the lookout ring.
Hemi smiled. “And just a little bit of a cliché,” he said more loudly, for Owen’s benefit. “I find a touch of the poetic gives some much-needed meaning to this black and gray metal world of ours. But if you let it go to your head, it could keep you from making the clear-minded assessments of situations that are necessary to remain alive as a submariner.” Hemi took a sighting of another star and marked its altitude down on his clipboard. “OK, Cassandra. Back to your radar scope. I need to make some minor course adjustments in the control room.”
Hemi and Cassandra climbed back down into the Prospect, leaving Owen alone to occupy the center point on a circular field of blackness under the perfect half-sphere of stars.