Hours later, when the clock said it should be early evening on the surface of the world, Cassandra’s eyes were bleary and drooping as she stared blankly at the sonar console. Percy and Hemi were having a discussion behind her in the sonar compartment about whether it was time to surface and begin their nighttime run.
“How’s the charge on the batteries, Hemi?” Percy asked.
“OK, but getting low. We are at maybe twenty percent capacity.”
“So, we could stay under maybe another four or five hours at a creep.”
“Yes. We took a big chunk out of the batteries by leaving the area where we contacted the Grackle at such a high speed.”
“I know, but strategically, putting on some fuckin’ distance was the right thing to do.”
“I do not disagree,” said Hemi.
“So when should we surface? We definitely want to run the diesels and put a charge back on the batteries, but it opens us up as a radar contact for those fuckers following us. They could easily still be within range to detect us on radar.”
“And if they do, the whole move with Shakes would have been wasted.”
“Fuckin’ right. So, do you got a recommendation for me?”
Hemi turned to Cassandra and tapped her on the shoulder. “Any contacts on sonar Cassandra?”
She pulled back a headphone. “Nothing…mechanical. But the background noise of the ocean has changed Hemi. It sounds… weirdly energetic.”
“Hmm.” Hemi picked up the other headset and made some adjustments. He listened for a moment and pulled the headset off. “Well, that complicates things. Seems like we drove right into that storm Shakes was predicting.”
“Fuck,” said Percy.
“Ohhh…” said Cassandra to herself, “so that’s what a churned up surface sounds like.” She filed away in her mind another almost-magical aspect of sonar. “But Hemi, I don’t feel any storm affecting the Prospect.”
“Even bad storms do not stir the water this deep.”
“On the surface though,” said Percy, “it’s another fucking matter.”
“I hope Captain Shakes is alright.” Cassandra muttered a little blessing for his well-being.
“How bad does that storm sound, Hemi?” Percy asked.
“Significant, I would say. There could be ten-meter waves up there.”
“That’s the kind of weather we’re better off staying under.”
“At least while we still have any battery left,” Hemi agreed.
“Normally, that’s the obvious move. But we need to be thinking ahead as well: staying down now could force us to the surface in daylight with no charge at all on the battery. We could end up a helpless target. If we go up now, we can get the batteries charged with very little chance of being found.”
“Running on the surface in the storm does provide a lot of cover — the radar will be swamped and the ocean makes enough noise to cover our running diesels… But it could also swamp us or crack the Prospect’s spine.”
“She’s a strong fuckin’ boat, Hemi, and with good pilots I think she can handle it. Let’s prep to surface.”
Hemi and Percy climbed up to the control room. Bastian and Owen sat in the control seats watching the unmoving gauges with bored and sleepy eyes.
“We are going to surface,” said Hemi, “and there is a serious storm up there. Owen, I am going to sit in that plane control chair. I need you to go down to the navigation/sonar compartment and get ready to blow the main ballast tanks.”
“You want to do an emergency blow?” Owen asked.
Owen stood, and Hemi slipped his bulky form around him and down into the tight fit of the planes control chair. “Not a full blow. On my signal, I just want you to open the high-pressure air into the main ballast for a few seconds. I want to pop the boat up onto the surface. If we use the normal low-pressure system to ease up, there is too much of a chance for the intakes to be swamped in these seas. You all understand the procedure?”
Owen and Bastian nodded. Owen slipped down the ladder to the sonar compartment and they could hear him opening the toolbox that held the emergency blow wrench.
“OK, Bastian, give us a little more throttle. I am adjusting the planes for some up-angle.”
The bow of the boat rose slowly ahead of them, and Percy, the only one standing, leaned into the angle. She found her pack of cheroots tucked into the wall joists and pulled one out to light it. Bastian slipped a cigarette from his shirt pocket and lit it off Percy’s coal.
“Hemi, another degree on the bow, I think,” said Percy.
Hemi turned the plane control wheel slightly, and the boat eased to a somewhat steeper angle. He made some small adjustments on the trim tank control panel to make the front of the boat a bit more buoyant so the motors did not have to put quite so much energy into lifting the bow.
“I am going to come level at just about ten meters, then we will have Owen blow air into the main ballast tanks.” Hemi kept his eyes locked on the depth gauge, watching it crawl slowly back around towards the zero mark as the boat rose. Just as it passed the ten-meter mark, Hemi turned the plane control wheel and the bow of the boat came down to level. At this shallower depth, the boat took on the motion from the waves on the surface, slowly listing from one side to the other by ten degrees or so. “OK!” Hemi yelled down to Owen. “Open the air into the main ballast, Owen!”
Percy punched the emergency blow alarm to be sure that this time everyone on the boat was aware they were performing a dangerous maneuver.
From below they heard the squeak of the turning valve, and a loud hiss. Air rushed through the pipes below them and out into the ballast. Hemi started counting to himself. There was a pause where nothing happened and then they all felt the upward acceleration of the Prospect lifting.
Hemi’s count hit five. “Close it down, Owen!”
The hiss stopped, but the upward motion did not. Percy wrapped her fingers in the leather strap hanging over her head. They rode the force of the expanding air upwards for a few seconds and then the boat went weightless for a moment as it reached the surface. They could feel their stomachs rise within, and Hemi and Bastian’s knuckles went white as they tightened their grip on the control wheels.
The depth gauge landed firmly on its zero pin and sat there. The boat rolled slowly and heavily with the surface swell.
All of these movements were well beyond the everyday range of motion for the Prospect, which typically experienced little more than a gentle roll in the course of a normal day of travel. But Percy knew her boat very well after all these years. Even during a dramatic maneuver like blowing out the main ballast tanks, the boat was well within its capabilities. Her crew might have nervous looks on their faces, but Percy gripped her strap and casually smoked her cheroot as they took the express route to the surface.
The boat bobbed back downwards and began to settle. She was about to raise the periscope and have Chips prime the diesels for starting when she felt the deck below her feet move in a way that she was not expecting.
It was nothing dramatic, just a slight roll and yaw that Percy’s whole being knew simply was not right. If the Prospect was a haptic extension of Percy’s own body, this was like she had just tripped over her own feet. While she had no worries during the rise to the surface, this sudden strange motion of the boat made her break out in a cold sweat. Nobody else seemed to even notice it.
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“Hemi…something’s wrong,” she said, but even the time it took to get the words out was too long of a delay. A second motion that was far more dramatic had begun. She punched the collision alarm and the klaxon sounded in every compartment to the lowest depths of the boat.
The Prospect started to list to the starboard side — the motion of some sky-scraping giant lifting them closer to his near-sighted eyes for inspection without regard for the orientation of the strange object in his hand. In this case, the giant was a twenty-meter wave.
The Prospect rolled hard over to starboard, and it did not stop rolling.
“Hemi! You brought us up in the ditch of a wave! We’re going over!”
The port wall became the ceiling. The boat was rolled over ninety degrees on its side by being caught in the wrong part of a huge wave. It kept rolling. Percy crashed into the starboard wall. Hemi put one arm out to brace himself, and the other arm against Bastian to brace him. Hemi’s enormous strength rippled through his body and held the two men firmly in place at their control stations, defying gravity. From every deck of the boat came the shifting, crashing sound of once carefully stowed objects falling hard against the starboard side that was now acting as the temporary deck.
As on all ships, the crew generally kept objects secured by strap or rail against the roll of the vessel. This both kept things from falling out of place with the normal motion of the boat, and on a submarine prevented a falling object from potentially making enough noise to give their position away on sonar. But objects were secured against maybe a twenty-degree roll, not ninety. At that angle nearly everything in the boat found itself yanked free by the malevolent hand of gravity.
The lights blinked a few times and then shorted out as bilge water made its way to places it did not belong. A few moments later the control room and sonar compartment were lit with the harsh white glare of the battery-backup emergency floodlights.
From the sonar compartment, Cassandra screamed. “Holy shit. Holy shit. Holy shit. Is this it? Are we fucking going down?”
Hemi responded to her with forceful strain. “Cassandra! Do not panic. Submarines are designed with all the weight at their bottoms. They always come upright eventually.”
“Except when they fuckin’ don’t,” said Bastian, but only loud enough for Hemi to hear.
“Hemi, what about the cargo?” Percy asked.
“We will put our faith in the packing material. If one of the warheads does explode, we will know it immediately. And a few seconds after that, it will not matter.”
Bastian coughed. “What if we try to submerge again?” he asked.
“I’d be too worried about the tanks flooding unevenly. We could end up turning fuckin’ turtle,” said Percy. “We need to ride it out. She’ll come up again…”
The sub rocked on its side for terrifying minutes, sometimes rolling in the wrong direction far enough that it seemed impossible they would not turn upside down. Occasionally the lights flickered, but continually shorted out. They listened to the ongoing sounds of the boat’s stores crashing and sliding through all the compartments.
As Hemi strained to hold himself in place and support Bastian in his, he began to doubt his own words. Maybe this was one of those times when the boat was not going to come back upright. And even if it did, coming upright could always be the motion that set off one of the magnetic warheads. Cassandra had been reduced to whimpering on the deck below them, though they could hear that Owen had made his way over to her and was telling her things in a low voice they could not hear but clearly had a reassuring tone. Bastian just kept saying “fuck!” every few seconds, with more and more frustration.
Percy lay against the starboard wall. She spat, and her intuitive expectation gleaned from years of experience that she would watch it arc to the deck was defied by gravity, which pulled the brown glop back against the side of the ship.
But as she was the first to feel the boat go wrong, Percy was also the first to feel it begin to right itself. There was the slightest relaxing of the angle, she could feel a tiny bit more pressure from the deck through her boots, and somehow she knew it was the beginning of a more substantive movement. The Prospect was telling her she was coming back up.
At first it was just a slow rotation, but then it gathered speed and soon the control room was whipped up into the air, and then came back again as the Prospect found its upright footing.
“Fuck!” said Bastian. “Now what?”
“Forward throttle!” said Percy. “Do the motors have power?”
From far below decks came the ramping-up hum of the electric motors spinning the props. The boat’s capabilities were severely limited without main power, but power between the batteries and electric motors that drove the props was isolated from the main power on its own circuit as a safety precaution for an emergency situation such as this.
“Fuckin’ motors do have power, Cap,” said Bastian.
“Small favors,” said Percy to herself. “OK Bastian, pick a bearing and keep us moving on it. Hemi! Get up on the bridge — with a fuckin’ lifeline — and get us steering into the waves so we don’t roll over in the fuckin’ ditch again.”
“You do not want to dive?” Hemi asked.
“Not without main power through the boat.”
Hemi nodded and slipped down to the lower decks to go after the gear he needed.
Percy grabbed at the boat PA mic and thumbed the transmitter, but there was no power to any of the radios. She leaned over the hatch to the sonar compartment. “Owen! Go find Chips and help her get the power back on.”
“Right, Percy.” Owen headed off quickly, nearly running into Gregory, who was stumbling up from crew quarters.
“You alright, Gregory?” Percy asked.
“Ya, I fucking fell out of the rack when we rolled, but I’m O-fucking-K.”
“Good. Get a flashlight and go down to the cargo hold and check the cargo — make sure nothing’s about to explode on us, and get it re-stowed, OK?”
“Ya, I’m on it.” Gregory pushed his way forward through the compartment against the sudden mountain grade he faced as the boat rocked. Now that it was on the surface, the Prospect was taking a beating from the weather.
Hemi returned wearing a full-length rubber foul-weather slicker and carrying a coil of heavy rope over his arm.
“We will not be able to see much up there, Sylvia. We need to rig some floodlights.”
“I know, but we can’t do that without power. Just do your best to feel your way out of the fucking ditch. As soon as the main power comes on, we’ll send some clamp-lights up.”
Hemi opened the hatch at the top of the control room, and wind immediately whipped into the boat, driving rain with it. Hemi climbed up, secured the heavy line around himself, and hitched it to steel rings welded in place behind the fairing of the bridge. The topside world was an environment of darkness pressing against blackness. Hemi was surrounded by huge moving mountains of pitch, rolling upwards and trying to touch the black sky that hung just over them, pressing down.
“OK, Bastian!” Hemi shouted down to the control room. “Left-rudder, three degrees.”
Bastian shouted the order back up to Hemi, repeating it like the pilot of a military ship would, knowing that Hemi had to be sure he was executing exactly the right move.
“I think you can try starting the diesels, Sylvia,” Hemi shouted a moment later.
Percy stepped up to the engine control panel located just behind Bastian. This panel was showing no power to the lights and indicators that usually glowed comfortably as they communicated to the control room crew that the core propulsion systems of the boat were working. Percy flipped the switch to turn on power to the diesels regardless — that circuit was also isolated from the main power circuits as a safety precaution. She pushed and held the starter buttons for the diesels. These were mechanically rigged to valves in the high-pressure system that let air flow into the engines with enough force to turn over the crankshaft and the big cylinder bores. The diesels required no external electricity source to start or run.
After a few seconds of listening to the high-pitched hiss of air flowing through the boat and down to the engines, Percy heard the rumbling vibrations of the diesels firing down in the deep parts of the boat and released the starter buttons.
“A little more throttle, Bastian!” Hemi called down after the diesels started bellowing their confident exhaust behind him. Now he felt the Prospect had the muscle to confront this big weather they were driving into.
A few minutes later the regular lighting came back on, and the harsh shadows of the emergency floodlights faded away. Power returned to the ship panel by panel, along with the reassuring hums of all the electric motors, circuits, and filaments that bathed every moment of their lives onboard the boat.
Percy picked up the PA mic. “Nice work, Chips.” She waited a second but there was no reply over the ship PA. “Bastian, I’m going to the cargo hold to check on the load.”
The ship was a mess. Percy made her way, stepping over all the detritus of a working sub scattered over every deck: tools, bedding, cans of food, cleaning supplies, scattered stacks of papers, half-unrolled charts, pencils, rags, parts, and steel-encased equipment. For all the mess in the main decks, though, the cargo hold was not too bad. Hemi’s careful re-arrangement of the cargo crates earlier had included strapping the crates hard up against the wall, and the old cotton-web straps had mostly held. Only a couple of crates had broken loose. Owen and Gregory were using the chain hoist to move the loose crate from the center area of the cargo hold. Chips had joined them and was stowing equipment that had been shaken loose. She had a rusty piece of grating gripped in her gloves when she saw Percy.
Chips’ face immediately went red. “That’s the second fuckin’ time, Percy. Two fuckin’ times you almost fuckin’ killed me now. You fuckin’ surface the boat in a fuckin’ storm? Fuckin’ damn you to a cold fuckin’ watery hell, you fuckin’ shit-faced asshole.”
“Fuck you Chips! I’m fucking captain of this boat. I have to make these calls. They aren’t always going to be fucking perfect or safe.”
“But with a hold full of fuckin’ explosives? Ride out bad fuckin’ storms submerged — every stupid-fuckin’ green boat driver knows that. But apparently, you fuckin’ think it’s fine to surface with a hold full of fuckin’ TNT. We were a fuckin’ mite’s-dick away from being blown to the bottom of the fuckin’ hole!”
Percy leveled her emotions. “I don’t fucking need this right now. I have bigger problems than you.” Percy turned and walked away.
Chips threw the rusted grating into the corner where it rang against the steel of the hull.