With the power restored, Percy tracked down heavy floodlights in the storage hold. They were designed to be clamped onto the fairing of the sail for situations like this, when the boat needed to be piloted visually from the top of the sail, but visibility was nearly zero. Powering the lights required running heavy weather-proof electrical cables up from the control room to the bridge.
She called on the PA for Gregory to come help her. Together they managed to get the heavy lighting units hauled through the control room and up to the bridge of the sail. In the slashing rain, Percy held each of the four lights in place while Gregory clamped the lights onto the fairing by bolts tightened with a wet and slipping wrench. Gregory draped the cables down through the sail and into the control room where he connected them to high-amperage power sockets.
So far, Hemi had been mostly guessing from which direction the biggest waves would approach, and then having Bastian adjust the course to keep the Prospect moving laterally across the troughs of the waves, where they faced the most risk of rolling over again. The powerful lights pushed back the darkness to reveal the black throbbing landscape surrounding him. Huge mountains, the color of crude oil, slipped towards him and under the boat, lifting it high up among the spindrift blowing white from their peaks and violently twisting off deep into the ferocious darkness.
Hemi tried to spot the big ones from a couple of waves away. When he saw one, he would have Bastian steer into it, driving up the side, splitting through the top, and crashing down into the valley below. The wind blew relentlessly, carrying a mix of rain and flying water from which no distinction could be made whether it was moving upwards or downwards.
To the uninitiated, this was a hellscape, an unstable surface on an alien world. Any ship in weather like this was a tiny figure on a vast plane roamed by monsters the size of apartment buildings that arrived with stealth, and an ability and intent to crush even the most formidable intruders and drive them down into the bottomless hole they themselves strode effortlessly over.
But Hemi felt no fear as long as the hum of the diesels shook his boots, and the heat of the exhaust bellowed from the pipes behind him. He had been through weather like this hundreds of times over the years and knew a well-found ship with a strong engine should have no trouble. As old as the boat was, he had all faith in the Prospect. The storm could try its evil best to do them down, but Hemi was not going to go without a fight.
After an hour of firing into the storm, though, the giant on the bridge was starting to feel the wear of it. Hemi was not a loud man, and his voice was cracking from continually shouting directives down to the control room. It also took an enormous amount of energy to keep his concentration focused on the nearly-featureless black seascape. Wild as it was, it became debilitatingly repetitive in a short time. And then it took physical stamina just to stay standing on the bridge against the wind and roll of the boat. But the most distressing thing to Hemi was that he had only been at this for an hour. There was a chance they could be running through the dark of this storm until dawn — something like ten hours away.
Owen, dressed in a black foul-weather slicker that covered him from crown to calves, where it draped over heavy rain boots, climbed up through the sail to join Hemi on the bridge.
“Captain Percy sent me up,” Owen shouted to Hemi through the wind. “She wants me in the lookout ring. Seems kinda stupid to me.”
Hemi nodded. “The sour prospects of fortune are determined by the winds that blow out of hell, Owen. I do not believe there is more to see from the lookout ring than down here on the bridge. Still, I will be glad to have help spotting incoming big ones…and someone to witness my end if I get blown overboard.”
“Maybe that’s the real fucking reason she wanted me up here!” Owen grinned at Hemi as the rain soaked his face.
Owen clipped on a lifeline and climbed up to the lookout ring, his hands almost glowing white where they peeked out from under the black slicker and gripped the wet steel ladder. In the lookout ring, he doubled up his safety line. From that modest height it looked like he could reach up and touch the long drifting tendrils of the low scudding clouds above his head. He drew a pair of binoculars from under his slicker, but they were nearly useless in a matter of seconds. He reverted to holding the brim of his hood down to shade his eyes from the water that came down on him. Though little good it did against the water that rose up at him.
In the sonar compartment Cassandra’s eyes were red and watery. She had been on sonar watch for more than twelve hours. Twelve hours of staring at the same gauges, which never showed the slightest change. While she had quickly adapted to the gentle motion of the submarine in normal conditions, now it was moving like the worst kind of low-riding surface ship. It lifted her up, and dropped her down, sometimes hard enough to lift her from her chair. But unlike a surface ship, there were no windows. No way for her to see any kind of horizon by which she could orient her confused inner ear. Sickness rose up in her again and again, and she kept forcing it back into herself. The only relief was the occasional cool, wet breeze that found its way all the way down through the open hatch in the control room to her far front corner of the sonar compartment.
She had expected to be in her rack hours ago, but Percy had come by and asked her to stay at the sonar. She had told Cassandra that, while it was unlikely they would meet any other vessels in a storm like this, sonar might be the only way they would know if another ship was coming at them, despite the noise of the storm. With so much precipitation, the radar was essentially useless, and Percy had turned the unit off.
Cassandra literally hung on. She gripped the handles on either side of the sonar unit in her small hands, her fingers curling around the cold painted and chipped steel, her fingernails digging into the flesh of her palms. The tension in her arms had passed from a searing ache to a dull background pain long before.
She slowly closed her eyes and focused on the sounds in her headset. She left her body behind in the boat and moved her mind out into the water. This had become easier with practice, though overcoming the exhaustion and pain of a long shift made it more challenging now.
The ocean was overwhelmed by the sounds of the storm on the surface and the heavy drone of the diesel engines reverberating through the hull of the Prospect. The whole boat shook with the vibration of the grinding cylinders. The engines provided a low frequency bass note that cut a never-varying line of deep sound through the sonar.
Above the engines in pitch was the sound of the waves. This sound was white, but unlike the drone of the diesels, it constantly shifted and changed. A heavy sound that curled and rolled, until a wave broke. When that happened, the sound would change to a rushing wall which would overtake everything until it receded a few seconds later and the low drone of the engines came back up underneath.
When she concentrated, Cassandra could hear the whistle of the wind itself, pressing against the surface of the water and driving it with its vicious will.
Those sounds all combined into a heavy repetitive groan that rose and fell depending on which source was taking over at any moment. Cut across all of it was the sound of the motion of the boat itself. Every minute or so, the bow would break out of a wave, accompanied by a rush of wind on the sonar mics. That would be followed by the crunching sound of the boat plunging back under the water, which would run out in the long stream rushing along the side of the hull.
All of this came together to form something that, to Cassandra’s ears, sounded like an almost spiritual music — a drone music from the culture of some remote land, with variations that held one’s attention as at the same time they carried you off to some higher plane, but then always came floating down to return to the same place it began. The grinding roll of it all seemed like some animistic entity’s effort to raise the consciousness of someone lucky enough to be listening to a height where one could see forever. Out through thousands and thousands of miles of empty ocean, to pick out some particular particle or source and understand what exactly its intentions were: the mind of a sperm whale three thousand meters down in the blackness, closing its jaws around the expelling sweet juices of an enormous cephalopod, or the byzantine economics that led to the churning roll of a machine bit boring into the ocean floor, or the tortured path of beach sand siphoned from its existence in the warm sun and deposited in the freezing darkness of the drowned depths.
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Cassandra let her mind sink into this strange music flowing through her headset, passing from one ear through the middle of her head to the other ear, letting her mind wander around in the sea surrounding them at the same time. This went on for more than an hour before she was jolted back to the sonar compartment by the distraction of Percy and Chips having a loud and heated argument behind her. That was unfortunate because just at that moment she believed she could hear a new sound out in the darkness. It was something faint and far off. Something incongruous and inappropriate.
She opened her eyes and looked at her instruments. She swung the mics around towards the boat’s rear starboard side. At about 160 degrees there was a slight, but very real, wavering of the signal strength indicator. It just popped its head up for a second, like some prairie rodent checking for raptors. Cassandra spun the mic direction wheel back across the bearing, and the needle went up and down again. Back and forth she scanned, and each time the needle bounced and now she was sure that she could hear a faint mechanical hum in her earpiece when it did so.
She targeted the mics on the source of the mechanical sound in the water and focused her attention on it. It was nothing more than a soft hum that had diffused itself across some unknown amount of the dense medium she worked in, gently tickling the sensitive membranes of the ship’s mics, and then running close to the speed of light through the ship’s wiring, past the condensers and filters of her equipment, up the fading braided wires of the headset and into her ears. For all that, it was a pulpy mush of a signal, barely discernible as mechanical save for the slow cycle of rising and falling at just a few hertz, but in an evenly repetitive way that was unmistakable.
She struggled to figure out if the source was far off or if it was closer but moving quietly. The drone of the engines and the background noise from the surface interfered and confused her sense of distance in the water. It made her feel a little like she was lost and alone on the surface, being lifted and dropped by the force of the storm. The source of the sound might be visible one second, and then she was deaf and blind under the water, and by the time she came to the surface again it had moved away.
Percy and Chip’s argument grew louder. Cassandra had the sense they might be on the verge of blows. The verbal exchange kept pulling her back to the sonar compartment when she knew she needed her mind out there in the water. But she still felt she did not have the authority to enforce quiet in the compartment.
She rested her elbows on the console and cupped her hands over the metal and leather pieces of the earphones. She listened to the mechanical hum in the water, and tried to guess by the difference between her right and left ear how far away that sound was. But the white noise of the storm washed it all into one blended continuous sound. She stared at the signal strength indicator and dared it to move.
And then it did. It jumped up, marked a point, and floated there for half a breath. It was accompanied by a rattling clink in the headphones — metal on metal somewhere out in the liquid expanse. A dropped steel pot or piece of equipment perhaps. The sound was distinctive, carrying Cassandra back to her childhood, to playing on the floor of a kitchen while a meal was being prepared above her. She tried to hold on to the feeling of safeness that brought to her as in her earphones the rattling-pot sound took on an other-worldly echo. An echo that her mind processed for distance — which brought the rising terror of how close she now knew that sound to be.
She turned and yelled. “Captain Percy! They’re right on us!”
Percy immediately broke off with the red-faced Chips and stared at Cassandra, her eyes going wide. It took her a second to process what Cassandra had said. “A contact?” she asked Cassandra.
“Yes!” Cassandra put all the conviction she could into this word, worried that she was not conveying the seriousness of the situation quickly enough.
“How close?” Percy asked.
“I don’t know!” Cassandra panicked. “Too close! They’re here!” She pointed her finger at the console. “Rear left side of the ship.”
Percy grabbed the gray steel rungs of the ladder up to the control room, feeling the old paint fleck off under her fingers where she gripped the rungs excessively tightly. She flew up the ladder, cupped her hands around her mouth and yelled up to Hemi, “Contact! Close rear port quarter!” She could hear Hemi repeating the information up to Owen in the lookout ring.
Owen made a motion to pull out the binoculars from under his slicker, but as he looked in the direction Hemi indicated, he realized he did not need them. There before him rose a shadowy leviathan, breaking out from the dropping curve of the next wave behind them. It was so dark that Owen would have thought it was literally a leviathan — something in the order of baleen whales — except as soon as its huge dorsal area split the surface, two holes appeared in its back, from which poured out a bright red glow, like the eyes of some corrupted pet of hell. The shadows of people briefly caused those eyes to blink, and Owen knew they were moving onto the deck of another sub that was so close it looked like the next wave could drop it on top of the Prospect.
Owen cupped one hand to his mouth and stretched his arm out to point in a gesture that dated back to the dawn of humans venturing out onto water. “Hemi!” And with the foreboding sense that they might be the last words he ever spoke, Owen could not keep the note of mortal terror from his voice. “It has come through the waves and is on us now!”
Hemi turned and looked, and instantly knew the Prospect’s only course of action. “Dive!” he shouted downward as he smashed the button for the alarm. He looked up at Owen in the lookout ring. “We have to dive Owen! Get below!” The alarm klaxon sounded from the control room below.
Long thin fingers of flame reached out from the submarine behind and split the darkness between. It was followed instantly by the low, fast crackling sound of heavy automatic weapon fire and the sickening thud of lead slamming into the thick steel of the Prospect’s sail. It rang with a clanging echo through the hull.
Hemi immediately dropped to the deck of the bridge, below the protective ridge of the fairing, and then lowered himself down through the interior of the sail and into the control room. He looked up through the open hatch and called loudly for Owen.
“Were they firing on us? That same sub — the Grackle?” Percy asked.
“Yes. I saw the ram,” said Hemi. “We need to dive. Now. Open the main ballast vents.” But he knew his words were redundant. Gregory had already shut down the diesels, and Bastian was putting an angle on the dive plane and the main ballast was flooding. The bow tilted towards the depths. But the row of lights that showed the status of the hatches contained one glaring red light among the green — the control room hatch.
The depth gauge had already climbed off its zero pin. The deck of the Prospect would be awash in a matter of seconds. The control room would be under shortly after that. Hemi looked up through the open hatch “Owen! We’re going down!” But all he could see was black rain blowing across the bridge. “He was pretty exposed up in the lookout ring when they started firing. He may have been hit,” Hemi said to Percy.
They suddenly all made a coordinated, involuntarily, wincing motion to duck down as more shrapnel hit the sail.
A rain of blood driven by the wind sprayed down through the open hatch above them.
Through the hatch they could hear a loud, low voice, enlarged by loudspeakers mounted to the sail of the pursuing sub, so that all enunciation blended together into one long echoing drone of command. “Do not submerge. Disengage your motors and prepare to be boarded.”
This was followed by a long string of regional control organizations, treaty clauses, and naval ranks by which the following sub conveyed its unshakable and inviolable authority to issue such a command.
“Close the hatch, Hemi,” Percy said.
“I…I cannot do that Sylvia,” said Hemi.
“We’re going to be under in seconds! This isn’t a discussion.” She climbed up two rungs on the ladder to the bridge, reached up and pulled the hatch down without looking up, cutting off the echoing voice on the loudspeakers explicating an ever-expanding description of pyramidal powers.
She screwed the squeaking hatch-sealing wheel down tight. The light on the hatch-status board went from red to green.
More bits of lead smacked against the sail and along the hull of the Prospect just below the waterline. Percy winced again. There was no telling what kind of damage they could be doing. It might be nothing, or it might wound the Prospect in just such a particular way that under exactly the right pressure of water, at some unknowable depth, the whole boat would collapse on itself.
“They’re tearing us apart!” shouted Bastian.
Hemi fixed the small frames of his glasses in front of his eyes. “Do not worry. The boat will be safe from bullets underwater. Just get us down.”
They could hear the water rushing up the hull and rising around them now as the sail went under the waves.
Then they heard the tapping.
Not the loud thunks of bullets, but the soft rhythmic bump of someone banging on the hull over their head. A few thumps evenly spaced, as if someone was putting all their strength into them. This was followed by a double-bump, which let them know for sure the source was not mechanical.
“Owen,” said Hemi, his face blank.
“There’s nothing we can do now,” said Percy. The thumps went on for another few seconds. After a moment of silence, there were a few weaker ones. And then they stopped.