Chips stood at the foot of the control room ladder looking up at Percy through the hatch. “Fuck you,” she said softly. “The fuckin’ judges in hell will hold you for eternity for that, Percy.” Chips turned and disappeared towards the stern of the boat.
Nobody else said anything. Percy spat. “Flood the fucking dive tanks!”
Hemi reached over to the tank trim panel and opened valves that let more water into the boat. Throughout the whole of the Prospect huge volumes of water poured into the ballast tanks as air was displaced up pipes and vented out above them in streams of bubbles. Percy flipped the lights from white to red.
“Set the planes down steep,” said Hemi, “full power to the electric motors. Drive us down as fast as possible.” Gregory pushed the main throttles all the way forward, and the hum of the electric motors rose up around them mixing with the sound of water rushing in to fill the boat. The rows of smaller dials showing the tank-fill statuses within their pitted chrome casings — one with a cracked glass face — all rose evenly and quickly.
The Prospect’s bow fell downwards ahead of them. Percy and Hemi grabbed the hanging leather straps and counter-angled themselves against the incline. The boat was going down fast enough that they could feel their stomachs rise against the descent.
The ship-to-ship radio lit up, and the communication from the pursuing sub continued where it had left off when Percy closed the hatch. “Diving submarine: you are ordered to discontinue your dive. Return to the surface and disengage your engines. If you do not, we will launch a torpedo at you. Under the International Waters Territorial Authority Control Agreement we are permitted to inspect any–” Percy punched the button cutting power to the ship-to-ship radio.
“If they want to sink us so bad, why didn’t they just fucking torpedo us already?” Gregory asked.
“They were too close,” Hemi replied. “They need to be at a minimum safe distance to fire without risking blowing themselves up. They probably also thought there was a chance they could capture our boat if we had been scared enough to just roll over.”
“So we’re not that scared?” asked Bastian. He put a cigarette to his lips for a long draw, not expecting a reply.
Percy sized up the situation. “It must have just been total bad luck for us. There’s no way they could have fucking tracked us down in that storm. …Don’t ya think, Hemi?”
“It is incredibly unlikely. They may have just been riding out the storm themselves, and suddenly found they were on us.”
“And that bad luck cost me a crew member,” added Percy.
Hemi looked away and found himself analyzing the gauges. They had already achieved thirty meters of depth.
“Cassandra!” Percy yelled down to sonar through the hatch in the deck of the control room. “Stay on them! I need to know what they’re doing.”
“I’m trying to, Captain Percy.” Cassandra responded, unable to hide the uncertainty in her voice. “I…I think they might be diving…”
Percy caught Hemi’s eye. “What’s their move, Hemi? What are they trying to do?”
Hemi considered. “Well, if they are diving, I believe that suggests they want tactical mobility. On the surface, their opportunities to threaten us are extremely limited by the storm.”
“Mmm hmm. By ‘tactical mobility,’ you mean get in range to put a torpedo in the water that’s pointed at us?” Percy asked.
“Our relative positions have barely changed. They are almost certainly still too close. But if we hear them turn away from us, we can assume they are trying to get enough distance to fire a torpedo. On the other hand, if they do not turn away, they may be lining up to try to ram us.”
“Only a truly suicidal sub driver would try a ramming while submerged. There’s too much risk of damaging their own boat beyond repair.”
“Cautious restraint is hardly how I would characterize the actions of this sub commander so far..” said Hemi.
“Cassandra!” Percy called down again. “What’s the range to the contact now?”
“Um..” Cassandra struggled, “I can’t really tell, Captain Percy. The background noise in the water is making ranging difficult.”
“You had better go down there and get on the sonar with her,” Percy said to Hemi.
Hemi nodded and slipped down through the hatch. He put one big hand gently on Cassandra’s thin shoulder so he would not surprise her — she had her eyes closed and seemed to be concentrating on listening. When he touched her, she turned and opened her eyes and nodded to him. Hemi put the second sonar headset on.
A minute later he reported to Percy. “Sylvia, their diesels are off. They are definitely submerged. Range…maybe 300 meters. Hold on…”
The signal strength indicator rose slowly. Cassandra looked up at Hemi.
“They are increasing speed, Sylvia. And turning…through our rear port quarter. They are going for distance. I assume to fire on us.”
In the control room, Bastian overheard this report from Hemi. “Maybe they are turning to run away from us,” he said to Gregory through the cigarette hanging from his lip.
Percy stood directly behind Bastian watching the depth gauge over his shoulder: 100 meters. “Push her down, Bastian.”
Bastian turned the dive plane control wheel to give the planes a steeper angle. Percy adjusted valves at the tank ballast control panel to give the bow even more weight.
“Hemi!” Percy said. “Let me know immediately if they start to turn again.”
“If they have rear torpedo tubes, they will not have to turn,” Hemi replied. “And they are so close a torpedo will be in the water for only a minute before it hits us.”
Percy spat again. “Hell’s bells. Then just fucking let me know if there’s any indication at all that they are about to fire, Hemi.”
“It is tough, Sylvia. Cassandra is right, there is a lot of background noise.”
Gregory reached up and wiped his sweating fingers on a rag hanging on the forward wall between the gauges. “I could never get used to going down fast like this, controlled or not,” he said, as if voicing his fear might let some of it out from his guts and disperse it around the room a little. His eyes rapidly scanned over the stacks of dozens and dozens of dials and readouts on the front wall of the control room. What Gregory read from those dials was that the sub was being driven close to the limits of its endurable capabilities.
The rising and falling needles on the dials, which usually moved with a deliberate and controlled slowness, were all rapidly chasing new positions. The RPM indicators for the electric motors were near red-line. The battery indicators were showing the batteries draining so fast that Gregory could actually see the needles falling on the dials. The plane angle indicators were showing a steep angle. And the ballast tank status indicators were rapidly pushing towards a completely flooded boat.
The depth indicator was the one that Gregory’s eyes kept coming back to though. He had never seen it move so fast, showing him quantitatively what he knew from the lightened weight of his stomach: the Prospect was a many-thousand-ton steel stone dropping through the water column. It was hard to imagine what would stop the boat from simply winking out of existence in the never-ending blackness of the deepest parts of the ocean, crushed like distant matter pulled into a singularity. Within a few minutes it was passing through the range of 175 and 180 meters.
Everyone silently gripped their stations.
“They are turning, Sylvia,” said Hemi from the sonar station. He tapped a light rhythm on Cassandra’s shoulder to draw her attention to a new unique sound in their headsets. “Sounds like they are flooding torpedo tubes!”
A loud ping resonated from every piece of steel the boat had been built with. It hit broadside, and passed right through them. It rang off the opposite side of the Prospect’s hull and echoed back through the air to the crew’s ears. At the sonar station, the ranging equipment lit up with the exact distance and direction of the pursuing sub. Hemi read the coordinates off the range display and relayed them to Percy. “That ranging ping of theirs puts them at 612 meters off our rear port side.”
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
“Now they have everything they need to fire on us,” Percy said to herself.
Half a minute later Hemi heard the unmistakable sound of a torpedo being pressed out of its tube. “Torpedo in the water!”
Nobody said anything, instinctively listening to the space around them. After a few seconds the ping of the torpedo homing on the Prospect started bouncing off the hull with the timed rhythm of a ticking clock.
“Take off your headset, Cassandra,” said Hemi, pointing at the range-finding equipment that lit up with the direction and remaining distance between them and the torpedo. It updated immediately following each ping — the torpedo was gaining about one hundred meters between each ping.
“Down. We have to get deeper,” Percy whispered to herself in the control room. She reached past Bastian and turned the dive planes wheel to the stop so they had maximum angle. The boat dropped from under them.
Where a moment before Gregory was fearing some unknown depth at which the Prospect would cease to exist, now he felt himself squeezed in the jaws of a closing vise: between a torpedo that could blow the Prospect open, and the pressure of water that could crush the boat flat.
Percy looked up. They were passing two hundred meters.
The torpedo’s pings increased in frequency until they came so fast that they pulsed in the ears. The torpedo was on them.
And then there was a creeping silence in the moment where they had all expected the next sound to be their eardrums pressed in by the shock wave of an explosion.
There was nothing but a long lingering quiet. The only sound was the groaning of the Prospect’s hull being pushed through the continued stress of fast diving.
Gregory looked at Percy. “What happened?”
“Most of the torpedoes on these Authority subs are older ones, because they manufactured fuckin’ huge numbers of them. They generally can’t swim below two hundred meters or so. The one homing on us probably just stopped functioning when critical components failed under the pressure.” Percy paused, thinking to herself. “It’s entirely possible that they are now loading a more modern torpedo into their tubes that can reach us at this depth, and all we’ve done is delay the inevitable.”
Percy tilted her head slightly and said loudly, “What are they doing now, Hemi?”
Hemi and Cassandra had their headsets back on and were listening. “Sounds like they stopped moving, Sylvia. They may have decided to wait us out.”
“OK,” she said to Bastian and Gregory, “level us out. Hold us at this depth for the moment.”
Bastian eased back the dive plane wheel while Gregory slid the throttle back to the zero mark. The electric hum died away as the deck of the boat came up under their feet to something like level ground. Bastian opened the valves controlling airflow to the ballast tanks, and a soft hissing whispered through the boat. The ballast tank gauge needles worked their way slowly back toward the middle marks on their dials. The depth gauge slowed and slowed, and then finally held level at 232 meters.
The anxiety Percy was feeling changed in character. A few moments before, her mind had been working quickly in the desperate survival mode of flight. Now that immediate pressure was off, replaced by an almost overwhelming cloud of slow and helpless dread as they switched to a mode of silent hiding where no further action could be taken.
She looked around in the crimson gloom. With the motors shut down her boat was completely silent. Their breathing loaded the air with dampness that condensed on the metal fixtures and gathered until it released with soft drips. The randomness of the dripping in the control room was maddening — like works that irregularly marked time towards absolutely nothing.
Bastian knew better than to ask, but Gregory did not. “What’s our plan, Captain?”
“Fuck, Gregory! Let me think.” She stared at the depth gauge, unblinking.
Bastian opened a valve on the tank trim control panel slightly further to make a minor adjustment to the level of the boat. Percy noticed his hand shaking as he reached out toward the palm-sized control wheel.
Percy placed a cheroot between her lips and lit it. “Do not make any moves.” she said to Gregory and Bastian. She slowly climbed down the ladder to the sonar compartment. Halfway down, another ping from the Grackle bounced off the Prospect’s hull and rang in the crew’s ears.
“They are 734 meters behind us, rear port quarter; 150 meters deep,” Hemi told Percy, reading off the ranging equipment. “Do you think they will fire another torpedo?”
Percy stepped over to the sonar console. “I think if they had a torpedo that could swim this deep, they would have fired it already. No, I think they just want to be fucking sure we have not gone anywhere.”
“They likely learned we are an unarmed boat at the depot as well,” said Hemi. “They no longer have any fear of pinging us.”
Percy nodded and thought. “Yes…but I wonder if they would be so quick to ping without a storm overhead. Right now, they can reasonably assume there’s no other Authority’s craft around to hear them. If we can make our way out from under this storm, and into busier shipping channels, they might need to hide nearly as much as we do — and lay off the fucking pings.”
Cassandra took a rag hanging from a hook and wiped condensation off the sonar gauges.
Percy pulled Hemi over to the navigation chart. Hemi did not remove the sonar headset, instead stretching out the wire across the space between the sonar and navigation stations.
“We did OK charging the batteries on the surface during the storm. We have about a half charge on them,” Percy said, as a starting point for managing all the variables they needed to weigh.
“So we can do a creeping speed for maybe ten hours.” Hemi did not express his opinion aloud that having ten hours of charge, a somewhat luxurious electrical hoard considering their current situation, meant they could have, and maybe should have, submerged earlier — and thus avoided the encounter with the Grackle.
“OK. Three knots, ten hours. Let’s see.” Percy measured a compass against a graduated straight edge and then deftly spun the compass against the chart, drawing an arced dashed line with the grease pencil. “That gets us somewhere along this line.”
Hemi nodded.
“Not very much in terms of ocean distances. We can probably get out from under the storm, but a long fucking way from any kind of shipping channel.”
“Any other features we can use? A relatively shallow place we can hide on the bottom again, like the tablemount?” Hemi asked.
Percy took a long draft off her cheroot and then leaned closely over the chart. She pulled down the magnifier and sighted her target through it with the tips of her fingers, holding the burning coal of the cheroot just off the glass. “There’s nothing but fuckin’ deep-sea. Bottomless for hundreds of miles in every direction.”
“They are likely looking at the same chart and figuring they can simply wait out our batteries. They know we do not have a full charge since they caught us on the surface, and figure anything less than twenty hours comes out in their favor if they are patient about it,” said Hemi.
“They might not be wrong.” Percy stood upright and smoked. “Fuck it. Here’s what we’re going to fucking do: we’re going to creep on a direct course towards Stilt City. If we can lose them, even briefly, we’ll surface and try to get in touch with Shakes — we’ll launch the fuckin’ pigeon.” She waved her hand in the air in a way that might indicate a bird fluttering off.
“Herschel. And what if Herschel finds Shakes. Then what?”
“Have him run interference or something. Whatever the fuck it is we hired him for!”
Hemi looked grim.
“We need to get something between us and those fuckers up there, whether it’s Shakes, other Authority craft, or some feature of the seascape. I just need something to hide my boat,” said Percy, wracking her mind for options. “Gregory! Give us three knots.”
The soft hum of the electric motors rose up through the silence.
“Hemi, can you stay on sonar?” Percy jerked a thumb towards Cassandra. “Let the kid get in the rack for a few hours.”
Hemi nodded again. Cassandra heard Percy and looked at them with relief in her bloodshot saucer-eyes.
While Hemi took over for Cassandra, Percy climbed back up into the control room and had Gregory adjust their rudder so they were on a more direct route.
Ten minutes later another ping echoed through the hull, piercing through the quiet drone of the slowly moving Prospect. Hemi quoted the distance and direction of the ping source to the control room. Percy ground her teeth. She willed the pursuers to get lost in the storm that still raged above.
The ping prompted Gregory to speak up again. “Captain Percy, don’t you think we should try talking them into not shooting at us? Someone over there must be a reasonable person and realize we are an unarmed cargo sub.”
“The best-case scenario if we can convince them not to shoot is we have to let them aboard for an inspection,” said Percy. “We aren’t going to pass any inspections with our current cargo. And something tells me those guys aren’t going to be open to a bribe either…” She trailed off. “Besides, they are out of ship-to-ship range now — probably trying to keep enough distance to fire a torpedo at us if we come back up above two hundred meters.
They settled into an extremely low-speed chase. The Prospect quietly hummed along under 230 meters of water — beyond the depth at which it was designed to operate. The Grackle stayed closer to the surface but maintained the same distance behind them. The night was dragging on. With the glow of the red lights and the pervading and unchanging hum from the electric motors it did not take long for their fears to subside, to be replaced with sleepy routine.
But every fifteen minutes, like a grating and persistent alarm, another reverberating ping broke through the silence. Each ping was always followed immediately after by Hemi’s report from the sonar compartment that the pursuing submarine was maintaining nearly the exact same distance behind them. This he could, and did, tell Percy with great precision.
Each new ping reset their anxiety. The eyes of the men at the controls would tear up and their hands would start shaking. The only relief was the passing of time, but that led inevitably towards the next alarm-ringing ping, and the cycle would start all over again.
And the cycle repeated itself without change for hours. The storm continued to spin above them, and their ears rang from the pings and from the silence between them.
Cassandra showed back up in the sonar compartment, unable to sleep for the pings, and offered to sit at the sonar station again. When Hemi climbed into the control room, Percy had him relieve Gregory at the throttle controls and sent Gregory to make them a late dinner.