Percy and Hemi refilled their coffee cups and Hemi brought an extra one to Bastian in the control room, who gratefully accepted it into the long fingers of the hand that was not holding a smoldering cigarette. Hemi sat down in the planes control seat and swiveled to review the tank ballast control panel. He made some small adjustments to the ballast to trim the boat more level — probably, he thought, to account for the water they were once again taking in through the poorly-welded gash in the pressure hull.
Percy stayed below the control room in the sonar compartment with Cassandra still listening to the sonar. She confirmed with Cassandra that their situation had not changed at all, then stepped to the navigation table. She looked at the clock and then used a pair of calipers to measure against the ruler. She put the calipers to the chart and marked down a single dash with the grease pencil to show the progress they had made in the last hour — a painfully small and slowly achieved progress.
The crew sank quickly back into the mired boredom of the chase. In the control room, Bastian lit one cigarette off another as he awkwardly tried to lean back in the control chair and put his feet up on the panel in front of him. Despite the casual pose, he was professional enough that his eyes never left the gauges showing the status of the boat — even though the array of dials and their indicating needles had not moved in any substantial way for hours on end.
The air thickened with smoke, became damp with the condensation of their breathing, and took on a shallow flatness after passing through carbon-dioxide scrubbers. The control room and sonar compartment felt hazy and wet. Hemi continually wiped water droplets from the ballast gauges with a grimy cotton rag.
Hours passed. Hemi and Bastian tried to start conversations with each other, instinctively knowing that talking was a way to keep alert. But the thick atmosphere, red lighting, and the grinding drone of the motors continually dropped down over their conversations, stifling like a fire blanket. And precisely every fifteen minutes there was the piercing ping from their pursuers that reoriented their attention and their fear.
At some point, Gregory returned to the control room from below and reported that the portable bilge pumps seemed to be overcoming the water oozing in through the welded seam, and they no longer had to worry about sinking — for the moment. Gregory took over the plane control seat from Hemi, while Hemi reminded him to keep an eye on the ballast tank they were pumping bilge water into, since it would need to be blown out at some point.
With Gregory back in the control room, Percy put the crew on rotating half-hour breaks. “You’re each in the rack for two pings from those fuckers up there,” she said to them.
Hemi took over sonar from Cassandra and let her sleep first. He was somewhat concerned about how well she could hold up under the strain of these many hours without sleep, though she protested from behind watering eyes that she was fine.
Putting on the sonar headset, Hemi could tell immediately that the storm had subsided quite a bit. Cassandra had failed to report that the white noise coming down from the storm-stirred surface above had greatly diminished in the last couple of hours. It was understandable, especially for someone new to sonar: the change had been gradual enough that it was easy for someone listening to it in an unbroken stream to not notice it had changed at all. An experienced sonar operator would have noted the change on the signal strength gauge. But it was also apparent to Hemi simply because he was listening with fresh ears.
Still, a reduced storm did not change their situation much in empty seas. Scanning around carefully, Hemi did not hear any other contacts, or much of anything, really. The ocean was getting quieter. At some point the pursuing sub might stop pinging simply because its sonar operator would be able to pick out the soft hum of the Prospect’s motors in the silent ocean.
Another ping smacked the Prospect. But this one sounded immediately distinctive to Hemi. He heard the ping as it rang the boat, but then he heard it again in his headset just a split second later, bouncing back up as if they had been pinged a second time from below. His head immediately swiveled to look at the ranging equipment.
“Sylvia!” he called up to her, “that ping just echoed off the bottom — just a hundred meters or so below us.”
“That’s fucking impossible, Hemi, there’s nothing but deep water…” In the control room she was looking at the depth-under-keel gauge, which suddenly in the wake of the ping had stood up from the “bottomless” pin and was now showing just ninety-six meters. She watched the gauge and it was slowly, slowly rising, like a gentle slope coming up under them.
Percy lit a cheroot and stared at the gauges.
“Another undersea mountain?” Bastian asked.
“No…” said Percy, “this came out of nowhere, it’s something weird…” She hung her weight from the strap above her, and leaned over Bastian as she smoked, watching the depth-under-keel gauge slowly rise. “Give us a little more speed, Bastian — ten knots.”
Bastian eased the throttle forward and the hum of the motors doubled in volume.
“Sylvia,” Hemi said from the sonar station below as he heard the increasing noise of the Prospect in his headset, “at this speed the Grackle can definitely follow us on passive sonar without pings.”
“Noted, Hemi, thank you.” Her eyes focused on the depth-under-keel gauge, which rolled back ever so slowly and then crossed the twenty-meter mark. Percy slammed her fist against the dive alarm. “Gregory, full down plane, now.”
Gregory adjusted the dive plane controls, spinning the polished stainless wheel through his fingers quickly until it hit the stop. The bow of the Prospect dropped from under them, and the depth-under-keel gauge fell rapidly towards zero. The depth from the surface gauge started climbing quickly in the opposite direction, from 235, to 240, to 245 meters deep.
“Gregory, open the main ballast valves,” Percy said.
“We’re dropping awfully fast. If we flood the main ballast, we’re going to hit the bottom and split apart!”
“Sweet fucking hell! Obey your captain’s orders — it’s the oldest fucking rule in seafaring.” She reached over Gregory to the ballast tank control panel and rolled open the main ballast valves herself. They could hear a rush of air escaping above as water flooded into the boat from below.
It was a sound they heard all the time, but at this depth it reminded Gregory how unique this sound was to submarines — on any other ship, it was the sound of death. In this particular case, he was not convinced it would not also be the sound of the Prospect’s death, at the hands of a captain who had snapped under the strain of days without sleep and on a constant edge of terror.
After hours spent staring at the wall of dials in front of him, with little black needles stubbornly refusing to move, suddenly it seemed like all the dials were climbing or falling — all in directions that communicated nothing but doom for the boat. The depth was rapidly increasing, their speed was increasing, the ballast tanks were filling with water, and the bottom — Gregory could see it in his head: black and thick, gooey enough that the boat might sink meters into it, yet hard enough that it might break the Prospect’s spine when it hit. The bottom was simply flying up at them. Perspiration ran freely down Gregory’s temples.
Bastian quietly wrapped his long fingers around the throttle control, ready to yank it back to reverse the motors…he willed the command to be given. His other hand reached out in front of him and pressed palm-forward against the steel of the console, in a near-subconscious gesture to brace himself.
Percy stood behind them, one arm slung above her with her wrist twisted into the overhead strap. Her other hand held the cheroot, aflame, with a long thin string of smoke rising upwards at a slant angle relative to the orientation of the control room in the steeply diving boat. She stared at the depth-under-keel gauge.
Seconds later that gauge tapped the zero pin.
Gregory and Bastian winced, waiting for the breaking, popping shudder that would be what the end of the Prospect felt like.
Another second after that, the gauge spun wildly and pegged itself against “bottomless” on the other side of the dial. It flipped over with such force that Gregory could hear the hair-tap of the needle against the pin in the quiet of the control room. The depth gauge next to the depth-under-keel gauge continued to rise steadily past 250 meters.
The Prospect let out a long low groan that tortured every surface of the boat.
“Level her off!” said Percy. She had calmly and confidently driven her ship through the false bottom, but now they were up against the very limits of the depths the boat was capable of. A few more seconds of descending and they would fall unstoppably into the hole, and never see the surface again.
Bastian immediately yanked the throttle into reverse, and Gregory spun the dive plane control wheel around in the opposite direction to steer the bow back upwards with one hand while twisting shut the main ballast valve switches on the tank control panel with the other.
The engineers who designed the Prospect intended the boat to operate normally down to 215 meters. But Percy had pushed the boat beyond that many times, and despite the age of the boat, she had full confidence in its ability to withstand 250 meters of depth — though she generally only tested that confidence in an emergency. Beyond that was the mystery of the death zone. The original engineers anticipated full collapse of the boat at 300 meters. But terrible things could happen in the range between 250 and 300 meters that they were passing into now.
Every ten meters further down added another atmosphere of pressure to the hull. The equivalent of another entire column of the weight of the air on the surface pressing down from space. And the measly one atmosphere of pressure inside the Prospect, reinforced with the strength of the steel pressure hull, had to stand against that. On a boat a hundred meters long, like the Prospect, in a steep dive like this, the bow could easily already be under an entire atmosphere more pressure than what the depth gauge (which measured from the sail) was showing Percy. A small adjustment in the wrong direction of the huge planing fins that guided the sub up or down, or one valve accidentally left partially open and flooding a ballast tank, could in a matter of seconds take them down the last critical meters beyond what the boat could stand. Percy knew they were within meters of crossing the unknowable line beyond which critical parts of the Prospect would fail, and they would never get the boat to rise again.
The Prospect’s motors were spinning the propeller in reverse now, pulling hard against the fall of the boat.
“Watch the forward speed Bastian!” Percy warned. “If we start moving backwards with the dive planes set like that, you’ll swing the bow deeper instead of shallower. Don’t let her reverse direction.”
“On it, Cap,” said Bastian, his eyes watching the speed gauge. With full reverse thrust, it was rapidly falling towards zero, but they still had enough forward momentum that the bow was slowly rising. As soon as their speed came below a single knot, Bastian pushed the throttle into neutral. The bow had come up almost level at this point.
The climb of the depth gauge had slowed dramatically and was now only barely moving — but still moving — higher and deeper.
“The ballast!” yelled Percy. She stepped to the tank control panel and flipped switches and spun open a selection of the dozen or so small valve control wheels in front of her. There was a hiss of air from deep in the boat as the high-pressure system blew water out of some of the trim tanks. The boat came back to almost completely level. Percy continued to work the tank ballast panel, pushing air back into the main ballast.
The depth gauge came to a slow stop at 263 meters.
Hemi climbed up from sonar. He looked at the depth. “New record?” he asked as his eyes found Percy’s.
“Nope. But a close fucking second. I had her down to 267 once.”
As if to remind Percy of the stress it was currently bearing, the Prospect let another slow groan rise from the guts of the boat. “My poor girl,” said Percy. “Sorry baby, we’ll take some of the fucking weight off soon.”
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
“What happened back there?” asked Gregory. “I thought we were going to hit the bottom for sure.”
“False bottom,” said Percy. “The deep scattering layer — billions and billions of tiny bony fish come up from the depths in the night to feed — such a fucking mass of them together that they reflect sonar back up, making them look like the bottom. We swam right through them and came out underneath.”
“Just when you think submarining is fucking boring…” said Bastian.
Another ping from the pursuing submarine hit the Prospect, but this time it had a different quality to it — not just less powerful, but also diffuse and muted, as if it were coming from much farther away than the last ping.
“So…they can’t see us now because of the layer of fish between us and them?” Gregory asked.
“With any luck their active sonar is nothing more than a damned fish-finder now,” Percy replied. “And we’ll just keep ourselves very quiet for a few minutes here.”
“Maybe I should go back to my bunk, then?” Cassandra asked, looking up at Percy from the compartment below, having returned from her short and harrowing break.
Another muted ping rang through the Prospect.
“I don’t think they are going to let you sleep, Cassandra,” said Percy. “Can you get back on sonar and see if you can figure out what their next move is?”
“Sure, Captain Percy,” Cassandra said before flopping into the sonar station chair.
A few seconds passed and another ping rang out.
“They have lost us,” said Hemi. “Now they are searching.”
The gaps between the pings started coming in an irregular pattern, every few seconds.
“Cassandra, can you tell what they’re doing?”
“They’ve got their motors going — pretty loud.” Cassandra listened for a few seconds as another ping passed through them. “They’re moving at a good clip… It sounds like they’re turning a circle?”
“Starting a search pattern,” said Hemi.
“And they’re moving quickly and loudly because they are relying on active sonar. I think I might go so far as to describe it as somewhat fucking desperate in character too. They’ve definitely lost us,” Percy added.
“So when do we make our move? Can we sneak away?” asked Hemi.
“Go down to navigation and start tracking them from their pings. We’ll move when they are furthest from us.”
“OK.” Hemi moved down to the navigation table. For the next fifteen minutes, every time he heard a ping from the Grackle, he looked at the ranging equipment on the sonar and marked down the searching sub’s precise location on the chart. Some of his dots were wildly off in random directions because the deep scattering layer was interfering with the ranging equipment. But the Grackle sent out so many active pings that Hemi was able to chart an accurate course of their movement. It was a circle that began where the Prospect had dropped through the deep scattering layer and turned in a miles-long arc away from that point.
“Percy,” Hemi called up to the control room as the latest ping showed their pursuers at nearly five nautical miles away. “It looks like they are at the apogee of their search arc. Now might be a good time to move.”
“Thanks, Hemi. Keep plotting them. Can you also give me a random course in some direction away from them? True fuckin’ random, if you can.”
“One moment.” Hemi pulled a book off the shelf above the navigation table that contained nothing but a million random numbers, plus instructions for selecting one of the numbers at random. Hemi looked at the chart and estimated about a dozen possible directions they could move that would take them away from the Grackle. Then he used the book to select a random number which he transposed into one of his dozen courses. “Here’s a true random bearing, Sylvia: 163 degrees.”
“OK, Bastian, make it three knots, come about to 1-6-3.”
Bastian shifted the throttle slightly forward and the speed needle raised slowly off its zero pin. He turned the rudder wheel and the boat leaned slightly into the turn.
“Keep her fuckin’ level, Gregory — we’re too deep to make any mistakes,” said Percy.
Gregory gave a gentle nudge to the bow plane control wheel so the boat would come up just a hair with the new forward momentum on it.
They cruised slowly and silently away from the spot where they had crossed the deep scattering layer. The pings from the sub with the ram quickly became more and more faint, though they could still hear them bouncing softly off the Prospect long after Cassandra reported that she could not hear the Grackle’s motors any more.
Percy stood directly behind Gregory, carefully double-checking his every move to make sure they did not accidentally sink below the boat’s crush depth. After an hour, she personally relieved Gregory in the dive plane control seat and sent him to his rack for a break.
At three knots the Prospect’s motor made just enough noise that with the right filters in place on sonar, Hemi could hear the echo of the Prospect off the deep scattering layer above them. He showed Cassandra what to listen for, and pretty soon she could give a rough estimate of their depth below the mass of fish. It stayed above them for more than two hours, but then Cassandra told Percy she could hear it coming slowly down on top of them — the fish were beginning their daily vertical migration back down the water column to the safety of the deep, far below the capabilities of the Prospect.
At the depth they were cruising at, the boat continually let out long moans as the steel of the hull flexed under the weight of the water and stresses of movement. The sounds had a visceral impact on Percy, as if her child were suffering. So it was with a sense of relief that they passed back through the mass of fish as the school descended. Once they were back above the scattering layer, there was no purpose to staying so dangerously deep, so Percy adjusted the bow planes and the Prospect rose to a much more comfortable two hundred meters of depth.
When Gregory came back from his break, Percy stepped down the ladder to the sonar compartment and joined Hemi at the navigation table.
“The next challenge we face,” said Hemi as she stepped up to the lighted chart, “is how long the batteries will last.”
“Don’t think for a second that isn’t front of my mind,” said Percy. “Coupla hours left, at best. Then we have to surface. And it’s fucking daylight now — barring another storm, we’ll be bright targets — both visual and radar — for those fuckers with the ram. They’ll be back on us before we can get the ballast tanks fully emptied.”
“We could wait it out until nightfall without moving. We have enough power to keep the lights on at least.”
“I’m worried we haven’t put enough distance between us for that. If they find us running on the surface, at least we can try to outrun them. If they find us deep with no battery, when they come back around on their next search circle, we’re done for.”
“We would benefit from another piece of covering luck, like the deep scattering layer,” said Hemi.
“That maneuver depended far too much on luck and a dangerous roll of the dice, Hemi. Luck and gambling is no way to run a submarine. The odds are never in our favor. What I want is a fucking plan that is reliable and executable.” She paused, feeling tired. “Fuck me,” said Percy. “I’m going to lay down for a minute. Run the batteries down and get me when we have only emergency reserves left.”
Percy climbed down a deck and disappeared forward into the Captain’s cabin. She was out almost as soon as she fell into her rack. The ability to fall asleep instantly was a talent she had gained from long years of working with short sleep on subs.
They motored nearly silently through the black depths for another two hours before the battery depletion warning lights lit up on the electrical system panel in the control room. Hemi had his deck crew shut the motors down and keep the boat hovering steadily in place while using as little power as possible. He went down to the captain’s cabin and woke Percy. They returned to the sonar compartment together, updated their probable position on the chart — still a long way from anywhere — and decided to take the only reasonable action available to them: rise to periscope depth and have a look around.
Not wanting to waste battery power driving up to the surface, they opened the high-pressure air system just a bit on the main ballast tanks to gain a little buoyancy and floated upwards. They watched the depth gauge rotate back to the left making its way steadily towards zero. At periscope depth, Hemi flooded enough of the trim tanks to hold them there. Percy put the scope up.
“Holy fuck, Hemi,” she said quietly, with her eyes in the viewport of the periscope. She rotated around the shaft of the periscope, swinging it around 360 degrees, as every submarine skipper is trained to do on their first day using a periscope. In every direction she was faced with a gray wall that occasionally pushed back to reveal an underlayer of a slate-colored ocean — much calmer now — rising and falling with the long frequency of deep ocean swells. “Would you fucking believe our luck is still with us? We have a thick fog bank. In every direction.”
Hemi smiled. “Makes sense — it was likely a big warm wall of air pushing that storm, and now all that hot air is sitting on the surface of the cold ocean, turning into cloud.”
“Alright! So much for needing a fucking plan! Start up the low-pressure compressors, and put us on the surface.”
Hemi flipped switches on the ballast control panel and the buzz of compressors vibrated up from far below deck. The Prospect rose in place until the deck of the boat pushed through the tightly-bound tension of the surface, and water washed off and over the curved sides.
Hemi opened the hatch of the control room and climbed up to the bridge, followed closely behind by Percy. The air on the bridge was warm and wet. It sat on the surface of the water without moving, and left droplets forming rapidly on the wooly fabric of Hemi and Percy’s clothes. The fog was the color of purgatory, lit from somewhere far off above to a flat dim nothingness. At some moments it was so thick they could not see beyond the top of the sail, and at others it pushed back just enough to see down to the bow.
A blinding fog was not a challenge for a submarine, though — which spent much of its time moving sightlessly through the pits of the world anyway — but a useful resource, transforming the surface into a similar dense covering medium as the deep ocean.
Percy called down to Bastian to start the engines, push the boat up to its maximum surface speed of fifteen knots, and come around to a direct course for Stilt City. A moment later came the loud hiss and roll of the high-pressure air system turning over the diesel engines until they were firing on their own. The exhaust shutters lifted and let out a stream of black froth into the gray fog. A minute later Bastian engaged the motors and Percy felt a jolt as the Prospect picked up speed.
“Welp.” Percy said to Hemi above the noise of the diesels. “I guess it might be time to launch the pigeon.”
“Herschel.”
“‘Herschel,’” Percy repeated. “Do you think that little fella will be able to find Shakes in this fuckin’ fog?”
“He has a better chance in this fog than he would have if we had sent him up into that storm. Though the truth is I am fairly skeptical about Shakes’s claims that Herschel can find a boat on the surface of the ocean. My understanding of homing pigeons is that they know instinctively how to fly home — I am not sure that works if ‘home’ is a moving target.”
“Shakes said the pigeon had special training.”
“It would have to be exceptionally special.”
“So we might just be sending the bird off to die on the fucking ocean?” For the first time, Percy’s face showed concern about the small animal.
“If I thought that, I would not send Herschel out. The other thing I have heard about homing pigeons is they are capable of flying extraordinary distances. I am confident Herschel will eventually find some place to land. I am just not convinced we will ever see him again. Of course, I am not entirely convinced we will ever see Shakes again either.”
“OK, Hemi, if you think the bird will be alright, and there’s a chance it will help us reconnect with Shakes, let’s launch him.”
“What shall the message say?”
“I noted on the chart the dock in Stilt City where we’re supposed to drop the cargo. I guess we’re close enough that at this point, you should just give him the dock info, and that our expected arrival is twenty-four hours or so from now. We’ll meet him there, if it’s at all fucking possible.”
“Alright,” said Hemi. “I will be back in a few minutes with Herschel.”
Percy watched Hemi’s wet, tweed-covered bulk disappear down the ladder and through the hatch into the control room. She lit a cheroot and took in deep breaths of damp, smokey air. A sudden wave of exhaustion passed through her. She looked at her hands gripping the fairing of the sail — the black grime of her work ground into the seams of her knuckles and the cheroot smoking between her fingers. The coal of the tobacco glowed robustly now that the Prospect’s movement was pushing some wind across it. She’d had only a few hours of sleep and no relief from the tension of being pursued since they left the depot days ago. The warm fog enveloped her and gave her a sense of cover and safety that she realized now she had missed and desperately needed.
Hemi reappeared on the bridge of the sail, cupping Herschel in one big hand as he awkwardly climbed the ladder. The bird looked quite content. One of Herschel’s feet hung out through Hemi’s fingers and had a small steel band with an even tinier cylinder attached to it. Percy instantly had a vision of how a few moments ago, huge Hemi must have been hunched over the galley table, printing extremely small letters with a sharp pencil on a short roll of thin paper. She regretted missing that.
“OK,” said Hemi. “Herschel is ready to go.”
Percy watched him. “So…do you have to give the bird any instructions or anything?”
“Assuming Shakes is right about Herschel’s training, all we have to do is throw him up in the air.”
Percy nodded.
Hemi swung Herschel with both hands and released him at the highest point of the arc his arms made. There was a wild flapping for an instant, then Herschel steadied, circled the sail of the Prospect once as he selected a course, and disappeared straight into the fog.
“I do hope we see Herschel again,” said Hemi.
“It would be pretty fuckin’ miraculous if this works and we see him again… and even more so if we find Shakes at the dock in Stilt City.”