Percy climbed down to the control room while closing and sealing the hatch above her head.
“Did you guys get the cargo hatch sealed?” she asked.
“Yup,” replied Gregory as he pointed upwards to the hatch control panel lit up all green indicating all the hatches on the boat were sealed.
Percy punched the dive alarm. “OK, take us down to periscope depth.”
“Sylvia,” said Hemi, “may I suggest that we send up Herschel with a rendezvous point for Shakes before we dive?”
“Ah shit, the fuckin’ bird. You’re right.” She pressed the dive alarm button a second time to deactivate it, and then got on the PA that echoed through the whole boat to let anyone listening know that the dive had been postponed. She did this even though the only person on the boat who was not in the control room at that moment was Cassandra — and she was only a few meters below in the sonar compartment. It was simply good practice to use the PA to announce boat maneuvers regardless of the location of your crew members, as Chips had often pointed out to her.
Hemi climbed down to the navigation station and reviewed the chart laid out under the glass. Leaning over with the magnifier in his hand, he selected a spot of deep water just off the continental shelf, about a day’s run out from Stilt City. Holding a tiny scrap of paper down against the glass of the navigation table with splayed fingers, he copied the coordinates with a sharp pencil. He also selected a backup location for the rendezvous just in case something went wrong and noted that on the reverse side of the paper. He scooped Herschel up from the deck where the bird had been walking around aimlessly and fixed the tiny paper into Herschel’s leg cylinder.
Percy was anxious to get the boat underwater, so as soon as she saw Hemi starting up the ladder to the control room with Herschel in one hand and nodding to her, she punched the dive alarm again. “Start the dive. Hemi, get the bird off.”
Bastian flipped off the diesel engines and their rumble died away beneath their feet to leave only the much quieter hum of the electric motors. Gregory opened the main ballast valves. Hemi opened the hatch above the control room; a light on the hatch control panel lit up a brilliant red, and an alarm sounded because the main ballast valves were open at the same time as one of the boat hatches.
Hemi quickly climbed to the sail and tossed a fluttering Herschel up into the wind. Air was shooting out from the top of the deck in front of him, carrying long streams of mist from the ballast tanks as high as the Prospect’s sail, which blew back in his face. He took one last look at Herschel, who had rapidly gained altitude and was now heading directly back upriver, hopefully towards the Gnat.
Hemi dropped below and resealed the hatch, silencing the alarm from the hatch control panel.
When the depth gauge showed the sail was under, Percy raised up the scope. As it came level with her eyes, she leaned into the viewfinder and started slowly scanning a full circle around the Prospect. She paid particular attention to the rear quarters, trying to see if she could catch a glimpse of the Grackle behind. The sub would be harder to spot from the lower vantage of periscope depth, particularly with all the traffic in the channel, but Percy felt that running submerged would be safer than cruising on the surface.
The pursuing sub was not within visual range. It was possible that it had gotten stuck again while navigating one of the other shallow spots in Sir Piero’s shortcut. Percy wondered if the Prospect might be free and clear to head out to sea. But she was still going to use every tactic she could put together to get away discreetly.
She focused the periscope forward and spoke without pulling back from the viewfinder. “Hemi, there’s a big fuckin’ outward bound cargo hauler about a quarter mile up the channel. I think I want to put the Prospect under it and hide in its shadow until we’re well the fuck out.”
“It is a dangerous maneuver in these shallow waters, Sylvia,” said Hemi.
“That’s why I need you on sonar. And their speed is pretty slow — that will make it a bit safer.”
“Alright,” said Hemi. “I will get on sonar with Cassandra, it will be good training for her to listen to this.” Hemi climbed down to the sonar station and had Cassandra move into the second sonar seat so he could more easily manage the sonar controls and filters himself. They both put on the headsets and concentrated on the sounds coming in as Hemi rotated the sonar directional control around 360 degrees for a full picture of the surrounding traffic.
With Hemi settled on sonar, Percy brought the Prospect down to twenty meters below the surface. In some ways this made Hemi’s job simpler, because all the traffic was now above them — there should be no other submerged submarines in the channel. But with only fifty meters of depth to play with, the sounds of the traffic above reflected off the bottom of the channel, back up, and then off in every direction, making the space they were moving through feel very compressed to Hemi.
They had maintained a fast fifteen knots since submerging. One of the first things Hemi asked Percy to do was to slow the boat down — both because it would make the sonar clearer, and because even at six knots he estimated they would be doing twice the speed of the cargo ship above his head.
Hemi began a steady and careful dialogue with Percy, much of which she relayed to Bastian and Gregory, to bring the Prospect up under the cargo ship, and then throttle back to match the slow-moving, building-sized ship that was cruising above.
Percy stood directly next to Gregory and worked the tank trim panel herself, feeling the weight of her ship through its movements and finding an absolutely neutral buoyancy. When she was satisfied that her boat was trimmed so it would be perfectly level without any out-of-balance forces causing them to gain or lose depth, she took one step back from the panel. She tracked Gregory’s moves on the dive plane carefully.
“Bastian, do what you have to with the rudder; we have space to play with to our sides,” she said. “But Gregory: only make the most delicate moves on the dive planes — one degree up or down, maximum. We want to have lots of time to correct before we drive the bow into the muck or the sail into that steel wall above us.”
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“Right, Captain,” said Gregory, gripping the dive plane wheel. His eyes darted back and forth from the boat level indicators to the depth indicator to the depth-under-keel gauge.
After twenty minutes without incident, they were feeling more confident with the maneuver and maintaining their position. Percy wondered if they might be able to cruise right out into deep water like this, and then spend the rest of the day running deep until they were well out and away from Stilt City.
Then a loud active sonar ping pierced through the Prospect’s hull.
“Hemi!” Percy called down to sonar. “Where the fuck did that come from? Was it them?”
There was a brief silence while Hemi continued listening. Then he called back up to the control room, “The source was roughly a mile back up the river behind us. It must have been the Grackle. I do not imagine anyone else has a reason to be sending out pings. They must have guessed we submerged, and decided that if they lit up the river with a ping, the only boat underwater would be us.”
“Do you think that will work?” Percy asked Hemi.
“There is enough distance and so much traffic on the water that the ping will be reflecting back massive amounts of information to them. There is a good chance we will be lost in all the noise.”
“OK, we’re sticking with the current fucking plan then.”
Every few minutes another ping rang out. Hemi reported that the pursuing sub was rapidly gaining on them with each ping. But the Prospect, still under the giant umbrella of the cargo ship above, was moving out of the channel and into more open water. Hemi could tell by the dispersing traffic that the main channel was much wider now — miles wide. He also estimated that they would soon be passing the structures built at the furthest extent of Stilt City.
Percy watched the depth-under-keel dial closely for fifteen minutes or so as three more pings washed through them. The depth of the water was a fairly consistent fifty meters, varying slightly towards the deeper direction in some places. The cargo ship maintained a straight course out from the channel, and the Prospect held its spot under it. Moving into more open waters meant they were more exposed. Any moment now the commander of the Grackle might figure out that the sonar shadow of the cargo ship above them was much too large. Percy needed to make a move.
She climbed down to the navigation station. “Hemi, how good are our charts for this area?” she asked as she leaned over with the magnifying glass. “Can we run close to the bottom without risking plowing into some uncharted feature?”
Hemi and Cassandra looked over at her without removing their headsets.
“The charts are good. We are also still on the continental shelf, there are not many features to begin with,” said Hemi.
Percy leaned over the chart. If it was accurate, then Hemi was right. It showed a flat unvarying plane, fifty to sixty meters deep, running out about two hundred miles from the port of Stilt City. There were much bigger shelf areas in the world, but two hundred miles was longer than most.
“You are thinking we could hide from the pings if we are close enough to the bottom?” Hemi asked.
Percy nodded. “Yeah. With all the fucking pinging, they are going to find us under the cargo ship any second now. Putting ourselves just off the bottom is the only other way I can think of that will let us hide from them.”
“I have heard that some of the sonar rigs Authorities are using now are good enough to pick out a boat on the bottom,” said Hemi somewhat doubtfully.
“Then let’s assume their sonar is of fairly fuckin’ average quality. After all, I’m pretty sure they lost us on the tablemount like that.”
“They may have also just assumed we sunk back then.”
“Well, unless you have a better fuckin’ idea…”
“I do not,” said Hemi, as another ping hit them. He turned back to his work on the sonar unit.
Percy climbed to the control room. She worked with Gregory on the dive planes and the trim tanks to bring the boat to a scant two meters off the bottom. She had them slow to two knots to make it less catastrophic if they hit anything — there was no such thing as a perfect chart. Hemi reported that the cargo ship above was creeping away ahead of the Prospect.
After a few minutes Percy noticed that the regular pings had stopped. “Hemi, what the fuck is going on? No more pings?”
“I am hearing high-speed ships heading toward the location of the last ping source,” he called up. “It is possible that all the pinging they were doing has attracted some unfriendly attention.”
“Ah,” said Percy, “the Stilt City Authority ships are on them?”
“Hang on…”
Percy could not see Hemi from where she was standing in the control room, but in her mind she had a perfect vision of him holding one thick finger up in the air towards her.
A minute passed. Then the crew in the control room heard low rumblings that came into the Prospect’s hull through the water in a softly percussive succession. Gregory looked at her.
“Fuckin’ depth charges,” she said. And when his eyes took on a bit of prey-like fear, she added, “A little fuckin’ ways off, though.”
“The Authority surface ships are dropping charges, Sylvia,” Hemi confirmed from the sonar compartment.
“Ha,” said Percy, “we should have thought of this before: it’s a known truism that the best way to get out from under the attention of one fuckin’ Authority is to sic another Authority on ’em. Bastian, let’s take this opportunity to change course. Maybe we will finally be able to lose these fuckers. Come around to something north-ish.”
“Right, Cap,” said Bastian, rolling the rudder control wheel in his hands to port as the compass on the wall of gauges started to swing.
Percy moved down to the sonar station, and for the next hour or so, Hemi reported charges being dropped in waves while Percy stood behind him, watching the dials of the sonar rig rise and fall with the sounds Hemi and Cassandra were hearing. “It seems like they are dropping charges in a random pattern around the area where the last ping came from an hour ago,” Hemi said, mapping an image in his head of the rough location of the dozens of explosions he had heard.
“It could be the Grackle is now hiding on the bottom themselves,” Percy replied. “The Stilt City Authority ships probably lost them in that brown muck water from the river outflow, and are hoping a random charge will force them to the surface.”
“Given the intensity of the attack, I would suggest that it is unlikely the Grackle could survive,” said Hemi. “And I would add I have recently heard sounds that would be not inconsistent with the failure of a pressure hull.”
“The Stilt City Authority boats destroying the Grackle would surely be a blessing from hell. If we had a way to confirm their sinking, we could sleep easy for the first time in a long time. That would be the greatest fuckin’ blessing of ’em all.”
As much as Percy wanted to cruise out of the area at high speed, she still did not want to risk giving away the Prospect’s position. They crawled at a painfully slow, but discreet, three knots on the more or less random northerly course Bastian had chosen for the rest of the daylight hours. By dark they had left the noise of the depth charges far behind, along with any kind of contact or signal that they might still be pursued.