They spent the entire night pinging their way through the densely polluted surface water with the Gnat following dutifully behind. Percy instinctively felt uncomfortable about the racket the two ships were making, especially since every ping told anyone within a ten, maybe even twenty, mile radius precisely where they were. And, of course, even at a near-idle, the Gnat’s diesel — which Shakes was now running again — growled loudly, with sympathetic vibrations from the abandoned ship hulls surrounding them. Percy reassured herself that they were far off any routine shipping lanes, and most vessels would steer around this patch they had chosen to plunge into. This refuse patch, which increasingly appeared to be quite a massive obstacle.
The boats were still on the surface, and Percy was still standing on the bridge of the Prospect, when the morning sun eased itself up over the eastern horizon. Its long red rays ignited the landscape of black hulks around them until it looked like boats were stirring the dead waters of an underworld lake of blood.
As the sun crept upwards and its light filled out the entire spectrum, the lake of blood turned into a turbid and viscous black sea — all the bunker fuels, engine lubricants, solvents and greases; all the specially developed chemical mixes that drove or eased the movements of the giant steel machines through the water — all eventually escaped from the rotting containers that held them and contaminated the pure sea water of the middle ocean. The contaminants floated on the surface, coating and binding together the more physical refuse. The stuck-together grime coalesced and joined forces with larger pieces that floated in defiance of the power of the perpetually sucking bottomless hole underneath.
By the full light of day, Percy felt far too exposed. She waved down Shakes until he stopped the Gnat’s engine and Hemi could contact him via radio to tell him to bring the Gnat underneath and mate with the Prospect. This was fine with Shakes, who had not slept the entire night and looked forward to taking a rest aboard the relatively luxurious larger submarine.
With the Gnat attached, Percy had the Prospect’s diesels shut down, and they submerged to 20 meters. It was much quieter underwater, with no noise but the gentle hum of the electric motors. But they continued to send out a ping every ten minutes or so with the active sonar to avoid the submerged wrecks, which occasionally hung bow- or stern-down hundreds of meters into the water.
On passive sonar, Cassandra listened to the sound of the Prospect’s motors traveling off into the water and come bouncing back. From the signals, she felt the impenetrable surface above and tracked the larger pieces in their unchangeable orbits in the gyre around her. She spent the first few hours of the morning scanning circles with the sonar, flipping filters on and off.
When she felt like she had found a good combination of filters for giving her the clearest view of the surrounding water — while at the same time taking out the source sound of the Prospect’s motors — she did a slow sweep in every direction, scribbling notes on a pad as she went. Toward the rear port side, she thought she could hear something oddly mechanical. She adjusted her filters and tried to pin it down, but it eluded her. It may have been the distant thrum of a motor, but it also could just be chunks of refuse grinding against each other. The sea was so full of signals and reflections that beyond her immediate surrounding landscape it was impossible to be sure what was real and what was just an acoustic mirage.
Throughout the day they slowly proceeded through the gyre. The active-sonar pings lit up the surroundings for Cassandra. Yet she continually faced her own doubts: about her ability to detect objects in the water, about the directional guidance she was suggesting to Hemi and Percy, and about that occasional far-off machine noise that suggested she was not quite running down every signal to its fullest extent. But every time her doubts came up, Hemi asked her to set off another active-sonar ping, and each of those pings came back with such a concrete depiction of what surrounded them that her doubts would melt away with the fading sound of the ping.
By the end of the day, Cassandra’s confidence was growing as she started to understand that sonar was becoming second-nature to her. She closed her eyes, and her mind would travel out into the water. All blackness at first. But she would relax and open her mouth slightly to minimize the sound of her own breathing. Her heart slowed. Her mind searched the water. Turning the directional wheel, she found she could follow the direction in her mind as if she were seeing out through the microphones. She no longer needed to look at the directional indicator to know whether the mics were oriented to the front, sides, or rear of the boat, she just knew, even with her eyes closed. The black pitch of the deep sea fell away, and in her mind it all lit up around her with a midday brightness that was entirely contained within her small skull. She watched the landscape with patience, like someone sitting in a rocker on a mountaintop porch. In her mind’s eye she could see with astonishing clarity the objects that marked the landscape: the smoothly curving walls of the hulls like the bodies of lanced leviathans, the crenelations of the superstructures, the sharply defined spaces between the refuse pieces. And from below, nothing. Always nothing.
With confidence came a love of her job, and the long shift that Percy was currently asking her to do without breaks seemed like less of a burden than it had at first. She found time passed rapidly when her mind was out there swimming in the sea of sound.
By the clock, it was just after dark when Percy suggested they might want to move up to periscope depth and have a look around at the garbage patch from the surface. The Prospect’s batteries were about half discharged, and if it was safe to run on the surface, they could run the diesels and recharge the batteries as usual. She asked Cassandra to have one last listen before she started raising the boat. Percy shut down the motors entirely so Cassandra could hear as far as possible.
In this complete silence, Cassandra swung the sonar mics slowly in a full circle around, listening to the sounds of the ocean in every direction. As the mics came around towards the rear of the boat, that soft far-off motorized sound arose again, floating up from the depths of the silence.
Suddenly all her doubts came flooding back, and Cassandra felt her ears go warm inside the headphones. She instinctively knew that motor off in the water was Grackle. Still behind them, still pursuing, perhaps never having left. She also knew that she should have known it was their pursuers when she heard the first faint wavering contact hours ago in the early part of the day. She realized she had made a mistake, potentially a large one, and that made her afraid to say anything.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
She listened to the sound for a few minutes, only just barely easing the directional wheel back and forth across the signal, trying to lock in on the strongest bearing. It was only when Hemi put his heavy hand on her shoulder that she realized that he had been standing behind her, watching. Even without hearing, it was possible for him to read the gauges and knew she was on something. Cassandra looked up at him. She wrestled down her fear about the mistake she had made.
She slipped a headphone off one ear. “Something’s there, Hemi.”
“It does look like it, does it not?” he said. “Let me listen.” He picked up the second headset and adjusted the gain. He paused for a second, then flipped a couple of filters on and listened again.
“That’s them, isn’t it Hemi?” Cassandra asked. “I…I think I heard them earlier.”
Hemi nodded as he patted Cassandra’s shoulder again. “Sylvia!” he bellowed upward as he stepped back, stretching out the wire of the headset. He looked up through the hatch to the control room.
Percy squatted on her haunches, her face a meter above Hemi’s. “What the fuck is it this time?”
“The Grackle…it is back again.”
“Sweet motherfucking fuck! Why? Why are they still fucking after us? We. Have. No. Cargo.” She breathed for a few seconds. “How far away are they?”
“The contact is faint and distant. That is why Cassandra did not hear them before.” His eye caught Cassandra’s grateful face. “They are far enough away that the active ping is not returning a distance to them — or at least the active unit cannot sort it out from all the other objects in the water.”
“But the pinging we’ve been doing has probably been leading them along through this garbage patch I fuckin’ mistakenly believed would provide us cover — like fucking breadcrumbs through some fucking black forest. I know I’ve said it before: but I can’t fucking believe that ugly fucking boat is still after us!”
“Round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round perdition’s flames…” Hemi said quietly to himself.
But Percy heard him quite clearly. “Oh, so the Prospect is the fucking white whale now?”
He looked up at her. “You must admit, there is almost a kind of classic literary insanity to their actions.”
“You stifle that fucking tendency of yours toward layered meanings of overwritten symbolism right now, Hemi Howell. Whenever you do that, it gives me the same crawling-nauseated feeling as sticking my hand in a toilet bowl full of unflushed shit. The ocean is plenty fucking dramatic enough without having to spread some kind of pretentious icing of bullshit modern literary sludge on top of it…alright? Now, are they gaining on us? How long before we have to start worrying about them putting a torpedo in the water?”
“No way to tell just yet. They likely have the same difficulty as us — moving fast through the surface garbage puts them at risk of hitting something.”
“On the other hand, they have a giant fucking ram mounted to the front of their fucking ugly-ass sub. Perhaps they have no fucking fear at all of plowing through any heavy obstacle before them. With that in mind: we run like the fearful little mammalian prey we are. We remain submerged! Bastian, seven knots. Fuck! No, wait. Gregory — first go find fucking Shakes and get that leeching boat of his detached from my Prospect.”
Twenty minutes later there was a clunk from the depths of the Prospect as the Gnat detached. Bastian eased the throttle forward slightly and the sounds inside the boat responded with a slightly increased pitch. The difference in speed was not significant, and most of the crew did not detect their increased velocity through the water.
But Percy could. To her it felt like her boat was now tearing through the deep, and the terror of what may be hanging down from the surface directly in her path made her break out in a cold sweat that did not evaporate in the cool, damp air of the control room.
For the first half of the night, they kept up the active pings. Percy traded the assurance of a clear path for the fear that each ping almost certainly allowed the Grackle to continue to track them.
As the night wore on though, Hemi and Cassandra’s careful measurements of the strength of the Grackle’s sonar signal suggested the Prospect was not going to gain any distance on their pursuers while the pinging continued. In fact, it seemed they might be losing ground.
The hours droned by with unchanging regularity. Hemi and Cassandra felt their minds softening with the persistence of the noise in their headsets. While Percy desperately needed every member of her crew, she also could not have them making bad decisions from lack of sleep. So after midnight she insisted that Hemi and Bastian hit the rack, with Cassandra and Gregory scheduled for a few hours in their bunks later in the night. She had no intention of sleeping herself.
When Percy inspected the page on the clipboard next to Cassandra’s sonar unit, she found it was rapidly filling up with notations describing the objects the active sonar was reflecting back, and the signal strength of the submarine following behind. Percy willed the Prospect on, trying desperately to get Cassandra’s numbers to add up to some more distance between herself and that dogged signal out there in the water. But the numbers eased ever closer together, and she knew it was only a matter of time before the Grackle would be within torpedo range. That sub’s commander must have known it too, because he did not increase speed, preferring to slowly reel his target in with minimal risk to his own boat. Given how quickly he had jumped to taking risks to gain an upper hand on the Prospect in the past, the patience the Grackle’s commander was currently showing telegraphed to Percy his unnerving confidence in the coming demise of her boat.
In the middle of the night, Percy came down to the sonar compartment to check on the numbers once again. Cassandra showed her that the list of signal strengths had steadily increased with the closing of their pursuers. Percy broke out in another cold sweat, this time from the fear of the torpedo that she now realized could be released at any second. The Grackle was rendering more clearly on the active sonar readouts — it had crept within ten nautical miles.
Almost regretting it as she said it, Percy asked Cassandra to lay off the active pings and use only passive sonar to track objects in the water. It would be challenging given the density of objects fouling the space they were moving through, but at seven knots the Prospect was putting out just enough noise that a good sonar operator should be able to clearly see the surrounding seascape for miles in every direction. Hemi’s faith in Cassandra’s natural skills was rubbing off on Percy.
With the active sonar off, Cassandra soon reported that the Grackle had slowed and was losing some distance. Percy knew exactly what the cause of that was — they had to run slowly and more quietly to hear the Prospect’s engine noise now.