It took Hemi about fifteen minutes of listening to get a grasp on the situation. The Grackle had given up the pursuit of the Gnat, probably not long after Shakes and Hemi had started the engines. Hemi assumed they had quickly realized the Gnat was once again playing a decoy. But the Gnat’s run had apparently thrown just enough confusion into the water for the Grackle to have lost their bead on the Prospect. They had taken up a search pattern again, and Hemi tracked them turning through a multi-mile diameter circle as they looked for the Prospect. They were pinging regularly, so if Percy was moving, there was a good chance they would find the Prospect soon.
Hemi pulled back one earpiece and turned to Shakes. “There is not much time. Give us all the speed the Gnat has got underwater. We have to get between the Grackle and the Prospect.”
“Ya, OK, Hemi. But…now you absolutely have to tell me what the plan is.”
“Well…” Hemi lowered the headset so it sat around his thick neck and made a wide gesture towards his devices piled up in the Gnat’s rear cargo space. “The plan is pretty simple, really. I intend to suspend magnetic warheads I saved from the last shipment in the water column. With some careful calculations, I hope to set them in such a way that the Grackle will move into one and set it off, hopefully disabling the submarine.”
“Ah,” said Shakes, “so it’s just a little matter of flushing one of those bad boys out the escape trunk at precisely the right depth and in the path of that big ugly sub, eh?”
“I can control the depth with the amount of air in these old boat fenders. I have calculated the pressure needed in the fenders with enough precision, I believe, so that they should float at precisely twenty-five meters deep. That should take care of the Z axis, but I need you to navigate us across the path of the Grackle.”
“That may not be so easy.”
“I am aware. I will be listening on sonar, though. I am confident the Gnat can do the job.”
“Well, of course this boat can do it! …I just never thought I’d be using my bug to play chicken with a full-sized full-speed foul-looking ram-headed military sub.”
Hemi put the headset earpieces back over his ears and listened closely as he slowly spun the sonar in an arc across the direction of the bow of the Gnat. He slowed when the microphones were pointed a little off the starboard side, and then stopped.
“Sylvia is on the move,” Hemi said quietly.
“Really? Seems stupid, with that sub looking for her.”
“That’s the ‘bait’ part of the plan: she will let the Grackle find her and chase her. As soon as she heard us shut down the diesel, she ramped the Prospect up to something like ten knots — to make it look as though she is trying to make a run for it.”
“They are submerged?”
“Yes. We planned for the Prospect to run at about thirty meters down — that way they can move fast with less risk of hitting a derelict. But her batteries are very low. I estimate she can only maintain ten knots for perhaps twenty minutes, so we have to move quickly to put this plan into action.”
Shakes leaned his hand on the throttle, but it was already pushed all the way to the forward stop. The electric motor whined steadily from behind them, driving the small boat forward with all the force it could muster.
“Come port to 227 degrees,” said Hemi, with his hand cupped over the earpieces of the headphone, trying to eke out just that marginal amount more sound dampening that might be what he needed to hear some crucial thing out in the water. Shakes leaned the yoke slightly to the left and the boat heeled over in response.
“Down. Thirty meters. The Grackle has clearly heard the Prospect’s run and matched its depth. They are lined up in pursuit a little less than five miles behind. We need to intercept their course in the next ten minutes or so, if we possibly can.” Hemi lifted a stopwatch that hung from the same peg the sonar headset was stowed on and clicked it once to reset it to zero. He counted for a few seconds while listening, and then clicked it a second time to start the stopwatch. He made a note on the clipboard.
“If your plan doesn’t work, Hemi, the Prospect is done for. Honestly, I’m not even sure why they haven’t already fired a torp.”
“There are still a number of derelicts around. A torpedo is a precious thing. At the moment it is still too likely they would hit one of those garbage hulls rather than their target.” Hemi looked down at the stopwatch, ticking away loudly and quickly. “I have to get ready. Do not change speed or course.”
“Right.”
Hemi left the headset behind on its peg, now relying entirely on the stopwatch and the unvarying speed and course of the Gnat to know where he was in the water. He gingerly moved toward the stern, stepping over and around the detritus Shakes felt was perfectly reasonable to cast about in his only living space.
He picked up one of the explosive devices. It was heavy enough that even Hemi struggled a little to lift it. In addition to the sheer weight of the two warheads strapped together, he had to manage the awkward fenders and lines that tangled themselves repeatedly around the myriad protrusions that plague the interiors of all submarines.
The escape trunk was located behind the engine and motor, so it took some effort on Hemi’s part to pass one of the heavy devices through the narrow space and push it back until it was underneath the cylinder of the escape trunk that hung down from above. The escape trunk had a heavy hand-screw-sealed hatch on the bottom of the cylinder. Hemi opened the hatch and hefted the device up into the narrow interior space.
His intention was to get the device to sit on a narrow ledge that circled the lower inside rim of the hatch, which was intended as a foothold for the person who wanted to escape to stand on while sealing the hatch from the inside. It was difficult to get the heavy warhead package to balance on it, but he did manage eventually to arrange it so it no longer tried to tilt back into the empty space over the hatch. Then he piled the excess line on top of the warhead package and stuffed the fenders in. The fenders were even more of a challenge to position so they would stay up in the escape trunk, but at least they hardly weighed anything and had no chance of exploding if dropped. He finally got the fenders to stay in the trunk by propping them on the ledge and leaning the two fenders against each other.
Finally, Hemi reached back up into the escape trunk and wound the mechanical timers that would close the circuit to arm the warheads when the timer reached zero. He set them to a frighteningly-short five minutes — hardly enough time for the Gnat to drive clear of the amount of explosive the combined warheads packed. But he could not risk the devices being unarmed when the Grackle came within range of them.
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
Time was compressing down on Hemi. The little mechanical timers buzzed away, their sound reverberating around inside the circular steel walls of the escape trunk. The rickety little devices strove desperately to count out their five minutes with some precision. Hemi gingerly lowered the escape trunk hatch down and spun the sealing wheel closed, which cut off the quick ticking of the timers and left him in silence.
Hemi looked around the outside of the escape trunk for a control that would flood it. The only promising component was a massive unlabeled lever set into the top of the pressure hull above his head.
“How do you flood the escape trunk?” he called forward to Shakes.
“Flood? Hemi, this ain’t no commercial sub with some kind of specs-mandated flood-and-pump escape trunk for getting a crew of fifty off a sunk boat. The Gnat has a normal crew complement of just one, so the escape trunk is a one-time use only. That big ugly lever above your head releases the escape trunk topside hatch, which is rigged with a giant spring to open it. There’s another lever inside the escape trunk just like it that does the same thing. The hatch opens and the ocean pours in. That’s it.”
“So it cannot be reset underwater, then?”
“No way. The only reason I even put in an escape trunk was so I could flush out any problematic cargo if I got into a sticky situation with an Authority vessel. That…and I was terrified of being stuck on the bottom of the ocean and unable to open the sail hatch.”
“Alright. It will have to do. Be ready, I will open the escape trunk in another minute or so.”
Hemi held the stopwatch up in front of his eyes and the second hand rapidly screwed itself across the face. In his head, Hemi could see their position in the water, see where the Prospect should be off to their port side, and see the Grackle — all black and fiercely toothy in the front in its way that was entirely unnatural for a submarine — charging towards Shakes’s rickety little craft from starboard. The boats all moved relative to each other in his head, driven into position by the second hand on the stopwatch. He put his hand up to the heavy iron lever covered with flecks of rust above his head.
The second hand curled around and came up level. In Hemi’s head, the boats were all in the exact position. His thick fingers tightened on the lever, and then the muscles all the way down his arm to his shoulder tightened — the lever had been resting and rusting peacefully for years.
But it budged, then gave, then swung back. From above his head came a loud clang as the escape trunk hatch snapped open and flapped back against the deck of the Gnat. Hemi could almost feel the intense weight of the water under the pressure of three atmospheres dropping into the escape trunk almost instantaneously. He put his ear against the trunk. Through the cold, damp steel he could hear the gentle bumping as his device lifted up and clear of the trunk.
“The device is away, Captain Shakes!”
“…Are you sure about that? I’d hate to find out it’s stuck in there and arming itself.”
“I am as sure as I can be. Blow the tanks — the surface is going to be the safest place for us in the next few minutes.”
“Aye, boss.” Shakes reached down and pulled up on the heavy red lever at his feet. The Gnat’s compressed air reserves blew past him in the boat’s narrow pipes with a whistling hiss. Water burbled heavily out from the ballast tanks into the surrounding ocean. The Gnat started upwards, slowly for a second, and then a moment later gaining speed. “Hang on to something Hemi!”
As his stomach dropped, Hemi grabbed one of the freezing pipes that ran along the hull next to him. He gripped the pipe with his hard fists, his knuckles whitening through his cracked skin. The pipe was so cold the moisture of his palms froze and his skin stuck to the metal.
Hemi had ridden upwards on submarine ballast blows hundreds of times, but the tiny Gnat was a different experience from a big cargo sub like the Prospect. In the Prospect it was a dramatic but graceful maneuver, with the power and dynamism of a calving glacier. The Gnat was another matter entirely. More like a bird of prey diving on a small sparrow. The whole boat shook with the strain of it, the hull made sounds like it was cracking apart — and it was by no means clear to Hemi that it was not. When the bow popped through the surface a second later, the boat came down hard and Hemi was forced to rip one hand from the pipe and throw it up to keep his head from being driven up into the escape trunk lever.
On the surface, the bow of the boat, which had taken on a dramatic upward angle during the ballast blow, settled slowly in front of the two men. The Gnat leveled out and a sense of calm flowed through the craft. As soon as he was sure the maneuver was complete, Hemi moved rapidly past the engine and pushed in next to the sonar unit. He had the headset on and was tracking the Grackle in a few seconds.
Shakes cut the throttle to the motor and caught Hemi’s eye. He pointed to the hatch at the top of the sail with a questioning look, and Hemi nodded. Shakes lifted himself up, unscrewed the hatch, and sat up on the sail searching the flat gray water behind the Gnat. With little wind, there was almost no noise. Only a stifling silence, broken by nothing except the soft slap of water against the drifting hull. The sea was mottled in places with black oil that reflected back the gray of the sky, making Shakes feel like they were floating in a bath of concrete slurry.
Nothing moved under that silent dome of sky as one minute passed, then another. Shakes shaded his eyes against the brightness and scanned the water between him and the horizon line, looking for any surface manifestation of the movements going on below.
Another minute passed. And then, much closer than Shakes had anticipated, the heavy thud of an underwater explosion broke through the surface, and a plume of water, driven up and forward by explosive momentum shot upwards and dropped a gray oily rain onto the deck of the Gnat. The rain passed up in a rapid squall line from stern to bow, soaking Shakes where he sat on the sail.
“Ha ha! Hemi! It worked!”
“Hold on,” Hemi’s voice came up darkly from below. “I am tracking the sub on sonar.”
Shakes’s initial feeling of excitement that such a claptrap device actually functioned as intended subsided to be replaced by the more rational thought that detonating the device was one thing, while actually damaging the Grackle was another. He stared into the water next to the Gnat for a moment and saw a long black shadow — endlessly long and thin, it seemed to him — pass under his boat down in the depths below.
“The device detonated, but I am not hearing any sign that they were damaged.” From where he was standing below, Hemi’s voice did not reveal any sense of disappointment. “They just passed under us, still tracking the Prospect.”
“So that’s it? An impenetrable hull?”
“They hit my explosive with their ram, which is probably a very well-reinforced part of the sub.” Hemi hesitated. “We need to figure out how to deliver a charge to a weaker point.”
“Yeah, and while you are pondering that tiny challenge, they are closing in for a shot on the Prospect.”
“Hopefully Captain Percy can manage one close pass by the Grackle and give us time to get another device into position. We need to get the Gnat back under water.”
“Hold up. Don’t forget we need to reset the escape trunk first.”
“How do you pump the water out of the flooded trunk?”
“Pump! Ha. Just open the bottom hatch down there, and let it run into the bilge. Then we’ll turn on the bilge pumps to toss the water off the boat.”
“Elegant.” Hemi made his way back past the engine again, and a minute later Shakes saw the water in the escape trunk drop away into the bottom of the Gnat.
Shakes stepped out of the sail and leaned over the now empty escape trunk where Hemi’s round, black-bearded face was looking up at him. “Maybe I should rig some kind of pump for the escape trunk,” Shakes said to him, “I actually have to do that emptying maneuver more often than I like. The hatch opens sometimes while diving, just from the stresses on the hull, I guess. Drives me nuts.”
“You could just fix the latch to make sure it only opens when it is supposed to,” Hemi said. “When we are done with this project, I can help you with that.”
“You mean if we live through this quote-unquote project.”