Chandler’s Reach, Sixteen Kilometers Below
Lumiara, Survivor’s Refuge
4454.2.16 Interstellar
The Seraphine had been running silent in the Chapo’s shadow for a little over twenty minutes, which meant that the pirate submarines were somewhere between forty-five and sixty-five kilometers away, which was within the outer edge of the launch envelope for torpedoes. Since the pirates were ahead of them and the current was driving them closer, the Seraphine had the advantage, but she also had two larger, slower targets to protect.
“Can’t we just go active and target them from long range?” Syn asked.
“And admirable thought, Ms. Larson-Dowery, but if I was them, I would only expose one of my submarines at a time.”
“So they’d know where we were, but we would only know where one of them was.”
The captain nodded.
“What if we leave the current?” Janus asked.
“Same problem,” Syn said. “One in, one out, and we’re moving slower.”
Janus swallowed. He hated the military stuff. This sort of thing didn’t happen on Irkalla, where explosives and firearms would compromise dome integrity. These people could fabricate just about anything, and they had the technology to live long and well, and yet here they were, still hitting each other over the head with rocks like cave dwellers—which, ironically, many of his people on Irkalla were.
Still, he could try to participate, at least. “If that’s a bad thing, how can we put them in the same position?”
“The problem is one of positioning, Mr. Invarian,” the captain said. “If the Chapo or the Deep Rider exit the stream, we’ll have to reduce our speed, and we risk losing contact if we maneuver. We need to stay in the channel, and they know it.”
“Right, but what if we didn’t have a thousand-year-old captain at the helm, and we just weren’t that smart?” Janus asked.
The captain and Syn looked at him, and several other members of the command crew did their best not to.
“Remarkable,” the captain said. “I can see what Nikandros likes about you.”
Janus grunted. He wasn’t sure if the captain was complimenting his thinking or acknowledging his lack of it.
“Let’s assume we only now realized there was trouble ahead, and we were, as Mr. Invarian so rightly said, that smart?’”
“We’d go active to confirm and maybe stick a drone out of the current to look for trouble.”
“We don’t have drones,” the Captain said. “We’re just a fat, dumb, and happy cargo convoy.”
“Now, you’re just being hurtful,” Janus said, and several people around the room laughed.
Syn, on the other hand, had that focused look she got when she was thinking about how to hack into a system she wasn’t supposed to. “We have the Deep Rider swap places with us, and either we or they go above the channel, and we kick out a drone to keep comms open. How do the pirates react?”
“That depends,” the captain said. “Are they the first kind of pirate or the second kind? If they like killing and they don’t want witnesses, they’ll attack the more vulnerable sub and then force the other sub to surrender.”
“And if they’re the first kind?” Syn asked.
“They corner the vulnerable submarine outside the channel.”
“So, either way, they go after the sub outside the channel first,” Janus said. “We go outside the channel.”
“Quite,” the captain said.
Syn nodded. “If they launch on us within thirty kilometers, they’re the second kind of pirate.”
The captain grinned. It was clear which variety of pirate he was hoping for.
***
Another ten minutes had passed, and the presumed range between them and the pirates was now somewhere between twenty-five and a half and thirty-nine kilometers. They were well within torpedo range, although still within the performance envelope where the Seraphine’s higher speed and decoys would likely be effective.
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“I have two faint returns at thirty-six kilometers, captain,” the sonarman said.
“Nothing within the channel, captain,” Syn reported. “I think we can assume we’re dealing with two pirate submarines and that they’re of the first variety.”
“I’m not sure about that last qualification,” the captain said. “They may launch on us at closer range, counting on the higher probability of a hit, and then go directly after the other ship.”
“They wouldn’t stay to confirm we’d been destroyed?”
“If we were, in fact, a cargo submarine, and we detected torpedoes in the water, we would do one of two things,” the captain said. “Either we would try to lose them by returning to the channel, in which case they would be able to call both ships to heave to, or we would try to outmaneuver a torpedo, in which case we would die.”
Janus pinched the bridge of his nose. “So we still don’t know if these are opportunists or homicidal maniacs.”
“You’re making a false assumption, Mr. Invarian,” the captain said. “You think I care. Weapons, prepare to launch a two torpedo spread.”
“Hold on a minute,” Janus said.
“No,” the captain said. “Proceed with launch when ready.”
Janus looked at the weapons officer. Things were escalating fast.
“I’m just saying that if these are run of the mill—”
“Tubes ready. Torpedoes away, captain.”
“Acknowledged.”
There was a rushing, bubbling sound.
Janus felt paralyzed. He’d thought there would be more discussion about this, more time to think through the moral implications.
“Tracking torpedo trajectory,” Syn said. “Awaiting status updates.”
Janus could see the track on the holo tank. The torpedoes were running at forty knots—a ten-knot differential between them and the Seraphine. The display responded to his query and indicated that, at the present speed, the torpedoes would reach attack range in eleven minutes, except they weren’t on a direct course to intercept them.
“Something troubling you, Mr. Invarian?” the captain said with a note of warning in his voice.
The threat to gut him if he hesitated aside, Janus thought back to his days on Krandermore, when Koni had been willing to kill hundreds of people because the coldsider trade delegation stole an advanced breed of food crop. He’d disagreed with her, as had Lira, and looking back, he didn’t think Koni had been in her right mind after the death of her husband and son, but this was a different situation. The floating monasteries were only self-sufficient for so long, and getting an incomplete delivery—or not getting it at all—when they could only be reached once a year could make a whole habitat collapse.
The torpedoes started to turn toward the pirates, coming at them from the lower starboard quadrant.
A loud ping ran through the hull as one of the pirate subs shifted to active sonar.
“They’re starting to maneuver, captain,” the sonar operator said.
The enemy’s ping had given away its partner’s location as well, and the estimated position of the two pirate subs appeared in the holo tank.
“They’re running, sir,” the sonar operator said.
The two subs were sticking together, climbing away from Chandler’s Reach and the two torpedoes. By turning away and running at maximum speed, it looked like the pirate subs would escape the torpedoes’ maximum range if Janus understood the display correctly.
The captain didn’t take his eyes off the display. “Any minute now.”
Janus’s eyebrows rose as the two torpedoes accelerated to two hundred knots. “How is that possible?”
“They’re flying torpedoes,” the captain explained. “They create a thin bubble of air around them, reduces friction.”
“That doesn’t seem like it would work.”
“The technology is old,” the captain said. “Making it work sixteen kilometers underwater isn’t.”
The pirates were already reacting, but the time they had to defend themselves had just shrunk from a comfortable forty minutes—assuming the torpedoes had lasted that long—to four minutes and twenty-seven seconds. Janus could only imagine the panic on those ships, maybe only in the control rooms at first, but then spreading through the crew as the captains pushed their engines for all they were worth. The smaller sub, which was a kilometer closer than its partner, kicked out some sort of decoy that made its signature expand and stop dead in the water.
“They’re both using decoys,” the captain said, punching a set of commands into the holo tank, and a double set of contacts appeared in place of the second sub. “It’s a towed array. Mimics the submarine in front of it; only get one use out of it.”
“So they’re going to get away?” Janus asked.
“Against anyone else, yes,” the captain said.
The torpedoes continued to close on the targets. Janus watched as the smaller sub’s decoys failed—he wasn’t sure if the other captain had launched them too soon or if there had been some sort of maintenance failure. The submarine had then, apparently, cut its engines and thought that would save it, but the flying torpedo slowed to a more conventional speed and switched to active sonar less than twenty seconds before detonating less than three meters from the submarine’s hull. Janus’s upper lip curled as the contact faded from the holo tank, and the second torpedo raced on.
The captain smiled, but none of the crew members cheered.
The second sub started to get more frantic, and as it turned, the number of contacts on the screen doubled, then quadrupled. The pirate captain was throwing out everything trick at their disposal, and the torpedo ignored all of it, flying straight past all of the ghosts. It continued one kilometer past the target, slowed down, and turned.
Janus winced. The number of ghost targets dropped off from eight to six, then five, then two. The torpedo had a fifty-fifty choice. It went for the one on the left, approached it from above and dead-on from the bow, and detonated.
Both remaining contacts faded from the screen, and a hush fell over the control room.
Almost twenty tense seconds later, the sonar operator said, “I can hear her breaking up, captain.”
“Pilot, return us to the Reach and resume convoy ops.”
“Aye, captain,” the pilot said. “Adjusting my dive angle to ten degrees down and returning to the Reach.”
“The Chapo and the Deep Rider acknowledge resuming convoy operations, captain,” the comms officer said.
“Very good,” the captain said, clasping his webbed hands behind his back and looking more cheerful than he had since they’d met.
Janus wasn’t sure how to feel. He’d fought in battles before, and he’d caused people to die, either personally or through the events he’d set in motion.
This hadn’t felt like a fight, more like an execution. The captain had been ahead of the pirates at every step. They never stood a chance.