The boatswain on the forward starboard ship control console jammed his joystick to the forward bulkhead and the ship dived, the deck beginning to tremble with the power of the main motor speeding up to maximum velocity at one hundred percent reactor power.
“Three-fifty meters, sir. Four hundred!”
“Everybody grab a handhold and make sure you’re strapped in,” Trusov shouted, “And don emergency breathing masks and fireproof hoods!” She picked up the shipwide announcing circuit microphone. Her voice boomed throughout the previously rigged-for-silent submarine. “Attention all hands, this is the Watch Officer. All personnel don emergency breathing masks and fireproof hoods. Set material condition X for imminent weapon impact.”
Orlov glanced over at Trusov, his eyes shaded behind his gas mask. He nodded at her while he reached for his seat belt to strap himself into the position one command seat. Trusov did the same, putting the five-point harness over her chest and snapping it into position at her beltline.
Lieutenant Vasilev shouted again from the sonar-and-sensor console. “I have a splash, very faint. Wait, I have a second splash, this one heavier, bearing in our stern sector, detected on the rudder rear-facing hydrophones.”
The deck flattened from its steep down-angle of twenty degrees.
“Captain, steady on depth six hundred,” the boatswain announced from the ship control center, “steady on course two-two-zero, engines answering ahead one hundred percent, sir.”
“Very well,” Orlov acknowledged.
Trusov glanced over at Captain Orlov, and just as he seemed to be about to say something to her, her memory and her thoughts stopped as if switched off like a light.
The two nuclear energy releases, ten nautical miles apart, grew identically outward from their start at the center of their depth charges, only differentiated slightly by their explosions at different depths. The western plasma fireball was subjected to a higher sea pressure than the eastern explosion, but that mattered only in that the plasma ovoid formed by the deeper weapon was just slightly smaller than the dimensions of the plasma to the east at the plasma’s biggest point. Despite the ultra-high temperature and pressure of the plasmas, the sea overcame them, cooling and dispersing the hot gases, much of their energy directed upward to escape the higher pressure of the deep. The steam from the sea cooling the plasma rose furiously rapidly to the surface above and blew upward into the atmosphere, until there were dual mushroom clouds rising over the seascape.
The western plasma had encountered nothing but seawater, but the eastern plasma had engulfed a large steel shape, first liquefying the metals and composites inside this odd envelope of steel, then vaporizing the liquids, then making the matter turn into a plasma, a state of matter where the energy levels were so high that the electrons boiled off the molecules. There remained no trace of what had once been that object — no wreckage, no floating mattresses, no oil slick. All of what had been the Russian Republic submarine Voronezh became atoms stripped of electrons and simply flew upward in the eastern mushroom cloud, what molecules that remained the same elements — iron and carbon — raining down on the sea as little more than contaminants.
The two nuclear fireballs sent out shock waves in all directions, hammering down on the sea floor two miles below, upward to the surface, and outward. The twin shock waves combined to form an even stronger shock wave traveling outward in all directions, the wave weakening as it traveled.
The shock wave soon encountered the hull of the Russian Republic submarine Novosibirsk, located 49 nautical miles west-southwest of the westernmost detonation. The shock wave had sufficient strength to slam into the submarine, roll it far over, and shake the ship so hard that every living soul aboard lost consciousness from hitting something, even the officers strapped into their seats in the central command post. The shock tripped the submarine’s reactor and took all propulsion systems offline and opened every electrical breaker aboard, but perhaps the worst effect happened in compartment three’s lower level, the location of auxiliary machinery room number two, where the twin oxygen generators came off their foundation mountings, the piping to the high pressure oxygen and hydrogen receivers rupturing, and the mixture of oxygen and hydrogen exploding, the intense fires overcoming the halon firefighting system and the smoke of the flames melting through the emergency breathing air manifold and dumping the pressure of the emergency air breathing system into the room, further feeding the fire. A check valve in the system had been designed to prevent this loss of emergency breathing air, but in the hellish conflagration, it melted and ceased to exist other than a liquid metal puddle on the deck of the room.
The opening of all electrical breakers shut down the ventilation fan that took a suction on the room and distributed it to the ship, so the outgoing air flow stopped as well as the incoming flow from the ship’s spaces, starving the fire of oxygen, although the flames licked up against the metal piping of the high-pressure oxygen that fed the oxygen banks. Had the oxygen level in the room continued to sustain the fire, the flames would have melted the oxygen manifold and become unstoppable, which would have led to the atmosphere of the submarine becoming toxic enough to kill all life aboard, but as the flames blasted against the oxygen piping, the smoke and carbon monoxide in the room choked the flames and fire went out, leaving the room a smoldering wreck of burned valves, cables, piping, tanks and electronics, the smoke so dense that no amount of visible spectrum candlepower would penetrate it.
In the first and second compartments, the crew, all of them wearing emergency air masks, and all of them unconscious from the battering the ship took in the shock wave, began to suffocate from the lack of emergency breathing air system pressure, and as the habitable spaces of the submarine filled with smoke, the crew all began to die at the same moment in time.
By the time the shock wave had traveled at the speed of sound underwater, to the locations of the United States submarine Vermont and the United States’ pirated submarine Panther, 149 nautical miles west of the western-most explosion, the shock wave was little more than a loud sound wave, but still blasted the ears of the inhabitants of those two submarines, rattling the dishes in the pantries, and causing enough of a sudden roll on the Panther to knock books off the shelf in the navigation room.
Weapons Officer Irina Trusov coughed into her gas mask and tried to inhale, but there was nothing there. She instinctively pulled the mask off and tried desperately to breathe, gasping in huge lungfuls of smoky air. She blinked hard, not sure if she had gone blind or if the space were so smoke-filled that there was no visibility. She tried to reach under the console for the battle lantern, but the five-point restraint restricted her motion. She unlatched the seat belt and vaulted out of the seat, still gasping as she found the large flashlight and switched it on.
The room was dark, with smoke, but there was enough visibility in the room to see the forward bulkhead. She could sense the deck was tilting downward a few degrees. She shone the light on the captain, who was collapsed in his harness. Quickly Trusov pulled off his mask, then circled the room, pulling off the masks of the other crewmembers. She returned to Orlov to see if he were breathing, although if he weren’t, she wouldn’t be able to try to resuscitate him. The rules of their training were specific for times like these: save the mission, save the ship, save the reactor, then save the crew. As for the mission, it wasn’t able to be salvaged with the ship in this condition. The hated Americans had won, with one swift stroke, once again humiliating Russia. But there was no time for that, she thought, forcing herself to try to understand how to save the ship.