She sat in the captain’s console seat, the far-left seat of the three seats of the command console, in the central command post. In front of her was a large flat panel display that could show anything from any of the other displays, whether ship control, sonar, battlecontrol, weapons control, communications or navigation. The console could be set to rotate through all available displays if desired, or it could be turned over to the AI system, the Second Captain, and left to have the Second Captain decide what was display-worthy. The number two and three screens in front of the seats to her right were selected to Second-Captain-discretion display modes, but Isakova insisted that her own screen show only what she herself selected. In her opinion, the Second Captain was a bit of a moron, or as she was fond of saying, AI — artificial intelligence — would be better named artificial idiocy.
Isakova was standing command duty officer watch for the midnight to 0600 watch run by Captain Lieutenant Maksimilian Kovalyov, who was the communications officer. Kovalyov was seated at the middle seat of the starboard side battlecontrol attack center console, where he liked to spend most of his watch, but he rotated through the sonar-and-sensor consoles on the port side or stood at the aft port navigation display as well.
The central command post of the Voronezh was startlingly large. The center of the room was occupied by the three-seat command console, with three large displays, with annunciators and phones set into the console between displays. Behind the command console, directly behind Isakova, was the number two periscope, the number one periscope beside it, behind the far-right seat of the command console. Behind the periscopes, the bulkhead was crowded with navigation equipment and electrical junction boxes, communication panels and bookshelves. The far aft starboard corner had a door that opened into the aft passageway. The starboard side of the room, on the aft end, was filled with the battlecontrol’s attack center, a long console with three seats in front of it, with eight large displays, arranged in two rows of four, an extended gauge panel above the top row. This console was manned only with the middle seat during normal steaming, a battlecontrol petty officer of the watch normally studying the displays, but the watch officer sometimes liked to station himself at the console so he could see all eight displays at once, rather than one at a time at the command console. With Kovalyov taking his normal seat, the displaced battlecontrol petty officer of the watch had taken the forward-most of the three seats.
Forward of battlecontrol, on the starboard side of the forward bulkhead, was a three-display console with two seats facing the displays, both seats occupied by the boatswains of the watch, controlling the ship’s bowplanes, sternplanes, rudder, auxiliary ship’s systems, complex ballast systems and the masts and antennae in the conning tower. To the left of the ship control console was a long slender credenza with the stand-behind under-ice sonar console, several navigation displays showing the health of the inertial navigation system and the status of navigation satellite downlinks when at periscope depth, with the upper center section occupied by two large flat panel screens, the left displaying the output of the number two periscope, the right tied into the number one scope. Farther to port, the credenza ended at the door leading forward. To the left of the door, on the forward port corner of the room, was the sonar-and-sensor console, the longest console in the central command post, with four seats placed facing the port side to attend to twelve large displays arranged in two rows of six, the horizontal section of the console jammed tight with keyboards, fixed function keys, trackballs and annunciator lights.
Aft of the sonar-and-sensor console was the navigation electronic chart table, a meter wide and two meters long, with navigation cabinets behind it on the port bulkhead, interrupted by the port aft door. Both aft doors led to a wide spot in the central passageway that led aft to the officer’s berthing and several equipment spaces, one for radio, one for sonar, another for battlecontrol. Isakova would usually spend much of the watch at the navigation chart, trying to imagine where the target submarines were in the Arabian Sea, but at this moment, she had just selected the navigation chart to display on her command console display. This ocean was vast, extending from the farthest south point of India to the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula and northward all the way to Pakistan and the Gulf of Oman.
At the battlecontrol console, Kovalyov’s tablet computer beeped. He looked away from the display screens to check it, then turned to Isakova.
“Madam First,” he said, “messages are in from our excursion to periscope depth. There’s one marked ‘personal for first officer.’”
They’d spent a half hour at periscope depth, only going deep ten minutes before, the surface rotten with shipping this close to the Indian coastline, Isakova’s time at the scope exhausting and sickening, the sea state high, the boat rocking hard in the heavy waves, while she took laser ranges to various surface contacts and fed them to the battlecontrol system, tracking them over time to make sure none of them got within a thousand meters, requiring two maneuvers to avoid the closest ones, Isakova finally lowering the scope and taking Voronezh deep as the third appeared inside the kilometer safety range.
Once they’d gone deep, she’d hoped there would be an intelligence update — perhaps a satellite sighting of the Panther or the American target submarine, unwisely surfacing. Without aircraft or surface ships thanks to the worm, there would be no eye-in-the sky of an antisubmarine warfare patrol plane or a surveillance drone. They’d have to hope for other intel, such as an intercepted message with some inkling of where they were and their course and speed. Or some human intelligence, perhaps one of the Americans consorting with a well-placed prostitute working the town of the submarine’s home base. But there was absolutely nothing. All that time at periscope depth, fighting the surface traffic, tossing in the damned waves, gone to waste.
“Send it to my tablet,” Isakova ordered. The message was switched to her pad computer, which beeped with a notification. She opened the message and read it, and no sooner had she closed out the message than her eyes filled with water. She blinked it back as hard as she could, finding a roll of tissue paper and wiping her eyes, suddenly aware that Kovalyov was staring at her.
The message had been from her mother, with whom she had been in a running cold war for over a decade over her supposedly “unwomanly insistence on joining the Navy.” But this message wasn’t cold at all, it was tender and full of empathy for her, because Mother knew full well that Isakova was close to her beloved father, and the message was sent to report that Father was lying on his deathbed, finally succumbing to the lung disease from the mineral insulation he’d worked with for fifty hard years at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, and that at this point he wasn’t expected to live for more than a few days. He had hidden his illness from Isakova on her last visit, but she’d suspected he wasn’t himself. But now, here she was at sea, unable to rush to his bedside, and the knowledge settled into her soul that she’d seen her father alive for the last time.
She put her head in her hands, the unwelcome tears flooding into her palms. Daddy, she thought desperately, please don’t leave me. She was sobbing too hard to notice Kovalyov pick up the phone at the station between battlecontrol display two and display three and dial the commanding officer’s stateroom.
“Captain,” a sleepy Captain First Rank Boris Novikov answered, his voice laced with anxiety. After all, why would the watch officer call him when the command duty officer — Isakova — was stationed right there with him in the central command post?