The view through the scope was a perfect simulation, taking into account weather and time of day. It was calm and bright. Pete watched the water get lighter as they came shallow, expecting the whole time to hear that a fire had erupted in the engine room, or a scram had shut down their power plant, or that a torpedo had appeared out of nowhere and was screaming toward them.
But nothing happened.
The scope broke through, and Pete executed three slow turns, verifying (once again to his surprise) that they were alone. “No close contacts!” he said. And he trained the scope on Eris Island.
It was right where it was supposed to be. Drones flew above it, some lazily making their way toward him. Pete knew that they were randomly searching, that they hadn’t seen his scope at this distance. And the degaussing had made the ship invisible to their magnetic sensors at periscope depth. They moved slowly toward the small break in the shoals. Pete’s heart raced; they’d never allowed him to make it this far.
Right before the shoals, one of the drones drifted right on top of them. Pete knew immediately they’d been seen. It soared into the sky. At this proximity to the island, it attracted a legion of followers.
“Right full rudder!” he ordered. He was too close to the island to go deep, however. The ocean bed was right beneath him. An attack formation of five drones was heading directly toward them. Pete braced himself for the impact of their bombs.
The simulator stopped moving with a pneumatic gasp. The lights came on around them. Pete heard Ase approaching first, and then saw him at the edge of the platform, throwing over the small bridge onto the simulator.
“I thought the degaussing would make me invisible?”
Ase shrugged. “I guess it didn’t take.”
“Didn’t take?” said Pete, his frustration rising. “What am I supposed to do? Swim out there and fix it?”
“Calm down,” said Ase. “You did fine. I would just recommend verifying the effectiveness of the degaussing before you make your approach to the island. That range hasn’t been used in five years. If it doesn’t work, you can always make another pass.”
“Verify it?”
“Give the drones a peek before and after you degauss. Do it while you can still go deep and evade if necessary, see how they react. That’s all, Hamlin.”
“OK,” said Pete. Ase was being unusually constructive in his criticism. It was every bit as unnerving as his quiet approach to the degaussing range. Pete found himself bracing for the next catastrophe.
They did three more runs, these a more traditional series of flooding, fire, and every variety of ship control casualty. Pete had learned that the outcome of the training wasn’t necessarily to bring the ship through the degaussing range every time. Indeed, he was convinced that given the complexity of some of the casualties being thrown at him, recovery was often impossible. Rather, they were looking to see if he had completely absorbed the procedures and the doctrine that they were throwing at him all day, so that even in a catastrophic situation, he was still making logical choices, making the best of whatever bad options he had.
“You’re getting there,” said Ase, after a particularly challenging run through the range in the simulator. He was sitting on the dive chair with a clipboard, going through his critique.
“High praise,” said Pete. He’d been in Charleston for four weeks. The last week they’d abandoned the classroom entirely, and he’d spent full days in the simulator, eight hours with a short break for lunch. At night, it was back to his room to study procedures and try to relax enough to fall asleep.
“Well, don’t let it go to your head,” said the commander, smiling with the half of his face that still worked. The dim lights in the simulator exaggerated the ripples of his scars. He was truly a frightening man.
“Want to do that one again?” asked Pete. “Maybe throw in a couple of helicopters?”
Ase shook his head. “Nope,” he said. “That’s it. You can practice more when you get to the boat.”
Pete was startled. He’d stopped asking when he was actually going to report to Polaris. “When is that?”
“You leave tomorrow for the coast.”
Pete nodded, trying not to look nervous in front of Ase. “Tomorrow.”
“Yeah. Pack your shit. The driver will be there at 0600.”
“Will do.”
“Here,” said Ase. He pulled a tablet computer that had been hidden beneath his clipboard. “That contains your orders, and the patrol order for the Polaris that takes effect when you get onboard. You’re the only one that can open that thing, but you’ll have to show Captain McCallister when you report.”
“You know him?”
“He’s a good man,” said Ase. “Smart.”
“Is he lucky?” asked Pete.
“Up to this point,” said Ase, not quite smiling.
The silence grew as Ase continued to stare at him. The support crew had left, and all the lights on the surrounding platform were off, making it invisible. The simulated control room was now a small cube of dim light suspended in darkness, supported by unseen forces. Soon, Pete realized with a chill, he’d be sitting in a real submarine, suspended in an endless ocean.
“I was out there,” said Ase after a long pause.
“Out there?”
“Where you’re going. Near Eris Island. We’d caught a whiff of a Typhon submarine on a SOSUS array; they sent my boat out there to check it out. I was skipper onboard the Regulus. Heard of it?”
Pete nodded. “Were you there…?”
Ase did his scary half smile again. “Yeah, I was there during the fire. We went out there to sniff around for this enemy boat, and soon enough we found her. She was noisy as hell, the way those Typhon boats all are — we heard her from five miles away. They don’t build them for stealth. A fifty-hertz tonal in a sound channel on the towed array… remember what all that means?”
Pete nodded. The enemy ship’s electrical system operated on 50 Hz, unlike the 60 Hz of Alliance ships. A 50 Hz tonal, or any of its harmonics, was one of the surest sonar signatures of an enemy boat. A sound channel was caused by different temperature layers in the ocean, causing sound to travel many times farther than it normally would, like light being reflected by parallel mirrors.
“We worked hard to get close, creeped up on her baffles,” continued Ase. “She went quiet, drifted in and out, but we had a solution we were pretty confident in. By the time I was ready to shoot, we’d been at battle stations for twelve hours.
“We shot two torpedoes with a twenty-degree spread. Instead of running away, she turned right toward us. Launched a couple of countermeasures and came right at us. Her countermeasures worked, our torpedoes peeled off. And then she shot one of her torpedoes right down our throats.”
This was news to Pete. He’d only heard about a fire on the Regulus, a heroic damage-control effort. No one had ever told him that the boat had been hurt in battle.
“Her torpedo went right by us, exploded about a hundred yards past. We were so close to each other, it was like a knife fight in a telephone booth. The torpedo missed us, but the shock wave blew out one of our main seawater valves — the engineer called away flooding in the engine room. I fired two more torpedoes back at her and came shallow, trying to slow the flooding.”
“You surfaced?”
Ase shook his head. “Hell no. There were drones everywhere. We stayed at periscope depth and hoped they wouldn’t see us. She did the same.
“Anyway, my boys did good work, flood control worked, we slowed the flooding soon enough, but we’d taken a tremendous amount of water onboard — we had to stay shallow while we pumped it off. And it seemed like my torpedoes had done the job; nobody was shooting back at us. We thought we were lucky with the drones, too; none had spotted us at that point with just our periscope raised, although we could see them darting around in the distance. I thought we might live to fight another day. Then the OOD called me to take a look.” He took a lengthy pause, as if he were once again looking out a periscope.