“Only got four on the entire crew right now,” said Ramirez. “Captain, XO, me, and Frank.”
“You’re forgetting somebody,” said Moody.
“Oh, the doctor!” Ramirez said in a teasing way, as if he knew it would irritate her.
“He gets a stateroom to himself and no duties on the watch bill,” she said. “But you won’t get off that easy. I’ll need to observe you before putting you on the watch bill, of course.”
“Of course,” he said, and their eyes locked.
“It’ll mean spending a lot of time with me,” she said. “Hours and hours.”
“Looking forward to it,” said Pete.
She laughed loudly. “Sure you are, hotshot. All right — I’m going forward to take the watch from the captain.”
She turned and left without another word.
“She’s pretty hot, right?” said Ramirez.
“Sure,” said Pete.
“Beautiful,” Ramirez said a little wistfully. “But deadly.”
They spent a few minutes talking about hometowns, and what was going on ashore, as Pete unpacked. Ramirez was eager for news about the epidemic and the Dallas Cowboys. He had a girlfriend who had dumped him recently, and clearly he still pined for her. She hadn’t written to him in months; Ramirez worried about her.
Pete pulled out a Lucite block, one of the only personal items he’d thought to pack.
“What’s that?” said Ramirez.
Pete handed it to him. He turned it over in his hand. “Is that a honeybee?”
“It is,” said Pete. “At every stage of its life cycle. There’s the larva,” he said, pointing. “The pupa, the adult.”
“Very cool,” said Ramirez, staring at it curiously.
“It was a gift,” said Pete, feeling it necessary to explain.
“Let me guess,” said Ramirez. “From a girlfriend.”
Pete shook his head, trying to hide his sadness.
“Wife?” said Ramirez.
Pete shook his head again, and carefully took the Lucite block away.
“Ex-wife?” said Ramirez.
Pete didn’t have it in him to clarify, so he let that stand.
Ramirez shook his head ruefully. “Join the club, my brother. The Submarine Force Lonely Hearts Club.”
Pete placed the honeybee memento above his desk, and continued unpacking.
After a few minutes, a sound-powered phone on the wall of the stateroom chirped, and he was summoned to the captain’s stateroom. On the way there, he passed a muscular lieutenant with HOLMES on his nametag. He nodded gruffly in Pete’s direction, his only acknowledgment. I guess not everyone here is happy to have a new shipmate, he thought.
“Come in, shut the door,” said the captain when Pete arrived. He scooted over to make room in the small stateroom.
“Aye, sir.”
“Listen,” said the captain, as they both sat down. The cramped quarters made for a kind of instant intimacy. “I suspect you’re a civilian — maybe I’m about to find out. So, if that’s true, why don’t you call me Finn, and I’ll call you Pete. At least when it’s just the two of us.”
“Sure… Finn.”
The captain smiled broadly at that, as if he was pleased and surprised at the effort. “OK, let’s take a look.”
Pete pulled out the small tablet that he’d been holding, and powered it on. He swiped his finger across it, and the patrol order came to light. The first few pages were all boilerplate, long descriptions of responsibilities and secrecy requirements. The captain scanned through it all quickly, swiping ahead with the confidence of a man who had read a great many patrol orders and knew how to get to the good parts. He watched the animated projections of the epidemic, his eyes growing wide. Finally he got to a paragraph that offered a summation of the mission and he read it, and Pete watched him go back to the top and read it again before he offered any kind of reaction.
“Eris Island,” he said. “You can get us in there?”
“I can,” said Pete. “It won’t be easy, but I can.”
“One time we got within about two hundred miles and it was hot as hell. Drones everywhere.”
“We’ll stay submerged as long as possible. Degauss and cross the shoals at PD.”
The captain nodded while making eye contact. “And that’s where we’ll find the wonder drug?”
“Yes, sir,” said Pete. “We hope so.”
The captain tapped the icon on the screen that contained Pete’s personnel file. “I’ll read this in a minute, after we get through the nuts and bolts here, but are you a doctor? A scientist?”
“I’m an engineer,” said Pete. “With extensive experience on Eris Island and with the drones. That’s my expertise.”
“Aha,” said the captain, nodding, thinking it over. “There’s someone I’d like to share this with,” he said.
“You have that authority, sir.”
The captain picked up a microphone over his desk, and turned a switch. His voice boomed across the ship. “Doctor Haggerty, report to the captain’s stateroom.”
He hung up and waited for the doctor to arrive. Pete knew that somewhere close, Commander Moody was fuming at being kept out of the loop. He wondered how she would take it out on him.
Later that night, Ramirez took Pete to the wardroom. “I’ve shown you where to sleep, now I’ll show you where to eat. That should about cover it.”
It was a somewhat formal-looking room: wood panel cabinets, a glass case with actual silver serving platters on display, and eight chairs arranged around a table with the captain’s chair at the head, the only chair with arms.
“That silver is from the USS George Washington,” said Ramirez, pointing at the cabinet. “The first ballistic missile submarine. The first to carry a Polaris missile.”
Pete stared through the glass at the elaborately etched silver tray, a long, flat-decked submarine carved upon it. “Beautiful,” said Pete.
“Hard to imagine an era when they served food on silver like that onboard a submarine.”
Pete looked around and confirmed what Ramirez was saying. Any formality in the wardroom had long since given way to a kind of grubby practicality. Very old magazines were stacked across the table. A well-worn steel coffeepot had the power of place in the room, right next to the door. Giant, unillustrated bags of Navy-issue snack foods were arranged on a side counter — cheese balls and corn chips. Little boxes of cereal were stacked like bricks against one wall. After years at sea, it seemed, the Polaris had given up on the burden of formal meals.
“Breakfast?” said Ramirez, holding up a tiny box of Apple Jacks. “Or lunch?” he said, poking a bag of the bright orange cheese balls.
“How about just coffee?” Pete responded, sitting down across from him.
“We have that,” said Ramirez. He began to make a fresh pot.
“How often do you get resupplied?”
“As often as we can,” said Ramirez. “Which ain’t that often. We meet a tender up north… every year it gets farther north. Every six months if we can pull it off. Each time the food gets worse, the supply parts get harder to come by. Unfortunately, they made this boat so well that it just keeps running.”
“Why so far north?”
Ramirez looked at him as the coffeemaker began its noisy burbling cycle. It was a hard, assessing stare.
“The drones,” he said.
“The drones?”
“If we go far enough north, we’re less likely to get one of our own little bombs dropped on us. Every year we go farther. Two months ago I was on the bridge when we met the tender. We were so far north that with my binoculars I could actually see ice in the water.”