“Jesus.”
He shrugged. “Of course, we’re not supposed to say that. But I can tell you that we haven’t heard a whisper from an enemy ship out here, submarine or otherwise, in over a year. But every time we get near the surface, those drone alarms start screaming.”
The door burst open, Frank Holmes in workout gear carrying a stack of papers. He was followed by a man Pete hadn’t yet met. It had to be Haggerty, the doctor. Ramirez quickly stopped talking.
“What’s going on in here?” said Holmes with a large smile on his face. “A non-qual lounging in the wardroom?” He began feeding classified papers into a shredder that sat at the corner of the room, which groaned as it tried to digest them. Pete fought his engineer’s impulse to tell Frank to slow down, he was feeding too much paper into the machine at once.
Ramirez shot Pete an evil grin that said, watch this. “Hey, Frank… whatcha doing?”
Frank turned around, still feeding his sheaf of paperwork into the shredder. “I’m deleting these old targeting documents,” he said.
Ramirez burst out laughing. “That kills me every time!” he said. He looked at Pete. “He says he’s deleting stuff when he shreds it.”
“Whatever,” said Frank with a shrug. “Same fucking thing.” He clapped his hands as the shredder finished chewing through the last document.
“So,” Frank said to Pete. “Who won the Super Bowl? Was it awesome?”
“Tell us it was,” said Ramirez. “Even if it wasn’t.”
Pete learned in the wardroom that part of his onboarding required a cursory physical examination from Haggerty. He followed the doctor to sick bay after he finished his coffee.
“Any contagious diseases?” Haggerty asked, reading from a clipboard.
“No,” said Pete.
“No coughing, diarrhea, sore throat?”
Pete shook his head.
“Don’t be offended,” said the doctor. “We have to ask everybody.”
“I’m not offended at all,” Pete answered.
The doctor turned and reached in a drawer for a small plastic cylinder. He wrote a tiny serial number on it and handed it to Pete. “Here, wear this on your belt: your personal dosimeter. It will keep track of how much radiation you receive from the reactor. Don’t worry, it won’t be much. I read them once a month, and all of us have negligible doses, even guys like the captain and Ramirez who have been here for years.” He pointed to a row of binders, one for each crewman, past and present. Ramirez’s was thick with paper, one sheet representing every month onboard.
“Thanks,” said Pete, undoing his belt to attach the device.
“It’s a hell of a thing,” said the doctor.
“What’s that?” said Pete.
“Your mission. Our mission. You really think the cure is out there?”
Pete shrugged. “You’re a doctor, don’t you believe in cures?”
He smiled wryly. “Of course I do. I’m just not sure I still believe in patrol orders.”
After his physical, Pete met Ramirez back in the stateroom.
“Home sweet home,” said Ramirez as he walked in.
“How long have you been at sea?” he asked, remembering the folder with Ramirez’s exposure tracking.
He squinted his eyes, as if deep in thought. “Five years and two months. Longer than anybody except the captain.”
“And you’ve been engineer the whole time?”
He nodded. “Yep. And Frank is weapons officer, Moody is XO. That’s it — four watchstanders. The ship was designed to operate with no fewer than six, originally, but here we are.”
“What about the doctor?”
“Not a watchstander. Technically, he’s not required to learn a watchstation as the science officer, but it would be, you know, good manners if he did. I hear most doctors on other boats do it.”
“That’s the plan for me?”
Ramirez nodded. “You should be able to complete the qualification in a couple of weeks with all your simulator time. Everything is pretty much automated. But it’ll still be nice to have another name on the watchbill.”
“I’m looking forward to it.”
“Just don’t get too good. They’ll never let you leave.”
Pete laughed. “Is that what happened to you?”
Ramirez nodded. “Yeah. For a while I sent messages requesting a transfer — my sea tour was supposed to end two years ago. They stopped even giving me the courtesy of a response. And I stopped asking — don’t want to look disloyal. In the current environment.”
He held Pete’s gaze.
“Meaning?”
He could tell Ramirez was assessing him, not completely sure if he could trust Pete.
“The captain and I — we’re Navy guys. He went to the academy, I was ROTC at Texas A&M. Frank and Hana — they’re Alliance officers. Pure Alliance.”
“True believers?”
“Exactly. They distrust everyone and anyone who isn’t drinking the Kool-Aid. And they don’t mind letting their bosses know about it.”
“And that includes you?”
“Absolutely. And the captain.”
Pete thought about that.
“What about the doctor?”
Ramirez laughed. “Who knows where he comes from. Medical school, I guess.”
“So why did you volunteer for submarines?”
“That’s a question I ask myself a lot these days,” said Ramirez. “My father was a submariner, I guess that had something to do with it: a captain.”
“What boat?”
“The Alaska. An old Trident. Here,” he said, “let me show you something.”
He reached into his desk and cleared some papers and books out of the way, revealing a small safe. He spun the dial and opened it up. Nestled among a dozen bottles of medicine was a small nine-millimeter pistol.
“This was my dad’s,” he said, pulling it out. “At sea, he slept with it.”
“The drugs, too?”
“No,” he said. “I happen to be the controlled medicinals custodian, one of my many collateral duties, that’s why I’ve got a safe.”
“So why did your dad sleep with a gun?”
“He said that the captain of a Trident submarine was the most vulnerable part of the entire strategic weapons triad. So the minute the boat went alert, he put the purple key around his neck, and this pistol under his pillow.”
Pete took it and hefted it. He dropped the clip. “It’s loaded,” he said.
“Well, he couldn’t very well stop a mutiny or a KGB takeover if it was unloaded,” he said.
“Are you allowed to have this?”
He shrugged. “Not technically. No real small arms allowed on the boats anymore — just a few Tasers and billy clubs. The doc is the only other one who has the combination to the safe, we do a monthly inventory of the drugs together. He never says anything.”
“Maybe he thinks it’s a cigarette lighter.”
Ramirez shook his head vigorously. “God no. Cigarettes would really get me in trouble.”
Pete spent the next days learning the ship’s systems, usually with Ramirez but also standing watch with Moody, Frank, and the captain. Ramirez had been right, the ship was easy to learn, the systems supremely well engineered, and with Pete’s technical acumen he soon learned them all. While he didn’t have the competence they’d all gathered after thousands of hours on the conn, the simulator and the attention of Commander Ase had served him well, and he was soon trusted enough that they signed his qualification book and made him an officer of the deck. They honored the occasion in the wardroom with a real meal, a chicken that had been saved deep in the freezer for a special occasion, and a bottle of wine that the captain brought down from his stateroom. Only Moody wasn’t present, as someone had to stand watch in the control room.