Polaris

WELCOME ABOARD THE USS POLARIS

The officers and men of the USS Polaris extend to you a sincere WELCOME. It is our pleasure to have you as our guests. As your hosts, we hope that your visit on board will be informative, interesting, and enjoyable.

Watchstanders will be happy to answer any questions you may have as long as they do not interfere with assigned duties.

Should any emergency situation arise, alarms will be sounded and the word will be passed. You are requested to STAND FAST, BUT CLEAR of all passageways and operating areas. Do not obstruct ladders, hatches, or watertight doors. Allow ship’s personnel to perform required action without interference. Members of the ship’s company will explain the situation as soon as possible.

Do not operate equipment or switches, position any valves, or enter any posted areas without prior approval from ship’s force to do so. Observe posted precautions and procedures in all operations.

Certain aspects of the ship’s operational characteristics and certain areas of the ship are classified. The Radio Room, Sonar Room, Navigation Center, Missile Control Central, and the Engine Room are classified areas.

CHAPTER ONE

He sensed the pain before opening his eyes. Slowly he regained consciousness. It was dark and loud, his eyes stung from smoke, and his ears rang from the multiple discordant alarms that rang just outside the door. His face was pressed against a steel floor. He rolled over onto his back and looked upward, trying to get his bearings and let the splitting pain in his head subside, but there was nothing to see, just more steel, pipes, and cables. He felt a momentary panic, afraid that he’d been swallowed whole by a giant machine.

He sat up, felt something heavy in his hand. He was startled to see he held a nine-millimeter pistol.

He slowly pulled himself to his feet, waiting for the disorientation to pass. Where am I? He saw the sweeping arc of a yellow alarm light through the crack in the door. Several kinds of smoke combined in the air he inhaled: the sharp ozone of electrical fire, the sour tang of gunpowder. He shook his head, but the disorientation didn’t pass.

He made his way to a small metal sink at the end of the bunks. The sink was made to fold into the wall. Reluctantly putting the gun down, he pushed a button, and a narrow stream of cold water ran out. He filled his hands with the frigid water and buried his face in them, savoring the coldness that snapped him awake. For the first time, he looked into the mirror that was above the sink.

A bumper sticker, cracked and faded, had been pasted across the top: POLARIS: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM. The silhouettes of two submarines faced each other in the background, one very old, he somehow knew, with a flat missile deck and a boxy tower, and one very new and much larger. A big, modern submarine. The submarine he was aboard.

Focusing suddenly on his own reflection, he saw he was in the blue uniform of a submarine officer, a nametag embroidered onto his chest: HAMLIN.

Only then did he notice the gash above his left eye, caked in blood.

He heard hard, quick footsteps outside the door, hurried climbing down a metal ladder, but somehow sensed he wasn’t ready to venture outside the stateroom yet. He desperately wanted some idea of what was going on first. Taking the gun back off the sink, he turned and faced the darkness.

The bunks were made with military precision, a contrast to the papers that had been thrown around the rest of the room. Military documents stamped SECRET combined with personal effects on the floor: photos of girlfriends, of dogs, handwritten letters in pastel-colored envelopes. For the first time Hamlin became aware of movement, a slight rolling at his feet; the ship was under way. Where it was going, and where it came from, remained a mystery. At least to him. A battery-powered battle lantern was affixed to the overhead. He found the switch and turned it on. Its single beam of light crossed the room, landing on the form of a person, sitting, head slumped forward.

Pete raised the gun, startled. “Hey!” he said. No response.

He stepped forward just as the ship rolled again, and the body fell over, revealing a stark, lifeless face, a hole in the middle of his forehead. The light of the battle lantern reflected a thick streak of gore on the bulkhead where he’d been leaning.

Hamlin read his nametag: RAMIREZ. He felt a stab of sadness and knew somehow that Ramirez had been his friend, even though he didn’t remember him. He stepped back and felt a growing sense of horror as the dead man stared at him accusingly, and he felt the weight of the gun in his hand.

Someone grabbed his shoulder from behind.

He whipped around, gun raised.

It was a strikingly beautiful woman wearing a uniform like his, but with oak leaves embroidered on her collar. Her nametag read MOODY. She had a wound, too, a torn sleeve that revealed a gash on her upper arm, and she looked breathless with exhaustion. Unlike Hamlin, though, she seemed to know exactly what was going on. Also unlike Hamlin, she seemed exhilarated.

“Jesus, Hamlin, relax. It’s me.”

Slowly he lowered the gun.

She stepped past him into the stateroom and looked at Ramirez. Amazed, she looked back at Pete, and then back at the corpse again.

“Is he dead?”

Pete nodded.

She knelt down, searched his pockets, looked at the papers that had fallen from his desk onto the floor. “Good. You stopped him before he did any more damage.”

Satisfied with her search of the body, she stood and looked at Hamlin quizzically. “Are you okay?”

“I’m… really not sure.”

She stepped toward him and looked him in the eye. “I’m sorry you had to do this,” she said. “Truly. But you did the right thing. You might have saved the ship. And — you’ll never have to prove your loyalty to me again.”

They both looked down at the body a final time.

“Let’s go,” she finally said. “We’re not out of the woods yet.”

CHAPTER TWO

“The control room is secure,” she said as they walked briskly through the narrow passageway. “Along with missile control. The good guys are back in charge now.” She was moving fast, a natural athlete riding a charge of adrenaline.

“Good,” said Hamlin. He somehow knew they were moving forward in the ship, but little else seemed familiar to him. He felt the comforting weight of the pistol in his pocket as they moved.

They stopped at a motor generator room, scarred heavily with streaks of black soot and charred insulation. A heavy layer of smoke clung to the overhead, and thick gray foam dripped from every surface.

“The automatic extinguishers kicked in immediately, put the fire out. But both motor generators are trashed. We’ve switched all the vital loads, but there are some lighting busses we can’t reenergize. There are parts of the ship that are dark, parts of the ship that are cold, and probably will be for a while. Especially with our engineer—” She pointed back toward his stateroom. “—gone.”

Hamlin started to reach out to touch the damp wall when Moody grabbed his hand with surprising force.

“You know better than that,” she said. “We haven’t overhauled this yet, might still be energized and dangerous. We can’t lose you now.”

He put his hand down.

“Are you hurt?” she asked.

He shook his head. He thought better of telling her about the complete amnesia that seemed to have befallen him. “My head,” he said truthfully. “It’s killing me.”

She reached up and touched his forehead with surprising tenderness. “The bastard got you good,” she said. “We’ll get that bandaged up. When we can.”

They walked by the radio room, where a half dozen computer monitors blinked and an acrid smell hung thick in the air. “He started with radio,” said Moody. “Took out communications before he did anything else. It’s completely wrecked, we’ll be lucky to get any of it working.”

As they continued forward they came upon a room that Hamlin knew was sonar. They approached a screen.

Moody pointed at a symbol, an upside down V in the center of the screen. “Our shadow. No change. We’ve made their job easy today, with all the noise we’ve been making. No change in range, about one nautical mile behind us, as always.”

She hit some buttons on the screen, and the display changed, a banner reading DRONE CLOUD appearing at the top of the screen. The thought of drones resonated with Pete; he knew that once he’d had deep familiarity with them. Along with all his memories, that was gone, but it left a shadow of dread inside him.

“Normal,” she said. “Medium density. Direct overpasses every fifteen minutes or so.” They continued walking.

“Propulsion is in good shape,” she continued after a moment. “I think that was probably going to be his next stop, before you got him. The screw is still turning and the lights are still burning. Most of the lights, anyway.”

Hamlin had a sudden vivid memory of close-quarters fighting: fists, blood, and screams. His head hurt with the memory.

They were nearing the control room, Hamlin knew. Immediately aft of it was an escape trunk, a large steel egg with beveled ends that was designed to allow an emergency escape from a crippled submarine. The bottom of the trunk penetrated from the overhead. Its access hatch at the very bottom was open, its ladder cast aside.

“You need to see this,” she said. “We converted the forward escape trunk into a makeshift brig. There’s actually a procedure for that, believe it or not.”

Hamlin stepped beneath the trunk.

“Be careful,” she said. “He’s dangerous.”

Hamlin looked up and saw that a heavy steel grid had been affixed to the bottom of the trunk, fastened by heavy bolts on the outside. He could also see the soles of two shoes on the grid above his head, a pair of standard-issue Navy oxfords.

Suddenly the prisoner looked down, between his legs, and saw Hamlin. He immediately threw himself to his hands and knees.

“Pete!” he said. “Thank god you’re here!”

His face was dirty and his eyes were frantic, but Pete thought he recognized something just as he had in Ramirez: a friend.

“Finn,” he said, surprising himself with the memory of a name.

“You’ve got to get me out of here!”

Suddenly Moody stepped to Pete’s side, into the view of the prisoner.

McCallister’s face darkened. “Moody? Pete, why are you with her?”

“That’s right, McCallister, he’s with me. And you’re in there, trapped like the animal you are.”

“Pete!” The intensity of his shouting made Hamlin wince. “You’ve got to get away from her!”

“Shut up, McCallister,” she said.

“She’s going to destroy us all!”

Moody suddenly pushed Pete aside and pulled something from her pocket. She pointed it up at the steel grid and fired it.

An electric blue arc jumped from her hands to the steel grid that McCallister knelt upon. Sparks shot across the chamber. McCallister howled and tried to jump away from the pain, but there was nowhere to hide inside the metal cell. He screamed and bounced off the sides of it in agony as Moody held her finger down on the trigger, a grim smile on her face.

When she finally relented, McCallister collapsed to the grid, his face pressed against it, breathless, almost unconscious. A thin stream of drool escaped his mouth and fell between Moody and Hamlin.

“I guess you’re done talking now,” she said, reholstering the Taser.

McCallister muttered in pain. “Pete…” he said. “Help me.…”

“Ignore him,” said Moody. “He’s a traitor.”

WELCOME ABOARD THE USS POLARIS

Captain McCallister is a native of Dennison, Ohio, and is the son of Mr. and Mrs. Finnegan McCallister, Sr. He received his commission in June 2009 upon graduation from the United States Naval Academy. Following graduation, he received Nuclear Power and Submarine Training.

Captain McCallister reported to the USS Alabama (SSBN 731) in December 2010. He served in division officer assignments prior to transfer in June 2013 to Naval Ballistic Missile School. Subsequently he was assigned to the USS Seawolf (SSN 21) from October 2013 to October 2015. Captain McCallister attended the Submarine Officer Advanced Course (SOAC) from October 2015 to March 2016 before reporting to the USS Newport News (SSN 750) as engineer for a three-year tour.

Starting in March 2019, Captain McCallister took a series of roles within Naval Sea Systems Command to design and build the new class of Polaris submarines. Working at the right hand of Admiral Wesley Stewart, the father of the Polaris program, he was an integral part of the team that designed the weapons suite as well as the long-life nuclear fueling program designed to increase the duration of submarines.

Captain McCallister assumed command of the USS Polaris in May 2027. He remained in command as the Polaris was assigned to support the Alliance in 2029.

Captain McCallister’s personal decorations include the Legion of Merit with a Gold Star, the Alliance Bronze Star, Meritorious Service Medal with a Gold Star, Navy Commendation Medal with three Gold Stars, and the Navy Achievement Medal with two Gold Stars.

CHAPTER THREE

Hana Moody and Pete Hamlin climbed a short ladder into the control room. Standing on the conn was a muscular lieutenant who was studying a green sonar console. He jumped to his feet when they entered.

“Commander Moody!” he said, clearly ecstatic to see her. His biceps bulged in his uniform sleeves and he practically leapt toward them. He was attracted to Moody, it was obvious. But as he started talking, it was evident to Hamlin that he craved her approval as much as he craved her body.

“Were you worried, Holmes? Think I can’t handle a few mutineers? And look what I found,” she said, waving her hand at Pete.

“Glad you could help out,” said Holmes with a sneer. “Now that the fighting’s done.”

“He did his share,” she said. “He killed Ramirez.”

“What?” said Frank, shocked.

“I saw the body myself,” she said. “Got him in the head, killed him with one shot.” Moody reached up and for the second time touched Pete’s wounded head. “So it looks like he was in the fight at least as much as you were.”

Stung by the words, Holmes glared at Pete. “Looks like he was kicking your ass before you got to his gun.”

Pete shook his head, waiting for the memory to come back to him. “Maybe so,” he said.

Frank sneered at Pete’s lack of a comeback.

Moody guided Pete over to the computer screen where Holmes had been staring.

“Still there?” she said.

“Still,” said Holmes. “Always one to two miles behind us. Never maneuvering too close, never completely drifting away. I’m sure it was easy for them to track us during the fight, god knows there was plenty of noise.”

Hana turned toward Pete. “We still don’t know if she’s friend or foe, no way to tell. If she’s a Typhon boat, they’re still not making their move.”

Typhon. The word jolted Hamlin. He knew that Typhon was their enemy, one of the few distinct memories to return to him. But was the word an acronym of a foreign slogan? Part of a phrase made pronounceable for English speakers? A slur against all those who would kill them? Pete strained to remember but wasn’t sure he’d ever known.

“But if it’s Typhon, they made no move to attack us during the mutiny,” she continued.

“We should attack them first!” said Holmes.

Moody sighed impatiently. “What if that’s an Alliance boat? And they somehow got word about the mutiny? They may just be trying to determine if the mutiny succeeded or not, ready to blow us out of the water if they think we’re in the hands of the enemy.”

“Not if we get her first.”

“And then we’ve got every submarine out here after us: Alliance and Typhon. Stick to driving, Frank, and leave the thinking to us.”

Holmes turned red at the insult. “Hey, hotshot,” he said to Pete. “Why don’t you take the conn for a while? I’ve been up here for hours.”

Moody looked at them both, and nodded in approval.

“Sure,” said Hamlin, unsure what to do next. He stepped toward Frank, hoping that some knowledge of the task at hand would materialize. At least the mechanics of how to take the watch. But nothing came to him.

“Would you like to know our course and speed?” said Holmes after a moment, mocking him.

“Of course,” said Hamlin.

“Ship is on course two-four-zero, twelve knots, depth seven hundred feet,” he said. “Rigged for general emergency. The port nonvital bus is deenergized because of the fire in the motor generators. I’m guessing about half our lights are out. Sierra One, our shadow, is still behind us, about one mile abaft.”

“OK,” Hamlin responded.

Holmes looked at him in disbelief. “Did you just say ‘OK’?!” He looked to Moody for affirmation, and then back at Hamlin. “How about, ‘I am ready to relieve you’? That’s the customary phrase at this point.”

“I am ready to relieve you,” he said.

“No, you’re not,” said Moody, stepping forward suddenly. She looked him up and down impatiently. “You’re hurt worse than you look, aren’t you?”

“Maybe,” said Hamlin.

Holmes sighed loudly in disgust.

Suddenly Moody turned and slapped Holmes across the face, stunning them all. “I’ll relieve you, Frank, how’s that? Go belowdecks and eat, or read a comic book, or whatever it is you do in your free time, you weak son of a bitch.”

Holmes trembled in rage and shame.

“Go!” she said. “Now! I relieve you! I have the deck and the conn.”

Holmes stormed out of the control room, leaving the two of them standing there.

She stared at Pete with concern. “You always were tough,” she said. “Don’t risk the ship on it.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She looked around to verify that no one else was in the control room, and leaned in. “I love it when you call me that,” she whispered in his ear.

She then stepped back. “Now get yourself to sick bay, Hamlin, and pull yourself together.”

He waited a moment before responding. “Yes, ma’am.”

Moody exhaled deeply as Hamlin walked out of the control room. Could she trust him? She’d seen the gun in his hand, seen Ramirez dead at his feet. Still, he seemed off, perhaps hurt worse than it appeared. She would ask the doctor after he’d had a chance to look him over; maybe he’d medicate him with something. If the drugs were good enough, maybe they could all use a dose. For now, she knew only the next step in the patrol order, the one thing the captain had shared with her, and he’d done that only when he had to. But it was a doozy: they were going to drive through the old Pacific degaussing range. Ever since she found that out, she’d been trying to figure out what it meant for the rest of their mission.

And she could only guess, because no one would tell her.

But now Hamlin wouldn’t have any choice. He would have to show her the complete patrol order so they could fulfill the mission. And Hamlin should trust her, shouldn’t he? She’d thwarted those two traitors, one of whom Pete himself had killed.

From the beginning, she hadn’t known what to make of him. Maybe it was a natural by-product of him being on the ship the least amount of time — a few weeks, when Frank, the next-newest crew member, had been onboard for two solid years, never stepping outside the hull that entire time. They all knew each other like one big dysfunctional family, living in a house with no windows that they could never leave.

But it was more than that: Pete was opaque. He wasn’t quite Alliance, and he wasn’t quite Navy. But the simple fact was now she had to trust him.

And surely he could see that she had only one goal: the mission. And beyond that, the Alliance. It was all a big joke to McCallister and Ramirez, always had been, a punch line. The Alliance officers like her and Frank, with their coloring-book training and their in-depth knowledge of Alliance dogma. Moody could debate them into the ground about international politics. Unfortunately, on a submarine that had been on patrol for far too long, that was much less important than being able to keep a main feed pump working, or the generators going. At least in Captain McCallister’s eyes.

But that’s why she was here; that’s why the Alliance had put her onboard, made her second-in-command. Because she believed in the mission with the same kind of purity Ramirez had tried to get out of his roaring evaporators. From the cold murk of the ocean that surrounded them, he could produce water a thousand times cleaner than anything available on land, a requirement for his nuclear power plant. That’s what was required with ideology, too; it had to be even purer at sea than anywhere else, to hold up under the relentless pressure that constantly tested them all. Ramirez had never believed that, and neither had the captain. But now: she was in charge.

She looked down at the display and checked again for the two undeniable realities in their ocean at the present time: the next step of their mission, represented by the two bright, straight lines of the degaussing range fifty miles ahead. The lines were superimposed electronically on the screen, essentially drawn on by the computer. It was a motionless, silent structure that was invisible to their sonar, or anyone else’s. The bright lines on the screen conveyed certainty, but they were just the coordinates they’d inputted, a visual representation of where the range was supposed to be.

The upside-down V behind them on the screen represented less certainty, but was at least the result of real acoustic information, the thin but steady stream of noise that came to them from their shadow, the other submarine that had dogged them for days. Despite what she told Frank, she was certain she was a Typhon boat, based not only on her menacing posture but also on that noise: she was too loud to be an Alliance boat. A modern Alliance craft in their baffles like that would be silent and invisible. She sat down on the small foldout seat in front of the console, fiddled with the range, and realized for the first time how exhausted she was.

It was hard to believe that just three years earlier she’d been a high school teacher. Business and Econ, her only responsibility a roomful of disinterested eleventh graders in Oak Lawn, Illinois. It was a working-class area, the kind of area that the military had always fed on: patriotic kids without a lot of options. So when the war heated up, Oak Lawn sent its share to all three services, and Ms. Moody was one of the teachers who encouraged them, making her a friend to the recruiters that periodically swept through the halls giving away ARMY OF ONE T-shirts and promises of upward mobility, college tuition, and adventure.

At first, like most of the teachers, she was conflicted about sending the kids away. Even though she believed deeply that it was the right thing, she knew many of them would end up in harm’s way, and some of them would end up hurt, or even dead. Many of the teachers quietly discouraged kids from joining for just that reason, although they soon learned to keep their mouths shut about any doubts they had. Teachers were public employees, and public employees who were labeled as unpatriotic soon found their careers limited. Especially as the enemy had one success after another in the Pacific, and the war seemed to close in on them all.

But as time went on, Moody began to actually envy those kids. The war consumed all the media, and it was clear, as the Alliance coalesced in a last-ditch effort to defeat Typhon, that democracy itself was at stake. Many of her former students were in the fight, doing something about it. They would come back to school occasionally, with their uniforms and their ribbons, and sometimes even with their wounds, and she could see it in their eyes: their lives had purpose in a way that hers did not. Meanwhile she continued to count textbooks and teach supply and demand, the Laffer curve, and price elasticity.

Finally, one day, a Navy recruiter lingered in her room after giving the standard pitch to her kids, and they struck up a conversation about officer programs. She fit the criteria, he enthusiastically told her: she was young, single, a college graduate. She found herself surprised as she listened, surprised at how right it all felt. She gave herself one more day to think about it, and then she drove down to the recruiting office, sandwiched between the Department of Motor Vehicles and a Laundromat, and volunteered to be a US Naval Officer. Over the next few days, she filled out a stack of forms with her personal information, took a short medical exam and a basic math test. The fantasy grew in her mind with each step: military glory, exotic ports of call, her own return to Oak Lawn in uniform, an example to all.

One week later, the Navy rejected her.

The embarrassed recruiter was flabbergasted. He tried his best to assuage her, afraid it would turn her against the entire recruiting program, of which she had become Oak Lawn High School’s biggest supporter. He attributed it to an unusually good month for officer program recruiting, her lack of a technical degree, some kind of glitch in her application. He asked her repeatedly if perhaps she had something dark in her past that would have come to light in the initial background check, perhaps a youthful DUI or a shoplifting arrest. He finally left her alone in her classroom when it became clear that she now regarded his shoulder boards and ribbons as an insult, a reminder of her rejection.

For two weeks she simmered about it. The school year ended, and she resigned herself to a life in her small classroom, perhaps inspiring her students toward adventure, or maybe even glory, but never tasting it herself. Perhaps after the war and retirement, she thought, she could take a budget trip to Europe and see Rome or Paris.

Then one day as she sat at her desk in an empty classroom, compiling another semester of grades, a stranger walked into her room.

“Ms. Moody?” he said with a smile. “I’m Chad Walker. I’m a recruiter with the Alliance.” He handed her a business card that had no rank or title, just a name, phone number, and email address. And he wore no uniform, just a tasteful dark suit. She invited him to sit down. He somehow managed to look perfectly comfortable in the undersized desk — chair combo right in front of her.

The Alliance needed officers, too, he told her. Men and women who would work alongside the traditional military. People like her were desperately needed. “And I believe,” he said, looking her right in the eye, “that you would thrive as a military officer.”

“Would I have a military rank?” she asked. “A normal uniform? Could I do any job in the military?”

Walker answered yes to all her questions. You’ll have all the same opportunities as a traditional military officer, he assured her. The war effort, and recent legislation, guarantees it.

“So what’s the difference between being an officer in the Alliance and being an officer in the regular Navy?”

Barely any difference at all, he said with a chuckle. If you ascend high enough, you would eventually end up working at Alliance headquarters, rather than at the Pentagon. But in the trenches, you’ll be a military officer, with the same privileges and responsibilities.

She said yes before he left her classroom.

There was a background check again, and another skills test. While the Navy had asked her math questions, the Alliance asked her political questions, and she wasn’t always sure what answer they wanted to hear. Did she always vote? Had she ever run for office? Could she name the five original member countries of the Alliance? Could she name its current commander? Did she believe that every nation could function as a democracy? She sweated over the answers, desperate not to feel the sting of rejection again.

Two weeks after her physical, she got a congratulatory letter and her orders. She would begin basic orientation at the Alliance Training Center in the countryside west of Baltimore in one month. The orders contained a list of items she was to bring with her to training, and what not to bring: “minimal” cosmetics were allowed. Playing cards were not. The congratulatory letter was from the Alliance Commander, whose name, she saw, she had gotten incorrect on the entrance exam. She resigned from the Oak Lawn school district the next day.

Chad Walker was right about one thing: Moody did thrive as a military officer. She found an athleticism she never knew she had during training, excelling on the obstacle course, the daily runs, and the hand-to-hand combat sessions. She learned to her surprise that she was still a very good swimmer, her best sport in high school, cutting through the water so efficiently that she lost herself in the process, swimming laps until she lost count and had to pull herself exhausted up the ladder. The order and rigor of military life came easily to her; she was one of those people the military has always coveted, a person who found great comfort in being part of a system.

“Systems” was a keyword in her Alliance training, a shorthand for the simplified block diagrams they used to explain everything. The entire submarine was reduced to three blocks labeled CONTROL, WEAPONS, and PROPULSION. Turn a page and propulsion was reduced to blocks of PRIMARY and SECONDARY. One more page and the primary system was turned into blocks of NUCLEAR REACTOR, MAIN COOLANT PUMPS, and STEAM GENERATORS. Occasionally they would drag in an actual engineer who would show them photographs of pumps, breakers, and pipes, but it all looked drab and undramatic, indistinguishable blobs covered in wires and lime-green insulation, objects whose appearance seemed unworthy of their exalted positions and titles on the block diagrams. The reactor itself, the holy grail of the ship, the block that touched in some way every other block of every other diagram, looked like a large steel trash can penetrated by a dozen ordinary-looking pipes. After studying its characteristics and the nearly magical process of nuclear fission, seeing what a real reactor looked like filled Moody with the exact same flavor of disappointment she’d felt when she lost her virginity.

All the block diagrams were compiled in a softcover book that they were encouraged to take notes on, and it was universally referred to, by teachers and students, as “the engineering coloring book.”

The philosophy of the Alliance was treated similarly, in a separate coloring book: broad outlines in a neat, digestible framework. The pre-Alliance world was shown as a jumble of democratic nations, represented by small- and medium-sized blocks — the United States, Britain, Canada — all jumbled on a page, their energies directed in different directions, friendly but tragically unorganized. Opposing them, on the opposite page, was a large, unified block that contained inside it the allied nations of Typhon. Ominously, they were lined up neatly inside the Typhon block, and the lines of their individual borders were dissolving, as if Typhon were feeding on them to gain strength against the peaceful, unorganized nations it preyed upon.

On the next page, though, the Alliance was born: a giant dotted line that surrounded the friendly countries, which had suddenly lined up neatly to face their enemies in the Typhon block. Moody gathered that because the Alliance nations kept their solid borders intact despite their overarching block, they were still free and independent, just better organized to fight their enemy. Twice during their political course, they got word from their instructors that allegiances had shifted. An Alliance nation shifted to Typhon, and a Typhon nation shifted to the Alliance, and they were instructed to scratch out and hand-draw them in their updated positions on the appropriate pages of the coloring book.

She excelled at every stage of training, graduating number one in her class, and was given her choice of orders. She chose Polaris, the most advanced submarine in the fleet.

Once onboard, she soon found out that Chad, her recruiter, wasn’t right about everything. She was not indistinguishable from other military officers. In fact, since their uniforms were all the same, it was generally the first thing officers asked each other at the officers’ club, or the Navy Exchange, or the base gym while making small talk. And it was clear that when you answered “Alliance,” this was somehow a second-class status. Over beers, some regular officers would even confide in her, often while trying to romance her, that while they weren’t talking about her, of course, everybody knew that the Alliance officers were generally men and women who’d been rejected by the regular military. The Alliance recruiters got lists of every reject, which became their feeding ground. The highest compliment that anyone could pay an Alliance officer was that they probably could have made it as a regular. This was a compliment that, to Moody’s disgust, the Alliance officers even paid to each other.

It all just made her work harder, volunteer for every tough position, and pounce on it with a giant chip on her shoulder. On the Polaris, she attacked her qualifications and was promoted twice in a year. After two more years of impeccable fitness reports, and setting a squadron record for the physical fitness test, she was promoted to second-in-command. She got another personalized letter from the Alliance Commander, and oak leaves for her uniform. They had a real dinner in the wardroom to mark the occasion, with a roast beef that Ramirez had found in the darkest recesses of the deep freeze, served with respectable gravy and a loaf of fresh bread that was downright good. After the meal, Captain McCallister pinned the oak leaves on her collar and told her that he was delighted to have her as his Executive Officer.

Just a week later, she stepped into the galley to get a cup of coffee before taking the watch. The coffeepot was full and fresh, and the wardroom door was closed, indicating that someone was having a conversation that they didn’t want overheard. She filled her cup and stood silently for just a minute, her curiosity piqued.

“So that’s the way it is?” She could hear Ramirez through the door.

“She’s worked hard,” said McCallister. “As hard as any officer I’ve ever known. She deserves this. I would have made her my XO regardless.”

“I don’t work hard, Captain?”

“I need you in engineering. She’s not qualified to run that plant, and you know that.”

“So I’m too qualified to be XO?”

“Stop whining,” said the captain, not without affection in his voice. “You’re a fine officer, you’ll get your chance.”

“If I can’t get promoted on this boat, I’ll never get promoted. They’ll never let me off. That’s the curse of an engineer.”

There was a pause; then the captain spoke quietly. “Everything OK with Tracy?”

“Fine,” said Ramirez. “I get letters every mail call, filled with pictures. I send letters every mail call. We’re great at this now, we’ve mastered it.”

“Are you worried?”

“Worried that we might just be good at this: being a couple that never actually sees each other.”

“There’s a war on,” said the captain. “That’s the world we live in. And we’re all beholden to the needs of the Navy.”

“The needs of the Navy?” asked Ramirez. “Or the needs of the Alliance?”

“Tell yourself whatever you need to tell yourself to keep this submarine running and to fulfill our mission. I personally don’t give a shit if you do it for the Alliance or if you do it for the Navy.”

“Did you have to promote her, Captain? Did somebody tell you to?”

There was a long pause as the captain considered his answer. “Yes,” he said. “It’s been encouraged for some time now: they want Alliance officers in command positions. But the guidance was widely ignored. So they formalized it. Every boat gets a Number Two from the Alliance.”

“So Moody is a token.”

“Would you rather have Frank Holmes as your XO?”

They paused for a moment; Hana pictured them drinking their coffee, the easy camaraderie they would never share with her.

Ramirez finally spoke. “To think, they told me an engineering degree would be good for my career.”

“Yeah?” said the captain. “They told me I’d be fighting Russians.”

“Commander Moody?”

She was snapped awake by the appearance of Frank Holmes, that muscular, dogmatic, slightly dense incarnation of the Alliance officer stereotype.

“Sorry,” she said. “I think I fell asleep for a second.”

“About earlier…”

“Forget it,” she said with a wave of her hand.

“Do you want a relief, ma’am? Hit the rack for a few minutes?”

It was incredibly tempting, but her eyes drifted down to the screen in front of her, where they had inched closer to the degaussing range, and their shadow had stayed, maddeningly, the same distance away.

“No,” she said. “No time. Find Hamlin. I sent him to medical a few minutes ago to get fixed up. Tell him to slap a Band-Aid on his head and to meet me in the wardroom so we can talk about what’s next.”

Frank snapped to attention with ridiculous precision. “Aye, aye, Captain.”

He spun on his heel and walked down the ladder to find Hamlin.

CHAPTER FOUR

Two miles away, on the Typhon submarine, Commander Jennifer Carlson listened to the recording from sonar. Her second-in-command, Lieutenant Banach, stood next to her. She pushed a button, and listened again.

“Any ideas?” she asked Banach.

He shrugged. “It’s loud.” He spoke with the thick accent of his native province, and he’d learned to speak in short direct sentences to avoid confusion.

She nodded back. “Thank you for that penetrating analysis, Lieutenant.”

Carlson was the purest killer Typhon had, in any branch of the military. On the first day of the war, three long years earlier, she’d sunk two Alliance warships in the South China Sea: a guided missile cruiser, and a destroyer that was sent to destroy her. Afterward, she’d steamed among the wreckage, taking photographs through the scope, looking at what they’d done with their two torpedoes, and acquired a taste for killing that had never been sated. She didn’t believe in politics, diplomacy, or anything that Military Intelligence told her. She wasn’t even all that fond of nuclear power, which kept her highly engineered killing machine moving through the water. She believed only in torpedoes, missiles, and, when thing got really tight, bullets. She believed in angles of attack, ranges, and keeping her baffles clear. Because she was pure, the crew adored her.

She hit play again.

“You’re right,” she said. “It is loud.”

In fact, for them to hear noise from an Alliance submarine with their crude sensors, it had to be deafening. “I hear hatches slamming shut, depth changing, alarms. Maybe even a gunshot.”

“Impossible,” said Banach. “They carry no small arms onboard Polaris-class boats.”

“Well, they also say that Polaris-class boats are silent, so I guess you can’t believe everything you read.”

“Do you think our man onboard is taking over? Giving us a signal that the mutiny is complete?”

“No,” she said, “unfortunately. They are still submerged, still cruising. Maybe it was a failed attempt.”

“Such weakness,” he said. “Our crew could easily overpower us if they chose to mutiny.”

“True, they are armed to the teeth, and extremely bored.”

“What shall we do?”

“Stay on it,” she said. “Same range. They don’t seemed inclined to shoot us at the moment. We should have some contact soon from our spy; if he’s still alive, maybe he’ll fill us in.”

“Aye, Captain.”

She put the headphones on and listened again, let her imagination go to work on the noise. Banach hadn’t learned it yet, but on a ship with no windows and very limited sensors, an imagination was a vital military asset. She pictured the submarine in front of her, and tried to picture the chaos within. She badly wanted to shoot them, and they were there for the taking. But she’d learned from her experience with the airplane; it was better to shoot somebody on their return from Eris Island, not on their journey there. Take out the vessel and their precious cargo.

The temptation was great because she needed to kill an enemy submarine; it was a gap in her résumé. She’d come close once, very close, in an episode that was now taught to midshipmen in her home country, and celebrated on military holidays.

It was in those early days off Eris Island, one year into the war, when they were watching the drones take off endlessly through the scope. Initially they’d tried to count them all, but it proved impossible. Instead they tried to count how many took off in an hour, and then counted the hours. A few times the drones had seemed to notice her scope, and they quickly submerged, moved to a different sector, and resumed their surveillance of the island. Other than the drones, they had the ocean around Eris to themselves. No Allied ship came anywhere near them.

Carlson sent messages to fleet headquarters. They replied indifferently, asking pointedly if she had plans to surveil any targets of military value. Then the drones began dropping their little bombs on their surface ships, and the commodore asked her why she hadn’t sent more thorough reports about the drone menace.

At some point, a daring Allied submarine commander decided to take a peek at the waters around the island as well — perhaps looking for her, perhaps just equally curious about the business at Eris Island. He was able to completely sneak up on them. The Allied submarine service had made a cult out of silence, and her primitive sonar couldn’t have detected a submarine that was twice as loud. Her submarine was designed to be durable and cheap, so they could manufacture them in vast quantities and overwhelm the enemy. This might have been helpful to the commodore, who commanded twenty-six boats, but it did little good to Carlson, who had only one. Banach was in control when the enemy attacked.

“Torpedo in the water!” he shouted into the intercom. By the time she ran into control, Banach was already turning sharply toward the unmistakable sound of muzzle doors opening and a torpedo hurtling toward them.

“Launch the countermeasures!” he said, and suddenly the sound of the screaming torpedoes was replaced by a wall of noise pumped in the water via their noisemakers, shot out of both signal ejectors, one on each side of the Typhon boat.

Carlson looked at the sonar display while Banach tried to save the ship. Their countermeasures appeared to be working; the torpedoes were peeling away.

“Ready bearing and shoot!” he said, sending a bearing to fire control. The enemy ship, of course, far more sophisticated than theirs, remained silent. The only datum they had for her location was the sound of the torpedo being launched. They were two people shooting at each other in a dark room, firing at the muzzle flash.

There was a rumble beneath her feet, a loud whoosh of air, and her ears popped as her submarine fired her torpedo.

“Torpedo is in high speed!” said Banach.

“Very well,” said Carlson. That left them just four torpedoes.

She looked at sonar. The enemy torpedoes were behind them now, drawn to the noise of the countermeasures. But the Alliance weapons were steerable and could turn back, as long as there was a man alive on the Alliance boat.

“Fire another?” asked Banach.

She was contemplating just that when they heard an explosion to starboard.

“They’re hit!” said Banach. Carlson watched the display.

For a few moments, they listened for the telltale sounds of a submarine dying: tanks exploding, the gush of flooding, the desperate roar of an emergency blow system. But nothing came.

“They’re still alive,” she said. She heard something, though, hull popping as the enemy ascended. “But she’s going shallow. They must be hurt.”

“To fight the flooding,” said Banach. “Shall we finish her off?”

Carlson nodded. “Not now,” she said. “We might not have to.”

The wounded ship was noisy, undoubtedly busy trying to save herself. Carlson maneuvered them away from her, to disguise their position, but the Alliance boat seemed like the fight, at least temporarily, had gone out of her. “Take us to PD,” she said. “Let’s see if we can take a look.”

Banach complied and drove the ship carefully upward. Carlson raised the scope right on the bearing of the Alliance submarine. She was making so much noise now, she was impossible to miss, the pumps working to get water off her, men hammering on pipes trying to staunch the flood. She took a quick sweep around, verified there were no drones on top of them. It was clear, for the moment. The drones were like that, they had learned, could come and go with the randomness of a rain squall. She trained the ship’s single eye back on the bearing where she knew the enemy ship was fighting for her life.

“I see her,” she said. “I see the scope.” There it was, like a pencil sticking straight out of the water, a small V behind it as it moved slowly forward.

“Why aren’t they surfacing?” said Banach. “Do they think we don’t know where they are?”

“That can’t be it,” said Carlson. “They’re making too much noise. They really should surface if the flooding is as bad as it sounds. Of course, I’ll shoot them if they do.”

Suddenly a drone caught her eye on the horizon, sweeping lazily across the water, searching.

“I see,” she said.

“Captain?”

“They’re afraid of the drones, just like we are.”

“Drones will attack their own?”

“They will attack anything, they are the dogs of war.”

“So what shall we do?”

She had an idea. “Tell me, Banach, how many of those inflatable lifeboats do we have?”

The question startled him, and he had to think. “Three.”

“And what is the direction of the current?”

Banach went to the chart, did some calculations, and told her. “Just three knots, running southwest.”

“Tell our sergeant to prepare to launch one of those life rafts from torpedo tube number three.”

“Can I explain to him why?”

“I’d rather not say,” said Carlson. “In case it doesn’t work.”

She positioned the boat carefully so the wounded enemy with its periscope was down-current. She thought about timing, watched the random drones that were still in the sky, not having spotted either scope. She wanted to be close enough that by the time the drones spotted the raft, it was directly on top of the enemy, right on its scope ideally. If the drones got to the raft too early, it would be a waste. And then she would have to leave because the drones would eventually spot her scope. Doing the rough math in her head, she crept to about six hundred yards until she finally gave the order.

“Deploy the boat,” she said. She heard the clank of the hatch, the rumble of the torpedo tube ejecting its contents.

“The lifeboat is deployed,” said Banach, taking the report on his headphones as she watched through the scope.

A few seconds later it popped to the surface, a bright orange bundle. Immediately it began to inflate and unfold, growing to full size in seconds. It appeared motionless, but Carlson could see that it was in fact moving with the gentle current toward the enemy’s periscope. It looked almost comical, a big orange tent bobbing happily upon the sea. Triangular panels on the outside had a metallic sheen — radar reflectors, designed to make it highly visible to rescuers. She couldn’t take her eyes off it.

After all, it was designed to be seen.

And soon enough the drones saw it.

The first drone flew directly over it at high speed. Carlson panicked for a moment; it was too early. But the drone didn’t drop its bomb; instead it flew high into the sky. Alerting its brothers, she realized.

A swarm of four came in, flying at high speed and in a direct line. By now, the bright orange boat was directly against the enemy scope.

When the first bomb landed, the lifeboat simply evaporated, like an exploding balloon. Tiny pieces of orange fabric littered the ocean around them like confetti. The more substantial parts of the raft remained afloat, in a pool around the scope, and the drones poured their bombs upon them.

Whether a drone targeted the scope, or it was just a lucky shot that missed the life raft’s detritus, Carlson didn’t know. But the bomb landed directly atop the scope, shattering it, sending smoke and sparks into the sky. Too late, the enemy captain lowered it, undoubtedly with new fires and flooding to combat.

“Shall we finish her off with a torpedo?” said Banach.

“No,” said Carlson, although it pained her. She wanted to preserve her remaining four torpedoes. “They are damaged beyond repair. She is out of the fight. Even if she doesn’t sink.”

“Very good, Captain,” he said. The enemy ship was making a racket as she pulled away, damaged and clinging to life. Carlson could hear alarms onboard from her ship’s hydrophones — the enemy’s overworked pumps — and she imagined the screaming of burned men inside.

“Everything OK, Captain?” Banach had caught her in her reverie.

“Yes,” she said.

“You look angry.”

She nodded. In fact, she was. She knew she’d done the right thing in not finishing her off, in conserving those last four torpedoes, not using another on a ship that was already crippled beyond repair. They were the same four torpedoes that she still possessed, and it was looking like they might very well need them for the fight ahead. But it galled her that the Alliance submarine had gotten away with her life. Galled her that somewhere a submarine captain was sitting in an officers’ club, telling the story of his close call, his escape, his survival.

CHAPTER FIVE

Pete walked away from the control room, still trying to gain his bearings — and to recall some memories of what had happened to the Polaris, and his role in it. He climbed down a ladder as he headed aft to avoid McCallister, locked in a steel cage one level above.

Exiting the forward compartment through a watertight hatch, he stepped into the missile compartment: two parallel rows of missile tubes stretching into the distance like a forest of steel trees. There were few signs of the mutiny in here, save for a wisp of smoke that followed him from the forward compartment and the darkness caused by the partial power outage. But there were signs everywhere of a ship that had been stretched to its limit. A shower room, wedged between two missile tubes, was taped off with a sign: OUT OF COMMISSION. The floor was dusty and the stalls had no curtains. Next to it were two nine-man bunk rooms that were dark, their metal racks bare of any mattresses. It looked like the ship had been designed to carry far more men than she had now, and that she had been reduced, even before the mutiny, to the bare minimum complement. The few lights that remained energized blinked and buzzed, and the air smelled dank, like somewhere below him a bilge needed to be pumped. The Polaris, like her crew, had been at sea far too long.

He reached the end of the missiles and came upon two massive machines that were covered in indicators and dials. One had a large red tag hanging from a breaker that read OUT OF COMMISSION. Its twin looked functional, but wasn’t energized. Pete looked it over for a minute and found a small sign: OXYGEN GENERATORS. Behind the amnesia, his engineer’s mind went to work, looking at the dials and indicators, and soon enough put together a rough picture of how the machines functioned. They took the one natural resource that the submarine had access to in unlimited quantities: water. They placed a large voltage across that and tore the water molecules into their constituent parts: hydrogen and oxygen.

While the machine was turned off, a monitoring panel remained lit — a small diagram of the ship with a digital indicator for each of the three main compartments: forward compartment, missile compartment, and engine room. A selector knob allowed him to choose different attributes to measure: oxygen, carbon monoxide, and carbon dioxide. The oxygen level of the engine room and missile compartment was 20 percent — the number was in green, leading Pete to believe that was in the acceptable range. The forward compartment reading was lower and in bright red: 14 percent. Perhaps a result of the fire? The panel showed an open valve between the oxygen banks and each compartment, and Pete pictured an outlet somewhere dispensing the invisible, odorless air that they all needed to survive. But the oxygen banks, he saw, were severely depleted. One was completely empty, and the second was at less than one-quarter capacity. Could anyone onboard make that machine run and create new oxygen? Anyone who wasn’t locked in an escape trunk? He continued aft.

Pete surprised himself by arriving at medical. It seemed like a lot of his memories were like that, trapped right below the surface. If someone had asked him how to find medical, he never could have described it. But wandering through the ship, thinking about everything else, he had found his way there.

The door was unlocked. He found a light switch but it did nothing when he flipped it. In the darkness, he could see locked glass cabinets containing gauze and bandages. He tried the doors, hoping he might procure some industrial-grade painkillers, but they were all locked, and despite the chaos that seemed to have descended upon the Polaris, he was reluctant to break into them and violate the thin glass and tiny locks that guarded them.

He walked farther into the room and began opening drawers until he found a thick roll of gauze and a pair of scissors. He started to fumble with the gauze but dropped it, and it rolled across the floor.

As he bent over to pick it up, he heard movement from the corner, and he flinched just enough to avoid a massive blow. It hit him on the shoulder rather than on his head, where it likely would have cracked his skull.

He rolled onto his back and quickly kicked the implement out of his attacker’s hands — it was a small fire extinguisher. His attacker looked briefly like he wanted to say something, but Pete gave him no time. He sprang to his feet, punched his assailant quickly — twice in the kidneys — then threw him to the ground and put him in a merciless choke hold.

He felt the man tapping his arm, trying to speak. He let the pressure off his throat just enough.

“Pete…” he gasped. “It’s me… Doc Haggerty.”

The name was familiar enough that Pete let him go, but he threw him to the ground and stood up, still unsure if he was friend or foe. He felt the gun in his pocket and resolved to use it if necessary.

“Jesus,” he said, rubbing his throat. “You nearly killed me.” He started to get up, but thought better of it, and sat on the deck while Pete looked him over.

“Who are you?” he said.

The man chuckled at first, but then saw he was serious. “Jesus, Peter. I’m John Haggerty. Ship’s doctor. Your friend!”

Vague memories went through Pete’s mind as he looked him over: the dark beard, the intelligent eyes, the professorial glasses. He seemed familiar enough that he reached down to help the doctor to his feet. The doctor warily took his hand.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“No, I’m sorry,” said Haggerty. “I didn’t know what else to do when the mutiny started, so I came back here to guard my little domain.”

Pete nodded. “Trying to fix this,” he said, pointing to the gash on his head.

The doctor looked at him quizzically, and then went to work, skillfully binding up his wound. He looked Pete closely in the eye as he worked. “Do you want to tell me what happened?”

Pete decided that the time had come to trust someone. And this was the ship’s doctor apparently — maybe he could help. He took a deep breath.

“I don’t remember anything,” he said. “I woke up in a stateroom with this cut on my head, and a gun in my hand.”

“A gun?”

Pete nodded, and hesitated. “I think I shot Ramirez.”

The doctor took a moment to take this in, watching Pete carefully as he did.

“You really don’t remember anything?”

Pete nodded.

“You could easily have some short-term amnesia — brought on by that blow to the head. Or, maybe, the trauma of killing your friend. Your memories will probably come back with time. And with rest.”

“How much of either of those am I likely to get?”

He nodded. “Good point.” He looked Pete over hard as he finished, snipping the tape that held the gauze in place. “So you don’t remember our orders? Your mission?”

“Nothing,” said Hamlin.

The doctor sighed and leaned heavily against the wall. “Where do I start? You came here a month ago, sealed orders in hand. When you showed the captain, he brought me in — thought I might be able to help, given the nature of the mission.”

“Which is?”

“You really don’t remember, do you?”

“I wouldn’t be asking you if I did.”

“You carry the fate of the Alliance — and maybe the whole world — on your shoulders.”

“And now I don’t remember a thing. Great.”

The doctor nodded grimly, and seemed ready to speak, when loud footsteps came down the passageway. Frank Holmes appeared at the door.

“You’re needed forward,” he said to Pete. He ignored the doctor. “Captain Moody wants us both in the wardroom, now.”

“What about me?” said the doctor.

Frank smirked. “She didn’t say anything about you. You can stay here.”

Without another word, he turned on his heel and walked away.

Hamlin turned to Haggerty. “I guess I should go.”

He nodded in agreement. Just as Pete walked out, he stopped him. “Pete…”

“Yes?”

“Don’t tell anybody what you’ve told me. Trust no one.”

Pete nodded at that, and followed the sound of Frank’s footsteps ahead of him. As he did, a thought crossed his mind. Why would the captain assign a doctor to help me?

WELCOME ABOARD THE USS POLARIS

The USS Polaris is the first Polaris-class submarine, and the first ship to bear that name. She was named for the Polaris missile, the first submarine-launched nuclear missile, in honor of the contribution that weapon made to world peace during the Cold War.

The keel was laid on October 14, 2020, and the crew was formed in July 2023. On May 19, 2024, Irene Gilchrist, wife of the Honorable James Gilchrist, United States Representative from New York, christened the Polaris during launching ceremonies held in Groton, Connecticut.

Builders’ sea trials were conducted between February and April 2025. Each sea trial set a record for efficiency, and the ship was delivered sixty-eight days early.

On May 25, 2025, USS Polaris was commissioned at Naval Underwater Systems Center, New London, Connecticut.

The ship then commenced shakedown operations and underwent shipwide inspections. The crew completed a Demonstration and Shakedown Operation (DASO), and launched the ship’s first C-6 missile. In April 2026, the ship conducted its first strategic deterrent patrol.

In fall of 2028, the USS Polaris spearheaded a program to assist the community near its homeport in educating local schoolchildren on water-quality issues. “Water for Life,” as this program was christened, has become a landmark project involving local, county, and state agencies in a major cleanup of the area watershed.

On May 29, 2029, operational control of the USS Polaris was given to the Alliance, to aid in their mission of supporting democracy around the world.

CHAPTER SIX

Hamlin walked into the wardroom just behind Holmes. On the table was a pitcher of slightly gray-looking reconstituted milk and a dozen tiny boxes of cereal in a metal mixing bowl. Moody was waiting at the head of the table: the captain’s chair.

“Gentlemen,” she said. “We’ve got some time before we get to the degaussing range. Wanted to get a quick status update. Frank?”

“You’re looking at the entire crew. Not counting the doctor or the one locked in the escape trunk.”

“That’s it then? Three officers. And a doctor somewhere.” She inhaled deeply. “Well, it’ll be tough. The three of us can stay on the conn as much as possible. Use the automated systems when we can. We don’t have much choice. Autopilot is driving us now, seems like that’s working at least.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Frank.

“And how are our systems?”

“Everything vital is running, with the exception of radio. Propulsion is good, all combat systems are good.”

“Oxygen is low,” interrupted Pete. They both looked at him.

“How low?” said Moody.

“Fourteen percent in the forward compartment.”

“Christ, no wonder I was falling asleep up there. Can we increase the bleed?”

“One bank is empty,” said Pete. “The other is less than twenty-five percent.”

“And none of us can operate that oxygen generator,” said Moody. “We’ll just have to ventilate when we can.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said both Frank and Pete.

“One more thing,” said Moody, looking at Frank. “After the degaussing range, take Ramirez to the torpedo room — let’s shoot his body overboard as soon as possible. Before long he’ll start to… smell. Bad for morale. And we’ve already made an unholy racket — one body shot overboard won’t matter much at this point. Do you need help?”

Pete froze, filled with dread that he might have to help move the body of his dead friend, the friend he killed.

“No,” said Frank as he smirked and involuntarily flexed his arms. “I can get him down there.”

“That’s not what I meant,” said Moody, rolling her eyes. “Can you operate the torpedo tubes? Shoot him overboard?”

Frank bristled. “Of course,” he said. “I’ve operated those tubes a dozen times.”

“OK,” said Moody, doubt in her voice. “Just checking. Get help if you need it, just get it done. The sooner the better.”

“Do we want to do the whole burial-at-sea ceremony?” he asked.

“Absolutely not,” said Moody. “We won’t ring any bells for a traitor.”

Frank stood and snapped to. “Aye aye, Captain. I’ll do it right after we finish at the range.” He started to turn.

“Wait,” she said. “Grab a bowl.” She tossed a small box of cereal at him. “Let’s eat dinner first.”

After a silent, quick dinner of slightly stale cereal and thin artificial milk, the three of them headed to the control room together.

Pete stepped up to the command console and took it in.

Their own ship was represented right in the middle of the screen by a small green silhouette of a submarine. Behind them, about two miles aft, an upside-down V represented their mysterious shadow submarine. And directly ahead of them were two bold, parallel lines. From the scale on the screen, Pete could see they were about five miles away.

“The degaussing range,” said Moody. “I was privy to this part of your orders. I’m assuming for the drones…”

“Yes,” said Hamlin. “To reduce our magnetic signature.”

It came back to him with a powerful clarity. Not only the mechanics of the degaussing run, but the entire control room as well. It came, he realized, from a different layer of memory than the one that had been somehow erased. It came from a thousand hours of practice in this very room, etched on his brain like acid on glass. For the first time since he’d awoken on his stateroom floor, he knew what was going on, what he was doing. The feeling was intoxicating.

He stood on a small raised platform in the middle of the control room: the conn. On each side of him were the polished steel cylinders of the two periscopes, both lowered into a forty-foot well beneath his feet. In front of him, Frank climbed into a large pilot’s chair. At Frank’s knees was a control yoke that would actually drive the ship. To the left of the yoke was an old-fashioned brass engine order telegraph he would use to control the ship’s speed. Despite the gesture toward nostalgia with the brass control, Pete knew that it was an entirely automated system, channeling his orders for ship’s speed directly to the engine room. And while Pete would give the rudder and depth orders from the position of command on the conn, Frank would actually be driving the ship from his seat, his hands on the controls.

Directly in front of Pete was a console with several selectable displays. Currently it showed the sonar display: the two bright parallel lines that marked the walls of the degaussing range, and the shadow submarine behind them. He could turn a switch, and the same screen could display the status of the drone cloud, sensed via a floating wire that trailed behind and above them, registering each drone as it passed. If he turned the switch yet again, he could read reports on all the ship’s vital systems.

Where Frank could see them from the dive chair were the controls and indicators for the ship’s non-tactical systems: the hundreds of pipes and valves that kept the ship and crew alive. The panel was speckled with yellow warning lights and a few red alarms. Pete couldn’t read them from his perch on the conn, but he knew most of the alarms represented damage done by the mutiny. Of all the valves and controls, the most imposing were the two large yellow levers directly over Frank’s head: the “chicken switches” that activated the ship’s emergency blow system. They controlled a direct mechanical linkage that would fill the main ballast tanks with air and shoot them to the surface in the event of a severe emergency. It was the last-ditch safety measure they possessed, something they could use only once and only when nothing else would do, the submarine’s equivalent of a fighter pilot’s ejection seat. Both were designed to get vessel operators safely to the surface of the earth, albeit from different directions.

Pete flipped the switch back to the drone display. Hana looked over his shoulder.

“Medium density, undirected,” she said. “That’s expected given our proximity to the island. A flyover every ten minutes or so; doesn’t look like they’re actively seeking us or dancing each other in.”

“Very well,” he said. “Prepare to go to periscope depth.”

Moody looked at him, and Frank guffawed.

“PD?”

“I want to see the action of the drones myself, before and after. It’s the only way we can assess if the degaussing has been successful.”

“And?”

“And it’ll help us get away from our friend out there.”

“How’s that?”

“She won’t be able to do what I’m about to do.”

“That’s my boy,” said Moody, an intense smile on her face. Frank grimaced in disgust, and turned back to the controls in front of the dive chair. Hamlin hesitated for just a moment before giving the order. He thought about McCallister locked in the escape trunk, and Hana here in control. Who exactly was he working for now? He wondered if Moody and McCallister were wondering the same thing.

“Dive, make your depth eight-five feet.”

“Make my depth eight-five feet, aye, sir,” Holmes responded. He pulled slowly on the yoke in front of him. Pete felt the angle in his feet as the big ship began to drive upward.

“Ahead one-third,” he said.

“Ahead one-third, aye, sir,” repeated Frank. He reached down to the engine order telegraph to order the slower bell, and the automated system immediately answered with a ding. Pete and Hana watched the speed of the ship drop on a red digital indicator until it fell below ten knots. Any faster than that, and the scope could be damaged.

“Raising number one scope,” said Pete. He turned the orange ring over his head. He put his eye to the scope as it rose, and he began turning slowly around, looking through the optics underwater. Even though he knew their shadow sub was too far behind them to see, and too deep, he found himself pausing briefly on that bearing directly behind them, looking into the murky ocean for their invisible pursuer.

The darkness in the scope turned steadily lighter as they came shallow, from black to gray to green. Suddenly, the scope broke through.

“Scope is clear,” said Hamlin, exhilarated both by his sudden proficiency and clarity of mind, and by the view of the sky — for as far as he could see, glorious sunny blue sky. He didn’t realize how imprisoned he’d felt by the steel walls of the Polaris, and the gloom that pervaded her, but in an instant, through the pristine optics of her periscope, he could see for miles. “No close contacts.”

He twisted the right grip on the scope toward him, tilting the optics as far up as he could, looking into the sky.

“No visible drones,” he said.

He heard Moody from the console. “ESM shows the nearest drone about two miles away on a relative bearing of zero-nine-zero, heading this way.”

“Seeking?” he asked.

Moody turned some knobs on the command console. “Negative, not seeking, standard random search pattern but on our vector. Should be visible in five minutes.”

She stepped up to the conn. “And it’ll see us right after we see him.” She was concerned, but willing to let Pete execute his plan.

“Understood.”

Hamlin swung the scope around to the starboard beam and looked, and waited.

He saw it three minutes later, a tiny black dot on the horizon, barely visible even with the scope in high power. It looked almost like a big seabird, a cormorant, but Pete knew they were too far from land for it to be anything natural. And soon enough, he saw the sun glint on its metallic head. “I have a visual on contact Delta-One,” he said, pushing the red button on the scope to register the bearing in their fire-control systems.

The drone was flying near the surface, in a leisurely serpentine pattern that betrayed no urgency. It was hunting, Hamlin somehow knew, but it hadn’t seen them yet, as it swooped gracefully back and forth. While it was hunting, it was also conserving energy, flying slowly, its wings turned efficiently upward to soak up energy in its solar cells, its computer steering it to take advantage of the winds, gliding when it could. In good weather, it could stay airborne for weeks.

He also knew that the drone wouldn’t see their periscope visually — its cross section, about three inches, would be invisible among even the light waves at this distance. The only effective sensor the drone had for shallow submarines was its magnetic anomaly detection, or MAD.

As long as men had made ships out of metal, people had attempted to use magnets to detect and kill them. Everything made out of steel distorts the earth’s magnetic field as it passes through, and relatively simple sensors take advantage of this. It was a time-tested method — the Germans developed very effective magnetic mines in World War II. In short order, navies began using those same magnetic effects to detect submarines. A submarine could become invisible to radar by submerging, and invisible to sonar by silencing, but the way its steel distorted the earth’s magnetic field was a physical constant, seemingly impossible to mask. MAD was a big enough threat to submarines that the Soviet Union, during the cold war, had built an entire fleet of subs out of nonferrous metals, materials that were scarce and difficult to use but produced no magnetic signature.

MAD was also a very effective method for the drones — it worked well because the drones could sweep large areas of ocean as they flew, and with large numbers of drones they could cover vast swaths of the world. Submarines could avoid detection by staying deep, but this was tactically fine with the drone strategy — a submarine forced deep was a compromised asset, limited in what it could do.

To counter this, the Polaris would try to erase her own magnetic signature, or “degauss.” This was named for the “gaus,” a scientific unit of magnetism, and was accomplished by steering the ship between two giant electromagnets. The electromagnetics would temporarily erase the field of the Polaris, making her, for a time, invisible to MAD detection. This was the first step of Hamlin’s mission, getting the Polaris through the range. But first he had to see the drones.

Looking through the scope, Hamlin could tell the instant the drone had sniffed them out. It was close enough by then that Hamlin could see the glint of the sun on its solar cells, its power-giving wings. Suddenly its graceful, lazy swooping changed. Its wings tightened up from the ninety-degree angle to its body into an attack posture, pointed and fast. It dived until it was just above the surface of the water, corrected its course slightly, and flew directly overhead. He swung the scope to watch it pass by as ESM alarms shrieked in the control room.

“Flyby!” Hana shouted, cutting out the alarms.

“Confirmed,” said Pete calmly.

“Want me to go deep?!” said Holmes.

“Not yet,” said Hamlin.

“Why didn’t it bomb us?”

“A sub at periscope depth, with just a single drone in the area — it doesn’t like its odds. Every algorithm is designed to optimize its chances for a kill, and a single shot at a periscope isn’t good odds. They’re designed to work best in swarms.”

“So now it’s going to get its friends?”

“Exactly,” he said. But still he waited, and watched.

The drone flew high into the sky, almost straight up, twisting as it soared, a motion designed to attract its comrades. An upward-looking sensor on the head of the drones was designed to look for exactly this behavior. Pete found himself curiously pleased at how well the system functioned.

“Drones approaching from all bearings,” said Hana.

Pete had no intention of allowing a swarm to get on top of the Polaris in attack formation, but at the same time he couldn’t help but stare at their deadly, beautiful efficiency. The lead drone, the one that had spotted them, banked sharply away from them, and came down to just a few feet above ocean level. The others soon aligned behind it, in a delta formation, pointed right at the Polaris. It had all taken just minutes.

“Emergency deep!” he ordered.

Ready for the order, Frank immediately pushed forward on his control yoke, and the ship took a steep downward angle. Pete lowered the scope and braced himself against the angle as they dived. Within seconds, they were at two hundred feet.

“Make your depth six hundred thirty-two feet,” he said.

Frank acknowledged the order and drove them deeper, to a point just a few feet above the ocean floor.

“Will they drop their bombs?” asked Moody.

“No,” said Pete. “We’re too deep and they know it. They won’t waste their bombs, won’t drop unless they register a ninety percent chance or better of a hit. Like bees with stingers: they only get one shot, and they want to make it count.”

“So what’s the point?”

Pete shrugged. “They know we’re here, that’s now stored in their memory; they’ll increase their concentration around us, in this whole sector, ready to pounce if we surface again. They’ll shift the priority of this area, intensify the search patterns. There are thousands of them, and only one of us. They know that time is on their side if we show our heads.”

“Which we won’t,” said Moody.

“We will,” said Pete. “In just a few minutes. But if everything goes according to plan, we’ll be invisible.”

He sat back down at the command console, switching it back from ESM to sonar. Just as planned, they were pointing right at the two bright, parallel lines of the degaussing range. “Right five degrees rudder,” he said.

Frank repeated the order and eased the ship right.

“Steady as she goes,” said Hamlin, reaching down to change the scale of the display as they approached.

While the sonar display just showed two bright green lines, vivid visual images of what lay in front of them came to Pete. First, he saw the degaussing range like an engineering diagram, the spirals of electrical coil, the parallel lines of switches, the banked symbols of the massive batteries that powered it. A remotely activated magnetic switch and a sensor at the entrance, the ship’s magnetic signature activating the range even as the range would soon erase it. This textbook diagram in his mind then gave way to a photographic image, a memory of an underwater survey, stark white lights trained on coral-covered walls, the coils of wire protected by heavy conduit, impermeable to the sea but completely transparent to electricity and magnetism. In this mental movie, a recovered memory from somewhere in his training: a lonely crab skittered across a horizontal beam encrusted in coral.

“Approaching Point Alpha…” said Moody, jerking him from his reverie. “We’re at the entry point.” It was like trying to pull a car into a one-car garage blindfolded.

“All stop,” said Hamlin.

“All stop, aye, sir,” said Frank, immediately ordering the bell.

He and Moody stood over the display and watched as the giant ship slowly drifted between the two bars on the screen, perfectly centered. In a box on the right hand of the screen, Pete saw the ship’s acceleration in all three dimensions, and watched carefully to see if he would need to add a small rudder angle to counteract a stray current.

“Nice driving,” said Moody, looking at him with a smile.

“Thank you, ma’am,” he said. The back of Frank’s neck turned red.

There was a moment of concern as they drifted inside the range and nothing happened. Pete worried that it had been disabled, either by the relentless destructive power of the ocean and nature, or by an act of war. But then suddenly, the lights in the control room dimmed, and a dozen new alarms went off as the ship was engulfed by a powerful magnetic field.

“The range is active!” said Moody. “It’s working!” Frank was leaning forward, cutting out the alarms that had sounded as a result. Pete could almost feel the effect upon them, stretching the magnetic field of the Polaris into line with brute, electric force, making them invisible in at least one, crucial way. Frank ably managed their depth as they continued to drift through, no easy feat as the ship’s speed continued to decrease, making ship control difficult.

“We’re clear of the range,” said Moody as they passed beyond the two bright lines on the console. Their speed had dropped to under three knots. Pete confirmed on the screen in front of him that they had drifted completely through.

“Ahead one-third,” said Hamlin. “Make your depth eight-five feet.”

They repeated the process of going to periscope depth. As the scope broke through, Pete immediately turned the ship’s single eye upward.

A dozen drones swooped around them in circles, their electronic brains excited by the recent sighting. They swooped, dived, and circled around, many of them virtually buzzing their periscope. But none of them attacked.

“Captain,” said Hamlin, “the ship has been successfully degaussed.”

“Very well,” she said. “Take us deep and report to my stateroom for debriefing.”

Carlson and Banach watched the Polaris slow and go deep in front of them, immediately after her strange, short trip to periscope depth. They’d done nothing at PD, didn’t shoot trash or broadcast a message. The only thing they seemed to accomplish was attract a swarm of drones, which quickly developed attack formations, forcing the Polaris underwater just in time.

More precisely, they listened, as they heard the hull popping of a ship descending and the slowing of the ship’s main reduction gear.

“What are they up to?”

Carlson shook her head. “I have no idea. They are very deep. Almost to the bottom.”

Banach took the two strides necessary to get to the other side of the control room, checked the chart. “Are they trying to lose us?”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “They seem to have other things on their mind.”

“Can our friend onboard tell us anything?”

She shook her head, frustrated. “Haven’t heard from him lately. That would make this entirely too easy.”

She walked over to the cramped corner of the control room where Banach stood, where the chart was spread out. In the lower corner of the chart was Eris Island. They’d followed the Polaris up here, to the opposite corner, to a spot that was strangely featureless on the chart, devoid of geological marks or even soundings.

“Stay at this depth, and slow,” she said. “Let’s see what they are up to.”

They drifted closer, staying about a mile away, waiting to see what happened. She tried to visualize what they were doing as they slowed almost to a standstill, drifting forward at a speed of just a few knots. She thought about their man onboard, wondered if he was still alive. Maybe he’d been discovered in the ruckus that they’d overheard, exposed, perhaps even executed. No, she thought again, the Alliance prized themselves on their civility too much for that.

Suddenly, a noise spiked on their sonar. She could hear it right through the hull: a dull ka-chunk.

Before she could say anything, a delicate alarm sounded next to the chart, a rarely heard alarm that took her a moment to recognize.

“Captain,” Banach said, “the inertial navigation system is failing.…”

She looked up at the central panel in front of the dive chair, where a number of other alarms had sounded. Some of the smaller circuit breakers on the ship had opened, and the electrical system was busily resetting itself into a safe mode.

Meanwhile the Polaris continued drifting slowly forward.

“Is it some kind of weapon?” asked Banach. “An electric pulse? Are we under attack?”

“No,” said Carlson. “I don’t think so. But we are at the edge of some kind of electrical field… a powerful one.”

They waited a few more minutes and then the ka-chunk sound repeated, and the alarm for their navigation system cleared. Breakers continued to reset around them, and she realized that the sound was similar to the one that had come to them on the bearing of the Polaris.

Once again the Polaris sped up and changed depth, ascending to periscope depth.

“Let’s follow them up this time,” she said, heading for the scope. Banach climbed into the dive chair and efficiently brought the ship shallow.

She raised the scope as they came up. Soon they were at periscope depth, and Carlson squinted at the bright equatorial light through the scope. The Polaris was a mile or so away, too far for them to see the scope.

But she could see the drones everywhere, attracted by their earlier trip to the surface. They were swooping overhead, many of them directly above where she thought the Polaris was sticking up her nose. They were no longer in the tight pattern of attack that she’d seen earlier. The drones were swooping and searching.

“Captain?”

“They’ve made themselves invisible to the drones,” she said, the solution suddenly dawning on her. “At least at periscope depth.”

“How?”

“Degaussing,” she said. “They must have passed an underwater degaussing range.” It made sense, in a way, this close to Eris Island, probably the outcome of another, earlier research product. She grudgingly respected the Alliance and its technology; it always seemed to work when they needed it. Her leaders, on the other hand, couldn’t provide her ship a microwave oven that would work without bursting into flames.

“So the drones use MAD?”

“Apparently,” she said, watching the drones fly obliviously over the Polaris. “At least for shallow boats.”

“Well!” said Banach. “That is good news for us!”

She took her eye off the scope and smiled at him. “Yes, it is, Lieutenant. Very good news.”

Her submarine, like their entire fleet, had been designed with coastal warfare in mind, where mines might be concentrated at strategic chokepoints. And while her government might not be able to make a decent microwave oven, they did control 90 percent of the world’s titanium supply. And if they couldn’t make a decent microprocessor or a clever movie or a decent rock-and-roll record, they could, better than any government on earth, marshal the huge labor forces necessary to mine titanium ore from its inevitably difficult locations, smelt it, and refine the metal. Titanium was a complete pain in the ass to work with. Every weld on her big boat had to be conducted in an inert atmosphere, a blanket of argon or helium to prevent the introduction of oxygen. But that was exactly the kind of laborious process at which her people excelled, and her boat was entirely crafted out of that difficult, rare metal. The Polaris, made out of strong American steel, had to subject itself to an ancient and clever degaussing range to make itself magnetically invisible. But her titanium boat had been born that way.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The ship had limited exercise equipment, but Frank Holmes diligently used it all. He bench-pressed every free weight they had, 220 pounds total, and now he could do twenty-five reps at that weight. He would then curl 100 pounds at a time, five sets of ten, and finish by squatting the full 220 pounds. He felt he was capable of squatting maybe twice as much, but those were all the weights they had, so that was that.

On off days he did bodyweight exercises: push-ups, pull-ups, dips, and hundreds of crunches. He’d run on the ship’s lone treadmill to chisel off the tiny amount of fat left on his body, and punch the heavy bag that he had diligently repaired over time until now it was virtually constructed of duct tape. Most guys got soft on submarines, he knew, but he’d put on fifteen pounds of pure muscle since deploying on the Polaris two years earlier. Two inches on his chest, an inch on his arms. He would be even bigger, he thought, if the ship had any decent food, but the animal protein his body craved was hard to come by. He’d hoarded some beef jerky, but the last of the real chicken and eggs had long since been consumed, and the next trip to the tender could be months away. As often as he once dreamed about sex with the soft, sweet girls he’d grown up with in Katy, Texas, he now dreamed about protein. He was a proficient masturbator after two years at sea, but there was no equivalent way to satisfy his primal need for meat. Visions of ribs, cheeseburgers, and T-bone steaks filled his dreams. Still, he was enormously strong.

So moving Ramirez’s dead body was easy once he got past a small, initial burst of squeamishness that came with the sight of all the blood.

The torpedo room was directly below the staterooms, the lower-most, forward-most compartment on the ship. Frank dragged the corpse to the ladder and briefly tried to think of a more dignified option before simply dropping him down the hatch. The body landed with a thud on the steel deck below. Frank climbed down after it, then dragged Ramirez to the front of the torpedo room, past the racks of indexed Mark 50 torpedoes, and caught his breath before proceeding.

The torpedo room had always been one of his favorite places on the boat. Filled with forest green torpedoes, it seemed more military than any other place on Polaris, full of manly, menacing firepower. There were four firing tubes in all, two port and two starboard, with the control panel between them. It smelled dank, both because of its low position on the ship and because the torpedo tubes were often filled, drained, and filled again with the sea that surrounded them. When he had volunteered for submarine duty, Frank had a picture in his mind of what a submarine would be like. The torpedo room was one of the few places on the boat that somewhat looked like that picture.

He had fond memories of the torpedo room as well: during his walk-through for his qualifications, the torpedo room was where Captain McCallister had brought him his final task: to line up the system and shoot a water slug — basically a tube full of water, although the actions would be nearly the same if firing an actual torpedo. Captain McCallister had been patient as he plodded through the procedure, and had given him a few key hints along the way when he was stuck. But he had succeeded, finally pushing that red button and ejecting a thousand pounds of seawater back into the sea with a satisfying whoosh. He still recalled the subsequent ratcheting and hissing of valves that returned to a firing position, the popping of the ears as the pressure changed with the expulsion of the compressed firing air. Later that night, after dinner, Captain McCallister had pinned gold dolphins on his chest, Frank’s proudest moment aboard. So he fancied himself as something of an expert.

The memory gave him a brief stab of guilt about the captain. The man had always been good to him, and he obviously knew the submarine better than any man aboard. Hell, he had designed the thing. But Moody said that he was a traitor, and he’d seen it himself. Somebody was giving them away, and with an enemy boat behind them, this wasn’t a time to screw around. He was taking his orders from Moody now, and he was comfortable with that.

He reached for the bound yellow book of torpedo room procedures, thumbed through it until he found the correct one, and reviewed it carefully, a thick index finger pointing to each step as he slowly read it. He remembered the way Moody had raised an eyebrow at him in the wardroom, the doubt in her voice: he was determined not to screw this up.

Three of the four tubes had small signs hanging from their breech doors: WARSHOT LOADED. The lower port tube was empty; that would be the one he would use. Everything on the submarine, Frank knew, was controlled by switches and valves. Therefore switches and valves were everywhere, and, amazingly to Frank, every one of them had a specific purpose, a reason for being. He went through the initial lineup in the procedure, verifying the positions of valves and pushing buttons until he thought he was ready. But when he tried to open the big breech door of the lower, port tube, it wouldn’t move. He knew from his practice down there that when things were properly aligned, everything moved with a liquid, well-engineered ease. But when something was amiss, the strongest guy in the world couldn’t make it budge. He studied the panel, trying to figure out what was blocking his progress. An interlock prevented it, he saw, because the muzzle door was open; the ship’s designers logically made it impossible to open both the muzzle and the breech simultaneously. Somehow he’d skipped that step in the procedure, so he backtracked, pushed a button to close the muzzle door, and tried again. Still the breech wouldn’t open.

He sat down and reread the procedure again, starting to get nervous. He was stuck in the middle of it, and if he had screwed something up, he didn’t know how to recover, how to back out, how to start over. He remembered Captain McCallister talking to him two years earlier as he nervously attempted the procedure. “You can’t sink the ship from here, Holmes,” he said. “Don’t worry. Torpedo tubes have been around for over a hundred years, and they’ve pretty much idiot-proofed them.”

But Frank wasn’t worried about the quality of the ship’s idiot-proofing. Rather, he was worried about the ship proving that he was an idiot. He imagined telling Moody that Ramirez’s body was still cooling away on the torpedo room deck. Or stuck in the breech door. Or jammed in a tube. No, he couldn’t face her with that kind of news.

Reading the procedure for the third time, he noticed a warning on the bottom of a page that cautioned not to open the breech door until the tube was fully drained. In fact, yet another interlock prevented it, so that a thousand gallons of seawater wouldn’t gush from the tube onto the deck of the torpedo room. He eagerly found the drain valve for the port tubes and opened it. At first he was alarmed to hear so much water draining from the tube. Submariners were conditioned to worry at the sound of gushing water. But the noise soon diminished as the tube emptied, a yellow warning light went off on the console, and he approached the breech door once again.

As if he had spoken a magic spell, the locking ring turned smoothly, and the door swung open with barely a tug. He bent down and looked inside, peering into the tube with the small flashlight he kept on his belt. It was polished smooth, still damp, and smelled of the sea. He rejoiced for a moment, the battle seeming half won. Now he just needed to get Ramirez inside.

The tube was, he remembered randomly from his qualifications, twenty-one inches in diameter. Seemed like a lot, and Ramirez wasn’t a big guy, but as Frank lifted him up and tried to shove him inside, he saw that it would be difficult. He decided put him in headfirst, because it seemed like the right thing to do. He grabbed him from behind, around his waist, and tried to flop him inside. Frank winced as he heard Ramirez’s teeth crack on the edge of the tube. One of them broke off and fell to the deck. He continued pushing, got Ramirez in up to his hips, where he became stuck. Of course, thought Frank, he probably has a thirty-two-inch waist, and this is a twenty-one-inch tube. But wait — that would be the diameter, whereas the thirty-two-inch waist was a circumference.… He was certain there was a formula he could use to convert one to the other, but even if he remembered it, he wouldn’t be able to do the math in his head. Rather, he just kept shoving, with all his considerable strength, until he could move Ramirez no more. His lower legs stuck out of the tube, the thick soles of his heavily worked engineer’s boots dangling in the air.

So close, thought Frank. He saw the tooth he’d knocked out of Ramirez’s head, kicked it across the deck and into the bilge in frustration. He’d be all the way in the tube if he were just five pounds skinnier. Or one inch.

And then he realized what he needed to do: he would have to undress him.

He sat down on the floor and braced his feet against each side of the tube, grabbed one of Ramirez’s feet with each hand, and pulled. It took all his strength to reverse the work he’d already done, but at last he got him out of the tube.

He untied the boots and pulled his pants off. Then he unbuttoned his shirt, threw it on a pile with the pants and the boots. Ramirez was down to his undershirt and his Jockeys, and Frank prayed that he had reduced the man’s diameter enough; he couldn’t bear the thought of stripping him naked. It already felt increasingly like he was doing something wrong, something close to desecrating the dead, with possible legal and moral consequences. For all of Ramirez’s sins, Frank didn’t want to shove his naked body into a torpedo tube.

He lifted Ramirez again, and shoved him inside headfirst. Undressing him had worked, and this time, he went in all the way, until the toes of his feet touched the inside of the tube. It was tight, which made Frank worry, but he remembered how completely those green torpedoes filled the tubes, each weighing many times what Ramirez weighed, and the system hurled them effortlessly into the sea. He closed the breech door, deeply grateful to be no longer looking at the feet of his dead engineer.

Now he found himself in the procedure again, determined for things to proceed smoothly from that point on. Flood the tube. He pushed the button and heard the valve open, heard the movement of water from the tank into the tube. He tried not to picture Ramirez’s dead body in there, now surrounded by seawater inside the brass tube. Pressurize the tube. He opened the pressure valve, allowing the pressure of the tube to equalize with the sea, so the muzzle door could open. He opened the muzzle door, and the light on the console turned from an amber line to a green O, indicating success.

Now nothing remained but to shoot him out. The tube was a loaded gun, and Ramirez was the bullet. Frank paused for a moment. The Navy had a ceremony for burials at sea, he knew — rituals that had been handed down for hundreds of years, rituals older than the republic. They’d done one when he first got to the boat, fulfilling the request of an old retired submariner, and he still remembered the somber announcement Captain McCallister had made on the 1MC, “All hands bury the dead.” But they didn’t have a procedure for this, disposing of a traitor. Frank sighed, just wanting it to be over.

He pushed the FIRE button, and a pressurized air bank forced a slug of water into the tube, instantly ejecting its contents. The machinery reset itself in a way that Frank remembered, the sliding of hydraulics, the hissing of compressed air, the popping in his ears.

Frank shut the muzzle door and reversed the process he had just done until he could once again open the breech door.

Slowly, he opened it. He sighed with relief to see that the tube was completely empty again. Ramirez was gone.

He shut the door and locked it, noticed the pile of Ramirez’s clothes at his feet. He was excited again now, eager to report his success to Moody, and the clothes gave him an idea. He searched the pockets, hoping to find evidence of some kind, notes about the conspiracy, maps, codes, who knows? In the back pocket, he found a standard-issue green notebook.

He flipped through the pages until he found the most recent entry. It was a neatly kept table of handwritten data, in two rows, with “PH” at the top. He got excited — Pete Hamlin? Was this some record of their communications? A table of codes that they used?

He looked at it further until he realized that it wasn’t “PH,” it was “pH”: a measure of the water chemistry of the primary plant, one measurement for each day of the last two weeks. The numbers meant nothing to Frank — he could see that they were drifting downward, but he didn’t know if that was bad or good.

Frank was disappointed at that, and all the rest of the routine engineering data that filled Ramirez’s notebook. It wasn’t very compelling evidence of a conspiracy. In fact, it was downright boring.

He gathered Ramirez’s clothes and threw them into a trash can in the back of the torpedo room. There was a shredder back there, too, so Frank dropped the notebook in it as he passed.

There, Ramirez, he thought with a smirk as the shredder whirred to life. I deleted it.

After the degaussing, Pete followed Moody down to her stateroom, which was immediately adjacent to the captain’s. In a passing glance, he saw pictures of Captain McCallister’s family, a wife and two kids, smiling from the wall. They looked familiar to him, he thought, like maybe he had met them, or maybe they just looked familiar in the way that all happy families do, like Tolstoy said. The bed was made with military precision, but at the foot of it was a comfortable-looking striped blanket.

Moody’s walls, in contrast, were bare of personal effects. A few professional decorations, pictures of herself from her training class, a citation from the Alliance. Files and binders neatly arranged, Navy procedures sharing a shelf with binders of Alliance doctrine. It looked so much like an office that the neatly made bed seemed out of place.

“Nicely done up there,” she said as they entered. She reached behind him to shut the door, close enough in the small room that Pete could smell her shampoo. “I guess you’re starting to feel like yourself again.”

“I guess,” he said.

“So now that we’re degaussed, we’re ready to begin the high-speed run?”

“You’re asking me?” he said. “I thought you were in charge.”

“I am now,” she said. “And keep in mind that your friend up there—” She pointed upward, in the direction of the escape trunk where Finn was locked. “—he tried to destroy it all.”

Destroy what? he thought, but kept his mouth shut.

“You know that in a very real way, the fate of the world is in our hands,” she said. “In your hands.”

“That’s what they keep telling me,” he said.

“Things have gotten worse out there. We rarely get any radio transmissions from land anymore… haven’t heard from command in weeks. We used to hear surface ships up there, occasionally. They’re all gone, driven away. Before long, we’re going to need a tender, and I’m not sure there is one out there anymore. Without our radio room, we can’t even ask.”

“So what do we do?”

“We complete the mission at hand. That’s all we can do.”

Pete cleared his throat and waited for her to indicate what was next. “So what is our mission?”

She raised an eyebrow. “Don’t be a smart-ass. McCallister never saw fit to share it with me, as you well know. But I have my guesses. I think it’s something to do with the illness. The epidemic, whatever you want to call it. I think that’s why you’re here.”

“The illness?”

“Here,” she said. “Take a look at this.” She pulled a book off her shelf and opened it to a page that she had bookmarked. It was an aerial photo, stamped SECRET, of what looked like a massive refugee camp.

“This is outside Los Angeles,” she said. “The disease was killing a hundred people a day, everybody was streaming out of the city — the government built this place for a thousand people out in the desert. Currently it’s holding five thousand, and there’s a tent city being built outside the fence, a shantytown, people waiting to get in. Cities like this are going up on both coasts.”

“Just the coasts?”

“They seem to be hardest hit,” she said. “Which is contributing to the rumors that this whole thing is some kind of biological weapon planted by Typhon. Some of the rumors say the virus is delivered by submarines.”

“Jesus,” said Pete. The photograph was startling, Americans looking up at the sky with real dejection in their eyes. The camp was a jumble of unfinished wood and barbed wire. But he noticed, curiously, that about every fifth building had been constructed from thick concrete and had what appeared to be a heavy plate of metal for a roof. A strange defense against a disease.

“That’s what we’re fighting for, Pete,” she said, taking the book away. “The people back home.”

“And what can we do about it?” said Pete.

“I’m assuming you’re about to tell me,” she said.

“I am?”

She fought to hide her annoyance. “I understand your hesitation,” she said. “Your orders were highly secret, and the captain shared them with whom he saw fit. Whatever. But I am in command of this ship now, and you need to share them with me.”

“What if I can’t?”

“Then you might be sharing that escape trunk with McCallister, Pete.”

She reached into her desk — Pete thought momentarily that she was reaching for her Taser. But instead she pulled out a large brown envelope and handed it to him.

It was sealed with a small electronic keypad.

“I took these from McCallister’s office. I would have opened them earlier myself — no offense. The situation called for it. But I think they would auto-destruct with one false entry. So I’d like to ask you, as your commanding officer, to share them with me.”

Pete hefted the envelope in his hand and could feel that a small tablet computer was inside. Perhaps a tablet with all the answers he needed.

“Open it, Pete,” she said.

He hesitated, but in fact, the curiosity was more than he could bear. Pete wiped his thumb across the locking device. A light turned green, and he opened the envelope and pulled out a small tablet computer. When he touched it, the screen came to life, and three icons appeared. One icon said BACKGROUND, another said SERVICE JACKET: HAMLIN, PETER, and the third said PATROL ORDERS.

He reached for the background icon.

“Haven’t you already reviewed these?” she said. “Let’s look at the patrol order.”

“I thought you wanted to see everything?”

She sighed impatiently, but let him touch the icon.

A computer animation launched, showing the earth’s oceans rising several years in the past. Low-lying cities and islands were wiped out.

In the second part of the video, the more recent past, populations became more concentrated as people moved inland. Food supplies, shown in yellow, began to dwindle. Regional conflicts broke out, and soon global war did as well. Typhon formed, and the Alliance followed in short order. Looking at the timeline on the bottom of the screen, Pete saw that this brought them to the present day.

A new wave of color began to spread across the global map, the time now projecting into the future. Pete understood it to represent the spread of an epidemic of some kind, brought on by the war, the rising waters, and the concentration of the population. According to the video, the epidemic would soon decimate the world’s population.

It ended five years in the future, as the formerly bright-red population centers dimmed and turned black.

“Jesus,” said Hamlin.

“I can see why these projections are so classified,” she said. “It would cause a panic. People might turn against the war effort.”

Hamlin turned to her. “Maybe they should.”

She smirked at that. “You’re still an engineer at heart, Hamlin. Which is why I’ll let that go. But the good guys are going to win this one, and you are one of the good guys. Now, let’s see what’s in your orders that I don’t already know about.” She reached over his shoulder and touched the PATROL ORDERS icon, but it didn’t work: the tablet was keyed to Pete’s fingerprints alone. Frustrated, she tapped the screen with her fingernail and handed it back to Pete.

Reluctantly, he tapped the screen, and a document came to life. It was all text, with a number of embedded coordinates on it and a few interactive colored charts. In the first section of the orders was a chart that Pete instantly recognized as the degaussing range. He scanned it quickly as Moody read over his shoulder.

“Complete, right?” she said.

Pete read that section and saw that she was right — they had orders to degauss, which he had done completely. He scrolled down and saw a block where he was to verify completion with a swipe of his finger.

As he did so, a new section of orders immediately came to life. Hana inhaled eagerly as the screen changed. She looked over his shoulder, staring at the chart that came up first.

“There!” said Moody, pointing, excited. “I knew it!”

Pete scanned the text section. Top secret… vaccine at hand. Locate and deliver to global medical command… critical importance to war effort… Engineering Research and Implementation Station.

Moody, on her feet now with the excitement, put a hand on his back. “It makes perfect sense! I told Frank this is where we were going. All those eggheads out there — and I knew you’d been stationed out there! Plus, I’d heard what happened to your wife.…” Pete looked up at her quickly, a stab of heartbreak going through him at the mention of a wife he didn’t even remember.

Moody quickly changed the subject. “At ahead flank—” She looked at her watch and did a quick mental calculation. “—we can be there in two days.”

Pete swiped the screen with his finger, expanding the small chart of their destination. A tiny spot of land became visible. Several bands of dotted lines surrounded it with the words RESTRICTED ZONE. It was the research station, he could see. And on the chart its name had been abbreviated.

ERIS.

Pete touched the map, and the image of the island expanded.

It was a navigation chart that looked deeply familiar to Pete, in the same way the control room felt familiar, something borne of thousands of hours of studying. A TOP SECRET label adorned it on top and bottom.

He tapped a button on the screen, changing it from a map view to a satellite image. The island was roughly kidney shaped. At the north end of the island, right up against the shore, was a tower. At the far other end of the island were two small buildings, also facing the sea. The roofs were darker in color, worn, conveying a greater age, and seemed disconnected from the work on the other side of the island. The center of Eris was taken up almost entirely by an airfield, with a few scattered maintenance buildings in between.

Pete used two fingers to change the scale of the chart, zooming out, and changing it back from a satellite photo to a nautical chart. Two concentric rings circled the island, both colored in red to convey danger. The innermost ring was a perfect circle with the tower at its exact center, a five-mile radius. It was labeled EXCLUSION ZONE. Pete noticed hash marks on the outside of the circle… it seemed to indicate that safety lay inside.

Farther out was a more irregular dashed red line, about seven miles from the island. This line was jagged and imperfect, unlike the inner circle, and seemed to be a product of nature. Pete could see the italicized soundings indicating the depth of water around it: it was shoal water. Serious shoal water, as shallow as ten feet in some spots, a superb natural barrier to the island. And it had been there eons, Pete could tell. All around the perimeter were the dotted-line profiles of wrecked ships, the chart symbol for the vessels that had wrecked themselves upon the shoals over hundreds of years. There were a few shallow breaks around the shoals where a careful surface ship might approach, but no submerged submarine ever could. And that meant a two-mile stretch between the two circles, some kind of no-man’s-land… Pete traced the circle with his fingers until he found one tiny spot in the shoal line where the water was 120 feet deep. If the tower was the center of a clock, the break in the shoal water was at about seven o’clock.

“There,” he said, tapping the break. “We could get through right there at periscope depth.”

Moody suddenly pulled him to his feet, turned him around, and kissed him hard upon the lips.

He jerked backward, almost falling over his chair, and dropped the tablet with his orders to the deck.

“What?” said Moody, clearly annoyed. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s… my head,” he said. “It still hurts.”

She looked him up and down. “You haven’t been the same since the mutiny,” she said.

“Tell me about it.”

“Go get some rest,” she said. “That’s an order. But the next time I see you, be ready to work.”

“Aye, aye,” he said, grabbing the tablet and backing out of her stateroom.

WELCOME ABOARD THE USS POLARIS

The Polaris-class submarine is the latest advancement in submarine technology. It is well equipped to accomplish its assigned mission, providing significant advances over previous classes of submarines. Specifically:

• Each Polaris-class submarine carries 50 percent more missiles than its predecessors (36 compared to 24).

• Ease of maintenance has been designed into the class, minimizing maintenance requirements and extending the period between lengthy shipyard overhauls. Polaris-class submarines are able to stay on patrols for longer periods with shorter time between patrols.

• The increased range of the C-6 missiles enables the Polaris to operate in ten times more ocean area than previous submarines.

• The central command and control system of the Polaris allows significant automation and reduction of crew size. For example, Trident submarines, the workhorse missile submarine of the Cold War, carried a crew of over 150 men. The Polaris will go to sea with just 18, and can operate with as few as 6.

• The total system was designed to ensure that the United States and her strategic allies have a modern, survivable deterrent system in the 2020s and beyond.

• The Polaris is vital to the Alliance submarine force. Her mission is to maintain world peace.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Instead of heading to his rack, Pete turned toward the escape trunk where Finn McCallister was being held prisoner.

He saw the bottoms of McCallister’s feet against the grate, motionless. It looked like he was sleeping, his head hanging, his mouth open. His face was somewhat hidden in the shadows inside the trunk, but Pete could see that he looked haggard, exhausted. His uniform had been ripped, like Pete’s. The captain awoke with a start.

“Pete!” he said, overjoyed to see him. He jumped down on his hands and knees so his face was against the grate. “Are you alone?”

“I am,” he said.

“I knew you’d be back,” he said. “You’ve got to get me out of here.”

“I’m trying… to figure out what’s going on.”

“Do that,” he said. “Keep your head up. You can’t trust anyone right now.”

“Can I trust you?”

Finn looked stricken. “Of course,” he said.

“How much do you know about my orders?”

The captain looked confused. “Everything that I could read,” he said. “And what you told me after I read them, when you came on board. You said the Alliance had identified this epidemic as a massive threat, not just to the war effort, but to humanity. I also saw in your service jacket that you’re an engineer, not a doctor; that’s why I brought Haggerty in the loop. We’re the only ones aboard who know the full patrol order.”

“How much do you know about the epidemic?”

He shook his head. “Not much. We’ve been at sea so long… but I know everything has changed up there since we left. You showed me the projections, though, showed me what it was doing to the civilian population. And…” He hesitated.

“What else?”

“Your wife,” he said. “You told me your wife was killed by the disease.”

Pete was rocked by a real sadness, a profound sense of loss. A memory of her flashed in his mind, blond hair, blue eyes. The death of his wife, he knew, was what had put him on the boat somehow, the event that set him on a path that ended onboard a nuclear submarine. And while it made him tremendously sad, he was grateful to Finn for sharing this information with him, to give him a real memory that he could build upon. He decided at that moment to trust McCallister.

“There’s a lot I don’t remember,” said Pete.

“About?”

“The mutiny.”

McCallister shook his head, still angry with the memory.

“Moody has gone completely crazy,” he said. “It all really started when that shadow boat showed up. With your orders, and that boat tailing us, she just started getting increasingly paranoid. Frank — that idiot — convinced her that someone had been giving our position away somehow. We had a huge fight in the control room; none of us had slept for days. She wanted to shoot the shadow boat, I ordered her to stand down, and then Ramirez ran out of the room. Alarms started going off, fires broke out — it looked like someone was trying to sabotage us.”

“Ramirez?”

“That’s sure what they thought. And they assumed we were in on it together — the two Navy guys aligned against the two Alliance officers. So she snapped, and here I am.”

Pete hesitated for a moment. “I think I killed Ramirez,” he said.

“Jesus, Pete, really?”

“I woke up with a gun in my hand, and he was dead.” He looked at his feet, unable to face the captain. “I guess that means that one of us, me or Ramirez, was a traitor.”

McCallister shook his head again. “I don’t know what happened, Pete. But I do know this: those two maniacs are the only traitors. And god help us with them in charge.”

Pete looked into Finn’s eyes, and believed him. “I’ll get you out of there,” he said.

“Please do,” said McCallister. “But don’t let it get in the way of the mission.”

“The mission?”

“We have to get that cure,” he said. “Whoever finds it first will control everything. We have to make sure we get to it before anyone else does. I have no idea what’s going on up there,” he said, pointing upward. “Eris Island may be the last piece of land the Alliance holds. It should be — it’s a goddamn fortress surrounded by ten thousand drones. But if we can get the cure, and secure it for the Alliance, then we win.”

“I’ll get you out of there,” Pete said again. He started looking around for whatever implement had been used to bolt the grid in place at McCallister’s feet.

“It’s in that locker…” said McAllister, sticking a finger through the grate and pointing.

Pete opened it and saw a large wrench. He started to get it out.

There was a sudden whoosh below their feet.

“Are they shooting torpedoes?” asked the captain, recognizing the sound, alarm in his eyes. “What are they shooting at?”

“No,” said Pete after a moment, realization setting in. “Getting rid of Ramirez’s body.”

Their ears popped as pressure changed in the boat as a result of the shot. Then they heard footsteps on the forward ladder, and locked eyes.

“I can wait,” said McCallister.

“I’ll be back,” whispered Pete, returning the wrench to the locker.

“Hold on,” said Finn. “Before you go,” he pulled a key from around his neck, “take this. It’ll give you access to everything in memory on the central computer. There’s a key slot in the deck right by the main console in control. No one even knows it exists, it’s unique to Polaris submarines. I designed it myself.”

Pete took the key and looked at it. It was a simple, flat steel key with no identifying markings. “Old-fashioned,” he said.

“Yeah, old-fashioned. Like me,” he said. “Now, get out of here before anyone sees you talking to your traitorous captain.”

Pete walked away quickly and hung the key around his neck. As he did, he was surprised to find another key already hanging there, this one painted red.

CHAPTER NINE

Pete walked forward, distracted by all the new information, and found himself at the door to his stateroom.

Ramirez’s body was gone. A large red stain streaked against the bulkhead and trailed out the door. Pete had walked through it, he saw to his revulsion, and the soles of his shoes were now stained by his friend’s blood. Holmes had dragged the body out of the room, pulling him across the floor like a hyena dragging a carcass across the plain.

Trying to avoid the blood, Pete sat down on the small chair at the stateroom’s desk and pulled out the tablet computer that he’d gotten from Moody. He turned it on, hesitated, and then opened the file that contained his service jacket.

Doctorate in engineering. Cum laude from Georgia Tech. A list of military commendations. Marital status: widower. No children.

He scanned backward in time, flipping through the years with the tip of his finger, going further back into his own, unknown history. He saw that he had been an overachiever, but not one without a blemish. He’d been reprimanded lightly for a bar fight in Tokyo. Worse: he’d been demoted for a time for another altercation, this one with a superior at Eris Island. Clearly, his talents had been desperately needed by the Alliance, or they never would have tolerated him.

At the thought of Eris Island, he skipped ahead to that tour of duty, which had lasted for almost a year. When he got to that part of his biography, though, he reached an electronic dead end. The tablet read CLASSIFIED and wouldn’t let him proceed any further.

He sighed and looked around his stateroom for additional clues about who he was. He identified the desk that was his — it was mostly filled with military documents, but there were a few personal items. A worn novel by Stephen King. He flipped it open and saw an opening passage that had been highlighted:

He picked up a digital music player, but the battery was dead; even his own taste in music remained a mystery to him. Above his desk there was a coconut that had been carved into a woman with obscenely large breasts. On the bottom of the coconut-woman were etched the words BEAUTIFUL HAWAII. Someone had drawn onto its chest with a black marker, like a nametag on a uniform: POLARIS.

He inventoried the information he had assembled about himself: it wasn’t much. He searched his mind for more than what the paltry artifacts in his stateroom and the scant information in his service jacket gave him. The effort soon exhausted him.

He stood and climbed up into his rack, needing to lie down even if he couldn’t sleep. There he found something that contained more information about his life than everything he’d seen since regaining consciousness.

Taped directly above him in the short distance between his mattress and the overhead was a photo of a woman: he knew instantly she was his wife. Her name came back to him suddenly with a power that took his breath away. Pamela.

She was blond and athletic, with a smile that electrified him. In the picture, she was dressed in hiking clothes, laughing at the camera, her hair tied back in a ponytail. A green tropical forest closed in behind her, not another person in sight. She was standing by a sign at a trailhead that read: KEALIA TRAIL. Pete knew he had taken the picture; he could remember the moment. He could smell the sweetness of the flowers, the tang of the rotting mangoes, the cleansing sea air. He felt an incalculable sense of loss.

Soon he couldn’t look at it anymore, the pain was too great. He turned over and fell into deep sleep.

He had a vivid nightmare about the mutiny. He was fighting in the stateroom, and he knew he was fighting for his life. It was dark, and the quarters were so close that he could barely see whom he was fighting as they struggled. His opponent was strong and fast, but Pete soon had the edge and began to wear him down. Finally he got behind his adversary and put him in a choke hold, just as he had done to the doctor. But this time he didn’t let up. He held his grip until the body beneath him slackened and died.

He rolled the dead man over, and looked into his own face.

He awoke with a start. A piece of paper, folded in half, had been placed on his chest while he slept. He opened it.

He looked at his watch: he had ten minutes. He didn’t know whom the message was from, or what it meant, but the rendezvous might provide more answers. He took a final glance at the photo of his wife, and slid out of bed. He tried not to walk in blood as he exited, but there was too much to avoid.

WELCOME ABOARD THE USS POLARIS

The propulsion plant of a nuclear-powered ship is based upon the use of a nuclear reactor to provide heat. The heat comes from the fissioning of nuclear fuel contained within the reactor. Since the fissioning process also produces radiation, shields are placed around the reactor so that the crew is protected.

The nuclear-propulsion plant uses a pressurized water reactor design that has two basic systems: the primary system and the secondary system. The primary system circulates ordinary water and consists of the reactor, piping loops, pumps, and steam generators. The heat produced in the reactor is transferred to the water under high pressure so it does not boil. This water is pumped through the steam generators and back into the reactor for reheating.

In the steam generators, the heat from the water in the primary system is transferred to the water in the secondary system to create steam. The secondary system is isolated from the primary system so that the water in the two systems does not intermix.

In the secondary system, steam flows from the steam generators to drive the turbine generators, which supply electricity to the ship and to the main propulsion turbines, which in turn drive the propeller through a reduction gear. After passing through the turbines, the steam is condensed into water, which is fed back to the steam generators by the feed pumps. Thus, both the primary and secondary systems are closed systems where water is recirculated and reused.

There is no step in the generation of this power that requires the presence of air or oxygen. This allows the ship to operate completely independent of the earth’s atmosphere for extended periods of time.

CHAPTER TEN

Pete walked aft, guided by that interior autopilot that seemed to know the layout of Polaris. Darkness and silence were everywhere.

He passed through a watertight door into the missile compartment once again and found himself wandering in a forest of missile tubes, two rows of eighteen missiles each. Numbers were etched on each tube, and he saw the numbers decreasing as he continued aft: even numbers to port, odd numbers to starboard.

The noise level increased as he walked, which he found somewhat comforting, a sign of life in the otherwise ghostly ship. He arrived at the watertight hatch to the engine room, and opened it.

He stepped into a warm, white tunnel that was, he knew, a heavily shielded passage through the reactor compartment. Once on the other side, he was in the engine room, surrounded by the machinery that made the voyage of the Polaris possible. He felt the power of the place, the rumble of the deck plates starting a vibration that coursed through his whole body. He was in the middle of a symphony of machinery, an orchestra of turbines, valves, and pumps that had been exquisitely engineered to make a ship move and a crew survive: “the lights burning and the screw turning,” as Moody had said. It thrilled him.

He remembered some of the specifics, at a rudimentary level. He sensed that while he was comfortable with machinery in general — Hana had called him an engineer — he had never been an expert on the inner workings of the submarine. He walked past the giant evaporator, the machine that turned salt water into pure water that both they and their thirsty propulsion plant could drink, water that was now a thousand times more pure than anything available on the surface. But like the oxygen generators, this life-giving machine wasn’t running. Just as with their oxygen, they were drawing their water from their reserves. Reserve feed tank number one, Pete saw, was empty. Reserve feed tank number two was down to 15 percent. As he stared at the indicator and breathed in the engine room’s humid air, it dropped to 14 percent. The ship was slowly suffocating, and also dying of thirst.

He continued into the turbine room, where steam turned the giant machines that made their electricity. Their twins turned the main engines, which in turn made the screw move, and powered them through the water. He was close to his destination now.

Down a ladder, where it got darker, quieter, and cooler, away from the throbbing power of the turbines, he saw where the main engines connected to a giant set of gears, which in turn connected to the screw. Suddenly, it was there, the enormous shaft that penetrated the back of the submarine. It turned slowly, steadily, and silently, the most primal expression of the engine room’s immense power. He was as far as he could go from his watchers in control. He realized that’s why this location had been selected.

No one was there.

He looked around, increasingly apprehensive. He felt the gun in his pocket and felt some comfort in that. He looked at his watch: 0610. He wondered how long he should wait around.

While it was quieter in shaft alley than it was near the turbines, it still took Pete a while to recognize the electric crackling that was periodically sounding near his head. It was regular and rhythmic, as if a signal. It was also a contrast to the mechanical noises of the engine room. He followed the noise to an alcove along the bulkhead, and reached in. He pulled out a small handheld radio.

A red light was blinking on it. He pushed the button and spoke. “Hello?”

“Pete! Jesus! Where have you been?” It was a female voice, unfamiliar to him, with a slight accent he could not place. The voice was electronically scrambled and delayed in reaching him. He had an inkling that it was being sent from outside the boat.

“Who is this?” he said.

“Carlson,” she said. “Commander Jennifer Carlson.”

“Where are you?”

Even through the electronic noise of the radio, he could make out an exasperated sigh.

“I’m about two miles directly behind you,” she said.

Pete almost dropped the radio as he realized what she meant. She was communicating with him from the shadow submarine.

“Report,” said the radio.

“Who are you?”

There was a pause. “What do you mean?”

“Are you with the Alliance? Or are you the enemy?”

“We’re not your enemy,” she said. “Now, make your report. What’s going on in there?”

“I’m not telling you anything,” he said angrily.

“What’s wrong with you?” she said. “We’ve only got about five minutes on this link, and you need to tell me what’s going on. We heard the noise, heard the torpedo tube cycling a few hours ago. We almost fired at you then until we realized there wasn’t a weapon in the water. Who is in control of the ship?”

“I am an officer on an Alliance submarine,” said Pete, his face getting hot. “I’m not telling you a thing. I will help them blow you out of the water.”

“Pete, I don’t know what’s gotten into you. But you need to get your head on straight. We’re running out of time. You were supposed to disable the boat completely after the degaussing. We kept waiting for your signal, but then you disappeared.”

“Why would I help you?” said Pete.

“Why?” She was getting angry. “Because it’s your sworn duty. Because it’s the plan we worked on together for months.”

“Bullshit…”

“Because of Pamela,” she said, stopping him cold. “To avenge Pamela.”

“Avenge her?” he said. “I thought she died in the epidemic.…”

“Bullshit,” said Carlson. “The disease killed her because the Alliance won’t release the cure. They’re saving it for military purposes, sacrificing millions of lives in the process, including your wife’s.”

“I don’t…”

“It’s bad out there,” she said. Despite the distortion of the radio, Pete could hear real fear in her voice. “Every day we get new reports of whole cities that are quarantined. Whole boats have been wiped out after one person gets infected — no one has been off my boat in over a year. If one person gets sick—”

The radio made a beeping sound, and the red light began to blink rapidly.

“We’re almost out of time. Do your duty, Pete. Do what you know is right. We’ll be waiting for you, we’ll know when you’ve disabled Polaris. But don’t wait much longer or it will be too late. We can, and will, proceed without you.”

The radio clicked off, and the light turned dim. Pete glanced around, and then placed the radio back in the alcove where he’d found it.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

McCallister awoke from a quick, shallow sleep, never deep enough to escape his small prison even in a dream.

He looked over the small egg-shaped cell in which he found himself, and once again saw no possibility of escape. Ironic, inside a system that had been expressly designed to give the crew a chance to escape a doomed submarine.

The escape trunk consisted of three hatches. One below his feet, which was now covered by a steel grate and represented his only window into the ship he once commanded. The second was directly over his head, and was designed to mate up with a rescue vehicle. The third was at his knees, and represented the “swim out” hatch that would be used to escape the submarine with no rescue vehicle present. For either of the escape hatches to work, the trunk had to be flooded with seawater, until the pressure inside the cylinder was equal to the surrounding sea pressure. At that point, the outer hatches could swing open easily and allow egress. That’s why the trunk made such an ideal prison — if it could withstand thousands of pounds of sea pressure, it could withstand the worst that a recalcitrant prisoner could throw at it.

Even with sea pressure equalized, escape from a crippled submarine was fraught. In a locker below the trunk, in the same locker that held the wrench that had bolted him in, were exposure suits and hoods that filled with air and helped pull submariners to the top. As they ascended, the air in their lungs would expand with the decrease in pressure, requiring that they exhale forcefully the entire way. Generations of submariners had learned to shout HO! HO! HO! on the way up. In an earlier era, the skyline of every submarine base was dominated by a cylindrical dive tower in which submarine crews practiced the procedure to escape a submarine, which was usually the capstone of training, a rite of passage, the ultimate skill of a submariner. Doctrine stated that the procedure could work at depths up to six hundred feet. In the nuclear age, new submariners were often shocked to learn that they nearly always operated in water much, much deeper than that.

McCallister stared at the flood valve and contemplated opening it. Water would pour into the trunk, then into the ship through the grate at his feet. He’d be discovered immediately, of course, the roar of flooding at this depth would sound like a freight train. And sinking or crippling the ship wasn’t his goal anyway. He’d been accused of being a saboteur; he wasn’t about to become one. He assumed that’s why Frank had left the valve unlocked when he put him in there: he knew it wouldn’t do McCallister much good to open it up. Or, more likely, he just didn’t understand the ship well enough to worry about it. When McCallister had qualified on the Alabama, all those years ago, he had to draw every system on the ship from memory, know the location of every valve, breaker, and fire hose. Every man with dolphins on his chest, from the captain down to the cooks in the galley, was an expert on his boat. Gradually, as the technology on submarines became more complex, they required less and less of that, block diagrams and black boxes becoming acceptable substitutes for real physical knowledge. The introduction of nuclear missiles sealed it. The goal was to launch missiles, not to repair them. If a part was broken, swap it out. No one considered it possible, or desirable, for a sailor to know how to build or repair a nuclear weapon.

His first boat had a crew of 125 men. The Navy, understandably, had staffed submarines like ships, making them self-sufficient cities that could make their own air, water, and repairs to every system, keeping them at sea for as long as the food and spare parts held out. It was the dream of nuclear power: a “true” submarine that never needed to rise to the surface to take a breath. Steadily, however, automation took over, and crews got smaller. The Navy, in its wisdom, made them more like the crew of an airplane now than the crew of a battleship, a few specially trained men and women riding on a mass of high-priced technology. The Polaris required a crew of thirty men in the initial design phase, a crew that seemed revolutionarily small at the time for the United States, although the Soviets had for decades been sending out similarly sized crews in their small, rickety submarines. They pared this down to eighteen, which was what he first went to sea with. With attrition, however, and the losses the Alliance was taking, the number kept getting smaller and smaller. There was a joke in the fleet, before things got so serious, that the Navy was using the Polaris as part of an experiment to see how small a submarine crew could get before things fell apart. They seemed to have found the limit.

He sighed and looked at the green bucket sitting on the small bench across from him; Frank had thrown it in there with him when he locked him up, it was his toilet. He’d actually watched the asshole check it off the procedure that he held in his hands and studied with furrowed brow. There was a thin layer of urine in the bottom, which did nothing to improve the smell in the escape trunk. But there was more, too. McCallister had been on submarines a long time, long enough to recognize when the air was going bad. Almost all the things that could poison a sub’s atmosphere were odorless and tasteless: hydrogen from the battery, carbon monoxide from combustion, carbon dioxide from their own lungs. But while odorless, the combination of those things, along with the depletion of oxygen, created a palpable staleness that McCallister was familiar with, a burning in the throat, a headache right behind the eyes, an overpowering sense of fatigue.

“Wake up, McCallister.”

Moody had appeared beneath his feet.

“Moody,” he said, his throat dry. “What do you want?”

“Wanted to take a look at you. Make sure you’re OK. See if you’re ready to cooperate.”

“Ready to cooperate?” He laughed. “It seems you and Frank have already taken over the ship. What do you need me for?”

“Not just me and Frank,” she said. “Hamlin, too.”

“Bullshit,” he said. “I don’t believe you.”

“He killed Ramirez.”

McCallister hesitated at that, wincing at the dead man’s name. “I’m sure he had his reasons.”

She snorted. “And you believe that? I saw him. He was standing over his dead body, the smoking gun in his hand. The only difference between Hamlin and me is that he doesn’t have the balls to tell you where he stands. He wants me in charge, but he still wants you to think he’s a swell guy.”

“I don’t know what happened. Maybe Ramirez attacked him, maybe Pete got scared. That doesn’t make him one of your conspirators,” he said. But Hana could hear the doubt creeping into his voice.

“Then consider this: we were just in my stateroom, reviewing his orders. He showed me everything. Unlocked the patrol order and read it in front of me.”

“No,” he said, shock in his voice. “I don’t believe it. Pete’s a good man. He would never cooperate with you.”

“Oh really? Let me review the patrol order with you: we’re going to Eris Island. Now that we’ve degaussed, we can approach the island at periscope depth and go ashore. Our mission is to collect the cure and return it to the Alliance. Pete showed me the projections of the epidemic, everything.”

McCallister slumped against the side of the trunk.

“Everything you wouldn’t.”

McCallister looked down at her. “Jesus, is that what this is about, Hana? That Alliance chip on your shoulder? You took over the ship because you felt slighted?”

“I was slighted!” she yelled. “You shared those orders with the ship’s doctor, for Christ’s sake, but not with me, your XO!”

“Exactly,” he said. “I made you my XO. I trusted you.”

“The Alliance made me XO,” she said. “But I made myself the captain. So now the Alliance is really running this ship, the way it should have been from the beginning. Guys like you and Ramirez — you’re mechanics. Drivers.”

“Based on the atmosphere on this boat,” he said, sniffing the air, “you’re going to need a good mechanic soon. How’s the oxygen level, Moody? And by my calculations, we’re about out of water, too, right?”

“You have no loyalty to the Alliance—”

“And your life depends on machinery that you don’t understand.”

“You have no sense of mission—”

“No sense of mission?” He laughed loudly at that, the sound amplified and sharpened by the steel walls that surrounded him. “Moody, in my career I have targeted Trident missiles at Russian cities. I have launched cruise missiles at Tripoli and Tallil. On my first patrol, I had to fight a scram in maneuvering when the only light I had to read the procedure by came from a fire that burned in a main seawater pump breaker behind me. You think you’re the expert on the mission of this submarine? I’ve got more time eating ice cream at test depth than you’ve got under way.”

He stopped, out of breath from his rant. Moody reached in her pocket and McCallister flinched, certain she was reaching for her Taser. Instead, she handed him two granola bars through the grate.

“Here,” she said. “I’m sure you’re hungry.”

“You brought me food?” he said.

“Of course,” she said. “We’re not barbarians.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

Pete walked briskly out of the engine room, through the tunnel, and into the missile compartment. He was greeted immediately by Haggerty.

“Pete! I’ve been looking all over for you.”

“I was… walking… touring.”

Haggerty gave him a quizzical look. “Clearing your head, too, I’m sure. Completely understandable. The engine room is one of the few places you can find some peace around here. Nobody goes back there unless they have to.” He looked around. “Are you starting to remember anything?”

Pete shook his head. “Bits and pieces,” he said. “Not really.”

“What else do you want to know?” said Haggerty. “Maybe I can help.”

Pete looked him in the eye. He had a million questions, wanted to know more about his mission, what was happening onboard Polaris before the mutiny. But one question overwhelmed him more than all that.

“I’d like to know more about my wife.”

The doctor shook his head sadly. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s do this in my stateroom.”

The doctor had done what he could to make his stateroom comfortable. There was an antique medical diagram of a skeleton on the wall, next to a calendar with nature scenes. The calendar, Pete noticed, was three years out of date. A stethoscope hung on a hook, next to an old-fashioned black doctor’s bag. He had a quilt covering his rack, and a shelf of well-worn novels.

An object on the second shelf caught his eye: a Lucite block with bees trapped inside.

“Honeybees,” said Haggerty, watching Pete closely as he picked it up. “At each stage of its life cycle.”

It was fascinating to look at: some tiny relic of the natural world entombed in perfectly clear plastic, each stage numbered, one through ten. Tiny white eggs, almost too small to see. A slightly larger larva, then the pupa, which was starting to look like a bee, with tiny legs and wings. A mature worker bee, and a queen. A perfect cube of honeycomb. The queen’s cell, worker foundation, and finally a tiny vial of honey that poured back and forth as Pete tilted the block. He could have stared at it for hours.

“Something we studied in Biology, back when I was an undergrad,” said the doctor. “Fascinating, don’t you think?”

“It’s beautiful,” said Pete.

“Here,” said Haggerty. He’d poured two small glasses of scotch from a bottle he had hidden beneath socks in a drawer. They clinked the shot glasses together cheerlessly and drank them down.

“I never met Pamela,” said the doctor. “Your wife. But you talked about her all the time.”

“What did I say about her?”

“You met on the mainland. You had a whirlwind romance. You left her behind for your tour on Eris Island. You’d see her on leave, but honestly, Pete…”

“Yes?”

“You were plagued by guilt about it. Devastated, actually. We got your fitness reports before you transferred here, Finn shared them with me before you arrived — I’m the closest thing to a psychologist onboard and I guess he wanted my opinion. They all said the same thing — you were brilliant, had made vast contributions to the Alliance, but that after her death you were… a changed man. Said you’d been overheard blaming the Alliance for her death. Frankly, reading between the lines… it seemed like some of them were even beginning to doubt your loyalty.”

The word hung in the air, and the doctor and Pete looked at each other.

“What about you, Doc? Do you doubt my loyalty?”

The doctor shook his head. “I think, after all these years, after all the loss… any thinking man would begin to have doubts. About everything. Thank god we’re not all like Frank and Hana. Or McCallister, for that matter, all blindly giving ourselves to the cause without ever thinking about right or wrong.”

Pete thought about his radio conversation in shaft alley. “I’m thinking about right and wrong,” he said. “I’m thinking about it all the time.”

The doctor leaned in and put his hand on Pete’s shoulder. “Think about your mission now — you’re going to Eris Island to get the cure for this terrible disease. The disease that killed your wife. It’s a goddamn humanitarian mission if there ever was one. How could finding that cure be anything but good? I don’t care who is doing it.”

Pete shook his head — the doctor’s words certainty felt good. “That’s true,” he said.

“That’s why I want to help you,” said the doctor. “Let’s have another drink.”

As the doctor poured his shot, Pete’s eyes drifted back to the honeybees in the clear plastic block. Trapped, dead. So light, you couldn’t feel their weight. And yet those tiny insects were part of a hive — a society, really — that was incredibly complex and captivating.

“Still looking at my little friends?” said the doctor. “Those guys have kept me company awhile now.”

“They’re all female,” said Pete, surprised with the suddenness of that knowledge.

“What?”

“All the worker bees in a hive are female. The males, the drones, they keep them alive only long enough to impregnate the queen. Then the workers let them starve. The bees in that block: all female.”

The doctor shifted in his seat, uncomfortable with Pete’s hard stare. “Of course,” he said. “You know something about bees?”

“I do,” said Pete.

And he knew, suddenly, that the bees in that block belonged to him. The doctor was lying to him.

“Thanks,” said Pete, putting down the honeybees and taking a second shot from the doctor. But this time Pete drank a silent toast to himself: Here’s to finding out the truth.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The alcohol had the desired effect of clearing his head. Pete excused himself from the doctor’s stateroom after the second shot, pretended to head for his own stateroom, and then turned and walked into control, where Frank was standing watch.

He looked up at Hamlin, surprised. “Here to relieve me?” he asked.

“If you ask nice,” said Pete.

“OK: fuck you,” he said.

Pete walked around control and stood in front of Frank. He extended his hand. “It’s been a rough day,” he said. “I’m sorry if I stepped on your toes. I got whacked on the head down there pretty good — let me use that as my excuse.”

Frank looked at him warily but then took his hand. “Fine,” he said. “I appreciate that.” His grip was like a vise.

“And I am ready to relieve you,” said Pete. “Go grab some sleep, or get something to eat. Better yet, go to Haggerty’s stateroom: he’s handing out shots from his secret stash of scotch.”

“Now you’re really starting to get on my winning side,” said Frank. He pointed at the monitor in front of them. “We’re on course two-six-zero, heading for Eris Island at ahead flank.”

“Our shadow?”

“Right behind us, as always. She crept a little closer at about 0600, we caught a whisper of some kind of active transmission. But it was directly behind us and the recording sucks.”

“Interesting,” said Pete. It was his conversation from shaft alley.

“But now: status quo. Looks like she’s following us all the way to Eris Island. I wish Moody would let us shoot a torpedo right down her throat.”

“I’m sure she has her reasons.”

“Whatever,” said Frank. “I’m ready to be relieved.”

“I relieve you.”

“I stand relieved.”

“This is Lieutenant Pete Hamlin,” he said into a microphone over his head, recording the procedure for the ship’s digital deck log. “I have the deck and the conn.”

Frank stomped out of control without another word.

Control was quiet. Several alarms were still cut out, their lights a steady red on the main status board, the residual effects of the fire and the destruction in radio. Occasionally he felt a vibration and heard a slight whir, the sound of a hydraulic pump cycling to maintain pressure, or a fan cooling one of the ship’s many computers, some of which chirped quietly as their screens updated. But other than that, the big ship was silent. Pete waited a few minutes, to make sure he remained alone, and then he sat down in front of the main computer.

He scanned the deck near his feet, looking for the key slot McCallister had told him about. The deck was covered in smooth plastic tiles. He began pulling at the corners of them until one of them came up. Beneath it, as innocuous as the captain’s key itself, he found the keyhole. He inserted the key and turned it. As he sat up, the console in front of him was resetting, the normal sonar display disappearing. He put the key back around his neck and the tile back in place as the new display generated.

Below that was an extensive menu of options. There were maintenance records, personnel files of everyone who’d ever been onboard, and access to the deck logs. It appeared to be the entire digital history of the command. Additionally he could access secret Navy and Alliance documents, detailed descriptions of the actual capabilities of the ship’s systems — capabilities far beyond the conservative constraints they operated by, like test depth and maximum speed. Pete clicked on the heading PATROL ORDERS and suddenly accessed a library of the ship’s entire tactical history, starting when Finn took command years before. He scanned all the way down to the present, to see the orders he’d brought with him. The parts they’d accomplished, like the degaussing run, were available. Subsequent sections were not.

Curiously, a single more recent order was highlighted as ACTIVE on the bottom of the list. Pete clicked on it. The order was in the form of a message written from Hana to the Alliance. She reported that she had captured two traitors, taken command, and that she was proceeding to Eris Island as ordered. Once there, she continued, she intended to seize the cure, by force if necessary, to keep it out of enemy hands.

If it looked at any point like the cure would be lost to the enemy, she wrote, she would destroy it. And the Polaris, too, if required.

The Alliance hadn’t responded.

Pete switched back to the main menu and searched for more message traffic. It looked like they hadn’t received any messages from the Alliance in weeks — and all their outgoing messages had gone unanswered. Hana’s message hadn’t even been transmitted — the radio room having been destroyed during the mutiny. Apparently Moody had created it just for the record, to demonstrate that what she had done was legal and justified.

A total lack of communication. What did it mean? He sat back and contemplated it. Were they the Alliance’s last hope? Or was the war over and they were just a fighting remnant, like one of those Japanese soldiers in the jungle fighting long after the emperor had told them to go home?

Pete began scrolling through the rest of the computer menus, looking for clues. There were highly classified reports of Alliance losses at sea, and on land. The drones had turned the ocean into a vast no-man’s-land, bringing commerce and trade to a complete halt. Pete tried to decipher who was winning the war, but it was impossible to tell in terms of victories and defeats. In dry, military language he could only tell that massive suffering had been unleashed on both sides.

He clicked on a digital map labeled TOP SECRET, and at first he thought it was a different rendering of the flu projections he’d seen in his own orders: there were bright splotches of color highlighted on both coasts of the United States. But when he looked closer, he could see it actually represented drone attacks. The drone attacks on land that were supposed to be impossible.

“I knew it!” a voice yelled.

Pete jumped out of the way just in time, as Frank swung a roundhouse punch at his head. “You hacked the main computer!”

Even though the blow just grazed him, it knocked Pete to the ground. He rolled as Frank stood over him. Pete noticed for the first time that there was dark, dried blood around the cuffs of Frank’s pants. It was the blood of his friend Ramirez. “I told Moody we couldn’t trust you!”

Pete kicked him in the balls.

Frank buckled over in pain. Pete rolled out from under him and got to his feet. He swung hard and connected with Frank’s jaw. Frank fell against the starboard periscope with a grunt. Pete’s hand felt like he’d hit a brick wall.

Pete readied himself to punch Frank again, this time with his left hand. He saw too late that Frank was reaching in his pocket. He saw a quick blue flash, and then felt blinding, electric pain as the Taser made contact with his chest.

Every muscle in his body contracted, incapacitating him. He fell over, unable even to brace his fall. His entire body was cramping, making it impossible even to yell in pain. When the agony stopped, Frank was standing over him again, the Taser pointed right at his head.

“It’s supposed to be a ‘nonlethal’ weapon,” he said. “But I’ve heard this thing can kill you if you get it right in the head enough times.”

Pete tried to respond, but his mouth wouldn’t move.

“We don’t really know anything about you, do we?” There was a deranged smile on Frank’s face. “I think we should tie you to a chair, zap you with this thing in the nuts a few times until you tell us who you are, where you really come from.”

“I wish I knew,” Pete rasped.

“Smart-ass,” said Frank, training the Taser on him. “Hana was blind to it, she liked you for some reason, trusted you. Maybe she was just sick of looking at all of us after all these years, happy to have a new man onboard. But now I’ve got you. And I’m going to get some answers.” He pointed to the screen. “How did you access this?”

“Fuck off.”

Frank smiled and pulled the trigger of the Taser.

Pete’s entire body went rigid again with pain. He blacked out momentarily, waking with the taste of blood in his mouth. Frank was looking down at him with a broad smile, the Taser still trained on him.

“I missed your balls,” he said. “Hit you in the belly. But I think I know how to aim this thing now.”

“OK, OK,” said Pete, raising his hands. He was having a hard time forming words. “I’ll tell you everything.”

Frank snorted. “What a pussy. I thought you would at least take one more shot.”

“What do you want to know?”

“This, dumbass!” he said, rapidly tapping the computer screen with a thick finger. “How did you access all this? It looks like everything in the entire main computer. And more! I’ve never seen any of this.”

“McCallister showed me how,” said Pete. “He gave me a key.”

“A key? Like a code word?”

“No. An actual key. A backdoor into the computer system only he knew about. He gave me the key and told me how to access it. He designed it himself.”

“Bullshit,” Frank said, raising the Taser.

“See for yourself,” said Pete, gesturing toward the deck. “There’s a keyhole there, under that tile, it gives you access. Right where your left foot would be when you’re sitting at the console.”

Frank looked skeptical. “You show me. Open it.”

Pete dragged himself over, and reached for the tile with one hand. He lifted it up so the keyhole was visible. The effort exhausted him.

“Shit,” said Frank. “You weren’t lying. Give me that key.”

“I can’t do that,” said Pete.

“Now,” said Frank. “I’m not fucking around.” He slowly raised the Taser.

“OK,” said Pete, surrender in his voice. “Whatever you say. Just don’t shoot me again.”

Reaching into his pocket as Frank smirked, Pete put his hand on the gun that had killed Ramirez. Aiming as best he could through his pocket, he pointed it, and shot Frank through the stomach.

A look of utter shock on his face, Frank fell on top of him.

Pete pushed Frank’s body aside and stood up. Frank still clung to life, but wouldn’t live for long, as his blood poured onto the deck. He clutched the bullet wound with both hands. The shot had been deafeningly loud; Pete knew he wouldn’t be alone much longer. When Hana discovered that he’d killed Frank, there would be no doubt in her mind anymore that Pete was either a traitor to the Alliance or a dangerous psychopath.

Pete quickly closed out the main menu on the console and returned it to the normal sonar display. To his shock, he saw immediately that the tactical situation had changed — the shadow submarine had maneuvered closer to them. Much closer. He heard hard footsteps in the passageway outside control, footsteps that he now recognized as Moody’s, running to investigate the gunshot in control.

Suddenly a bright red light came on above the console, and a recorded alarm sounded: “Torpedo in the water!” Red lights flared and sirens screamed.

Even more ominously, Hamlin could hear the sonar of the weapon itself through the hull, pinging rapidly as it homed in on them.

He grabbed a microphone and shouted, “Battle stations! Torpedo in the water!”

He was thrown to the ground as the ship was rocked by an explosion.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The ship took a huge upward angle, and Pete slid aft, against the conn. Frank’s dead body did as well, leaving a red smear of blood along the deck, all the way to the dive chair.

Somehow Moody had fought her way to control. “What the hell is going on?”

“Torpedo!” said Pete. “They’re trying to stop us before we get to Eris!”

She stepped over Frank’s body, barely giving him a look. “What happened to him?”

“He was getting in the dive chair as the torpedo hit. He fell—”

“How far are we from the shoals?” she interrupted. “From the island?” Pete needn’t have worried about providing a detailed explanation about Frank. For the moment, Moody was laser-focused on saving the ship and fighting the enemy.

Pete pictured the chart in his memory. “We’re right on top of the shoals… maybe two miles away… nine miles from the island. Four miles until we’re inside the safety radius…”

“Safety radius?” She looked at Pete quizzically.

“Just trust me,” he said. “That’s where we’ll be safe from the drones.”

“Four miles at twenty knots…”

“Twelve minutes.”

“Good enough,” she said. She lunged for two red levers over the dive chair and pulled them forward: the emergency blow system.

An enormous whoosh of air filled the control room as the actuating valves opened. All around them, huge banks of compressed air shot into the main ballast tanks of the Polaris, pushing out thousands of tons of seawater, making them instantly buoyant. The submarine shot to the surface.

“Ahead flank!” she yelled, and the automated system acknowledged the order with a ring of its bell.

The computer counted down their depth as they raced upward. Ninety feet… eighty… seventy…

Finally they broke through the surface, the ship actually rising fifteen feet into the air. It crashed back into the ocean with a splash, and soon reached equilibrium.

“We’re still at an angle,” said Pete.

“Because of the torpedo hit,” said Moody. “We’ve taken on a lot of water aft, weighing it down… maybe we’re still taking it on. Automatic flood control should limit the damage. On the surface, like this, can we make it over those shoals?”

Pete raised the scope after briefly glancing at their speed. Even at ahead flank they were moving at only seventeen knots, perhaps limited by the flooding and the angle of the ship. Moody scrambled forward and operated the trim system to limit the damage, frantically cutting out alarms to limit the noise in control.

The scope came up and Pete put his eye to it, quickly trained it toward the island. Directly in front of him, he could see the discoloration in the water that marked the shoals that surrounded Eris. Farther ahead, he could see the low brown shimmer that was the island. Above it flew a swarm of drones.

“We’re right on top of the shoals…” said Pete. Just then, they heard the hull scraping bottom. The whole ship shook as they slid over the top.

Just as soon, it was over. Pete kept his eyes on the scope. A drone, a scout, was directly over them, soaring into the sky, signaling their presence.

“It doesn’t sound like that worsened the flooding,” Moody said when the scraping stopped. “Flood control has completely sealed off the engine room.”

Pete took his eye off the scope to check speed; it was dropping. When he looked back outside, three drones were low to the water, flying directly toward them.

“Drones!” he said. They disappeared from view as they flew directly overhead.

The first bomb hit the missile deck directly behind them and exploded. The noise inside the ship was deafening. That part of the deck, however, was superstructure, and acted as armor for them, absorbing the explosion without further damaging the pressure hull. Through the scope, Pete saw a hole ripped in the steel, a jagged gash, but the pressure hull below was still watertight.

“How many drones?!” shouted Moody.

“Three so far,” said Pete, just as the second bomb hit.

It landed right next to the sail. The scope jerked so hard from the force that Pete felt like he’d been punched in the face. The scope started to drift downward, but Pete fought to hold it up so he could keep looking.

“External hydraulics is damaged,” said Moody, cutting out an alarm. “Pressure dropping fast.” Pete watched as the third drone swerved to avoid its comrade. As a result, it dropped its bomb slightly off target, and it landed harmlessly in the ocean off their port side.

He barely had time to feel any relief before he looked up and saw at least a dozen drones heading directly toward them from the island.

“More on the way,” he said.

“How many?”

“Too many.”

They both looked at speed.

“How far do we need to go?” she said. “How far to this safety radius?”

“Maybe a mile left,” he said. Speed had dropped to fifteen knots. Pete did the math: four minutes until they reached safety.

The Polaris kept churning through the water. Pete knew they couldn’t survive a coordinated attack by that many drones, especially in their already damaged condition. One more hit might rip open the hull, ignite a fire in the missile compartment, and spread radioactive debris from the warheads. They were pointed directly at each other, the Polaris and the incoming swarm of drones. The island was clearly in sight now; he could see the control tower on the north side. More drones were taking off, sweeping up into the sky, ready to finish them off. The ESM alarms throughout the control room screeched.

Moody fought her way to the command console. “We’re five and a half miles from the island!”

Pete kept his eye on the scope. “We have to make that five-mile line.” The drones were screaming toward them.

“Four hundred yards,” she said. “Three hundred… two hundred… one hundred.”

“Brace yourself!” said Pete as the drones reached directly overhead. The lead drone dropped its bomb, which landed on the aftmost exposed part of the deck, tearing a new hole in it.

But then the rest of the drones pulled up, and circled them. They had made it, slipped across the five-mile line.

“Yes!” shouted Pete.

“All back full!” said Moody. It took Pete a second to realize what she was doing. While they were now safe from the drones, they were speeding at fifteen knots toward the jagged coral shore of the island. The big ship reluctantly slowed, then stopped.

The big engines changed directions, and the ship started to slow. Pete watched as the island loomed in front of them, the magnification of the scope making it seem like collision was inevitable. But the ship slowly ground to a halt, the speed dropping to zero.

“Are we good?” she said.

“Yes,” he said. Through the scope, he felt like he could almost reach out and touch land. “Somehow.”

Pete rotated and searched behind them — no sign of the Typhon boat. He knew now precisely where the five-mile line was, having seen the drones relent. But Carlson was out there somewhere. He had an idea.

“Keep backing up,” he said.

“Why?” said Moody.

“We want to get close to that five-mile line,” he said. “As close as possible.”

“Without going over.”

“Exactly,” he said.

“All back one-third,” she said.

He watched through the scope, trying to fix in memory the exact point where the drones had relented. “Here!” he said as they approached.

“All stop!”

The ship slowly drifted to a halt, dead in the water. Only the nose of the ship, and the tower, was above the surface, the aft end of Polaris weighed down by the flooding. Pete knew they were inside the five-mile radius — because the curious drones swooping above them weren’t dropping their bombs. But he hoped they were very close to that line.

“They’re out there somewhere,” said Pete. “Watching us. They could kill us now if they wanted.”

Moody shook her head grimly. “Those shoals might protect us — not sure how well their torpedoes would navigate over them. And they may not want to shoot us now. They could have done it long before. They may want to board us — seize us. Save their man McCallister. Find out what we know. Dissect every piece of technology onboard. There’s no way I’m going to let that happen.”

“We’ll fight?”

“Not in this condition,” she said. “But I’ll scuttle the ship before I let those bastards have us.” She started heading aft, and Pete yelled after her.

“We might not have to. We’re safe here. But they’re not safe where they are.”

“Are you sure?”

“We’re right on the line. Maybe we can lure them to the surface, let the drones attack them.”

“Well,” Moody said as a new flooding alarm shrieked and the Polaris continued to take on water. “I don’t have any better ideas.”

They hurried to the forward hatch, walking up a steep angle to get to it. As they left the control room, they could hear the rushing of water behind them as it flooded into the ship. They didn’t have much time. Moody spun open the hatch, and together they muscled it open and climbed topside.

The sun blinded Hamlin at first; he hadn’t realized how dark it was inside the ship. The equatorial heat, as well — the humidity, the sea breeze — it was almost too much to bear. He found himself gasping, his body starved for good air. As he breathed it in, he could feel himself getting stronger. Seagulls swooped overhead, their shadows crisscrossing the battered deck of the submarine.

But they weren’t gulls; they were the drones. Agitated, like bees, and the Polaris had approached too close to the hive. They swooped overhead, buzzing Pete and Moody so closely that they ducked. Each one clutched a bomb in its talons, but obedient to their coding, they didn’t drop them. Hamlin noticed that they looked old, their wings battered in some cases and frayed, their bodies no longer shiny. But they still flew with deadly, precise alacrity.

“Out there,” said Pete, pointing. “The Typhon boat is out there somewhere.”

“They won’t surface. They know better, with all these drones out.”

“When they see the drones are avoiding us… maybe they’ll think they’re safe. Maybe they’ll think the shoal line is the safety barrier. If we’re right on the line and they surface out there—”

“The drones will get them.”

“That’s my plan,” said Pete.

“So what are they waiting for?”

“Our surrender,” said Pete. He quickly stripped off his uniform shirt, and then his white T-shirt. He waved it in the air. He did it for five minutes, hoping someone on the Typhon boat was observing him through their periscope. The sun pounded on his shoulders, and soon he was sweaty with exertion.

“There!” said Moody, pointing. Pete stopped waving his shirt momentarily, and looked in the direction Moody was pointing.

It was a periscope.

But instead of driving straight at them, the submarine adjusted course, and drove to the south.

“What are they doing?” said Moody.

“Not sure,” said Pete. He could see them driving south a few hundred yards before turning back toward them.

“Which way is north?” Pete asked Moody, the realization dawning on him. She pointed forward.

If the direction north was twelve o’clock, the Typhon boat had driven itself to seven o’clock. Precisely the location of the break in the shoals.

“That’s the break in the shoals,” said Pete. “The one place they can pass at periscope depth. Somehow they knew.”

Moody nodded grimly, her thoughts confirmed once again: they’d been betrayed.

The enemy submarine glided easily through the break in the shoals. It crept closer and closer to them; he could just barely make out the small V of water it left in the periscope’s wake. Pete imagined Jennifer Carlson looking at him through the scope, magnified, with the crosshairs of the reticule on his chest. Soon it looked so close that Pete could see the glass of the scope lens. He was worried the two ships might collide.

Then suddenly, the giant submarine rose from the water.

The enemy boat rose faster than the water could fall from it, so the sea poured off it in sheets as it surfaced. Just as Carlson had told him in shaft alley, the ship had been at sea for years; its paint was chipped, and starfish adhered to the hull. It looked like an ancient ghost ship that the sea was relinquishing to them.

Instantly the drones adjusted their flights, a contingent of them peeling off the Polaris and swarming over the enemy boat.

But none dropped their bombs.

“Shit,” said Moody.

“They’re too close,” said Pete. “Inside the five-mile line, just like us.”

“So now what do we do?”

“We have to make them back up,” he said. “Just a few feet.” He thought for a minute, thought about what little he knew about Carlson, her fearful voice on the radio in shaft alley. Now that they knew they were safe from the drones, an armed boarding party was starting to climb out of the Typhon submarine, methodically loading two small inflatable boats and putting them over the side.

“How…” she said, but Pete was already climbing back down the ladder to enter the Polaris.

“Where are you going?” she said.

“Take this,” he said, handing Moody his shirt. “I have to make a call.”

He ran aft, aided by the angle of the ship, running downhill all the way. The angle had grown steeper, and the smell of seawater, and the sound of it rushing in, permeated the ship.

Through the missile compartment and into the engine room, almost falling as gravity aided his sprint aft. He opened the door into the tunnel and ran into the turbine room.

Water was up to the deck plates. Some of the turbines were still running, but the noises were unhealthy. The symphony of machinery he’d heard earlier, machines lovingly maintained by Ramirez, was now discordant. Gears were grinding, and steam was hissing from the turbines and pumps that were in their death throes. Pete continued running aft, to the ladder to shaft alley. Looking down, he saw there was just about a foot of space remaining above the water; he hoped the radio was still dry and functional.

As he stood at the top of the ladder, he also considered that the water might not be seawater — it could be coolant leaking from a damaged reactor, which would be lethally radioactive. It might also be alive with electricity, through the bared wires or deranged generators that were submerged beneath it. But there was no time to check, and he was running out of options. He took a deep breath, and dropped down the ladder.

The water was up to his chest, and got deeper as he fought his way aft. When he got to the alcove where the radio was hidden, only his head was above water. He reached in and pulled it out. He pressed the red button and spoke. “Typhon, this is Polaris.”

He waited a moment, hearing nothing but static. He was about to give up when a response came.

“Hamlin, this is Captain Carlson. Is that gushing water I hear? Are you coming around now that you’re about to sink?” The voice was clearer than he remembered it, perhaps aided by their proximity.

“No time to argue,” he said. “You need to surface and send a boat over here so we can surrender to you. Moody is ready.”

“I see her waving that flag. A boarding party is on the way.”

“Thank god,” said Pete. “We’ve got sick people onboard. Very sick.”

There was a pause. “Nice try, Hamlin,” she said. “I’ll have to see that for myself.”

“Send your doctor.”

“I’ll see if he’s available,” she said. “I think today is the day he golfs.” She disconnected.

He shut off the radio and climbed out of shaft alley. He ran forward, through an engine room that was now almost completely dark.

At the watertight door, Doctor Haggerty met him: somehow he always knew when Pete was in shaft alley. He looked panicked. “Are we sinking?”

“Looks that way,” said Pete.

“We’ve got to get out of here! Aren’t we right next to Eris Island?”

“How did you know that?” asked Pete.

The doctor shrugged nervously. “I’ve been paying attention, glimpsing at our position on the chart when I can. We’ve got to get to that island!”

Pete stared hard at him.

“And we need to help Finn,” the doctor added.

“You’re right. Let’s go.”

They ran forward to the escape trunk, uphill all the way, fighting the steep angle of the ship. When they got there, they found Finn sitting calmly on his steel bench, seemingly resigned to going down with his ship. He looked awful; his days locked in the dark had taken their toll. His skin was sallow, his eyes sunken. He looked, Pete confirmed, like a very sick man.

“Wake up, Captain,” said Pete.

“Look who’s here,” he said, opening his eyes. “What’s going on?”

“Port call,” said Pete. “The doctor and I thought we’d take you out for some fresh air.”

“I don’t know if I can today, I’m pretty busy.”

Pete was already unbolting the grid that had kept Finn captive. He was dripping wet, and water pooled around his feet as he worked. The grate dropped to the deck with a clang. The captain started to climb down.

“No,” said Pete. “We’re going to use your little room here, if you don’t mind.”

The doctor climbed up the ladder. Pete handed up three hoods from the locker, followed by a tightly packed inflatable raft.

“Grab that one, too,” said the captain, pointing to a tightly bundled canister wrapped in the same Day-Glo orange nylon. “That’s the motor.”

Soon all three men crowded into the escape trunk with the two bundles. Pete pulled up the bottom hatch behind them and turned the locking ring until it was tightly shut. It was suddenly quiet as they were sealed off from the rest of the noisily sinking ship.

“How far below the surface are we?” said the captain. “I can feel the angle.”

“I think about twenty feet right here,” said Pete. “The forward trunk is completely out of the water. The engine room is almost completely flooded. And we’re getting deeper.”

The captain moved deftly around the trunk, verifying that all the valves were lined up correctly, then he handed each of the men a yellow hood. “Put these on. They’ll help you get to the surface.”

Soon they each had a hood on, and gave a thumbs-up. Finn opened a valve, and the trunk began to fill with water.

“We’ll fill it up first!” he shouted above the noise. “Then we’ll equalize pressure, and we’ll swim out.”

The water was soon up to their knees, and it was hard not to feel panic as they sat in a small steel chamber that was rapidly filling with water. Pete felt his heart pounding as the waterline reached his neck. The doctor looked even more stricken, his eyes wide with fright through the clear plastic of his hood.

“Will that raft hold all three of us?” Pete shouted over the sound of rushing water.

“It should,” said the captain. “I used to look at that thing when we were eight hundred feet deep in five thousand feet of ocean — always made me laugh. I couldn’t think of a situation where it would ever be useful.”

“Those engineers at Electric Boat think of everything.”

The water finally stopped pouring in. “The pressure is equalized,” said the captain. “We can open the escape hatch now.” He pointed down, into the water.

“I’ll go first!” said Haggerty, not giving them a chance to discuss it. He then dived below the waterline and disappeared. They heard a clank outside as the doctor egressed.

“You’re next,” said the captain.

“Are you sure?” said Pete.

“Go,” he said. “I’ll meet you at the top.”

Pete took a deep breath, then stuck his head underwater. In the murk, and with the ship’s steep angle, it was difficult to find the escape hatch, even in the close confines of the trunk. He hit his head hard on the way under, and fought off the natural instinct to avoid diving into a dark, water-filled pipe.

But once he was inside, the natural buoyancy of the hood and his own body took over. He made his way through the open hatch and felt himself being pulled to the surface, and before he could even remember to say HO HO HO, he broke through, his head once again exposed to bright sunshine and clear air.

McCallister came up soon after. The orange raft popped up immediately after that, and began to unfold and inflate immediately with a hiss. They ripped off their hoods and paddled toward the raft. The captain pulled himself in first, then leaned over and pulled Pete in with a strong arm.

“Over there!” said the captain. The motor canister was bobbing a few feet away. They both leaned over and paddled toward it until the captain could pull it onboard.

He ripped off the protective casing and soon had the parts spread out on the floor of the boat. He popped out the blades of the propeller, pulled off a plastic tag that activated the battery. He then hung it off the back of the boat, on a mount that was designed for it. The final step was to thread together two small poles, the larger of which had a ribbed rubber grip: the till. It was done in minutes. He pushed a button, and Pete could hear the engine switch on.

“It’s got a high-capacity battery, and only one speed,” said the captain. “It’ll last about thirty minutes.”

Pete looked forward. Hana Moody was still standing on the front of the ship, waving his white shirt; she hadn’t noticed him escaping with Finn yet. And Haggerty, he saw, was eagerly swimming away. Toward the Typhon boat.

“Haggerty!” shouted the captain. “We’re over here!”

Haggerty looked back briefly but continued swimming toward the other submarine. It didn’t surprise Pete at all: a final confirmation.

“Head for the shore?” said the captain.

“No,” said Pete. “The other direction.”

“To rescue Haggerty?”

“No — screw him. I just want to get close to them.”

“Why?” said Finn. “Don’t they want to kill us?”

“Probably,” said Pete. “I’ll explain later. But do me a favor — lie down. And try to look sick.”

The captain did as Pete asked, and he turned the boat toward the Typhon sub, about one hundred yards from the Polaris. They were gaining on Haggerty, who was frantically swimming away from them. Pete looked down at the captain, who looked, for all the world, like a dying man.

Pete saw a woman on the main deck, looking shocked as they approached. She gave an order, and men with rifles trained their guns and shot — bullets whistled over their heads. His gambit was having the desired effect. Pete began waving his arms frantically and pointing at the lifeless body of McCallister, as if begging Carlson to let them aboard. The small engine of the boat whined loudly, making it seem like they were approaching much faster than they were. In fact, they were moving against the tide and the waves, and were barely making progress. The distance and the motion of the waves, he hoped, would keep them out of the range of the riflemen.

A shot cracked against the casing of the motor, splitting it, but it kept running.

“Are you sure about this?” said the captain.

“Not at all!” Pete said. He kept the little boat pointed at Carlson.

They were close enough that he could see the concern in her eyes. Playing the part perfectly, McCallister began coughing violently, and leaned his head over the side to spit out a giant glob of phlegm. Carlson suddenly relented, shouted another order, and the ocean behind her began to churn as her submarine’s massive engines turned and pulled the submarine away from them.

She was backing away from them, panicked that a deadly epidemic was heading her way in an orange life raft. Just as Pete had intended.

The huge engines worked quickly, and the drones continued to fly in their seemingly random patterns overhead. Carlson wasn’t worried at all about the drones, Pete could see; she was fixated on the raft that seemed to be speeding toward her with a cargo of disease. She backed up twenty feet, then thirty. Even as they moved away, though, some of the sharpshooters’ shots came closer to the raft, as the men adjusted their aim. Pete could hear bullets whistling by them in the boat, and some shots hit the water so closely that spray hit them, and drummed against the side of the raft. Come on, thought Pete, cross that line.

The Typhon submarine continued to pull backward while the sharpshooters shot at them. The drones dived over both submarines and the raft without dropping their bombs.

Then finally, as Carlson and her ship crossed that invisible five-mile line in the ocean, the drones attacked.

The first bomb exploded on the main deck of the Typhon ship with a loud pop, seemingly causing no damage on the thick metal. It had landed on the aftmost part of the deck, far from where the men were boarding their inflatables — the part of the submarine, Pete realized, that crossed the five-mile radius first. Carlson’s crew looked at her in shock. She looked at Pete with a grim smile.

“Kill the engine!” said Pete, and McCallister quickly sat up, turned off their small outboard, and turned the till so that they stopped moving forward.

While the first bomb had done little damage, the other drones were attacking in a frenzy now, dropping their bombs in a fury as the marines on the main deck took cover and scrambled to get in their small boats. The big submarine continued to move backward, exposing more and more of herself to the drones’ attack. The drones ignored the inflatables, told by their programming to focus on the big target.

It was fascinating to watch.

The whole Typhon boat was now under attack. Some of the bombs began to have an effect, opening holes on spots on the deck that had previously been hit and weakened. Carlson realized what had happened and cut the engines, the water no longer churning behind the boat. But she weighed thousands of tons, and her momentum was slow to reverse, carrying her farther into the free-fire zone.

In the shower of bombs that the drones dropped upon her, one fell straight into the conning tower. A shower of sparks shot into the sky, followed by a column of black smoke. The other drones took note, and poured more bombs into the wound.

As they did, each flew away in an orderly straight line, back to Eris Island to reload.

The two inflatable boats from the Typhon were now full. A few men, some wounded terribly, were swimming in the sea. Their shipmates stopped firing at Pete and McCallister as they tried to pull their comrades aboard. The submarine was mortally wounded, smoke and fire pouring from multiple holes, the ship listing badly to port.

“She’s dead,” said McCallister.

“You’re sure?” said Pete.

“Listen,” he said. “You can hear the air banks exploding.…”

Pete did hear it, a series of deep explosions coming from beneath the waterline. He could feel the concussion in his feet through the soft bottom of the raft. A tower of flame now roared from the Typhon conning tower.

“All that compressed air is feeding the fire,” said the captain. “Turning it into a blast furnace inside. God help anyone who’s still onboard.”

The ship rolled suddenly all the way on its side, toward them so that they were looking into the top of the conning tower.

“We need to get away!” said McCallister. “When that tower hits the waterline, it’ll sink like a rock. The suction could take us with it!”

The conning tower drifted closer to the water, and just as McCallister had predicted, once the giant opening hit the waterline, the ship sank with stunning speed.

Pete could feel the suction at work, trying to pull their little boat backward. But they had gone far enough, had the tide working in their favor, and were soon speeding toward the beach. The small boats from Carlson’s sub were still pulling survivors from the water, ignoring them for the moment.

“Let’s go,” said Pete, pointing toward Eris. “We’ve got a head start.”

“Do I still need to look sick?” said Finn.

“No,” said Pete. “Look like a captain. And get us ashore.”

He quickly pulled the till, and turned them around.

Moody, still holding Pete’s shirt, watched in shock from the deck of the Polaris as they passed.

“Fuck you!” she shouted.

Finn’s eyes were trained on the shore. But as he kept his left hand on the till, he flipped her off with his right.

Commander Carlson jumped from the deck into one of the rubber boats, landing only halfway on; the sergeant of the marines pulled her the rest of the way aboard. “Get away!” she said, pointing toward the island. The drones continued hammering her submarine behind her, which was belching fire and smoke, and groaning as it died. Her small rubber boat pulled away, and the drones ignored it. They were prioritizing, she realized. Her dying submarine was a bigger, better target. As they sped away, she saw that they were in parallel with her other rubber boat. Her XO, Lieutenant Banach, was on that one. He gave her a slight nod, and she was flooded with relief to see that he was alive. She nodded back.

She’d been fooled, she realized. And it had worked because she’d been afraid. That little boat had started moving toward them, with the sick man onboard, and she had reacted out of fear. She was a woman who had stared down death a hundred times, from torpedoes and bombs, and the multitude of ways that the deep ocean can end human life. But for fear of a disease, she’d backed the big ship up, directly into a trap. They must have been inside some kind of safe zone, she realized now, a buffer around the island. She’d been trying to fool Hamlin, but he had fooled her instead. That clever boy had tried to get her to surface outside of that, and when that didn’t work, he let her drive herself right out of it. He knew what she was afraid of. And because of that, she’d lost her ship.

She wouldn’t let fear drive her again.

Banach’s boat veered suddenly to port, drawing her eyes to the surface of the water.

It was Dr. Haggerty, her spy. He stopped dog-paddling and waved his arms wildly at her.

She’d never seen him in person, just a photograph in his file, but she knew it was him. That type of person, she supposed, and the intelligence he provided were vital to the war effort. To any war. Trying to trick Hamlin into cooperating had been his idea; he said they could convince Hamlin that he had worked for them all along. Said the man was unstable and distraught, and that he would be easy to manipulate. So much for that, she thought, as she looked back at her burning submarine. Because she was a warrior, she despised disloyalty, despised spies, even if they were working for her. And because she was smart, she knew she could never trust the doctor.

“Shall we stop?” yelled the sergeant as they neared him.

“No!” she shouted. “To the island.”

She looked back briefly at Haggerty as they sped by him. He continued waving his arms for a moment, but then seemed to realize that he’d been abandoned. He started swimming toward shore, but they were almost five miles away, and the doctor was old and out of shape. The swim would have been challenging even for an athlete. Carlson watched without emotion as his head went under, then disappeared.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

McCallister and Hamlin waded to shore and onto a landscape that seemed vaguely familiar to Pete. They dragged the raft onto a rocky beach and hid it, barely, in a patch of weeds.

“This way,” Pete said, the geography slowly coming back to him. They crested a small sand hill that marked the end of the beach, staying low to be unseen.

Over the rise, they could now see the airfield. It was riddled with craters — artillery shells from ships and cruise missiles that had once tried to pound the island into submission, before the drones had turned them away. The outlying buildings around the field had mostly been bombed into rubble. But the tower, reinforced and strategically built into the surrounding landscape, still stood tall.

Drones were everywhere. They didn’t need much runway to take off, Pete knew, could rise almost vertically, so the craters on the runway had little effect. Some were resting on the tarmac, their wings oscillating slowly in the sun. One rose up and circled lazily in the sky. Pete watched, fascinated, as an empty drone, perhaps one that had just bombed the Typhon sub, landed on the runway, crept slowly up to a free bomb on the field, and armed itself.

Not a human was in sight.

“You know this place?” asked Finn.

“I used to,” said Pete. He was lost in the sight, a grand vision of modern warfare, reduced, wounded, and bruised, but still murderously effective. Perhaps, he thought, as he looked in vain for another human, even victorious.

“Look,” said the captain, tapping his arm. He was turned around, looking out to sea.

The two rubber boats from the Typhon submarine were fully loaded with heavily armed men in fatigues, making their way toward Eris. In the front boat sat Jennifer Carlson.

“Let’s go,” said Pete. “We don’t have much time.”

The drones took notice of the speeding Typhon boats but didn’t bomb them, as they were now well within the safety radius. The drones also ignored Pete and Finn as they headed toward the tower.

At its base, Pete found the heavy door locked. On the small keypad next to it, he pressed his thumb. Nothing happened.

“No power?” he said.

“I don’t think that’s it,” said Finn, pointing up to the windows of the tower. “I can see lights inside. Maybe it’s been locked from the inside. Or you’ve been taken off the access list.”

“Shit,” said Pete, looking back to the beach where Carlson’s boats were quickly making their way toward them.

“Do we have any weapons?”

Pete reached in his pocket and pulled out Ramirez’s small gun. “Just this,” he said.

He turned back to the keypad and noticed a small metal disc below it. It was corroded and rusted, but he managed to slide it over.

It revealed a small keyhole.

He pulled the red key from around his neck, and showed it to Finn.

“A key?” he said.

“Yeah. You submariners love this shit,” he said. He stuck it in the hole and turned it.

He heard a metallic click deep inside the door as a relay turned. He pushed, and the giant armored door glided open.

“Let’s go,” he said.

They ran up the stairs as the door swung shut and locked behind them.

They bounded up the stairs to the top floor, where an unlocked door awaited them. Pete looked at Finn and drew the small handgun without a word. Nodding, they pushed the door open, Pete holding the weapon in a firing position.

“Pete Hamlin,” said an old man from the center of the hexagonal room. “It’s about time you showed up.” He had a gray beard, and wore the shoulder boards of an admiral.

“Who are you?” Pete shouted over the sights of his pistol.

“That,” said Finn, wonder in his voice, “is Admiral Wesley Stewart.”

Pete allowed himself to take it all in for a moment before he began speaking. The familiarity of the control room washed over him; he knew he’d spent many days in there in the past, watching the drones below. Despite the carnage outside, the control room itself was in relatively good condition, the carpet still clean, just one of the surrounding windows cracked. Electric lights still illuminated the room, and the computers beeped, clicked, and contentedly reported their data. Somewhere far beneath them, he could feel the hum of a generator in his feet. He placed the small pistol slowly in his pocket.

Admiral Stewart broke the silence. “I didn’t expect to ever see both of you in the same room. Certainly not this room.”

He turned to Pete and pointed at McCallister. “How much does he know?”

“You might want to ask me the same thing,” said Pete.

“We’re here for the cure,” said Finn. “The epidemic.”

“The disease that killed my wife.”

The admiral looked at Pete with concern. “You may have come to the right place for the cure,” he said. “But that disease didn’t kill Pamela.”

Pete was confused. It was one of the few things he thought he knew, the memory that had anchored his actions. “But…”

Stewart looked at him with a seriousness that gave way to sympathy. “Pete, the disease didn’t kill Pamela. The drones did.”

And with that, everything came back to Pete.