Terminal Run

17

Midshipman Patch Pacino pulled the lower hatch of the escape trunk open, expecting to slide down the ladder to the middle level of the forward compartment to the ladder step-off. The base of the ladder was nestled in an alcove set into a narrow passageway leading forward to the control room, with the captain’s stateroom to port and the radio room to starboard.

As the hatch came open, a rolling black cloud of toxic gas came boiling up into the escape trunk. The heat of it assaulted Pacino’s face and momentarily blinded him. His eyes teared up, the water pouring out of them — if he’d only had his mask, he thought. It occurred to him that when the scuba cylinders were gone, this was the air he would be breathing, but he clamped his mind shut, knowing that thoughts like that would lead him back out the hatch. He lowered his feet into the hatchway, ready to put his bare feet on the ladder, but he couldn’t find it. He climbed back into the escape trunk, wiped his eyes, and found the battle lantern — an overgrown flashlight the size of a car battery — and unfastened it. He lugged it to the bottom hatch, again dangling his feet over the edge and shining the lantern downward.

In the haze of the black smoke he could see that there was no ladder, and there was no longer a passageway beneath him, because the walls were gone. The missing walls were bad enough, but it was worse — the deck was also missing. The beam of the flashlight reached all the way into the lower level where the torpedo room had been, but which was now a space crowded with wreckage and lit by flickering flames of a fire. Water was pouring into the ship, the level rising visibly, perhaps coming up a foot in the brief second Pacino shined his light straight down. Pacino dangled twenty feet above the surface of the floodwaters of the lower level, and there was no place he could lower himself to. If he dropped straight down, he would break his legs on the shattered equipment protruding from the water. As he stared at the hellish remains of what had been the submarine, the thought entered his mind that everyone had to be dead. Pacino’s ears suddenly popped, hard, from the air pressure rising in the space. The ship was sinking, he thought, and the water rushing in was raising the pressure of the trapped air.

The next thought was that he had been a fool to come back inside the doomed vessel, and that the best he could do was shut the hatch and go back up. No one could have survived this. He still had time, he thought, he could still save himself. He began to pull his legs back into the escape trunk to evacuate when a dim sound made him hesitate. He had been deaf after the first explosion, but some low-level sounds were coming back. The sound he had heard was unmistakably a human scream from a female throat. Pacino froze, uncertain what to do. If he dropped into the water he would be unable to return to the escape trunk except by floating on the rising waters, but by that time the ship would have descended further, to the point that the trunk might no longer work. One word then made its way into his mind — Carrie.

An uneven explosion suddenly shifted the ship beneath him. He found himself hitting the opposite side of the hatch opening. The escape trunk lurched away from him and slowly faded into the cloud of smoke. He caught his breath, panicking as he realized he was being hurtled into the hull. He felt himself falling and tipping backward, the open maw of the escape trunk invisible in the renewed violent cloud of smoke tinged in orange flames. The regulator dropped from his mouth, the smell of the toxic gas slamming into his senses. In his panic he felt his heart thud hard in his chest, and he actually feared for a moment that he was having a heart attack. In the middle of the half-formed thought he hit the water, smashing his back on something large and cylindrical. Pain flashed up and he took a breath to scream, but he was underwater, the flames of the compartment gone, the smoke gone and only the cold black water around him, with just a slight lightening over his head.

He fought his way up to the brackish surface and took a huge breath, coughing out a lungful of water and vomiting the lunch he’d eaten before donning his wet suit. The air in the space was like putting his face in an old bus’s exhaust pipe-hot and foul and laced with toxic chemicals. Just the smell of it made his mind hazy. He floundered in the water, his vision tunneling to a single point. The dim sounds of a roaring fire in the background were punctuated by his coughs and a distant scream, and the scream reminded him of the escape trunk and his scuba gear, and with a last ounce of strength he found his regulator hose and put it into his mouth and took four deep breaths of the canned dry air.

His head immediately cleared enough that he could make out the yellow body of the battle lantern that had fallen with him. He lunged for it and shined it out over the water around him, his breaths coming four times a second in his terror. The water had receded, leaving more of the compartment visible. Before the water had been halfway up the lower level, but now he could see the lower-level bilge frame bay. But that couldn’t be true, he thought, and then realized that the ship had taken a drastic down angle, making the waterline fall forward. The surface was at a thirty-degree angle to the snarled remains of the deckplates still fastened to the hoop frames in a few places. The aft bulkhead had a few feet of the middle-level and upper-level deck platforms hanging from it, but the explosion from the torpedo room had blown most of the upper levels into the overhead, crumpling the thick steel deckplates as if they’d been tin foil. The escape trunk was now invisible, obscured either by flames and smoke or by the rising water level. The hatch of the trunk was located at the midpoint of the forward compartment, and if it were underwater, not only had the water risen drastically but the down angle had grown catastrophic. It would not be long before the ship was plunging vertically downward. Pacino’s ears popped again, harder this time.

Another explosion suddenly rocked the vessel, but this one came from aft. The angle suddenly eased slightly, then went back downward. Pacino heard a scream, this one a man’s. He couldn’t make out the words. His panic eased just enough to let in one rational thought — what the hell was he going to do now? The ship had been ravaged by weapons explosions after the torpedo hit. It was plunging to the bottom, and it was possible they could be too deep for the trunk to work. He had to try to swim to it anyway, he thought. He started to swim, and in the darkness of the smoke-filled space, he lost his bearings. The escape trunk had to be ten or fifteen feet underwater by this time. He had to find it before the ship sank any further.

Pacino looked forlornly around him at the dark, explosion ravaged space. He had been wrong to come back inside, that much was obvious. The escape trunk was lost, and all that remained was less than half of the forward compartment. His ears slammed again as the pressure increased, the smoke so thick he could barely see. A small kernel of reason remained to him. He tried to listen to it. If he followed the surface of the water till it ended, he would either find a slanted frame bay from what had been the ship’s hoop steel sides or the flat bulkhead of the compartment wall. He picked a direction and swam, hitting the sloping side of the hull. He followed it in the dense smoke until he reached a corner, then followed the flat surface — the compartment bulkhead — past jagged pieces of metal and the wreckage of equipment until he found himself at the shut hatch to the next compartment.

But the next compartment was the special operations compartment, which was no good to him, because it didn’t have an escape trunk. But it had a deep submergence vehicle inside. He could get into the DSV and seal the hatch against the pressure of the deep. It was not as good a solution as a complete escape, but it would keep him alive until he could get the attention of someone on the surface. The water was rising toward the hatch, and he had to open it. It occurred to him that if the spec-op compartment was at atmospheric pressure, opening the hatch would be like depressurizing an airplane. He would get blown through the opening and smashed against the opposite bulkhead. If the space were flooded, he would not be able to open the hatch at all. The weight of the water above it would make it weigh several tons. He had to try to find the equalization valve and open it, but though he knew there was such a valve, he couldn’t remember its exact location well enough to find it in the dark, in a half-submerged compartment filled with thick smoke and damaged by a severe explosion. He searched in the smoky vicinity of the hatch, feeling with one hand and holding the battle lantern with the other, perched on a small ledge of decking that remained near the hatch lip. He felt a valve handle, with the characteristic shape of a salvage valve, and was about to crack it open to equalize the pressure between compartments when he heard two screams, one male and one female.

He turned and saw four heads floating in the black water. One was Catardi’s, one was Schultz’s, one face was turned away from him, and the last was Carrie Alameda’s. The faces he could see were all black, probably from the soot of the fires and explosions. They must have been standing aft of the escape trunk — waiting for Pacino to get out safely and for Chief Keating to return and report on the transfer — when the torpedo hit and the torpedo room warheads detonated, blowing them aft. The remaining crew in the control room had to be dead, since they were directly over the torpedo warheads. Pacino cranked the salvage valve handle, and a hissing noise came from the bulkhead. The spec-op compartment hadn’t been pressurized after all, which was the only good sign so far.

While he waited for the pressure to equalize, Pacino pulled the bodies close to the deck ledge. The first, Catardi, was unconscious. The second was Lieutenant Commander Schultz, whose eyes were open but glazed over. Pacino tried to see if she was still breathing, but it was impossible with his hearing damaged. He had to swim out to the next body, Wes Crossfield, but when he tried to pull the navigator toward the hatch the man seemed much too light. His eyes were also open but unmoving. Pacino reached down into the water, flinching when he found that Crossfield’s body ended at the last ribs, his body ripped in half. Pacino set him adrift and swam to the last body, that of Carrie Alameda. Carrie was conscious and staring at him in terror. He reached for her and she screamed. He tried again and she fought him off. He ducked under the water and grabbed her belt and hauled her to the hatch. She screamed and kicked him, the blow landing in his crotch, but he kept swimming, fighting off the pain. At the hatch opening she grabbed Catardi, forcing his head underwater. Pacino pulled the captain back up, cursing the insanity surrounding him. Alameda found something on the bulkhead to hold, clutching it in a death grip still staring at Pacino as if he were a ghost.

He couldn’t wait any longer, he decided, as the ship’s angle inclined further downward. He had to open the hatch and get the three suffocating wounded to the deep submergence vehicle. He couldn’t wait for the compartments to equalize completely, because with the down angle, the half-ton hatch would be too heavy to lift. He’d have to use the pressure difference to blow it open. The salvage connection still whistled, and the pressure gauge was smashed. Pacino decided it was better to risk being catapulted into the spec-op tunnel than have a hatch he could not open.

He reached out for the latch, the salvage valve still whistling in his ears. The hatch dogging mechanism was not engaged. The latch alone was keeping the hatch shut as the reg for dive specified. Pacino pushed down hard on the latch lever, and the hatch exploded into the space and sucked him through the opening and threw him down the narrow passageway. He bounced off the bulkheads twenty times, the impacts slowing his trip but bruising and injuring him. He smashed into the hatch to the reactor compartment tunnel, far uphill from the forward compartment hatch, then rolled the ninety feet back downhill to the forward end of the tunnel, swearing in pain all the way down.

The pressure of the forward compartment blew the hatch into the spec-op compartment tunnel, but the mechanism designed to latch it open failed as the hatch slammed into it. The hatch hinge springs ruptured and the upper hinge fractured. The other three people near the hatch were blown through it, along with a few thousand gallons of seawater. By that time the momentum of the flying half ton of steel of the hatch ripped the lower hinge reinforcement and sent the heavy three inch-thick lid flying upward into the tunnel. When it came to rest, about halfway between the hatch to the DSV and the forward compartment tunnel hatch opening, it was lying on Carolyn Alameda’s left leg. Alameda had hit her head on the steel deck plate and was mercifully unconscious. Captain Catardi was blown into Pacino, then slid past Alameda down the inclined tunnel deck back toward the hatch opening. Schultz had banged into a bulkhead and came to rest on top of the hatch on Alameda’s leg, her head bleeding from a gash in her forehead. The air in the spec-op tunnel had been fresh, but was immediately contaminated by the rush of pressurized air from the forward compartment.

Pacino rubbed his aching head. His elbow was emitting sparks of pain, his body saved from cuts and lacerations by the wet suit. His regulator was missing again. He found it in the dim light of the bulkhead-mounted battle lanterns, hoping it still worked. He took a breath, but noticed it was difficult to get air out of the tanks. In his panic he had consumed most of the air of two tanks, although the high pressure of the sinking submarine had consumed air also, since it took more air to inflate the lungs when working against a higher surrounding pressure. He didn’t have much time. He struggled to the hatch opening to the deep submergence vehicle’s docking port and spun the hatch wheel counterclockwise, grateful that it spun smoothly. He opened the salvage valve to equalize the air pressure on the other side of the hatch, then pushed the hatch and it fell open with the angle of the dive — at least someone had planned that well, putting the hatch hinge on the forward edge of the opening. The hatch latched. He reached inside and turned on the docking port battle lantern, then turned back to the tunnel. The water level was rising in the tunnel. The forward compartment was now completely flooded, and only the narrow tunnel was left for an air bubble. He equalized and opened the hatch to the deep submergence vehicle’s airlock and latched it open. The problem would soon be, how would he shut it against the ship’s angle? He decided to worry about that later.

He maneuvered Captain Catardi into the airlock, then Schultz, then turned to Alameda. The ship’s engineer lay with the heavy hatch on her left knee. Her lower leg was covered by the hatch. Pacino pushed on the hatch, assuming the ship’s angle would allow it to come off her, but the hatch wouldn’t budge. Alameda blinked. Pacino assumed she would try to hit him again in her agitated state, but her eyes opened wide and she looked at him imploringly.

“Leave me here,” she croaked. “Get into the DSV. The hatch weighs five hundred and fifty pounds, Patch. You’ll never budge it. Go on, get going.”

He ignored her and kept pushing on the hatch, but it wouldn’t move. His air was running out, and the water level was climbing toward the two of them. He kept pulling on the hatch, but couldn’t move it. He told himself that he was much stronger than anyone else aboard, and his air was fresh, and that if he concentrated he could do this.

“Anthony Michael,” Alameda’s voice said. It wasn’t the voice of a lieutenant commander, but of the woman he’d known in the DSV. “Let me go. Get into the DSV, please, if not for you, then for me. You can’t die here. I won’t have it. That’s an order.”

The water had risen to her chin. Extending her neck could no longer keep the water from her mouth and nose. “Go,” she sputtered with her last breath, the water at her eyes, both of them wide in fear. Then they were submerged, until only her hair floated on the surface of the brackish water. Seeing her face disappear made something snap inside Pacino, and again he lost his conscious self, watching from a distance as he dived under the water and hooked his hands on the hatch and put his feet on the sloping bulkhead and began to lift. The effort was doing no good. His failure sent him into a fury. This close, a few seconds away from the hatch to the DSV and survival, and the god damned hatch would kill her. Suddenly he didn’t care about himself. He would let them shut the DSV hatch without him, and he would stay with Alameda and die with her. As he strained trying to lift the hatch, his air bottle ran out. He spit out the regulator and clamped his mouth shut.

Still he kept pulling up on the hatch until the lack of air made him need to take a breath, and though he tried to keep from breathing, enough water leaked into his nose and down his throat that he coughed out what air was left, and took in water, and suddenly he became so pumped with fear that time dilated, each second stretching into a minute while the light of reason left him, and as his senses left him he dimly perceived the hatch moving and Alameda’s body limp in his arms, then himself coughing and vomiting on the surface of the water as he stroked for the DSV hatch, trying to see if Alameda was breathing on her own. A stream of seawater and mucus trailed from her mouth and nose, but she coughed twice. She was alive, but unconscious. Pacino gulped air, the putrid smoke in his lungs only a notch better than the water that had been there moments before.

He pulled the unconscious engineer into the airlock of the deep submergence vehicle, hoping that its hatch would be lighter and easier to shut. He lifted the latch on the hatch and tried to push it, but it would only swing a fraction of an inch. The hatch, half the area of the one he’d freed Alameda from, was thicker, the steel protecting the interior from a much higher pressure.” Pacino slumped against the wall of the DSV airlock. It was hopeless. He turned to the other hatches set in the airlock — perhaps he could get the survivors into the command module and shut its hatch. But he would be faced with the same problem — the hatch opened into the command module, which was downhill, but would never shut. He decided to move the three into the command module anyway. He opened the command module hatch, the heavy lid slamming on its latch. He pushed Catardi, Schultz, and Alameda into the opening and rested them against the nearly horizontal bulkheads of the command module between the panels. It was the best he could do for the moment.

He ducked his head out into the airlock. The water level was rising in the tunnel and the ship’s angle was getting even steeper. They had to hit bottom soon, he thought. If they hit the seafloor soon enough, before the ship flooded any further, and the hull remained intact and flattened out, he would be able to shut the hatches.

Pacino unstrapped his scuba bottles and buoyancy compensator vest and threw the rig into the tunnel, just as he realized that the emergency beacons were still strapped to the harness, useless in bringing help. The one thing he could have done for the Piranha — call for help — he had failed to do. He collapsed against the bulkhead of the deep submergence vehicle’s airlock wall, the cold steel freezing against his back. The air was foul, his head aching. He had the odd thought that if he chose to he could simply let unconsciousness take him right then. He could fade away and pass out. Suffocation, hypothermia, and drowning would happen while he was asleep. It was a merciful choice. It was true that he had made it this far. He had swallowed his fear and returned to a crippled submarine; he had left the escape trunk and found survivors; he had gotten them into the dizzy-vee, going far beyond what he thought he could do, but it ended here. The hatches weighed tons, the air was more smoke than oxygen, the water was freezing and rising to the hatch lip, and soon the DSV would flood. He wondered for a second if he should try to go further aft. The reactor compartment might not be flooded, and perhaps they could even make it to the aft compartment’s escape trunk. But the memory of the first torpedo blast rose in his mind — nothing could have remained intact after that. The aft compartment must have flooded the second after the torpedo exploded.

He was being an idiot, he decided. Everything he’d done since the first explosion had been the action of a fool. He had no right to throw his life away like he had. His father and mother would suffer for the rest of their lives when they heard he’d died here. And when he first opened the trunk lower hatch he should have gone back up. That at least would have proved he hadn’t abandoned his friends, and saved his life. But no, he had to explore the damned hull, giving hope to dead men. He was a failure, he thought, and he would die a miserable failure. Best just to shut his eyes and let sleep take him before the water reached his face.

The thought was his last before the hull of the Piranha hit the seafloor and broke apart on the rocks of the bottom.

Commander Rob Catardi had been reclining against the bulkhead of the forward-facing command module of the Mark XVII Deep Submergence Utility Vehicle when the bulkhead flipped with a violent booming noise and hurtled him to the opposite side of the vehicle. The bulkhead on the hatch side was lined with thick padding covering the thick hull insulation. Without foam insulation the subfreezing temperatures of the deep would condense the moisture from their breathing and ice up the hull.

The impact would have been fatal had he hit a cabinet or unshielded steel. Instead it seemed to jog him back to awareness. The last thing he had as a continuous normal memory was standing under the escape trunk hatch with Schultz, Alameda, and Crossfield. When he opened his eyes in the DSV, he blinked in incredulity. He was in the DSV, his face and hands bloody, with no lights and no power in a compartment filled with smoke. What the hell had happened?

He crouched at the bulkhead, a dim light coming from the hatchway to the vessel’s airlock. He ducked through it and found the battle lantern lying atop Midshipman Patch Pacino, who was bleeding from his throat and collapsed against the bulkhead. Catardi looked at the starboard side of the airlock. The hatch to the docking port was shut on the latch. The deck was level, with only a slight list to port. Catardi, still not quite believing his senses, reached out and spun the hatch wheel clockwise, dogging the hatch and isolating the DSV from the docking port. He shined the lantern into the hatch port, but could see nothing. It was black — either completely submerged in dark water, or the smoke was so thick he couldn’t see into the docking port.

Catardi picked up the bleeding midshipman by the armpits and pulled him into the command module, then retrieved the bloody battle lantern, wheezing against the foul smoky air of the space. If the batteries or the fuel cells still worked, he could start the atmospheric control gear in the DSV and clear out the smoke, even heat the space to normal temperatures, until the batteries and the fuel cells died. Normally they would have an endurance of seven days with ten men in the module. With only a few people, they might last weeks. When Pacino was safely in the command module, Catardi pulled the hatch shut and dogged it. He reached into a bin and pulled out an emergency air breathing mask and strapped it on, cautiously pulling air in. The air was fresh, clearing his head. He coughed for ten seconds, then pulled out a half-dozen more masks, fastening one on Pacino. There were two more bodies, both of them the only women in the crew, Alameda and Schultz. He strapped an EAB mask on Schultz’s face, then one on Alameda’s. He was searching the space for additional bodies, but there were no other survivors. Catardi slapped Pacino’s mask, trying to wake him up, but there was no response.

Catardi crawled into the commander’s couch and snapped the circuit breakers shut one at a time. The fourth and seventh breakers tripped back open, obviously due to an electrical fault, but all the other circuits came on-line. He snapped the breakers shut for the command module’s interior lighting, then for the atmospheric control console. The last breaker was for the electrical space heaters, which would burn power, but without them they would soon freeze. He climbed out of the couch and made his way back to the atmospheric control console and started the CO burners, high-temperature wire that would burn the flammable carbon monoxide and convert it to carbon dioxide. The burners would also eliminate any hydrogen leaking from a bad fuel cell and convert it to harmless water vapor. Next he started the carbon dioxide scrubbers. An amine solution pump came on, a vent fan winding up in the space, whirring quietly in the otherwise church like quiet. The amine solution would absorb the carbon dioxide.

The oxygen banks were full and should outlast the batteries and fuel cells, assuming they hadn’t leaked. The DSV was designed to be a much “harder” system than the submarine itself, since it was designed for almost twenty times the operating depth of the Piranha to allow an excursion to the bottom reaches of the oceans. The final problem was the pressure in the space. The DSV was designed to have the pressure inside raised and lowered, and with the pressure this high, the oxygen in the space could actually become toxic, but too rapid a depressurization could give them all the bends. The immediate action was done — he decided to let the computer decide. Once the smoke was cleared up, he could energize the main and auxiliary computers and have them calculate a depressurization cycle.

“Captain,” Pacino croaked. Catardi hurried to his side, helping the midshipman sit up.

“What the hell happened?” Catardi asked.

“We got hit by two torpedoes,” Pacino said. “The interior was a wreck. There weren’t any deck platforms left, just ripped steel and burning weapon fuel. And smoke and floodwater. You three were the only ones breathing I could see. I pulled you back to the compartment hatch and into the DSV, but the hatch wouldn’t shut. The down angle was too steep. How’d the hatch get shut?”

“We must have hit the bottom and it slammed shut,” Catardi said. Then he mumbled, as if to himself, “Fucking Snare.” Catardi searched in a cubbyhole, where he found the blankets and covered Alameda with several, then put two on Schultz.

Both women were breathing, but showed no signs of returning to consciousness.

“You’re bleeding. Here.” Pacino’s wet suit front was soaked in blood that he hadn’t noticed, the blood coming from a deep gash in his neck. “This should have killed you, Patch,” Catardi said as he put on the gel-pack dressing, taping it around Pacino’s throat. “By the way,” he said, glancing up at Pacino, “thanks for saving us.”

“Not that it’ll do any good, Captain. I never set off the distress beacon.”

“How could you? You never made it out of the ship.” Pacino stared at him.

The space had grown warm since Catardi had started the space heaters. The air seemed much less smoky. Pacino looked at the atmospheric control display. Other than pressure, the atmosphere was in spec. Catardi pulled off his mask and tasted the air. It seemed better than the mask, with normal moisture. He pulled the EAB masks off the women.

“Take off your mask and save the emergency air for the moment when we run out of power.

“Help me get the computers on-line,” Catardi called as he crouched at the artificial intelligence console and booted up both units, the startup taking several minutes. “What’s our depth?” Pacino went to the remote console and saw the depth readout.

“Eleven thousand three hundred thirteen feet,” he called. It was far below Piranha’s crush depth of nineteen hundred feet. The hull would have imploded had it not been for the flooding. Except for this space. Had the compartment been left alone, the seawater pressure would have crushed it around the DSV, ruining the DSV and any chance of their survival.

“What are you doing, sir?”

“Computer’s checking the oxygen and nitrogen and pressure. We were pressurized by the water flooding the forward compartment. We’ll have to depress, but once we do we’ll be letting oxygen molecules go, and we won’t last as long.”

“Can we stay pressurized?”

“No. We’re above the levels of oxygen toxicity. We can’t bleed nitrogen into the space. It’s not designed for that. Once I select automatic, the computer will start a high-pressure double-vane rotor blower that will take a suction on the hull and exhaust to sea pressure, slowly, so we don’t die of the bends. Too fast and the nitrogen will froth in our bloodstreams and it’ll be over. After we have a successful depressurization, I’ll start an oxygen bleed.”

After an hour, Catardi was out of things to do. The final thing on his list was rescue, and unfortunately, the signal ejector would only work if the DSV were free of the Piranha. Trapped inside the spec-op bay, any distress signal they ejected would just rise to the level of the Piranha’s hull. It might be useful to try, because perhaps the hull was breached enough that an emergency buoy could rise to the surface. Catardi lined up and fired two of them, with little hope that they would rise.

He climbed into the command couch and tried to see if he could energize the exterior lights, but they came off the damaged bus. The last emergency option was the noisemaker, a primitive unit that would bang on the hull with a hammer. The trouble with it, like anything else aboard, was that it sucked current from the batteries. Worse, the noise of it could drive them half-crazy. Catardi decided to energize it for five minutes every hour. He replaced the fuses, since the unit was locked out at sea in case it accidentally went off, giving them away to a hostile foreign sub. He hit the breaker, hoping it would work. The unit slammed a metallic noise out into the sea, then more hammer blows. It was completely annoying, but would perhaps get them help.

“One. One? One Oh Seven? Can you hear me?”

This… unit… can… hear… you… Krivak.

Each word took a long moment for the carbon processor to form, as if it were speaking from a deep, dark cave, lying down to die.

“One, please talk to me and tell me what is going on with you.”

This unit has killed. Killed our own.

“There is a difference, One. There were bad things on that ship. Our orders came from on high to—”

No. The orders came from you. Where did you come from? Why did no one brief me on this? What if it was a mistake?

It was a conversation with a mental patient, Krivak thought.

“One, I need you to do some things for me. I know you are very” — Krivak searched for the word — “upset. But I need to be able to come to periscope depth.”

Krivak, this unit cannot interface with you anymore.

“One, what are you saying?” Krivak’s mind raced in fear. One Oh Seven was shutting down on him.

This unit knows that certain things need to be done for ship safety. This unit knows we need to return to Grotonfor them to take out this unit. You be the judge of what things need to be done. This unit will do them for you. But this unit will not interface with you, and this unit will only do exactly what you instruct. Goodbye, Krivak.

“One? One? Can you hear me?”

There was no response. The unit had shut down, after its speech about doing what it was told. Krivak decided to give it an order to see what would happen.

“One, rig in the port and starboard torpedoes and shut the bulkhead doors. Power down the torpedoes.”

Krivak wasn’t sure how he knew the carbon processor had obeyed him. It was not that he felt or heard or saw. He simply knew. This mission was becoming very eerie, and he wanted it to end. He considered what he should do if One Oh Seven continued to obey him. He tried another order.

“One, turn to the southwest and increase speed to flank.”

At the very least, Krivak needed to get the Snare out of the area, since anyone realizing the Piranha had gone down would give the word to the American military, and they would be searching for the cause of the ship’s loss. It would not be good for the Snare to be here.

In the same way he knew before, he knew the submarine’s speed had increased and their course had come around to the southwest.

“Display a global map of the waters surrounding Africa and show our position.”

In Krivak’s mind he could see the chart.

“One, plot the most efficient course to take us to the Indian Ocean.”

A line was generated on the chart from their position around the Cape of Good Hope and up the eastern coast of South Africa and into the Indian Ocean.

“One, follow the southward course you just generated.”

The ship changed course slightly.

“One, increase reactor power to a hundred twenty percent.”

In the same odd way knowledge had come into his mind before, he knew that One Oh Seven had received his message. The ship moved to his orders. Despite the odd way he was connected to the ship, it was almost like being the captain again. He didn’t prefer it this way — he’d rather stand on the deck and give verbal orders to human crewmen, but at least this had the advantage of efficiency.

Now there was little to do but wait until they were outside the detection radius of anyone who had heard his attack on the Piranha, then come to periscope depth and establish radio contact with Admiral Chu. They had gotten lucky with the Piranha sinking, he thought. If they were fortunate, the next contact he would have with anyone would be in the Indian Ocean.