Katya steered until they were clear of Mologa Station’s approach volume and then switched on the autopilot. The inertial guidance systems took what data they could from the baseline of Mologa’s precise location on the charts and took over, taking them on a slow downward gradient into seabed clutter to try and make them a difficult contact to acquire should a Yagizban boat happen by. In peacetime, echo beacons along the way would have provided route correction, but they had all been closed down now. Anything that might help the enemy was to be denied to them, even if it inconvenienced your own people.
“Arrival at Atlantis docking bays in nineteen hours, forty eight minutes,” said the Lukyan’s computer voice in the same calm tones that it announced everything from waypoint arrivals to incoming torpedoes.
Katya lifted her hands from the control yoke and watched it move by itself under the autopilot’s direction. “I sometimes wonder why boats even have crews anymore.”
Sergei was already climbing out of the left hand seat, and was glad to do so. “They used to use drones. Then we got pirates after the war. Drones aren’t so great when it comes to out-thinking people who are after your cargo.” He sat in the forward port passenger seat and pulled the table down from the ceiling on its central strut that swung down to the vertical and then telescoped out. He pulled up the screen on his side and gestured impatiently at the opposite seat. “Well?”
Katya left the co-pilot’s position and climbed into the indicated seat. “What are we playing?” she asked. “Chess?”
Sergei curled a lip and tapped some keys. Katya raised the screen on her side to find a virtual card table already waiting for her.
“Poker,” he said. “A proper game, with risk and chance. Just like life.”
They played a few hands until Sergei said he was feeling tired again and was going to take a nap. Katya noted that his energy seemed to have a direct correlation to how well he was doing in the game. After a disastrous losing streak that would have cost him his wages for a year had they been playing for real money, he was entirely exhausted and was horizontal across two passenger seats and snoring a minute later.
“Your choice, my friend,” said Katya under her breath, logged when he fell asleep and set that as the beginning of his down shift. He would argue about it when he woke up in thirty or forty minutes’ time, but it had been one of Lukyan’s hard and fast rules. If Sergei had ever thought Katya was going to be a soft touch, he was well on his way to re-education now.
As it was, he actually woke twenty-three minutes later when Katya threw an empty beaker at his head. He struggled upright, swearing copiously until she told him in a harsh whisper to shut up and quiet down. The realisation that the drives were off and they were drifting in the current was enough to calm him instantly. He was up front, headset on, and seat restraints locked inside ten seconds.
“What is it?” he whispered. “Yags?”
“Don’t know yet,” she replied. “Just caught a glimpse of something on the passive sonar. One-oh-five relative. Might be nothing. Better safe than sorry.”
Sergei nodded. “Better safe than dead.” He noted the concentration on her face and knew she was listening through the hydrophones, the submarine’s “ears,” for the sound of engines. Without needing to be told, he pulled up the passive sonar interface on his own multi-function display and started a slow, careful scan, quadrant by quadrant.
Five minutes passed. Ten. At fifteen Katya was about to call it off as a false alert when something showed on the passive sonar at fifty degrees high relative to their heading. She immediately brought the hydrophone array to bear and listened intently.
“A shoal?” asked Sergei with unusual optimism.
Katya shook her head slightly. “I hear a drive. Lock it up at my bearing and give me an analysis.”
Sergei told the passive sonar to lock onto the hydrophone bearing and ran the sound through the database. “It’s military.”
“Yeah. She’s no civilian.” Military boats carried engines with much higher performance than those of civil transports and carriers. Their turbines ran at greater speed and generated a very distinctive tone that every sensor operator knew. There was still a chance it was a Federal boat combing the Mologa approaches. Not even three hours out and a Yag warboat sniffing around? It seemed… all too likely. The ocean deeps were vast and even a large carrier could shuffle around out there with a whole fleet looking for it and probably stay safe. The station approaches, though… there the game went from looking for a fish in an ocean to looking for a fish in a bath. It was dangerous for the hunters if the station defences picked them up, of course, but war is all about risks.
Another twenty seconds of tracking the unidentified contact passed before the computer decided it had enough information to offer its analysis. “Eighty seven per cent likelihood contact Alpha is a Vodyanoi/2 class hunter-killer submarine of the Yagizba Enclaves,” it told them. “It is therefore designated an enemy.” And to show them what it thought of enemies, the computer changed the contact’s symbol on the sonar display from yellow to red.
“A Vodyanoi?” said Sergei hollowly. He had gone very pale, or at least his stubble seemed much more clearly defined. “One of their new boats? The Grubber design? It would be.” His tone was bitter. “We’ve never dealt with one of those before.”
It wasn’t good news. The Yag’s Vodyanoi/2 class was a development of a Terran boat called the Vodyanoi, the vessel of the notorious pirate Havilland Kane, no less. She had met Kane, and she had been aboard the Vodyanoi. It was a highly sophisticated boat, but she knew the Yag copies were not its match; necessary compromises had to be made in their production to keep down costs, and some aspects of the original’s technology were beyond Russalkin manufacturing methods. Even so, the Vodyanoi/2s were dangerous predators. If it got a clear lock on them, they were as good as dead.
So, they did the only thing a minisub could do against such a killer; they remained quiet and hoped for the best.
“Do you think they’d hear our ballast tanks vent?” said Katya in a whisper. When you knew people who were keen on the idea of killing you weren’t very far away and were actively listening for you, it was difficult not to whisper. “We’re about fifty metres above a thermocline. We’d be a bit safer under it.”
Sergei shook his head. “I know it’s tempting, but it’s best not to do a thing, Katya. If they’re low on munitions, they might not bother, but if they’re flush, they might stick a fish in our direction on a search pattern, and then we’d be pretty screwed.”
By “fish,” he meant “torpedo.” By “pretty screwed,” he meant “very thoroughly dead.”
Katya knew good advice when she heard it, so she leaned back in her seat and crossed her arms so she wouldn’t be tempted to press any buttons just to relieve the tension.
The only thing they could do was watch the sonar screen as the passive return grew stronger. The Yag boat was heading almost directly for them; it would pass by about three hundred metres above them and a little in front. It would be a close call whether they ended up in its baffles — the conical volume astern of a boat in which its own engines blinded its sonar.
Katya had no idea how broad a cone that was. If they were hidden by the Yag’s engine noise, they could risk the descent to the thermocline and hide behind the layer of the water where the temperature above was lower than that below, and which could reflect sonar waves. If they weren’t, however, the Yag would hear the air venting from their ballast tanks as they gained negative buoyancy, and then the Yag would kill them. Given how nice a boat the Vodyanoi was, she reckoned its baffles were small, and that the baffles of her clones might be small too. It wasn’t worth the risk.