“Sounds dangerous.”
“It is. That’s why everybody uses contra-gravity; it’s much more forgiving. Usually, a sub handles like a CG aircraft but, with this steady sinking, we’re behaving more like a fixed-wing aircraft at the moment. She’s constantly fighting going down and crashing.”
“I ask again, what’s your point?”
“We’ve got a good head of speed up at the moment. That can make us climb if we use the hydroplanes like the wings of an aircraft.”
“And that’s it?” said Petrov dismissively. “You think we don’t already know that?”
“Oh yes, you know it intellectually. But you don’t know it in here.” Kane tapped his chest over his heart. “You’re going to try to translate too late and we won’t climb far enough or too early and we’ll stall.”
“Stall?” said Zagadko.
“If you burn off too much speed, you’ll sink like a brick and it’ll be ‘next stop, crush depth.’”
“Let me understand you. Are you asking to be at the helm when we make our approach on the mine?”
Kane smiled. “I’ve done something similar in the past. I can do this. Trust me.”
Zagadko didn’t hesitate. “You’ll have the helm at a thousand metres off the mine.”
Petrov’s jaw drooped with incredulity for a moment. “What? Sir?”
Zagadko looked at him steadily. “I hope you’re not intending to debate your captain’s command, lieutenant?”
He clearly wanted to do just that, but discipline overrode it. “No, sir. Of course not.”
“Good.” Then to Kane, “The helm position uses a perfectly standard yoke. You might want to run a couple of simulations before the real thing to get the feel of the vessel.”
Kane, who’d apparently been expecting some argument at least, was almost as taken aback by Zagadko’s agreement as Petrov. “Yes. Yes, that would be helpful. Thank you very much, captain.”
Only Katya saw the captain’s expression when Kane turned away to set up a simulation and she didn’t like it at all.
Kane, on the other hand, was too focussed on the work at hand to pay much attention to anything else. It was the work of only a couple of minutes to set up a simulation of the Novgorod approaching the mine from a range of a thousand metres, engines at full power and the nose pulling down harder than the rest of the sub could lift back. The one unknown was the exact proportions of the mine’s moon pool. “We don’t have time to model it anyway,” Kane told Tokarov who’d assisted in setting up. “I’ll concentrate on hitting the outer entrance and then make up the rest as we go along. Going from full speed to a dead stop in perhaps a couple of hundred metres is going to be quite a party trick in itself.”
“What if the entry tunnel is shorter than a couple of hundred metres?”
“Then we’ll be making a dead stop no matter what I do. Ready?”
Tokarov checked a display and nodded. Kane pulled on a headset, braced himself in his seat and nodded. “Let’s go, then.”
Katya stood behind him as the screen flared into light and movement. Novgorod was running fast and noisy; there was no possibility that the Leviathan could not detect them. Indeed, it was probably right behind them at that very moment. With stealth no longer a concern, the captain had given Kane leave to use active sonar on the approach. A little more noise would hardly make a difference. He’d set up a tight cone of rapid pulses to give high resolution to the imaging sonar. In the same way a terrestrial bat would build up a picture of its surroundings in pitch darkness by using sound pulses, the Novgorod’s computers would be using the sonar returns to make a model of the mountain and the tunnel entrance.
On Kane’s display, the rocky finger of the underwater mountain thrust up from the seabed six kilometres below. Four hundred and fifty metres below the sea surface, high on the mountain, the tunnel entrance stood out in pulsing red. The Novgorod’s current depth was one and half thousand. Kane immediately paused the simulation. “I know we’re at flank speed, but is that flank flank, or is there a little bit held back for special occasions?”
Tokarov shook his head. Kane nodded. “Okay. This is going to be difficult.” He toggled the speed display from kilometres per hour over to knots and started the simulation again.
The mountainside flew towards them at shocking speed; Kane was like her uncle in preferring to work in knots but Katya was a kph woman herself. She did the calculation in her head quickly and grimaced. The Novgorod was doing one hundred and ten kph. They would cover the thousand metres in a little less than thirty-three seconds. Kane immediately started pulling back on the yoke, making the hydroplanes dig and the boat climb. They would have to climb over a thousand metres in a thousand metres of forward travel. Katya didn’t need to delve into sines and cosines to know that was at least a forty-five degree climb. She looked around her, looking for a bulkhead she could sit against when the deck tilted up like that.
The simulated Novgorod climbed quickly and smoothly, but its velocity was withering away with every metre faster than she would have believed possible. As her speed dropped, the intercept time drifted upwards from thirty-three seconds. At forty-six seconds, the Novgorod stalled, her forward speed no longer enough to make the hydroplanes bite. The nose went down and she ploughed into the mountainside fifty metres below the entrance.
“Only a first attempt,” said Kane, a little unsteadily. “I’ll do better next time.”
“You don’t have a next time,” said Zagadko stepping up beside him and looking at the display with disgust as the virtual Novgorod scraped down the virtual mountainside with her virtual nose crumpled and her virtual crew dying. “In one minute, you have the helm.” He went to his command chair, swivelled it forward and clamped it. As he strapped himself in, he ordered a collision warning.
“All hands secure! Brace for impact!” squawked the usually placid computer voice throughout the boat.
Tokorov found a vacant seat for Katya and put her there when he saw her making to sit on the floor. “We’re likely to hit something pretty fast and pretty hard,” he warned her. “If you’re not strapped in, you’ll smash your brains out on the far bulkhead.” She didn’t need a second warning, strapping herself in quickly and efficiently just as Sergei had shown her. She hoped she wouldn’t need Kane to get her out again in as much of a hurry as last time.
“Twelve hundred metres. You might as well have the helm now, Mr Kane. Good luck,” said Zagadko, his voice carefully toneless as if he was handing down a death sentence.
The “active” light on Kane’s console turned to green. The sonar image on his screen was now the real thing and Katya imagined how very useful it would be if the “pause” control still worked, freezing the boat in the water while they worked out something cleverer than simply flinging themselves at the side of a mountain.
Kane pulled back on the yoke, but nowhere near as violently as he had in the simulation. The deck started to tilt back as the Novgorod began to climb towards the surface. He didn’t want to kill their speed so badly this time, but now he ran the risk of not climbing far enough in the short distance they had. The hull thrummed with the water rushing rapidly over the hydroplanes, angling back further and further.
“Eight hundred metres,” read off the navigator. “Depth thirteen-fifty.”