Christopher Cartwright
Omega Deep
Prologue
It was 10:15 p.m. exactly when the cold, rigid plane of the submarine’s sail deck broke the icy surface of the Norwegian Sea. The rounded belly of the steel predator — a heavily modified and experimental Virginia class block VII nuclear-powered fast attack submarine — slowly rose until she was resting on the almost glassy surface. In the calm and moonless night, the sea looked like a series of fragmented shards of jet-black shale being slowly jolted together.
The darkened sail deck made a silhouette barely the length and breadth of a small whale, but even that would be visible to the prying eyes of enemy satellites. A test like this would likely draw the attention of any number of enemy and friendly nations. In fact, they had made sure of it. Not letting the enemy know one’s capabilities was as absurd as trying to maintain a nuclear deterrent without acknowledging one has nuclear weapons.
Inside, the command center was abuzz with action.
Commander Dwight Bower planted his feet in a wide stance, closed his eyes, and breathed deeply. The air smelled vaguely of warm electronics, black coffee, and amine — the chemical used to scrub carbon dioxide from the air on board. It was the smell that had enveloped him for most of his adult life, the familiar scent of home.
Beneath his feet he could sense the life in her, the activity of the men, the nuclear propulsion unit easing the 7,900-ton vessel silently along the surface of the sea.
As the weight of expectation grew, conversations took place in subdued tones between crew members at their stations.
The commander’s mind was sharp and focused. Eyes from around the world would be on his submarine now, and if all went well, they would be provided with one of the most impressive feats of modern engineering since Thomas Edison publicly demonstrated the power of electricity in Menlo Park, in December 1879.
He pictured his behemoth craft, longer than a football field and seven stories high, her sail and bow carving the surface waves. She was dark and formidable — an embodiment of intimidation and strength. She was unmatched for firepower, technology, and maneuverability by any other ship on Earth. At his word, she could effortlessly shirk the crushing weight of the Atlantic, diving to a cruising depth unfathomable in days gone by, disappearing into the deep waters below.
A silent, deadly predator.
Commander Bower was still as trim as he was in his early twenties. A lifetime of discipline and calisthenics had given him the physique of a much younger man. The only sign of his sixty-three years of age was slight accents of gray in his dark hair.
He raised the Universal Modular Mast to its maximum height and brought its view piece up to his eyes. Unlike a traditional periscope, it incorporated eight separate components — two photonic masts, two tactical communication masts, one super-high-frequency SATCOMs, one snorkel, one AN/BPS-16 surface search and navigation radar mast, and one AN/BLQ-10 Electronic Support Measures warfare mast used to detect, analyze, and identify both radar and communication signals from ships, aircraft, submarines, and land-based transmitters.
Bower examined the view piece for the photonic mast. At the mast’s core, it was a very powerful digital camera, which fed back to the Command Center via a fiber optic cable. Although he was already on the surface of what appeared to be an empty sea, he wanted to get a better view of the area immediately surrounding him. The device rotated 360 degrees, and at its maximum height out of the water, could provide a range of three miles on a clear night.
He made a slow arc in a counter-clockwise direction. The sea was calm and clear of any visible vessel. His thick eyebrows drew together. It was impossible to think that no one had taken notice of his new command. Changing the view feed to radar, he grinned.
Yes. He found two surface contacts.
One at eight miles to the north and another at six miles to the southeast.
He fixed in on the contact eight miles to the north. It had the outward appearance of a large offshore fishing trawler. Its nameplate was Russian, almost undoubtedly a spy-vessel. The sight relieved him.
What was the point of possessing the Omega technology if one couldn’t terrify one’s opponents with a demonstration of power? He made a note of the vessel’s name, Vostok, and rotated to the southeast.
The second vessel looked like an old ice-breaker, with a helicopter on its aft deck. Due to its large array of radar instruments, it was more likely another spy vessel. It was angled straight on, making it impossible to read the ship’s name. Commander Bower rotated the digital camera upwards, stared at the starlit sky above, and wondered who was staring down upon his submarine.
Let them watch.
It was for them that he’d brought the submarine to the surface.
The Omega Deep project had been his brainchild and his baby for as long as he could remember. It had taken him twenty years in the Navy to convince anyone that the leap from such difficult and obscure science could be made into this game-changing technology. Then it had been another twenty years before the technology caught up with his goals. In the end, it was luck that had delivered to him the materials required to achieve his aspirations.
Something not even from this world.
Nearly thirteen thousand years ago a large meteorite struck the earth. Upon impact, millions of tons of rock and soil were sent into the atmosphere, triggering the last mini-ice age, known as the Younger Dryas. Nobody knows from which region of the seemingly infinite universe, or from what solar system the asteroid once originated. Subsequent darkness decimated the Earth’s flora and fauna.
The human race was hit hard, and the event stalled the fledgling process of domestication, in what would soon become the Agricultural Revolution that transported mankind from its humble hunter-gatherer existence into the permanence of modern agriculture.
Ancient technology and skills derived over the eons were nearly lost in its entirety.
The world’s knowledge was not forgotten by all. A small group of ancient scholars and astronomers, known as the Master Builders, set about building a series of stones in a temple which appeared set to record the movements of the stars. The temple was called Göbekli Tepe, and its remains were discovered in the 1990s within Turkey’s Southeastern Anatolia Region.
But it didn’t just record an ancient event — it predicted the future return of that same asteroid on its eccentric orbit. The same celestial body from which the earlier meteorite fell.
Twelve months ago, the asteroid returned, threatening to achieve what it had failed to do some thirteen thousand years earlier, wiping out the remains of the human race by causing cataclysmic and widespread changes to the weather globally. Thankfully, the ancient scholars of that era had kept a small amount of the original meteorite’s strange material for the purpose of stabilizing the magnetic poles.
What few people knew was that 13,000 years ago, there wasn’t just one meteorite, but two. A secret team from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, located the second meteorite. After doing so, it harvested the rare material found inside, known as blackbody.
Once only theoretical, the material absorbed all energy.
Omega Deep’s hull was a unique combination of advanced metallurgy, biomimicry, and advanced projection technology. The hull was coated with blackbody. In addition to its unusual appearance and long list of rare qualities, the unearthly element absorbed electrons and flattened soundwaves. The result was to make an entirely silent chameleon out of a four-hundred-foot hull, making her the deadliest nuclear predator to ever stalk the seven seas.