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?”