She nodded back. “Thank you for that penetrating analysis, Lieutenant.”
Carlson was the purest killer Typhon had, in any branch of the military. On the first day of the war, three long years earlier, she’d sunk two Alliance warships in the South China Sea: a guided missile cruiser, and a destroyer that was sent to destroy her. Afterward, she’d steamed among the wreckage, taking photographs through the scope, looking at what they’d done with their two torpedoes, and acquired a taste for killing that had never been sated. She didn’t believe in politics, diplomacy, or anything that Military Intelligence told her. She wasn’t even all that fond of nuclear power, which kept her highly engineered killing machine moving through the water. She believed only in torpedoes, missiles, and, when thing got really tight, bullets. She believed in angles of attack, ranges, and keeping her baffles clear. Because she was pure, the crew adored her.
She hit play again.
“You’re right,” she said. “It is loud.”
In fact, for them to hear noise from an Alliance submarine with their crude sensors, it had to be deafening. “I hear hatches slamming shut, depth changing, alarms. Maybe even a gunshot.”
“Impossible,” said Banach. “They carry no small arms onboard Polaris-class boats.”
“Well, they also say that Polaris-class boats are silent, so I guess you can’t believe everything you read.”
“Do you think our man onboard is taking over? Giving us a signal that the mutiny is complete?”
“No,” she said, “unfortunately. They are still submerged, still cruising. Maybe it was a failed attempt.”
“Such weakness,” he said. “Our crew could easily overpower us if they chose to mutiny.”
“True, they are armed to the teeth, and extremely bored.”
“What shall we do?”
“Stay on it,” she said. “Same range. They don’t seemed inclined to shoot us at the moment. We should have some contact soon from our spy; if he’s still alive, maybe he’ll fill us in.”
“Aye, Captain.”
She put the headphones on and listened again, let her imagination go to work on the noise. Banach hadn’t learned it yet, but on a ship with no windows and very limited sensors, an imagination was a vital military asset. She pictured the submarine in front of her, and tried to picture the chaos within. She badly wanted to shoot them, and they were there for the taking. But she’d learned from her experience with the airplane; it was better to shoot somebody on their return from Eris Island, not on their journey there. Take out the vessel and their precious cargo.
The temptation was great because she needed to kill an enemy submarine; it was a gap in her résumé. She’d come close once, very close, in an episode that was now taught to midshipmen in her home country, and celebrated on military holidays.
It was in those early days off Eris Island, one year into the war, when they were watching the drones take off endlessly through the scope. Initially they’d tried to count them all, but it proved impossible. Instead they tried to count how many took off in an hour, and then counted the hours. A few times the drones had seemed to notice her scope, and they quickly submerged, moved to a different sector, and resumed their surveillance of the island. Other than the drones, they had the ocean around Eris to themselves. No Allied ship came anywhere near them.
Carlson sent messages to fleet headquarters. They replied indifferently, asking pointedly if she had plans to surveil any targets of military value. Then the drones began dropping their little bombs on their surface ships, and the commodore asked her why she hadn’t sent more thorough reports about the drone menace.
At some point, a daring Allied submarine commander decided to take a peek at the waters around the island as well — perhaps looking for her, perhaps just equally curious about the business at Eris Island. He was able to completely sneak up on them. The Allied submarine service had made a cult out of silence, and her primitive sonar couldn’t have detected a submarine that was twice as loud. Her submarine was designed to be durable and cheap, so they could manufacture them in vast quantities and overwhelm the enemy. This might have been helpful to the commodore, who commanded twenty-six boats, but it did little good to Carlson, who had only one. Banach was in control when the enemy attacked.
“Torpedo in the water!” he shouted into the intercom. By the time she ran into control, Banach was already turning sharply toward the unmistakable sound of muzzle doors opening and a torpedo hurtling toward them.
“Launch the countermeasures!” he said, and suddenly the sound of the screaming torpedoes was replaced by a wall of noise pumped in the water via their noisemakers, shot out of both signal ejectors, one on each side of the Typhon boat.
Carlson looked at the sonar display while Banach tried to save the ship. Their countermeasures appeared to be working; the torpedoes were peeling away.
“Ready bearing and shoot!” he said, sending a bearing to fire control. The enemy ship, of course, far more sophisticated than theirs, remained silent. The only datum they had for her location was the sound of the torpedo being launched. They were two people shooting at each other in a dark room, firing at the muzzle flash.
There was a rumble beneath her feet, a loud whoosh of air, and her ears popped as her submarine fired her torpedo.
“Torpedo is in high speed!” said Banach.
“Very well,” said Carlson. That left them just four torpedoes.
She looked at sonar. The enemy torpedoes were behind them now, drawn to the noise of the countermeasures. But the Alliance weapons were steerable and could turn back, as long as there was a man alive on the Alliance boat.
“Fire another?” asked Banach.
She was contemplating just that when they heard an explosion to starboard.
“They’re hit!” said Banach. Carlson watched the display.
For a few moments, they listened for the telltale sounds of a submarine dying: tanks exploding, the gush of flooding, the desperate roar of an emergency blow system. But nothing came.
“They’re still alive,” she said. She heard something, though, hull popping as the enemy ascended. “But she’s going shallow. They must be hurt.”
“To fight the flooding,” said Banach. “Shall we finish her off?”
Carlson nodded. “Not now,” she said. “We might not have to.”
The wounded ship was noisy, undoubtedly busy trying to save herself. Carlson maneuvered them away from her, to disguise their position, but the Alliance boat seemed like the fight, at least temporarily, had gone out of her. “Take us to PD,” she said. “Let’s see if we can take a look.”
Banach complied and drove the ship carefully upward. Carlson raised the scope right on the bearing of the Alliance submarine. She was making so much noise now, she was impossible to miss, the pumps working to get water off her, men hammering on pipes trying to staunch the flood. She took a quick sweep around, verified there were no drones on top of them. It was clear, for the moment. The drones were like that, they had learned, could come and go with the randomness of a rain squall. She trained the ship’s single eye back on the bearing where she knew the enemy ship was fighting for her life.
“I see her,” she said. “I see the scope.” There it was, like a pencil sticking straight out of the water, a small V behind it as it moved slowly forward.
“Why aren’t they surfacing?” said Banach. “Do they think we don’t know where they are?”
“That can’t be it,” said Carlson. “They’re making too much noise. They really should surface if the flooding is as bad as it sounds. Of course, I’ll shoot them if they do.”