Lacking a torpedo room, the Goliath presented Cahill its tactical control room as its first cylindrical compartment. Two of his four-man tactical team staffed the space, with one seated before a console and a supervisor sitting beside him.
“Good afternoon, sir,” the supervisor said.
The young leader had been an officer aboard Cahill’s submarine prior to quitting the Australian Navy for lucrative mercenary adventures. Like all of Renard’s commanders, Cahill let his crew address him by name or retain the habit of addressing the officers as ‘sir’.
“What’s on sonar?” Cahill asked.
“Half the Aegean Sea, sir.”
“Keep listening for warships, and make sure the one over us keeps driving the hell out of here.”
He continued his sternward walk, passing electronic cabinets that appeared where he would have expected a conning platform and additional display consoles on Pierre Renard’s other warships, the Specter and the Wraith.
With the elevated bridge pod atop the starboard bow and with cameras mounted atop the weapons bays in the sterns providing external views, the Goliath’s design omitted half the standard submarine control room. Renard had instead allowed for a larger crew’s accommodation area, which he extended into the control room, to add both crew comfort and extra buoyancy for carrying the Goliath’s heavy cargo.
A high-powered, unique ship designed to transport the Specter or the Wraith to distant operations theaters, the Goliath had shown Cahill its value as a standalone combatant. While walking into its elongated berthing area, he reflected upon the hybrid transport-submarine-gunship’s rise in Renard’s pecking order to center stage against the Greeks that relegated the two Scorpène-class submarines to the distracting roles of attacking liquefied natural gas tankers. As its commander, he felt privileged.
Placing his weight onto the balls of his tennis shoes, he crept into the ghost-silent scullery and then continued to the mess hall, where two men played dominoes. He nodded and continued to the first ethanol-liquid-oxygen propulsion plant MESMA section. The hiss of steam filled the room, and heat wafted over him.
With his jumpsuit’s torso flopped over his waist, a technician exposed a sweat-marked tee-shirt. He was examining gauges on a control panel when he looked up and winked. Since the man had proved himself on two combat missions, Cahill agreed he’d earned the right to affirm his readiness with a solitary eyelid.
Twenty-five meters and two MESMA plants later, Cahill ran an industrial-strength paper towel across his face and then dropped it into a waste bin. He turned athwartships towards the tunnel that connected the halves of his ship. Reaching through the opened circular doorway, he hoisted his torso into the cramped space and began crawling.
The confines bothered him. Difficult to clean, the intra-hull tunnel smelled stale, and the air tasted thick. Bowing his head to avoid the air-intake cross-connect, he watched his multiple shadows stretch under the thin grating that served as a floor. His labored breathing echoed off the bilge, where condensation reflected light from the twin rows of LED bulbs that ran beside the crossing air duct. He abraded his knuckles on a hydraulic isolation valve to the giant stern planes, to which the controller and lever arms loomed ahead.
“Bloody hell.”
He licked blood and swallowed before continuing his crawl and followed hydraulic lines to an oversized block of metal. With algorithms sending electronic commands to the controller, its arms glided with grace across a small range of their full motion. Cahill craned his neck and watched them move outward through grease-coated holes into an invisible nook that shaped the hydrodynamic rear of the ship and housed the rocker that transferred the arms’ piston-like movement into the arcing swing of the stern planes.
Scrunching his shoulders to his ears, he slipped past the controller and raised his gaze to the tunnel’s end. His blood pressure rose.
“Dumb bastards.”
Three stacked crates of spare rounds for the port railgun blocked his egress. He thought about muscling the top one to the grated flooring but realized his kneeling leverage was nil. Instead, he leaned into the tunnel’s curved metal wall and felt its coolness through his shirt.
Habit preventing him yelling, he cast his raised voice through the crawlspace’s port hatch.
“Who the hell’s on watch in MESMA plant six?”
He listened for a response to rise above the steaming hiss but heard none. He risked a louder attempt.
“This is the captain. Who the hell’s on watch in MESMA plant six?”
Again, no response.
As he pondered giving up and backtracking to the tunnel’s sound-powered phone, the desired response arrived.
“Oh shit! Sorry, Terry. Hold on. I’ll get this out of your way.”
“Be quiet about it, for God’s sake,” Cahill said.
“Right.”
The man slid the top rack through the portal, causing the rounds to rattle. As he reached for the next crate, Cahill saw his face.
“Johnson.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Who put these here?”
“Do I really have to answer?”
“I’ll find out eventually.”
“It was Brown, sir.”
“Do you know why he did it?”
“He said he was getting tired of moving them around during his workouts. They were in the way of the exercise machines.”
“This isn’t a storage area. How the bloody hell do you guys expect to travel between hulls with this pile of metal in the way?”
“That’s the problem, Terry. We don’t have much chance to move between hulls. We have all we need in the port hull. We don’t get to the starboard side much.”
Cahill suspected he may have been leading independent crews on either side of his ship.
“But I have the MESMA plant supervisors switch sides every three days.”
“We just move two of the three crates and then put them back after they’re through the door.”
Cahill took the hint and crawled over the remaining crate, and Johnson stepped back.
As his head emerged in the port hull, Cahill twisted his torso and grabbed a bar attached above the door. He pulled his shoulders through the portal and then reached for a higher bar. With his waist freed, he walked his heels out and pushed his buttocks free. He drove his haunches backwards, making space for his legs and feet to back into the compartment and transfer his weight to rungs mounted below the door.
He felt free as he stood and gathered his bearings.
“Well, what about food?” he asked. “You’re not eating the emergency rations are you? I see food being carried back through the starboard MESMA spaces to you guys every meal.”
“Right, again, Terry. The main meals come sealed in cellophane. We turn them sideways and slide them around the spare rounds. We do the same for the soups and drinks.”
“You do that for all ten meals, three times a day?”
“All ten, three times a day. Plus snacks and beverage runs a couple times in between. Whoever’s the most junior guy on watch on the starboard MESMA plants is the poor bastard who gets to bring it all over to us. Everyone is fed and happy.”
“Agreed that everyone is fed. But I’m not happy.”
“Right. I’ll have these moved back where they belong.”
Cahill moved forward through MESMA plants four and two, reaching the open space that paralleled the starboard side’s galley and mess. The quiet compartment had dining tables, housed spare parts, and served as the recreational space for the crew — rather, for less than half his crew, as he realized the port hull team monopolized it.