"You sure this is a good test, skipper?" Aleman asked. His tone of voice made it clear he was dubious.
"Sure," Chu answered, "why not?"
"Because Orca drew the escorts away."
"Not all of them. There are enough here for a test and we did go right under that Amethyst Class' nose."
Aleman nodded. "That's true, I suppose. Even so—"
Auletti interrupted. "Skipper, the frog sub just pinged the Orca! Continuous pinging . . . oh, shit, she fired! Orca's returning fire with a supercavitating torpedo! I've got . . . JESUS!" Auletti pulled the headphones from his head and cupped his ears with the pain of multiamplified noise assaulting his eardrums.
S806 Diamant, Shimmering Sea, Terra Nova
The supercavitator was much faster than the more conventionally propelled torpedoes launched by the Diamant. Flying, for all practical purposes, in a vapor bubble created by a combination of its own speed and the shape of its nose, it closed the five and a half kilometer range to the Gallic sub in just at one minute. Guiding by sonar from the Orca and vectoring itself by thrusting out small fins just past the gaseous supercavitation envelope, it reached the Diamant and detonated at a point very near and just forward of where the sail met the hull. The resulting shock wave breached that hull, allowing very high pressure water to burst inside.
The captain knew he, his crew, and his boat were dead as soon as he saw the wave of water coming for him. Pressure built up almost instantly to the point of agony. The flooding being more forward than aft, the Diamant's nose sank quickly to point at the ocean floor. Crew, though by this point few if any were aware of it or much of anything else, were thrown from their feet and down into the collecting mass of water.
Crew further back were likewise catapulted from their feet and tossed against bulkheads. One of them, known but to God, managed to get a watertight door shut after of the hull breach. This didn't matter in the slightest as, without control, the submarine continued its plummet into the depths. At a point in time, that depth exceeded the hull's rating. It collapsed. The pressure, thus the temperature, of the air inside shot up so much and so rapidly that it, and anything it surrounded that was combustible, ignited.
The death shriek of the Diamant could be heard halfway across the ocean.
SdL Orca, Shimmering Sea, Terra Nova
Yermo had had enough warning to remove the headphones from over his ears before the Orca's torpedo exploded. He replaced them immediately after the shudder that ran through sea and ship told him it was safe to do so. Thus, he heard the death of Diamant clearly.
"Poor bastards," he muttered, voicing the thoughts of every man of Orca's crew.
Sympathy however was short-lived, mainly because the Gallic sub had gotten off four torpedoes before Orca had fired. With their main guidance platform—Diamant, with its greater computational power and better sonar—now gone, the torpedoes were on their own.
"One," said Yermo, "two . . . three . . . four fish in the water, skipper. Marking them one through four. They're pinging and hunting independently." The sonar man forced a degree of calm into his voice he in no way felt.
"Deceptive countermeasures," ordered Quijana.
The defense station pressed a button to release a small pod from the hull. It began to rise like a cork. Once it was about three hundred feet above the still passively diving sub, the pod let in a minor quantity of sea water, which reacted with a chemical inside to release a massive cloud of bubbles. The pod also generated a major magnetic and electronic signature on the chance that a pursuing torpedo might be MAENAD (Magnetic And ElectroNic Anomaly Detector) equipped and proximity fused.
"Two of the fish have locked onto the pod, skipper," Yermo announced. "I make them as one and four. Two—two and three—are still hunting, and . . ." Again, Yermo pulled his headphones away from his ears as twin explosions rocked the water and the sub. "I guess they are MAENAD equipped."
Yes, Quijana mentally agreed, since the pod's too small to hit and the bubble cloud too insubstantial. Proximity fused, based off the MAENAD or sonar return. Think clearly, Miguel, think clearly if ever you did.
Quijana's eyes searched again over the screen mounted forward.
"Right side screen, vertical display," he ordered. After a brief pause for the operations man to enter the command, the right third of the screen changed color from light blue to green. The green also showed the thermal layer the sub had passed through, in a still darker green. Possible thermal layers, caused by volcanism and the cold current that ran through the Shimmering Sea were marked in a green so light it was almost white. Both screens showed the explosions from the two torpedoes, in red, as well as the known tracks of the two still hunting, in dotted red lines preceded by torpedo icons. The icons radiated the active sonar pulsing of the hunting torpedoes.
Release another deception pod? Quijana wondered. On a delay? We only had the two. And what about those surface frigates? They've got to know we took out their Amethyst Class.
D 466 Portzmoguer, Gallic Navy, Shimmering Sea
More clearly than any other ship in the battle group, the Gallic frigate Portzmoguer heard the engagement below and the death scream of the Diamant. The shocker had been that that destruction had been the result of a supercavitating torpedo. Like many another, the captain of the frigate had been extremely skeptical of the notion that the Balboan submarines had been unarmed.
But a supercavitator? Portzmoguer's monarch, Captain Casabianca, shuddered. We can't hope to outrun one of those and they're so fast we probably can't even react with countermeasures quickly enough.
Of course, between ourselves, Horizon, and Cotentin we can drench that submarine with more torpedoes than it can hope to dodge.
Fat lot of good that will do us if she fires first, or even fires last but before we can destroy her. How many, I wonder, of those supercavitators does she carry? Bastard intel shits! Insisting the subs were unarmed!
The captain's musings were interrupted by the admiral's voice. Coming over the radio. Admiral Duguay sounded furious. His orders were simple. "Sink that submarine."
Already Casabianca could see three more helicopters rotoring in from Charlemagne. A quick glance at his own operations board showed that a fourth frigate, Montcalm, was joining the hunt, leaving only one to secure the carrier. He thought this questionable policy but, hoping to be an admiral himself, someday, chose to say nothing.
The problem, though, is that we can't hear that sub but it can almost certainly hear us. Fortunately, the carrier is a good distance away.
On the plus side, she's still fairly close underneath. If she'd moved much, we'd have heard those irregularly cut gears again.
SdL Megalodon, Shimmering Sea, Terra Nova
Charlemagne was moving slowly ahead and towards the coast. Meg had no trouble keeping up with the carrier and being perfectly silent while doing so. Of course the Carrier could burst into speed and lose the submarine if it chose to. Range from sub to ship was under two kilometers. Even at the slow headway she was making, and even with somewhat substandard Volgan sonar, Charlemagne stood out clear.