“Low-level pressurizer, sir. Heater cutout.”
As pressure dropped, Delaney ordered the plant to be shut down. “Manderson, insert a full scram.”
“Rods aren’t dropping, sir. The fuel elements must be melting!”
The nuclear reactor became uncovered, boiling away the last remaining coolant. The fuel elements in the core melted, fuel pooled in the lower head of the reactor vessel and began to melt through the thick steel. Up to this point Delaney hadn’t notified Pacino in control — what the hell could the captain do about it? An alarm bell sounded in the room, announcing the high radiation in the engine room. Delaney pulled the microphone down out of the overhead.
“CAPTAIN, ENGINEER. REACTOR SCRAM. CORE IS UNCOVERED AND FUEL IS MELTING. BATTERY’S DEAD AND STEAM POWER IS GONE. RECOMMEND YOU EMERGENCY BLOW TO THE … TO THE ICE.”
Delaney put down the microphone. Suddenly it was very cold in the engine room.
Vlasenko lowered his aching body down the rungs of the ladder, now at a crazy 50-degree angle to the vertical. Actually he came more over than down — and stepped over a limp form… Novskoyy. Some previous head injury must have knocked out the admiral with more force than his punch. He hadn’t really connected solidly.
A booming noise diverted him from his inspection of the escape-pod-release-system, and he looked over to the port side to see the signal-analysis console explode. The deck was too steep to climb far enough aft to see exactly what had happened. But he didn’t have to see the console at close range to know the cause of the console explosion— the titanium inner-hull framing was sticking out in a large bulge just on top of the console. The hull was beginning to fail, and as he thought this, the console under the bulge started to leak seawater onto the deck.
Vlasenko stared at the leak, refusing to believe that this high-tech hull had actually been breached… Titanium failure could only mean that they had gone below 2000 meters, the maximum-safety depth, though there were no working pressure indicators in the space now that the computers were dead. The ominous flicker of the overhead battle lantern brought him back to grim reality. The water stream was raining down at him now, the forward bulkhead was a deck as the submarine dived at a 90-degree angle.
Vlasenko looked over at the ladder to the escape pod — it was completely horizontal. He realized he had only moments left to get the crew out before the hull of the compartment gave way. He decided on Ship Control Officer Katmonov, still strapped into his seat. He tried to release the five-point seat-harness, but with Katmonov’s body weight on it the release lever wouldn’t work. He left him and pulled Ivanov’s body up by his armpits. Ivanov was still breathing, going in and out of consciousness. Vlasenko hauled him up and staggered over to the ladder to the pod. The straightdown angle of the ship actually helped at this point, giving him a level surface on which to carry Ivanov. But the treads of the escapepod ladder would trip him. Vlasenko set Ivanov down on the ladder and slid him over to the hatch, then with one final push he got the man into the pod. The compartment shuddered, the flooding got worse.
Now there were ten centimeters of water covering the control console. Vlasenko pulled Chekechev over out of the water and checked to see if he was breathing. He was dead. Blood came out of his mouth. Vlasenko felt a rush of anger — at Novskoyy, at the attacking submarine. The water was lapping now at the pod’s hatch. If he took any more time the pod would be flooded, finishing them all. He waded back to Katmonov through the water that now submerged the long dead control console. Katmonov was still suspended by his safety harness to the control seat. The water had swallowed his arms and legs. His head hung into the black water but he was not conscious enough to raise up from it and sputtered while he tried to breathe, coughing the water out.
Vlasenko took a deep breath, dived below the oily water and grabbed Katmonov’s seat harness, trying to release the kid’s harness before the water drowned him. But the water was too high, now submerging the back of the chair. Vlasenko’s fingers, numbed from the cold, fumbled at the harness release, jammed by the shock of the weapon or frozen by the cold. Lungs bursting, Vlasenko forced himself back to the surface and gasped for air, spitting up the dirty water. He realized his feet were no longer touching bottom—
A rumbling explosion jarred the ship, then another. The weapons in the first compartment were exploding.
Vlasenko dived into the water, pulled himself down by pulling on Katmonov’s shirt. As he made his way into the blackness of the water he felt Katmonov’s hand grab his arm. The kid was still alive. Vlasenko found the harness, pulled hard on it… the harness was still frozen. He gave the release lever one last jerk, and it finally yielded. He managed to pull Katmonov from the seat, then got to the surface.
As he burst through, he saw Novskoyy, and felt a wave of fatigue that nearly destroyed his will to survive. He looked up at the flooding from the upper bulkhead of the compartment, then hauled Katmonov to the pod hatch, now half underwater, and floated him in. It was easier now, with the water in the compartment. He was about to slide into the pod hatch himself when the face of Alexi Novskoyy came floating into view in the semi-darkness. At first Vlasenko thought that the admiral must be dead, but as he turned to swim away Novskoyy’s eyes fluttered open and the admiral looked directly at him, grabbed his sleeve and collar. No time to gloat, no time even to push Novskoyy away, much as he was tempted. However mixed his feelings, he told himself it would take less time to pull Novskoyy into the pod than to fight him off.
As he pulled the admiral to the ladder, the man lost consciousness and his head began to bump on the rungs of the ladder, now horizontal to the pod. By the time Vlasenko reached the pod hatch it was half gone, the water flooding the pod. He pulled Novskoyy in, saw that the admiral had collapsed and was floating face down, pulled him up away from the water and struggled to shut the hatch. It took all his strength to push the hatch against the water and turn the wheel. When he turned away from the hatch he saw that Novskoyy had fallen back into the murky water. He set him back up, out of reach of the icy water and draped his arm around a handhold. Ivanov and Katmonov had their eyes open now and were shivering. Ivanov, hands grasping his leg, rocked back and forth in pain.
Vlasenko began to make his way to the pod control panel just as the lantern in the pod flickered and died, shorted by the water. He felt his way to the panel, maneuvering through the numbingly cold seawater, found the panel in the dark, reached to its upper right corner, shut his eyes and pulled up on the toggle switch, praying that the pod would release from the mortally wounded submarine. The switch clicked home into the RELEASE position. Nothing happened.
Two thousand lousy yards from survival and the reactor melts down. Pacino couldn’t blame Delaney, he couldn’t have done any better. He let go of the yoke of the control panel and climbed to the ballast panel as the lights went out. The ventilation fans wound down again and the room plunged into silence, illuminated by the single bulb of the battle lantern Pacino had turned on just moments before after the blast. He plugged his gas mask into the manifold of the ballast control panel, looking up into the overhead as if he could see through the dark water to the ice cover. The ice was probably 100 feet thick here, he thought, and ice that thick was equivalent to five feet of steel. Even if he could get the ship up to 20 knots on an emergency blow, wouldn’t the ice crush them? Try, damn it. Pacino got ready to blow all main ballast tanks under the thick ice cover. He reached up to the forward lever, pulled the plunger cap down and rotated the lever from straight-down to straight-up.