Here they were at last. His legs would wobble if he let them, and his lungs had been scorched by the DDT, but he was here. Probably very late for the party.
He started to look at his watch to see how late he was, but then the watch lit up and demanded his attention. In moments, the strange device they’d given him at the start of the mission revealed its purpose.
Dr. Dash was here! Straight ahead! Clearly, she’d been in the CIC all this time. He grew excited for a moment.
Then he looked more carefully at the watch to check the time, to see just how badly he was off-schedule.
Once he understood the readout, a hard lump formed in his stomach. He wasn’t just out of time. Unless something really bad had happened, the American fleet had initiated the destruction of the BrainTrust ships long ago.
By all rights, Lebedinsky should be a burned husk of a man on the burned husk of an isle ship, yet the only indication he’d had of outside combat was a couple of thumps and whumps like far-distant explosions.
He was delighted to be alive, of course, but what all had happened while he was struggling through here?
16
Blinding Light
Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.
—Roman philosopher Seneca
Captain Tucker of the South Dakota continued to suppress much of his excitement as he gave the command, “Fire One!”
“Torpedo away.”
The sonar operator gave a running count as the torpedo hummed toward the Chiron.
Unlike the torpedoes of WWII, modern torpedoes did not try to hit the target. Rather, the newer weapons went underneath the target and exploded when their sensors suggested they had reached the centerline under the keel. The goal was to break the ship’s back, leaving the fore and aft sections to sink independently, much like the Titanic’s pieces had sunk after its fatal encounter with an iceberg.
The submarine captains of America’s fleet had spent a substantial amount of time contemplating and arguing about how well this would work with an isle ship. With a vessel so huge whose hull had been grown in the ocean like a seashell, what would happen? The general consensus was that a single torpedo would not break the ship, but it might put a whopping hole in the keel, which might be enough. In the betting pools, the guesses crowded around two or three torpedoes to decisively destroy the vessel.
Wilson Tucker had drawn a different conclusion. These isle ships had a pair of truncated inverted cones much like Dixie cups attached to the bottom fore and aft to contain the nuclear reactors. He believed that when his torpedo drove between the cones like a football that had been kicked for a goal and exploded, the cones would keep the force of the impact contained. Instead of dispersing, the force of the blast would reverberate, ripping more powerfully into the hull and the reactors.
So the captain planned to give his first torpedo a little time to do its work, to see what would happen. He was especially interested in the outcome since he had placed a small bet in the captains’ pool with great odds that a single hit would do the job.
Of course, his second torpedo was ready, just in case.
The sonarman counted down to impact. “Seven, six, five—”
Everyone could hear the muffled whump! as the torpedo exploded.
The radar operator said with a hint of puzzlement, “Premature detonation.”
On the photonic display, the captain could see a small hump of water rise in the ocean above where the torpedo had presumably exploded.
The Chiron floated on, serenely oblivious and apparently unharmed.
Then fountains of water erupted on all the isle ships as dozens of tubes on each vessel sprayed tons of water into the air. Very strange.
The sonar operator shouted more news. “I have propulsor contacts, small ones. South of the Chiron. Five, six, seven…” He stopped counting, and after a moment, summarized, “A couple dozen.”
What sounded like a hundred weak but possibly effective active sonars pinged on the South Dakota’s hull, then silence fell once more.
The sonarman’s voice shook as he finished, “All heading for us.”
The captain lost his cool and bellowed, “Sonar! Identify the bogey in the center of that mess! Torpedo room, fire on the target!” He waited for the torpedo to depart and finished, “Dive! Dive! Dive!”
As the sub descended, passing a thermocline, hopefully shaking off the pursuers, Tucker found himself wondering, mystified, what the hell had just happened?
Admiral Beck stood in the CIC of his flagship, the aircraft carrier Kennedy, watching the BrainTrust fleet from a drone they’d launched earlier.
He did not pace between the battle stations, although there was room. He did, however, fret.
In moments, the South Dakota was supposed to launch the first attack of the engagement.
But the sub’s torpedo was supposed to be the first of a devastating one-two punch. The bombers were supposed to follow up within seconds with their anti-ship missiles. So where the hell were the bombers?
The bombers were of course stealth, so he couldn’t have found them on the radar even if he’d been willing to start active scans. And the bombers were of course under strict EMCON themselves.
The member of his staff who’d become his combined arms submarine expert, who’d been a boat captain, pointed at the display. A hump appeared in the water some distance from the Chiron. “Looks like a torpedo explosion.”
Sonar chimed in, “Torpedo detonation. A Mark 48 ADCAP.”
The Chiron floated serenely, apparently no more impressed by the torpedo than Admiral Beck.
Sonar spoke with crisp urgency. “Multiple sources pinging the water.” After a moment, he continued, “Dozens.” A look of strain crossed his face. “I hear hull groaning as a submarine crash-dives.” He shook his head. “That’s it.”
So much for the sub attack. Beck muttered out loud, “So where are the damn bombers?”
Finally, his satellite operator projected a view on one of the displays. The plane was invisible to just about everything groundside, but from a satellite, if you knew where to look and used the highest-resolution cameras in the constellation, you could pick out their immense wings. “I tracked back along their intended flight path and found them. Well, I found two, anyway.”
Beck swore. Had the BrainTrust already blown away one of his bombers? Had he already taken casualties?
Bureaucracies have an unquenchable hunger to expand. As they expand, they achieve their mostly unintended but always predictable goal with ever greater efficiency: they render further progress by their vassals less efficient and much more expensive.
A watershed moment in the history of America’s weapons procurement bureaucracies came with the development of the B-2 Stealth Bomber. It was a technological marvel, and they originally planned to build a couple hundred.
By the time the cost overruns finally yielded the first production plane, the bomber was so expensive that only twenty could be manufactured.
It got worse. The SeaWolf submarine, another technological marvel, proved so expensive that in the end, they could only afford three.
The F-22 Raptor, a plane so advanced that decades would pass before anyone could build something faintly resembling it, did a little better. They built about two hundred of them out of the needed fleet of eight hundred.
The Zumwalt destroyer, however, set the standard. Once again, only three could be built, and they could not even fire the main gun. Three became the magic number of military R&D.
Then came the B-21 Raider bomber. The tech in this vehicle would make any combat geek drool. It was not a marvel, it was a miracle of engineering. Once more, they set forth to build a couple hundred. Skeptics suspected that, like the B2, they’d only see about twenty.
Of course, they only got three.
Captain Glenn Roberson of the United States Air Force sat stolidly in the pilot’s seat of his Raider as he led the entire fleet of B-21 bombers to the BrainTrust. He thanked hi
s lucky stars he was still in the air.
After a decade of fixes and patches, the bombers were still buggy. One of his three planes had had to abort shortly after takeoff after one of the vertical stabilizers jammed. Typical.
But they were coming up on the enemy at last. His vidcams zoomed in on the target, a huge array of enormous ships.
All the ships were shooting water in the air. He watched as a shadow comparable in length to an isle ship but much lower to the water hustled into place between him and the enemy fleet. The shadow started spraying water into the air too in vast quantities, as if the top of the shadow were entirely composed of waterspouts. This ship’s fountains blew water so high that it arched over the other isle ships, draping the entire fleet in its flood.
Then a bright flicker danced over his eyes. Thousands of tiny popping noises accompanied the appearance of tiny bubbles in his helmet’s faceplate.
Then he couldn’t see anything. It wasn’t the little cracks in the faceplate obscuring the scene. It was total darkness. He tried to look at his hand. Nope.
He was blind.
Everyone in the CIC on the Kennedy who could afford to glance at the main display did so, goggling at the fountains of water throughout the BrainTrust.
Admiral Beck asked the question. “What the hell are they doing?”
The radar station answered first. “At first the water was muffling the radar signatures, but now the returns are getting stronger.” He paused. “Though we’re losing resolution. On radar, it looks like the entire fleet is merging into a single big lump.”
As they watched, the water started solidifying. One of the staff officers figured it out. “It’s ice. The fountains of water are freezing into sheets of ice.”
At this, the admiral’s adjutant Lieutenant Lambert, by far the geekiest adjutant the admiral had ever met, gave an explosive laugh. He spoke with wonder and admiration in his voice. “It’s the solid ice aircraft carrier.”
Beck pierced him with a stare. “Explain.”
Lambert turned to address the entire CIC. “In World War II, before we figured out how to protect our aircraft carriers and we were routinely losing them, we actually started to build an aircraft carrier out of ice.”
Beck blinked. “Ice?”
Lambert nodded. “Ice floats and it’s surprisingly hard, so if they built an entire carrier out of ice, they reckoned it would be effectively unsinkable. Enemy airplanes and battleships could pound it all day and it would continue to float, and they could even do repairs using the ocean itself.”
One of the staff officers objected. “But keeping it frozen!”
Lambert turned to the objector. “That was the problem. You had to generate immense amounts of power to keep it solid.”
Beck’s face acquired a pinched look. “One of the things the BrainTrust has in vast quantities is power. All those ships have nukes capable of generating more power than they will ever need.”
Lambert pointed at the bases of the fountains. “Remember when we attended the Autonomy Day celebrations? They used those fountains to blow ice into the air as a backdrop so the lasers could generate gigantic rendered images in the air. Now those fountains are shooting some kind of supercooled slush that freezes on contact.”
He had a sudden realization. “Remember that the torpedo exploded before reaching the ship? What if the torpedo exploded on contact with an ice hull outside the main hull?”
The radar operator announced with a hint of joy, “The bombers have arrived. Missiles away.”
But they were too late, Beck saw. Layer after layer of ice had already solidified.
He realized he had no time to waste. The longer he waited, the more ice would build up, and the less effective his weapons would become. He sent out a fleetwide signal. ”I want the squadrons launched now. Free all weapons on all the ships. Prep missiles to fire on my mark, all tubes, Plan B.” Plan A had involved sinking just the flagship and the empty tourist boat as a demonstration in hopes the rest would surrender. That plan was now out the window.
Instead, they’d have to sink everything in the next few minutes—or they might sink nothing at all.
On board the BrainTrust submarine Alcyone, Chen Ying sat on the edge of his chair as he watched his bots spread out from the ejection ports tossing them into the water. He already had a decent bearing on the enemy submarine since he could track the torpedo fired at the Chiron back to where the motor had kicked in. Once he had his bots properly arrayed, he ordered them all to ping the ocean with their sonar, one ping only.
The simultaneous set of pings from widely dispersed locations gave him a view of the battlespace similar to what one might get from a synthetic aperture radar. His display showed him an outline of the sub, which he was able to distinguish as a Virginia-class hunter-killer.
The sonar returns also showed him another submarine on the far side of the BrainTrust fleet. That ship seemed to be sitting quietly, waiting for something.
Captain Samuels looked over his shoulder and offered tactical advice. “The far one is Russian. Don’t worry about her. She’s too close to the isle ships to be firing torpedoes. I presume she’s supporting some kind of boarding operation.”
Chen pointed his fleet of scuba bots at the American sub and sat back, reflecting with satisfaction on how he’d gotten this role in this battle:
Despite Fan’s early outrage, Chen Ying had, in the end, gotten his wish to join the fight. Lenora had personally taken a stealth copter and piloted him out into the middle of the ocean. When she descended toward sea level with absolutely no land or ship in sight, he wondered briefly if she were planning to throw him into the middle of the ocean and leave him there. She did not, after all, like the Chinese Politburo.
But as they dropped, something rose from the sea’s depths. He guessed it was a submarine, although it had no sail sticking up. And the sub didn’t have, on closer inspection, a teardrop or cigar-shaped hull. Rather, it looked like three cylinders strapped together.
Lenora pointed. “Welcome to the Alcyone.” As a man clambered onto the top surface—there was no flat deck—Lenora added, “That’s Captain Samuels. He’ll get you squared away.”
She gave Chen a hard look. “Remember your cover story.”
Chen nodded. “I’m not here to fight the Alliance or defend the BrainTrust, I’m just here to do some tactical assessment of the Americans, who have been China’s main rival for generations. No one could reasonably be accused of treason for studying the American weapons in action.”
Lenora patted him on the leg. “Good. Pretty flimsy, but as good as we’ve got. Now go.”
She hovered the copter, Chen jumped, and Samuels grabbed him before he could fall overboard.
Lenora disappeared in the sky.
Captain Samuels guided Chen to the hatch and let him work his way down the ladder before sliding smoothly down it.
The captain led Chen around the boat, which was indeed composed of three cylinders strapped together, each cylinder being small enough that the two-deck-high 3D printer on a BrainTrust manufacturing ship could create it as a single piece. As they walked, Samuels interrogated Chen and helped him understand what role he’d play. “Chen, I understand you’re a programming wizard when it comes to putting underwater bots to work.”
Chen pushed his hair out of his eyes. “Pretty much.”
“Excellent.” Samuels led him into the back of a cylinder. Rows of scuba bots rested against the sides of the boat. “The Alcyone is not a military ship, as you have probably deduced. We spend most of our time these days hauling heavy cargoes at high speeds. We delivered the vaccines for the Red Rubola, for example.”
Chen put his hand on the chest of one of the scuba bots. “So what are we doing here, heading into a war zone?”
Samuels explained. “We might not have torpedoes, but we do have bots with hands and opposable thumbs. Since you have lots of experience making bots build things underwater, we were hoping you could figure out how such a bot m
ight engage an attack boat.”
Chen smiled. “There is perhaps no weapon in history as important as the opposable thumb, which allows one to wield many different kinds of weapons.”
Chen watched his bots move forward with streamlined grace as they all communicated back to the Alcyone with their blue-green lasers. The enemy sub was still too far to see with his bots’ video, but that would change soon.
The sonar operator muttered tersely, “Torpedo in the water.”
Chen jerked in surprise.
The captain gave him the best advice he had. “Don’t react until you have a better idea of what you’re reacting to.” He turned to the sonarman. “Where’s it heading?”
The sonar station had a fully integrated sensor fusion suite that took the sounds picked up by all the bots, as well as the sub’s acoustic pickups, and merged them into a single sonar view. “It’s heading toward the center of the bot cluster.” He drew a red circle to highlight the bot closest to the center. “It’s heading there.”
“So the sub hasn’t seen us yet,” Samuels muttered with relief. “And now we’ll be almost impossible to detect, with the bots’ noise interfering.” Chen had heard Samuels say he hoped the Alcyone would be hard to spot. She’d sailed underneath the noisy Aegis for most of the trip, and on approach had slowed to three knots to effectively eliminate cavitation noise from the propulsor as it pushed out water to produce thrust.
Even on American nuclear submarines, the pumps in the power generation and propulsion trains created sound. The BrainTrust sub used electric motors that were effectively silent, and the Stirling engines converting the reactor’s heat to electricity were nearly so. This made her approximately as silent as the coastal subs of China that traveled on battery power when underwater, widely acknowledged as being even quieter than American submarines as long as they didn’t have to surface to run the diesels to recharge the batteries.
Braintrust- Requiem Page 30
