Quantum Storms - Aaron Seven

by Dennis Chamberland

  “Come on,” she responded slyly.

  Seven looked over to where the still stern faced Edgar Allen was standing, continuing to eye them all with an unbroken, severe expression.

  “Well, I know Edgar can read lips, but I didn’t know you had that talent,” Seven responded with a surprised stare at his wife.

  “I’m just chock full of surprises, my dear,” she responded.

  Then Seven looked directly at Serea and mouthed silently, “Mais pouvez-vous lire des lèvres en français?” (But can you read lips in French?) Serea stared at him with a puzzled expression and said nothing. Seven grinned back and breathed a deep sigh of relief. Then he glanced over to Edgar and lost his smile immediately.

  She was looking back at him sternly and slowly nodding her head.

  25

  Captain Xiao Luan’s eyes swept the bridge of his submarine like infinitely precise sonar. He missed nothing. No detail went unobserved and un-logged. He saw every gauge, every valve, every indicator light and every nervous twitch of his officers and crew. Luan was more than a precise submarine skipper, he was a fanatic, an imperious ruler and master of each nuance of man and machine. He was a micromanager of infinitesimal resolution and he accomplished everything with brilliance. His officers and men feared him, but it was not mixed with hate. Luan was revered. High marks from his pen carried guaranteed long term career rewards in the Chinese military.

  “Dive the boat to periscope depth, Mr. Yan,” he ordered his Officer on Deck.

  With requisite flourish, Yan barked orders to begin the dive as the submarine plowed beneath the cold waters of the Yellow Sea, just outside their home port of Qindao, some 965 miles southeast of Beijing . The ship and crew were headed out to the deep waters of the north Pacific. They had all been warned by Central Command that the country of their birth would have absolutely vanished upon their return, if they were ever to return at all. Their loved ones, their families, their beloved cities and all they had ever known would be gone forever. The officers and crew all knew it might well be a one way journey. Their exclusive order was ‘…to protect the covenant of empire’ using every nuclear powered resource at their disposal and to take any action it required to succeed. Regardless of the disaster heaped upon the planet by the cosmos, the People’s Republic was to survive, at all costs.

  Xiao Luan was the top skipper of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy Submarine fleet. He commanded the finest, quietest, fastest and most deadly boat in the fleet, the Jiang Zemin, SSGN 421, a Type 093 fast attack nuclear submarine armed with 16 Shkval rocket torpedoes and a sizeable suite of long range cruise missiles. The Jiang Zemin was a subsea juggernaut, over a football field in length, displacing nearly 6,000 tons, outfitted with a nuclear reactor capable of 130 megawatts of energy without refueling for 20 years.

  “We have achieved periscope depth, Captain,” Yan said crisply.

  “Very well,” Luan intoned. “Make our course and heading good per your watch orders. Make our depth 150 meters.”

  “Yes, Captain,” Yan responded. Then to the helmsman he ordered, “Turn right to one two zero degrees. Make our depth 150 meters.”

  Yan knew that it was a deliberate test by the Captain to see if he, as Watch Officer, remembered the minute details of the watch orders, and he had passed.

  “Aye, sir, coming about to one two zero degrees,” the helmsman responded.

  “Mr. Yan, all engines ahead one third, five degrees dive on the bow planes,” Luan commanded. “Let us become proficient at diving the boat with maximum intent and minimum cavitation. Get the feel for her, Lieutenant Yan, make her skin your skin.”

  “Yes, sir, Captain,” Yan responded, a single trickle of sweat running down the back of his neck, a nuance fully noted by Captain Luan.

  “Five degrees down bubble,” the helmsman reported.

  Xiao Luan was named after the third Emperor of the Qi Dynasty of 494 A.D. in a reign named for the Chinese word “brilliant.” He was well aware that his own lineage had been totally disrupted and his family records were purposefully destroyed in the Mao revolution of the mid twentieth century. If he were somehow a descendant of the great Emperor, there would be no way to trace it now. But it did not matter. He believed in the great cause of the People’s Republic. He was a member of the Chinese Communist Party, an honored and decorated hero of the People’s Republic.

  Luan also fully believed in his mission to preserve the seeds of the Republic during and after the great cosmic holocaust that was almost upon them. He had been given this awesomely powerful machine and more than a handful of nuclear warheads to make it so. He just had no idea exactly what his orders meant or how he was supposed to carry them out. But even that was fully acceptable to him. He correctly reasoned that his superiors knew even less than he did and that made his position and his plans most powerful.

  The uniquely designed seven bladed propeller of the Jiang Zemin quietly and efficiently turned behind the immense underwater behemoth and pushed it powerfully into the eternal night of the undersea void. The Captain of the great vessel knew well that the world above them was about to die. He knew that in this underwater existence of crushing pressure and relentless darkness, the new world of man would inevitably express its power. Submarine crews from all over the doomed planet were departing their ports with wholly uncertain intentions of ever returning home. In large part, they were each busy looking for one another and any other human resident of the undersea domain. But each of them also carried awesome arsenals of power never intended for control by the hands of just a few.

  “Easy on the planes,” Yan cautioned as the dive bubble inched toward six degrees down.

  “Very good, Mr. Yan, maximum intent, minimum cavitation. Run silent. Stay alive.”

  26

  Aaron Seven glanced about his new apartment at the end of the day. It was identical to the apartment he had in Middlearth and opened onto a balcony. Without looking outside, there would be no way of knowing whether he was in the deep recesses of Middlearth or ensconced hundreds of feet beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean. His new home was obviously of the identical design that had been dreamed up by his talented wife for both cave and ocean living.

  Seven looked around his spacious quarters and toward the open balcony. He had just finished a shower and Serea had taken his place beneath its deliciously warm stream. Seven walked to the balcony and, stepping outside, leaned against the railing and looked over, down into the void of Pacifica .

  The view from the top, some nine stories above the base of the dome, was breathtaking. Pacifica was designed for beauty and visual power as much as was its engineering functionality. But there was nothing austere about it at all. Seven’s eyes were drawn to Central Park, the wide patch of high foliage centered in the lower middle of the enormous sphere. From its center a grand shaft of pure water shot thirty feet into the air and splashed down into the middle of an immense crystal pool. The main spout was surrounded by lesser jets of water as they splashed about in a wide circle around it. The fountain injected a fine spray of water into the air of the main dome and lent a kind of perpetual haze to the air. The park itself consisted of rows of high tropical plants, separated by lines of lower plants, delicate flower gardens, what appeared to be small hanging vegetable gardens, smaller pools linked by streams and waterfalls, and even a wide, grassy areas with picnic tables and bench seats.

  Seven could see to the opposite edge of the great dome nearly obscured by the mist, five hundred feet distant. All along the walls of the flattened sphere were mounted structures in rows separated by wide windows that opened to the view of the wild Pacific void outside. It was night now and the outside waters were totally black. At the depth of Pacifica, daylight only lasted six hours during sunlit days above. Under the best of conditions, daylight at Pacifica consisted of a deep blue twilight. That was why Serea had designed brilliant banks of lights to be mounted - just as in Middlearth - so that the artificial sunlight of the colony was a balanced spec
trum that was brightened during the day and dimmed considerably at night.

  To his immediate right, the Command Center structure hung conformed to the curvature of the wall of the sphere. Seven could see its wide windows facing down into Pacifica and he knew on its opposite walls, wide windows looked outside into the underwater world, onto the sub-sea approach corridor to the colony.

  Directly before him at the far end of the sphere was the walkway that led the length of the great cavernous void to the wide tunnel that ran on hundreds more feet beyond the far wall of the main dome. From that vast tunnel the rest of Pacifica branched off into hundreds of minor passageways and connected structures.

  “Well, at least you put a towel around you this time,” Serea said, as she laced her arms around his body from behind. “What do you think?”

  “Speechless,” he replied.

  “I’ve often fantasized about this,” she sighed.

  “About what?” he asked, not taking his eyes off the view of Pacifica.

  “About what you’d say when you saw this.”

  “Even before you knew me?” he asked, surprised.

  “No. Even before you knew me. Remember, I’ve known you for much longer.”

  “Oh yeah, I keep forgetting I’ve been the object of someone’s electronic voyeuristic fantasies.”

  “I fell in love with an electronic phantom, a series of mere traces. I’m so happy he proved to be all that I had imagined,” she admitted. “I knew of your love for all things engineering, all things ocean, and that you had a finely balanced left and right brain. I knew that you were the perfect artist and the perfect engineer, the renaissance man of any woman’s dreams. And so I fantasized about this moment, when you could see that I painted this all just for you.”

  Her words caught his breath as his eyes scanned the amazing beauty that was Pacifica. “You didn’t even know me when you started this design. Not even your little electronic tracks.”

  “Aaron Seven, I did know you before I started this design. Father told me of you and your theories years before we knew they were real. He said that he prayed they would never actually come to pass, but feared you may have been right all along. The moment I began the design for Pacifica, I built it from your inspiration.”

  “How’s that?” Seven asked, still facing the great sphere, still feeling her arms linked around his waist. He reached up and ran his fingers along her warm, still damp flesh.

  “Because in my mind you were my perfect hero: the genius punished for his greatness, the great one who would rather fight injustice than give into the rewards for his silence. You were the man who struggled for love’s sake, who didn’t mind losing it all to maintain his convictions, and didn’t fear that one day the power of your intellect would manage to pull it all together in the end. And then, after I saw your photograph… well, it was just so easy to go ahead and fall in love with you. How could I not?”

  Seven turned around and faced Serea. “I guess you and Frank would have a serious disagreement on that assessment,” he noted with a wry smile.

  “Yes, you’re probably right,” she agreed. “But remember two important things. One – I’m the one who selected Frank as your perfect persona consensio. And two – which one of you is sleeping alone tonight?”

  “Can you be so sure about that?” Seven responded quickly.

  “What?” she asked, truly mystified.

  “Never mind…”

  Serea’s hair was still wet from her shower and she was covered in a silk bath robe that clung to her damp body. Her face burned with love for him, her eyes bore into his, her beautiful face framed in near pain with the deliberate, dedicated passion she had fashioned just for him. As Seven saw her expression his heart melted, his resolve was replaced by his own passion and a consuming fire. He could not help himself as he slipped his arm up around her, lifted her gently to himself and covered her mouth with his.

  gh

  Their bodies lay together, legs intertwined, sleeping on the king size bed when a buzzer rang sharply in the air. It sounded three times before Seven groped about with a free hand in the dim light streaming through their open window until he found the personal communicator, or PC, about the size and shape of a cellular telephone.

  “Seven,” he responded in a sleepy voice.

  “Dr. Seven, this is the Command Center. We have a priority emergency in progress. Please report to your emergency station immediately.”

  “Of course,” Seven responded as the line went dead.

  “What is it, Aaron?” Serea asked, her eyes still closed.

  “There’s an emergency of some kind. They want us in the Command Center right away.”

  As soon as he had spoken the words, Serea’s own PC began ringing and she immediately answered it. “Yes, of course,” she responded. “Same message,” she said looking to Seven.

  “Well, finding the Command Center may be an issue,” Seven noted. “That tour wasn’t scheduled until tomorrow.”

  “No problem, dear. I designed the place, remember?”

  Immediately there came a furious pounding at their door.

  “Just a second,” Seven barked, still swiftly pulling his coveralls on over his naked body. As Serea ducked into the bathroom, Seven opened the front door to their apartment. Facing him stood a red-faced, somewhat disheveled Twink, who was breathing hard.

  “I came to escort you to your emergency station,” he said between pants. “I came running up here as fast as I could.

  “Thanks, Twink. Come on in. Serea, we’ve got a visitor,” he warned.

  “Ok Twink, what’s up with the emergency?” Seven asked, combing his hair in a nearby mirror.

  “It’s not a drill,” the young man responded, obviously excited.

  “Is there a flood? A fire? What?”

  “None of those,” he replied. “Those are all different and public alarms. This one is an emergency, but not an immediately life threatening emergency, and not a general quarters emergency.”

  “Wow. We have a lot of different varieties of emergencies going on around here,” Seven responded dryly.

  Serea opened the door and came out dressed in her own coveralls. “Your training in procedures doesn’t start until tomorrow,” she said. “I’m sure Frank will instruct you on this one. We just need to get there fast.”

  “This way,” Twink said, pacing quickly toward the door.

  Four minutes later, they walked into the Command Center. Seven was stunned at the immediate visual power of the center. Like the rest of Pacifica, it was devised with every conceivable iota of human genius poured out into its design, its layout and its astounding functionality.

  “Captain on deck!” a voice said loudly as Seven walked into the Command Center and everyone rose on their feet to attention.

  Seven just stood there and looked at them.

  “Say, ‘carry on’,” Twink whispered quietly.

  “Carry on,” Seven said uncertainly as the Command Center crew immediately resumed their duties.

  “Dr. Seven, do you have the con?” Frank Spencer asked in a loud voice from across the room.

  “Wait!” Twink whispered urgently, but too late.

  “Yes, okay,” Seven replied confidently to Spencer.

  “Dr. Seven has the watch,” Spencer said, rising from his centrally placed chair in the heart of the Command Center.

  Seven looked around him just as Sean Conlin burst through the front door.

  “Frank, what’s up?” he asked in a loud voice.

  “Ask Dr. Seven,” Spencer responded, nodding toward Seven. “He has the con.”

  “It’s a setup,” Twink whispered. “The relieving watch must brief the oncoming watch before they give up the con. Everybody knows that.”

  “Those guys wouldn’t set me up, would they? They’re not that bad, I hope,” Seven responded, surprised.

  “Welcome to life with Spencer,” Twink stated dryly.

  Serea was listening to the exchange and her face tur
ned rigid and red as she looked back and forth between Spencer and Seven. At that moment, her Assistant, Edgar Allen, entered the center and paced quickly over to stand beside Serea.

  Seven sized up the rapidly unfolding scene. Spencer’s Personal Assistant, Vance Armstrong, leaned toward Spencer and, with a wicked grin on his face, eyed Seven and then whispered into his boss’ ear. As soon as he saw this exchange, Seven completely relaxed as his mind swiftly formulated the proper response.

  “Commodore Spencer… ah, I mean Counselor,” Seven asked, addressing Spencer by his post-navy and most current title. “Don’t move from where you’re standing,” Seven ordered. “Stand right where you are and brief the oncoming Senior Staff and their aids so that everyone can hear your remarks. And please be thorough.”

  Spencer looked as though he was thrown off balance by the command. “Just a moment,” he replied as Armstrong whispered into his ear once more. “You have the con, Dr. Seven. Perhaps you’re in a better position to brief them than I am,” Spencer replied in an angry voice. “No one would accept the con without a proper briefing. It’s one of the most basic fundamentals of our training here. Not even the lowest level personnel would dare accept the con without a full briefing.”

  “The other half of that equation is that no one would dare risk the lives and safety of the community by giving up the con to an unprepared watch stander,” Seven replied in a prefect riposte. “But, since none of that is true, carry on with your briefing as you have been lawfully ordered. Time is wasting, Counselor. We are, after all, dealing with a real-time emergency, are we not?”

  Spencer sighed deeply, his dim-witted, shallow plot obviously already unraveling. “Very well,” he responded as if to a junior officer, in an exchange that everyone in the room with any naval background well understood. As he spoke the words, a smile flickered across the face of Armstrong as he eyed Seven from across the room. “We have a bogy plotted incoming at 305 degrees true and it’s crossed the blue warning line.”