The Lotus Eaters cl-3

by Tom Kratman

  SdL Megalodon, Shimmering Sea

  Now that I heard, thought Auletti. "Captain Chu, the Amethyst Class is flooding tubes. Location on screen now."

  Chu hadn't taken his eyes from the screen lately. He saw the Gallic submarine reappear as his target "Five" (because Meg, being under the layer, didn't have as clear a picture of the surface as Orca did.

  "This shit has just gotten way too serious," was Chu's pronouncement. "Quijana," he whispered, "I think we've already proved our point. You can turn around and go home any time now."

  Auletti said, "Sir, the Orca's stopped . . . or maybe just turned off its clicker. I think they must have heard the tubes being flooded."

  Chu shook his head. "No, they didn't turn off their clicker. Quijana's the literal sort. His orders were to use his clicker continuously while moving under power. He'll do that right up to the point where it means self destruction . . . and maybe past that point. Maybe he'll be clever and stop for a bit.

  "Continue on course for the Gallic battle group."

  SdL Orca, Shimmering Sea, Terra Nova

  "All stop," Quijana ordered, as soon as he was informed that the Gallic submarine was arming itself. The clicker was electronically, although not mechanically, tied in to the drive system, to the extent that it would stop clicking if the jet pumps stopped, or increase or slow its rate of clicking if the sub's speed went up or down.

  And now what? They're nuclear, with maybe two or three months rations aboard. I'm not; I can't replenish my air anything like that long; and we'd all starve long before he does. Fuck.

  Garcia walked over to stand next to Quijana's command chair. "If it comes to it, skipper," the Exec whispered, "The bitch is already in line with our rear tubes. At this range"—the main screen indicated the Gallic sub was less than a kilometer astern—"she'd hardly know what hit her if we use the supercavitating torpedo we've got back there."

  "Ten seconds is long enough to press a firing button," Quijana answered.

  "Yes, sir," Garcia agreed. "Yes, sir, it is. But if the sub's destroyed, and there's no one to provide guidance to the torpedo, we've got a much better chance."

  "You want to start a war, XO?"

  "No, sir. But I don't want to die right now, either."

  Neither do I, Quijana silently agreed. But . . ."I will press on with my Cazador mission, though I be the last man standing."

  "Yes, sir," Garcia agreed. "We all went to the school, too."

  "The thing that bugs me, Dario," Quijana said, "is that frog captain. Flooding tubes is not a minor step. Either he's got a crappy attitude or he's got orders to engage. I wish I knew which it was."

  "Maybe not," Garcia answered. "Maybe we just make him nervous."

  "We don't get nervous that easily," Quijana said.

  "We aren't responsible for guarding a multi-billion drachma nuclear carrier either, skipper."

  "I'm not sure that makes things any better." Quijana considered, and compromised. "Weapons, stand by to fire number fourteen at the Gaul. My command only."

  "Aye, sir."

  S806 Diamant, Shimmering Sea, Terra Nova

  "The enemy's stopped," the deck officer informed the captain. This was the first time that anyone aboard the Diamant had actually referred to the Balboan sub as "the enemy." It was, perhaps, an unfortunate choice of words.

  The captain really didn't notice the word choice; he'd long since classified the Balboan as an enemy. He attached no particular emotion to the word.

  For the rest of the bridge crew, however, the use of the word went through the men like an electronic shock. Not a one of them, no moreso the captain, had ever fired a shot in anger. To actually classify someone as "the enemy" was unheard of outside of a lecture room, a motion picture, or a history book. Indeed, the bureaucrats who actually ran the Tauran Union had a semi-official policy of not considering or permitting anyone to be considered an "enemy."

  Tension on the bridge, already high, shot upward.

  From a chest pocket the captain took out a handkerchief and began dobbing at the sweat building up around his neck, discoloring his uniform collar.

  "What now, sir?" the deck officer asked.

  "Now we wait. Once the fleet has passed out of range, I'll order our tubes unloaded and allow the Balboan to leave."

  "And if he won't wait for that?"

  The captain sighed. Yes, he'd long since classified the Balboan as an enemy, yet he still had no great desire to destroy that enemy.

  "Pray he does," the captain said.

  SdL Orca, Shimmering Sea

  "We can't sit here forever," Quijana announced, folding the piece of paper on which his orders were written and sliding it into a pocket. "I'm going to try something."

  "Skipper?" asked Aleman.

  "Start letting the rubbers in the ballast tanks chill. We'll liquefy the ammonia and sink. As we sink I want to use the dive planes to glide."

  "But our orders are to use the clicker when we move?"

  Quijana smiled. "No, actually, our orders were to use the clicker whenever moving under engine power. We won't be . . . mostly . . . just enough jet to keep us gliding."

  * * *

  The process of boiling the ammonia to expand the "condom" to force water out of the tanks made a little noise, though less than a normal submarine made pumping air in or out. Chilling the ammonia, on the other hand, made virtually none, since the only process used was to cut the flow of power to the heating elements. This cut, they cooled. With them cooling, the ammonia naturally reverted to a liquid state. With that, the "condoms" collapsed under the water pressure, letting the tanks flood. The sub began to sink, in utter silence.

  It began to pass through the thermal layer to the ocean level in which rode the Diamant. The Gallic sub took no notice. Continuing on downward, through the layer, the Orca twisted her dive planes in opposite direction and began to turn back in the direction from which it had come. Because it was natural to drive, fly or dive forward, it also moved closer to the Charlemagne, even as it made its very slow turn. As it did, just before it's turn became noticeable, one of its dive planes aligned at right angles, briefly, with the sonar from the hunting helicopter's sonobuoy.

  S806 Diamant, Shimmering Sea

  The captain's face went white and his eyes opened wide at the news from the underwater telephone. "Dear God, she's still closing on the carrier and we didn't hear a thing." The captain was torn with indecision. Still, he was by trade a hunter and a killer, even if that hunting and killing had, so far, been purely theoretical. His indecision lasted but a moment.

  "Ping the enemy vessel now. Continuous. Weapons, as soon as you have a firing solution open fire. Kill that sub."

  Under the sonar barrage of Diamant, closer to the same ocean level, very powerful, and much more discriminating, Orca stood out clearly.

  "Target is found, captain," said sonar.

  "Range and bearing to target entered."

  Weapons was only a few moments slower in reporting, "Fire control. Firing solution is ready. Torpedoes are ready, one programmed to go direct, the other three to bracket the target and veer inward."

  "All tubes in sequence: Shoot!"

  "Unit One away. Running straight and normal. Good wire."

  SdL Megalodon, Shimmering Sea, Terra Nova

  Charlemagne was just ahead, five kilometers. They couldn't hear it through the hull, not at this depth, but Auletti had it firm on the sonar. At the current speed of the carrier it would pass almost directly overhead within the next six minutes.

  "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.

  In Meg's control room, as Quijana had aboard Orca, Chu had ordered his main screen split for a vertical display.

  Mixed bag, he thought, looking at it. One of the Gallic torpedoes is searching upward; but the other is gradually spiraling down to where I think Orca's at. Our double hull and the cones that connect the two give pretty good scattering from active sonar, but if the torpedo comes close enough it will see Quijana. And there's not a lot I can do about that.

  The frustration Chu felt at having a comrade under attack and being helpless to intervene caused a tight knot in the sub skipper's stomach.

  I could attack Charlemagne, and probably draw off her escorts hunting Orca. But that would let them know we've a sub that can sneak right through their screens. Ruin the whole point of the exercise, that would. Shit.

  SdL Orca, Shimmering Sea

  The ocean floor below was far deeper than the sub's even theoretical crush depth. There'd be no escape in hiding among the clutter of sea bottom.

  "The torpedo still hunting us just broke into our level, skipper," sonar announced.

  Can't go down much; can't stay here.

  "Inflate the rubbers, fore and aft," Quijana ordered. "Just enough for a mild positive buoyancy. I want to put the thermal layer between us and that torpedo. Level off just after we pass the thermal."

  "Aye, skipper," helm answered. After
a few minutes, the nose down angle the sub had taken on reversed itself as the bow began to ascend. The movement was so slow that, other than for the reversal, there was no sense among the crew of ascending.

  Another quick glance at the right side of the main screen showed that the other torpedo, the one that had gone high, was still patrolling in a spiral and still actively pinging.

  In some ways the screen was a distraction, presenting, as it did, a three dimensional problem in two dimensions. Quijana closed his eyes and tried to imagine the totality of the situation, with frigates hunting above, helicopters dipping above that, a barrage of sensors having been placed between him and the carrier, and probably another being dropped somewhere by now.

  If we hadn't taken out the sub their primary effort would have been protecting the carrier. As is, and with us having dived so low, they probably think the carrier's safe enough. That means their major effort is going to be revenge. Well . . . I suppose I could understand that. The first barrage of sonabuoys was generally south. If they're putting one in now, it's probably north to keep us from heading to port and safety. So we head where? East or west, I think, but which?

  West brings us nearer Santander; east there's not a decent port for two hundred miles. But we've got the endurance, easily, for either.

  East or west? West or . . .

  Yermo's voice was strained, if not shocked. "Skipper, the torpedo found us. Pinging like a bitch and making fifty knots for us. I make it impact in ninety seconds."

  "Deception pod," Quijana ordered instantly. "Set for no delay. Dive! All dive!"

  Torpedo Number Three, Shimmering Sea

  What with the need to pack sonar, both active and passive, propulsive gear and fuel, fuses, MAENAD, controls, and—by no means least—explosive into the torpedo, the room left over for a brain left the thing something of an electronic moron. Even a moron, though, can sometimes be right.