Polaris

by Todd Tucker

She climbed onto the main deck while Banach drove the ship from the control room; she wouldn’t even put anybody on the bridge, wanted to be able to submerge quickly if they had to. Among her team topside were three of the marines, including their sergeant. One of them held a long, curved hook, exactly like those used by lifeguards, to pull any compliant survivors from the sea to be interrogated. The others carried the short carbines that they so loved, in the unlikely event that a survivor wanted to fight to the end.

  But, as she expected, no one had survived. Only tiny traces of the plane remained, a few thin seat cushions floating in the water, some empty plastic bottles, a tire from the landing gear. They steered silently among it, the flashlights from the commandos illuminating the detritus.

  “Confirmed kill,” she said, almost to herself.

  “I wonder what they were doing,” said the sergeant.

  Carlson shrugged. “Me, too. Not delivering the mail.”

  She heard a slight scraping along the hull beneath her feet. One of the commandos shined his light on it.

  “I don’t see anything,” he said.

  She squinted. It was almost impossible to see, but she could hear it. Then she saw it; a transparent plastic container, bobbing at the waterline.

  “There!” she said. She sensed it was important. Two of the marines got down on their bellies and tried to reach it, but it was impossible. The sergeant tried with the big metal hook, but there was nothing to grip on the plastic container.

  Suddenly, the radio on her belt clicked to life. “Drone,” said Banach from the control room. “Port beam.”

  Shit. “How far out?” she said.

  “Maybe ten minutes,” said Banach. “Heading straight for us.”

  “Shall we secure, Captain?” asked the sergeant.

  “No!” she said. “Get that box!” He resumed frantically batting at it with his hook, but it was futile.

  “Looks like four drones in all,” said Banach on the radio. “In attack formation.”

  Carlson looked at the sergeant. “Get that box,” she said again.

  Without a word, he handed her the hook, nodded, and dived off the side of the submarine.

  “What the hell?” said Banach from control. He’d heard the splash. “Do we have a man overboard?”

  The sergeant grasped the floating container with both hands and kicked himself over to the side of the sub. Carlson lowered the hook around him, so it grabbed him beneath his arms, just as designed. The two other commandos got behind her and helped pull him up, plastic container in hand.

  “Visual on drones!” said Banach. He had the 4x magnification of the scope on his side; they still couldn’t see or hear them topside, but Banach’s visual meant they were very close. “Get below!”

  The commandos ran for the hatch, plastic crate in hand. Carlson followed them, her eyes to the dark sky.

  At the hatch, they tried to go below, but the crate wouldn’t fit.

  “You’ve got to be shitting me,” she said. The commandos were frantically turning the crate, trying to find an angle at which the rectangular container would fit down the round hatch.

  She could hear the drones.

  “Move!” she said, stepping between the commandos. She tore the lid off the sealed crate, threw it into the sea, and dumped the contents of the container into the submarine. A torrent of paper poured down the hatch.

  “Down, down, down!” she yelled. The first drone was in sight now. The marines jumped down the ladder, landing and slipping on the pile of Alliance paperwork. Going last, she slid down two rungs of the ladder, and slammed the hatch behind her.

  Without waiting for her order, Banach performed an emergency dive. Water poured around the hatch as she spun the locking ring, sealing the ship shut. They had just made it. Banach, she knew, would have submerged with them still topside if that’s what he needed to do to save the ship. She had trained him that way.

  After a few minutes, Banach made his way aft, wild eyed. She saw him do a quick count of everyone before he met her eyes with relief.

  “Disappointed?” she said. “You almost got to take command.”

  He nodded. “Maybe next time, Captain.”

  “Any damage from the drones?”

  “We heard the lead drone drop its bomb. Hit the surface of the water and sank without detonating.”

  “Good,” she said, the adrenaline rush subsiding. She held her arms out, indicating the pile of paper at her feet. “Get somebody down here. We need to start scanning this shit.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The three original members of the team, Hamlin, Strack, and Harkness, were all sitting at their desks awaiting word about the flight to Eris Island.

  Harkness had the propaganda machine ready, waiting to unleash it the moment the plane touched down safely. He passed the time by nervously watching the ever-changing word clouds on his monitors as they told him what people were saying about the flu and the Alliance, and no doubt fantasizing about how the displays would change when the cure was announced. Strack nervously shuffled papers at his desk, the latest mortality reports, also no doubt hoping that his daily diet of statistics was about to change radically.

  As for Pete, he busied himself with rough calculations using approximate speeds of transport planes. He didn’t know the exact plane or its speed, of course, but had a feeling it might be trying to approximate a drone, meaning it would travel very slowly—at least until it was a safe distance away, or closer to areas that the Alliance controlled. He kept adding variables to the equation, wind speed and rates of fuel consumption for a plane fully loaded with passengers, but soon the results all started converging on a single number. It was a complicated problem but allowed Pete to use his extensive knowledge of military aircraft, and gave him a comforting refuge to occupy himself. His slowest estimate had the plane touching down on US soil in twelve hours. The fastest: six.

  That’s why Pete felt a stab of dread when he heard someone buzzing their office door for access after just three hours. He knew it had to be bad news.

  Especially when General Cushing himself walked in.

  They all stood up, automatically. Cushing was in a dress uniform, a step more formal than what Pete saw him in weekly at their Tuesday briefings in Silver Spring. He carried nothing but his hat. His face was grim. He was alone, without the aides that were as much an insignia of his rank as the stars on his collar.

  He looked them over for a moment before speaking, and cleared his throat. “They’re gone,” he said.

  Harkness almost jumped. “Gone? What do you mean? General?”

  “Missing without a trace,” he said. “The plane from Eris Island. Missing and presumed dead.”

  “Shot down?” asked Hamlin.

  “We have no direct evidence of that,” said the general. “But they were a warplane, on a strategic mission, flying unescorted in a war zone. They went missing a few minutes after takeoff. Draw your own conclusions.”

  Strack went pale. All that work in pieces over the ocean, or drifting to the bottom. Colleagues of his, too, now dead. Scientists killed by the war machine they had all tried to avoid.

  Harkness, too, looked stunned. More than Strack, he looked bewildered. A huge, enthusiastic consumer of his own propaganda, he couldn’t believe the Alliance could suffer a defeat like this. “Maybe it was a mechanical failure,” he said, wanting to believe it.

  “Maybe,” the general said. “Doesn’t make a difference to me. To us.”

  Pete looked up at that. Even as his two colleagues digested the news in their own way, he realized that the general wasn’t there just to deliver bad news. He was there to tell them what was next. And he was staring right at Pete.

  “What now?” he asked.

  “There’s a chance there’s still usable information on the island. The plane was small, and the medical team couldn’t bring much with them. They were supposed to bring just the essentials, and destroy everything they left behind. But they didn’t have much time.
Maybe they left something useful behind. If they did, we have to get it. We need it, and we need to keep it away from our enemy.”

  Pete shook his head. “You’ll never get close, General. And neither will Typhon. It’s surrounded by drones, and shoals, and thousands of miles of open ocean. If there’s anything of value on Eris, it couldn’t be in a safer place.”

  “No fortress stays secure forever.”

  Again Pete noticed that the general was staring just at him, not the other two members of his detachment. He wasn’t surprised. A realization dawned on him. In a way, it confirmed a feeling he’d had ever since he learned that the flu research was being done at Eris—he would return to Eris. It was his destiny.

  “You want me to go there.”

  “You’re the only man who can,” said the general. “You’re the only man in the Alliance with a working knowledge of the drones, the island, and the epidemic.”

  “How?” asked Pete. “Want to put me on the next transport plane? Because that didn’t really work out so well.”

  “Not a plane this time,” said the general. “A submarine. The Polaris.”

  The thought of flying a plane there had seemed reckless to Pete, but the mention of a submarine sent a chill through him. All the stories he’d heard about life onboard a nuclear submarine—the stale air, the bad food, the claustrophobia, the constant risk of death. He’d personally worked on the drones’ anti-submarine algorithms, and the MAD sensors that made them work. He’d rather take his chances on a plane, where at least the end would come quickly.

  “It won’t work,” said Pete. “The drones won’t let you approach on the surface, or at periscope depth. The shoals won’t let you approach submerged.”

  “We think there’s a way in,” said the admiral.

  Pete shook his head in disbelief. “It’s a suicide mission.”

  “I feel that way about every submarine patrol,” said the general. “But we’ve spoken to the best minds in the submarine force. They think there’s a way.”

  Pete laughed out loud. “Sorry, but you’re talking to a guy who knows better, General. I picked that island, I’ve studied the charts probably more than any man on earth. I programmed the drones that surround it on how to kill submarines.”

  “We think there’s a way,” the general said again.

  Pete scoffed, looking at his two colleagues for support. “Care to share the details?”

  “In due time,” said the general. “But first … we have to teach you how to drive a submarine.”

  The door to their office burst open again, and a small man in a khaki uniform limped inside. He was wearing a black leather patch over his left eye, the same half of his face covered in pink wrinkled scars, the distinctive scars of a man who’d lived through a ferocious fire. He had the oak leaves of a commander on his collar, but the front of his uniform was devoid of military decoration save for two things: the gold dolphins of a submarine officer, and below that, a war patrol pin. His nametag said ASE.

  He nodded at the general and then stared down Pete with his one good eye. Pete felt an old, rebellious urge to say something sarcastic, to show he wasn’t intimidated by this show of military brass.

  “Is that pronounced ‘aze’?” he said. “Like purple haze?”

  “No,” said the submariner. “It’s pronounced ‘ace.’ As in: I’ve killed a bunch of people.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Pete stared at the sonar screen, his eyes burning from fatigue. The two bright, parallel bars of the degaussing range came into view, as he knew they would.

  “Dive, make your depth six hundred and thirty-two feet,” he said.

  The diving officer acknowledged the order, and Pete felt the angle in his feet as the ship dived. He pictured the bottom of the ocean rising toward them as their depth increased. It was flat there, he knew, and sandy. But he still didn’t want to touch bottom.

  “Left five degrees rudder,” he said, steering the ship slightly, putting it right in the middle of the range. They were easing toward it, right on track. When they lined up perfectly, he gave his next order.

  “Ease your rudder to left two degrees.” There was an unusually strong current at the range that day, pushing them sideways, or making them “crab,” in the words of Commander Ase. The small rudder would keep them moving right on track, right down the middle. Unless something went wrong.

  Right on cue: a screeching alarm, a swirling red light. “Stuck dive planes, sir!” yelled the diving officer. They suddenly tilted forward steeply. Pete had to grab on the periscope ring over his head to stay on his feet.

  “Right full rudder!” he ordered. “Switch to manual control!”

  The diving officer complied, but the ship continued to dive. The big rudder was having the desired effect, the ship would dodge the electrified walls of the degaussing range, turning right in front of the entrance at Point Alpha. But he wasn’t sure they would miss the ocean floor.

  “Emergency blow!” announced Hamlin. “Forward main ballast tanks!”

  He grabbed the right-hand lever and pulled it toward him. He heard the tanks gasp as the valve turned and high-pressure air shot into the forward MBT and expanded, instantly expelling thousands of tons of seawater. The angle of the ship came off instantly, the huge air bubble in the tank overwhelming the force of the stuck planes. For a moment, the ship was level; then the angle started going up. “We caught it!” said Pete. He went from leaning forward to leaning backward as he watched their depth change. The ship was now soaring toward the surface.

  The diving officer counted down their depth as they ascended. “One hundred feet,” he said. “Ninety … eighty … seventy…”

  The angle leveled off suddenly as the ship broke through the surface, and crashed back down. They were bobbing on the surface.

  “Sir, the ship is broached,” said the diving officer, stating the obvious. Pete could hear waves breaking against the side of the hull.

  Immediately, drone alarms began screeching from the ESW console. The floor shuddered as bombs rained down on them. “Emergency deep!” shouted Pete as alarms indicating fire, explosions, and flooding lit up the control room. He scanned the alarms, prioritizing, identifying a reactor scram as his most pressing concern because it would kill their propulsion.

  Then, with a pneumatic sigh, the control room shuddered and the alarms went silent. The lights surrounding them came on, revealing that they were not in the control room of an actual Polaris-class submarine. They were on a simulator, a perfect replica of a control room perched atop hydraulic pistons and a bank of computers that could simulate every possible catastrophe. It belonged to the Navy’s submarine school in Charleston, South Carolina, but it seemed to Pete that every other student had been sent home so the facility could be devoted entirely to his brief, intense apprenticeship.

  Commander Ase limped to the edge and dropped a small steel gangplank that linked the simulator to the surrounding, three-story platform.

  “Well, I didn’t hit the bottom that time,” said Pete as Ase made his way in. His heart was racing.

  Ase nodded. “Aye, that’s true,” he said. “But you’ll be on the bottom soon enough. After the drones take care of you.”

  “So what was I supposed to do?” said Pete, too tired to sound frustrated.

  “You’re supposed avoid the bombs,” said Ase. “These submarines cost a lot of money. Reset!” he yelled into the shadows. The simulator shook with a thunk as unseen operators prepared it for another run.

  * * *

  And so they ran it again, Pete trying to squeeze the ship through the degaussing range during fire, flooding, every variety of stuck planes, and attacks from both above and below. When not on the simulator, he was in the classroom, learning from a string of submariners, all of whom seemed to worship Ase, about all the systems that would keep him alive and get him to Eris Island. Even in his exhaustion, Pete soon learned to appreciate the elegance of the submarine’s design, the engineering that had gon
e into it. Every feature and system had evolved over time, many in battle, to make the ship at once both safe to her crew and deadly to the enemy. His education in aeronautical engineering was more useful in the process than he’d expected. Underwater, the submarine moved more like an airplane than like a surface ship, as the water moving over her control surfaces positioned her just like the air flowing over a plane’s wings. Thus he was comfortable with the principles that kept a submarine submerged. Ase and his followers rarely spoke about how a submarine operated on the surface.

  Much of his training revolved around great submarine disasters. They called it “lessons learned,” and in fact, the fleet did an admirable job of adapting their machines and their tactics by studying the wreckage of their martyrs. But it was more than that. His instructors in Charleston were indoctrinating Hamlin into a brotherhood. And part of being in that brotherhood, he learned, was an understanding that every time you left port in a submarine, you were going in harm’s way.

  * * *

  The USS Thresher was the first great nuclear submarine lost, commissioned in 1960 and lost in 1963, with all 129 men aboard. It was during a post-overhaul dive trial, about two hundred miles east of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The ship was in constant communication with the Skylark, a submarine rescue ship that cruised above her, a safety measure that ended up doing no good at all. At test depth, one thousand feet beneath the surface, flooding began in a place and for reasons that were never determined. At that depth, Pete learned, the force of the water would have been like a cannon, the noise alone would have been debilitating. For reasons not completely understood, the ship’s emergency blow system failed to save them. There was some speculation that the rapidly expanding pressurized air froze the valves that were designed to channel it. At 0915, the worried commander of the Skylark transmitted on the “Gertrude,” his underwater telephone, the message, “Are you in control?”

  In response, the Thresher transmitted back this garbled, incomplete message: “Nine Hundred N.”

  Those were the last words anyone ever heard from them.