April 8: It's Always Something

by Mackey Chandler

  "I did not credit you with the honor or the nerve to meet me without a public humiliation. But you insult me right there sufficiently to challenge," Patrick said. "I'm one of God's Warriors."

  "No matter. All of you fanatics are pretty much the same to us. Shall we just dispense with this waste of the citizen's time or do you insist on bringing it to a vote?"

  "As long as you are challenging me, let us just say our duel will decide the matter."

  "No, I intend to kill you, but I won't leave Home with this foul legacy if I should die. Mr. Muños will you bring the vote?" Jeff requested.

  "On the matter of making the Solar the official Home currency, how do you people say?" Muños said in very abbreviated form. Everybody understood the issue.

  The tally only ran to a bit more than six hundred before it timed out with no new votes coming in. They were all against. Nobody wanted to vote yes. Jeff wasn't sure if it was because they really rejected the idea, or if they were afraid a yes vote would bring another challenge after he disposed of Mr. Patrick.

  "0700 in the new ring industrial corridor," Jeff said. "Be there on time and I shall put a shot between your eyes," Jeff promised.

  "I read this as your challenge," Patrick said. "I have the choice of weapons."

  Jon Davis stood with a stormy face, and that was a scary thing to see. "This is ridiculous," he objected. "Mr. Patrick clearly instigated this entire thing. As Jeff said he is a provocateur. I only object because I want to stand second to my friend, Jeffery."

  "Let's not quibble over it," Jeff said, dismissively. "I can send Mr. Patrick to hell by any route of his choosing."

  "Sweet," Patrick said. "And all by your own filthy rules."

  Chapter 21

  The first submersible was floating somewhere below. Billy said he'd drop it to a hundred meters and let it just float with the current for a bit while he helped lower the other. He assured them he wouldn't lose it. Both could be controlled by his instruments. Captain Havilland gave him leave to put his controls on the bridge temporarily. The antenna he put out on the catwalk made Havilland suspect this temporary control was done remotely through a geostationary satellite. He had no idea how.

  "Very nicely done," Billy said as Havilland's crew eased the second drone into the water. In reality they could have been dropped over the rail and probably survived, but why take the chance of doing some damage? Dave was a manufacturer of spaceships, and it stretched their ability and experience to create something to work in an opposite environment, under pressure instead of vacuum. Dave joked he simply had to build it reversed, but of course it wasn't that simple.

  "Before I move either one of them I'm going to test the sonar," Billy said. "First the unit at the end of the spike." He activated that. It was pointed off approximately south.

  * * *

  Five hundred kilometers north a small USNA submarine was coming toward them, moving dead slow. That meant about three knots, at which speed they were effectively silent. They were in no hurry at all, because their target was station keeping. The captain suspected if they got close enough undetected the mission might change from surveillance to intercept.

  The vessel had modern batteries and thermo electric generators with cores heated by radioactive material. The vessel not only had noise absorbing coating on the hull, it had noise deadening surfaces inside. It was carpeted, with shock absorbing tiles under the carpeting. There was not even a cooling fan or air circulating fan with a rotary element in the boat. In extreme silent mode the small crew would not even speak, communicating on screens in text. The chief sensor tech touched his screen to indicate a contact. That showed on the captain's screen and the helmsman's. They both waited for the follow up.

  "Sharp very high frequency spike to the south. Could be biological or mechanical, of indefinite origin. Range uncertain, well over a hundred kilometers due to the space of time over which reflected pulses arrived," he typed on a keyboard that didn't even click.

  * * *

  "Well nothing is in the water ahead of number two. The sonar is very narrow in emissions. It 'sees' about a ten degree cone very well but falls off rapidly on the edges. We got a little noise off bottom reflections, but nothing significant," Bobby said. "Most of this tech is obsolete, at least twenty years old, but that doesn't mean it doesn't work, it's just mature. The fact we have power out the wazoo to waste helps. We bought the specs and even some components from the Swedes and the Argentines."

  "Didn't they wonder what use spacers would have for sonar tech?" Havilland asked.

  "Europe is still a mess economically from the flu," Billy said. "We offered to pay in gold, but they decided to take their pay in fabrications our shop could do for them. They didn't make our intentions their concern. Neither did we inquire about the purpose of their parts."

  "This front sonar lets the drone follow a target. That part of the software is ours, modified from missiles. Too bad there is nothing out there to reflect a signal. It would work off a whale or a surface craft just fine, to maybe a hundred kilometers. But we can run the drone out a ways and use ourselves as a target. The big question is if it will work with the cavitation running? That may take some tuning. We'll scan for a frequency that the cavitation doesn't produce strongly." Seeing Havilland's raised eyebrow he added. "Assuming there is one."

  "Now, the panels that produce cavitation are driven by an oscillator. However if they aren't in use they can be used as active sonar by applying a short spike or square wave. We have a lot of power and a lot of panel area, so it helps make up for the fact our software to analyze the return is out of date. We may be able to see big ships and things like sea mounts and islands out to a thousand kilometers." He touched a screen and said, "On its way."

  "Sir," the helmsman addressed the Captain, "The engineer asks if one of the drones has collided with the ship. He notes a loud bang that scared, uh, that alarmed them. He sent two crew along to check for leaks or damage."

  Havilland looked askance at Billy and got a nod. "No Mr. Goodall, tell him that was a sonar pulse, but he is correct to have a damage team check out all spaces. Anything that loud may have popped a bad weld or plug."

  "They may hear other noises," Billy warned.

  "Relay that information too," Havilland told his helmsman.

  * * *

  The captain of the USNA Silverfish sat to the right beside the helmsman. The signals tech sat facing away to the side of them. The weapons officer sat to the left with his back to them, on the helm side.

  The signals tech suddenly seemed to levitate in the edge of the captain's vision. He looked over and the man had both hands on his earphones. He slowly relaxed, but didn't take them off. Over the man's shoulder the captain could see an orange spike clear off the top of the screen, slowly scrolling to the left.

  "What was that, and are you OK?" his captain put on his screen.

  "I'm fine, just really startled, and thank God for good filters or I'd be deaf. I have no idea what that was unless a diver smacked our bare hull with a sledge hammer." That was unlikely at three hundred meters in motion.

  "Can they see us?" the captain asked.

  "We are nose on to the source. The possibility exists they will miss the return signal if they have fairly old sensors or software. With that kind of power, if they have outrider receivers and modern software, they can probably read the build plate riveted on our hull in the boat yard," the man admitted.

  * * *

  Billy had four screens set up in a cluster. One showed an overhead map of the ocean with them in the middle. The second showed a tactical map such as a weapons officer would want. Another showed the two superimposed on each other. The third showed a 3D representation of the sea floor with color coding where there were areas that gave no return, such as behind a ridge, or of uncertain validity. Billy was proud they'd spent the funds to buy enough computer power to draw the contours almost real time.

  When the drones were operated from orbit the mapping would be integrated with
chart data, and deep penetrating radar and lidar. The chart would also build up details from various angles as the ship intended to move around in the same area. Jeff and his partners were reluctant to leave the actual long term operation of the drones aboard the Isle of Hawaiki for security reasons.

  The sea floor image expanded from them in a circle, but slowed down as the computer lagged with the data. It was out at two hundred kilometers now and running about a thirty second lag drawing the contours. The detail, of necessity, got fuzzier at a distance. The near ocean floor showed some complex wrinkles and bumps. There was also what might be a shipwreck about sixty kilometers to the west north west of them. The targeting screen showed a couple schools of fish, and then to their delight a surface vessel crossing west to east a hundred ten kilometers south east. The labels on the screen were in English. No need to know Swedish.

  "The software says the ship is about our size," Billy said, pointing at the boxed caption on the short dash. It even had its long dimension aligned.

  At eleven minutes the tactical sonar screen drew a short arc on the screen like a parentheses, convex side pointed back at them. "What's that?" Havilland asked from his seat. He was too far away to read the text.

  "It says possible bow shot of either a sperm whale or a submarine at shy of five hundred kilometers," Billy read off the screen.

  "Really?" Havilland asked, laughing. "Male or female," he asked.

  "I don't think a nose on view tell us that," Billy joked.

  "Well you wanted to move these around anyway. Why don't you run one off a ways, stop, and take a look at it from a different angle," Havilland suggested.

  "I want to test the first drone with the mechanical cavitation first, but in the slow mode. It has an electric drive that uses the electrically conductive sea water like a linear electric motor. I'll set it moving toward that target at about four knots. Then I'll try out the second drone. It's not made to be so silent. It will be interesting to hear the difference. Then I'll try them in fast mode."

  Havilland gave a nod. He was just making a suggestion, but he was the master at sea. He didn't want the young man to forget that, so he gave his assent.

  * * *

  Jon and April, Chen and Irwin all jammed into April's living room. Even Tetsuo, more commonly known as Papa-san had arrived looking concerned. Tetsuo bluntly offered to go "Make the fellow disappear," and Chen had nodded a clear agreement to that. They were both ex-spies, well, mostly ex, except they obviously still retained a fairly loose and pragmatic view of disappearing people. The one that bothered him was Jon. He considered Jon a pillar of moral rectitude, and Jon looked thoughtful at the idea rather than outraged. He didn't even want to turn his head and look at April beside him. She was probably checking the charge on her pistol...

  "I'm disappointed in you, all of you," Jeff said. None of them bothered to look abashed.

  "He's an agent of the government that just rejected their solemn treaty with us," April said. "He basically admitted he was just here to use our own laws and customs to do an assassination under color of law. Crying out loud, they are at war with us still by their own declaration. I should have followed my instincts and burned him down where he stood!"

  "You are right," Jon declared, "But it's so hard to weigh all the moral issues and come to a decision on the spot. After thinking it all through you make a good case, but it would look really, really bad to people to do so after such a delay. I applaud your restraint, because you can do something like that and come to regret it, but I have to admit your gut feelings were spot on, this time."

  "He's the sort an agent will do in the field as a freebie, just because he's a jackass," Chen said.

  "You aren't taking my meaning," Jeff told them all. "I'm hurt nobody has the least shred of confidence in me. I'm faster than him and stronger than him. He's God's Warrior and they are death, literally, on gene mod. More than that I'm smarter than him. You've all been sheltering me from risk for years. Believe it or not, I'm not a helpless little kid!"

  "Well, obviously he's not going to pick pistols since you indicated you expected them," Jon said.

  "It doesn't matter," Jeff said. "I have never been a wonderful shot with a pistol. That's no great loss. You aren't going to teach me the use of any exotic weapons between now and the morning even if we did know. We have all the Wednesday night sparring sessions that we've done together for unarmed combat and sword," Jeff told Jon. "I doubt he knows about that. I'm glad April has her grandfather's swords, because there is a world of difference between a dummy practice sword and a real weapon. I know what the proper sort feel like. I can't imagine the fellow will show up with bows and arrows or throwing stars. I'd be happy with pipes even, like Dakota had to face."

  "We value you," Jon said. "Without you I don't think we would have won our revolution, and without you our future is much more uncertain."

  "Thank you, but you can't count on me," Jeff insisted. "I could slip in the shower tomorrow and break my neck. You'd have to carry on."

  "Is there anything we can do?" Jon asked.

  "Have a medic there, take video, and bring me back to a nice breakfast here afterward. Everybody invited," he said, just to make it clear. He didn't think to ask April if he could invite a crowd to her apartment, and under the circumstances she didn't even think about it.

  * * *

  "I'm moving the first drone off now," Billy announced. "Might as well send it to meet that target too, but directly at it, not offset like the spiked version." He watched his instruments and was pleased. "I'm at five percent power, making about four and a half knots. I can't pick up a thing on my passive sensors."

  "That's stern to us?" Havilland asked. Then he frowned. "Or maybe without props it doesn't matter."

  "No, I think that's a good point actually. I'll have it make a slow circle and see if it is noisy from another quarter." Billy did so with a touch of the screen.

  "Not a whisper. Let's speed it up until we get something," Billy said.

  "There...getting some low frequency noise at almost eight knots," he said, pointing at the bottom of the one screen. "I don't think anybody could hear that unless they are right on top of us."

  * * *

  Ten minutes later he was proved wrong. "Very low frequency rumble," the sensor tech on the Silverfish reported. "From the south and likely coming our way. Definitely not a current induced noise. Picking up! May be a hydrodynamic drive," he decided. "It has similarities to known drives."

  "Are there still any in active military service?" his captain asked.

  "Yes, they are still quite usable if you can go slow. This one isn't. In fact he is still accelerating."

  'Come west thirty degrees and let's open up some angle on this thing," the captain ordered the helm. "I'd like a range before he is too close and some idea what it is. Increase speed to six knots. They probably can't hear us anyway, but certainly not over their own noise now. We can go to throat mics and earphones."

  "Aye," was all the helmsman posted to his screen.

  * * *

  "I'm going to ease back the speed on the tube drone a bit and let it continue on autopilot. Let's see what the number two unit can do," Billy said. He was enjoying having an audience.

  "I understand the hollow drone sucks water through. The other one had the oddest pods hanging off the back, were those the propulsion units?" Havilland asked.

  "They are. Three of them, and I know they look odd. I can't tell you much about them, because the fellow who designed them tried to explain them to me and I still don't get why they work better than plain old props. He assures me they do and I have to accept he knows what he's talking about. Dave assured me they worked in a scaled down test. They are steerable and nobody expects them to be very quiet, just efficient and terribly fast."

  "I'm no engineer," Havilland admitted up front, "but it's rare you can build something to do everything well. It's usually a balance and compromises."

  "Yes Sir," Billy agreed, with a nod. "Star
ting number two up. Then I'll take her off to the west to see if I can get a look at our target from a better angle. No point in going slow with this one. I'll take her up to ten knots right off."

  "That's sweet," Billy said after a few minutes. "She is up to twenty knots on seventeen percent power and no cavitation activated at all. It's going to be fast alright."

  "OK. Getting forty three knots before I really hit the drag wall," Billy said after a few minutes.

  "That's better than they estimated. Turning west. Let's see what we can do with some cavitation." Billy flipped a switch and activated the ultrasonic panels at low twenty percent power. A mere two tenths of a megawatt.

  * * *

  "The first vessel has eased back on power but still in motion," the sensor tech reported on the Silverfish. Another source is turning screws. It sounds more like a torpedo but with multiple screws. It's hard to tell how many with the heterodyning. The computer says three or five. I don't believe five. Nobody in their right mind would make it that needlessly complex. The artificial stupid has no common sense."

  "Picking up screw counts," he said after a pause. "From Dopplering shift relative to the first screw noises I estimate it is making about forty five knots. Ahhh..."

  "Ah what?" the captain asked, sharply.

  "The second noise source is moving west the same as us."

  That wasn't good. Was it moving to block them? "Is it a ship or a weapon?" the captain demanded.

  "It's unlikely to be a ship. It's simply too fast," the rating insisted. "It doesn't match the profile of anything, Chinese or otherwise. You can't test something like this in total secrecy. Somebody would have recorded the sound even if they couldn't connect it to a definite vessel."

  "The way they're speeding up and down, turning and maneuvering..." the captain said.

  "Yes Sir?"

  "They're testing it now," he deduced.

  "I concur. That makes sense Sir, but it's the Spacer ship up ahead," he said confused. "They bought a bulk carrier, but had to hire crew," he repeated needlessly. They'd all had the same briefing. "I wouldn't expect them to have any expertise in wet navy matters."