Terminal Run

by Michael Dimercurio

  to nudge the rudder over to maintain course east, then back to the ship’s centerline.

  “Emergency hydraulics tested, test sat,” he called out.

  “Very well, Dive.” Crossfield’s voice was muffled by his periscope helmet.

  “One two zero feet, sir,” Pacino called, the sweat soaking his eyes now, the gauges on the manual displays blurry. “Passing one hundred feet.”

  The up angle was too steep, Pacino realized. He pushed the emergency lever forward, easing the bow plane angle, trying to get the bubble back down.

  “Ninety feet, sir.”

  Pacino struggled, the angle now too flat. He was roller coastering the ship, he thought in chagrin. He reached for the emergency lever for the stern planes and pulled it back, getting the bubble back to an up three-degree angle. He was soaked in sweat now, even his long sleeves dripping.

  “Eight zero feet, sir.”

  He had to get the angle back down, or he’d broach the sail. He pushed the stern planes down, grabbed the emergency lever for the bow planes and pushed them down to a two-degree angle, then reached for the stern plane lever again and put the stern planes to zero, again reaching for the bow planes and pulling them back to up one degree.

  “Seven five feet, sir!”

  “Scope’s breaking,” Crossfield called. “Scope’s breaking. Get us up, Dive!”

  “Aye, sir, seven four feet.” Pacino’s sweat droplets flew in the cockpit as he pulled up higher on the bow planes until they were at the full rise position, but the ship was heavy as lead. He pulled up on the stern planes to use the ship’s angle, putting a one-degree up bubble on the ship to get up to periscope depth, but the depth meter wouldn’t budge. He needed to pump out some water, and quickly.

  “Seven five feet, ship’s heavy,” Pacino reported. He selected the trim system’s hull and backup valves, then reached by feel and found the rotary switch to energize the massive

  trim pump in the auxiliary machinery room in the lower level. Nothing happened. He rotated the rotary switch again, but the trim pump didn’t start. Instead a red annunciator alarm flashed on the display panel, reading trim pump trouble.

  “Trim pump fails to start, OOD, pump trouble light, lining up the drain pump. Seven four feet, sir.”

  “Scope’s awash, goddammit. Dive, get us the fuck up!” Crossfield’s irritation was becoming fury. “Handle your fucking casualty and get us up!”

  “Aye, sir.” Pacino’s hand shook as he flipped the toggle switches to line up the large bore ball valves from the drain system to the trim piping, then valved out the malfunctioning trim pump. Holding his breath he grabbed the rotary switch for the drain pump and turned it to the start position. Nothing happened. He tried again, a second alarm light popping up to read drain pump trouble. There was only one thing left to do. He clicked the toggle switches to pressurize the depth control two tank with medium pressure air.

  “Drain pump trouble light, pressurizing DCT two with seven hundred psi and blowing, sir.”

  “Dive,” Crossfield called in exasperation, “scope’s awash, get us up.”

  Pacino opened the DCT2 hull and backup valves and raised the hovering system joystick to the blow position, normally a forbidden operation because of the noise it made. Immediately the air in the top of the tank blew its contents overboard into the lower pressure seawater, the ship finally lighting. The depth meter flashed a few feet upward rise.

  “Seven four feet, sir. Seven two feet. Seven zero. Six nine feet, sir.” God, Pacino thought, finally. He took the bubble off the ship and relaxed the bow plane angle, the ship steady on depth.

  “Scope’s clear!” Crossfield called, the navigator now furiously doing a surface search for close surface contacts, the smallest surface ship able to cut open their hull. By the standard operating procedures, there would be complete silence in the control room until the officer of the deck said the words to

  stand down, “no close contacts.” Anything else, including the expletive “oh shit,” would be interpreted as an emergency order to go back deep to avoid collision with a surface ship. The submarine’s hull was strong and thick, but it was built to withstand the pressure of the deep, not a puncture force from a surface ship hull.

  “No close contacts!” Crossfield called out. Pacino exhaled in relief.

  Pacino shut the depth control tank’s hull and backup valves and vented the tank’s pressurized air to the machinery room.

  “Six eight feet, sir.”

  But now the ship was rising with no angle on the planes. Had he gone too far? He put the bow planes on down one, then down two. “Six seven feet, sir.” Dammit, he was roller-coastering again. Using emergency hydraulics was impossible. “Six eight feet, sir.”

  Pacino noticed he’d drifted off course by three degrees. One eye on the depth, he pushed the emergency lever to move the rudder to the right by half a degree, and when he was back on course east he pulled it back to zero degrees. The ship was on ordered depth with zero angle.

  “Starting high-power search,” Crossfield called. “Dive, raise the

  BRA-44.”

  The AN BRA-44 was the radio mast to grab the satellite broadcast, Pacino thought, its nickname the BIGMOUTH. He found the lever on the starboard vertical panel toggled it upward. A moan of hydraulics lifted the mast, the emergency system much slower than the main hydraulics normally would be.

  “BRA-44 up, OOD,” Pacino said.

  For the next two minutes Pacino adjusted the ship’s depth, the vessel much steadier now that it had the proper weight. He was fighting a slight nose-heaviness, but adjusting it could begin the oscillations again, and he figured it would be easier to counter it with the bow planes

  The hydraulics thumped again, the BRA-44 being lowered by the radiomen.

  “Conn, Radio, broadcast aboard, BRA-44 comin’ down.”

  “Radio, Conn, aye,” Crossfield acknowledged.

  Behind Pacino XO Schultz tapped Crossfield on the shoulder. He peeked out of his periscope helmet to see her holding a picture of an approaching aircraft carrier, the photo shot from low in the water directly in the path of the behemoth. Schultz had just initiated another drill.

  “Emergency deep!” Crossfield called.

  Without thinking Pacino grabbed the throttle with his right hand and the bow plane lever with his left, advancing the throttle to where ahead full should be, and pushing the bow planes to full dive. He grabbed the stern plane lever with his throttle hand and pushed the stern planes to a ten-degree down angle, then lined up the trim system to flood and jabbed the joystick down. He held the joystick with his left hand and reached out to advance the throttle by another ten RPM, then pulled the stern planes back to up five degrees and the bow planes to a ten-degree rise. He released the joystick lever, one eye on ship’s depth, and called out, “Emergency deep aye, ahead full, flooding, down bubble ten degrees.”

  A selector switch on the yoke piped his boom microphone into the 1MC ship wide announcing system. He punched the key and heard his amplified voice in the overhead echoing through the ship, “Emergency deep, emergency deep.”

  He struggled with the planes until the depth was steady at 150 feet, then pulled the throttle back to turns for ahead one third. “One five zero feet, sir!” The sweat had returned, and in seconds he was soaked again.

  But the drill was over, and he had made it. The console buzzed. Pacino punched the squelch button. “Auxiliary hydraulics are back on-line, sir.” Another buzz. “Main hydraulics are back.” He switched the cockpit back to main hydraulics, the nightmare with the emergency levers over. A whirring noise sounded and the screen displays changed, a half-dozen flat panels coming to life. “Cyclops ship control is back online.” He put the visor back on, the ship animation display returning.

  “Very well, Dive. Make your depth seven hundred feet, all ahead standard, steep angle.”

  Pacino acknowledged, pushing down the control yoke and advancing the throttle, the ship’s down angle plunging to
down twenty degrees. For two minutes he hung on the straps of his seat until the Cyclops animation indicated 650 feet. He pulled out at 700 feet and checked the display.

  “Seven hundred feet, sir,” Pacino called to Crossfield.

  “Mr. Pacino, turn over the dive to Chief Keating.”

  Pacino gave his briefing, released the watch to Keating, and climbed out of the cockpit. He was surrounded by the ship’s officers and chiefs, from the captain on down, the crowd suddenly bursting into applause, Catardi’s smile lighting up his face. Even Crossfield was grinning at him and clapping. And Lieutenant Alameda, her normally sour expression gone, was actually beautiful when she allowed herself to smile.

  “Gentlemen,” Catardi announced, “I give you Midshipman Patch Pacino, the newest qualified diving officer of the watch, and a damned fine one at that.”

  “Hear, hear,” Duke Phelps added.

  “Amen, Mr. Patch,” normally surly Chief Keating said with a wink.

  Pacino smiled weakly, aware that his coveralls were soaked with sweat. He felt his face flush, embarrassed, knowing the awkward approach to PD could have gone much better. He’d kept Crossfield’s view underwater for a full thirty seconds.

  “A fine job, Patch,” Catardi continued. “No one aboard has ever handled the Piranha quite that well in the face of so many casualties. Pay up, everyone. You too, Chief Keating.”

  Pacino stared as hundred-dollar bills changed hands, the whole circle of men passing the money to the captain. Keating grinned at him as he passed five twenty-dollar bills over his shoulder to Catardi.

  “What the hell?”

  “These unfortunate unbelievers all bet you’d either broach the sail or have to ask for a two-thirds bell to get up to depth. Or that you’d lose the bubble completely.” Catardi grinned.

  “Probably because not a single solitary one of them ever made it to PD on emergency hydraulics with no Cyclops while six tons heavy with a double trim system and drain system malfunction. Any one of these people would have hung up with the scope awash for two minutes and then given up and added power to dry off the periscope. Like I said, we’ve been waiting for you.”

  Pacino smiled again, aching to get to the officers’ head to strip off the soaked coveralls and take a shower. As he turned to go Chief Keating called him back to the ship control console.

  “Yes, Chief?”

  “Sir, sorry I called you a nonqual air breather Keating said gently. “You can breathe my submarine’s air anytime, sir.”

  Pacino felt a lump in his throat. Oddly enough, it was one of the highest compliments he could remember receiving.

  “Thanks, Chief,” he said, turning and leaving the control room.

  He knew he’d be back in three hours to take his first watch on his own, no longer under instruction, but as a qualified watch stander

  10.

  Dr. Frederick Wang walked uncertainly down the steps of the private jet that had whisked him from his Denver home to Rayong, Thailand. He shook the hand of the large Thai driver and climbed into the Rolls-Royce. He had never even seen a car like this, much less ridden in one. It had been a terrible week, but this turn of events was so strange that he wasn’t sure he could call it fortunate. Ten days ago Wang had been summoned from the DynaCorp artificial intelligence lab in the Denver Tech Center to the downtown office, escorted by a mean-looking security guard. He was hustled into the vice president’s office, told his security clearance had been pulled, and that they would pack his personal belongings for him. Wang had signed a restrictive employment agreement when he had come to work for DynaCorp, one that disallowed lawsuits on the basis of compromising secrets that were vital to national security. In exchange, the agreement indicated that he could be fired for reasons that DynaCorp did not have to disclose. At least he received a year’s severance pay, but the withdrawal of his security clearance meant he could not obtain another defense contracting job, and there was nowhere he could work in the private sector that had anything like the funding he’d had at the DynaCorp Denver lab. That assumed he could get hired by a private corporation after losing the security clearance.

  The reason they had fired him was that he was second generation Chinese and he spent hours on the phone with his immediate family in Beijing, and DynaCorp suspected his loyalty. It was a miserable situation, but there seemed little he could do about it. He was out of a job and expected to be out of his field as well. He was too depressed to try to plan ahead, and had despondently wandered around his house, unable to concentrate. When the phone rang, he considered not answering it, but the code read that the call had come from Thailand, and he was curious. The large man on the video display had spoken words for several minutes, but it was not the words that had intrigued Wang, it had been his manner—warm and accepting, the way DynaCorp executives used to be toward him back in the days when he was their most brilliant AI engineer.

  The man’s name was Sergio, and he wanted to interview Wang. The job he had in mind required a considerable amount of travel, which would be perfect for Wang—he wanted to get away from Denver and the DynaCorp memories. He told Wang that a car would be waiting for him in an hour. The car had arrived, a sleek black stretch Mercedes limo, and had taken him to Denver International, driving through the security fence right to the open door of a swept-wing supersonic private jet. A beautiful Chinese flight attendant had served him dinner and drinks on the plane. He had slept, awakening as the jet’s wheels thumped on the Rayong runway.

  An hour later he was in an opulent beach house on the sand in Pattaya, Thailand, talking to Sergio in person, and his partner, a polished and encouraging executive named Victor Krivak. The talk seemed less an interview than the first day of work. Finally, Sergio simply asked him if he would come to work for them at United Electrics, and if a starting salary of five million U.S. dollars a year would be adequate—with a bonus on earnings to go with it, of course, Sergio had added, as if the salary alone might be inadequate. The only catch was that United Electrics would be, as Sergio cautiously put it, “interfering” with the American military using Wang’s extraordinary credentials. If Wang could do that without qualms, he could have the job as a senior director of AI technology.

  Wang took less than a heartbeat to think about it. His father had come to America and worked in a convenience store in East Los Angeles, getting beaten up and robbed in a city rife with crime, scraping and saving so Wang could go to college. At Cal Tech Wang was a perpetual outsider, as he had often seemed at DynaCorp. There had been nothing but work in Wang’s life, and when he had been terminated, there was little allegiance for America left in him. The thought of working for men who were adversaries to the people who had rejected him had a certain appeal. And as Wang now knew, when his small severance salary ran out, he could be working in a convenience store himself.

  Unit One Oh Seven, Wang thought, was the one thing in the world that came closest to being his child, his creation. DynaCorp had thrown him out in the street without even letting him say goodbye to the lab researchers or the sentient carbon processors. He missed One Oh Seven more than any of the rest. He tortured himself, remembering all his encounters with the unit, remembering how it was sometimes playful, sometimes vexed, the computer’s emotions stirring something inside him, a feeling that he wanted to protect and nurture the unit. It was strange to think of it this way, but he was a father to One Oh Seven in every sense of the word. And when he was fired from DynaCorp, it was as if he’d had a child torn from him, with no possibility of seeing it again. When he was able to sleep, in his dreams he was talking to One Oh Seven or playing chess with it or teaching it the classics. When he woke, the worst part of the day was remembering that One Oh Seven had been brutally cut out of his life.

  But these men in Thailand had offered him the opportunity to revisit his creation. Once more he might be able to talk to One Oh Seven, perhaps even ask it how it was doing, perhaps even be recognized by it. He hoped that all of this was for real.

  Wang stutte
red that he agreed, and Sergio and Krivak smiled and shook his hand. Over champagne, and at Krivak’s

  prompting, Wang talked about the history of the development of machine cognizance while Krivak and Sergio listened attentively.

  “Superconductors reached their limits of miniaturization ten years ago,” Wang explained, spreading his hands wide. “We got to the point where a single dust particle could wipe out a processor, and to where the heat generated within the circuits became capable of melting the silicon. Twenty years earlier, the organic chemists came to the party, bringing with them their theories of molecular circuits. In the DynaCorp lab we had the largest funding in North America, and the scientists I managed solved the initial problems quickly, the ability to determine the behavior of a single molecule holding up progress until we got the scanning tunneling microscopes, which opened the window to the atomic-scale world. The initial organic molecular devices we fabricated were able to conduct electrons by passing them from one atom’s electron orbital to the next, but the issue was, could they do this under command and only when an outside signal told them to, turning on or off at the orders of the controlling signal? If they could, we would have ourselves an electrically controllable switch, which would form a molecular transistor, and we would be computing digitally at the molecular scale. If we failed, the whole concept would crash. But nothing seemed to work. Finally we constructed a molecular string that could rotate to remove one conducting electron orbital from proximity to the next, effectively turning the molecule off, and then could rotate back to make the orbitals come close together again to turn the molecule back on. The rotation was keyed by light photons hitting the molecular string, an awkward, impractical way to control the switching action. So we went to work on a more complex molecule that could switch on and off from an electrical impulse instead of light. That took the better part of a year, but when we finished we had made the first true molecular transistor. The next year we were able to fabricate single-molecule diodes, amplifying transistors, AND-gates, OR-gates, and amplifiers. I remember how we thought we’d cracked the safe.