Now this is ridiculous, Nathan thought, making his way again to stand beside Ford. This thing's not two hours out of dock and it's falling to pieces! He had begun sweating earlier, and this now started to get more pronounced—as much from embarrassment as anxiety. This is my boat, my design, my creation—and now she's going to get me and everybody else aboard her killed!
"Go to redundant systems," Ford said. His voice was beginning to acquire an edge of fear that Nathan didn't like. Not that it was wrong to feel fear, or to express it—but the expression had to be appropriate, and if it weren't, it could spook a whole crew—with disastrous results.
"Redundant systems refuse to engage!" Hitchcock said, and there was fear in her voice too.
"What else can go wrong?" Ford said, and swallowed again. And that was all that Nathan had a chance to see, because a bare second later, all the lights in the bridge went out. The light of the screens wavered, and then the displays came up again as their own independent power systems cut in. By their ghostly light, people could be seen staring at one another in horror and sheer astonishment.
Ortiz was staring, not at the other crewmen, but at his own display. "Target vessel has just fired, sir!" he shouted. "One electrostatic torpedo away—homing... Locked and heading in!"
Only one? Nathan thought. Though he was under fire again for the first time in years, he felt strangely calm—and very surprised. Under the circumstances, maybe we should be grateful—but hey, aren't we supposed to be the new UEO supership? You'd think they'd at least fire a spread—unless they have some kind of idea that since we're a peacekeeper, we're not armed at all—
There followed a second's breathless silence. Even when they locked on, E-plasma torpedoes sometimes failed to acquire their target properly— not that this failing necessarily solved your problems: sometimes it made them worse. But it had to be taken into consideration. All right, Nathan thought desperately, it would have happened by now, and it hasn't—he was right, they're locked on, dammit. Countermeasures—come on, Com-mander! Countermeasures!
"Countermeasures!" Ford shouted.
Hitchcock headed back for her station and started hitting switches. Nathan watched as she brought up the display of countermeasure routines—false plasma, EM misdirect, decoy echo return—and apparently decided not to be shy, but to call for all of them, wide spread, favoring forward—
And nothing happened. The blank spot in which the accept statement should have immediately appeared, just lay there black and empty.
"Countermeasures aren't responding!" Hitchcock reported, furious. What the bloody blue blazes is wrong with my boat?! He watched her try a systems reroute, sourcing the countermeasure routines through the main computer's redundant backups. Nothing: the console just sat there, with the damned torpedo still on its way in and the shrill whine of its approach audible even through seaQuest's hull—
"Sound collision!" Ford said. It was all he could do. The collision klaxon started howling through the boat like a banshee. The front screens showed, all too clearly, the WSKR's tripartite view of the E-plasma torpedo heading toward them, a spinning top carved out of malignant ball lightning that left a trail of expanding smoke-filled bubbles behind it as it literally burned the water into hydrogen and oxygen in its passing.
"Everybody hold tight!" Ford said. In the darkened bridge, everyone grabbed something steady enough to serve as a handhold, and hung on, grimly waiting, counting the seconds. Bridger braced himself on the ex-o's station, listening to the electrostatic whine scaling up and up, getting louder and louder as the torp plunged in at them—
And hit, and everything rocked, all the images in all the screens whiting out, then rolling back in again, jittering with the power fluctuations. One of the WSKR probes' images in the main screens showed that the torpedo had hit just abaft the docking sphere, and a searing blue webwork of plasma charge was crackling along seaQuest's hull from the point of impact.
"Damage control!" Ford shouted.
Hitchcock had left the helm, obviously unable to make any headway with it, and was back at her engineering station, her hands swiftly manipulating the controls. "Port side strike!" she said, and a look of pain twisted her face. "Definite hull damage! We're taking on water!"
Nathan felt for her: she was clearly an engineer who experienced a given ship as an extension of her body, and felt any damage to it like a wound. But he had other things to think about at the moment. Ford's face was a study in helplessness, wearing the expression of a man caught in his worst nightmare, and finding that there was no waking up from it: it was real. "Where are my battle systems, Lieutenant?"
She shook her head, still working over the console, and looking angry as well as upset. "Inoperable! All still down!"
"Delta is preparing to fire a second strike!" Ortiz said, and looked over at Ford.
Everyone was looking at Ford now, waiting for the answer, or at least for an order.
"Commander," Bridger said. But Ford only stared at the screens: an order might be needed, but he was fresh out.
Bridger wasn't: he found, not entirely to his surprise, that adrenaline still speeded up more than just his reading speed. While waiting for that torpedo to hit, he had been watching the landscape on the forward screens, and had noted the dark shadow past the perimeters of the Gedrick Station—blackness, a depth too deep for the side- looking sonar to fathom. Quickly Bridger stepped up beside Ford. "Blow open all ballast tanks, fore and aft!" Bridger said.
The bridge crew stared, understandably enough, and Ford looked at him, uncomprehending. Hitchcock stared, plainly wondering whether she was really supposed to listen to this beachcomber.
"Do it!" Bridger nearly shouted.
Hitchcock blinked, then touched the controls to bring up the ballast diagrams and menu, and vented the tanks, all of them—aft first to bring the stern up and let the bow angle down. There was an immediate whoosh as the neutral-buoyancy air left the tanks, and then an increasing roar as seawater flooded in to take its place. The deck slowly began to tilt. Backward...
Bridger quickly went to Ortiz's station, had a look at his screens, pointed at one of them. "How deep is that rift below us?"
"Deep. Twenty-two thousand feet!"
The more the merrier, Bridger said to himself. I think. Ortiz was looking at him with a combi-nation of bemusement and concern as Hitchcock called, "We're into a crash dive!"
Nathan ignored her. "Helm," he snapped, "take us into that hole!"
"Crash diving into a narrow rift with slow helm response—" The helmsman gave him an if-you-say-so expression. "Sure. I always wanted a burial at sea..."
Nonetheless, he wore an edge of grin as he said it, and turned back to his console to carry out the order. Ford stepped over to Nathan and said softly, "Captain, this boat wasn't designed for a crash dive."
"You're tellin' me," Nathan said. Stupid of me to assume it wouldn't be necessary. Let's hope good materials and workmanship will save our asses now... "If you've got a better idea, I'm wide open! Otherwise..."
But Ford shook his head. There was no otherwise.
seaQuest sank into the rift, her stern a little lower than her bow despite all Nathan's efforts: the dive planes were out of angle, he suspected, because of the problems with the helm. The WSKR probes were now well up and out of the way, watching her sink, relaying the pictures of it: and of the Delta, plainly not ready to be cheated of a fight, plunging down into the rift after seaQuest at full power.
They fell. They fell. The creakings of the hull grew slowly louder: soft voices at first, then moans, long odd subdued howls, getting more and more frequent as the titanium-composite frame began to compact slightly under the increasing pressure. The readouts on first one of the main screens, then another, flicked out, and there was nothing to be done about it—the WSKR telemetry systems sometimes became finicky at the greater depths, and in a dive at speed like this, the signal would become deranged anyway. Bridger sighed and shook his head: the Whiskers would take care of th
emselves, holding at "depth of last signal" until they got better or clearer instructions from Ortiz or the ship's computers: if they lost the carrier entirely, they would store their data and make for the nearest relay buoy, then home on Pearl. If worse came to worst, at least the UEO would know what had happened to its pride and joy. A lot of consolation it'll be to us, Nathan thought sourly, and willed the boat, his boat, to hang on...
* * *
The commander of the pursuing submarine, though, heard no one willing anything. Her own will, and her whole attention, was concentrated on the screen image of the sleek dark shape that was preceding her, slightly stern-first, downward into the abyss.
The sensor chief and all the crewpeople around him were doused with sweat, as if someone had upended buckets of it over them: the place reeked with their fear. "Captain!" the sensor chief was saying, as he had said several times now, varying only the numbers he appended to his protests.
"Captain, seaQuest is heading down—into that rift. We can't follow, not in this...!"
"Maintain pursuit. I don't care what she does, stay with her ..Stark hadn't taken her eyes off the image in the screen, drifting downward, drifting away. I will not let you get away, she thought. You got away from me once. Never again. And if I can't have you, no one will.
The hull was howling protest, a noisy counterpoint to the mutterings of her crew. She ignored both interruptions and concentrated on the image in the screen.
"We should fire!" Pollack said.
"No," Stark said, "not yet. I want to get closer."
Never again...
* * *
"Eight thousand feet and dropping," said Ortiz, forcing himself calm.
"Systems are crashing all over the boat...," Hitchcock said, as the hull-groans got louder still. Nathan nodded and exchanged what was meant to be a reassuring glance with Ford—but Nathan felt, when the truth was told, that he could use some reassurance himself at this point. Not that any was forthcoming.
The third screen's image was getting grainy with dive artifact and the failure of most of the image-processing systems: it was hard to make out much of anything on it.
"Where's our friend?" Nathan said to Ortiz.
"Still pursuing..."
That hardly came as a surprise to Nathan. That sub wants us for some reason. Wants us enough to attack a power station to draw us in. He was convinced of it now: there was no other explanation. Why? Why?
"All right," Nathan said, "let's see how bad they want us. Take her to the bottom."
Heads swiveled all around the bridge, and everyone stared at him.
"Is there a problem?" he said.
"No, sir," Ortiz said.
Nathan stepped up by Crocker in the number two helm seat, watching, impressed but concerned, as the big man muscled the helm controls over, trying to regain some kind of balance between the helm malfunction and the dreadful pressure of the water at these depths flowing over the dive planes in the wrong direction. He glanced up at Nathan.
"This mean you're captain now?" he said, cheerfully enough.
Nathan gave him a dirty look, thinking, No wonder you keep getting your stripes busted off. Later for you, you son of a— "Just tryin' to save our necks, Chief. Just tryin' to save our necks..."
The slope of the dive increased: the boat moaned more loudly. They fell, and fell, and the Delta followed.
An old sub, Nathan thought. Only one careful owner. Well, mostly careful, except when the thing got its sail caught in someone's fishing nets and dragged them halfway across the Irish Sea backward at fifty knots. Or was that an Alfa? Who cares. Bought secondhand from little old Mother Russia, who never used it except to cruise around the North Cape and maybe tiptoe up people's fjords without telling them. But, in any case, no matter what kind of armor these pirates had glued onto it, old. Maybe not real well maintained since it was converted: you just can't get the spares anymore. And certainly not built for this kind of thing. He willed whatever conscienceless bastard was commanding the big black ugly brute to see reason, break it off, run away and play somewhere else before they were destroyed...
... and before I find out for nure whether or not my baby can take this kind of strain...!
Crocker had been smiling until he looked back at his controls. Then the smile fell off. "Thirteen thousand," he said.
Go away! Nathan willed whoever stood in the bridge of that other sub, only faintly visible now on their screens. Are you completely nuts? You think that poor caviar can will stand these kinds of depths? You really want to kill all the poor slobs you're dragging around to do your dirty work? Who do you think you are, Captain Ahab or something? Because this boat's no white whale! What the hell kind of captain are you? Even the old-time pirates who braided firecrackers into their beards and set them off weren't this crazy!
seaQuest's hull moaned more and more loudly, beginning to sound like a beaten puppy as structures never meant to be subjected to such strain now began to bend and buckle under it. Nathan's heart bled for his creation. According to Noyce, she could go to twenty thousand feet. But backward, with her hull integrity compromised, and in an uncontrolled crash dive? That was another story. He could not take his eyes off the screens, off the black shape that followed. The abyss was still a better chance...
* * *
"We're almost at ten thousand feet," Stark's sensor chief muttered. "We can't do this..." He didn't care anymore that she was right behind him, leaning over his seat, staring at the screen as if she were unable to tear her eyes from the image of seaQuest, still falling away before her. But not for long. And when they caught her—
"Maintain pursuit."
"Captain!" Maxwell said from beside her. "Captain!" She would not look away from the screen. "You heard the man. Ten thousand feet!" Now it was nearly a shout in her ear: he was desperate. "The retrofitted armor isn't going to hold any deeper—they wouldn't even guarantee us to ten! Captain."
She could not look away from the screen. They will not get away. Not again.
Maxwell leaned close to her: not that she saw him do it—only that his voice came to her, not as a shout now, but almost a whisper, from right by her ear. "If we let ourselves get crushed," he said, "... the seaQuest wins!"
That caught her attention. The words clutched at Stark's heart like a fist, for if she died, there would be no chance for her revenge, ever again. Later, after it was achieved, and her family honor put right, she might die: but not before. Slowly, slowly Stark looked up at him: and Maxwell gazed hack at her, unmoving, waiting to see what she would do.
Waiting...
* * *
Bridger hung onto the back of the helm chair and watched the black shape on the screen fall closer and closer toward them. The muttering on the bridge had faded away to nothing in the face of the appalling determination of that other sub's commander. A deep dive was nothing to this boat; they all knew that. But damage from an E-plasma torpedo strike was exponentially increased by depth, and they had been hit once already, squarely amidships, the place where a strike was most difficult to isolate and control. One more, anywhere else, would be more than enough to finish them. Everybody was waiting for the sound that would not be a moan, but the screech of that second torpedo, and right after that, the inward crash of catastrophic implosion as the seaQuest blew herself in half...
"Fourteen thousand, five," Crocker said, sounding resigned now, as if announcing a baseball score that he didn't particularly care about.
Nathan breathed in, breathed out again, wondering each time if this would be the last time he would get a chance to do it.
Then, "She's going up!" Ortiz cried. "Ten degrees—fifteen—The Delta's breaking off! She's moving away!"
There was a long moment of silence: no one quite dared believe it; everyone was a bit too numb to respond. Then people started letting out all their last breaths.
Bridger took another long one, and thought, It just goes to show you: never let your hardware be built by the lowest bidder. I'm so glad
I made them scrap the old tender system for this lady...
"Don't let her out of your sight, Mr. Ortiz," Nathan said. "We don't want her doubling back on us."
"Yes, Cap—" Ortiz stopped. "—Uh, sir—uh, yes..."
Nathan smiled. The feeling was so strange, after the tension of the last few minutes, that he thought his face might crack. He turned to Crocker then. "Chief—pump some oil into our ballast tanks. We gotta stop dropping like a stone." He made a wry face. "Who knows? We may even want to go up—and save those power station people."
"Aye-aye, Skipper."
Oh God, Nathan thought, grimacing, and turned away.
He found Ford right in front of him, which was more or less the last thing he wanted at the moment: for Ford looked extremely uncomfortable, like a man who had to say something, but didn't know what. It's mutual, Nathan thought. "That okay with you, Commander?" he said.
"Yes, sir. Check Delta's positioning, Mr. Ortiz. I don't want to get caught with my pants down again." Then he turned back to Nathan.
"We'd better check out the damage," Nathan said.
Ford nodded, accepting, but it was plain to Nathan from Ford's troubled look that something was bothering him... and he didn't much want to deal with it. It's not my table, he thought.
As they headed out, though, Bridger had a feeling that eventually, it was going to be.
CHAPTER 6
It took a while to climb up out of the abyss; and they spent a rather longer while hovering above Gedrick Power Station, surveying its damage, and their own. The station was the worse damaged. Designed before the advent of E-plasma torpedoes, it had no such defenses against them as seaQuest had, and large parts of the station lay dark and shattered now, the bright lights of the outbuildings and towers dimmed, or darkened entirely.
seaQuest herself had done well enough, despite the uncontrolled plunge. Under proper control, with all systems up and running, there would have been no problems; as Noyce had said, she had been tested far deeper. But not in a stern-first crash dive brought on by an emergency flooding of her main tanks, and doubly not while there was torpedo damage to her outer casing. While she lay over the station, standing guard over its evacuation, the WSKRs hovered outside the hull, scanning the place where the E-plasma torpedo had struck. There was an ugly, jagged scar there, some meters long, but it was now a closed scar, healed over: the homeostatic single-fiber hull, designed to repair its own breaches, had done its job, sealing out all but the initial influx of water, and preventing catastrophic implosion. It had also isolated the transmission of the electrostatic charge, which unconfined would have wreaked havoc with the on-board life-support and computer systems, possibly killing everyone inside more quickly than mere hull damage.