Polaris (29 page)

Pete looked around and confirmed what Ramirez was saying. Any formality in the wardroom had long since given way to a kind of grubby practicality. Very old magazines were stacked across the table. A well-worn steel coffeepot had the power of place in the room, right next to the door. Giant, unillustrated bags of Navy-issue snack foods were arranged on a side counter—cheese balls and corn chips. Little boxes of cereal were stacked like bricks against one wall. After years at sea, it seemed, the
Polaris
had given up on the burden of formal meals.

“Breakfast?” said Ramirez, holding up a tiny box of Apple Jacks. “Or lunch?” he said, poking a bag of the bright orange cheese balls.

“How about just coffee?” Pete responded, sitting down across from him.

“We have that,” said Ramirez. He began to make a fresh pot.

“How often do you get resupplied?”

“As often as we can,” said Ramirez. “Which ain't that often. We meet a tender up north … every year it gets farther north. Every six months if we can pull it off. Each time the food gets worse, the supply parts get harder to come by. Unfortunately, they made this boat so well that it just keeps running.”

“Why so far north?”

Ramirez looked at him as the coffeemaker began its noisy burbling cycle. It was a hard, assessing stare.

“The drones,” he said.

“The drones?”

“If we go far enough north, we're less likely to get one of our own little bombs dropped on us. Every year we go farther. Two months ago I was on the bridge when we met the tender. We were so far north that with my binoculars I could actually see ice in the water.”

“Jesus.”

He shrugged. “Of course, we're not supposed to say that. But I can tell you that we haven't heard a whisper from an enemy ship out here, submarine or otherwise, in over a year. But every time we get near the surface, those drone alarms start screaming.”

The door burst open, Frank Holmes in workout gear carrying a stack of papers. He was followed by a man Pete hadn't yet met. It had to be Haggerty, the doctor. Ramirez quickly stopped talking.

“What's going on in here?” said Holmes with a large smile on his face. “A non-qual lounging in the wardroom?” He began feeding classified papers into a shredder that sat at the corner of the room, which groaned as it tried to digest them. Pete fought his engineer's impulse to tell Frank to slow down, he was feeding too much paper into the machine at once.

Ramirez shot Pete an evil grin that said,
watch this
. “Hey, Frank … whatcha doing?”

Frank turned around, still feeding his sheaf of paperwork into the shredder. “I'm deleting these old targeting documents,” he said.

Ramirez burst out laughing. “That kills me every time!” he said. He looked at Pete. “He says he's deleting stuff when he shreds it.”

“Whatever,” said Frank with a shrug. “Same fucking thing.” He clapped his hands as the shredder finished chewing through the last document.

“So,” Frank said to Pete. “Who won the Super Bowl? Was it awesome?”

“Tell us it was,” said Ramirez. “Even if it wasn't.”

*   *   *

Pete learned in the wardroom that part of his onboarding required a cursory physical examination from Haggerty. He followed the doctor to sick bay after he finished his coffee.

“Any contagious diseases?” Haggerty asked, reading from a clipboard.

“No,” said Pete.

“No coughing, diarrhea, sore throat?”

Pete shook his head.

“Don't be offended,” said the doctor. “We have to ask everybody.”

“I'm not offended at all,” Pete answered.

The doctor turned and reached in a drawer for a small plastic cylinder. He wrote a tiny serial number on it and handed it to Pete. “Here, wear this on your belt: your personal dosimeter. It will keep track of how much radiation you receive from the reactor. Don't worry, it won't be much. I read them once a month, and all of us have negligible doses, even guys like the captain and Ramirez who have been here for years.” He pointed to a row of binders, one for each crewman, past and present. Ramirez's was thick with paper, one sheet representing every month onboard.

“Thanks,” said Pete, undoing his belt to attach the device.

“It's a hell of a thing,” said the doctor.

“What's that?” said Pete.

“Your mission. Our mission. You really think the cure is out there?”

Pete shrugged. “You're a doctor, don't you believe in cures?”

He smiled wryly. “Of course I do. I'm just not sure I still believe in patrol orders.”

*   *   *

After his physical, Pete met Ramirez back in the stateroom.

“Home sweet home,” said Ramirez as he walked in.

“How long have you been at sea?” he asked, remembering the folder with Ramirez's exposure tracking.

He squinted his eyes, as if deep in thought. “Five years and two months. Longer than anybody except the captain.”

“And you've been engineer the whole time?”

He nodded. “Yep. And Frank is weapons officer, Moody is XO. That's it—four watchstanders. The ship was designed to operate with no fewer than six, originally, but here we are.”

“What about the doctor?”

“Not a watchstander. Technically, he's not required to learn a watchstation as the science officer, but it would be, you know, good manners if he did. I hear most doctors on other boats do it.”

“That's the plan for me?”

Ramirez nodded. “You should be able to complete the qualification in a couple of weeks with all your simulator time. Everything is pretty much automated. But it'll still be nice to have another name on the watchbill.”

“I'm looking forward to it.”

“Just don't get too good. They'll never let you leave.”

Pete laughed. “Is that what happened to you?”

Ramirez nodded. “Yeah. For a while I sent messages requesting a transfer—my sea tour was supposed to end two years ago. They stopped even giving me the courtesy of a response. And I stopped asking—don't want to look disloyal. In the current environment.”

He held Pete's gaze.

“Meaning?”

He could tell Ramirez was assessing him, not completely sure if he could trust Pete.

“The captain and I—we're Navy guys. He went to the academy, I was ROTC at Texas A&M. Frank and Hana—they're Alliance officers. Pure Alliance.”

“True believers?”

“Exactly. They distrust everyone and anyone who isn't drinking the Kool-Aid. And they don't mind letting their bosses know about it.”

“And that includes you?”

“Absolutely.
And
the captain.”

Pete thought about that.

“What about the doctor?”

Ramirez laughed. “Who knows where he comes from. Medical school, I guess.”

“So why did you volunteer for submarines?”

“That's a question I ask myself a lot these days,” said Ramirez. “My father was a submariner, I guess that had something to do with it: a captain.”

“What boat?”

“The
Alaska
. An old Trident. Here,” he said, “let me show you something.”

He reached into his desk and cleared some papers and books out of the way, revealing a small safe. He spun the dial and opened it up. Nestled among a dozen bottles of medicine was a small nine-millimeter pistol.

“This was my dad's,” he said, pulling it out. “At sea, he slept with it.”

“The drugs, too?”

“No,” he said. “I happen to be the controlled medicinals custodian, one of my many collateral duties, that's why I've got a safe.”

“So why did your dad sleep with a gun?”

“He said that the captain of a Trident submarine was the most vulnerable part of the entire strategic weapons triad. So the minute the boat went alert, he put the purple key around his neck, and this pistol under his pillow.”

Pete took it and hefted it. He dropped the clip. “It's loaded,” he said.

“Well, he couldn't very well stop a mutiny or a KGB takeover if it was unloaded,” he said.

“Are you allowed to have this?”

He shrugged. “Not technically. No real small arms allowed on the boats anymore—just a few Tasers and billy clubs. The doc is the only other one who has the combination to the safe, we do a monthly inventory of the drugs together. He never says anything.”

“Maybe he thinks it's a cigarette lighter.”

Ramirez shook his head vigorously. “God no. Cigarettes would
really
get me in trouble.”

*   *   *

Pete spent the next days learning the ship's systems, usually with Ramirez but also standing watch with Moody, Frank, and the captain. Ramirez had been right, the ship was easy to learn, the systems supremely well engineered, and with Pete's technical acumen he soon learned them all. While he didn't have the competence they'd all gathered after thousands of hours on the conn, the simulator and the attention of Commander Ase had served him well, and he was soon trusted enough that they signed his qualification book and made him an officer of the deck. They honored the occasion in the wardroom with a real meal, a chicken that had been saved deep in the freezer for a special occasion, and a bottle of wine that the captain brought down from his stateroom. Only Moody wasn't present, as someone had to stand watch in the control room.

“To our new watchstander,” said the captain, raising a glass. “By my calculation, this should give each of us twenty-five percent more time in the rack, and Hamlin seventy-five percent less.”

They clicked their glasses together and drank.

“What now?” said Ramirez.

“Now—we have a mission to complete.”

“Are we getting close?”

The captain nodded. “We're getting close.”

Suddenly the phone buzzed at his knees, a direct line to the control room. He picked it up.

“Captain.”

He nodded as he listened, his brow furrowing with concern. “OK. I'm on my way up.”

“Something wrong, Captain?”

He nodded. “We've got a submerged contact. Moody thinks she's following us.”

*   *   *

The next two weeks were a blur of evasive maneuvers, countermeasures, and stifling tension. But they couldn't shake the shadow boat. Pete watched a change come over the captain as he tried to evade the enemy boat, but couldn't. One night prior to taking the midnight watch, he spent some time with the captain to discuss the situation in the wardroom.

“You're certain it's the enemy?”

He nodded. “No Alliance boats would get this close to Eris—trust me. It's crazy to get this close, and if I didn't have your assurances that you knew some backdoor in, I wouldn't be trying it either.”

“Why don't they shoot us?”

“I've thought about that,” said the captain. “Maybe they want to see what we're doing. Maybe they want to shoot us after we pick up our cargo.”

“So why don't we shoot them?” Pete asked.

At this, the captain's demeanor darkened. “Have you been talking to them?”

“Who?”

“Hana and Frank,” he said. “They think I should just fire two torpedoes at her, make all our problems go away.”

“They haven't said a word to me about it,” said Pete. “But why
don't
you?”

“At this range—they'll shoot back immediately. And they'll hit us, sure as shit. Firing a torpedo at them is a murder–suicide. As long as we've got a chance to evade, and complete our mission, I'm going to keep trying.”

“Unless they shoot us.”

“If they shoot at us first,” said the captain, “I've got a torpedo in tube one with their name on it. We can say goodbye to each other as our torpedoes cross paths.”

*   *   *

The next morning, the captain called them all to control. He looked like he hadn't slept all night. Ramirez and the captain stood on one side of the plotting table, Frank and Hana on the other. Pete stood to the side, equidistant between the adversaries.

“OK,” he said. “We're going to try something new. We're going to launch the MOSS.”

Hana rolled her eyes. Frank looked to her for approval, then snickered.

“The MOSS, Captain?” Moody was incredulous. “That thing is archaic. It's a waste of time.”

“What's the MOSS?” Pete asked.

“It's a submarine simulator,” said Ramirez. “Basically a fake submarine we launch from a torpedo tube. It broadcasts our same acoustic signature. The bad guy follows it.” But even Ramirez didn't sound optimistic.

Moody continued. “Captain, respectfully, we'll never fool a modern boat with that thing.”

“We'll rig for ultraquiet,” he said. “Then we'll launch countermeasures and push out the MOSS. While Typhon is trying to figure it out, we'll peel away to the north. If we're quiet enough, and the MOSS works like it's supposed to, we'll slip away.”

“Waste of time,” said Hana again, frustration in her voice.

“You have any better ideas, XO?” said the captain. They were glaring at each other.

“I do,
sir,
” she said, emphasizing the word. “Instead of firing that dusty MOSS, launch a real torpedo down their throats. If you want to evade, a torpedo in the water will make that a lot easier. Let's get the first shot off in this fight.”

“She's two thousand yards away, Hana. At this range, she'll fire right back on a dead bearing.”

“So we evade!” she said. “That's what you're planning on doing anyway! Let's take a shot and then evade!”

“I've made my decision,” said the captain. “Frank, load the MOSS in tube three, and prepare for battle stations.”

“We're not going to discuss this anymore?” said Moody.

“Discussion is over,” said the captain. “Now, follow your goddamn orders.”