Undersea Fleet (15 page)

I leaped past Roger to the autopilot, cut it out with a flick of the switch, grabbed the conn wheel and heaved the
Dolphin
into a crash dive.

Everyone went sprawling and clinging to whatever they could hold. Roger Fairfane fought his way up, glaring at me, his face contorted. “Eden! I’m in command here! If you—”

Whump.

A dull concussion interrupted him. The old
Dolphin
shook and shivered, and the strained metal of her hull made ominous snapping sounds.

“What was that?” Roger cried.

Gideon answered. “A jet missile,” he said. “If Jim hadn’t crash-dived us—we’d be trying to breathe water right now.”

Cut and run!

We jumped to battle stations, and Roger poured on the coal.

Battle stations. But what did we have to fight with? The
Killer Whale
had found arms somewhere—either by salvaging wrecks or buying them in some illegal way. But we had none.

Bob Eskow and Gideon manned the engines, and coaxed every watt of power out of the creaking old reactors.

It wasn’t enough. Newer, bigger, faster—the
Killer Whale
was gaining on us. Roger, sweating, banged the handle of the engine-room telegraph uselessly against the stops. He grabbed the speaking tube and cried: “Engine room! Eskow, listen. Cut out the safety stops—run the reactors on manual. We’ll need more power!”

Bob’s voice rattled back, with a note of alarm: “On manual? But Roger—these reactors are old! If we cut out the safety stops—”

“That’s an order!” blazed Roger, and slammed the microphone into its cradle. He looked anxiously to me, manning the microsonar. “Are we gaining, Eden?”

I shook my head. “No, sir. They’re still closing up. I—I guess they’re trying to get so close that we can’t dodge their missiles.”

Beside me, David Craken was working the fathometer, tracing our course on the chart he had made. He looked up, and he was almost smiling. “Roger—Jim!” he cried. “I—I think we’re going to make it.” He stabbed at the chart with his pencil. “The last sounding shows we’ve just passed a check point. It isn’t more than twenty miles to my father’s sea-mount!”

I stared over his shoulder. The little pencil tick he had made showed us well over the slope of the Tonga Trench. There was thirty thousand feet of water from the surface to the muck at the bottom, and we were nearly halfway between. The long, crooked outline of the Tonga and Kermadec Trenches sprawled a thousand miles across the great chart on the bulkhead—went completely off the little chart David was using. We were over the cliffs at the brink of the great, strange furrow itself, heading steeply down.

I caught myself and glanced at the microsonar screen—just barely in time. “Missile! Take evasive action!”

Roger wrestled the conn wheel over and down; the old
Dolphin
went into a spiraling, descending turn.

Whump.

It was closer than before.

Roger panted something indistinguishable and grabbed the microphone again. “Bob! I’ve got to have more power!”

It was Gideon who answered this time. Even now, his voice was soft and gentle. “I’m afraid we don’t have any more power to give, Roger. The reactor’s overheating now.”

“But I’ve
got
to have more power!”

Gideon said softly: “There’s something leaking inside the shield. I guess the old conduits were pretty badly corroded—that last missile may have sprung them.” The gentle voice paused for a second. Then it went on: “We’ve been trying to keep it running, but you don’t repair Series K reactors, Roger. It’s hot now. Way past the red line. If it gets any hotter, we’ll have to dump it—or else abandon ship!”

For a while I thought we might make it.

At full power, the old
Dolphin
was eating up the last few miles to Jason Craken’s sea-mount and the dome. Even the
Killer Whale,
bigger and newer and faster though she was, gained on us only slowly. They held their fire for long minutes, while the little blob of light that was Craken’s dome took shape in the forward microsonar screen.

Then they opened fire again—a full salvo this time, six missiles opening up like the ribs of a fan as they came toward us.

Roger twisted the
Dolphin’s
tail, and we swung through violent evolutions.

Whump. Whumpwhump. Whumpwhumpwhump.
But they were all short, all exploding astern. Roger grinned crazily. “Maybe we’ll make it! If we can hold out another ten minutes—”

“Missiles!” I cried, interrupting him. Another spreading salvo of bright little flecks leaped out from the pursuing shape in the microsonar screen.

Violent evasive action again…and once again they all exploded astern.

But closer this time, much closer.

They were using up their missies at a prodigious rate. Evidently Joe Trencher wanted to keep us from getting to that dome, at any cost!

The speaker from the engine room rattled and Bob’s voice cried: “Bridge! We’re going to have to cut power in three minutes! The reactor stops are all out. Repeat, we’re going to have to cut power in three minutes!”

“Keep her going as long as you can!” Roger yelled. He slammed the conn wheel hard over, diving us sharply once more. “All hands!” he yelled. “All hands into pressure suits! The next salvo is likely to zero in right on our heads. We’re bound to have hull leaks.” He shook his head and grinned. “They’ll fill us with water, but I’ll get us in, wet or dry!”

In that moment, I had to admire Roger Fairfane. He wasn’t the kind you could like very well—but the Academy doesn’t make many mistakes, and I should have known that if he was a cadet at all, he was bound to have the stuff somewhere.

He caught me looking at him and he must have read the expression on my face, for he grinned. Even in the rush of that moment of wild flight he said: “You never liked me, did you? I don’t blame you, Jim. There hasn’t been much to like! I—” He licked his lips. “I have to admit something, Jim.”

I said gruffly, “You don’t have to admit anything—”

“No, no. I do.” He kept his eyes on the microsonar, his hands on the conn wheel. He said quickly: “My father isn’t a big shot, Jim! He’s an accountant for Trident Lines, that’s all. They let me use the boathouse at the Atlantic Manager’s estate because they were sorry for him. But I’ve always dreamed that some day, somehow—”

He broke off. Then he said somberly: “If I can help open up another important route for Trident, down here to the Tonga Trench, it’ll be a big thing for my father!”

I shook my head silently. It was a funny thing. All these months Bob and I had made fun of Roger, had disliked him—and yet, underneath it all he was a fine, likeable youth!

We all struggled into our pressure suits, keeping the helmets cracked so we could maneuver better. Time enough to seal up when the crashing missiles split our hull open…

And that time was almost at hand.

But first—the blare of a warning horn screamed at us. Red warning lights blazed all over the instrument panel at once, it seemed. The ceiling lights flickered and yellowed as the current from the main engines flipped off and the batteries cut in. The hurtling
Dolphin
faltered in her mad rush through the sea.

The yell from the engine room told us what we already knew: “Reactor out! We’ve lost our power. Batteries only now!”

Roger looked at me and gave me a half-grin. There was no bluster about him now, no pretense. He checked the instrument panel and made his decision quickly.

He kicked the restraining stops on the conn wheel free, and wrenched it up—far past normal diving angle, to the absolute maximum it would travel. He stood the old
Dolphin
right on her nose, heading straight down into the abyss below.

Minutes passed. We heard the distant
whump
of missiles—but far above us now. Even with only battery power to turn the screws, the
Dolphin
was dropping faster than the missiles could travel, for gravity was pulling at us.

Roger kept his eyes glued to the microsonar and the fathometers. At the last possible moment he pulled back on the conn wheel; the diving vanes brought the ship into a full-G pullout.

He cut the power to the screws.

In a moment there was a slithering, scraping sound from the hull, then a hard thud.

We had come to rest—without arms, without power, with twenty thousand feet of sea water over our heads, at the bottom in the Tonga Trench.

We lay on the steep slope of the Tonga Trench, nearly four miles down, waiting for the
Killer
to finish us off.

Gideon and Bob Eskow came tumbling in from the engine room. “She’s going to blow!” Bob yelled. “We ran the engines too long—the reactor’s too hot. We’ve got to get out of here, Roger!”

Roger Fairfane nodded quietly, remotely. His face was abstracted, as though he were thinking out a classroom problem in sea tactics or navigation.

The microsonar was still working, after a fashion—one more drain on our batteries. I could see the blurred and dimmed image of the
Killer
on the topside screen. They were cricling far above us. Waiting.

The dead
Dolphin
lay onimously still, except for a faint pulsing from the circulator-tubes of the reactors. Nuclear reactions make no sound; there was nothing to warn us that an explosion was building a few yards away. Now and then there was an onimous creak of metal, an occasional snap, as though the underpowered edenite armor were yielding, millimeter by millimeter, to the crushing weight of the water above.

We lay sloping sharply, stern down. Roger stood with one hand on the conn-wheel to brace himself, staring into space.

He roused himself—I suppose it was only a matter of seconds—and looked around at us.

“Abandon ship!” he ordered.

And that was the end of the
Dolphin.

We clustered in the emergency pressure-lock for a final council of war. Roger said commandingiy: “We’re only a few miles from Jason Craken’s sea-mount. David, you lead the way. We’ll have to conserve power, so only one of us will use his suit floodlamps at a time. Stay together! If anyone lags behind, he’s lost. There won’t be any chance of rescue. And we’ll have to move right along. The air in the suits may not last for more than half an hour. The suit batteries are old; they have a lot of pressure to fight off. They may not last even as long as the air. Understand?”

We all nodded, looking around at each other. We checked our depth armor, each inspecting the others’. The suits were fragile-seeming things, of aluminum and plastic. Only the glowing edenite film would keep them from collapsing instantly—and as Roger said, there wasn’t much power to keep the edenite glowing.

“Seal helmets!” Roger ordered.

As we closed the faceplates, the edenite film on each suit of armor sprang into life, rippling faintly as we moved.

Roger waved an arm. Laddy Angel, nearest the lock valves, gestured his understanding of the order, and sprang to the locks.

The hatch behind us closed and locked.

The intake ports irised open and spewed fiercely driven jets of deep-sea water against the baffles.

Even the ricocheting spray nearly knocked us off our feet, but in a moment the lock was filled.

The outer hatch opened.

And we stepped out into the ancient sludge of the Tonga Trench, under four miles of water.

Behind us the hull of the
Dolphin
coruscated brightly. It seemed to light up the whole sea-bottom around us. I glanced back once. Shadows were chasing themselves over the edenite film—sure sign that the power was failing, that it was only a matter of time.

And then I had to look ahead.

We formed in line and started off, following David Craken. It took us each a few moments of trial-and-error to adjust our suits for a pound or two of weight—carefully balancing weight against buoyancy, valving off air—so that we could soar over the sludgy sea bottom in great, floating, slow-motion leaps.

And then we really began to cover ground.

In a moment the
Dolphin
behind us was a vague blur of bluish color. In another moment, it was only a faint, distant glow.

Yet—still there was light!

I cried: “What in the world!”—forgetting, for the moment, that no one could hear. It was incredible! Light—four miles down!

And more incredible still, there were things growing there.

The bottom of the sea is bare, black muck—nearly every square foot of it. Yet here there was vegetation. A shining forest of waving sea-fronds, growing strangely out of the rocky slope before us. Their thin, pliant stems rose upward, out of sight, snaking up into the shadows above. They carried thick, odd-shaped leaves—

And the leaves and trunks, the branches and curious flowers—every part of them glowed with soft green light!

I bounded ahead and tapped David Craken on the shoulder. The edenite films on my gauntlet and his shoulder-piece flared brightly as they touched; he could not have felt my hand, but must have seen the glow out of the corner of his eye. He turned stiffly, his whole body swinging around. I could see, dimly and murkily, his face behind the edenite-filmed plastic visor.

I waved my arm wordlessly at the glowing forest.

He nodded, and his lips shaped words—but I couldn’t make them out.

Yet one thing came across—this was no surprise to him.

And then I remembered something: The strange water-color Laddy Angel had showed me, hanging over David’s bed at the Academy. It had portrayed a forest like this one, a rocky slope like this one—

And it had also shown something else, I remembered.

A saurian, huge and hideous, plunging through the submarine forest.

I had written off the submarine forest as a crazy fantasy—yet here it sprawled before my eyes. And the saurians?

I turned my mind to safer grounds—there was plenty of trouble right in front of us, without looking for more to worry about!

David seemed at home. We leaped lazily through the underwater glades in file, like monstrous slow-motion kangaroos on the Moon. After a few minutes, David signaled a halt. Gideon came up from his second place in the file to join David; Gideon’s suit-lamps went on and Roger, who had led the procession with David, switched off his lights and fell back. It was a necessary precaution; the suit-lamps were blindingly bright—and terribly expensive of our hoarded battery power. We had to equalize the drain on our batteries—else one of us, with less reserve than the others, would sooner or later hear a warning creak of his flimsy suit armor as the edenite film flickered and faltered—