and small lenses, to fit under an emergency air breather mask. The glasses made Kathy look particularly owlish.
'Agreed,' Ilse said. 'The fiber-optic network's amazing.' Each console did sonar or weapons or target tracking, depending which menu you picked — all three functions were vital in undersea warfare. Ilse typed on her keyboard, massaged the trackmarble with her palm, and touched her screen. It was possible to access the programs for quick enhancements using software tool kits, as she was doing now…. Ilse was getting her sea legs back. She lived in a giant machine, with a soul of its own she felt bound to already; the snug control room was its heart. Sonar was its eyes and ears, very dependent on how the sea transmitted and distorted sound — a topic she knew a lot about. Ilse had grown up in urban Johannesburg, the oldest child of a media executive father and a city politician mother, and spoke English with a South African accent; she was also fluent in Afrikaans, the Boer tongue, related to German and Dutch. She'd always loved nature and scuba diving and had wanderlust in her soul — traits that took her to Scripps in San Diego for a Ph.D. in ocean science. During those four years she picked up American slang. She also, in those happier days, dated more than one American male naval officer from the bases around Coronado.
Lieutenant Richard Sessions came over and leaned between Ilse and Kathy. He read their screens — each station had a pair, one above the other, in high-definition full color.
'Quick work,' Sessions said. 'I see you two won't need much help from me.' This pleased Ilse; 'til yesterday he'd been sonar officer, reporting to Weps, the weapons officer, Lieutenant Jackson Jefferson Bell. With Kathy added to the crew, as an exchange officer from the Royal Navy, Jeffrey had promoted Sessions to navigator, a department head in his own right. The old navigator, Lieutenant Monaghan, was on a hospital ship, in intensive care with a broken neck. Kathy had served on the U.K.'s ceramic sub, HMS Dreadnought, as part of the Royal Navy's initial — and highly controversial — tryout of women in fast-attack crews, something made more palatable to most naysayers by the exigencies of war, the endless demands for talented people. Sessions was in his mid-twenties, from somewhere in Nebraska. Always earnest and polite, he was the sort of person whose hair and clothes seemed a little sloppy no matter what he did.
Sessions reached past Ilse's shoulder and pushed a selector button. Her lower screen changed from computer code to a broadband waterfall display. Ilse saw the — like traces of biologics and breaking waves, and watched the merged engine noise of surface ships fleeing from that beleaguered convoy. There were also weird tight spirals on the screen that Ilse knew came from acoustic jammers and decoys, and bright swellings here and there from the nuclear blasts.
'Looks bad,' Sessions said.
'Yes.' Ilse wondered why Jeffrey wasn't doing something to help, but figured his focus was on Texas. He'd been reclusive since the overcrowded ASDS docked with Challenger; she'd hardly seen him, and felt abandoned. One minute he'd been trying to ask her out, on leave at the hotel in Cape Verde, and she hadn't exactly said no. The next, after his hurried mission briefing, he'd foisted her off on Kathy and disappeared; for this watch, Lieutenant Bell had the deck and the conn.
Sessions straightened and returned to the digital nav table, to confer with his senior chief, the assistant navigator. Kathy spoke with one of the sonar chiefs. Ilse knew that in a very real sense the chiefs made Challenger go — and they'd be the first ones to tell you that. Ilse drank the dregs of her latest coffee, retrieved the computer code to her display, and went back to work.
She and Kathy discussed some further technical points. Kathy was approachable enough, but Ilse found her a bit reserved. This was probably just her needed persona as a naval officer, dealing with superiors and subordinates in the hierarchy of the ship. It could be because Kathy was new here, still testing the waters as it were. Ilse doubted it had much to do with the sex-balance on Challenger, since she'd had no trouble feeling welcome herself from the get-go: This crew was an elite, and knew no one would be assigned unless they also were very good. There was a strong sense of camaraderie on the ship, built from their shared first taste of combat two weeks ago, strengthened by this compelling new assignment, the Texas.
Well, maybe I'll get to know Kathy better, once we have a chance to unwind together alone in our stateroom.
Ilse felt Kathy stiffen abruptly. 'Here we go,' she muttered. The Brit put both ear cups firmly in place, and frowned. 'Console five,' she said into her headset mike, speaking to one of the enlisted sonar techs. 'Play back the last ten seconds, starboard wide-aperture array, on bearing zero two five true. Show me the power spectrum.'
'What's happening?' Ilse said.
Kathy's lower screen changed to show a jagged, squirming oscilloscope trace, a plot of sound intensity versus frequency, on bearing zero two five over time.
'That.' Kathy pointed to a quick blip at about 2000 hertz that stuck out like a sore thumb. On the tape, enhanced, it sounded like a clunk. Kathy froze the picture and studied it. 'Console three, give me the ray trace.' Her upper screen now showed a tangle of overlapping arcs and sine curves; Ilse's detailed knowledge of ocean mechanics made this plot more precise.
'Conn, Sonar,' Kathy called out. 'Mechanical transient, bearing zero two five. Closer than our first convergence zone…. It isn't friendly.'
Jeffrey finished wolfing down a stale ham sandwich alone in the wardroom. He felt Challenger shimmy for a moment, as she passed through a dying shock wave from another distant atomic explosion. He knew the second section of a huge convoy to the U. K. was under attack way up ahead, part two of a shipment of food and heating fuel on dozens of escorted merchant ships. The first section had run into trouble enough the day before, near the path of the Texas. The convoy had sailed in two sections — a day apart and on different routes past the Azores in mid-Atlantic — partly because the number of cargo ships that started out was so large, and partly as a one-two punch to try to overwhelm and blow past the Axis wolf packs. Similar tactics had been used in World War II, with mixed success — and now the U-boats had A-bombs, and silent airindependent propulsion if not nuclear power, and didn't send constant radio reports for the Allies to home on and decode.
Jeffrey heard and felt another detonation. He wished there was something he could do to help those merchant mariners. Half a year into the war, Great Britain was already starving, the initial six-month surge capacity of the Allies' submarine fleets was nearing exhaustion, and the killing North Atlantic storms had barely begun. But the convoy action was too far off for Challenger to make much difference. Besides, she had a pressing engagement elsewhere, Jeffrey's preoccupation: Texas, Texas, Texas. Her hundred or so combat-experienced American submariners — or as many as would actually live and recover from their injuries — were a priceless war-fighting asset, even with their ship herself lost. They were also an invaluable prize, if the enemy got to them first. Jeffrey rubbed sleep-deprived eyes. Spread before him on the wardroom table were hard copies of Virginia-class blueprints and subsystem diagrams. Just as he had for most of the past twenty-four hours — often in conference with his engineer, Lieutenant Willey, and with COB Jeffrey was trying to understand what the men aboard Texas might do to survive, and what Challenger might best do to aid them once she reached the scene. It would take several hours to evacuate the survivors, shuttling them from Texas to Challenger in Jeffrey's ASDS. It would be tragic indeed if some succumbed to wounds or oxygen deprivation while waiting their turn, when salvation was so near.
One of the wardroom intercoms barked. To Jeffrey the signal, the growler, always sounded like a shih tzu puppy. More stressed-out than usual, Jeffrey winced at this mental connection: His family had had a shih tzu when he was growing up, in a middle-class suburb of St. Louis. In a sick way, he was here now because of that dog. He'd found the shih tzu, his family, his playmates, the town, all excruciatingly ordinary, and he didn't try to hide it. His father was a local utility regulator — a career bureaucrat — his mother a nondescript housewife, his two older sisters — and their husbands — painfully bourgeois. He had always felt a burning need to escape from there and achieve something really special. Jeffrey sometimes wondered if this was a genetic quirk, or if he'd been mixed up with another baby at the hospital. In fifth grade, by accident, he discovered the naval history section at his local library, and quickly became addicted to the stuff — it soothed that savage, painful craving in his breast. As soon as he could, in a rather heavy-handed way, he left home for Purdue with a Navy scholarship, and after that joined the SEALs, till bad scar tissue in a leg required he be transferred; he picked submarines. Basically, Jeffrey'd run away to sea and hadn't looked back, and his family, not nearly as dull as Jeffrey had judged them to be, resented it. Jeffrey sighed. They had little contact with him now, and vice versa, and much of that was his fault. In fact, Jeffrey's father — deeply involved in America's desperate energyconservation program these days — seemed to blame Jeffrey somehow for the war. After all, Jeffrey was Navy. The Navy should have known, should have done something sooner, not been suckered into that nuclear ambush off western Africa that cost three carriers. Jeffrey forced himself back to the present: the growler. Its ringer was hand-powered from the other end by turning a little crank,
