Puerto Lindo, Balboa, Terra Nova
After all these centuries the great stone castles and their ancient guns still kept watch over the normally sleepy port and its town. It was a little less sleepy, this day, than usual as the bay was about to be witness to the most complex technological effort the legion had yet undertaken. (Indeed, it was so complex that most of the workers and all of the design staff were expatriates, mostly Volgans, on contract to the legion. It would be many years, decades even, before the native educational system was up to so high a level of technology.)
The first Meg Class submarine should have been ready two years prior. The sad fact was that it was only now that a seaworthy version was ready for trial runs and depth tests. That submarine, SdL-1, Submarino de la Legion 1, christened the Megalodon, rocked gently in the sheltered harbor, tied to a bumpered pier and surrounded by some of the ex-Volgan warships and sundry merchant carriers purchased by the Legion in years past but never restored to full operating condition. Not far away from where the sub lay at anchor a construction crew was building a sub pen, while yet another crew laid a special, double tracked rail line from the factory down to the rising shelter.
One at a time those old Volgan ships were being towed to the Isla Real and sunk or dismantled for fixed positions or cut up locally for scrap. Some of the scrap went into fortifications, both on the island and along the south side of the Gatun River, or for ammunition production. A great many artillery and mortar shells could be made from ten or twenty-thousand tons of steel ship. Indeed, a great many—millions, in fact— were being made from old steel ships.
And precisely none of that steel went into the production of the Meg. In fact, the submarine was about ninety-four percent engineering plastic, by volume, exclusive of any water in the ballast tanks. That had been much of the problem with production of this first, test, model. Prior to the Meg, the largest plastic casting machine on the planet of Terra Nova had been able to cast a cylinder no more than four and a half meters in diameter. Meg's pressure hull was made up of cylindrical and hemispheric sections, milled, machined, and heat bonded together, of six meters in diameter. Thus, the shipyard had had to have designed and built a plastic casting apparatus from scratch. Worse, the only company that had seemed capable of doing so was in Anglia. As a practical province of the Tauran Union, deprived of its own foreign policy, Anglia had balked at providing military technology to Balboa, however much the military nature of the project had been disguised.
Ultimately, in order to get approval for the project, they'd had to declare the Meg Class to be for drug interdiction, then redesign it to have external torpedo tubes, with the torpedoes to be carried inside the tubes, in distilled water, between the pressure hull and the smooth, teardrop-shaped exterior fairing. With that, Balboa had been able to claim, 'How can this thing be an offensive weapon? It doesn't even have torpedo tubes. No, no; it's for police work . . . and research.' (Which was, at least for this first model, and at least for the time being, true.) This, along with some not insubstantial bribes (and the assistance of some very anti-TU Anglians), had finally secured permission for the creation and export of the casting apparatus.
The power source had been another, non-trivial, problem. Nuclear? There had been two practical possibilities, a Pebble Bed Modular Reactor or a very small nuclear reactor developed by the Hakunetsusha Corporation, in Yamato. The former, however, was too large while the latter depended on convection cooling that would have been problematic in a submarine intended to operate and maneuver much like an airplane or glider. (On the other hand, some of the Hakunetsusha reactors had been ordered for emergency power supply to the Isla Real and the Gatun Line. There was, obviously enough, a serious disconnect between what various government bureaucracies and treaty regimes thought were militarily significant technologies, and what really were militarily significant technologies. In fact, everything was militarily significant, down to and including machinery for canning food.)
Failing nuclear, the designers had had to come up with some other Air Independent Propulsion, or AIP, system. None of the Taurans, naturally enough, had wanted to sell their systems. Ultimately the choice had come down to Molten Carbonate Fuel Cells or Solid Oxide Fuel Cells. The latter had won out, primarily because the concept permitted shapes more suitable for application in a smallish—at thirty-six meters in length, within the pressure hull—submarine.
The fact of the prototype's existence couldn't be hidden in the long run. What Carrera and Fernandez hoped was that the number and capabilities of the final design could be hidden.
But, thought Carrera, standing on the dock to wish good luck to the test crew, if this one just disappears into the ocean there won't be any more to keep hidden. We couldn't afford the waste.
Two years lost, he mourned. Two years. There was a time, just before I broke down, I might have shot one of the engineers to inspire the rest. Now I've fenced myself around with chains to keep me from doing any such thing. That's tactically moral, I'm sure. But is it strategically immoral to possibly lose having an important weapon in time to be of use? No, matter. Even if I had shot one of them, that would still not have guaranteed that they could have completed the job any faster. And it just might have guaranteed we'd never have the subs. Better to be a civilized man. As much as I can be, anyway.
The seventeen sailors on the test crew, along with Miguel Quijana, the captain of the second boat, the Orca, still being assembled, were all graduates of the Legion's Cazador School. They waited expectantly in two ranks. Carrera rarely had patience for the kind of formality that suggested. He put his arms out at about shoulder height and beckoned with his fingers for the men to cluster around. They didn't need to be told a second time. They immediately broke ranks and formed a small semi-circle around their Duque.
Carrera looked at the first sub's captain, Chief Warrant Officer Chu. Formerly a 'yacht' skipper under Project Q, which had done so much to crush the Islamic pirates of Xamar during the war against the Salafis; Chu had been hand selected by Carrera and the classis commander, Roderigo Fosa, for this first submarine because he was one of the most mule-headed, determined squids in the classis. Chu, along with thirty-three others, had spent the last year detached from the Legion and floating around the world, often literally, their roles rotating between unpaid 'volunteers' to various civilian undersea research projects and 'Officer Under Instruction' with three different submarines in the Volgan Navy, plus one each in the navies of Yamato and Zion. A couple of them had also spent some time understudying at the plant of the Solid Oxide Fuel Cell manufacturer, in the Federated States.
'You and your boys ready, Captain?' Carrera asked.
With a small smile the warrant answered, 'As much as we're going to be without some hands on, Duque.'
Carrera nodded his head slowly. I understand that.
