'Now!' Van Gelder shouted, and he stood up, bending low. His partners saw his intent and joined him, and they all rushed in among the flames, pouring forth their foam. Shimmering sheets of ignited gases danced and beckoned all around, leaping up from crinkling debris that dwindled as Van Gelder watched. Plastic melted, dripping, running, and bubbling, then disappeared. Jagged wires wilted, twisted, sagged. Compressors and air circulators slumped within their mountings, cracking and distorting from heat stress and failed supports. Corkscrewed pipes and cable fragments hung down from the overhead, swaying weirdly in the thermal drafts. Air filters quickly carbonized, and their remnants then collapsed.
More soot began to build up on Van Gelder's faceplate, now brownish black, making it almost impossible to see. Everywhere equipment was consumed and everywhere he sprayed.
Once more Van Gelder's foam stopped for a moment, turning to plain water, then resumed as someone changed the foam concentrate cans. Onward Van Gelder worked, blind to his companions, hypnotized by the inferno, battling with it endlessly, all sense of past and future gone.
Another quick pause in the foam, another can, then all at once the heart went out of the blaze. Piles of rubble still burned here and there and cremated wreckage smoked and steamed, but the contest had been won.
Van Gelder handed off the applicator, not even seeing who took it, and he staggered from the fan room. A crewman played some water on the outside of his suit. The senior chief followed. 'We did it, sir! We saved the ship!' Van Gelder tried to smile, but his parched lips cracked. He simply nodded. The chief leaned closer. 'We'll send more men to the
bilge space now, to start hosing down the buses. We'll have to draw from the reactor's secondary coolant loop main holding tank, but distilled water's a decent insulator.'
'Good,' Van Gelder said. 'I'll tell the captain we can do a restart soon.'
'We'll lay some dams to keep this foam from spreading, sir, then leave what's there in place. It'll protect against a flare-up, and we can clean the mess in a few more hours.' Van Gelder felt a dreadful weariness set in. He trudged aft along the passageway, leaving the damage control parties to their work. At a safe distance from the remnants of the fire he pulled off his steam suit hood, just as the cooling system's battery ran down. He borrowed the microphone from a talker in the next compartment, then lifted his breather mask long enough to report to the captain. He refastened the mask, but lingering fumes had gotten in. They made him choke and cough. He still felt awfully hot but for some reason couldn't sweat. As a medical corpsman approached, obviously concerned, Van Gelder sagged against the bulkhead and slowly slid down to the deck. He wanted nothing more than a nice cold glass of water and a breath of natural air. The corpsman bent over to say something, but Van Gelder only heard a rushing in his ears as he passed out.
ABOARD CHALLENGER
Jeffrey knocked on the CO's state-room door. The clean uniform he'd put on after a thorough decontamination washdown was already stained with sweat and grease from his walk-around inspection of the boat.
'Come in, XO,' Captain Wilson called.
Jeffrey wondered how the CO always knew when it was him. 'Sir,' he said after entering, 'I have the after- action battle damage overview report.' Wilson looked up from his little fold-down desk, covered with files and naval publications. His laptop was open too, a map of Africa on the screen. Enemy territory was in red, Allied-controlled in blue, the vast cruisemissile-dominated no-man's-land in amber.
'Let's hear it,' Wilson said.
'Aside from the three fatalities, sir, personnel injuries were light and the rem exposures are pretty trivial.' 'Good. What about equipment casualties?'
'Sir, the foreplanes are inoperative.'
'Not too serious,' Wilson said. 'We can manage depth-keeping with the afterplanes at anything over dead- slow speed.'
Jeffrey nodded. 'Sonar's finished with an autocheck. Sessions says the wide-aperture array's fine after all.
That enemy torpedo's pinging must have picked up the stators at the back end of our pump-jet.'
'I'm impressed,' Wilson said. 'It's not easy getting echoes off the edges of those blades.'
'Agreed, Captain. The other side's technology outdoes ours in some respects.'
'Their signal processing algorithms are supposed to be the best. Those math guys at Frankfurt scared me even before the war.'
'Our bow dome took a beating, sir,' Jeffrey said. 'Sessions says the cover's cracked and dimpled.' 'Not just at the tip?'
Jeffrey shook his head.
'So we're getting additional flow noise?' Wilson said. 'Yes, sir. Any chance we can stop back at the tender? For emergency repairs?'
'Out of the question, XO. We've got an awfully tight window to bring this SEAL mission off, and we're behind schedule already. Not to mention we're trying to play dead.'
'Understood, Captain… About the torpedo room… we have to load the weapons manually, and we're down to just four tubes.'
'The other outer doors won't open?'
'No, sir. All the port-side ones were belled in badly.' 'The starboard ones are working?'
'The blast was asymmetric, Captain. At fine scales of reference they always are…It's a dry-dock job.'
'Mmph.' Wilson's tone was sour. 'I'm not happy at our weapons expenditure.'
'The ones we lost to damage?' Jeffrey said.
'The nuclear torpedoes. Those things are scarce. There're tons of fissile metal in the arsenals of democracy, just not enough goddamn delivery systems to go around.'
'We still have four, sir.'
'We've barely started our patrol. We wasted two just stopping a pair of diesel boats.'
'Did we have a choice, Captain?'
'No. That's what bothers me. The Axis claims the initiative too often, in big things and in small. This is no way to fight a war.'
'It's not that bad, sir, is it? Look at the latest fleet action in this theater, off Madagascar and the African coast.'
'Sure, we control the Comoro Islands for now,' Wilson said, 'what's left of 'em, so the German and Boer armies won't be linking up by the east coast route any time soon, but at what price? Ten thousand KIAs, half of them on Ranger.'
'Sir, D Day cost twenty thousand Allied casualties.' 'We're a hell of a long way from another D Day, XO, in Africa let alone in Europe. The other side claims this one as a victory themselves.'
'That's ridiculous,' Jeffrey said.
'Not to some nonaligned countries it's not. They're better at propaganda than us, this Berlin-Boer Axis. They know many developing nations are secretly glad to have them break the back of American unipolarism. And since they intimidated the Russians into a false neutrality, they're still getting arms shipments courtesy of Moscow across the safe land bridge of eastern Europe.'
'I know,' Jeffrey said. 'It's like back in the 1920s, sir, the Wehrmacht in bed with the Soviet Union, even long before Hitler.'
'The deutsche mark is stronger than the dollar,' Wilson said, 'and entire continents are waiting to choose sides. So fine, the Germans didn't get to grab any of France's H-bomb stocks. But a few Hiroshima-sized cruise missiles aimed at London and New York are proving a pretty equal deterrent against our megaton-sized MIRVs… And lately there've been rumors the Germans are working up a Mach 8 liquid-H2-powered cruise missile. A Mach 8 ground hugger's basically unstoppable.'
'I didn't realize things were that serious, Captain.'
'And keep it to yourself. Maybe I'm just bellyaching…Miss Reebeck told me you know you're going with her.'
