'Warm up the nuclear torpedo in tube three,' Wilson said.
'Messenger of the Watch,' Jeffrey said, 'bring the captain some black coffee and his bathrobe, please.'
Jeffrey concentrated on the screen, his right hand glued to the trackmarble. 'Proton magnetometer's getting something, Captain. Field lines are bunching up.'
'What's the range?' Wilson said.
'From the nearest mass concentration to our probe, four hundred yards.'
'Get closer. Make it three.'
Jeffrey tapped some keys, increasing the image intensification gain to a factor of 10, 000. Diffuse and point- source bioluminescence, blues and greens stirred up by the torpedo-shaped LMRS, gave him a fuzzy view for a few yards ahead of its nose-mounted charge-coupled eyes. Jeffrey gingerly piloted the probe up off the bottom, inching it closer to the enemy subs, using a dip in the ground for cover.
'Definitely ferrous hulls,' he said a minute later, eyeing the magnetometer again.
'Take it to two hundred yards,' Wilson said.
'Aye aye, sir,' Jeffrey said. 'I'll hang a left, see where that fissure goes.'
'Sonar,' Wilson almost whispered, 'anything?' 'Slight flow noises from bottom currents, sir,' Sessions said. 'Nothing artificial.'
'Okay,' Wilson said, 'they're meeting their hotel load off batteries or fuel cells, and cooling that reactor convectively or just letting it run hot.' Jeffrey listened to the conversation as he gently moved the probe. 'Ready now,' he said.
'Pop up and take a look,' Wilson said.
Jeffrey increased the CCD image gain once more, to 50,000 times. As the probe rose slowly, he saw the lip of the fissure moving down the screen.
'Whoa!!' Jeffrey ducked the probe back down, his heart pounding in his throat.
'What was that?' Wilson said.
'A bow dome, sir. Big.' Jeffrey ran the replay. 'Should we flood tube three?'
'Sonar,' Wilson said, 'any reaction?'
'Negative, sir,' Sessions said. 'No sign they know we're here.'
'Should we flood tube three?'
'Negative,' Wilson snapped. 'They'll hear it. We have to back off first to fire anyway.'
'Captain,' COB interrupted, 'that sub's not showing on the gravimeter at all.'
'Or the probe's not where it should be,' Jeffrey said. He checked his screens and enunciators. 'Negative on a guidance flaw. Position overlay matches with dead reckoning.' Again he brought the probe up. 'Captain, look at this…a gigantic crack in the fiberglass.'
The probe rose over the top of the enemy sonar dome. 'It's just the cap,' Jeffrey said. 'There's nothing behind it.' Wilson sputtered. 'We found a goddamn wreck.'
'A fresh one, sir,' Jeffrey said. 'No growths yet, and hardly any sea snow.'
'All right,' Wilson said. 'Check out that middle contact now.'
'Aye aye, sir,' Jeffrey said. 'I'll be careful — a wreck's the perfect spot to hide an ambush.'
'Sonar,' Wilson said, 'what's happening?'
'No change, Captain.'
Jeffrey moved the probe. 'Something here.' The murky picture showed a twisted, fractured, splintered mass.
'That used to be the sail,' Wilson said. 'See? There's the mounting for the port-side fairwater plane…What's left of it.'
'I'll go around,' Jeffrey said. Suddenly ahead of the probe there loomed another mass, a huge one. 'The reactor compartment,' he said.
'Get closer,' Wilson said. 'Switch to active line scan. Lowest emitter power.' The picture changed, no longer an eerie natural glow. Now it was much sharper, more detailed. Jeffrey could see tattered steel, wires, and cables waving in the current. He saw a small dogged hatch in the middle of a bulkhead, next to broken pipes.
'The forward accessway,' he said, 'into the reactor tunnel.' He brought the probe in closer, already suspecting. He could see the writing now, fragments of the safety warnings posted near the access door. 'It's one of ours, sir,' Jeffrey said. 'Early Los Angeles class. Unimproved 688, pre-751 hull number.'
'One of the flight-one boats still in commission,' Wilson said. 'Make that past tense.' Jeffrey nodded. 'It's not a lengthy list, Captain, who she could be…Sir, the crew may not have had time to destroy the crypto gear, and it probably wasn't all cremated by the atmosphere compression. Maybe we should try to find the stuff, before the enemy does.'
'No, XO,' Wilson said. He frowned. 'We'll have to take the chance that this engagement was a double kill. We'll report it later. We don't have time or the right tools to do a proper inside search here.'
For a while no one spoke. Jeffrey moved the probe along the side of the middle hull section, knowing this chunk would have been unoccupied.
'Radiation?' Wilson said.
'Just normal background,' Jeffrey said, 'when you account for the added seawater shielding. I'm getting a minor thermal plume, that's all.'
'Good,' Wilson said, 'the reactor's stable. That core should be clean too. This boat would've been refueled recently.'
'And no hull implosion,' Jeffrey said. 'It must have flooded first, before they went through crush depth.'
'Switch back to passive,' Wilson said. 'Move to the next masscon contact, the one to starboard. Watch out for wreckage — there'll be a nasty debris field out there.'
'Understood.' Jeffrey worked the trackball and his keyboard, once more seeing through the LMRS's eyes by the faint glow of bioluminescence, strobed by natural flashes and sheet lightning. A fish darted past, then another, too quick to make out details. Jeffrey guided the probe around a shadowy pile of mangled metal.
'Auxiliary machinery?' Wilson said.
'I can't tell,' Jeffrey said. 'It made quite a crater.' 'Keep going.'
'I'm at the second contact now.'
'Okay, switch back to active laser line scan.'
'Looks like the forward hull,' Jeffrey said. 'Probe's over the accommodation spaces, sir.' For another long moment no one spoke.
'The hull's intact,' Jeffrey finally said, to break the silence.
'Move back and forth,' Wilson said. 'I want to know what sank her.'
'Oh boy,' Jeffrey said when he found what he'd been looking for. 'Here's the forward escape trunk, sir. Busted in completely'
'Not solely from blast shock,' Wilson said. 'The rim's too whole. That was water pressure, rupturing the weakened welds. Trunk gave out before the hull, catastrophic flooding. Again, no implosion.'
Jeffrey saw more tortured pipes and cables down inside the trunk. 'I'm moving on.' Soon he reached the dead sub's bow
'Smashed in,' he said. 'Looks like she hit nose-first.'
'This part did anyway,' Wilson said as the probe explored the chaotic flattened tangle. ' She may have broken up on the way down, from the strain, tumbling at over a hundred knots terminal velocity.'
'Yes,' Jeffrey said. He studied the image-enhanced display. 'Look at how the ballast tanks accordioned…I see fragments of the sonar sphere.'
'What's that thing off to the left?'
Jeffrey moved in closer. 'It's a body, sir.' Wormlike creatures swarmed around it.
'Christ,' someone said.
'Easy, people,' Jeffrey said. He took a breath. 'There'll be more, inside or outside. We have to do this.'
Wilson sighed. 'XO, go to the engineering plant now.'
Jeffrey piloted the probe, being careful not to snag the fiber-optic line. He stayed well off the bottom, afraid of what he'd see there. For a while the screen showed little, then the after portion of the hull came dimly into view.
'Here's what did it,' Jeffrey said. 'That crack, it runs ten yards along the hull…A near miss from something
