Barracuda: Final Bearing

The Eternal Spirit sailed at a keel-depth of 200 meters, speed ten kilometers per hour. Her crew, a dozen officers of the Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force, comprised some of the best in the squadron. The commanding officer, Comdr. Soemu Toyoda, was a Tokyo graduate and widely regarded as the flotilla’s captain to beat. His ship had been neck and neck with the Winged Serpent for the flotilla’s battle quality award, something Toyoda coveted. Toyoda was reading in his stateroom’s bed, the reading lamp the only illumination in the room. The report he was studying was an evaluation of the Destiny II class versus the Destiny III class, the leadership of the MSDF trying to decide the future of the force. Toyoda was forty-five years old and had spent his entire career at sea in submarines, first in the Harushio-c diesel boats built by Mitsubishi and Kawasaki, the ships streamlined and formidable-looking on the outside but crippled by the lack of a nuclear reactor. Batteries and a stinking sulfury diesel were no match for a nuclear power plant. Toyoda had been an engineering consultant for the construction of Japan’s first nuclear submarine, the Destiny class. At first the project had been exciting, Japan taking the next step in the technology curve, although the project had required the nation to take the next step, the embracing of nuclear technology for the military. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed by nuclear weapons at the end of the war with America in 1945, the very idea of using nuclear science was repugnant to an entire generation of Japanese. But one generation gave way to another, the younger generation tired of hearing about the holocaust of nuclear destruction. This generation had felt responsible for Japan’s emergence into the world scene as an economic contender. Products labeled “Made in Japan” went from being scorned to being state of the art. The generation after them went further, not happy with economic prominence but intent on economic domination, taking over one world market after another until the trade sanctions by the West had put a stop to that ambition. But a generation’s ambition couldn’t be turned off like a switch, and within two decades a desire to rule the world’s markets had given way to an unspoken desire to rule the world itself. Full circle. The Destiny submarine had been launched and found to be better than expectations.

The ship was built for export sale, Japan five years before intent on meeting the spirit of its military-banning constitution if not the letter. But when the trade war escalated, Japan realized the West was more enemy than ally, and it stood alone with the might of Russia and the two Chinas facing it to the west, the new regime of terror in India, and the country’s leadership had called on engineers like Toyoda to manufacture its own military hardware. Admiral Ta-naka — Akagi Tanaka, not his arrogant social misfit son Toshumi — had asked Toyoda to take a building-yard assignment to command the first Destiny II-class submarine, built by Japanese for Japanese in the Yokosuka shipyard. The ship was named the Eternal Spirit and was world class. More than world class, a world beater. Toyoda took the ship to sea on its initial sea trials. A week later he wrote a memo to the elder Tanaka that with a supersub like the Destiny II, Japan could again rule the seas. In the next five years the yards had pumped out Destiny IIs as if war were imminent. Toyoda had been pleased, watching the Maritime Self Defense Force move from a second-rate navy to a killer force. It was two years before that the development divisions of the MSDF made their most crucial mistake. Toyoda sat back against the fluffed-up pillows of his bed, continuing to contemplate the report. Two years ago the hull of the Divine Firmament was ripped open and the command module compartment amputated except for a few meters, just enough to contain the cabinets of a new computer system designed by a prominent research scientist named Onasuka, a biocomputer pioneer who took the previous technology of the Destiny II ship control system, the Second Captain, and modified it.

The Second Captain was already in the forefront of computer technology, able to run the ship in the absence of the crew for routine straight-line steaming, but was not able to fight the vessel in combat.