Barracuda: Final Bearing

There had to be something they could do. Shut down the ship, scram the reactor, emergency blow to the surface, ping active sonar at the Nagasakis, anything. But there was nothing he could do without being in command, and Kane was too intense to reach without shaking him by the shoulders. Besides, if Pacino thought he had a clear course of action that would save the ship, he would be happy to dress down Kane in front of his men, but Pacino knew his guesses were no different than Kane’s. On second thought, all they could do was wait— The detonation erupted into control, throwing bodies forward into the equipment like dice against the border of a crap table. Pacino went into the pole of the number one periscope, shoulder first, ribcage next, knees last. He slipped down to the deck, but the deck had become a bulkhead as the ship rolled far to the left, so far that the decks had become vertical. He slipped down the deckplates, conscious enough to see the blood pooling beneath him, hearing the screams of the wounded and dying, feeling the ship try to right itself, the deck coming back to being a deck, but when it was done with the recovery, he realized that it was not level at all. The ship had taken on a steep down angle, the lights off, the blood running downhill. Barracuda was busy dying.

SS-810 WINGED SERPENT

The detonation from the northeast — the Nagasaki torpedoes hitting the first Seawolfclass ship — blew the Winged Serpent into a tailspin as the Second Captain lost control of the X-tail aft. The computer then regained control, but Captain Tanaka had been thrown to the deck. He picked himself up and looked up at the sonar console. The Nagasakis launched against the intruder to the north were still tracking. The first target was now gone, its sonar signature lost in the fireball of the Nagasakis. Tanaka smiled. Winged Serpent was winning.

USS PIRANHA

Phillips learned almost immediately that his prayer should have been said for his own ship, the Piranha.

“Conn, Sonar, two torpedoes in the water, bearing two zero zero! Both of them Nagasakis.”

“Shit,” he said. “Attention in the firecontrol team, apparently Target Six isn’t as dead as we thought he was. And I’m not running, I’m shooting.” He paused, noting the eyes of the crew on him. “Firing point procedures, Target Seven, Vortex unit nine.”

The combat litany rolled through the room again until the Vortex roared off into the darkness of the sea, its destination the Destiny that had caused all the hell.

SS-810 WINGED SERPENT

“Sir,” Mazdai reported from the sonar panel, now that he was back from recovering the Second Captain, “we’ve got another strong broadband contact. This is some kind of torpedo, sir. We’d better evade it.”

“No, First. The SCM will take care of it. Prepare to engage the Second Captain in ship-control mode. We’ve evaded eight torpedoes before, we’ll evade one more now—”

“But sir—”

“Mazdai!” Tanaka was furious, even raising his hand as if to strike Mazdai, but then they both froze, hearing the sound of a submerged rocket motor. There were no words capable of describing the power of that roar as the missile came shrieking in toward the Winged Serpent.

The Vortex missile detonated, raising the temperature of the vicinity around it to that of the sun’s surface.

Toshumi Tanaka was vaporized, the atoms of his body so elevated in temperature that they lost their electrons and became a plasma, glowing brilliantly in the depths of the sea.

Nothing was left of the ship, its steel becoming a plasma of iron and carbon atoms. The Second Captain died along with every living being aboard, the computer able to watch itself die, its consciousness much quicker than the processing of the human mind. It sensed the collapse of the hull, the propagation of the plasma front, the sequential vaporization of its process-control modules, watching the plasma eat it alive, finally howling in electronic pain as the plasma devoured it. There was nothing left then but a cooling bubble of gas and a shock wave of a pressure pulse moving through the ocean. An external observer would never have suspected that one of the world’s greatest designs had passed with nothing left to mark its passage.

USS PIRANHA

XO Roger Whatney looked up at Phillips.

“Sir, now that the missile is away, maybe we should evade those Nagasakis.”

Phillips looked down at Whatney and thought about Pacino’s simulation in Norfolk. He’d be damned if he’d experience in reality what he’d experienced in that simulator, running from the Nagasakis and dying on the run.

He would die with his boots on, his Vortex battery empty.

“No, XO. Goddamned if I’m going to run.” Phillips raised his voice to the men in the room. “Attention in the firecontrol party. We’re going to do the same thing for ourselves as we did for the Barracuda. Helm, right two degrees rudder, steady course two three zero, all ahead two thirds.

Mr. McKilley, give me a phantom target straight ahead, range four thousand yards.”

“We won’t make it, sir.”