Phoenix Sub Zero

But the men inside the Hegira did not move, and half of them no longer breathed. The lights in the control room were out, only the glaring bulbs of the emergency lighting system energized, the blood running on the deck turning brown as the minutes turned into an hour. The room had not served its masters well, the seats in the room mostly rolling swivel chairs, the only bolted-down control seats those of the ship control officers. The other men had been standing or sitting in the rolling seats when the torpedo detonated. The bodies in the space flew like marbles in a shaken jar. Physically, except for the blank screens of the Second Captain consoles, the room was intact. The men were the difference. Before there had been almost two dozen in the control space, the room normally large and uncluttered but made cramped by the entire ship’s crew of officers jammed in. Now there were piles of bodies thrown about by the intense g-forces from the explosion. Four men had died almost instantly in the blast, more in the ten minutes after, the result of strangling from a pileup of bodies or drowning from blood spilling into lungs.

The unconscious living and the dead lay on the floor, no spark of intelligence in the ship except the core processors of the Second Captain in the process-control modules on the lower level.

After two minutes of waiting with no commands from the human crew, the core module of the Second Captain took action, as it had been programmed to do. Its first action was to power up the peripheral modules made inactive by the loss of AC power. The remainder of its systems were fed off a motor-generator that was powered by the reactor’s electrical grid, and the reactor was down. Almost a third of the system was functional at the end of this action, including the ship-control modules, the air-quality systems and reactor-control cores.

The Second Captain took inventory of the condition of the reactor plant and began the reactor startup recovery routine.

* * *

While the control rods came slowly out of the reactor core, an American ASW patrol plane orbited above the spot where the torpedo had detonated. The Hegira did not hear the plane, the sensor-control processors still dormant. Astern of her, two other torpedoes closed, still in pursuit from before.

* * *

Sixty nautical miles west of the Hegira’s position, the Phoenix still lay inert on the bottom, her systems shut down, a few souls struggling for survival inside. After initiating emergency-core cooling, Tom Schramford intended to shut his aching eyes for just a moment. If he had realized he was suffering from a severe concussion he would have kept going, but his minute rest was now into its twentieth minute with no sign of ending soon.

Up forward. Commander CB Mcdonne opened his right eye and watched the world swirl around him, unaware of where or even who he was. A few minutes later he felt his tongue, which hurt like hell and was stuck hard to the roof of his mouth. When he tried to move it, it sent pain to his brain that’ went a long way toward shaking off his lethargic state. At least it brought him the realization that he was the executive officer of a submarine in serious trouble. He tried opening both eyes and saw only a dim tangle of feet and limbs, poorly illuminated by a battle lantern that had clicked on by itself when the power had gone down. Mcdonne tried to breathe and felt another streak of pain shoot through his ribcage. He took another breath and pushed outward at the pile of bodies. He barely seemed to notice at the time that some were warm, some slick with blood, others cold and stiff. He gathered himself, got to his feet. He bent to the men and began pulling them apart, careful to avoid moving broken limbs or men who looked like they might have broken their backs or necks. The kid at the helmsman’s station had taken the control yoke on the forehead. The diving officer, originally seated behind and between helmsman and stern planesman, had plunged forward onto the deck. The chief of the watch, originally at the ballast-control panel to port, had smashed his head on the BCP, his head spun nearly around to face his back.

Houser was in the pile that Mcdonne had pulled himself out of. Also in the pile were the three officers originally at the attack-center consoles. All were still breathing. Captain Kane was in the pile, and seemed okay if bruised, his face swollen and covered with dried blood from a forehead gash.