Phoenix Sub Zero

His nose looked like it was broken. Mcdonne pulled the weapons officer, Follicus, off the heap. He was alive but dead white. After separating the bodies, all of them at the forward end of the room, Mcdonne stood again and felt faint. He figured that it must be from the exertion, but then wondered about the atmosphere in the ship. It had a pungent acidic taste to it, more than the smell of blood—the air had to be contaminated. With no power, the ship’s air would soon be totally polluted. It might already have near-toxic levels of carbon dioxide, maybe even chlorine if the battery compartment was taking in seawater. He moved aft to the damage-control locker and pulled out a dozen masks, plugging in one for himself and began strapping them onto the faces of the men who remained alive. As soon as he felt his initial taste of uncontaminated air, the ache in his head vanished and he had a new energy, and with it, a new series of thoughts, all bad. Such as the reactor fuel assemblies melting; without the emergency cooling system it might now be fried to a radioactive crisp. He might already be dying from a lethal dose of radiation and not feel it. The ship might be flooding, or would be unable to ascend from the bottom if the propulsion machinery were broken—after slamming into the bottom that hard how could the systems be intact?

And if the ship turned out to be paralyzed it meant the unthinkable—a submarine escape. Suddenly he wanted to know their depth, searching the ship-control panel for the old-fashioned Bourbon-tube pressure gauge calibrated in feet of seawater. The one on the panel read 1,355 feet, deeper than crush depth by fifty-five feet. To exceed crush depth and slam into a rocky bottom and still make it in one piece was a testimony to the design engineers and perhaps to a supreme being too, if Mcdonne had been religious. By the end of the day he might well be, he thought, pondering a submarine escape from 1,300 feet.

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The whole concept of sub escapes had been rethought after the Russian Navy opened their archives and provided details of submarine accidents. One of them stuck in Medonne’s mind, that of the Kaliningrad, which sank under polar ice cover. Several men had made it inside an escape pod when the ship broke in half. The cause of the sinking was still classified, but evidently several of the Russian officers had escaped and survived the. cold of an arctic storm.

The other accident that came to mind was the sinking of the Komsomolets; the escape pod from that incident brought a handful of men up from below test depth but they later died of complications. The U.S. Navy opened an inquiry into submarine escapes, wondering if it was missing something by not including escape pods on American subs. Mcdonne had done some of the work for the study during his shore tour at navsea in Crystal City. The report’s conclusion: “Submarine sinkings generally lead to depth excursions below crush depth and hence to complete hull failure with 100 % crew casualties. Hence, installation of escape vehicles is not considered a worthwhile safety investment.” In real English, why put in escape pods when the crew would die in a sinking when the hull imploded?

But there was a positive result — the escape trunks, the ship’s airlocks — were redesigned to allow crewmen to leave down the ship’s full crush depth, rather than from 400 feet.

The escape trunk changeout had been done in that messy shipyard period when the reactor was replaced by the new hotrod core. The installation had taken months, but the escape trunk was now able to function down to 1,300 feet.

Still, surviving a free ascent to the surface from a quarter mile deep was unlikely. The bends, the cold, the length of the trip, all would conspire to kill a man. And who would want to leave the ship at 1,300 feet with nothing between him and the sea than a Steinke hood? It would be worse than suicide, it would be madness.

Mcdonne tried to forget the idea while he strapped emergency air masks on the men in the space. He slapped several cheeks and saw a few regain consciousness. Captain Kane’s eyelids fluttered open, blinking away the blood. As soon as he got the men in their masks he unplugged and moved aft through the middle level, wondering what the status of the reactor was, a thought still nagging at him that the ship might well have turned into a tomb if they couldn’t get off the bottom.

* * *