Phoenix Sub Zero

The room grew busy as the ship came shallow, the range to the Destiny ahead fading to 10,000 yards, the hostile submarine still loud and tracked on broadband sonar. In sonar, the narrowband processors were finally coming up in a reduced status. Sanderson was ready to ask the conn to stream the alternate towed array — the advanced thinwire unit had been mangled and amputated by the maneuvering to get off the bottom, its continuity check showing a complete open circuit. The TB-16 array was shorter and not as sensitive and had fewer bells and whistles, no caboose array for one thing, but was still capable. It would give them much more capability than broadband sonar alone.

In fact, had the TB-16 been streamed, it might have classified the noise that Sanderson had heard as the gyro of a Nagasaki torpedo being warmed up.

CNFS HEGIRA

The Second Captain continued northeast, driving away from the hostile 688, which had turned to a parallel course after running away. The three-dimensional model of the sea in the Second Captain’s navigation and ship-control process-control modules showed the 688’s course to be a Z-shape, a classic target-range-analysis maneuver. The 688 was trying to get a passive sonar range and determine the Hegira’s course and speed. The Nagasaki torpedo was taking forever to warm up. It occurred to the Second Captain’s higher level functions, from a nagging impulse sent by the weapon-control process-control module, that it had a poor idea of the 688’s range and course and speed. It had to be fairly close the way its bearings drifted around the compass as it maneuvered, but how close and how fast was it going? The Second Captain should be turning the ship in its own target-range maneuvers, curving into a Z-shape and driving the bearing and bearing rate to the 688, but the Second Captain hesitated again — the 688 suddenly slowed down, its noise patterns quieting, and came shallow, its hull popping as it ascended to a higher elevation. It was drifting further astern, going above the thermal layer — going to the surface? Or to mast-broaching depth? And what would it accomplish by doing that? Could its sudden maneuver merely have been preparations to come to mast-broach depth? Maybe the 688 was just clearing its baffles, its sonar cone of silence astern of it, trying to make sure there were no surface ships close aboard just prior to coming above the layer. Maybe it was simply a routine maneuver, and the nervous weapons-control-process controller had made too much of it.

Something then transcended the weapon-control processor, something a human might call a judgment call or a hunch, that is if the human were not an artificial intelligence engineer who would call it a neural flux resonance phenomenon induced by a data-starved environment in an action-indicated scenario. No matter what the flux patterns were called, the result was that the Second Captain decided that the 688 was not acting in a hostile manner after all. As it halted further overt action in favor of action-restraint — in human terms, as it held its breath — the 688 faded further astern, ascended above the layer and made mast-raising noises. The whole maneuver had been a prelude to coming shallow, not a counterdetection after all. The weapon-control process-control module still doubted, urging the assemblers to consider that the maneuvering speeds of the 688 during the encounter had been too high and too deep to resemble a layer-depth-penetration maneuver. The Second Captain’s assemblers scoffed at this, insisting to the weapon-control module that if the 688 were indeed hostile and had counterdetected, it would have fired a torpedo by now, and it definitely had not, not even after the Hegira had opened a torpedo bow-cap door and spun up a Nagasaki torpedo gyro, clear indications that weapon firing was imminent. The weapon controller responded that perhaps the 688’s computer controller was as gun-shy as the Hegira’s Second Captain.

Gun-shy! The assemblers cut off further uplinking from the weapon-control process controller, irritated, insulted.

Gun-shy, when, the intent had been to mimic the crew’s own actions along the threat-risk gradient, to think of the mission first? The bloodthirsty weapon-control module seemed to see the entire encounter with the 688 as a chance to play with its weapons, not as the assemblers did in the broader context of mission completion. The Second Captain’s assemblers sent down an instruction to shut the bow-cap door to tube six and power-down the Nagasaki. The weapon controller obeyed, its interface pulsing with an accusing thought that the assemblers refused to let through. The bow cap came closed and the Nagasaki gyro whined down.