Terminal Run

“Engines stop, well received, Captain, and nuclear control answers, engines stop.”

“Sir, should we stay surfaced? We can perhaps fool the torpedo, but on the surface, we’ve lost our stealth.”

Lien made a dismissive sound in his throat. “We lost that some time ago, as the incoming torpedo can testify. No, Zhou,

we will remain on the surface until this is over. It is too dangerous to be submerged until that damned torpedo gets lost. And even then, if we stay surfaced without motion, the enemy sub may not find us. He is undoubtedly below the layer. In case his sonar systems continue to listen on narrowband, we need to shut down the rotating machinery. Obviously we have a pump or a turbine or a generator that is sound shorted, and is giving us away. We’ll shut it all down, and keep battle control on the uninterruptible power supply.”

Lien picked up his microphone and clicked the selector to nuclear control. “Engineroom, Captain, shut down the reactor and place the ship on battery power.”

The voice of the chief engineer came through the speakers. “Captain, this is the chief engineer. Are you sure you want to do that?”

“Shut it down, Chief.”

Almost immediately the lights flickered and the air handlers stopped. The command post became much quieter, almost immediately becoming stuffy and humid. The extinguishing of the ship’s power source seemed sadder than the pending death of the vessel from the torpedo. It seemed as if the seconds had turned to hours and that the Tsunami would never warm up. The thought entered Lien’s mind that he might die standing here stupidly, from an enemy torpedo that had gone unanswered.

Vortex Mod Echo missile number one had been nestled securely and warmly in its vertical launch tube, its power applied two minutes before. Its self-checks had all been satisfactory, and it reported back to the control room its perfection. The solution to the target came in from the signal wire port and became locked in to the processor. The processor signaled back to control that it had received the target. The control room informed the processor that launch was imminent, and the Vortex waited.

At time zero the gas generator ignited, a small rocket engine aimed into a reservoir of distilled water, which erupted into a tremendous volume of high-pressure steam at the missile’s aft end. The pressure of the bottom of the tube rose until it bore the weight of the missile and far beyond, until without moving more than an inch, the missile was experiencing five g’s of acceleration. The tube began moving so fast around the missile that it seemed as if it were tumbling down a steel tunnel, leaving the envelope of the ship and entering the cold sea.

As the aft end of the missile cleared the ship the missile’s first-stage propulsion ignited, a small torpedo motor with a combustion chamber piped to a B-end hydraulic motor. The escaping high-pressure exhaust gases made the motor spin against its swash plate, spinning the shaft up to a speed of five thousand RPM and beyond, and the thrust built up as the unit sped up to ten thousand revolutions per minute. As the engine thrust built up, it turned its nozzle to roll the missile from the vertical to the horizontal, then took it to a down angle. It continued to accelerate downward at thirty degrees, taking the missile to a depth a hundred feet deeper than the Leopard, then pulling the missile out of the dive and leveling off. After a final burst of acceleration, the first stage’s explosive bolts fired, and it fell away in the slipstream.