Piranha: Firing Point

Pacino donned his virtual-reality helmet and climbed into the darkened station four, waiting to see what had happened since they had gone blind and deaf.

SS-403 ARCTIC STORM

The missiles kept on coming.

Chu knew enough to turn tail and run, but before he did, he made sure he put out his last three highspeed Nagasakis to the bearing of the ship that had launched these miserable plasma missiles at him. Once the three weapons were away, Chu turned and ran west at maximum speed at maximum depth to try to evade the saturation attack.

It would turn out to be too little and too late. Plasma missile number six detonated a kilometer astern of his position, a termination detonation as it ran out of fuel.

The explosion shock wave blasted through the water at sonic speed and hammered the Arctic Storm. If Chu hadn’t been strapped into his console, he would have died, but as it was, the five-point harness held tightly, his body bruised by the G-forces, but not broken. But although Chu survived, the ship was not as lucky.

The reactor shut down.

The ship began to flood through a seawater cooling system.

The periscope no longer worked, nor would any of the masts or antennae.

All that was an easy day compared to the worst casualty.

When the ship took the shock wave, the Second Captain died on impact The upper functions of the processing suites, the DNA parallel processors, ceased functioning as their cabinets broke open and the soup of DNA spilled to the decks.

When the upper functions died, the lower functions of the neural network became confused and actually began working at cross purposes, a sort of machine equivalent to the convulsions of a headless chicken.

Although the ship was whole, the loss of the Second Captain meant they had to abandon ship.

And Chu couldn’t abandon ship by surfacing it, because whoever had launched more than a dozen plasma missiles at him would not stop shooting because he was on the surface.

No, he’d get the crew out the escape hatch, then scuttle the ship. With luck they’d be picked up by one of his trawlers.

“Gentlemen, your attention, please,” he said. “Leave your posts and assemble at the forward escape trunk. We are abandoning ship without surfacing. Any questions? Now!”

At the escape trunk, Chu found a dozen air hoods and surface survival kits, and he sent Xhiu for their own emergency radio transmitters and beacons. Once Chu opened the lower hatch, they climbed up into the chamber.

The deck of the ship was starting to list slightly to port, taking on a more pronounced down angle. With his crew in the escape trunk, Chu shut the lower hatch, ordered the men into their hoods, and flooded the trunk.

A hydraulic lever opened the upper hatch, leaving the men in a protected section separated from the upper hatch by an air pocket on the other side of a wall. Chu found the hose manifold, filled each man’s hood with pressurized air, then shoved him out the open upper-escape trunk hatch. Last to go, he filled his own hood, ducked under the air barrier into the cold water, and climbed up out of the hatch.

For a passing second he regretted leaving the ship to die. He tapped twice on the hull in a gesture of farewell, and pulled himself out of the hatch. The buoyancy of the hood pulled him up to the surface, and Chu was careful to blow out all the way up. The air pressurized to one hundred twenty meters’ depth would blow up his lungs if he didn’t exhale hard.

In twenty seconds he broke the surface. The initial members of his crew had already inflated two rafts and were clicking the radios, trying to find help.

“Any luck, Lo?” he asked.

“I got through to Tianjin. They should be sending a seaplane for us. They’ll be here in about two hours.”

“Good.”

“Admiral? Do you think we won?”

Chu considered the question. It had seemed so obvious to him that they had lost that the question almost seemed academic.

“We sank their first task force, then twelve of their submarines, five of their maritime-patrol planes, and they killed five of our subs and paralyzed our ship, forcing us to abandon her.”

A booming roar sounded from beneath them, the sound muffled by the depth.

“That was either the ship imploding from the deep or someone finishing her off with a torpedo,” Chu said.

“Anyway, our success is to be measured by how well and how long we held off the American landing force.

If the Americans decide this sea is still too risky to cross, then we will have won a huge victory. If they decide they have vanquished us and proceed to White China to fight our forces, then we will have suffered a tremendous defeat. My opinion? We did our best, and I owe each one of you a debt of thanks for your work, for risking your lives.”

“Hear, hear,” Lo Sun said.

USS PIRANHA, SSN-23

“Things are pretty quiet out here now,” Master Chief Henry said.

“No missiles, no torpedoes, no Rising Suns.”

“Correct.”

“Let’s restart the reactor, submerge, and get out of here,” Bruce Phillips said.

USS DEVILFISH, SSNX-1

“Cyclops will be starting up in three, two, one—”