Terminal Run

This call to battle stations came on the dot of zero three hundred. The word had gone out that the captain would be shooting at four o’clock. No one had slept, the rig for ultra quiet demanding that the crew members not standing watch return to their bunks. But the crew were awake and murmuring through the red-lit compartment. When the call came, the crew dashed for their watch stations and battle stations were fully manned two minutes later.

Lieutenant Kingman was already at his watch station since the battle stations watch bill called for him to be the officer of the deck. Executive Officer Donna Phillips arrived, joining Captain George Dixon and Kingman. Phillips wore her coveralls with the flag patch on the right shoulder and the Leopard emblem on the left, a dolphin emblem above her left pocket, her name embroidered over her right pocket. Without a word she nodded to Dixon, took a headset, and vanished in cubicle zero, the furthest forward of the firecontrol stations, a telephone-booth-sized walled space with nothing inside it but a helmet and a set of gloves. The other members of the firecontrol party arrived, taking helmets and gloves in cubicles one through four, the weapons officer’s station in another cubicle aft of firecontrol four, the weapon control cube. Captain Dixon didn’t enter a cubicle but remained standing aft of the command console, where a set of temporary rails had been pulled out of the console section to surround his waist so that he would not fall while he wore the virtual helmet. He strapped himself in with a safety harness, so that a shock to the ship-from a torpedo, for example — would not toss him away from his console, then donned the firecontrol cursor gloves and put on the helmet.

The firecontrol helmet had a blacked-out visor, headset, boom microphone, and cool air ventilation feed. Dixon strapped it on, and his view of the control room vanished to complete darkness.

“Firecontrol display on,” Dixon said to the Cyclops Mark II battle control computer. The darkness vanished and was replaced with a three-dimensional world. Beneath Dixon, where his feet should have been, was a blue submarine showing “own ship.” The vessel appeared to be about four feet long and pointing to the left, as if it were a surfboard. Dixon appeared to be standing on an olive-colored floor that extended to a distance of about fifty feet. White range circles were drawn around him, each one about five feet apart, going to the end of the floor. Every ten degrees a line pointed out from Dixon to the ending of the floor. One of the rays pointing outward was red, the north mark, which was the direction Dixon was facing. At the far edge of the floor, the walls began to climb vertically, sloping gently away at first, then becoming more steep, as if Dixon were inside a huge bowl or virtual stadium. The circles of range began to compress. Each range circle represented one nautical mile, every tenth circle colored purple, and as the circles climbed the walls, only the purple ones remained. Eventually the olive color of the floor changed to a pink color far up the sloping wall of the bowl, indicating the range of Leopard’s weapons.

The olive floor and the pink bowl walls were the anti surface warfare display. Coexisting with the surface display was the antisubmarine ASW display, a mirror-image bowl with its walls extending downward. Dixon said, “ASW,” and the floor of the anti surface bowl came up to his face and he sank lower, as if he’d plunged into water. A new surface appeared just above his head, this surface colored blue. This was the ASW ceiling, which the computer had set just below the surface of the sea. Just like the olive-colored anti surface display, the antisubmarine display had similar range circles and bearing rays extending out to the distance, a similar curving bowl wall beginning fifty virtual feet away, this wall going down rather than up. The blue color changed to green, showing the extreme limit of the Mark 58 Alert/Acute torpedo. Further down the bowl wall the color shifted from green to yellow, showing the limit of the Mod Echo Vortex supercavitating missile, an underwater solid-fueled rocket with a blue laser seeker and a plasma warhead.