… an interceptor antenna. It's a radio mast that can be extended while surfaced to pick up distant radio traffic. I guess they want us listening in on the Caspian comms more.
---
Up above, you knew the seas were heavy, swells rising, falling, and crashing against each other as the chill wind of the new year whipped across the northern seas. Down below, though, you were fairly snug and warm in your little submarine. You were bent over the back of the man sitting at the cramped additional radio station, listening in on the spare headset. The new master had been extended--it was similar to the periscope, a long, tall wire encased in a protective extension that could be raised into the open air to listen in from beneath the waves, which made it easier to use without being spotted, even if doing so meant less clear transmissions than if you were surfaced.
It was mid-January, 2537. You were cruising outside of Khabanovsk, the largest port city outside of Port Georgia in the Caspian Far East, and the furthest north. It was the natural stopping point for any shipping coming either across the Auroric from New Allegheny, or coming from the north, down from the North-Eastern Passage. Khabanovsk wasn't
quite a warm water port and near shore there were often chunks of ice and slush. As the convoy route (presumably) went further north it began to get iced in. There were rumors (which your government wanted to confirm) that the Caspians had new ice-breakers which would allow them to send more material to Khabanovsk and from there, local railheads and roads could bring it to their army outside of Port Georgia. It was your duty to investigate these various possibilities. You were a few miles off the coast, waiting. Listening.
A series of dots and dashes, Vail code, assaulted your ears and the man in front of you began putting down letters on his pad of paper as quickly as he good. It was all nonsensical junk, of course, until it could be decoded. Recording each message was important though: have enough and you might be able to find commonalities. You were also helped by an
extremely classified document: a code book. The New Allegheny tramp freighter that you had reported before had been stopped outside of Caspian waters by a patrol frigate and searched. The Caspian agent on board had been foolish enough to keep his own notes of decoded transmissions, probably because he had gotten slack and lazy, and so you had a partial translation of Caspian code on hand.
The message you were listening to wasn't from the shore station, you were fairly sure. You'd been here a few days and the shore transmitter was always loud with a spark that startled you if you had been listening to nothing for too long. This was fainter, more distant--probably a ship at sea.
Both you and your assistant Murakami were writing down the code: the redundancy reduced the odds of mistakes getting through. Precision was vital for codebreaking: a mistake in transcription could ruin the code breaker's odds of translating the message by ruining the pattern. The transmission stopped and you waited. A few minutes later, a reply from the shore station, loud and strong and in the same code. You noted who was transmitting and began copying down the transmission. You had a good idea of what the shore station started with--it was always the same series of letters, some sort of station identifier. Bad discipline from them.
As the message finished, you watched as your new cryptologist Saeki and your translator Murakami began the process of decoding the message, checking what you knew against the code. You decided to join in as well, just to get a bit of practice. It took you all a good thirty minutes, cross-checking each other's work before you finally had most of the two messages.
Pack ice thicker than XXXXXXXXXX (Note: expected, maybe? Let the boys at headquarters chew on it). Conditions worsening. Unable to make progress. Stuck fast in ice. Will report in morning. Position follows.
Station KBSK, message received. Passed along to higher headquarters. Will relay further orders when necessary.
You entered the date and time of the messages in your log, along with the content, then put the log back into the care of the radiomen and went aft to find the captain. Kenshin was not supposed to be on duty right now. In fact, he was supposed to be getting some sleep, so when you knocked on the door to his tiny cabin and he replied with a command to enter almost immediately, you knew he was doing anything but sleeping. He was sitting at his cramped excuse for a desk in his shirtsleeves with a pen in his hand writing out and stamping paperwork. Paperwork that probably could have waited until he after got some sleep, but he was the captain so you couldn't really say that.
"Arisukawa. What's up?" You offered out the scrap of paper with your cross-checked code breaking and translation and he took it, gave it a long look.
"Just intercepted this. Think it might be worth investigating."
"Wait, do you think this might be one of their icebreaking ships?" Kenshin looked positively eager. "We could blow them out of the water while they're stuck in the ice!"
"If we can get close enough," you pointed out. "If the ice is too thick for them to break through, we might not be able to get close enough for an attack."
"Not if we don't try, Arisukawa." He laughed. "Let the control room know to alter course, if you please. Good job." You sighed, just a little.
"Yes, sir." Then you stepped out into the so-called corridor and headed to the control room to relay the orders.
---
It was not a quick journey, and it involved a lot of stopping and prepping to dive when smoke was spotted on the horizon. Caspian patrols were slowing a bit: there was speculation that there was maybe a coal shortage because of their supply bottleneck, so even though the Akitsukuni fleet had a lot of holes in it, the Navy was pushing north with more and more daring patrols.
Still, it was hardly safe, especially this far up. You were almost certainly the most northward ship in the Navy right now.It was almost a full twenty-fours later that you arrived. You had surfaced once it had gotten dark (it got dark early this far north) to make better time, and then slipped back under the waves as you closed in on the position that been reported. You had to--as you got closer to the coast, you found more and more ice in your path and soon you had to dive or simply not go forward. The boat creaked and groaned as you descended, hull popping a little, and moved on.
Finally, the boat gently rose towards the surface. Stopped and descended again. Moved again. And again. Finally, after nearly two hours of creeping along, the boat found an open space. Kenshin looked around, studying what he could see with his periscope, and then ordered the boat to surface.
You tugged on a heavy coat, gloves, and furlined cap and clambered out onto the conning tower with Kenshin. It was already getting towards dark and you could actually see the dancing lights of the aurora. More importantly, jammed into thick ice about a kilometer away as the imposing bulk of a Caspian icebreaker. All of you studied it through binoculars for a long moment. No one spoke, then Akio pursed his lips, puzzled.
"There are no signal flags," he murmured. "...That's strange. No national flag, either. And there's no smoke from her stacks."
"Maybe they've stopped the boilers since they're stuck?" You ventured.
"No," Kenshin broke in. "They'd need to keep up at least some steam so that they could get free if they spotted some open water…" You hesitated for a long moment, then swept your binoculars towards shore. It wasn't far. You were further out to sea than the ice breaker, though you weren't sure if that was due to the drift of the ice or because they had gotten too close to land--it was only a few kilometers further across the ice to solid ground. Easily walkable, if you had the desire. Why you would abandon a warm ship for the frigid coast, though, you had no idea.
"Well…" Kenshin pursed his lips. "Lieutenant Kehara, Lieutenant Arisukawa, I want you to take a party to investigate the ship. If she's abandoned, we might be able to find some valuable intelligence still. Take a party. Kehara, retrieve arms from the locker."
Akio looked shocked by the order, then saluted.
"Aye aye, sir." You followed him down the ladder--your revolver was sitting in your cabin where it had been for months except for the occasional cleaning. You took the weapon, felt the weight in your hand, then tugged your belt on over your heavy black coat. You needed to take some men of your own along--who was on hand. You took a moment to decide, the reached out to tap Kwon on the shoulder as you headed back towards the tower.
"Kwon, how's your Caspian?"
"Not great, but getting better as long as I have a phrase book. Murakami speaks it like a native. Why?"
"Get Murakami, then report to Lieutenant Kehara at the arms locker. Tell him that I sent you draw arms and ammunition and then meet me on deck. Quickly." Kwon didn't take the time to look confused. Instead, he saluted and turned to hurry off to find Murakami.
A few minutes later, Akio and his men were assembled on the forward deck, along with you and your own small party. He had picked out eight men, including Ota, who looked positively chuffed to have a chance to be off the boat. The squad had been handed out every rifle and bayonet from the locker (eight) and Kwon and Murakami had to make do with revolvers. You glanced at Akio, technically the superior lieutenant. He cleared his throat and despite being shorter than his sailors, spoke up in a gruff voice.
"Alright. We're going across the ice to check out the Caspian. We think she's abandoned but we can't say for sure. Petty Officer Hino will cover us from here with the deck gun, just in case. If I fire a red flare, that means open fire, a blue flare means all clear. Everyone got it? Okay." That done he turned to salute Kenshin, who stood on the conning tower looking like some grave feudal lord, and then your small party clambered down the hull onto the ice. It was slow going, even with the light of the moon and the northern lights shimmering overhead. Everyone walked single file, with the man in front moving carefully to make sure the ice was thick enough to support his weight.
It was agonizing. You waited, sure that at any moment, machine guns and deck guns would open fire and wipe the whole group out. The anxiety grew every passing moment and your mind hesitated, balking. Surely no one else felt this way! You glanced at your men and saw the tension in their faces and that feeling of isolation dropped. A little. Closer and closer you all tramped and still there was no shout of a look out, no burst of gunfire. Then, finally, impossibly, you were all at the hull of the ice breaker. She wasn't large...certainly no bigger than a large destroyer, but she had a massive, blade like bow designed to cleave into the ice. An impressive vessel, if you had time to admire her lines.
"Up the sides, quick," Akio hissed and two men hurled lines with hooks attached to them up the cliff-like sides and began to make their way up. Soon, they had made it and two more followed. And two more. Until at last, it was only you and Murakami. You glanced at him, then stepped forward to take the rope. You were glad that you were the last, it made you feel… less picked out. As you took the rope, you realized your other hand was still gripping your revolver and you fumbled it into your holster before climbing up the side of the ship.
When you were finally on the deck, you could see the sailors spread out around you, fidgeting.
"No sign of anyone?" You asked, surprised.
"No. Not even a deck watch…" Akio whispered back. "Let's go to the bridge--" He indicated two men. "You two stay here, guide our line of retreat." Then you all set off again, this time at a jog. What the hell was going on here?
The bridge, as it turned out, was empty. Not a soul on it, the telegraphs set to all stop (that's what Murakami said, anyway). The only thing anyone found to indicate that there had ever been anyone on the ship was the disquieting sight of a smeared pool of blood in the middle of the bridge, as if someone had fallen there and been dragged away after laying there for some time. No time for that, though.
"Kwon, Murakami--let's check the radio room." You figured it would be close to the bridge and headed aft. Your instinct was right, and soon the three of you found yourselves in a cramped space filled with radio equipment. Whoever had been there, though, had cleared out their codebooks and other material, though there was a pad of paper with a pen on it, a half-written sentence that someone had been in the middle of either sending or receiving. An ashtray with a half-smoked cigarette (Kwon and Murakami immediately relit it and started passing it back and forth between them, despite how awful you knew Caspian tobacco to be). A mug of black tea with a slice of lemon in it (lemons? This time of year? You were jealous) that wasn't warm, but definitely wasn't frozen yet. All of that seemed normal. Even the switch for the radio power was carefully set in the 'off' position. When you tried the lightswitch, the weak bulb overhead flickered into life, too.
Strange. Very strange. You stepped out into the corridor and glanced back towards the bridge, where you could hear Akio's voice saying something indistinct. Down the other way, there were doorways. You turned and headed away from the bridge, glancing into the doorways as you went. A wardroom, still set for dinner. A cabin that must have been the captain's, based on its grandeur. Even at sea, Caspian nobles apparently liked to live in style. Then other cabins and… You thought this one might have been the first officer's. But what surprised you was the skirt and uniform jacket hanging from the open door of the small wardrobe. There was a woman here. Or had been. What a strange feeling, to know that there was someone so much like you on the other side of this war.
What do you investigate next?
Snippet votes of where you look and what you fear you might find.
