Skipjack

[Pineapple]

Skipjack

Diesel Fuel Is An Improper Substitute For Reactor Shielding​

The explosion outside of the hull resonated in my ears in a way that made my teeth hurt. The smell of salt air and hot diesel fuel combined into a taste that threatened to empty the contents of my stomach all over the deck.

It was also Tuesday.

"That was fucking close." I hissed under my breath. "fifteen degree down angle, right full rudder. Do not cavitate." I ordered to helm as I kept my death grip on the navigation desk. Another depth charge lit off above us, this time a little further away. At least, my ears thought so.

"Fifteen down, right full rudder, aye." my dive officer answered. Normally you'd want two people for that station but we were left with just the one; though she was more than up to the job. It was just that usually we didn't get shot at this much.

The hull popped and creaked as we dropped through four hundred feet. That was test depth; we were pushing our luck. "Zero degree down angle, all ahead flank." I ordered in that same whisper as before. Quiet was invisible, invisible was safe.

The boat leveled off and the electric motors whined through the hull as they spun up with as much torque as they could muster. The reduction gear-sets would be howling like a son of a bitch at this speed, but then that was quite the point.

"Conn, Sonar, surface traffic is on the move; looks like the destroyer is making turns for fifteen knots." my sonar operator replied; a young kid named Francis who had an ear that meant you couldn't keep a secret anywhere on the boat.

"I don't hate that." I responded, "Make aft tubes one and two ready in all respects."

In the corner of my eye I watched my second in command call to the aft torpedo room. It was far from our first mission together, but he still had more years at sea than I had alive. He was probably the fittest man to ever come out of Florida, or at least the top ten.

"Aft torpedo room states tubes one and two ready in all respects." he finally answered back after a few moments. Tubes were already loaded, it was just a matter of flooding the tubes and opening the outer doors.

All we had to do was wait--


"Conn, Sonar, torpedo in the water, torpedo in the water! Bearing zero-nine-zero range two thousand!" Francis yelled in warning.

"Slap-shot tube one bearing zero nine zero, come left to bearing two-seven-zero, slap-shot tube two bearing zero two zero, pop noise makers, and then emergency blow!" I ordered and the crew responded immediately and skillfully, without waiting for the order to be relayed by my XO.

The deck pitched to port as the dive officer spun the rudder and bow plane wheels aggressively in their tracks. I felt it through the deck as each torpedo fired. And then the compressed air charge blew the water out of our ballast tanks and I felt myself get heavy.
Or rather, the boat got very light. The popping of the hull was as good an indicator that our depth was decreasing as anything else. The shaking under my feet and the thirty degree up angle of the deck meant that staying on my feet was a full time job of hanging onto the navigation desk.

"Passing through fifty meters," the dive officer intoned.

I grabbed my handset for the 1MC and keyed up, "all hands, brace!"

"Conn, Sonar, our fish have gone active and are homing on contact sierra one, impact in ten seconds!" Francis called out in the moment before the deck dropped out from under my feet and my stomach rose into my throat—before it was slammed down into my boots as the bow came slamming back down into the sea.

I grit my teeth and pulled myself back onto my feet. The microphone handset was still in my hand, and so I brought it to my mouth again, "All hands, prepare for surface combat.; gunnery crews topside!"

I hung up the handset an instant before a distant explosion rocked our boat and I turned an expectant look towards Francis as the rumble of the Fairbanks-Morse diesels started to thrum through the decking. "Francis?"

"Contact l—no there it is, contact sierra one is surfacing, they're running pumps, it's a hit!"

Nice.

"Reload aft tubes one and two, make aft tubes three and four ready in all respects." I ordered as I grabbed my binoculars off the hook on the back side of the ladder leading up into the sail, and then stuck my foot on the first rung. "I'm going to direct fire from the bridge."

The ladder was slick with condensation from the cold of the steel, but my gloved hands didn't much care as I hauled myself up to the first hatch. A few spins of the wheel popped it open and then I hauled myself up into the sail, and then through another hatch and up a ladder to the top of the sail, the 'bridge'.

And outside in the thin frozen air wasn't much better. I would take another polar contract when I felt like I hadn't been brought to cryogenic temperatures in too long. Dropping from orbit hadn't been this bad.

Of course, we hadn't fired our five inch yet, and that was sure to rattle the teeth out of my head and blow my ear drums apart at the same time. I was definitely about to change that. I pulled my headset on and then pulled my hat back on over it, rolled the sides down to cover my ears as best I could.

"Mic check, Albert can you hear me?"

"Affirmative, the connection is good." My XO answered from down inside the control room.

"Ok. Take us up to flank speed and work on a torpedo firing solution for that sub. I'll work on sinking her from up here. See who gets it done first." I joked as I stared through my binoculars, looking for—and there it was, the silhouette of a destroyer rising above the surface through the pervasive mist that seemed to cover the polar regions.
It looked like it had once upon a time been an Arleigh Burke class ship, but that it had been refit more than once for completely opposing purposes. Pirate ships did tend to end up looking like that after a while.

"Albert, check thermals on the periscope forty five degree off starboard. Is the engine room in the usual place?" I asked as, out of the corner of my eye, my five inch crew were hand-loading our world war two vintage five inch naval cannon.

It was bigger by a lot than the original forty that had been mounted to the deck, but that was nothing money and metal couldn't fix, though it was too much of both for my usual taste. In this case it was more than worth it.

"Can confirm, the powerplant looks original on infrared."

I twisted the channel dial on my headset so that I could talk to my gunnery crew and took a look down at them again. "Trip, you loaded solid shot?"

"Yes ma'am."his voice crackled into my ear while he looked up from the deck and waved up to me with a smile.

"See, you are learning my preferences, range looks like four hundred. I'll make you a deal, if you can take out both gas turbines with one slug I'll double your bonus for this job."

"Fuckin' done." he answered back as he cracked his neck and started working his hands on the adjustment wheels, dialing in the sight on the cannon, adjusting for windage, elevation, the speed of our ship and the speed of the target. It was almost a balletic dance as his hands tweaked this and adjusted that.

I lined up the destroyer in my binoculars and prepared for the shot. "Fire."

"Firing."

The muzzle of the cannon was sitting out over the surface of the freshwater ocean and the blast pushed a depression into the surface as a thin wake followed from the shell's turbulence. It was but an instant later that the shell blasted through the thin hull of the destroyer and carried some of the ship's parts with it out the other side in a small cloud of debris.

My ears were ringing, but it looked like he wouldn't have to fire a second shot, so there was that. There was a reason I offered him that bonus, after all.

"Sonar just heard a backup diesel fire up on the destroyer. The enemy sub is disabled and taking on water." my XO's voice rang out in my ear.

"If they want to keep the lights on to make our job easier that's fine with me. Bring us alongside the destroyer and prepare a boarding party. If the sub stays quiet let them abandon ship. If they make noise shoot them with a torpedo."

"Copy tha—sonar reports a new subsurface contact headed in from dead north. It's an Akula and they're not trying to be quiet."
"Cancel the boarding party and rig the ship for dive. While you're at it, have the aft torpedo room put one right under that destroyer's keel; looks like we won't be looting spoils of war today." I answered back into the headset before I grabbed onto the ladder rails and slid down into the sail, sealed the hatch above me, and took a look down to the far end of the compartment to see my gunnery crew pouring back into the boat.

Time was of the essence in times like these and Albert knew and had trained for that. A nuke boat bearing down on us left us very few navigational options to get the hell out of the area.

My feet hit the deck of the conn and my binoculars bounced on their strap, but the fifty year old leather held, like it had every other time we'd been in the shit. The map table was just opposite the ladder and thankfully because of it I had some idea of the ocean floor geography.

"Francis how long do we have until they can detect us?" I asked as I spun my compass and pencil against the topographical map of the ocean floor, marking out rings using a few guesstimates based on their range of how far we'd make it before they put a torpedo into us.

"They're running wide open, they probably won't be able to hear us until they're right on us, we have maybe ten minutes?" the young man offered and I felt my brain starting to melt.

Simple contract my ass.

"Did we fire that torpedo yet?"

"Torpedo is running hot straight and normal, Captain."

"Rig the ship for silent running." I ordered a moment before the lighting all over the ship shifted to blue and the diesel engines shut down, along with the ventilation system. There was exactly a zero percent chance we were going to win a fight with that Akula and so our best bet was to hide.

I tucked my binoculars into my jacket to avoid dropping them and crept as quietly as I could across the deck to the dive plane controls. "Marie, bottom is at six five eight feet and the topographical report says its soft mud. Think you can set us down in it without making a peep?" I asked the twenty something girl manning my dive planes.

She turned her head towards me and smirked nearly to her eye—not that I'd see it under all that god damn hair—and nodded quietly with a thumbs up. Captains weren't supposed to have to deal with this shit.

"All stop." I whispered and a moment later the electric motors shut down. We were in a free fall and blind, but then that was most of what submarining was about; normal people didn't pick this career.

And so the six of us were left in the cold silence as the hull creaked and popped around us as we drifted silently through the sea; the only indicator we were even moving were the occasional soft whines of the dive plane actuators, or maybe even some air escaping from where it was trapped in the ballast tank.

I crept over towards Francis, who was beckoning me over urgently, and knelt down next to him. 'What have you got?' I mouthed at him.

He pointed his finger up and then put his hands together in a gesture meant to let me know that the torpedo had in fact detonated on its target. If we didn't die we were getting paid full price, so there was that.

Just had to not die. 'Range?' I mouthed.

He dragged a wax pencil against a sheet of paper a few times before he handed it to me.

The message was simple: 'Range 9000 and running active sonar.'

A look at the gauges near the dive planes told me we were about ten feet from the bottom when the bow struck the mud and knocked me off my feet and directly onto my ass before I bounced down the deck and ended up with my back against the bow plane control wheel.

That was the kind of thing that hurt for a while.

I winced but bit my tongue against crying out and looked over at Francis, looking for a confirmation of whether or not we'd been detected by the very loud nuke. His eyes met mine and he grimaced as he held one finger up in the air and drew it in a circle.

They were circling, which meant our dinner plans had shifted firmly away from 'hot meal at Port' and into 'spend thirty six hours holding in a burp on the bottom of the ocean.'

Any longer and we'd have to risk a fight to exchange our air, but that wasn't my problem. Future me was gonna be really pissed off about it though, if it came down to that.

We were close enough to hear the pings blasting out every few minutes. I pulled my hat down over my eyes and leaned against the wheel I'd fallen on. Yeah, it was definitely gonna be a long night.

 

[Pineapple]

I Would Have Worn Something Else To The Prom​

"Locks are secure; we're docked." XO Albert announced as though the clunk of the boat falling into the elevator clamp was something I could miss. The sudden firmness of the deck under me was always unnerving but after a few years I did end up getting used to it.

Land sickness?

I shook the thought out of my head and pulled my hat off; I wouldn't be needing anything to warm my head for the near future. "Alright, open all ballast tank vents and signal dock control to take us up." I ordered as I pulled the 1MC off the hook and thought about what I was going to say.

This most recent tour of duty had been six months away from port, picking up contract after contract and either taking our supplies in salvage or paying a private logistics ship for fuel and torpedos when we couldn't.

My train of thought was interrupted as the boat started to ascend, matching its acceleration to the gravity of the planet we were on to equal about one Earth gravity. Nothing quite compared to feeling your own weight again. After all, who wouldn't want to get out of breath just walking from one end of the boat to the other?

We needed to make port if for no other reason than a break from the stress. We'd ended up spending fifty four hours at the bottom before that nuke left, and we burned through about half of our oxygen candles in that time and our carbon filters were just plain smoked.

The hull popped and creaked as the pressure dropped and we rose in altitude. No matter how many times I told myself if the hull can keep the water out it can keep the air in, it still made me grip the edge of the map table, just in case.

I finally clicked down the mic switch on my handset and spoke, "All hands this is an announcement from your captain… After a successful tour of duty where you showed exemplary performance, and more importantly didn't get any of us killed...

"Pending approval from your department heads—after we dock and secure the boat—you are all on a seventy two hour liberty. Do not burn down Olympus Junction as our bail fund was wiped out by the incident in Schiaparelli so you will be staying in holding if you fuck up. That is all."

Marie gave me one of those bitchy looks that every twenty-something this side of the asteroid belt seemed to have ready to go on demand. And just like that, the wind was knocked out of my sail.

"That bad?" I asked her with a frown, or maybe more of a pout. Both, it could have been both.

"You sounded like you were in pain. XO Albert should probably handle these things." Marie confirmed as the artificial lighting of the CIC mockingly reflected off of her silver eyebrow ring.

I rubbed my forehead and shook it off. "Marie, I hired you to drive my boat, not to drive me to drink." I answered back as I sat down into my chair. "However, your feedback has been noted."I added as an afterthought; she wasn't completely wrong.
I stood back up. I didn't need to sit in a fifty year old steel chair, I had a fifty year old steel bed in my quarters I could be laying on instead. Actual warm sleep, wouldn't that just be a treat. "I'm gonna get some rack time while I can. Order us a new drop shell when we dock and for the love of god don't get another Grumman or I swear to fuck I will open a door. Buy a Lockheed or a Martin-Marietta or call me and ask."

It didn't hurt that my room was right next to the CIC; it was only a cool thirty seconds later that I was stripped down to my thermals and sliding into a mattress that was certainly the same half century old as the rest of the boat.

Or at least most of the boat.

I was sure that there were prison cells larger than my quarters because I'd been in them, and yet surprisingly it had been easy to fit my entire life into one tiny room. Not that there had been much more than a box of pictures and a few of Dad's war medals by the time I'd actually bought the Skipjack.

Balao-class, built to serve in a war that ended fifty years ago and somehow still finding itself in conflicts through the present day. As long as the boat kept going I supposed that I would as well. The sub was a mirror of myself in a way; cranky and constantly in need of repair.

She was a sturdy old tuna all the same.

~~~​

I woke up, which was strange because I hadn't remembered falling asleep. I must have been damn exhausted. I would have gone back to sleep if the flashing lights and klaxon hadn't woken me up, and I was putting a lot of thought into rolling back over and going back to sleep even still.

Wait.

I snapped upright in bed and didn't stop until I was on my feet and falling towards the door. The impact popped the latch and I manged to catch my footing as I collided with the periscope. "Where's the leak?!" I yelled to the already chaotic CIC as the oxygen alarms screamed.

"The outer door seal failed on aft tube one while the inner door was open--" Albert started to explain before I cut him off.

"Why the fuck was the inner door open!?" I screamed loud enough that I was sure my voice cracked.

"We can shoot that pig later, right now we've got three guys stuck behind a pressure hatch turning hypoxic in the aft torpedo room."

"Do we have camera feed? Is the leak contained?" I asked as I turned towards the glowing computer monitor we'd managed to strap to the ceiling of the CIC. If it ever fell whoever it hit was sure to die but until then we could pretend we were like the nuke boats.

Not really.

Francis was calling up the right camera from the keyboard and despite how long it was taking there was a lot less key clacking than movies would have lead me to believe. After a few more attempts the screen temporarily lost vertical tracking, until I smacked it, and by that point the feed was up.

"Looks like the leak stopped," Albert commented and pointed to a crewman who was hanging off of the inner door for tube one.

"Trip got the door closed but the pressure is too low in there to force the hatch open to get them out." I observed as I scanned the feed for anything we could even interact with from the CIC; it wasn't like this was a digital age nuclear submarine after all—

"The inner door on tube three isn't sealed," Marie's voice cut in on my thoughts, "we could bypass the interlock and flood the tube. There should be enough freshwater reserve to bring the pressure up enough to get the hatch open."

I didn't hate that idea.

"Do it. How long until we reach Olympus Junction?"

"Fifteen minutes. We've already declared an emergency and they're waiting for casualties." Albert answered as Marie began her work on the torpedo controls. If anyone could…

"We can't wait that long," I answered with a frown. Ah, fuck it. "Have Jimmy meet me at the aft torpedo room hatch, and have him bring the cutting torch. If this torpedo tube thing doesn't work I'm gonna have him burn a hole in the bulkhead."

For once I was glad I didn't have a bigger boat; the time it took to run the length of the boat was under a minute and that still seemed like an eternity too long. My right elbow snagged on a bare rivet as I lost my balance and slid against the wall, drawing a ragged red line in my skin that was certain to start hurting later.

A deafening clanging greeted me when I arrived to see that Jimmy was already here and was beating the door open with a sledge hammer, bashing it down on the wheel to move the lock bolts a few millimeters at a time.

I doubted that anyone else could have done it, but Jimmy was nearly seven feet and almost three hundred pounds without an ounce of fat on him. I'd never seen him fight but the man could swing a sledge hammer like it was a hobby horse.

I could hear the freshwater pipes banging against the hull as the water rushed through them, but those pipes were never meant to fill a room in a hurry. The vacuum on the other end of the lines was making the water scream through them all the same.

Fu—

In one instant I could hear, see, and think. In the next instant a bang louder than anything I'd ever experienced before happened to me, for there is no other way to adequately describe it. The pressure equalization had forced the door open past its limits and tore the steel as it had come around to the other side.

My ears were ringing. I opened my eyes in time to see the flood of water rushing towards me. I raised my arm across my face as the water slammed into me in little jets of agony; like riding a motorcycle at triple digits in sleet. Tank top, no leathers.

After the initial blast things calmed down quickly and I saw that by some miracle Jimmy was not only still alive, he was still standing on this side of the door. His hammer was MIA, and hopefully not stuck in a torpedo.

Jimmy was big but he wasn't stupid, in fact the opposite; he could take our engines apart and put them back together and without leftover parts. Panic makes us stupid animals and I could forgive that all day long.

Whoever was responsible for the torpedo tubes being open during lift, however…

I tried to yell asking for signs of life but I couldn't hear my own voice and wasn't even sure I'd said anything at all except for the vibrations I felt in my throat told me I was doing something.

I needn't have worried; it was only a few moments before Trip staggered through the hatch, panting like he'd been running a marathon. He took maybe a minute to catch his breath before he looked at me with a facial expression that very nearly made me think he had to poop.

Maybe I'd hit my head.

He started mouthing words to me, but my glasses had gone off somewhere and I had to squint really hard to make out the shapes his mouth was forming. 'Got'? No, the corners of his mouth were pulled back; it was 'Get'.

Get something, get meds? I drew a cross in the air and mouthed back 'Get Meds?' to which he shook his head. I got one of the words right though, at least I thought so.

I spotted the glint of my glasses frame out of the corner of my eye and fished them out of the ankle deep water and put them back on to find one of the lenses missing.

This time I could see him clearly—at least in one eye—and he tried again. Get dressed?

I looked down and remembered all at once that I was dressed only in my thermals, which were now drenched and stuck to my skin, not unlike my hair or the wet candy bar wrapper on the bottom of my foot. That last detail reminded me to get on the crew about cleaning up their messes because I am not their mother.

The deafness subsided into a high pitched ring accompanied by almost being able to hear voices, though they sounded too distorted and robotic to really make out. I took a step closer to Trip to make sure that he was okay—my own deafness notwithstanding—and I felt a sharp stinging in my left foot which I pulled back, which resulted in me falling on the floor.

Oh hey, I found my missing lens. Half of it anyway.

 

[Pineapple]

That One Time Your Kids Found The Can Opener While You Were At Work​

In the end the only real casualty that required off-boat treatment was my foot and the lens of my glasses stuck most of the way through it and I wanted to pull it out despite my better judgement. Olympus Junction was a good half of the way down from the geo-station so there was still enough gravity for walking; about as much as on Luna.

Sort of a mixed blessing in my case, as I found myself double-crutching it across the berth common-area towards the med-center instead of drifting weightlessly, but the gravity also meant that my blood wouldn't do the weird things it liked to do when you had an injury in zero G.

In either case it wasn't much of a hike; I arrived in a little under two minutes from the time I stepped through the door on the Skipjack's sail. The med-center—like every other part of the orbital elevator tower—was immaculately kept.

That was, until my I came through the door with half a pair of glasses jammed through my foot leaving a trail of vibrant red in my wake. There were already medical staff standing by, waiting for the call to come aboard and tend to the casualties.

"Hi, I'm the casualties from the Skipjack."

~~~​

Next time I bought a pair of glasses I was going to make sure the lenses were nice and round, rather than a pointy ellipse. Fortunately that day wouldn't be for a while; the surgeon managed to get the lens out of me without breaking it, he was even kind enough to set it back into the frame after he got done closing the hole in my foot.

And really, that was the most hilarious thing to me. I'd just had my foot closed up, but when I stepped back out into the berth common area I was greeted by the confusing and alarming sight of Jimmy cutting a hole the size of a Volkswagen around the aft port torpedo doors with an oxyacetylene torch. I think what really drove it home was when the outer door for tube one just straight the fuck fell off the side of the boat.

The lazy spiral of the steel plate through the air and the clang when it bounced off the bottom of the bay was just… if I'm being honest with myself it was artwork. I just needed to find out who set the artist in motion because Jimmy wasn't the kind of guy to start cutting holes in the boat of his own volition.

In fact, most of his job was to patch holes in things, recent events notwithstanding.

"Hey Jimmy!" I yelled as I crutched my way up to the railing. A shower of sparks came down around as he turned to look at me.

"Hey Cap! How's the foot?" He shouted down at me as he cut off his torch and lifted up the mask protecting his face.

"Water-tight, which I can't say for Skipjack. What uh, what the fuck are you doing bud?" I asked him as I looked up at him with an expression that let him now I wasn't kidding around.

"Oh this? The port tubes are fucked fucked from that door seal failure and Trip scored us a stack of ADCAPs. We should have tubes one and three replaced with a single mark forty-eight launcher by week's end."

I nodded along, it was sound logic but there was a reason I hadn't done it five years ago. "We don't have any storage for torpedoes that big."

"We're going to rig the aft multipurpose compartment for torpedo storage" he answered as though that kind of thing was obvious and I should have known.

Of course, there was a reason I didn't.

"We don't have an aft multipurpose compartment," I protested as the wheels started turning, I didn't like where this was going. I sighed and leaned against the railing in defeat. "You're cutting the boat in half to add a new section, right?"

The rather substantial Indonesian mechanic shrugged at me, "If you want us to stop it's still your boat. The master-at-arms assured me that you would be fine with this."

I shook my head, "It's fine Jimmy. We could use the refit, I just don't generally like being trapped on an orbital station long enough to get one done, but, my foot needs to heal anyway. Cut away, just make sure it doesn't look chickenshit when you're done."

"I promise you won't notice a thing." he answered with a smile that was meant to be disarming but at the same time just made that sour knot in my stomach twist just a little tighter.

"You tell me that and yet I still worry," I joked. "But for real; this refit is your only responsibility until it's done."

"Aye."

Speaking of the master-at-arms… "Hey Jimmy where is Trip anyway?"

"Jenny's."

I sighed, "Of course he is."

~~~​

By the time I made it down the four levels to the commerce district the pain killers had mostly kicked in to the point that I was managing just fine with a single crutch, and it certainly made me a little less conspicuous to only have one, even if just by a small measure.

I could swap it out at the Skipjack later, though by then they would probably already have her cut in half. As a company that left us with our pants further down than they'd been in years and it wasn't a position I liked being in.

But those fat fucking torpedos that Jimmy promised we were getting did make up it.

I was in hunter-killer mode and I had my target in sight: Jenny's. Across the street and three blocks down, the walk took a few minutes but the huge marquee out front identifying the establishment made it hard to miss even from that far away.

The Japanese tower had always been my favorite. All of the towers were of more or less the same basic design but the Japanese tower was actually clean which was something the American tower was distinctly lacking.

Well, technically the 'American' tower on earth belonged to Panama, but Uncle Sam had his hand so far up the ass of the Panamanian government that it was effectively a puppet state anyway. Manifest Destiny or something like that, wasn't it?

Jenny's was the most popular establishment on this level, probably for three levels either side. The flow of people in and out of the place was on par with a few customs terminals I'd seen in the past. A line of eager potential patrons wrapped around the block, but I made my way directly to the doorman.

He gave me an expectant look and I had my union card in my left hand by the time I reached him. He was an inch or two taller than me, red hair, green eyes. His eyebrow furrowed as he squinted at the admittedly tiny print on the card before he handed it back.

"You'll find your party in the private dining room," He said before waving me in.

His accent was American and I found myself immeasurably disappointed, nearly as much as I was when I heard him say 'private dining room' even. Having a crew was like having a bunch of children. Actually, no, it was definitely worse.

The inside of the establishment was, if not well lit, properly lit. It was enough to see, but not enough to distract from the atmosphere or make blood shot eyes sting. If the latter hadn't applied to me at that moment I'd have been surprised.

I skirted my way around the edge of the room to avoid having to interact with or interrupt to many people enjoying their evenings until I found my way to the curtain separating the private dining room from the rest of the establishment.

I knew everyone in the room, of course. Trip and every single gunner's mate, standing and sitting around a table having drinks and laughs. They didn't notice me as they were already way too drunk and certainly having way too much fun to pay any attention.

The waitress finally walked in the room when I was preparing to berate the men and instead a different plan formed in my mind. Trip was deep in drunken conversation crouched down next to two gunner's mates about half way down the table, but his cap and jacket were hung up on the chair at the head of the table.

A chair with a freshly delivered meal sitting in front of it, a chair that I planted my flat ass directly into. The meal looked delicious; a big salted baked potato slathered in butter, a cut of wagyu the size of my face, and a row of grilled asparagus that smelled good enough to be a meal on their own.
I made a point of slowly and deliberately un-wrapping the silverware and tucking the napkin into my shirt collar. I wasn't even particularly discrete about cutting into the beef with the serrated blade of the stamped stainless steak knife.

Of course, they were drunk so I expected it would take them a moment to notice. I didn't expect that it would take until I had consumed half of the steak for anyone to even glance in my direction. However, after the first the rest followed within a few minutes; all of them watching me eat Trip's dinner.

The steak was delicious, nearly enough to justify the prices, so I pretended I didn't notice their stares as I continued through some of the asparagus before taking a brief stop in potato town before returning to steaksville.

It wasn't that I cared what they did with their time—they were on liberty after all—it was more that I, or rather Cap'n Jackie's Submarine Services (inc) was footing the bill for this little recreational jaunt. And for that matter they hadn't even invited me.

I saved the last bite of steak for after I had finished the rest of the potato and grilled vegetables and I savored it. When the waitress came I ordered a drink and kept nursing it for the rest of the evening. In the end I didn't need to levy any discipline for using company funds to hit the literal actual most expensive steakhouse on the planet, the anxiety of watching their Captain silently eat their commander's dinner was enough for me.

As for Trip, he would need to learn to keep me in the loop when he decided to cut the boat in half or feed half the crew imported steak.

Still, Jenny's had a hell of a steak, perhaps I would invite XO Albert and the senior officers to dinner. It wasn't like we were going to be leaving port for a while.

Of course, we'd have to go dutch after what the evening had done to my account balance.

Spoiler

 

[Pineapple]

If Being Bored Was The Worst Thing On My Plate I'd Have It Pretty Good​

It was boredom that was the true mind killer. There were only so many times you could re-watch the same movie while cooped up in a temporary stay apartment before you went out of your mind. I was about ninety percent of the way there.

I was one hundred percent of the way to wanting to bury my foot up the ass of whoever decided that Mars needed a copy of The Hunt For Red October and no other films. At least not ones in English. Now, if I wanted to watch things in un-subtitled Japanese my options were limitless.

Yet I continued to watch the damn movie; at about the time I watched Sam Neil get shot for probably the sixtieth time the movie just stopped. Then the TV stopped. Then the lights went out, and came back up in amber while an alarm siren wailed over the public address system.

The TV came back on with a feed from the news station, the person at the news desk didn't look like an anchor, they looked more like studio staff. I didn't understand a word he said, but I understood pretty clearly what I was seeing when the image changed to a live camera feed of a ballistic missile screaming up from the surface of the martian ocean.

There was no doubt it was nuclear, but the pirates had never been this bold before. In fact this was more like terrorism; there wasn't any material gain to be had here. Six streaks flashed across the screen almost too fast to see; they'd fired the mass drivers on the ring. A few moments after the shot, the booster section of the missile exploded and an instant later the warhead detonated and blinded the camera.

That was definitely not a good thing. I was on my feet and grabbing my shit when the shockwave hit and the power dropped. Some of of the battery lights came up, some of them shot sparks and shorted out instead.

EMP was definitely a worse thing. I scooped my go-bag and my gun belt and hit the ground outside of my room running. Nuclear weapons had a way of making things messy and when things were messy I didn't like not being on my boat.

I only hoped that a month and a half had been long enough for Jimmy to have the boat and the shell ready to go. When the inevitable second missile got launched I wanted to be sitting in our Lockheed drop shell and burning for higher orbit.

At the end of the hallway I slammed through the crash bar on the emergency exit door and straight into a stairwell; I bounded over the railing and dropped into free fall down the center of the case, dropping three levels before I reached the far side, where I jumped off again in a zig zag that carried me down ten levels.

The near lack of gravity was awesome on occasion.

I hit the bottom of the staircase in a crouch and turned to the door. Next to the door was a public terminal that still had power. Maybe the stairwell had been shielded enough? Hopefully the berths were too or I wasn't entirely sure how we planned to mount the drop shell, let alone power it up and get outside.

I scrolled through the address book until I found the terminal at berth thirty-two: our berth. I crossed my fingers and pushed the call button, hoping there was an energized circuit between the two places. Watching the status bar jolt and freeze was nearly as stressful as watching the missile had been, or maybe the missile stress made everything around it worse.

I was about to abandon the terminal and continue my run when the call finally connected and Jimmy's panic-stricken face greeted me, not that I thought me expression was any less dire. "Cap, what the hell happened?"

"ICBM. Please tell me Skipjack is ready to sail."

"Nothing left that I can't finish while we're under way."

"Get the boat into the drop shell and get ready for launch, I'm on my way." I ordered as I abandoned the terminal and pushed through the door to find myself down in the carriage tracks of the berth deck.

Massive steel rails passed directly over my head, with massive chain drives to drag the cradles into their individual slips. The power was on and the lights were casting nearly enough light for me to see my hand in front of my face.

I knew the layout from the top, so I knew it from the bottom, in theory. I was at berth twenty seven if the massive painted letters on the floor under me were any clue. It would be a hike, but it was far from impossible.

The crack of a glow stick granted me an eerie green glow that helped keep me from running into debris as I made long leaping steps in the low gravity. There was a surprising amount of just… stuff. Bits of scrap metal, bags of trash, human waste, half of a torpedo, part of a propeller, and a torpedo tube door.

I stopped and looked up fifty meters above my head to see what was in the berth I was about to check when checking became redundant; that was most definitely my boat being shoved into a drop shell. I ran to the end of the wall separating the berths and dragged myself up the self-illuminated escape ladder four rungs at a time.

My habit of eating poorly may have made me lighter but it did get me winded by the time I was at the top of the ladder. I whistled into my fingers to draw my crew's attention as I ran across the concrete towards our drop shell boarding gantry.

"Get onboard!" I yelled as I stumbled and nearly took a header directly into the floor. Had the gravity been earth-normal I absolutely would have. A nuclear attack was a terrible time to not be inside of the boat.

There was a delay in reaction, probably due to the suddenness of my appearance, but that delay lasted just long enough for me to run through the group and onto the gang plank leading up to the pressure hatch on the side of the shell. A cacophony of footsteps trailed me through the airlock as the few crew who had still been outside followed.

Jimmy was at the shell control panel, his brow was creased and he didn't notice me.

"Hey Jimmy, is port control gonna let us--" I managed to say before before a single blare of the collision alarm blared, and then the most awful sound I'd ever heard, one of twisted metal and explosions.

And then the rushing of air, I felt myself leave the deck a moment before I heard a sound not unlike a gunshot. And then I hit something hard and went to sleep for a while.

~~~​

I opened my eyes to red emergency lighting. The metal behind my back was ice cold. I was inside of an airlock, with the inner door open and looking up and into the drop shell control room. It had to have been a decompression in the berth, which was troubling because the berth was deep within Olympus Junction.

The metal wheel above me made a good hand hold to pull myself up onto my feet atop the slanted deck and before I let go of the wheel I realized the lock bolts weren't extended. A frantic spinning of the lock wheel later and more than just the internal pressure was keeping the outer airlock shut.

I was the only one that had ended up inside the airlock. I was also the only one besides Jimmy to loiter above deck and Jimmy was certainly massive and strong enough to have held himself to the panel. I walked up the slanted deck past the inner airlock door, which I sealed behind me.

The red emergency lighting clicked off when the wheel locked into the closed position and the normal white lighting illuminated the control room, and Jimmy picking himself up off of the floor with a nasty gash across his forehead.

The indicated ship time on the control panel told me I'd been down for about four minutes.

"James, are you alright?" I asked him as I helped him to sit on the wall-mounted bench. Even the auxiliary seating on Lockheed drop shells was class. And a Grumman airlock definitely wouldn't have held up to that kind of shock load.

"I've been better. You can have a look outside if you want but you're not gonna like it." he answered me with a wave of his hand towards the interface panel.

Taking the hint, I opened up the camera system on the panel menu and then selected a mosaic of the external camera feeds. The outside of the shell was more or less intact with the exception of large patch of scoring on the port side of the normally white shell. The status lights were all still green though, so that was good.

The gaping wound in the berth deck that was also off our port bow gave me an indication of how the scoring had occurred. It couldn't have been a nuke, despite that I could see open space through most of that side of the berth, the damage all seemed to be impact damage.

"What the fuck happened." I asked in a near whisper as I surveyed the carnage. More than the outright destruction, the boats still sitting in berths with their hatches open made me sick to my stomach.

"EMP knocked a boat off the pipe." Jimmy answered despite my whisper.

"What?" I asked as I turned to him with my eyebrows somewhere up under my bangs, not to be seen.

"The nuke, the EMP probably disrupted the magnetic locks on the carriage and whatever boat was on its way down from the ring… fell off."

~~~​

"...and so that's where we're at." I said as I finished filling in the senior staff on the situation. Fortunately the CIC hatch had been closed and the decompression had been limited to myself and Jimmy.

"Comms are working but we still don't have anyone actually answering. The navigational beacon is still broadcasting but that runs off an RTG so I'm not surprised." the radioman added. He had only been on the boat a few weeks, but he was good at his job and I was ninety percent sure his name was Lewis.

I sat down in my incredibly tilted map table chair and sighed. It was a long sigh, deep and mournful. This fucking day. As if being laid up for three weeks hadn't been bad enough.

The boat rocked under me and for a second I was afraid the elevator was going to come down, but then we leveled off and I could hear the thrusters firing through the hull. "Marie what are you doing?" I asked as I spun to face her.

She kept her eyes on the camera screens we'd brought down into the boat and answered me without looking, "I'm getting us out of here."

I looked over to Albert, who shrugged, so I returned my attention to Marie, "I didn't tell you to do that."

At that she turned to me with a frown… I think. "Okay, do you wanna stay?" she asked.

"I mean… no." I answered with a blank dumb look on my face. She got me with that one.

She gave me a 'duh' look and then turned back to the controls, giving them a little bit more of an aggressive hand as she floated the shell on its thrusters. The gravity pitched back a little when she brought us around to align with one of the holes that lead outside.

"Take us out and put us into a hundred kilometer polar orbit. We don't wanna be anywhere near here." I ordered before the boat started to glide forward through space. We'd all be sitting down until our final orbit was stable but we'd be a lot harder to shoot down until we figured out what the hell was going on.

I had a suspicion that mars was about to get a lot more interesting.

 

[Pineapple]

Regular Flossing Does Not Help Prevent Orbital Decay​

Had I known that a submarine was going to crash through the station and let all the air out of the berth deck I would have had Jimmy buy an orbital shell and install that instead. Then we could get back to earth and the hell away from whatever nuclear war the pirates were trying to start.

Well, no. It was an unspoken understanding that everyone knew the pirates were just Russian Navy trying to stir up shit, but the launch of a nuclear missile proved it. Russia sold a lot of things to a lot of people but not nuclear ballistic missiles.

Of course they didn't officially even have a presence on mars, let alone something that Japan could strike in retaliation and even if they could, the Japanese didn't have submarines.

"Captain, I'm picking up radio chatter from the planet." Ninety Percent Lewis offered from his station. I would have gotten up so that we didn't have to talk across the room, but I was seat belted down so that I didn't go flying into bulkheads if we had to, you know, turn.

"Anything exciting?" I asked with a raised eyebrow as we crossed over the pole and completed our seventy third orbit of the planet.

"It sounds like the Union is operating out of Midway Station for now. Japan Geo just put out an open contract paying per kill on pirate vessels."

"What's the offer?" I asked as I leaned forward. We were about to leave orbit one way or another, if Midway Station was active, hell we could just go there.

"Thirteen million per fast attack sub, thirty for each boomer sunk, and that's in American." Lewis said, facing me with eyes wide as dinner plates.

Mine were filled with dollar signs. "Well you know Japan is good for it. Guess we're gonna be hunting some nuclear submarines for a while." I mused with a look to my XO, who almost certainly wouldn't be against it.

"We're coming down on the next orbit one way or another, should I aim for Midway?" Marie asked from the reaction control system panel.

"Albert?" I asked with a tilt of my head.

"Don't see why not." He answered simply.

Well, that settled it: we were going on a hunting trip.

I straightened up my cap and turned back to Marie. "Sound the dive alarm and rig for re-entry. Bring us down within the Midway recovery zone. Lewis will radio Midway and set up the shell recovery. Anyone who hasn't done this before, you're going to want to get strapped in."

~~~
​

With all the propellant we'd wasted staying in orbit for as long as we had we didn't have much left for a powered landing. That is to say, we did not have enough propellant left for a powered landing, and so the white knuckled grip I had on the arms of the chair I was strapped into became redundant after the first minute of engine burn.

Because after that minute we were out of fuel and in free fall: the most exciting way to de-orbit.

"Alright, pitch us over into the belly flop and be ready to punch the drogue chutes at twenty thousand." I ordered, despite that Marie probably could have handled it without me. Being all on the same page had its value.

It was almost imperceptible when we flipped from upside down and backwards to upright and forwards; it was extremely perceptible when we made atmospheric interface. The entire boat shook and rattled as our drop shell compressed a wave of air in front of us at a little over thirty times the local speed of sound.

At least the seals were holding. Grumman shells had a really bad habit of losing pressurization on unpowered descents. Springing for the Lockheed was worth it just for the peace of mind. Well, the peace of mind and the sub-volcanic internal temperatures the better shell afforded us.

"We're through the plasma blackout, we're receiving landing guidance from Midway." Lewis announced from his station as the shaking in the deck started to soften up.

"Well that's nice of them. Marie, punch the lower shell and prepare for dive as soon as we touch down."

The lurch in the decking signaled that the lower half of the drop shell had fallen away as commanded. The increase in wind noise and then the feeling like someone had grabbed me by my head shoved me down into the chair signaled that the main chutes had opened.

"Fifteen seconds to touchdown." Marie announced and I tensed up for the hit.

"Sound the collision alarm." I ordered as I grabbed the 1MC mic from overhead to announce on shipwide, "Touchdown in ten, brace for impact."

The sound of explosive bolts reverberated through the CIC as the upper half of the shell detached and there was just a moment of weightlessness before we dropped into the sea. The shock absorbers in the chairs took most of the hit but it still always took me a minute to collect myself after a rough landing like that one.

I popped the release on my seat belt and stood up onto shaky legs, but it only took a moment to get my sea legs back. "Pressure?"

"Still airtight." Marie confirmed as she glanced at the gauge cluster next to her station.

"Crash dive!" I ordered as I took control of the ballast vents myself. Forward vents wide open around the same time Marie forced the bow planes to maximum deflection. A loud humming temporarily reverberated through the ship as the new low-speed drive motors kicked in drive us down.

The ship fought the dive while the air took its time escaping from the superstructure and ballast tank vents, but only for a few seconds before the deck pitched forward and the bow slid under the waves. I spun the release for the aft tank vents before the propellers had a chance to lift out of the water.

Forty eight seconds to periscope depth; we were shooting for four hundred feet. "Albert, the approach?"

"I don't mind. You?"

"Going to head to the new compartment Trip had the boat cut in half for and see what the fuss is about." I answered with a sort of tired sigh and a crack of my neck.

He nodded and straightened up his cap before stepping forward, "Alright, reduce down angle to ten…"

~~~​

It was extremely disorienting to step through a hatch that had previously lead to the aft torpedo room to find myself instead staring at a—thankfully sealed—moon pool. That would add another layer of complication to ventilating with the topside air, but it wasn't like it was the most dangerous part of the job even so.

The weapons locker wasn't new, but it being in this part of the ship was. That part was fine, it meant the galley was no longer doing double duty as an armory. Diving suits lined the other side of the truncated compartment; there was almost certainly another room behind the starboard bulkhead of the moon pool if the off-center nature of the room was anything to go by.

Also, submarines had to remain a certain shape which precluded irregular hull shape.

I shook my head and stepped across the rectangular inner doors of the moon pool with a wave to one of the crewman inspecting a weld. "Hey, Jimmy's back here right?"

He looked up from his work, I didn't know his name but I'd seen him before. "Yeah he's calibrating the autoloader."

I cocked an eyebrow at that and passed through the open hatch at the aft end of the compartment. This room contained drilling equipment and a look around the corner showed that the area behind that wall was occupied by an ocean floor drill.

That opened up a lot of work we weren't able to do before.

I continued aft, passing by plenty of crewmen but none of the ones I actually needed to talk to. The final bulkhead was within arms reach and upon ducking under the edge of the hatch into that section I was greeted by the surprise of seeing the aft torpedo room.

A torpedo room that was a good twenty feet longer than it had been before with a large portion of the ceiling space occupied by a torpedo auto-loader, one set up to load directly off the storage racks into the new torpedo tube.
Losing a torpedo tube was a lot more palatable when the replacement tube could launch half a dozen torpedoes per minute. On the rack I counted eight full size ADCAP fish, stacked vertically like a rifle magazine. Further out from the wall was a second magazine style rack, this loaded with two ten foot electric torpedoes, lined up end to end.

The third and final row, however, was stacked eight deep with Harpoon anti-shipping missiles and that was something that I had questions about.

On the opposite side was a cabinet that looked like it contained the information processing unit for the new fire control system for the new launcher, as well as a small machine shop. It wasn't anything special but it looked like we could fab some of our own engine parts in a pinch, though I suspected that it was more likely for torpedo maintenance.

It was half way under the new torpedo tube that I finally found Jimmy. I couldn't see anything except his legs but those tree trunks were unmistakable. "James!" I yelled loud enough for him to hear me, but not so loud as to sound angry.

The wheeled crawled he was laying on slid out from under the tube with a chaotic clattering noise across the diamond plate. "Hey Cap, just reconnecting a sensor that came unplugged during the drop. What can I do for ya?"

I laughed and gestured weakly towards the, well, everything. "I think you've done more than enough for now. I came to see how hard we can push the boat."

He gave me a sort of pained look and shrugged up at me from the floor. "I mean… As hard as you ever push it. We're more or less done with the battery and motor upgrades. The pressure hull welds seem to be holding. The towed array is really the only major thing left and we should have that finished by the time we leave Midway."

I opened my mouth to say something but was interrupted by the sudden ping of our active sonar. I jumped a little and then shook it off. "Sounds like we're in the pipe. How long will the lithium cells last before we have to cycle the diesels?"

"I'd say a week if we're docked. After that we'd either need to surface the boat or shut the whole thing down."

Well that was almost a four fold improvement on battery life.

"That's good news," I answered, "I doubt Midway has much energy to spare for shore power right now. I don't imagine we'll be there more than a day though. I just need to pick up some charts and a few contracts."

"You gonna go see your dad?" He asked after a few seconds.

I grimaced at the thought. He'd been pissed since I'd left the Navy but… Well, he wasn't on that boat so he couldn't judge me. "Eh. I guess, since we're here. Really not looking forward to the inevitable recriminations and flatware throwing but… Yeah, fuck it, let's go see pops."

 

[Pineapple]

I'm Glad We Have A Drill So My Dad Can Keep Digging Up Old Shit​

"It's weird that you still hang out with my dad, just sayin'." I complained to Trip as we walked along the sea-floor tunnel to the habitat dome. Normally there would be LED lighting along the glass tube to illuminate the outside and provide some semblance of a view, however today they were dark.

They were running on backup power; it seemed that when Olympus Junction got hit all power stopped coming down the Japanese elevator. Midway had switched to backup fuel cells, or at least that was what I'd always understood the plan to be. Once the hydrogen ran out they'd be on battery, and after that everyone would be dead.

I mean, if everyone spent the next couple weeks sitting on their hands and not working on a solution.

"J.J., we were married for five years. I think it's okay to be friends with your pops." Trip said with a laugh as he clapped down on my shoulder. I really fucking hated that nickname, but I'd long since learned he wouldn't stop, at least off duty.

"And we've been divorced for seven because you couldn't stop putting your dick in strange places, so…"

"Hey I did stop," he protested as he took his arm off my shoulder.

"After I found you in the radar operator, doesn't count." I retorted with a narrowing of my eyes and a frown. No, I wouldn't do this again. Breathe in, eyes closed, breath out. Calm thoughts, happy places. Come on Jackie, you survived him cutting your heart and your boat in half.

"Are you sure the two of you aren't still married? You sure fight like it." A voice cut in, one dripping in smarm and ego.

"Hi Dad." I groaned as I opened my eyes and glanced towards the voice: Pops on an electric cargo skid. Yay.

"Trip, J.J." My dad regarded us. So now he was using that nickname? Clearly Trip was talking to Dad more than I was.

Et tu, Papa?

"Hey Lee, you look like you're packin' up to move. What's under the tarp?" Trip asked conversationally as he picked up the edge of the plastic sheet covering the wheelbarrow sized cargo bed of the skid.

"Doing a little prospecting. Took on a contract from J-PAC to drill some wellheads to get Midway back into the green on electricity generation. Just to keep the lights, heat, and oxygen on, nothing major." My dad replied back in that same conversational tone.

"Who's taking you out?" I interjected before they could continue.

"Javier, why?" Dad answered, I frowned.

"On the Marigold?"

"Yes. Why?" He answered with a little impatience in his voice.

I shrugged and put a mock helpless look on my face, "Oh nothin', just thinkin' about how the Marigold is a Salmon-class and how you're probably gonna die before you get to the drill site from a hull implosion.

"Oh, and you know, your only daughter owns a submarine."

"Marigold has a drill and my only daughter has a boat without a drill." He countered.

I grinned and held up both of my index fingers. "Hold on now, Skipjack does have a drill. We picked one up at Olympus Junction last week."

Dad nodded for a second before his eyes got wide, "Wait, were you there?"

I nodded. "Almost stayed there, permanently. Wasn't a fun ride."

"I can imagine. When are you leaving port?"

I shook my head, "We didn't make port, we're soft-docked against airlock six-bravo. We were gonna pick up some maps for the Typhoon hunt and scoot after we finished our visit with you."

"I guess I'll see you on the boat in about an hour then?" My dad finally asked.

~~~​

The salt hit my tongue with a sting as I aggressively chewed the end of the jerky stick. My dad was on my boat. My dad was on my boat because I loved my dad and I didn't want him to die on the fucking Marigold.

That didn't mean having my dad on the boat was any less nerve wracking, but as long as he stayed out of the CIC I could probably survive. Even so, the trickles of whispered hero worship from some of the crew grated on my nerves.

It wasn't that my dad couldn't be annoying. In fact, it would be fair to say that he was annoying most of the time. At least to me. No, the problem was that my dad spent six years as a boomer captain in the navy and I only managed XO of a Sturgeon-class.

Until it sank.

No, I definitely knew how awesome my dad was, and if I hadn't known a full third of my crew would have filled me in, whether I liked it or not. But I loved my dad, minor or even major annoyances aside.

"Alright Marie, push us back from the docking collar," I ordered as I rubbed my forehead. Damn headache.

There was a soft thump in the deck and then we were moving, albeit not terribly fast. I felt myself calm a little. Maybe it was the feeling of being mobile instead of tied down.

What? I don't have issues.

"Thank you Marie. Alright, active sonar up; let's run down the pipe."

She nodded at me and adjusted the throttle telegraph to ahead one third. A sharp ping echoed off the hull as the active sonar fired. My headache threatened to melt my brain and I rubbed my forehead enough that I was sure I was wearing a thing spot in it.

The low speed motors were quiet, so there was that at least. Un-like the whine of the high speed reduction gears, and with us going on a nuke hunt I would take every advantage I could get.

"What's our depth?" I asked as I blinked away the exhaustion from my eyes. Or maybe that was stress.

"We're at six-one-zero feet, twenty feet beneath the keel." Marie answered back. "We're a quarter of a mile from the mouth of the pipe."

It was called 'the pipe' but it was actually more of an hourglass shaped passage, with the narrowest portion only having a fifty foot radius. It was the only way in or out of Midway and it made the station one of the most easily defended and most easily blockaded place on the planet.

At least in theory, nobody had tested it yet.

"Ahead full." I ordered. I was tired of waiting and I really wanted some fresh air, freezing or not.

Marie pushed the telegraph forward and a few seconds later the pitch of the drive motors rose slightly. Flat out and not howling like a banshee, which was a new one for this particular submarine.

"We're clear of the mouth."

"Bleed a little air into the ballast tanks and take us up to periscope depth. Rapid ascent, please."

The ship pitched up gently, or at least gently compared to an emergency blow. In times like this I found myself anxious and unwilling to wait too long for information. It was probably counter-productive in the long run but it made me feel better.

I stood up from my seat and made my way to the observation periscope, one of the few modernizations to the Skipjack that I hadn't had to shell out for when I bought the boat. It was about the only thing that worked at the time.

"We're holding at forty feet," Marie announced as the boat leveled off under us.

"Up periscope," I ordered. The assigned crewman raised the periscope and I leaned against the eyepiece. Outside sunset was nearly upon us. Soon surface visibility would be zero, but for the moment the sharp angle of the light would make any surface traffic stand out like a sore thumb.

The Japanese elevator stood dark about two hundred miles to our east, with the tip of the Congolese elevator visible just over the horizon to our west. If there was any surface traffic, it was over the horizon, which was honestly ideal.

I flipped the handles of the periscope up and nodded to the crewman to lower it back into the pit. We were good to go for the next part.

"Alright, raise the radar mast and the snorkel and stand-by on the diesels."

The whirring sound of the snorkel tube elevating out of the hull was almost inaudible, really only noticeable in its absence.

"Just think of how much easier this would be on a Los Angeles-class. You know, if you were still in the navy."

"Sure dad, please come into the CIC while I'm working." I announced in an annoyed tone without looking at him. The sound of the diesels start to thrum softly through the deck and there was a sense of acceleration as the boat sped up slightly.

"Well, if you insist," he joked in that maddeningly cheerful tone he knew irritated me. A glance out of the corner of my eye and I noticed his ball cap, because of course he was wearing his veteran's cap.

"So," I asked, "Did you get un-packed and settled in?"

"Settled-ish. I seem to be sharing my accommodations with a rack of torpedoes."

"Would you rather hot-bunk?"

"J.J., any bunk I sleep in would be hot. At least your mother used to think so."

I felt the bile rising in my throat as the image. "Jesus Christ Dad. Do you mind?"

My dad laughed a laugh that made my eye twitch, "I didn't mind one bit, that's how you got here after all. You know, you could call more often instead of treating me like a mushroom, keeping me in the dark all the time. I'm a cool dad. I'm a fun guy."

I rubbed my fingers against my temples and let out a pained groan. "Dad, can you please go bother your best friend instead of bothering me just because you're bored?"

"Can't do it, wouldn't be prudent. Besides, Trip is taking some rack time so you're the only one I've got to talk to, daughter," he answered back as he threw his arm around my shoulders and pulled me into a side hug.

Well, wasn't that just fuckin' great.

 

[Pineapple]

I'm guessing that as soon as we laid eyes on Mars with telescopes a LOT of butterflies started flapping, but only mid/post-WWII did they really start to manifest in meaningful ways.

The Space Race almost certainly never ended and is likely moving at a much faster pace. The N1 possibly never had launch complications, and the Soviets made it to the moon. Whether it was before or after the US wouldn't change much, because we'd still need to one-up them, and a nice, watery world with a breathable --albeit thin-- atmosphere is a perfect target. Also if H.G. Wells' War of The Worlds (or a similar fiction) wasn't butterflied away, that means both justifiably paranoid superpowers have a vested interest in making damn sure there aren't any aliens waiting to attack.

The cold war seems to still be in full tilt, meaning even more rocketry development. Specifically the super-heavy-lift capabilities for orbital weapons platforms such as high-yield MIRVs, Rods-From-God, Star Wars arrays, etc, as well as the tech to make said OWPs themselves. The story even states Olympus Junction had mass drivers --likely coilguns-- capable of acting as PDCs, which means a high fire rate, and/or very precise targeting.

Project Pluto had to have continued, as stable, high-thrust nuclear jets is huge for aerospace, like, absolutely fucking massive. The impact of that tech cannot be overstated; Air-breathing nuclear propulsion makes all of the Delta-V disadvantages of surface-launch rocketry utterly disappear, and closed-cycle vacuum-optimized nuclear engines wouldn't be far behind. That kind of propulsion is the only way we could have that kind of economical Earth/Luna-To-Mars bulk-cargo capability in the 60s/70s (there are several orbital elevators present on Mars by 1999, even one of them would take ages to build and mountains of resources).

Whether the SLAM (the original purpose of Project Pluto) was actually put into production or not is largely irrelevant, because MAD alongside the insane ecological damage means it'd never be used anyways (just like the Tsar Bomb had its tamper removed to half its yield to only 50Mt). Humans are self-destructive, but not that self-destructive.

Click to shrink...

I don't mind being word of god about the background.

The load bearing structure of the three space elevators + orbital ring (plus the duplicate set on earth) wasn't actually built by humans, rather, it grew from sequestered atmospheric carbon starting right after the end of world war 2.

by 1970, the 'growth' had stopped and the very clearly mechanical frameworks of the elevators and ring were finished. the existence of a supporting structure motivated projects to fill those spaces with machinery.

As a result there are hundreds of miles of elevator that contain nothing more than lift track and skeletal framing. There are even greater sections of the ring connecting all of the elevators together that are barren of any technology. In this case the egg did precede the chicken. Rocket development was more well funded than ever due in large part the complexities of landing a rocket on a geostationary high altitude pillar that has no flat surface to set down on.

Sorry Falcon 9, you got beat to the party on fully recoverable boosters, but only out of necessity.

The first operational lift elevator was Ebisu, in the Pacific Ocean and controlled (and funded) by Japan. this put JAXA in a fantastic place to get into orbit without burning tons of fuel they didn't really have, and it also let them be the first ones on Mars. The Mars elevator was, as you would imagine, built top down. As Japan doesn't have a submarine fleet they hired private contractors to provide those services as they built out their infrastructure. These people eventually formed the Mercenary Union. Skipjack was lifted into space on this elevator, though it wasn't named that at the time.

The elevator was named Tsukuyomi and, as on Earth, came online as the first on Mars. Skipjack arrived on this elevator.

The Earth-based 'American' elevator, known as Shangri-La is located in Panama, though due to the value of the elevator the US has turned Panama into a puppet state. This elevator came online as the last one to be completed on Earth. Jackie used this elevator to leave Earth.

The Mars-based American Elevator, also the third to come online on its respective planet, is called Jacob's Ladder, and is used almost exclusively by the US government, most especially the Navy, to deploy to and from Mars. Civilian use is allowed but rare. Jackie used this elevator to arrive on Mars.

The remaining Earth-Based elevator is located in Congo, due south of Kisangani and located precisely on the Equator. This is the only elevator that actually sits on land, though access via a river port is possible after a large scale canal project. The Congolese had their elevator online second and it is the most used elevator for commercial shipping and as a result Congo is an economic powerhouse. the Congolese government also controls the remaining Mars elevator, which naturally serves as a receiving platform as well as a platform for the majority of launches destined for places beyond the Asteroid belt.

Midway Station is an undersea habitat and military dock owned and operated by the Mercenary Union. It also serves as their main base of operations after the damage to Olympus Junction. the majority of the living space is inside of a pocket of dry land-it was deep within a cave and higher than the entrance-that was not flooded in the early 30s when the first comets crashed into Mars and began to turn it blue.

Naturally, as Mars had a mostly carbon dioxide atmosphere there was more to work with (and less material needed) and so that tower and ring was completed a decade ahead of the one on Earth, allowing for some prediction of what the final result would look like, and allowing development to begin on supporting technologies. The relative similarity of the two megastructures also meant that they could send fully constructed modules ahead of the construction crews, allowing a top-down building of the elevators that allowed them to come online in a fraction of the time of their Earthbased counterparts, although the reduced scale played a factor in this as well.

The process that stripped the carbon from the atmosphere, naturally, released oxygen on both planets.

 

[Pineapple]

This May Be A Business Run By Family, But It's Not A Family Business.​

Martian soil was something of a rare commodity, given that there were only a few places above water on the whole planet and most of those were covered with ice. Most people who found themselves standing on on terra firma did so at the bottom of the ocean.

"It's not that I don't trust the science here, it's just that last time I was in a submarine with a hole this big in it we were sinking." I commented off hand as Trip operated the chain hoist that was lowering the drilling rig to me on the ocean floor.

"Hey, we've got a pressure skirt. A lot of boats just leave that last few inches of water at the bottom," he answered as the feet of the drill began to settle into the mud. He was right, of course, flowing water would have made the job more difficult than it already was.

"Either way," I grumbled, my fingers picking at the shackle holding the top of the drilling rig to the chain, "the sooner I get out of this mud hole and back up there where I'm actually inside of the pressure hull the better."

"You're not wrong," he admitted as slammed the ram-set in his hand against the drill's support leg, firing a bolt through a hole pre-cut into the plate, anchoring it to the ocean floor. The ignition of the powder charge sounded like a gunshot, because it basically was.

I glared at him and held my hands over my ears for the next two bangs of the ram-set, not that my ears weren't already ringing from the first one. He could finish by himself if he wanted to be like that. I grabbed onto the ladder rungs set into the bulkhead next to me and started to haul myself up into the moon pool room.

My dad was hunched over a junction box with thick cables trailing into it from the battery room, the drill sitting fifteen feet below us on the ocean floor, and the drill stem loader. To his left, leading down to the drill, the chain tightened back up as the winch reversed.

"Positive tension, we're anchored for drilling." Trip called up from below while I kicked my boots off from the edge of the decking. Mud in my CIC? Hell no.

"Dad?" I asked over to him, looking in time to see him screwing the access panel back down.

"Drill is ready as soon as Trip gets back up here," he confirmed as he toggled the power to the system and the amber caution lights on the equipment began to flash.

Long chain hydrocarbons were one of the stranger things that we'd found up here, on Mars. Nobody had actually been here before the back to back strike of about a thousand comets slammed into the planet with an orbital eccentricity greater than one. After that, well, who is to say where they came from? More importantly, it was one of those questions that people didn't like to ask too loudly.

Some, like 'how did that many comets end up on the same collision course with Mars?' were best left unasked entirely.

Of course, long chain hydrocarbons meant that even those of us not blessed with atomic power could operate near indefinitely. A vessel with a drill, like ours, could theoretically stay submerged for as long as it took for our food to run out, albeit most of the time at periscope depth.

The relative purity of those hydrocarbons was another thing that we all agreed we wouldn't look to hard at, let the science guys worry about the implications, we'd worry about sinking pirates.

Or in this case, worry about setting up a well head so a submarine tanker could fill up and keep the generators at Midway running for a while longer.

"Random stop program is running. We ready to drill or what?" Trip's voice cut across my thoughts like a dog dragging it's--

"Fuck it, let's poke a hole. Fire it up, Pops." I answered as I stood up in my socks, shuffling over to the rack of drill stem to make sure the straps were released. We had about four hundred fifty feet of stem, my sincere hope was that we'd strike gold before we ran out.

The drill started up with a low chug, and continued along at the same speed. Low speed, high torque. Keep things as quiet as we could. The random stop program gave us randomized stop intervals of random length, to keep anyone from figuring out a pattern to our noise and sneaking up on us.

Of course, our drill site was equally useful for that. A nearly perpetual thermal layer sat more or less right above our masts and the trench we had set down in shielded us from any side scan. We were about as safe and quiet as we could be, given that we were boring a hole into the seafloor.

"So why are you getting the seventy five percent cut when you're using our drill, Dad?" I asked with a slight frown. Even the twenty five percent cut wasn't bad money… which honestly rubbed more salt in the wound.

"Well, it's my contract and you don't know how to set up a permanent well head. Also I literally made you, J.J." He answered with that obnoxious grin and a clap of his oven mitt sized hand onto my shoulder.

I pulled his hand off my shoulder and cracked my neck as I walked around him to pick up my inside shoes, "Yeah, you did, although I'm not sure I'd call that a good thing. Besides, you weren't this tight with Trip."

"Well it was both of you then, and I like Trip!" he protested.

I tied the white lace sneaker with my foot against the railing around the erstwhile drilling pit. "I know you like him Dad, he's your buddy. I also know that you don't have the same relationship with marital fidelity that I do. Just because you were cheating your wife when you 'made me' doesn't mean I'm okay with being cheated on, but you two have fun."

"Hey hold the fuck on, are we not supposed to be friends? If you hate him so much why the hell do you keep him on your boat, Jackie?" Dad shot back with that finger, the one he pointed at me when he was proper angry.

Because I still lov—"He's a philanderer and a cheat but there isn't a better arms officer on the planet and I would know," I answered instead as I stomped out towards the CIC.

Trip gave me a deer in headlights look as I stomped past him, but he knew better than to say a word to me when I was in that state. Maybe that's why I was so pissed off, maybe dad had a point, thought. Dad did the exact same shit, him being buddies with my ex felt like a tacit endorsement of Trip's infidelity.

But I knew trying to get Dad to empathize with me on that particular point would be like trying to piss up a rope and I was far less equipped for that endeavor than he was. But maybe it wasn't fair for me to ask my Dad not to like him when I still had him on my crew.

Well, nobody ever said emotions were fair.

I stopped in the engine room on my way through to the bow. It had been widened considerably when the profile of the hull had changed with our extension, and there was as a result a lot more space between the engines. Not having them directly coupled to the propellers offered a lot of flexibility we might otherwise not have had.

It gave Jimmy more room to work and it gave all of us the benefit of much larger air scrubbers. Me most of all given the large number of un-bathed men on my boat.

Jimmy was, as he could usually be found when not working, laying in his hammock strung above the port engine. I was going to talk to him but the rip-saw like snoring that announced his presence drove that idea from my head. Better to let sleeping Jimmys lie.

Crew bunks were full of sleeping crew, as one would expect, and the heat and moisture that filled the air in the compartment was almost suffocating. I couldn't imagine what it would have been like in the war, given that I had maybe half that complement and it was… not unripe.

The CIC was nearly deserted but for Francis playing Gameboy at the sonar station and Ninety Percent Lewis passed completely the fuck out in the radio room. I gave a wave to Francis and he gave me a nod of acknowledgement as I passed by.

Admittedly, there wasn't much to do when the boat wasn't moving.

I briefly entertained the idea of raising the periscope and seeing if there was anything I could illuminate with the flood light, but that got old three years ago. The best solution for boredom on the submarine was the one that most of the crewmen had taken; rack time.

Sleep was a time machine into the future.

Hat, gloves, jacket all came off as I stepped through the hatch into the officer's quarters. Albert's room, Trip's, Mine. The warm bed would be better than the cold decking, and with the drill running that didn't spare many amps for the heaters.

Still, I mused as I bumped the door to my room open with my backside, blankets worked just fine and the more of them and the thicker, the better.

I reached to set down my jacket on my desk to see that there was already a jacket there, one of Marie's if I wasn't mistaken. I set mine atop it along with my hat and gloves. When I turned to my bed I confirmed that I was not mistaken as to the owner of the jacket.

Blankets worked even better for two.

 

[Pineapple]

From Now On They'll Call Me Jackie The Giant Killer​

"We've got the wellhead installed and the drill is stowed. We're ready for push-off to the next site." Trip's voice buzzed in my ear over the intercom headset. I was tired of sitting on the bottom, even if the nights weren't all that bad.

I felt a slight flush in my cheeks when I turned to look at Marie. She'd surprised me, but it turned out not to be a bad one in the end. "Marie, blow the tanks and take us up to periscope depth. I'd like to get some fresh air in here."

"No complaints from me. Letting a little air into the tanks now," she answered, and a moment later there was a slight jolt as the boat lifted up and out of the mud. The humming of the electric motors driving the moon pool doors shut followed a moment later before it ended with a thump.

"Ahead slow, no rush--"

"Conn, Sonar, picking up a subsurface contact bearing two six two… sounds like two five bladed screws. If it's a Delta Four, and I think it is, they're making turns for twenty knots at least. Range is about eight thousand." Francis announced over top of my order, and I couldn't complain.

"Marie, cease blowing the tanks, maintain our current depth and course. Francis, feed your data into fire control and work out a torpedo solution. I don't know what the hell they're in such a hurry for but we can help them to the bottom," I ordered as I reached over my head and turned the ship-wide lighting to blue.

The boat leveled off immediately and all of the little noises and whispers of conversation evaporated. If it wasn't necessary to make noise, we wouldn't be making any.

"Ma'am, I've got a firing solution."

"Send it to the forward torpedo room. Flood forward tubes one, two, and three, and open the outer doors," I ordered and wiped the sweat from my palm against my trouser leg. This was a hell of a whale to try to harpoon but with nukes getting thrown around it wasn't like there was much of a choice.

"Uh, Captain…"

I looked over at Francis and he had a look I hadn't seen on his face before: confusion. "What've ya' got?"

"For a second it looked like there was some VLF traffic coming from Jacob's Ladder. It's gone now—contact is slowing, sounds like they're flooding their missile launch tubes!"

Well, fuck me if that wasn't a hell of a coincidence.

"What the hell is even in range out here?" I asked aloud to, well, anyone.

"Uhh, Nzila-Mazulu?" Ninety Percent Lewis suggested.

Of course they were going to fire on the Congolese elevator. Motherfucker. "Do we have a firing solution?"

"We do," Francis confirmed with a look up from his station.

"Alright let's get ourselves killed. Launch tubes one through three!" I yelled and the sound of the pressure dumping into the tubes echoed through the hull, three torpedoes away.

"No reaction from the target, if they heard the launch they're not doing anything about it, still flooding their VLS tubes." Francis announced

"Keep sending tracking updates down the wire. I didn't just fire three spearfish to have them miss." And of course that fat fucking bounty check.

This was always the really tense part, the time between firing and impact when they could counter fire or an escort could appear out of the ether. A boat like that running that hot was still too good of a target to ignor—

I found myself behind the map table, which was weird because I'd been in my chair on the other side of it. My ass was wet which I didn't like and I couldn't hear a damn thing over the roaring sound in my ears. I also wasn't sure where my glasses were but that didn't really matter because half of the lighting was off so I wouldn't have been able to see anyway.

"J.J. on your fucking feet!" I heard screamed over the sound of the roaring before a pair of rough calloused hands hooked me under the armpits and hoisted me into a standing position. I recognized that voice. That wasn't just Dad, that was Captain Dad.

"Tell me we did not just get hit by a fucking torpedo!" I screamed over the roaring; a pipe had exploded and was letting the ocean in.

"Well I'd be lying!" Dad answered as I became aware of just how tilted to starboard the deck was. That wasn't good.

"Get back to the engine room and help Jimmy fire up the EPU," I told my dad as I stumbled across the CIC to Marie's station. I didn't bother to check to see if my dad had listened to me, I had more important matters to attend.

"Are we fucked?" I asked in a lower voice as someone had begun to secure the burst pipe.

"We are if we don't surface." she answered simply. No joking, no snark, no sarcasm. It was serious then.

"Well let's hope those spearfish do their job. Get us to the top any way you can. I sent dad to fire up the EPU. As long as we didn't take the hit to the screws you'll have full propulsion power for about fifteen minutes, will that help?"

"You say that like there's a good place to get hit by a torpedo. No, based on how she's handling I think we were hit in the sail," she speculated as our depth gauge slowly crept up into lower numbers.

"I'm going to be pissed if they broke my fucking periscope. Francis are you still with us? Is sonar still up!?" I yelled back to the sonar station.

Francis had blood pouring down his face but he didn't seem to notice, he was still fixed to his screen and doing his job. Shock or training? He looked up to meet my eyes and spoke, "There's a lot of noise but we've still got hydrophones."

"Then I'm done fucking around. Flood forward tubes four, five, and six and open the outer doors. Bring active sonar up one ping full power every five seconds, repeating. I want a firing solution on whoever the fuck fired that torpedo and I want it five minutes ago!" I ordered as I threw my hat to the ground and pushed my hands through my hair. Wet, sticky. I could deal with it later.

The high pitched whine that shrieked through the hull signaled the activation of the EPU. The emergency power unit was a curious thing. It was, for lack of a better comparison, a big torpedo engine hooked to a generator. Not unlike a ram air turbine on a jet liner, in an emergency we could start this thing spinning to get power back up.

Unlike a jet liner, our torpedo-fuel powered EPU produced eight thousand effective shaft horsepower.

The hull groaned with the sound of rending steel as we accelerated towards the surface, our propellers putting out more power than the four of our diesels combined due to the sheer output of the EPU. The only downside was the noise output and that the electric load could potentially blow out the main bus.

"Cap, the only thing out there is the Delta and our fish. I hear something that could be a helicopter rotor but we'd need the radar to confirm." Francis offered.

"I'll do it visually. You keep your ear on those torpedoes and call out any hits," I ordered as I stepped around the periscope to the locker on the opposite side. It was a small thing, shaped like a long pizza box. I popped it open and removed the Thompson submachine gun and it's magazine from within, before combining the two.

Sling over my shoulder, weapon under my arm. I grabbed onto the ladder for the moment we broke the surface, I wouldn't have much time before we were spotted once we were topside and whatever was up there had to be dealt with before it could deal with us. "Marie?"

"Five seconds!" she yelled back and I started to climb. This wasn't going to be a violent breaching like an emergency blow, no this would be comparatively gentle. Not out of a lack of urgency, more that I wasn't sure the boat wouldn't snap in half after being hit with a torpedo.

"Go!" she yelled, and I started to spin the wheel above my head.

Round and round and round, the hatch unlocked and I shouldered up through it like the devil was chasing me. A spray of water hit me as I came up the ladder and out onto the upper deck. I wasn't supposed to be outside yet.

The water pooling around my ankles was a clue that the outside had been let in, the sea spray from the—"holy shit."

The entire starboard side of the sail was just… gone, torn out along with a sizable chunk of the starboard superstructure. A goodly portion of our anti aircraft weaponry along with it. Even over the sound of the sea crashing into the boat I could hear the rotor of the helicopter overhead. Not exactly how I wanted my first breath of fresh air but hey.

A moment later the rotorcraft showed itself as it crossed over top of us and became visible through the wound it had put in us—if the three torpedoes occupying its four weapon hard-points were anything to go by—and he was coming around for another pass.

Nope.

"Get me a fucking stinger!" I screamed down the hatch before spinning out from behind the torn edge of the sail and loosing a burst of fully automatic fire from my SMG. Forty-five wouldn't do anything to a helicopter but it wasn't like he would be able to hear the caliber when the bullets started to hit him.

I had considered going for the forty up on the sail but the ladder to get up there was somewhere near the bottom of the sea. Instead, I held down the trigger as brass rained down around me, clattering and clanging against the decking, playing into the cacophony of muzzle blasts as I rode the lightning.

The bluff did the job, the helicopter pulled back from its run while the remote turret on the underside swung around to—oh that's not good. I ducked back behind the relative cover of the torn up sail as a spray of high caliber autocannon fire filled the space I'd just been standing and then continued on through the other side of the sail, tearing a hole the size of a trash can through it.

Okay, lesson: concealment isn't cover.

"Where's my fucking stinger!?" I yelled down into the hatch as I knelt down and threw the empty Thompson back into the CIC.

"Catch!" Trip yelled up to me as the cylindrical body of the missile launcher came sailing up through the hatch. Not a bad throw.

I snagged it by the carry strap and yanked it the rest of the way up and directly to my shoulder. Power was already on, I toggled targeting on and knelt in front of the hole that the fucker had shot through the port side of the sail.

There it was, straight above and coming around for a pass from the port side. It would have been a valid tactic if he hadn't given me my new window. Target in the center… the missile locked onto the engine of the helicopter and gave me tone.

Click. I squeezed the trigger and an instant later the rocket engine ignited and the stinger missile leapt from its tube and towards my foe, trailing a rope of fire behind it. The pilot hesitated, he couldn't decide in the split second he had if he wanted to die and kill us, or try not to die and miss his opportunity completely.

His delay robbed him of the chance to do either.

The missile tore into the center of the helicopter's engine intake and exploded a second later, enveloping the rotorcraft in a cloud of expanding debris. Bits of fire rained out of the smoke cloud, sizzling against the surface of the ocean.

Ahead and through the starboard hole, I saw three blasts near the surface in rapid succession with water spraying up into the sky, followed a few seconds later by a submarine with a very large hole in its back. At least we were going to be rich.
Hell, we might even be able to capture the thing if the crew didn't scuttle it first—and then the launch doors started to open, slowly and jerkily as if damaged. Didn't like that.

I dropped the missile launcher and jumped down the hatch into the CIC, the snap in my ankle told me nothing that I hadn't felt on impact. No worries, I bit my cheek against the pain. "Bring us right fifteen degrees, ahead flank and ram that fucking sub, now!"

Marie had slammed the telegraph forward before I'd even finished the order, her hands firm on the wheel as she turned the rudder. There wasn't much distance, probably not enough to gain any real speed but we would keep pushing after we hit if we had to.

The collision alarm sounded, echoing through the boat for three or four seconds before the sound of steel plates tearing drowned out everything else.

 

[Pineapple]

Spoiler

Brought To You, Courtesy Of The Red, White, And, Blue.​

The impact, in the end, was much worse on the Delta than it had been on us; our boat was still water tight. That wasn't to say it was un-damaged, the superstructure that made it look like a surface ship when surfaced was, well…

Skipjack was more of a Pug for the moment.

What was more important for the moment were the nuclear missiles in that boomer. Like most problems with pirates, it was a problem we could solve with violence, and the cacophony of boot-falls following me across the upper hull was me solving that problem.

I clenched my Winchester tight in my grip as I leapt off the mangled bow of Skipjack onto the broken back of the Delta Four, legs bicycling through the air before I crashed down onto the wet steel in a crouch.

My shotgun made a clacking noise as I eased the pump forward to chamber the first shell as I stood, "Trip, take your team to the forward escape trunk, I've got the launch tubes!"

He answered with a nod and took his team of five gunner's mates forward towards the sail while mine stayed near our impact point about half way down their vertical launch array. Whereas his team was composed of his own gunnery crew, mine was composed of Ninety Percent Lewis, the night shift Officer of the Watch Joslin Pike, and our ship's cook: the mononymic 'Bob'.

"Lewis, cover the hole in the hull and make sure nobody surprises us. Bob, get the charges on those missile tubes. Joslin, you're with me." I ordered while pointing where I wanted the first two.

Skip Lewis—I had finally looked him up in the company roster—had our only M16 but he was also the only one who'd actually carried one in combat, having been a U.S. Marine before he joined us. He might have been only a radioman, but every Marine learned how to shoot.

Bob on the other hand, well, he didn't really have much to say about where he came from but he cooked a mean bean soup and he knew more than most people should about shaped charges. Mostly I just had to bank on the idea that he wasn't going to blow the sub up while he was still on it.

Meanwhile, my boots were pounding the deck as I charged the dry dock shelter mounted to the forward most missile tubes. I really doubted they had enough missiles to fill them all, so it was an intelligent move to add extra ingress/egress.

I held up my hand to signal for Joslin to cover me while I let my shotgun hang from its sling to work the wheel on the door. One thing that most submarines lacked, that would have really come in handy for the crew of this Delta, were door locks.

The wheel turned smoothly in its race and it was about four turns till the bolts slid out and the hatch swung freely. In my left hand, I thumbed a flash bang off my bandolier and eased the pin out with my teeth.

Door open, I tossed the grenade over the gap, releasing the spoon a moment before shouldering hard back into the door—and had the door shoved back against me an instant before the grenade popped. My ears started to ring, but I didn't have it nearly as bad as the Russian who stumbled out into Joslin's line of fire.

Joslin had come up through the Royal Navy much in the same way I'd come up through the U.S.N., though she didn't have a sunken boat on her record. Even so, our backgrounds were similar and she was a shoe-in for the job.

Four back-to-back blasts of buckshot erupted from her shotgun. Her finger was tight on the trigger as she pump-fired the shells into the dry dock shelter, and the men within. The sound of the buckshot scattering around the inside of the metal can was… evocative.

"Clear!" she yelled, and I spun around the edge of the hatch with my shotgun in hand.

Three very much not alive Russian sailors with three very much intact SKS rifles. "Bag those," I whispered to Joslin as I pointed down to the weapons. Beyond the rifles lay an open hatch into the submarine, with flickering red light emanating from the hatch in a dance against the walls of the chamber that looked almost like fire.

I eased the muzzle of my shotgun over the edge of the hatch and checked the mirror taped to the end of it for anyone standing in wait below. I didn't really like the idea of not knowing how many were on-board, but I was glad enough that I wasn't going to get shot the second I dropped down the ladder.

Out of the corner of my left eye I saw the blaze orange of a mylar flotation bag; Joslin was loading the rifles up for recovery. Waste not, want not, right?

I jumped into the hole and landed in a crouch inside of the submarine. The source of the flickering became obvious, half of the emergency lights were blown and the other half kept shorting to the hull. I wasn't sure if that was from the torpedo attack or when we rammed them but I'd take it.

The path to the launch control room was flooded, and so I took the high path to the control room of the boat. If I couldn't disable the launch controls, I could sure as fuck scuttle the boat. Onward and upward, or forwards and upwards as the case may be, the muzzle of my shotgun lead the way.

Deltas were huge boats, but fortunately most of that length was missile tubes, we were only a couple of minutes away at the most.

"J.J., we're ready to breach the control room." Trips voice whispered into my ear over the radio.

"I'll be there in one twenty, breach on my mark," I answered back, I could bitch him out about the nickname later. The my hands were tight on the shotgun, storming a room we couldn't see inside of always held a lot of risk, but less than letting them fire strategic weapons.

Even in the low gravity my boots felt heavy as we stormed up the last flight of stairs. I was aware of how few people we'd seen and that bothered the hell out of me for reasons I was unsure of but I was sure that they'd soon become clear.

Around the corner, a single guard. I squeezed the trigger and took him in the chest with a round of buckshot. I cycled the pump and rushed for the door, they would have heard that. "Breach!" I yelled into the open channel as I sprinted down the final corridor, Joslin hot on my heels.

Oh yeah, this was cardio.

The hatch wheel turned, I jumped into the air. Time seemed to slow as a crescent of light appeared around the corner of the door. My shoulder was low, my weight was behind it. The door was heavy, the man behind it more-so, but I could run a four minute mile and he wasn't ready.

I heard my collar bone crack when I hit, the door slammed back on its hinges and I slid across the steel decking of the control room with the momentum I had left. The guy holding onto the door was above and in front of me, I raised the shotgun from my vantage on the floor and squeezed the trigger. At that range, the buckshot didn't even scatter before it punched through his torso and into the bulkhead.

I pumped another round into the chamber as I slid to a stop, then fired one round straight up into the face of an extremely surprised planesman, who didn't have much of a chance to worry about it. A boot came crashing down onto the shotgun after that, pinning it to my chest and knocking the air from my lungs.

The right elbow of my jacket slammed into the ground and my little two shot thirty eight slid out into my hand. Click, bang. His hat hit the ceiling and he tumbled off of me like a tree felled by an axe. Other gunfire bled into my perception as I started back to my feet.

But the time I made it there, the action was over.

One survivor that I could see, seven who didn't. On their side, my guys were fine. The Russian captain was easy enough to spot by his uniform. The survivor on the other hand, the one with a bullet in his shoulder, had a decidedly… different uniform.

"And who the fuck are you?" I asked the man held up by his shirt collar while a shotgun rested under his chin. His uniform told me one thing, but of course I needed to hear it from the horse's mouth.

"No, who the fuck are you?" he asked me in return with the kind of smug venom that I knew to expect from people like him. The accent, the attitude, the uniform.

I drove the butt of my shotgun into his gut and knocked the wind from him to give him some time to think about that while I turned to trip. "Where'd you find him?"

"Operating an American VLF set. Funny thing, that." Trip said to me with a sort of mock casualness that betrayed the very palpable fear forming in the room.

I turned back to our captive and grabbed him by the chin to lift his eyes to mine. "I'm Commander Jacquline Johnson, US Navy Retired. Again, who the fuck are you, sailor?"

That arrogant smirk crossed his face again, "I'm afraid I don't answer to people who sink their own ship."

"I was afraid you were going to say that," I answered as I took a step back and slid my shotgun back over my shoulder. I turned towards the aft hatch to the control room, I would be going back out the way I came.

"What about him?" Joslin asked as I walked past her.

"Shoot him. We're leaving, if the scuttling charges we have set don't do it we'll use an ADCAP." I put my head in my hands. We were absolutely fucked, but then that did answer the question of where the hell the pirates were getting back into orbit. Of course the Americans blamed the Congolese.

The footsteps behind me as I left the room must have been Joslin. The gunshot came a moment later and I flinched. "If we're running from the Americans, to where can we run?" She asked me.

"Tsukuyomi." I answered simply. "The Japanese are the only ones who can stand up to them."

"Olympus Junction is still inaccessible."

"I know, but we're not going up."

Of course we wouldn't be going anywhere if the Skipjack couldn't sail.