Steven Kent - 100 Fathoms Below

Stubic groped his way into the berthing area. “Don’t bother trying to hide from me. I can hear you.”

Jerry pulled himself farther along the floor. Stubic moved through the bunks and sniffed the air, trying to catch Jerry’s scent.

“Who are you? Spicer? Goodrich? No.” Stubic inhaled voluptuously, like a kid smelling candy. Then he grinned, his fangs glistening in the red light. “White.”

Shit. Jerry glanced at the curtained doorway of the berthing area—too far away for him to make a break for in this condition. He thought about shouting for help, but that would just give Stubic his exact location, and he knew how fast these creatures could move.

“Aren’t you tired of always following orders, White? ‘Aye, sir. No, sir. Please, can I have some more, sir.’”

Stubic was inching closer. Jerry pulled himself forward, gritting his teeth against the pain in his injured arms. He slid from behind one bunk to behind another, but the doorway still seemed miles away. Stubic cocked his head, listening to the sound of Jerry’s coveralls sliding against the deck, and gave a wry smile.

“Instead of doing what you’re told, wouldn’t you rather take what you want instead? Answer only to yourself and your desires? Wouldn’t you rather be at the top of the food chain, instead of the bottom?”

Jerry’s arms hurt so much, he could barely move them, but he had to keep going. He grabbed the foot of the bunk and pulled, sliding himself around it. Stubic paused, tilting his head to listen. The smile remained on his face, sharp and malevolent.

“I can make that happen for you, White. I can give you the gift of the green-eyed queen. I can make you like me, and then you’ll never have to follow orders again.”

Green-eyed queen? What was he talking about? Keeping his eyes on his pursuer, Jerry continued pulling himself toward the doorway. Suddenly, Stubic moved, fast as a cat, from where he had been standing amid the bunks. Jerry turned, and there he was, standing right before him, blocking his way. Jerry’s heart sank. Stubic had known where he was all along, and had only been toying with him.

In a single arcing movement, Stubic picked Jerry up off the deck by his coveralls and slammed him into the side of a triple-decker bunk so hard that the curtain rod came loose and fell to the deck with a loud metallic clang. Jerry’s face and broken knee shrieked in agony.

He gritted his teeth against the pain. “We killed the others. We’ll kill you too. One blind vampire can’t take over an entire submarine.”

Still holding him by the coveralls, Stubic grinned, his lips pulling back from his fangs.

“Who said there would only be one of us?”

“Captain, sir, there’s no cavitation coming from the other sub,” Tim reported, moving one earphone of his headset aside so he could hear. “I don’t understand it. The engine sounds Soviet, but the screw isn’t making any noise at all.”

“That doesn’t make sense, Spicer,” Captain Weber said from the door of the sonar shack. “A bear’s screw is loud as a lawnmower. They’re reliable that way.”

“I know, sir. Is it possible she’s one of ours? We’re close enough to Alaska that they might have come looking for us.”

The captain shook his head. “The navy wouldn’t risk sending another boat into Soviet waters just to find us.”

“Then I really don’t understand what this is, sir,” Tim said.

The captain straightened, his eyes widening in realization. “This is it, Spicer. This is what they sent us to find! The prototype submarine. She’s real, and we’ve found her.”

Tim looked at the screen again, at the shapes the sonar vibrations were creating within the cascading colors. The next generation of Soviet submarine? Was it possible? He felt as if he were looking into the future. Ten years from now, twenty, thirty, would some other sonar tech be sitting where Tim was and looking at the same readings on their screen, listening to the same sounds? And if they were, would they have learned about this very moment during their training—the moment a US Navy submarine picked up the first of a brand-new class of Soviet submarine on sonar?

“Are you recording her?” the captain asked.

“Aye, sir,” Tim said. “She still hasn’t detected us. If she had, she wouldn’t be running this loud.”

“Keep an eye on her,” Captain Weber said. “And keep recording. I want to bring back as much information as we can.”

A loud metallic clang in Tim’s earphone startled him, reflected in the sonar display by a sudden bright flare. Aukerman winced in pain and threw his headphones off.

“What the hell was that?” Aukerman asked.

“Whatever it was, it came from inside Roanoke ,” Tim replied.

“Shit,” Aukerman said. He slipped his headphones back on.

On the screen, the readings for the Soviet submarine shifted.

“Captain, sir, I think she heard us,” Tim announced. “She’s turning our way.”

“Has she engaged active sonar, Spicer?” Captain Weber asked.

“Not yet, sir.”

Then he heard something else on his headphones—something that made him go cold. The unmistakable sound of torpedo tube outer doors sliding open.

“This is how we survive,” Stubic said, pinning Jerry against the bunk. The vampire’s blind, unfocused eyes seemed to look through him, into his soul. “We feed and multiply and spread the gift of the green-eyed queen. And what better place for us to thrive than in the darkness of the ocean?”

“My friends will stop you,” Jerry said through gritted teeth. “Even if you kill me, they will take you down. It’s over. It ends here.”

Stubic laughed—a hideous sound that raised goose bumps on Jerry’s flesh.

“You’re missing the point, White. For my kind, there is no end.”

Stubic’s groping hands found Jerry’s head and pushed it to the side, exposing the neck. He bared his fangs and leaned in.

Captain Weber stood behind Tim’s chair and looked at the sonar screen. “If this bear detects us, we’re as good as dead. We broke into her house. If she shoots us, it’s a freebie. And we’d be fools to fire on her first with those ships on top of us.”

He was right. If Roanoke torpedoed the Soviet sub, the two ships on the surface would hear the explosion and drop their acoustic gear. Roanoke would be located, torpedoed, and its presence labeled an act of war. With both superpowers’ fingers on the button, Tim could imagine things escalating quickly.

He said, “Sir, my best guess is that she’s about ten miles out and closing. Her torpedo doors are open, but she’s still on passive sonar. She may not know for sure yet that we’re here.”

“We’re going to have to sneak out of here.” Weber ducked back into the control room and said, “Maintain current speed and depth. Slow and low, gentlemen—that’s how we’ll get out of this.”

On the sonar screen, the Soviet sub adjusted its bearing, diving to Roanoke ’s depth until it was aligned behind them. Tim’s chest tightened. His throat went dry. Had they detected Roanoke , or was this just an unrelated change in their bearing? It was possible the bear was trying to lose itself in Roanoke ’s baffles—the cone of water directly behind the sub, which the hull-mounted sonar couldn’t hear through. It was an unintentional blind spot caused by the need to insulate the sonar array from the noise of the submarine’s own engines, and one the Soviets had learned to exploit. It was also possible she was lining up to fire a torpedo at them. If only there were some way to know for sure whether they had been detected—some other way than being fired on.