Piranha

“How are you looking over there, Quicksilver?” asked Delaford.

“Uh, well, the sea is kind of a brownish green,” said Zen.

Delaford laughed. “I can tell you how to change the colors if you want.”

“I’m just fine,” Zen told him.

“All right. Those two white blobs are our submarines. We’re twelve miles behind the closest one. This is as close as we want to get. They’re oblivious to us. All their attention is ahead. Pretty soon they’ll be turning around,” added Delaford. “They’ll pull a quick spin in the water to make sure there’s no one behind them.”

“What do I do then?”

“Just stop. Their active sonar can’t see us beyond roughly five miles, if that. Truth is, we could probably get right on their hulls and they’d never know we were there.”

“Okay.”

“Temperature sensors are not nearly as sensitive. Here, look at the screen.”

Delarod fed in the display. It took Zen a second to realize the orange fu

“Very obvious what sensor you’re looking at,” noted Delaford.

“Clever.”

Delaford ran through some of the routine, then repeated things Zen had already heard from one of the Navy briefers as well as Je

“Okay, so eventually these guys split up. It’s not going to matter who you go with, but once you do, you have to stay with him. Just make sure the other sub doesn’t come back around and try and sniff you out,” said Delaford.

“I thought they couldn’t see me.”

“Hear you. Probably, they won’t.”

“Probably?”

“If we could sneak past an American destroyer, I wouldn’t worry about a Chinese sub,” said Delaford. “On the other hand, that’s kind of why we’re here, to figure out what they can do.”

“All right, I’m ready.”

“I would go with the sub that heads west,” said Delaford. “That’s the one that will be likely to be closest to the Indian ships, so if they’re going to do anything fancy, that’s the one that’ll do it. We want to see if they lay mines, fire torpedoes, that sort of thing. Be an intelligence bonanza, as long as you don’t get in the way.”

“Okay, I’m ready.”

“When they surface, just hang back. They come up every so often to use their radio. You know the auto-destruct sequence, right?”

“Yes, we do,” shot in Je

“Our preference is to pick up the probe when we’re done. You can hit the home sequence. You remember?”

“Yeah,” said Zen. “You know, I’m really ready to go. Let’s do it.”

“All right, do a ten-degree dive for a hundred meters, then return to three hundred meters depth,” said Delaford.

Zen pushed the joystick forward, remembering he needed to move very slowly. A bright red number appeared on the grid line as soon as he pushed on the stick to its right, what looked like a compass with an artificial horizon appeared, showing the attitude of Piranha’s nose. The depth climber—or rather, dropped—through 310 quickly, but the attitude of the probe barely budged. It was like flying in thick honey. Or swimming in thick honey—Zen had trouble conceptualizing what he was doing.

“Good enough,” said Delaford as he hit the mark, then brought the probe back. “Every movement is very gentle. Very Zen-like, Zen.”

“Ha-ha,” said Zen.

“So when do I get to fly the Flighthawks?”

They ran through a few more maneuvers and the detection modes. Delaford then transferred complete control and watched over Zen’s shoulder for a while.

“We’ve got great data so far,” the Navy commander told them. “What we get from here out is just icing on the cake. Anything you find out—how deep they go, weapons—it’s all icing on the cake.”

“Chocolate or vanilla?” asked Je

Delaford laughed, then signed off.

Dog’s brief to Brea

He told Brea

That, and to make sure Dreamland couldn’t grab all the credit.