Polaris Read online

  “Of course,” said Hamlin.

  “Ship is on course two-four-zero, twelve knots, depth seven hundred feet,” he said. “Rigged for general emergency. The port nonvital bus is deenergized because of the fire in the motor generators. I’m guessing about half our lights are out. Sierra One, our shadow, is still behind us, about one mile abaft.”

  “OK,” Hamlin responded.

  Holmes looked at him in disbelief. “Did you just say ‘OK’?!” He looked to Moody for affirmation, and then back at Hamlin. “How about, ‘I am ready to relieve you’? That’s the customary phrase at this point.”

  “I am ready to relieve you,” he said.

  “No, you’re not,” said Moody, stepping forward suddenly. She looked him up and down impatiently. “You’re hurt worse than you look, aren’t you?”

  “Maybe,” said Hamlin.

  Holmes sighed loudly in disgust.

  Suddenly Moody turned and slapped Holmes across the face, stunning them all. “I’ll relieve you, Frank, how’s that? Go belowdecks and eat, or read a comic book, or whatever it is you do in your free time, you weak son of a bitch.”

  Holmes trembled in rage and shame.

  “Go!” she said. “Now! I relieve you! I have the deck and the conn.”

  Holmes stormed out of the control room, leaving the two of them standing there.

  She stared at Pete with concern. “You always were tough,” she said. “Don’t risk the ship on it.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She looked around to verify that no one else was in the control room, and leaned in. “I love it when you call me that,” she whispered in his ear.

  She then stepped back. “Now get yourself to sick bay, Hamlin, and pull yourself together.”

  He waited a moment before responding. “Yes, ma’am.”

  * * *

  Moody exhaled deeply as Hamlin walked out of the control room. Could she trust him? She’d seen the gun in his hand, seen Ramirez dead at his feet. Still, he seemed off, perhaps hurt worse than it appeared. She would ask the doctor after he’d had a chance to look him over; maybe he’d medicate him with something. If the drugs were good enough, maybe they could all use a dose. For now, she knew only the next step in the patrol order, the one thing the captain had shared with her, and he’d done that only when he had to. But it was a doozy: they were going to drive through the old Pacific degaussing range. Ever since she found that out, she’d been trying to figure out what it meant for the rest of their mission.

  And she could only guess, because no one would tell her.

  But now Hamlin wouldn’t have any choice. He would have to show her the complete patrol order so they could fulfill the mission. And Hamlin should trust her, shouldn’t he? She’d thwarted those two traitors, one of whom Pete himself had killed.

  From the beginning, she hadn’t known what to make of him. Maybe it was a natural by-product of him being on the ship the least amount of time—a few weeks, when Frank, the next-newest crew member, had been onboard for two solid years, never stepping outside the hull that entire time. They all knew each other like one big dysfunctional family, living in a house with no windows that they could never leave.

  But it was more than that: Pete was opaque. He wasn’t quite Alliance, and he wasn’t quite Navy. But the simple fact was now she had to trust him.

  And surely he could see that she had only one goal: the mission. And beyond that, the Alliance. It was all a big joke to McCallister and Ramirez, always had been, a punch line. The Alliance officers like her and Frank, with their coloring-book training and their in-depth knowledge of Alliance dogma. Moody could debate them into the ground about international politics. Unfortunately, on a submarine that had been on patrol for far too long, that was much less important than being able to keep a main feed pump working, or the generators going. At least in Captain McCallister’s eyes.

  But that’s why she was here; that’s why the Alliance had put her onboard, made her second-in-command. Because she believed in the mission with the same kind of purity Ramirez had tried to get out of his roaring evaporators. From the cold murk of the ocean that surrounded them, he could produce water a thousand times cleaner than anything available on land, a requirement for his nuclear power plant. That’s what was required with ideology, too; it had to be even purer at sea than anywhere else, to hold up under the relentless pressure that constantly tested them all. Ramirez had never believed that, and neither had the captain. But now: she was in charge.

  She looked down at the display and checked again for the two undeniable realities in their ocean at the present time: the next step of their mission, represented by the two bright, straight lines of the degaussing range fifty miles ahead. The lines were superimposed electronically on the screen, essentially drawn on by the computer. It was a motionless, silent structure that was invisible to their sonar, or anyone else’s. The bright lines on the screen conveyed certainty, but they were just the coordinates they’d inputted, a visual representation of where the range was supposed to be.

  The upside-down V behind them on the screen represented less certainty, but was at least the result of real acoustic information, the thin but steady stream of noise that came to them from their shadow, the other submarine that had dogged them for days. Despite what she told Frank, she was certain she was a Typhon boat, based not only on her menacing posture but also on that noise: she was too loud to be an Alliance boat. A modern Alliance craft in their baffles like that would be silent and invisible. She sat down on the small foldout seat in front of the console, fiddled with the range, and realized for the first time how exhausted she was.

  * * *

  It was hard to believe that just three years earlier she’d been a high school teacher. Business and Econ, her only responsibility a roomful of disinterested eleventh graders in Oak Lawn, Illinois. It was a working-class area, the kind of area that the military had always fed on: patriotic kids without a lot of options. So when the war heated up, Oak Lawn sent its share to all three services, and Ms. Moody was one of the teachers who encouraged them, making her a friend to the recruiters that periodically swept through the halls giving away ARMY OF ONE T-shirts and promises of upward mobility, college tuition, and adventure.

  At first, like most of the teachers, she was conflicted about sending the kids away. Even though she believed deeply that it was the right thing, she knew many of them would end up in harm’s way, and some of them would end up hurt, or even dead. Many of the teachers quietly discouraged kids from joining for just that reason, although they soon learned to keep their mouths shut about any doubts they had. Teachers were public employees, and public employees who were labeled as unpatriotic soon found their careers limited. Especially as the enemy had one success after another in the Pacific, and the war seemed to close in on them all.

  But as time went on, Moody began to actually envy those kids. The war consumed all the media, and it was clear, as the Alliance coalesced in a last-ditch effort to defeat Typhon, that democracy itself was at stake. Many of her former students were in the fight, doing something about it. They would come back to school occasionally, with their uniforms and their ribbons, and sometimes even with their wounds, and she could see it in their eyes: their lives had purpose in a way that hers did not. Meanwhile she continued to count textbooks and teach supply and demand, the Laffer curve, and price elasticity.

  Finally, one day, a Navy recruiter lingered in her room after giving the standard pitch to her kids, and they struck up a conversation about officer programs. She fit the criteria, he enthusiastically told her: she was young, single, a college graduate. She found herself surprised as she listened, surprised at how right it all felt. She gave herself one more day to think about it, and then she drove down to the recruiting office, sandwiched between the Department of Motor Vehicles and a Laundromat, and volunteered to be a US Naval Officer. Over the next few days, she filled out a stack of forms with her personal information, took a short medical exam and a basic math
test. The fantasy grew in her mind with each step: military glory, exotic ports of call, her own return to Oak Lawn in uniform, an example to all.

  One week later, the Navy rejected her.

  The embarrassed recruiter was flabbergasted. He tried his best to assuage her, afraid it would turn her against the entire recruiting program, of which she had become Oak Lawn High School’s biggest supporter. He attributed it to an unusually good month for officer program recruiting, her lack of a technical degree, some kind of glitch in her application. He asked her repeatedly if perhaps she had something dark in her past that would have come to light in the initial background check, perhaps a youthful DUI or a shoplifting arrest. He finally left her alone in her classroom when it became clear that she now regarded his shoulder boards and ribbons as an insult, a reminder of her rejection.

  For two weeks she simmered about it. The school year ended, and she resigned herself to a life in her small classroom, perhaps inspiring her students toward adventure, or maybe even glory, but never tasting it herself. Perhaps after the war and retirement, she thought, she could take a budget trip to Europe and see Rome or Paris.

  Then one day as she sat at her desk in an empty classroom, compiling another semester of grades, a stranger walked into her room.

  “Ms. Moody?” he said with a smile. “I’m Chad Walker. I’m a recruiter with the Alliance.” He handed her a business card that had no rank or title, just a name, phone number, and email address. And he wore no uniform, just a tasteful dark suit. She invited him to sit down. He somehow managed to look perfectly comfortable in the undersized desk–chair combo right in front of her.

  The Alliance needed officers, too, he told her. Men and women who would work alongside the traditional military. People like her were desperately needed. “And I believe,” he said, looking her right in the eye, “that you would thrive as a military officer.”

  “Would I have a military rank?” she asked. “A normal uniform? Could I do any job in the military?”

  Walker answered yes to all her questions. You’ll have all the same opportunities as a traditional military officer, he assured her. The war effort, and recent legislation, guarantees it.

  “So what’s the difference between being an officer in the Alliance and being an officer in the regular Navy?”

  Barely any difference at all, he said with a chuckle. If you ascend high enough, you would eventually end up working at Alliance headquarters, rather than at the Pentagon. But in the trenches, you’ll be a military officer, with the same privileges and responsibilities.

  She said yes before he left her classroom.

  There was a background check again, and another skills test. While the Navy had asked her math questions, the Alliance asked her political questions, and she wasn’t always sure what answer they wanted to hear. Did she always vote? Had she ever run for office? Could she name the five original member countries of the Alliance? Could she name its current commander? Did she believe that every nation could function as a democracy? She sweated over the answers, desperate not to feel the sting of rejection again.

  Two weeks after her physical, she got a congratulatory letter and her orders. She would begin basic orientation at the Alliance Training Center in the countryside west of Baltimore in one month. The orders contained a list of items she was to bring with her to training, and what not to bring: “minimal” cosmetics were allowed. Playing cards were not. The congratulatory letter was from the Alliance Commander, whose name, she saw, she had gotten incorrect on the entrance exam. She resigned from the Oak Lawn school district the next day.

  Chad Walker was right about one thing: Moody did thrive as a military officer. She found an athleticism she never knew she had during training, excelling on the obstacle course, the daily runs, and the hand-to-hand combat sessions. She learned to her surprise that she was still a very good swimmer, her best sport in high school, cutting through the water so efficiently that she lost herself in the process, swimming laps until she lost count and had to pull herself exhausted up the ladder. The order and rigor of military life came easily to her; she was one of those people the military has always coveted, a person who found great comfort in being part of a system.

  “Systems” was a keyword in her Alliance training, a shorthand for the simplified block diagrams they used to explain everything. The entire submarine was reduced to three blocks labeled CONTROL, WEAPONS, and PROPULSION. Turn a page and propulsion was reduced to blocks of PRIMARY and SECONDARY. One more page and the primary system was turned into blocks of NUCLEAR REACTOR, MAIN COOLANT PUMPS, and STEAM GENERATORS. Occasionally they would drag in an actual engineer who would show them photographs of pumps, breakers, and pipes, but it all looked drab and undramatic, indistinguishable blobs covered in wires and lime-green insulation, objects whose appearance seemed unworthy of their exalted positions and titles on the block diagrams. The reactor itself, the holy grail of the ship, the block that touched in some way every other block of every other diagram, looked like a large steel trash can penetrated by a dozen ordinary-looking pipes. After studying its characteristics and the nearly magical process of nuclear fission, seeing what a real reactor looked like filled Moody with the exact same flavor of disappointment she’d felt when she lost her virginity.

  All the block diagrams were compiled in a softcover book that they were encouraged to take notes on, and it was universally referred to, by teachers and students, as “the engineering coloring book.”

  The philosophy of the Alliance was treated similarly, in a separate coloring book: broad outlines in a neat, digestible framework. The pre-Alliance world was shown as a jumble of democratic nations, represented by small- and medium-sized blocks—the United States, Britain, Canada—all jumbled on a page, their energies directed in different directions, friendly but tragically unorganized. Opposing them, on the opposite page, was a large, unified block that contained inside it the allied nations of Typhon. Ominously, they were lined up neatly inside the Typhon block, and the lines of their individual borders were dissolving, as if Typhon were feeding on them to gain strength against the peaceful, unorganized nations it preyed upon.

  On the next page, though, the Alliance was born: a giant dotted line that surrounded the friendly countries, which had suddenly lined up neatly to face their enemies in the Typhon block. Moody gathered that because the Alliance nations kept their solid borders intact despite their overarching block, they were still free and independent, just better organized to fight their enemy. Twice during their political course, they got word from their instructors that allegiances had shifted. An Alliance nation shifted to Typhon, and a Typhon nation shifted to the Alliance, and they were instructed to scratch out and hand-draw them in their updated positions on the appropriate pages of the coloring book.

  She excelled at every stage of training, graduating number one in her class, and was given her choice of orders. She chose Polaris, the most advanced submarine in the fleet.

  Once onboard, she soon found out that Chad, her recruiter, wasn’t right about everything. She was not indistinguishable from other military officers. In fact, since their uniforms were all the same, it was generally the first thing officers asked each other at the officers’ club, or the Navy Exchange, or the base gym while making small talk. And it was clear that when you answered “Alliance,” this was somehow a second-class status. Over beers, some regular officers would even confide in her, often while trying to romance her, that while they weren’t talking about her, of course, everybody knew that the Alliance officers were generally men and women who’d been rejected by the regular military. The Alliance recruiters got lists of every reject, which became their feeding ground. The highest compliment that anyone could pay an Alliance officer was that they probably could have made it as a regular. This was a compliment that, to Moody’s disgust, the Alliance officers even paid to each other.

  It all just made her work harder, volunteer for every tough position, and pounce on it with a giant chip on her shoulder.
On the Polaris, she attacked her qualifications and was promoted twice in a year. After two more years of impeccable fitness reports, and setting a squadron record for the physical fitness test, she was promoted to second-in-command. She got another personalized letter from the Alliance Commander, and oak leaves for her uniform. They had a real dinner in the wardroom to mark the occasion, with a roast beef that Ramirez had found in the darkest recesses of the deep freeze, served with respectable gravy and a loaf of fresh bread that was downright good. After the meal, Captain McCallister pinned the oak leaves on her collar and told her that he was delighted to have her as his Executive Officer.

  Just a week later, she stepped into the galley to get a cup of coffee before taking the watch. The coffeepot was full and fresh, and the wardroom door was closed, indicating that someone was having a conversation that they didn’t want overheard. She filled her cup and stood silently for just a minute, her curiosity piqued.

  “So that’s the way it is?” She could hear Ramirez through the door.

  “She’s worked hard,” said McCallister. “As hard as any officer I’ve ever known. She deserves this. I would have made her my XO regardless.”

  “I don’t work hard, Captain?”

  “I need you in engineering. She’s not qualified to run that plant, and you know that.”

  “So I’m too qualified to be XO?”

  “Stop whining,” said the captain, not without affection in his voice. “You’re a fine officer, you’ll get your chance.”

  “If I can’t get promoted on this boat, I’ll never get promoted. They’ll never let me off. That’s the curse of an engineer.”

  There was a pause; then the captain spoke quietly. “Everything OK with Tracy?”

  “Fine,” said Ramirez. “I get letters every mail call, filled with pictures. I send letters every mail call. We’re great at this now, we’ve mastered it.”

  “Are you worried?”

  “Worried that we might just be good at this: being a couple that never actually sees each other.”