Polaris (11 page)

“Wake up, McCallister.”

Moody had appeared beneath his feet.

“Moody,” he said, his throat dry. “What do you want?”

“Wanted to take a look at you. Make sure you're OK. See if you're ready to cooperate.”

“Ready to cooperate?” He laughed. “It seems you and Frank have already taken over the ship. What do you need me for?”

“Not just me and Frank,” she said. “Hamlin, too.”

“Bullshit,” he said. “I don't believe you.”

“He killed Ramirez.”

McCallister hesitated at that, wincing at the dead man's name. “I'm sure he had his reasons.”

She snorted. “And you believe that? I saw him. He was standing over his dead body, the smoking gun in his hand. The only difference between Hamlin and me is that he doesn't have the balls to tell you where he stands. He wants me in charge, but he still wants you to think he's a swell guy.”

“I don't know what happened. Maybe Ramirez attacked him, maybe Pete got scared. That doesn't make him one of your conspirators,” he said. But Hana could hear the doubt creeping into his voice.

“Then consider this: we were just in my stateroom, reviewing his orders. He showed me everything. Unlocked the patrol order and read it in front of me.”

“No,” he said, shock in his voice. “I don't believe it. Pete's a good man. He would never cooperate with you.”

“Oh really? Let me review the patrol order with you: we're going to Eris Island. Now that we've degaussed, we can approach the island at periscope depth and go ashore. Our mission is to collect the cure and return it to the Alliance. Pete showed me the projections of the epidemic, everything.”

McCallister slumped against the side of the trunk.

“Everything you wouldn't.”

McCallister looked down at her. “Jesus, is that what this is about, Hana? That Alliance chip on your shoulder? You took over the ship because you felt slighted?”

“I
was
slighted!” she yelled. “You shared those orders with the ship's doctor, for Christ's sake, but not with me, your XO!”

“Exactly,” he said. “I made you my XO. I trusted you.”

“The Alliance made me XO,” she said. “But I made myself the captain. So now the Alliance is really running this ship, the way it should have been from the beginning. Guys like you and Ramirez—you're
mechanics
. Drivers.”

“Based on the atmosphere on this boat,” he said, sniffing the air, “you're going to need a good mechanic soon. How's the oxygen level, Moody? And by my calculations, we're about out of water, too, right?”

“You have no loyalty to the Alliance—”

“And your life depends on machinery that you don't understand.”

“You have no sense of mission—”

“No sense of mission?” He laughed loudly at that, the sound amplified and sharpened by the steel walls that surrounded him. “Moody, in my career I have targeted Trident missiles at Russian cities. I have
launched
cruise missiles at Tripoli and Tallil. On my first patrol, I had to fight a scram in maneuvering when the only light I had to read the procedure by came from a fire that burned in a main seawater pump breaker behind me. You think you're the expert on the mission of this submarine? I've got more time eating ice cream at test depth than you've got under way.”

He stopped, out of breath from his rant. Moody reached in her pocket and McCallister flinched, certain she was reaching for her Taser. Instead, she handed him two granola bars through the grate.

“Here,” she said. “I'm sure you're hungry.”

“You brought me food?” he said.

“Of course,” she said. “We're not barbarians.”

 

CHAPTER TWELVE

Pete walked briskly out of the engine room, through the tunnel, and into the missile compartment. He was greeted immediately by Haggerty.

“Pete! I've been looking all over for you.”

“I was … walking … touring.”

Haggerty gave him a quizzical look. “Clearing your head, too, I'm sure. Completely understandable. The engine room is one of the few places you can find some peace around here. Nobody goes back there unless they have to.” He looked around. “Are you starting to remember anything?”

Pete shook his head. “Bits and pieces,” he said. “Not really.”

“What else do you want to know?” said Haggerty. “Maybe I can help.”

Pete looked him in the eye. He had a million questions, wanted to know more about his mission, what was happening onboard
Polaris
before the mutiny. But one question overwhelmed him more than all that.

“I'd like to know more about my wife.”

The doctor shook his head sadly. “Come on,” he said. “Let's do this in my stateroom.”

*   *   *

The doctor had done what he could to make his stateroom comfortable. There was an antique medical diagram of a skeleton on the wall, next to a calendar with nature scenes. The calendar, Pete noticed, was three years out of date. A stethoscope hung on a hook, next to an old-fashioned black doctor's bag. He had a quilt covering his rack, and a shelf of well-worn novels.

An object on the second shelf caught his eye: a Lucite block with bees trapped inside.

“Honeybees,” said Haggerty, watching Pete closely as he picked it up. “At each stage of its life cycle.”

It was fascinating to look at: some tiny relic of the natural world entombed in perfectly clear plastic, each stage numbered, one through ten. Tiny white eggs, almost too small to see. A slightly larger larva, then the pupa, which was starting to look like a bee, with tiny legs and wings. A mature worker bee, and a queen. A perfect cube of honeycomb. The queen's cell, worker foundation, and finally a tiny vial of honey that poured back and forth as Pete tilted the block. He could have stared at it for hours.

“Something we studied in Biology, back when I was an undergrad,” said the doctor. “Fascinating, don't you think?”

“It's beautiful,” said Pete.

“Here,” said Haggerty. He'd poured two small glasses of scotch from a bottle he had hidden beneath socks in a drawer. They clinked the shot glasses together cheerlessly and drank them down.

“I never met Pamela,” said the doctor. “Your wife. But you talked about her all the time.”

“What did I say about her?”

“You met on the mainland. You had a whirlwind romance. You left her behind for your tour on Eris Island. You'd see her on leave, but honestly, Pete…”

“Yes?”

“You were plagued by guilt about it. Devastated, actually. We got your fitness reports before you transferred here, Finn shared them with me before you arrived—I'm the closest thing to a psychologist onboard and I guess he wanted my opinion. They all said the same thing—you were brilliant, had made vast contributions to the Alliance, but that after her death you were … a changed man. Said you'd been overheard blaming the Alliance for her death. Frankly, reading between the lines … it seemed like some of them were even beginning to doubt your loyalty.”

The word hung in the air, and the doctor and Pete looked at each other.

“What about you, Doc? Do you doubt my loyalty?”

The doctor shook his head. “I think, after all these years, after all the loss … any thinking man would begin to have doubts. About everything. Thank god we're not all like Frank and Hana. Or McCallister, for that matter, all blindly giving ourselves to the cause without ever thinking about right or wrong.”

Pete thought about his radio conversation in shaft alley. “I'm thinking about right and wrong,” he said. “I'm thinking about it all the time.”

The doctor leaned in and put his hand on Pete's shoulder. “Think about your mission now—you're going to Eris Island to get the cure for this terrible disease. The disease that killed your wife. It's a goddamn humanitarian mission if there ever was one. How could finding that cure be anything but good? I don't care who is doing it.”

Pete shook his head—the doctor's words certainty felt good. “That's true,” he said.

“That's why I want to help you,” said the doctor. “Let's have another drink.”

As the doctor poured his shot, Pete's eyes drifted back to the honeybees in the clear plastic block. Trapped, dead. So light, you couldn't feel their weight. And yet those tiny insects were part of a hive—a society, really—that was incredibly complex and captivating.

“Still looking at my little friends?” said the doctor. “Those guys have kept me company awhile now.”

“They're all female,” said Pete, surprised with the suddenness of that knowledge.

“What?”

“All the worker bees in a hive are female. The males, the drones, they keep them alive only long enough to impregnate the queen. Then the workers let them starve. The bees in that block: all female.”

The doctor shifted in his seat, uncomfortable with Pete's hard stare. “Of course,” he said. “You know something about bees?”

“I do,” said Pete.

And he knew, suddenly, that the bees in that block belonged to him. The doctor was lying to him.

“Thanks,” said Pete, putting down the honeybees and taking a second shot from the doctor. But this time Pete drank a silent toast to himself:
Here's to finding out the truth.

 

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The alcohol had the desired effect of clearing his head. Pete excused himself from the doctor's stateroom after the second shot, pretended to head for his own stateroom, and then turned and walked into control, where Frank was standing watch.

He looked up at Hamlin, surprised. “Here to relieve me?” he asked.

“If you ask nice,” said Pete.

“OK: fuck you,” he said.

Pete walked around control and stood in front of Frank. He extended his hand. “It's been a rough day,” he said. “I'm sorry if I stepped on your toes. I got whacked on the head down there pretty good—let me use that as my excuse.”

Frank looked at him warily but then took his hand. “Fine,” he said. “I appreciate that.” His grip was like a vise.

“And I am ready to relieve you,” said Pete. “Go grab some sleep, or get something to eat. Better yet, go to Haggerty's stateroom: he's handing out shots from his secret stash of scotch.”

“Now you're really starting to get on my winning side,” said Frank. He pointed at the monitor in front of them. “We're on course two-six-zero, heading for Eris Island at ahead flank.”

“Our shadow?”

“Right behind us, as always. She crept a little closer at about 0600, we caught a whisper of some kind of active transmission. But it was directly behind us and the recording sucks.”

“Interesting,” said Pete. It was his conversation from shaft alley.

“But now: status quo. Looks like she's following us all the way to Eris Island. I wish Moody would let us shoot a torpedo right down her throat.”

“I'm sure she has her reasons.”

“Whatever,” said Frank. “I'm ready to be relieved.”

“I relieve you.”

“I stand relieved.”

“This is Lieutenant Pete Hamlin,” he said into a microphone over his head, recording the procedure for the ship's digital deck log. “I have the deck and the conn.”

Frank stomped out of control without another word.

Control was quiet. Several alarms were still cut out, their lights a steady red on the main status board, the residual effects of the fire and the destruction in radio. Occasionally he felt a vibration and heard a slight whir, the sound of a hydraulic pump cycling to maintain pressure, or a fan cooling one of the ship's many computers, some of which chirped quietly as their screens updated. But other than that, the big ship was silent. Pete waited a few minutes, to make sure he remained alone, and then he sat down in front of the main computer.

He scanned the deck near his feet, looking for the key slot McCallister had told him about. The deck was covered in smooth plastic tiles. He began pulling at the corners of them until one of them came up. Beneath it, as innocuous as the captain's key itself, he found the keyhole. He inserted the key and turned it. As he sat up, the console in front of him was resetting, the normal sonar display disappearing. He put the key back around his neck and the tile back in place as the new display generated.

CAPTAIN'S MASTER TACTICAL ACCESS

Below that was an extensive menu of options. There were maintenance records, personnel files of everyone who'd ever been onboard, and access to the deck logs. It appeared to be the entire digital history of the command. Additionally he could access secret Navy and Alliance documents, detailed descriptions of the actual capabilities of the ship's systems—capabilities far beyond the conservative constraints they operated by, like test depth and maximum speed. Pete clicked on the heading
PATROL ORDERS
and suddenly accessed a library of the ship's entire tactical history, starting when Finn took command years before. He scanned all the way down to the present, to see the orders he'd brought with him. The parts they'd accomplished, like the degaussing run, were available. Subsequent sections were not.

Curiously, a single more recent order was highlighted as
ACTIVE
on the bottom of the list. Pete clicked on it. The order was in the form of a message written from Hana to the Alliance. She reported that she had captured two traitors, taken command, and that she was proceeding to Eris Island as ordered. Once there, she continued, she intended to seize the cure, by force if necessary, to keep it out of enemy hands.

If it looked at any point like the cure would be lost to the enemy, she wrote, she would destroy it. And the
Polaris,
too, if required.

The Alliance hadn't responded.

Pete switched back to the main menu and searched for more message traffic. It looked like they hadn't received any messages from the Alliance in weeks—and all their outgoing messages had gone unanswered. Hana's message hadn't even been transmitted—the radio room having been destroyed during the mutiny. Apparently Moody had created it just for the record, to demonstrate that what she had done was legal and justified.