[The Fear Saga 01] - Fear the Sky (2014) (20 page)

But that was the machine part of each Agent: the control center that managed the shell they each now called home. On this day, though, four days out from Portsmouth, inside a perceived cocoon somewhere in the Agent’s head, the personality that called itself John Hunt did something it had never done before. Reaching out to a part of its slaved machine mind, it activated a memory. The memory was of the previous night when, like all his fellow sailors did on their off shift, John Hunt had lain down to sleep for six hours. Though sleep was a vestigial concept for a machine-housed personality, it was necessary to maintain the illusion of humanity, so each night each of the Agents, if they were around humans, stopped moving and lay still for six hours, awaking with their colleagues, or before them, as appropriate.

Recalling that memory of the previous night’s ‘sleep,’ John’s mind carefully overlaid the memory of that sleep over the current moment, at the same time disabling the system’s recording of his movements by his own slave machine mind.

The sub-computer never questioned the action, programmed, as was mandated, without the capacity to question or override its governing personality; instead it dutifully started reporting to the ever-interested AI that John Hunt was ‘sleeping.’

Free now to move without monitoring, John Hunt stood, unlocked the door to the cabin and left, his machine mind still reporting that he was sleeping quietly in his cabin.

* * *

“Hi, Mark, how you doing? As you were.” John Hunt said to the petty officer at the door of the engine room.

John’s proactive role in the engineering department saw him coming and going from the hot room many times a day, so the petty officer hadn’t even really made to stand up as his superior approached.

“Hey, Lieutenant.” said the semi-awake Liverpudlian who, like his colleagues, loved that John was one of those officers who didn’t stand on ceremony.

John walked through the bulkhead into the twenty-foot deep engine room and slid down the ladder from the gantry to the main floor below. Landing with a clang on the metal engine room floor, he walked toward the two vast, green painted diesel engines, nodding to the two or three men dotted around them.

Walking down between the engines, and out of sight of the others, he extracted a small black disc the size of a quarter from his pocket. At the far end of the engine room, the roaring engines focused into two great driveshafts that drove through and out the back of the lowest point of the hull, driving the two thirty-foot propellers churning under the back of the ship.

John glanced briefly over his shoulder and seeing no one looking, placed the disc on the rim of the giant bearing that sealed the hull around the spinning driveshaft. A red glow appeared on the surface of the disk, resolving into a set of numbers. Running his finger gently around the outside of the disk, John set the numbers to the precise time he desired and then turned and walked away.

As he walked away, the disc’s surface went blank once more, its surface began to morph into the color of its surroundings, changing to match the deep, glossy, frequently repainted green of the ship’s two engines.

* * *

The next morning, John lay in his bunk until the moment that his machine mind had reached the end of the recording he had placed into it. As it started relaying real-time once more, he stood up and left his room, his two ‘friends’ snoring in other bunks, heading to the engine room for his scheduled shift.

As he approached the door to the engine room, Able Seaman Julian (Mark had long since gone to bed himself) stood and saluted him.

“Morning, Julian. As you were.” John said smiling. Some of the sailors were more willing to relax than others. Nothing that John could say or do would make young Julian stop standing to attention when John walked into the room.

“Morning, sir.” said the petty officer, saluting.

Inside the engine room, the small disk, sensing the arrival of the precise moment it was set for, erupted, burning itself into oblivion in the blink of an eye, and creating a spark that would have blinded anyone that had been looking at it. It burned with the intense heat of phosphor, enough to flash-melt a small patch of the military grade steel it had been stuck to.

More importantly, it also burned so hot that, even though the flash only lasted a moment, it ignited the grease on the port engine’s driveshaft, starting a grease fire, one of the most dangerous things a ship can face.

The flames surged, immediately searingly hot. At the door, Julian started shouting into the engine room for the men inside to get out. But the explosion had been so fierce that it had knocked out the sensors on the ceiling, so the sprinkler system had not activated as it was supposed to.

Julian’s orders were clear: seal the room. The lack of oxygen would extinguish the fire, but it would also seal the fate of anyone left inside. However, clear orders and endless drills were one thing, to actually press the large red button by the door with three friends still inside was easier said than done.

Seeing Julian’s hesitation, John stepped forward, slamming his fist into the clear plastic that covered the alarm button. To the astonishment of Petty Officer Julian Billman, the lieutenant then pushed the frantic sailor away from the sealing bulkhead, and stepped through it into the burning engine room as the bulkhead sealed behind him.

As the steel door’s pressure seals hissed, the bewildered junior enlisted man was left standing on the outside, wondering why the lieutenant had just committed suicide.

Inside the room John had already leapfrogged over the gantry railing, landing on the floor twenty feet below.

The three men that had been inside the engine room were using small and ineffectual fire extinguishers to try to fight back. There was a manual sprinkler control that would quickly extinguish the fire, and maybe even save their lives, but it was down the side of the very engine shaft that was ablaze.

The fire was quickly consuming the oxygen in the now sealed room, and would, in theory, burn itself out in a minute or two. But by then the men inside would, by definition, have suffocated as well.

As they started to flag, oxygen deprivation slowing their brains, they watched as the lieutenant lined himself up with the side of the engine down which the manual controls were located, and then, at a surprisingly fast sprint, ran and jumped directly into the flames.

* * *

“REPORT!” shouted Captain Bhade running toward the now distraught engine room guard.

Julian stood to attention, “Yes, sir, err, there was an explosion … sir, in the engine room. Lieutenant Hunt, sir, he, err…”

“What, sailor? What did he do?” exclaimed the captain.

“No, sir, no. He didn’t do anything, sir, he wasn’t even in the engine room when it happened, sir.”

“Then what about him, sailor?”

“He, errr, he jumped in to the room after it happened, sir.” said Julian, still unable to believe the man had done it. “He activated the door seals then jumped in as the door closed, sir. That was a couple of minutes ago, sir. I’m afraid the door seals haven’t deactivated yet, and the intercom is silent.”

The captain stared at him, trying to understand why someone would jump into an engine room on fire as the doors sealed. It was insane. Were any of them still alive? Was his hull intact?

He needed to get into that room.

He needed to get in there now.

Where was the fucking chief engineer?

* * *

“Is he awake, Doctor?” asked the engineering officer at the door to the ship’s infirmary.

After Bill Shadley had arrived on-scene, he had checked from the outside that the sprinkler system had activated, then manually released the door seals, ready to seal them again if the fire was somehow still burning.

The dry suck of air as the room had equalized had been only momentary. Inside they had found three unconscious sailors clasping fire extinguishers, both they and the entire room covered with retardant foam from the sprinkler system above.

The lieutenant was not among them, and it was only when they looked down the blackened side of the port engine that they had found his also unconscious body lying next to the open sprinkler control panel.

The unconscious sailors had awoken quickly with smelling salts, each of them immediately asking after the young officer. The captain and engineer had listened in astonishment as they had heard about the explosion, the ensuing grease fire and the sprinkler’s failure to activate, and the lieutenant’s response. And then they had both stared in mute respect at the still slack Lieutenant Hunt as he was carried from the room, the sailors recounting again the way he had leapt into the fire to activate the fire retardant system manually.

* * *

Now, two hours later, the chief engineer was back visiting the boy in the ship’s infirmary. The captain and he had stopped by earlier but John had remained unconscious. It was a calculated choice, compounding the sympathy and respect he had planned to glean from the entire façade.

“Yes, sir, astonishingly he seems to be fine.” said the doctor. “I don’t know how many young officers actually wear that god-awful retardant engine room uniform, but it appears to have worked far better than I would have thought possible. Hardly a scratch on him. He’s a lucky boy.”

“Luck be damned,” said the engineer sternly, stepping past the doctor, “the other survivors are
lucky
, this boy’s a bloody hero.”

Stepping up to the lieutenant’s infirmary cot, he said to the bleary-eyed young officer, “Well, then, I hear you’ll be back and bothering me in engineering in no time.”

John Hunt smiled at the older petty officer, “Looks that way, sir, sorry about that. How is the port driveshaft, it hasn’t warped, has it?”

Bill Shadley shook his head. The young officer’s hair was clearly singed, his eyebrows all but gone, and here the little bastard was thinking about the job even now. But the lad’s instincts were bang on, the engineering officer had just returned from a meeting with the captain and XO. The driveshaft itself was not warped, hardened as it was to withstand attack by torpedoes and worse, but it would need to be rerun, and the sheathing rings would require a complete overhaul.

“Well, you’ll be happy to know you are going to be doubly popular with the ship. Not only did you save three sailors’ lives, but because of the need for a dry dock to repair the damage, we’re going to be spending two weeks in sunny Virginia.”

The apparently recuperating lieutenant nodded somberly. The explosion had happened as they made their way through the Anguilla Straight en route to the Panama Canal, and the nearest allied dry dock capable of taking them, as the Agent well knew, was the US Navy Yards in Norfolk, Virginia.

It had been a difficult two weeks for Neal since India. He had been fighting a rising tide of guilt over the loss of his two friends. He knew his mourning had been cut short by the sheer scale of the challenge he and Madeline now faced. He felt certain that if Laurie and James were here they would tell him to move on and focus on the greater issue at hand; but such speculation was, it turned out, not very much consolation at all.

No doubt at some point in the future he would let the whole event wash over him, allow himself to wallow, to grieve, to crawl into a corner somewhere and sob like a part of him keened to. But he had to fear that instinct, had to set it aside, and categorize it as the base, cowardly urge to flee he was afraid it truly was. No, before he could process the death of his two friends, he had to force himself to face the crisis at hand. He had to find out how deep the situation ran. There were so many questions to be answered; he knew he would have to leave grieving, or running away, for another time.

With that rationalization giving him a form of license to harden himself against the events in Kodikkarai, he had started to form a plan. Working with Madeline both before and after James’ funeral in Florida, they were now finally gearing up for his next step.

So, after James’ funeral, he had returned to Washington. The job offer was, of course, a godsend, and Madeline had joined the chorus of voices telling him he should go after it. They were going to need access to the halls of power, they were going to need all the information they could get their hands on, and then they were going to need the influence to do something about that information. Having the much increased classified clearance that would come with securing the posting to DC would be invaluable as they tried to subtly move against their unknown foe.

Amongst all of this, the mystery of who had sent him the two letters was, without doubt, the most confounding piece of the puzzle they faced. Whoever they were, they clearly had somehow stumbled on some aspect of this as well, and Neal wondered if it had cost them as dearly. Either way, Madeline and he were beside themselves with curiosity over who it was, where they were from, and what else they knew.

For now, though, they had little to go on there. The only consolation was that their mysterious ally had said they would announce themselves at some point in the future, so he and Madeline would just have to add this mystery to the list of things tugging at their already heavily depleted supplies of patience.

What they had been given, though, was both invaluable and deeply troubling advice. Clearly there was something in space, clearly they were being watched, and clearly their communications were being monitored. To say that this limited his and Madeline’s options was a gross understatement. To say it had saved them from making the same missteps that had cost Laurie and James their lives was best left for when, if ever, they had luxury for such speculation.

So, with little else he could really do at this time, Neal had come to Washington focused on the mission of trying his hardest to get the job. In truth, it was not hard to foster enthusiasm for it, such was the scale of the opportunity his last few months’ work had inadvertently positioned him for. In a flurry of activity, Neal had revived work on his long dormant thesis, with an ardency he had not applied to his studies in a long, long time. Madeline was a resourceful aide in this, bringing to bear her considerable intellect, and, wherever possible, her resources at the Institute.