Final impact

Captain Jane Willet came awake in an instant-even before the chime rang at her cabin door. At least that’s how it seemed.

It’s probably just my mind getting bent of out shape.

Willet was groggy from a fortnight of broken sleep. Gone were the days of dialing up a stim surge from her implants. Indeed, most of the things she had taken for granted were long gone. Close friends and family outside this boat. Six hundred channels of bad TV. Thai food. No-fuss contraception.

The chime rang again.

“Enter,” she said, her voice cracking badly. She had to repeat herself, after a cough. “Come in, please.”

The door slid to the side, and a female sailor stuck her head into the cabin. “Begging your pardon, Captain, but the XO says we’ve picked ’em up again. He said you’d want to be on the bridge.”

“Thank you, Bec.”

Willet sat up and ran her fingers through her hair, gathering the thick, shoulder-length mass of tangles and split ends into a workable ponytail that she tied off with an elastic band. The sailor stepped into the room and over to the counter, then poured a mug of coffee-the last of the boat’s stock of premium-blend Illy. She handed it to the captain.

“Ah. Thanks again. Champion effort.” Willet took a sip, and it felt as though the caffeine went straight to her cortex. Young Sparrow brewed a very mean cup of coffee.

Jeez, I’m gonna miss this when it runs out, thought the submarine commander. Wonder how long it’ll be after the war before anyone imports a decent Italian blend.

Aloud she said, “Tell the XO to keep his finger off the trigger until I’ve got some pants on. I’ll join him in two minutes.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Her orderly disappeared, closing the door as she left. Willet took a long slug of the coffee, brewed warm rather than hot so she wouldn’t scald herself. She set the mug down in a recess on the small table beside her bunk. She grabbed a ’temp-made energy bar and peeled back the waxed paper, then started chewing joylessly on her so-called breakfast at the same time as she climbed into a pair of gray combat coveralls. She checked her watch.

Zero four thirty-one hours, local.

She’d been asleep for less than two hours.

Washing down a mouthful of the bar with the last of her coffee, Willet gathered up her flexipad and left behind the small personal space of her cabin. Some novels, a few black-and-white photographs of the Sydney Harbor Bridge, a picture of her sister, and a small watercolor of their parents’ beach house painted by her dad back up in twenty-one marked out the room as her private territory. She was never far from work, however.

The cabin was located all of fifteen meters from the sub’s Combat Center, allowing her to arrive in a shade under the promised two minutes.

“Captain on deck!”

“As you were. Mr. Grey, I hear we’ve got them by the short and curlies again.”

Lieutenant Commander Conrad Grey stepped aside from a bank of flat-panel screens, a quick nod inviting her to take his place. She could see that he was tense, like everyone present.

“The sea’s calmed down a fair bit up there, skipper. We’re getting clean capture on the sensors now, the best we’ve had in three days. Their cocks are on the chopping block, ma’am. Just waiting for the magic word.”

Willet took in the sensor feed with a glance. Once upon a time, they would have made this kill from a much safer distance, but in such foul weather, without satellite cover, they’d been forced to come within six thousand meters just to use the boat’s own sensor suite. Tracking something as dangerous as a Sartre-class stealth destroyer was like snuggling up to a nest of vipers.

At least it would have been under normal circumstances.

The Dessaix, however, wasn’t under the command of its normal crew. Mostly their fates were unknown, but it didn’t take much to imagine what had become of them. The Nazis had captured the ship while they were all still comatose from the Transition, so there wouldn’t have been a chance to resist. If any still lived, they were probably hanging by their thumbs in a Gestapo cell somewhere in Germany.

Willet leaned back into the gelform seat padding and peered intently into the multipanel display. There was no video feed to examine, only animations of the boat’s electronic intelligence haul. The Havoc had five small drones left, but they weren’t robust enough to cope with the extreme conditions above. Three days earlier two giant storm cells had merged to create a supercell within which the Dessaix was trapped. Sitting two hundred meters down, the submariners had enjoyed an easy time of it. Conditions top-side, on the other hand, would be evil.

They were bad enough that tracking the ship had been near impossible. They’d lost contact again and again. At last, when the weather showed signs of abating, they had her-and the chance of taking her down.

“You know, Mr. Grey,” Willet mused, “we may not have to bother with this after all. Mother Nature might just do our job for us. It looks to me like the Dessaix is struggling.”