"Look, this will never work. I've been captured by Russian frogmen with cattle prods and - " "Cattle prods? Oh no. They got underwater Tesla Troopers too, now!" Greta burst out. "Never mind, guys, this is something we must settle." "Sharon" Jim proposed "do you think you can lead them into a tunnel, or a crevasse?" "Is there one nearby?" "Yes.... west-south-west then around that pillar, near the relic. We saw it on our way here." "I think I can manage." "You lure them in, and we'll seal them inside, leave a hole big enough for you." "Can you guys do it?" "Go now, or they'll get suspicious!"
"I do not like this, tovarish kapitan. She has been keeping still for too long." "Wait, she is coming back." "What was this?" "I am reading her near our hull, sir... she is knocking at the airlock." "Open the hatch, and clear a diaphragm. Communication on my headset." Captain Varius put on the bulky headset and sat heavily in the command post. The Leviathan's security officer had just suggested that they dispose of the mermaid; they were already nine hours ahead of schedule, having been able to go through the trenches at full speed, and her help was not needed anymore. "Pessimism in tactics, quoth Lenin, and optimism in strategy" Varius had answered. He hadn't joined the Navy for patriotism as much as to see the greatness of the sea before the war took away that too. Sure, for the people he'd do this mission; and if he didn't mess it up, he'd be able to get into the interchange program the Politburo was going to authorize as soon as news spread. And that, was only for himself. "Quo vadisti?" "Credam aliquid inveni. Nunc, me sequitur!" Sharon left the plasma bomb in the hatch; it did look like a giant pearl enough to fool more than a casual glance, and would have backed up her story for now. Now that they were about halfway between the Russian underwater base and the heavily industrialized German coast, she could see that the depths reacted to the lessening of pollution with a majestic, if narrow, outburst of life. She floated over a four-feet ray and raced it to a small crevasse when it noticed her; she felt the quasi-erotic sensation of brushing her tail on the seaweeds; she let the metal monster reach her after getting to the relic of an old Greek destroyer - HES Leon, its rusty fore read - and surfed on the currents generated by its front dome. Only when, minutes later, Sharon reached the entrance for the natural tunnel it came to her that her action was going to condemn the entire crew of the Leviathan to a dire death - anoxia or, if the modified Seawolf sub had air recycling, starving. She could almost hear the voice of Greta or Antoine reminding her that this was a war... but deep in her heart, she could't really believe it. Thirty years of war? One would think that the peoples of two continents knew better than that.
"Tovarish kapitan, may I speak freely?" "But of course, Ivanov." "I believe this is too risky. Should we not send in a scout?" "Ensign Ivanov, our success chances have gone from one in three to, I would say four in five because we have the best scout we could possibly get." 'Captain is under the mermaid's spell' Abram Ivanov thought. Like most of the crew, he just wanted to bring the sub close enough to the coast to hit the switch, go home, and enjoy the extended leave. To make it there in thirty hours rather than three days was surely a plus, but still he had a very bad feeling about this.
Sharon, given her situation, half expected the tunnel to look like Ariel's grotto in "The Little Mermaid"; the structure, made of rock and long-dead corral, looked more like a giant skeletal hole in existence. Sharon doubted that there was a second exit to the structure, but even if there was, few natural holes in the ground could possibly fit the submarine and cerrtainly not two in a row. She knocked three times on the Leviathan's hull to signal that she was going in. The inside of that stony womb was plain dark. After about twenty meters, all that Sharon could see was a faint, wavy outline of the nearest rocks. It was her sonar! She was picking up echoes from the Leviathan's engines! Sharon capered and laughed, and for a moment that little bit of the world looked brighter - or rather, echoed so. "They are in by twice their length." "That will definitely do. How do we tell Sharon?" "We don't." "What?" "Well, say that she gets jammed in, so what? We'll just drill a hole!" "Look, this is war, okay, but-" "Stop it. She'll hear the seismic charges powering up anyways." "She doesn't even know what a SC is!" "Guys! Drop it. Let's move, before they figure out there's no exit." Two figures in semi-rigid scuba gear exited the small submarine, and began jamming steel-plated vibrators in the corral. The closest thing the UNA has to a standard is a simple rule, "never build from scratch when you can recycle from something else." Possibly, something totally unrelated. Sharon felt the minisub drop on the roof of the grotto's entrance, and hoped that the Leviathan sonar mistook it for a natural settling noise. She tried to keep ahead of the submarine, and had slowed down her advance as if to look for obstacles. What if they bumped into the grotto's dead end? Would they kill her?
"Comrade captain, I do think he has a point now." "And then maybe an Allied gunboat hears the pulse, and bombs this passageway flat." "Sir, as the security officer on this ship, I note that your behaviour is somewhat suspicious." "Kolotov, as the Captain of this ship, I note that you have your orders! If we have been scratching the shelf for half a day it is not to be detected at this point! Sonar, are you able to tune our active system so that the wave will cancel out on the walls behind us?" "Ninety-four percent destructive interference, captain." "Well, Kolotov, it seems that we can afford to try." 'I hope the pulse won't harm her' Captain Varius thought. If the beautiful creature out there, their guide, had a sonar like that of dolphins... well, he saw a killer whale impale itself on a periscope after an active sonar pulse from a Typhoon II tore its eardrums apart. "Power down to 30%.. stop propellers. Sonar ping on my mark... mark."
Sharon almost passed out. She had been at a heavy metal live event once, with her previous boyfriend - to think she found Jim dull at times, after being with Arthur! - and remembered it well when the drummer burst out a shrapnell discharge with her being near an amplifier. She missed half of the song and came home with the mother of all headaches. This was three times worse. Things simply blacked out as she lost that strange almost-seeing her sonar gave her; uncertain of what to do, Sharon coughed and froze in mid-water. A second later, she realized her mistake - even if her tail skin could absorb oxygen from the water, every little bubble of air she coughed was precious. She felt the Leviathan stop before pinging. Did they find out this was a dead end? "Sonar ping." "Shit! Andy, fire up the shakers!" "No, wait!" "Jim. She'll get out. Either that, or we'll get out." Jim sighed inside his scuba gear, and for a moment wondered if when the air bubble reached the surface, someone would have heard his worry. 'Impossible' he reminded himself 'vibrations don't last that long. Maybe in another alt...' Four volts and a half ran through the web of wire hsatily put up by Jim and Greta, and the vibrators began to shake. One pillar broke, then another, and within seconds all of the grotto's entrance was trembling. Jim and Greta swam back to the small submarine.
"Sir! Frequency analisys shows a barrier within two hundred meters ahead!" "Damn it. The corridor's too narrow. Captain, we can't turn around!" "Helm, I take your position. Give me 25% power backwards, and reverse the rudder and pitch controls. What is her position?" "Sir, the... the scout is eighty meters from our bow, and floating still." "I think our ping stunned her. Two men to check." The deck began to tremble, a different pitch from the low hum of the electrical engines. "Full stop, and give me a 360 degrees passive scan." "Sir, we have irregular signals on our aft, increasing!"
"They're backing up. How long till collapse?" "I think it's four to six minutes." "That's not enough! If we don't trap the Leviathan in, it will just shrug the rock off its top!" "Plasma bombs." Antoine got back at the controls, while Greta got her pocket calculator out to find the most effective drop points and Jim set the bombs' timers to fifteen seconds. "We should save one to get Sharon out." Antoine and Greta didn't answer.
"They're bringing her in. Unconscious but undamaged." "Right. Keep backing up at twenty-five percent, we shall catch up when out of this hole." "Sir, I'm reading something on our aft. Could be depth charges." "It's a trap! Full power to the props!" "Kolotov, I hate to say it, but you have a point. Full speed. Ten men ready for EVA, and arm the magnetic mines. We might have to explode our way out of here." "What do we do with-" "Bring her in. Just bring her in... we shall see."
A resonance-induced implosion is a carefully engineered event. Crumbling a cave entrance with plasma bombs is not. The white, shiny orbs detonated at the same moment; the opening fell on itself with a shockwave that threw the minisub on a plateu and jammed it in the sand. The Leviathan lay silent. With the collapsed entrance behind it and no room to turn around, a polysteel hull and a nuclear engine were no good to break through the rock. To Varius, the solution was simple: use the magnetic mines to enlarge the residual hole. "EVA team ready, captain." "Good. Verify air and water recirculators, full check. I shall go out and help the EVA team, in the meanwhile, I want a complete sonar scan of the blocking wall, for thickness and composition." "Sir, we are in hostile territory, and that sonar ping might - " "Kolotov, do you not get it? We are trapped!" "Oh, it was a trap all right! Where's that dolphin tailed b-" "Trapped, just like us. Put her in the fore hatch for now, until she recovers." "Comrade captain, what if she -" "Ivanov, I did not ask for your opinion. Now, since you are our best sonar operator, take three men and begin probing the wall." The tall Norwegian saluted and ran out of the bridge. The Leviathan had electric power to spare and could easily extract oxygen from salt water, but the longer that situation lasted - men trapped in an iron box trapped in a rocky box - the more likely it would be for them to be tracked. And even then, there was a limit to the water recycling capabilities of the Leviathan - not to mention food, and morale. "Captain, your gear is ready." "Thank you. Power up every light on this tin can, and wish us luck." Varius found the diving gear in perfect order. The medium depth diving battlesuit had more in common with a knight-errant's armor than with a diving dress, both to withstand the higher pressures and fend off attacks. "All right, comrades" he said after putting on the bulky garment "our present priority is to help the sonar crew find a fault point. Then, when Engineering is through installing timers to the magnetic mines, we shall place them and clear the way for the submarine." So said, Varius stepped into the armored hatch. Sharon was inside, sound asleep. "Vake up." he said gently right after the airlock closed, then gave the 'open slowly' signal to the pressure gate operator. On the other side of the wall, the EVA team commented about the captain getting a little too old for fast re-prex. Sharon blinked, once, then twice. She was sitting on the hatch floor, and the spread-out itching from her tail told her she must have been out of the water for some time. "Huh?" "Vho are you? For real. You have three minutes." he continued, in English. Sharon saw that the Captain's hand was near the electroprod, but he wasn't making a move. As the water began filling the compartment, Sharon's tail instinctively began to twitch. "Okay. My name is Sharon. The Europeans... the Allies knew about your sortie, and wanted to capture the submarine." she replied in Russian. "And that is why you trapped us?" "No. I did it to avoid you getting killed. If this submarine gets out of this place, you are toast and probably so am I. But if we get out of this place, one by one... I have some friends who can help you go home." "Friends... like you? Who are you working for?" Sharon looked down and smiled sadly. She could almost read this man's mind. He just wanted to go home; and so did she. By then, the hatch was almost filled with water and she could get up. She took a deep breath, sealed her lungs, and gulped down some salt water just as the outer gate opened. "Will you shoot me?" Sharon asked. Underwater, her voice had a strange echo that made it all the more seductive. Captain Varius shook his head and swam out of the hatch, signalling the next man to go through repressurization.
"Owww. Okay, we're back on." The minisub shook, whirred, hummed and broke free from the quicksands. A large flashlight cast a round reverse shadow in the dark waters, and the three UNA agents inspected the collapse. "Seems shut tight." "How do we get Sharon out?" "Damn it! We've been down for seven minutes! Who knows what they did to her. We must break through now!" "Calm down, Jim. She's fine." "How do you know!" Jim had turned Antoine's seat around and was now facing him. The three were very stressed after the frantic work to get the minisub out of the quicksands, but Jim was enraged. "I'm getting the powersuit" he hissed in Antoine's face "I'm getting the powersuit and I'm going in there." "Jim. You get the powersuit all right, but to help us poke through. Calm down now." Greta interrupted the two. "Getting mad won't get us anywhere."
The eleven men and Sharon were hard at work planting modified sonar buoys in the wall of rock that towered above them. The engineers on the Leviathan had determined that to avoid another crumbling, the explosive charges had to deliver just enough power in just the right places - the problem now was to find them. Sharon didn't know sign language and the Babel leech was no help in this case, but it seemed to her that the EVA crew didn't know about her short conversation with the Captain yet. She hoped she had been ambiguous enough.
"All right, iron man" Antoine said with a forced smile "let's dig out your girlfriend." "Yes." The powersuit looked just like a standard Allied underwater battlesuit, but relied on hydromagnetic servo-motors to give its wearer four times the strength of an ordinary man. A side effect of this was that the wearer felt much more invincible than he actually was. Jim dropped like a stone from the minisub and landed on the crumbled entrance. With no method or plan, he began to throw rocks as big as his chest away from the grotto as Antoined scanned for the best place to dig.
The periscope light of the Leviathan turned towards the EVA team and began morsing out a message. 'DETECTED... EXTRANEOUS VIBRATIONS... FAULT POINTS LOCATED... SIXTY PERCENT... DISRUPTION PROBABILITY.... FOUR BOMBS READY." Four troopers folded their instruments and swam back to the submarine to get the ordnance, while the rest recovered the probes. That taken care of, Varius took Sharon away from the men for a moment. Using a plastic pad and an adhesive-ink marker, he asked her who was waiting outside. "I know not. Our deal with the Europeans was to destroy you, not lock you here." she replied in her - by now - almost flawless Russian. What about the depth charges that completed the collapse, then? Sharon didn't answer, but shook her head. Seeing that the troopers were coming back, she smiled and swam to help. Varius sighed inside his mask, and followed. How was it going to end? The first four explosions shook the gallery once again and showered the Leviathan with debris from the ceiling; when the dust deposited, the EVA crew cheered from under the submarine's belly - right on the top, there was a hole! While there was a long way to go to get the steel monster through, at least now they had the certainity they wouldn't die in that stony grave. The cheer stopped when a humanoid figure was seen throwing away a boulder and entering the cave, absolutely oblivious of the searchlights pointing at him. "Jim! Come back!" "This unit has Allied camouflage, there's no breach. Now shut up." Jim replied, then shut down the intercom. Antoine and Brenda steered the minisub on the gallery's roof, then got out and began to work on camouflaging it. After brushing aside some debris, he stepped into the gallery and turned on the ULF radar. Twelve very recognizable shapes, ten of which were aiming something at him, came into his visor. The other two were Captain Varius holding Sharon with the electroprod. "LET HER GO!" "Oh, geez! Men are always the same. Jim, I had everything under control! Now help these people to get out." Sharon replied, somehow knowing perfectly that the Captain's electroprod was not charged. "Is cognosces?" "Uh... yes. Yes, I do. He'll help." "You may try." Sharon kissed the Captain on the forehead and swam to Jim, only to turn and see that nine of the men were still threatening them - and one was disarming Varius. That trooper made a gesture towards them, and they attacked. 'Kolotov!' the Captain thought; a stray reflection let him see his captor's gray eyes. As Jim geared up the powersuit's weapons, Sharon did a half caper and stopped between him and the troopers, arms spread. "Please, no! He will help. I will help. The explosive on the Leviathan is not enough to break out, but you can still go home. This is not an Allied commando." she pleaded, in Russian. Jim hadn't been in this reality long enough for the leech to let him understand more than a few words, but by now he had recovered enough of his senses to lower his hands as well. Kolotov was still making gestures with his free hands, but when Jim turned and resumed broadening the hole, the EVA team members decided to just ignore him. Not used to such indiscipline, Kolotov lowered his guard enough for Varius to knock him down; as he sunk, Sharon sped downwards and recovered him. What are you doing? the Captain wrote. "I had a simple job" Sharon replied "the reason why I made it complicated was to end this stupid thing without anybody dying." Despite himself, Varius smiled. Maybe after all, there was somewhere under the sea where they didn't have to cope with the People's War. Somewhere that dolphin-tailed girl called home. "The hole is large enough for the lifeboats, tovarish kapitan. What are your orders?" "We evacuate." "But, sir! Our mission is -" "Our mission" a very tired Varius answered "was most likely a trap set off by the Allies to capture the Leviathan. This is why I will remain on board and disable the ship for good." "Commander, you do not have to. I will do it." "Thank you, Abram. Now, we have not discussed re-entry. On the way back, I have discussed an... arrangement."
"I can't believe you did it. That's about the only thing we have a death penalty for!" "Jim... I clothed it up with magical garbage. I had to come from somewhere, didn't I?" "Well..." "Ah, never mind now. It worries me what happens if they don't accept." "Guys, they will." Greta answered Antoine "Remember, those are sailors. Come on, let's resurface and call in the boom tube." "And Varius?" "He's a good man, Jim" Sharon replied "I can tell."
The boom tube was dropped in in the form of six large wooden crates, each with a balloon attached so it didn't sink. It took the four Uchronists less than ten minutes to assemble it into a shiny silver ring the size of a hotel room. During the assembly, Greta had to remind Sharon to stop humming the theme from 'Stargate' twice, as it literally froze Jim and Antoine in place. Sharon looked down. "They're beginning to come out. Is this thing tuned already?" "Set and ready." "Go hide then! I can push a single button!" As the minisub brought Jim, Antoine and Greta away, the latter's only comment was "This is the first operation in two subjective years that ends with no casualties." Very unFactionably, Jim just crossed fingers. The four lifeboats popped out of the water, surrounding the ring; each had been dragged out of the cavern by scuba troopers. There was the full crew of PNS Leviathan. A quick vote was cast, and upon realization that failure in such a key mission meant Siberia if not worse, the crew unanimously decided to take the ride to what they thought was Sharon's home - a faraway alt in which the dominant sentient species was a form of merfolk closely resembling Sharon's current shape. "Where is the Captain?" That Sharon could now speak Russian would have been a surprise to most of the crew, if they weren't all beyond surprise by now. "Still on ship... ehm... ma'am. He wanted to deactivate her permanently." "Here I am, Sharon" Varius said, popping out of the water and swimming to her. "I just talked with your boyfriend" he whispered. What the - 'So it was me who was breaching? Ah, never mind now' Sharon thought after pushing the concealed button in the midst of what was supposed to be an arcane gesture. She made a backflip out of the ring, just as the waterline within it began to glow blue and green. "Thank you." In good tradition, Varius was the last to jump; maybe ten seconds later, the boom tube exhausted its unstable shift-state energy supply and just ate itself from the inside out, collapsing into a tin string so thin it broke at the first wave. Sharon bent and dived again in time to see a second series of explosions rock the cave's interior. The sky was clear, and the sun was finally rising. A red dawn, Sharon knew it meant approaching rain, but couldn't help finding the color appropriate. If she got home, what would have happened to this Earth? And - what would have happened to her? As the minisub surfaced, Sharon suddenly decided that she felt too tired to think about it. "And what am I going to do with this?" she asked the sea, checking her tailfin for bruises.
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Mon Apr 24 19:43:45 2000