• • • • •

Jake was woken by a knock at the door. He pulled himself upright and twisted round to a sitting position with his legs over the side of the bunk. His hand felt much improved, but his side was still very painful. He got to his feet, opened the door.

“Hi Jake, I brought you some breakfast,” Ewan said.

He walked in with a tray, set it down on a tiny table. It was loaded up with buttered toast, jam, fruit, cereal, and black coffee. There were also some more painkillers. Jake picked them up straight away, knocked them back and washed them down with a couple of gulps of coffee. It was obviously instant, but he wasn’t complaining.

“Thank you,” Jake managed at last.

“You’re welcome. We don’t get many visitors. Nice to see a new face around here. It sounds like we might get to see a lot of new faces soon?”

“Where are we? How long was I asleep?”

“You’ve been out for about ten hours. As to where we are, somewhere in the Norwegian sea, I’m not sure precisely where. They think they’ve picked up a signal from your boat.”

“But they’re not sure? Could it be other survivors? Another submarine perhaps?”

“Unlikely. Even after the end of the world, protocol would prevent most submarines from broadcasting a distress signal unless they were genuinely in trouble. We’re detecting a search and rescue radar transponder approximately thirty nautical miles ahead. No GPS location, we believe the satellites were taken out by the asteroid. We should have visual confirmation within the hour though.”

“If you’re picking up the SART, then I guess we’re not underwater?”

“No, we didn’t dive. The antenna array works better out of the water.”

“Will they see us coming?”

“Not from this distance.”

“We’ll need to get close though. Without being seen.”

“Not being seen is something we’re very good at.” Ewan hesitated, seemed to be debating with himself whether to speak further. He made up his mind. “If I may ask, was it really that bad? At Longyearbyen? Was everything destroyed?”

“I’m sorry,” Jake said. He stopped eating, looked at the young sailor. He could imagine what he was thinking. “Yes, it was bad. But it must have been over quickly. Like being in the blast radius of one of your nuclear warheads. The town was vaporised. The people, they wouldn’t have felt anything. It would have been over very quickly for them.”

Ewan nodded slowly. “It’s strange. We carry these weapons. We all know what they’re capable of, the damage they can do. And we all hope we never ever have to use one in anger. My father served in the navy all his working life. I was too young to really understand, but I knew he was afraid of all out nuclear war. He never said it, of course. But I knew. When I joined up the cold war was already over. Some of the older sailors, they talk about the old days. We talk a lot on here, there’s not much else to do. They tell me the same thing, about the fear they had that one day, one day they would have to launch these things, and that when the boat surfaced, months later, everything would be gone. Us younger ones, we never had that fear. We’re told that the nukes, they’re a deterrent, to make sure the end of the world never happens. And despite all that, for all the money, the technology, the arms race, the standoffs, the world still ended. We couldn’t stop it.”

“Ewan, the world didn’t end. Not for everyone. You’re still here. I’m here. There are three thousand people on the Spirit of Arcadia. And who knows how many others? Other submarines. Maybe other boats. Perhaps some corner of the world got spared, just like we did?”

Coote stuck his head round the door.

“Ah, awake! Excellent. Very good. Ewan told you that we’ve picked up a signal? We’re tracking it on the radar, it looks like it’s your boat. That or a bloody big whale with a radio transponder! When you’ve finished your breakfast, Ewan will bring you through to the communications suite. You need to meet Ralf. He’s something of an ace hacker, but I expect you can find us a quicker way in.”

Jake nodded. “I’ll be right out.”

He wolfed down the rest of the food on the tray. The previous night’s soup had settled his stomach, but he still felt like he hadn’t eaten in a week. By the time he was done the painkillers were taking effect, and he was starting to feel human again.

• • • • •

The communications suite was one of the rooms he had passed through when he arrived. Men sat at floor to ceiling workstations that Jake thought looked surprisingly old fashioned for such a recent vessel. It was something about the solidity of the equipment. He had no doubt it was state of the art, but it wouldn’t have looked out of place on Ewan’s father’s cold war ships.

Coote beckoned them over to the end station. A young man with a shaved head and tattoos up both arms was sitting in a swivel chair. He was the only crew member in the room not to be wearing a headset.

“This is Lieutenant Ralf Cormack, he’s one of our senior communications officers. Ralf can do things with a computer that even the makers wouldn’t think possible.”

Ralf held out a hand. Jake shook it, all the time thinking that the Lieutenant looked like anything but a hacker,

“We’re closing in on your ship. Coote tells me that you have the latest anti piracy measure on board?”

“That’s correct,” Jake said. “I just hope Flynn doesn’t know that and hasn’t disabled them.”

“That’s what I’m here to find out sir.”

“Jake, please. Call me Jake.”

“No problem. Does the system have a live feed, or record only Jake?”

“Both, live and record. There’s also a facility for remote playback. It can be triggered externally. There’s a web page interface, you just need a username and password. We can try mine, but I think it only works from an on board terminal. The navy are supposed to have some kind of access though.”

“We wouldn’t be issued with that. Fighting civilian piracy is a skimmer’s job, not something that us dolphin’s deal with.”

Jake looked enquiringly at Coote.

“Dolphin’s are submariners. Skimmers are surface ships,” he said. “You’ll have to excuse us, we have our own dialect down here.”

Jake was starting to sense how the crew really was like one family. Shared language, like code. Mutual respect despite the banter he had heard around the place. He wondered if it had been like that for Lucya when she was in the Russian navy, and whether she missed that camaraderie on the Spirit of Arcadia.

He brought his attention back to the task in hand, and reeled off some technical details to the communications officer, information about how to connect to the ship’s anti piracy system remotely. Ralf bashed away on his keyboard at an impressive rate of knots. The screen in front of him seemed even more incomprehensible to Jake than the submariner’s lingo. Tiny green text against a black background. But when Ralf hit Enter and sat back, the text was replaced by an image. It looked like a website was loading, but very very slowly.

“We’re too far away to get decent bandwidth…good connection speed. It will improve as we close in,” Ralf explained.

“I think it’s about time we made ourselves less visible,” Coote said.

He picked up what looked like a phone handset from the console, punched a button and relayed orders. Before he’d even replaced the handset, red lights began to flash, a speaker crackled into life and a voice called “Dive, dive!”. A klaxon sounded throughout the submarine, resonating around the confined space, blaring out its deafening message for ten full seconds before stopping as abruptly as it had started.

“You might want to hold onto something Jake,” Coote said smiling. “We’re about to dive.”

Jake grabbed onto the back of a chair. Ralf and Coote both burst out laughing.

“Sorry old chap,” Coote said grinning. “Couldn’t resist! We don’t see many newbies. At ease sailor. This boat is as smooth as they come.”