Day 133

Writing exercise – Write a story starting with

…

The sound of pounding came closer and closer.

It was the crew’s worst nightmare.

A routine patrol had been marred by an equipment failure, a failure that could have been averted but had been missed or overlooked at the last docking and final inspection.

A tick missing on a form that required a thousand ticks and one that could easily be missed.  The problem was that this one was an update to a critical system, one that, if not rectified by a simple software update, could cause critical failure of the propulsion system.

And despite the odds against it happening, it did.

In a place where we should not be, and in normal circumstances, it would not have mattered.  Inside the international boundary of a foreign country that we would rather not be.

Of course, that wasn’t the only problem.  We were quite literally dead in the water, and the captain ordered the vessel to descend to the sea floor, about 450 meters, and well below our maximum depth.

That, he said, was better than staying at operational depth, some 200 meters above, and giving us a chance of not immediately being discovered.

And give us some time to see if the hapless soul who was supposed to carry out the update hadn’t left the update behind, so we could do it ourselves.

Only the ship passing overhead wasn’t far away, and searching for us.  They know we were playing a cat and mouse exercise, and we’d been practising avoidance tactics.  It meant they knew we were somewhere under them.

Aside from creating noises because of the depth, there was silence, everyone straining to hear the vessel above.   The new sound, other than the propellers of surface ships, was that of their sonar.

So far, they hadn’t found us.

A man called out contact, bearing zero five four, slow heavy screws.

I was with the XO, going through the paperwork from the last docking in the hope there might be an update or a reason why it had been overlooked.

There were hundreds of pages of documents, reports on everything that had been replaced, repaired, removed, updated, and one that was about the update that was supposed to have been implemented.  A hand-scribbled note added to the file said they had simply run out of time, and it was deemed less critical than other system updates.

At the bottom of the box was an envelope with a USB and a CD. I doubted a critical system could be updated so simply, but I gave it to the XO, who grabbed it and headed straight to Engineering.

He told me to inform the captain, which I did, when a sonar ping was heard from the passing vessel. 

He nodded, and then I thought he said a prayer that they would not find us.

It was a forlorn hope.

Several anxious minutes passed before the system’s panels that had powered down due to the fault came back to life.

The captain barked the order, four hundred meters, bearing one nine zero, flank speed, just as the first probe of the sonar hit us.

At least now we have a chance.

…

©  Charles Heath  2025