What No One Else Can See
The things we can't see might just be our undoing...
V.
What No One Else Can See
by
Vixyy Fox
"Please," I told him, "Just speak your mind and I will record what you say for the after action report. If you wish, you can pretend I'm not even here."
He snorted a derisive laugh. "As you wish, sir. My name is Sonarman First Class Samuel Stevenson,. We launched two torpedoes at exactly 0955 UTC. We run on the Universal Time Clock because we never see the turning of the sun when submerged, and we remain down for a long long time. They were type twenty two wire guided sub to sub torps and I vectored them in; it is my job to do so. I'm sonar, sir, and during General Quarters I am the eyes of the boat. I'm the only one who can see for this blind mechanical monster..."
The sailor stopped talking and sipped at his coffee. Emotion washed over him like a rippling wave in a tidal pool. My pencil stopped moving and I held it ready above the plain yellow note pad. When he spoke, I wrote, and when he didn't speak, my mind went over what I'd been told; seeing what he described for me in mental paints that were omnipotent in the coloring of the unseen.
"When you're ready," I told him softly, urging him back to the task at hand. His face scrunched up as he fought off the tears and he nodded.
"The target was an easy mark," he continued. "Fuck the computers, I knew the signature by heart and with my hearing I picked it up a good two seconds before the stinking piece of crap magnetron hertz bender. Hell, I'd been tracking the sound ghosts for weeks. You do know we dubbed him Moby Dick?"
I nodded but said nothing. In cases like this it's always better not to be too animated. You want what you write to be as accurate as possible and if you so much as smile, that can send the teller's mind off in the wrong direction. The emptiness of my nod to this fellow was lost to me, however, as I concentrated on simply getting the report down.
"Moby Fucking Dick and every bad pun you could imagine to go along with it," he told me as if seeing in any case. "Christ I wish we could smoke down here. The nicotine gum just doesn't cut it." He sipped again at the coffee and told me, "No one but me even knows what he looked like. To the rest of the crew he was just something that was out there."
"Description..." I said, looking up at him in a way that I could keep my eyes on both the pad and the sailor.
"Not as long as you might think." His eyelids closed and he calmed his breathing as if he was sitting back in sonar; listening intently to what the sea had to tell him. "I'd give him fifty five point six meters long with a tapering girth beginning at point and moving out to fifteen point three meters thick for the most part of him. He tapers back to the props which were massive ducted bastards. He was the most silent bastard I've ever seen until he heard the torps coming. God he could move. He went from maybe three knots to sixty in a matter of five minutes. He knew they was coming and didn't even try to evade. He must have figured he could outrun what we have, which means they still don't know about the twenty twos. He popped one, but the other struck true."
His eye lids opened and he began to shake in a way that I knew was transmitted movement.
"We touched bottom," he told me softly. "Standard procedure; but you know that. Lay still and silent... go nowhere... do nothing... wait."
I nodded again, my pencil still poised.
"He was red," the sonar operator told me. "Fucking bloody red like one of those salmon I've been told about... the one they call the Sockeye. I know, because I saw him up close and personal."
He touched his head with a finger as he said this; and I just kept writing.
After sipping his coffee again, he exhaled loudly. "The torp struck him on the upper deck amidships at a downward angle. He was doing at least sixty knots and it was doing maybe eighty, which I know it can do and screw the documents that say otherwise. I had him on acoustics both here and in the nose of the torp. The computer takes that information, compares it to our speed and direction versus the temperature of the sea water, and about a hundred other bleeding variables it picks up from... well... never mind all of that; I never use the computer in any case. I heard his 'balls on' noise."
My pencil stopped moving as I gave him a questioning look.
"The noise his propulsion system makes," he explained. "It's a combination of things starting with the props and moving up his shaft to the engines so we call it 'balls on'; another bad pun on 'shaft'. It started low and built up as the torp over took him. Once I was past the wash I could hear the heart beat of the electrics. It was simple logic then... push the little joystick forward to nose her over."
He paused, and then looked in my direction. His eyes were sunk back in his head, sightless, as they had always been. It was what made him so effective as a sonar operator.
"The flash was orange," he told me. "The bubbles were the purest of white. Everything else was a hodgepodge of colors depending on what the stuff was made out of. Metal, plastic, flesh, blood... You know they say that death at this depth is instantaneous, but that's not so. I heard the screams. I saw them die."
"You did your duty," I offered.
"Fuck..." he said in a softer voice, "You don't get it... I saw them die. I saw the guide wire snap wide and float free. I saw his props still turning frantically as he tailed up and went deep. When he broke apart, I saw the bodies, and the fuel, and the carnage, and the death I had caused." He paused again, pulling himself back from the edge of something I could only guess at. "I saw the bodies..." he told me again softly, and then became silent.
"Do you know who it was?"
The man gripped his empty coffee cup and reared back to throw it against the wall, but he had a change of thought, and calmly placed it back upon the table. "I told you, it was 773... Moby Fucking Dick. Now, sir, if you don't mind I will go back to my post now; and you can tell the Captain they're looking for us. Tell him for me, sir, that these are not the same color as the boat we killed. Friend, foe, or otherwise; unless he wants to meet the same fate as the one I killed, he might want to avoid them. I'll know more when I get on the phones, but they're actively pinging and that tells me they're hunting in a hurried and very pissed manner."
I listened, but heard nothing more than the muted sounds of our own vessel. "How do you know this?"
He touched his head again with one finger, his missing eyes giving him the oddest of facial expressions. "Because I'm not the blind one down here sir... and that is a pitiful shame. To you we only sunk something we never even saw. To me... I seen it all and probably will for the rest of my life. Now if you'll excuse me?"
I nodded again and though he couldn't possibly have seen me do so, got up and made his way aft through the hatchway.
A second later I heard a very faint ping confirming what the sonarman had told me. Muttering a curse, I tore the sheets from the pad and stuffed them in my pocket as word was passed through the boat; General Quarters, silent running.