Free Collapse Depth by Todd Tucker Page A

Study was empty except for him and his charts. He had a splitting headache, and the color scheme of the OS did nothing to relieve it, everything in the room was painted a different shade of orange, with the exception of the brass clock, the only nautical touch in that sterile space. The Nav noticed with a sigh that the clock had stopped; keeping those old-fashioned clocks wound, six of them placed throughout the ship, was yet another responsibility of the navigator’s. He turned back to the clean chart in front of him.
    In the case of nautical charts, unblemished was not a desirable thing. It meant the charts had never been used, and hence never been updated with the frequent changes and revisions that they received from a variety of sources, including the NOAA. Their home charts, the ones near Puget Sound, were smeared and smudged with notes and numbers that had been added as more detailed depth surveys were taken, sand banks shifted, and, occasionally, ancient shipwrecks were identified beneath the waves. When planning the ship’s track with those charts he could be confident that while there were many hazards, every hazard had been identified. But now, they were not only steaming through an area that the
Alabama
had never been through, it was an area far from the traditional shipping lanes to and from Asia. The new charts he’d received from Group Nine were pristine, with vast swaths of light blue that, the navigator knew, did not indicate a lack of hazards, but a lack of information. With a stack of bulletins and messages, he was adding what few updates he had, but the charts were still dominated by unmarked stretches marred only by the dark pencil line of the ship’s track that the navigator had laid out. The ship was travelling so fast, it was all he could do to keep up with their track, getting a chart updated and approved by the captain and XO just in time to hand it to the OOD as they raced westward. He involuntarily glanced at the stopped clock again; he didn’t know what time it was, and he didn’t how long it had been since he’d slept. He glanced at the edge of the chart, the small island of Taiwan, the looming mass of China.
    His hands started shaking at the magnitude of what they were doing, at the magnitude of his role in it.
    The end of the world
, he heard, in a voice that was not quite his.
    You have to stop this submarine.
    •   •   •
    Danny Jabo was not born to be a naval officer. There was nothing remotely nautical in his family heritage, nor was there anything suggesting he was destined to wear the gold braid of an officer, which even in the navy of the world’s greatest democracy carried the faint whiff of aristocracy. His father was the son of a farmer who’d learned to repair air conditioners at the county’s vocational school. He’d passed on to Danny a keen mechanical aptitude, which helped him in the Navy, and an uncomplaining, tireless attitude about hard work, which helped him more. His life had not been without drama or tragedy—he had a little brother die in the crib when he was just five, a loss from which his sad-eyed mother never completely recovered. But it was a solid, good upraising in Morristown, Tennessee, forty miles east of Knoxville, at the edge of the Appalachians. There was an old joke that navy chiefs told when asked where they would go upon finally retiring.
I’m going to strap an anchor to my back,
they said
, and start walking inland. When someone points to me and says, “hey, what’s that thing on your back,” that’s where I am going to live.
His hometown, Jabo thought, when he first heard that joke, is that place.
    He’d learned about ROTC scholarships from his high school guidance counselor, and applied to both the air force and the navy, mainly because both services, on their brochures, seemed to offer something that was more technically alluring than the Army’s marketing literature. One part of the process required him to go to Fort Knox,