The nearby explosion would mask the sound of their firing torpedoes, and they fired these new shots right at the enemy behind them by shifting the momentum from their drift into a backward slide. It was an acrobatic method of attack.
“One, two, fired!”
“Good,” said Tessa. “Come left to 0-4-0. All-ahead one-third. Increase depth to nine hundred, twenty degrees down bubble. Escape to the north-northwest.”
“Yes, Captain,” said Mardukas, a hint of relief entering his voice at the mention of escape. The noise from the other enemy torpedo’s explosion gave the de Danaan perfect cover to flee the scene. Several minutes later they activated their safety devices, silenced their machinery, and sank deeper into the water.
Tessa knew that the torpedoes they had fired were just a way to buy the de Danaan time. They wouldn’t explode even if they hit, and probably wouldn’t even do that much. She didn’t want to kill anyone on those submarines if she could help it, after all. They were just pawns being manipulated by Amalgam and probably questioning the attack on the Toy Box themselves.
But...even so, their opponents were serious and attacking them with live torpedoes. She’d managed to avoid firing a real shot this time, but even if these people knew their orders were nonsense, they would continue to obey them and attack. Tessa wondered, Am I really obligated to have mercy on these people?
She could confirm that there were three US Navy submarines out there, plus one most likely hiding beneath the thermal layer. If she wanted to, she could change course now and fire off ADCAP torpedoes, ADSLMM autonomous mines, and MAGROC aerial dispersal mines, and sink all four instantly.
Really, she wondered, why not do it? If I just kill them all here, I’ll be able to give my subordinates plenty of rest in the twenty or more hours to come. It would make things so much simpler...
“Captain,” said Mardukas, interrupting her dark chain of thought. “Should we reload the launch tubes with the same torpedoes?”
Under normal procedures, that was what she would do. But if she was going to seriously try to wipe out their enemy, strategically speaking, Tessa would have to switch two of them to ADSLMMs. Mardukas was circuitously—circuitously enough that the rest of the crew wouldn’t catch on—feeling out Tessa’s intentions.
She cast a glance at Mardukas, who was standing by her side. His brow was furrowed, sending her a tacit message: I know what you’re thinking, and I’m against it.
“Yes, the same torpedoes,” Tessa said out loud. “We need to escape this area quickly.” She was effectively saying back, ‘We won’t be mounting any more attacks.’
“Yes, Captain,” Mardukas said simply.
When the Tuatha de Danaan arrived at nine hundred feet, they leveled out and quickly began navigating north-northeast to escape. The commands to silent running and battle stations were lifted, the hangar deck lighting returned to normal, and the maintenance crew resumed work at their stations—the transport helicopters with their rotors folded up and arm slaves with their outer armor removed to expose their internal frames—and got back to work on maintenance.
Sousuke was helping with the maintenance on his own machine, the ARX-8 Laevatein. It was their only lambda driver-mounted arm slave, and probably the second most powerful machine in the world. Its armor was mostly white, with dark red highlights painted on. Its silhouette seemed to be both more massive and aggressive than that of its ancestor, the M9 Gernsback.
Still, there wasn’t much Sousuke himself could do to help with maintenance. He spoke with the machine’s AI and offered simple advice to the maintenance crew. He expected that if he touched the machine’s internals himself, the head of the maintenance team, Lieutenant Sachs, would strike him down with lightning. It was the same in any military; engineers were very possessive of the machines which they were put in charge of. If you asked them, they’d say they were merely lending them out to their operators during deployment.
《Please readjust alignment of sixth cartilage unit on right bicep to .12,》 the machine’s AI, Al, requested both through speech and text.
“The sixth? You said to do it at .05 earlier,” Sousuke said through his headset.
《The abrasion from muscle packages 32 through 37 added since then have exceeded expected limits. Make it .12.》
“Understood,” said Sousuke, who then explained the circumstances to the engineer. The man nodded back, making adjustments to the artificial cartilage unit in the right elbow—a part that looked like a short damper—fine-tuning its elasticity.
《No, return it to .05 after all.》
“What did you say?” Sousuke asked.
《At .12, it puts a burden on the 10th cartilage unit instead. It’s better to keep it at .05.》
Sousuke scowled, swallowing back the urge to complain, and then asked the engineer to reverse it. The engineer just shrugged and did as he was told.
“Done,” said Sousuke. “How is it now?”
《Sorry, please try .08.》
“Excuse me?”
《I take it back. Leave it at .12.》
“Well, which is it?”
《Ah, maybe it’s better to try it at .15 so—》
“Figure it out and then tell me,” Sousuke ordered.
《But—》
Sousuke turned off his voice input and threw the headset onto the desk. He’d had enough of yelling at his machine.