Dopecentury XXXX --- Sand Sub 2
This short fiction is part of Dopecentury, an experimental project where I attempt to channel the aural aesthetics of Dopesmoker into written text. (Dopesmoker is the legendary stoner-doom metal masterpiece by the band Sleep, of which it is said: “the monotony rarely becomes tedious.”) My plan is to listen to the single hour-long track of Dopesmoker while writing each of these “Dopecentury” entries. And repeat that 100 times. See the Dopecentury project page for more details.
Despite my restraint at the controls, the engines were being driven hard to push their way through the sand, fine as it may be. I watched the engine temperature gauges climbing, directly before my eyes.
“Well,” said the Director, looking over my shoulder, “we certainly could not expect ideal performance if we drive this machine made for the open ocean through this sea of sand. I’m sure there will be some kind of alarm if the engines are about to melt down, we’ll worry about that then. How fast are we going?”
I looked at the gauges. “There’s no way to know. The instruments were designed to measure the speed of the boat in water. They have no idea what is happening in sand.”
The Director shrugged. “OK then, we’ll just have to eyeball it. Let’s see what it looks like on the surface. Take us up.”
The former digger sitting next to me was a big fellow, with a long black braid of hair down his back. “You mean me?”
“Yes!” said the Director, “spin that wheel that controls the dive planes until we have a positive direction on the bow.”
The Engineer returned to the control room and observed the operation. “Make sure you don’t let the dive planes get above the surface,” she said, “it’s not like water where we will sink back down if a bit of the boat rises above the surface. If the dive planes clear the sand, we simply will stop moving, and that will be the end of this surreal little adventure.”
“Adventure! You mean mission,” said the Director.
The Engineer waved her hand. “Also remember the air tanks are meaningless in the sand… so don’t sink too deep, if we hit more dense material we may never gain the surface again.”
“How were the hydraulic systems?”
“Almost unbelievably, all the critical mechanical systems are all intact.”
“I told you, the dry dessert environment preserves. Are we at the surface?”
“How would we know?” I asked. “I told you, the instruments do not understand sand.”
“Fuck, right,” said the Director. She raised the periscope and looked through it. “Looks to me like we’re up. Level the dive planes. Remember to not come up too much, try to just keep the sail above the surface.”
“He just said: there’s no way to know how deep we are!” said the Engineer.
“So go up and look!” said the Director. “Take the one complaining about the instruments with you.”
I followed the engineer up the ladder and through the hatch onto the bridge of the sail. The night was still bright under the filthy moon, so bright that it washed out most of the stars in the sky, except for the pinpricks off closer to the other side of the horizon, where it was darker. Behind us, the snorkel stuck its nose up into the air and inhaled oxygen while belching a long continuous stream of diesel exhaust. I looked back, and could see the surface of the sand behind churning over where the prop spun below.
“Well,” said the Engineer, “that’s about what I expected,” she said, pointing to the sand ever so slowly shuffling along the sides of the submarine’s sail.
“Watch this,” she said, and putting a leg over the side of the bridge, climbed down the steel ladder rungs welded to the side of the sail. Somewhat gingerly, she stepped off the lowest rung above the surface and onto the shifting sand next to the sub. She took a few more quick steps and then was strolling along next to the sub, at just about the same speed. “I don’t think we could ever get this thing to do more than a walking pace through the sand.”
“Why are we even doing this?” I asked.
She shrugged, “the Director has orders. And a plan.”
We returned to the control room, leaving the hatch open above us.
“Well, we are moving,” the Engineer reported to the Director. “Barely. I think we need to keep someone up on the sail to make sure we don’t slip too deep or too shallow.”
The Director nodded and instructed a couple of the other former diggers to stand watch up on the bridge of the sail.
“But what are we doing with this thing?” the Engineer asked.
“The smoke on the horizon. We’re going that way.”
“And what does the smoke on the horizon mean to us?”
“That smoke is a caravan. A shipment being moved across the dessert, that we have been ordered to stop.”
“What are they carrying?”
“I cannot say that.”
The Engineer scoffed. “And how are we supposed to stop it?”
“Well, that’s where I was hoping you might come in. I was thinking about the torpedoes…”
The Engineer laughed. “Moving the sub through sand is already improbable. But torpedoes? That’s not going to work. Even if they could move through the sand, underwater they are ejected from the tube with compressed air. That will not work in sand.”
“I realize that. But they are still powerful weapons, high-explosives. I was thinking you might be able to convert one or two into essentially land mines. We’ll get ahead of the caravan and lay them in the path they are traveling along.”
“I suppose I could rig some kind of remote detonator.”
“Meanwhile, we will move on an intercept course with the caravan, slow as it may be. I expect we will cross their path around dawn.”
The Engineer tapped me on the shoulder and we made our way down through the sub to the torpedo room. There we found a rack of old torpedoes. We selected the most promising looking of them, and removed the warhead. It was not exceptionally difficult to rig the simple proximity trigger to some old radio parts and override the arming device. Each warhead packed an enormous amount of explosives: enough to sink a large ship. The device, even removed from torpedo housing and motor unit still weighed far more than we could lift.
This work had taken more than a few hours. When we checked back in in the control room, the Director told us the sky was lightening in the east.
“We need to be lower. They will see the sail when we move across their path if it’s daylight. Do you think we can run on battery?”
The Engineer was skeptical, but the batteries did indicate a charge. We shut the diesel down, lowered the snorkel, and switched to battery.
“Now to get the device up on the sail,” said the director. She selected the largest of the former diggers, and they went with the Engineer down to the torpedo room. Ever so carefully, four of them hauled the rigged warhead up to the control room, and then delicately up the ladder to place it atop the sail.
The Director went up to the sail, and, shouting instructions down to the control room, got the submarine lowered in the sand until the top of the sail was the only part of the sub moving along just above the surface of the sand.
The Director called me up and told me to keep an eye on the caravan and make sure they didn’t spot us. The sun was rising behind the caravan, and I could see black vehicles crawling across the waving surface of the sand, with black smoke rising from their engines. They were moving about the same speed as us, dessert require slowness and patience, I thought.
We passed over the spot where they would be in the next few hours. The Director shouted down to dive, and we climbed down as sand poured down on us from above. We managed to get the hatch closed. The idea was that the device would be left behind at the surface, or maybe just under the surface of the sand.
For two hours after that we sat in the sub, which presumably, hopefully, was moving silently just under the surface of the sand. The Director, looking through the periscope, was the only one aboard who knew anything about was happening.
But after two hours, she told us to surface the sail. We climbed up onto the bridge, and looked back to where the black vehicles of the convoy crawled.
“Now.” said the Director. And the Engineer twisted a switch in her hand that had a long whippy aerial sticking from it.
Far off at the horizon the sand exploded upward in a cloud of flame and dust. The caravan shuddered and disappeared into the cloud. The sand and dust rose up into the clear sky in a great ballooning mushroom of blackness.