Phillips took off the headset and handed it to Meritson, then took a long look around at the sea, shrouded in fog, the snow drifting heavily, densely down and vanishing as it hit the water. He consciously took a deep breath, tasting it, knowing that his air for the next days or weeks or months would be canned, flavored with ozone, sweat, sewage, oil and garbage, as well as carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, amines and other chemicals used inside the ship. The breath exhaled, Phillips raised the deck grating and lowered himself into the rigged for-black tunnel, the vertical tunnel’s lights extinguished so they would not ruin the officer of the deck’s night vision. Blindly Phillips came down the long ladder, passed by feel through a smooth lip of a hatch and further down into darkness. Inside the ship now, there was still blackness surrounding him. He felt for the blackout curtain entrance, pushed through it into the dim red wash from the upper deck passageway red lights. The red light that made the ship look ghostly. He went down through the center of the ship past the opening to the crew’s mess, past the chiefs quarters— the “goat locker” it was called, in reference to the age of the ship’s senior enlisted men — down a steep set of stairs to the middle level. There in the stairwell was a large hatch leading aft. The lights in the tunnel were bright white, the red no longer applying, the difference between the ship’s operating habits starkly different for the forward tactical sailors and the aft nuclear-trained men. Phillips stepped through the hatch and into the bright reactor compartment tunnel, a narrow corridor through the shielded reactor compartment. This was the only access through the space, since the nuclear reactor was so radioactive and gave off such powerful neutron radiation. The tunnel had a central hatch that went into the reactor compartment. The hatch dogs were locked and chained with a second lock, since anyone making their way into the compartment would not survive more than ten minutes when the reactor was critical. At the end of the tunnel Phillips stepped through a hatch into the middle level of the engine room then up a ladder to what was properly known as the aft compartment upper level or ACUL for short. The upper level held the steam piping on its way to the electrical turbines and the main engines, as well as the upper few feet of the electrical generators and the main engine turbine casing. Further aft, the top of the reduction gear’s casing poked through the deckplates, requiring Phillips to walk around it until he came to the door to maneuvering, a large and soundproofed, heavily air-conditioned space, the maneuvering room, where the reactor and steam plants were controlled. He pressed the intercom button and announced himself, then opened the heavy door and walked in. The room was freezing. Walt Hornick stood in the center of the space, staring at the reactor plant control panel over the shoulder of the reactor operator. Next to Hornick was his main propulsion assistant, the MPA, a senior lieutenant named Katoris, a bone-thin blond officer who looked like he should be walking the hallways of a high school rather than the passageways of a nuclear submarine. Phillips walked next to Hornick and scanned the reactor-control panel. Phillips looked at the position of the control rods; they weren’t moving. On the surface of the console a Plexiglas cover was lifted off a black rotary switch marked manual scram. The reactor operator’s hand was on the switch while his eyes were on the panel. Nothing seemed to be happening. “Well, Eng, pretty slow day here?” Phillips said. Hornick didn’t budge, not even to look at Phillips. When he spoke it was in a quiet mutter. “It’s an emergency approach to core critically, and the startup rate meter might jump at any second. We’re standing by to try to scram the plant manually if that happens, but more than likely a failure of the protection circuitry would find us blown to pieces back here before Bronson there could hit the scram switch.”
“How did you do this?”
“We calculated the estimated critical position of the control rods for the core based on the core life — it’s new and highly reactive — and the fission product poisons from the last operation — minimal since we’ve been at low power on our two previous startups — and the length of time we’ve been shut down. All those factors have tolerances and errors, so we backed off about 5 percent on the reactivity of the core. Once that was done it was checked and triple-checked. I did my own calculation and confirmed the reactor chiefs calcs. The book is not all that specific about this, but I took the liberty of taking the reactor-protection circuits to maximum sensitivity — the voting circuits are out, so any one channel of the protection can scram us out — but that’s all I can do.”
