Panic Switch полностью

I blame myself. Perhaps I was too cryptic. So today I shall try to be more… specific. So you can understand. Understand, and live.

“What happens now?”

She half-smiled at him with an air of mystery. You have a long walk ahead of you in your very near future. Bundle up. It will be very cold. Make sure you tell the crew to walk with you or else they’ll die.

“What?” he said. “A long walk? And the crew dies if they don’t come with me?”

Yes, she said. Walk east-northeast for eight kilometers. Remember, Captain. East-northeast. Eight kilometers.

“What do you mean by that?”

She just looked at him, that same half-smile on her face, but then her expression turned serious. She frowned and said suddenly, in a loud voice, You have to wake up.

“Wake up? From what?”

Matveev leaned forward, opened her mouth wider and shouted, Captain, you have to wake up!

He felt a stinging slap on his face and he blinked, and as he did, the Moscow bistro evaporated, and with it, Chief Engineer Matveev, and he was staring into the panicked face of his weapons officer, Katerina Sobol.

“What happened?” he asked weakly, coughing in the darkened room filled with a slight dark haze of smoke, Matveev’s words haunting him even as reality returned. A long walk, he thought. East-northeast. Eight kilometers. Bundle up. Bring the crew.

“I can’t say for sure, sir,” Sobol said in her ridiculously high-pitched voice, “but I think the Gigantskiy blew up too close. We didn’t have enough distance. Or it went off prematurely.”

Alexeyev rubbed his head. He had the worst headache of his life, worse even than during the fire onboard Kazan as that submarine died. He reached for his right eye, since it felt different. His eye patch was gone. Blown off in the shock, he thought.

“Do you know the status of the ship?” he asked.

“It’s bad, Captain. Sixth is flooded and the fifth started flooding, and it looked catastrophic, probably from a double-ended main seawater shear or loss of the hull valve. The aft battery is gone. The reactor is gone. And the explosion in the machinery room blew away our atmo control, and with the oxygen jettisoned, we’re slowly suffocating. I’m so sorry, Captain, but Belgorod is gone and it isn’t coming back. The mission is over. We need to abandon ship, sir, but we’re under thick ice.”

Alexeyev unbuckled from his seat. “We need to energize the Bolshoi-Feniks and call for Losharik,” he said. “Losharik will have to rescue us through the upper hatch of the escape chamber. Prepare the crew to abandon ship. And try to wake up the sonar officer, Palinkova. We’re going to need her, or her senior enlisted.”

“Sir,” Sobol said, “do you think the Losharik came through this okay?”

Alexeyev shook his head. “If it didn’t, this day will end very badly,” he said, wondering how Sergei Kovalov had taken the nuclear detonation.

Irina Trusov was playing in her room when her father came in after smoking his pipe and having his after-dinner drink with Mommy. He habitually spent an hour at the end of the day with Irina, talking, reading stories, teaching her to play chess, or working on the submarine model.

“Daddy, look,” Irina said, “I made a figure of you for when you are driving the boat on the surface.” She showed him the carving she’d made, the size of a fingernail, of a man in a heavy black coat with a fur cap on, the detail of the tiny character exquisite.

This is great work, Irina, he said, the pride in his voice filling her with pleasure. Carefully, he placed the figure in the conning tower of the large submarine model.

“I want to make one of you for the central command post,” she said. “Like you’re standing at the periscope. Show me how you’d stand at the periscope, Daddy.”

He stood from the bed and crouched slightly down, extending his hands out as if holding on to periscope grips. I’d be wearing my blue submarine coveralls, he said. Irina took a mental picture and smiled at him.

But then he stood erect, his smile vanishing, a serious expression crossing his face. Nizkiy uroven’ kisloroda, he said loudly, frowning. Daddy’s alarm clock started blaring from the other room. His face took on a look of fear. He said it again. Nizkiy uroven’ kisloroda… oxygen level… low.