Phoenix Sub Zero

The tube ruptured and spilled flaming exhaust out into the torpedo room, vaporizing the deckplates above, the flames melting and vaporizing the four torpedoes exposed on the upper tier of the torpedo rack. The Mark 50 weapons began to burn, then to explode, the pressure in the torpedo room soaring from the burning, exploding torpedoes as well as the fury of the Vortex-missile exhaust. The metal of the tube gave way, coming apart and blowing the Vortex tubes below it into misshapen wrecks. By the time the top Vortex missile was leaving the ship behind, completely immersed in the waters of the Labrador Sea, the lower two Vortex tubes smashed and dispersed the two missiles’ rocket fuel into the room, the rocket fuel igniting and blowing apart the already crushed lower tubes. Six hundred milliseconds after launch, the Vortex was surging ahead into the water, leaving the Seawolf behind, while the lower two Vortex missiles exploded, both their warheads and their solid rocket fuel adding to the exploding mass inside the torpedo room.

Outside the ship the Vortex missile accelerated, its rocket nozzle turning under the direction of the onboard computer, directing it to turn to its programmed approach, heading to the target. By the time the Vortex missile was a shiplength away from the launching platform, the nozzle had turned to the proper angle, and the missile felt the lateral g-forces guiding it to its proper heading. At the same time the hull of the firing ship came apart, the torpedo room in the lower level vaporized, the hull enclosing it blowing outward, the light from the explosions lighting up the under-ice world in a harsh, foreign glow. After two hundred milliseconds the light dimmed, the explosion faded. The Vortex was now surging ahead, another third of a shiplength further from its launch point. The outgoing missile then passed an incoming torpedo, the incoming weapon smaller and lighter, and by that time much slower than the Vortex. The Vortex continued in its turn, uncaring.

By the time the Vortex had steadied on its approach course to the target it was 1,500 yards from the firing ship.

Behind it, obscured by the noise of the roaring solid-rocket exhaust, came the sound of the explosion of the first Nagasaki torpedo as it hit the Seawolfjust under the sonar dome forward. The forward compartment, already breached and flooding from aft at the torpedo room, blew inward at the bottom, all three decks collapsing upward, the hull caving in, the nose cone at the sonar sphere breaking apart, the air that had filled the ballast tanks from Pacino’s emergency blow scattering into the sea.

The Vortex continued accelerating, its velocity climbing to what would be terminal velocity at 300 knots, an underwater speed unknown outside of the Vortex test program. It passed and left behind the second Nagasaki torpedo and continued.

When the second Nagasaki torpedo exploded, the Vortex was a third of the way to its target.

The second Nagasaki smashed into the Seawolf amidships, at the bulkhead separating the forward compartment from the reactor compartment. The torpedo-room explosion had already carried away half the bulkhead of the compartment.

The torpedo explosion added to the damage, blowing the reactor vessel off its mounting and slamming it into the pressurizer vessel further aft, the steam pipes rupturing. The hull skin had already been breached and blown off at the keel from the aftermath of the Vortex-tube explosions. The second Nagasaki detonation completed the damage, the hull giving way and letting go at the top surface, the ship shearing into two pieces — the forward half violently damaged.

The aft half of the ship, with a barely intact bulkhead that was once the aft reactor compartment wall, was by comparison unharmed, but it had lost stability on all three axes. It spun and tumbled to the depths, its buoyancy lost.

The rocky ground of the Ungava Ridge rose up to meet it as it sank. The hull fragment hit the bottom at terminal velocity, the hull-half crushing, the stern planes and rudder at the far aft point shearing off and scattering across the rocks.

Inside the hull, the equipment shook against the mounting bolts, the lighter pieces — pumps and pipes — coming loose and rattling around inside. The hull came to rest with a fifteen-degree incline downward, a list of nearly twenty degrees.