The Savage Deeps by Timothy S Johnston

Author:Timothy S Johnston
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fitzhenry & Whiteside
Published: 2021-09-17T12:33:10+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

We kept the SCAV drive on through the rift all the way north past the Equator and beyond. The turbulence was less noticeable while travelling at 450 kph, but we had to be more vigilant when piloting at that velocity. Still, the rift was ten to twenty kilometers wide through the entire distance of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, so the seacar was not in danger of crashing into the towering mountains.

We had to follow that track back to Trieste; if we arrived on a heading from the south, the USSF would notice we had left heading north and arrived from the south. So, we would go north first, back the way we had come.

As we were powering through the trench at 450 kph, an alarm sounded from the sonar and I glanced down at the scope. It could only have happened if a vessel was passing above us, but we were in a canyon, and out of the common sea lanes.

I instantly pulled back on the throttle and we dropped from SCAV. The details on the sonar shocked me and my heart strobed.

This was no ordinary seacar or warsub.

It was gargantuan.

The largest submarine in the oceans was the Doomsday class USSF nuclear missile boat. It was 232 meters in length. But the one overhead was a whopping 414 meters! There was no known sub in the world that size. It had thirty decks, which would make it a hundred meters tall.

Johnny and I stared at each other. The figure was just too difficult to accept.

But even harder to comprehend was the vessel’s velocity.

It was 467 kph.

It had a SCAV drive.

“Impossible,” Johnny said as we watched the signal trace across the screen. Above, in the VID heads-up display, the vessel was shooting across the canopy faster than any other I’d seen, trailing a long white plume of swirling bubbles and turbulence.

Johnny and I couldn’t say another word at that moment.

The vessel was just so damned huge.

The fusion reactor would have to be massive.

As it passed by overhead, the wake churned up the water hundreds of meters down. It tossed us like a bit of flotsam in a storm. Another hundred meters below us, it was churning sand from the bottom of the canyon.

And sure enough, on the screen, the label read:

Unknown Registry

Database Identification: Unknown

Not even the computer knew what this vessel was.

An hour later we decided to continue on our journey back to Trieste, and left the mystery of the largest sub we’d ever seen—and with a SCAV drive too!—far behind.

No one would believe what we’d come across.

—••—

Using the SCAV in the trench shortened our return trip markedly, but once we hit a latitude of thirty degrees north, we decided to cut the SCAV, crest the ridge, and turn due west toward Bermuda. Once at Bermuda, we would shift southwest and toward home.

The fact we had encountered the French warsub Hunter in that general area occurred to me, but only briefly. After all, we could have been any sub on a

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