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11:15 pm - Black Swan Retaliation

"Captain! We have contacts. Three… no, at least four incoming!"



I glanced at Raley through the small hatch. "Ours?" I tried not to look at Jackson's body, where he'd been lying since we had to shoot him.



"One is, a Virginia," he replied. "But it's a mixed squadron, sir. Russian Akula… British Trafalgar… And one I don't recognize, might be that new Yasen."



I nodded grimly. "Hostile, then. They know we're off the plan." I grabbed the nearest phone and rang the bridge. "Go shallow and start shaking," I told my pilot. "We need to stay loose in the socket until it's time to launch."



The ship lurched and shifted as it throttled up and nosed up.



I turn back to Harris, chained to the steam pipes along the wall outside the sonar shack. Of course it was our fucking chaplain that was their operative. Religion had always been their tool, ever since they first introduced it to our species ten thousand years ago; our primitive ancestors had no defenses against memes.



"You gonna cough up the coordinates or do we do this the hard way?" I asked him.



He sneered. With half his false face torn off, it gave me a clear view of his sharp teeth and forked true-tongue. "Go ahead and shoot me through the head," he hissed. "I'll never tell you where the flagship is."



I laughed, showed him my sidearm. "What, this? This isn't what I'm threatening you with." I pointed down the hall in the direction he wasn't facing. "That's what you have to be afraid of."



He turned, and suddenly blanched as he saw Mendelson, the cook. Raphael was trimmed with rather more glowing energy than you'd normally expect from an enlisted man. Funny how the Pleiadians are like that.



"How could you let that… thing… on board!" Harris practically shrieked. I wasn't about to admit that I knew it was a risky gamble. I just wanted the information.



"Do it," I told Raphi, and the little fellow reached out with impossibly long fingers towards our former chaplain.



Suddenly, the impact alarm sounded and we rolled hard to port. A loud thrumming sound whipped along the wall, the unmistakable tone of a high-velocity torpedo barely missing us. It had to have been fired at almost point-blank range in order to have been inside its arming range…



I snatched up the phone. "What's going on out there?" I shouted.



"Something shot at us," came the answer. "Not one of the bogeys we're tracking."



Shit. The dracoids must have directly committed something to the area. Guess that shows how much trust they had in their human agents. I looked quickly at Mendelson, pulling energy from the screaming face of Harris. I wasn't sure if I could interrupt or not. "Just keep us near the surface," I said into the phone. "We are only going to have a few seconds of firing window once we get these coordinates."



"Aye, sir."



Mendelson pulled away from Harris suddenly with a shriek of his own. The chaplain was an even worse-looking mess, his head mostly melted, his limbs twitching. Good thing he wasn't really human or I'd have felt real horror. The cook turned to me with blue-white eyes of fire. "I have the targeting information."



I handed him the phone. "Tell it to fire control."



The little fellow began rattling numbers into the phone while I stepped past the smouldering remains of Harris, into the sonar shack. "Any more shots?"



Raley nodded, intent on his screens and the one headphone muff on one ear. "Couple, but they can't really dial in while the area is so dense with their own. But they'll get over their timidity real soon and then we're in trouble."



Raphael handed the phone back to me. I grabbed it and put it to my ear. "Did you get that?" I asked the missile room. They confirmed. "How long do you need to get a solution calculated?" Ninety seconds. Okay.



"Ninety five seconds to breech," I told the bridge. "I'm on my way up."



I left Mendelson feeding on the dissolving corpse of his millennial enemy. On the bridge, there were injured and dead, just as in every critical part of the sub, but all the right people had survived through making the right choice. They were mostly loyal to me. We were going to do this thing.



"Twenty seconds to breech and fire," Baker told me as I entered. Nobody saluted anymore; we didn't have time and I was, strictly speaking, no longer a Navy Captain anyway.



"Keys," I said, and we presented, locked, and turned in sequence. The cover flipped off the master launch.



"Five seconds," the piloting system said. The light on the fire control panel switched from yellow to green right on time. "Four. Three. Two." There was a suddenly lurch as the ship tipped up hard and rushed toward the evening sky that we couldn't see. "One." I slammed my hand on the button.



For two seconds, suddenly weightlessness as the entire sub leapt up out of the water like a whale. At the peak of its motion, THROOOM, the tremendous rushing sound as our single largest missile cleared its silo. That was it, then: half of California was going to see that nuke head skyward. God only knew where it was going; I certainly didn't know how to interpret the coordinates we'd gotten out of the reptile's brain.



Then: OODGE, as we landed back in the water.



"Sonar!" I shouted over the open phone line. "How are we for…"



KRUMPCH! The loudest tearing sound in the world and the entire world flipped over and went black. Total loss of power. Nicely done, whoever plotted that torpedo shot. Perfectly timed. My ears popped as the pressure inside the sub changed suddenly. The sudden press of air circulation as, somewhere else, millions of gallons of water were rushing into us.



No two ways about it: we were on our way to the bottom now. But it was too late for them. Good luck with your invasion, you fuckers, after our twenty megaton surprise hits your command center in the next few minutes.



I felt around in the dark until I got a good grip on the nearest rail. After that, nothing to do but wait for the water to find me.



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For consideration: putting topical alien invasion crazies and mysterious missile launches together in the only way possible