Polaris by Todd Tucker

best in swarms.”
    â€œSo now it’s going to get its friends?”
    â€œExactly,” he said. But still he waited, and watched.
    The drone flew high into the sky, almost straight up, twisting as it soared, a motion designed to attract its comrades. An upward-looking sensor on the head of the drones was designed to look for exactly this behavior. Pete found himself curiously pleased at how well the system functioned.
    â€œDrones approaching from all bearings,” said Hana.
    Pete had no intention of allowing a swarm to get on top of the Polaris in attack formation, but at the same time he couldn’t help but stare at their deadly, beautiful efficiency. The lead drone, the one that had spotted them, banked sharply away from them, and came down to just a few feet above ocean level. The others soon aligned behind it, in a delta formation, pointed right at the Polaris . It had all taken just minutes.
    â€œEmergency deep!” he ordered.
    Ready for the order, Frank immediately pushed forward on his control yoke, and the ship took a steep downward angle. Pete lowered the scope and braced himself against the angle as they dived. Within seconds, they were at two hundred feet.
    â€œMake your depth six hundred thirty-two feet,” he said.
    Frank acknowledged the order and drove them deeper, to a point just a few feet above the ocean floor.
    â€œWill they drop their bombs?” asked Moody.
    â€œNo,” said Pete. “We’re too deep and they know it. They won’t waste their bombs, won’t drop unless they register a ninety percent chance or better of a hit. Like bees with stingers: they only get one shot, and they want to make it count.”
    â€œSo what’s the point?”
    Pete shrugged. “They know we’re here, that’s now stored in their memory; they’ll increase their concentration around us, in this whole sector, ready to pounce if we surface again. They’ll shift the priority of this area, intensify the search patterns. There are thousands of them, and only one of us. They know that time is on their side if we show our heads.”
    â€œWhich we won’t,” said Moody.
    â€œWe will,” said Pete. “In just a few minutes. But if everything goes according to plan, we’ll be invisible.”
    He sat back down at the command console, switching it back from ESM to sonar. Just as planned, they were pointing right at the two bright, parallel lines of the degaussing range. “Right five degrees rudder,” he said.
    Frank repeated the order and eased the ship right.
    â€œSteady as she goes,” said Hamlin, reaching down to change the scale of the display as they approached.
    While the sonar display just showed two bright green lines, vivid visual images of what lay in front of them came to Pete. First, he saw the degaussing range like an engineering diagram, the spirals of electrical coil, the parallel lines of switches, the banked symbols of the massive batteries that powered it. A remotely activated magnetic switch and a sensor at the entrance, the ship’s magnetic signature activating the range even as the range would soon erase it. This textbook diagram in his mind then gave way to a photographic image, a memory of an underwater survey, stark white lights trained on coral-covered walls, the coils of wire protected by heavy conduit, impermeable to the sea but completely transparent to electricity and magnetism. In this mental movie, a recovered memory from somewhere in his training: a lonely crab skittered across a horizontal beam encrusted in coral.
    â€œApproaching Point Alpha…” said Moody, jerking him from his reverie. “We’re at the entry point.” It was like trying to pull a car into a one-car garage blindfolded.
    â€œAll stop,” said Hamlin.
    â€œAll stop, aye, sir,” said Frank, immediately ordering the bell.
    He and Moody stood over the display and watched as the giant ship slowly