Deep Sound Channel by Joe Buff

port of her centerline. The tubes were located abaft the bow, canted outward nine degrees to clear her sonar sphere—gantries between the four tall weapons racks created an upper mezzanine. Tube eight
    was on the lower left of the port-side, even-numbered group. Water gushed from around its inner door, blasting harder than a fire hose.
    By the time Jeffrey climbed through the hatch and dogged it shut behind, the boat was trimming noticeably by the bow from all the weight of added water. The lowest pair of three-foot-wide gleaming titanium inner doors was half submerged. The next pair up, tubes five
    and six, wore small signs, WARNING WARSHOT LOADED.
    The water was tinged with red and flecked with bits of plastic and raw flesh. Shoved out of the way behind one weapons rack were the remains of the torpedomen who manned the room at general quarters. The force of the incoming spray at depth had battered them beyond recognition. Electronics cabinets near the tube-eight door were smashed as if hit by cannon fire. The fore-ends of the weapons in direct line to the door had all been shredded, their blue protective covers and fiberglass nose caps gone and their guidance packages in tatters. The conventional Mark 48 highest on the inner port-side rack teetered menacingly, its support clamps knocked asunder by seawater jetting in at a thousand psi. Jeffrey wondered what state its arming circuitry was in. He sloshed forward through the thigh-deep freezing water, his head just clearing the gantry overhead, his shoulders brushing the weapons racks on either side. He wriggled past the damage control party, then bent over and took a good look at tube eight, which projected from the forward bulkhead through a mass of pipes and fittings. Thick wooden beams pressed against the damaged door, placed there before the concussion by the nowdead crewmen. The sea spewed out all around the edges of the interrupted-screw breach, ricocheting off the bulkheads and hydraulic loading gear.
    "The balks won't hold it," the local man in charge yelled in Jeffrey's ear, above the constant roaring of the water. "The outer door's jammed open!"
    "We tried driving in more shims!" a leading petty officer said. "It didn't do much good!" The LPO held a sledgehammer with both hands.
    Jeffrey nodded. The balks, hastily fitted when Wilson ordered the door shored up, had kept the door from being blasted inward by their own Mark 88. But the shock wave of the detonation had driven into the tube—kept open so they wouldn't lose the fiber-optic wire—and like a water hammer, it warped the inner mounting frame.
    Jeffrey eyed the door once more. "We'll have to knock those off first," he shouted through his mask, pointing to the balks, "then fit a lock-down collar on!" He glanced at his radiac and didn't like what he saw. "Everybody without a respirator get out of here!" The LPO read Jeffrey's unit, a proportional counter that caught radioactivity from the unfissioned uranium or plutonium scattered in a low-yield burst. "Sir, four millirems a minute's nothing!"
    "The guidelines say—"
    "Screw the guidelines, Commander! We helped build this boat!"
    "Okay," Jeffrey shouted back, "belay the order." He'd transferred on as Challenger's exec after the war started, and wasn't about to argue with a motivated plank owner, especially one who'd just lost friends.
    Besides, everybody was already soaking wet and breathing hard. Ordering them to put their masks on wouldn't make much difference now Instead Jeffrey told the local phone talker to have COB pump in high-pressure air—at least that would slow the flooding. The man kept flicking water from his mouthpiece as he bellowed each word carefully, then listened. He caught Jeffrey's eye and nodded hard.
    Jeffrey glanced at a depth gauge as the bow suddenly whipsawed vertically, sloshing water everywhere, knocking crewmen off their feet. The boat was going down, getting too hard to control.
    "Sir," the man in charge yelled hoarsely, "that