Katya's World by Jonathan L. Howard

I’ve done something similar in the past. I can do this. Trust me. ”
    Zagadko didn’t hesitate. “ You’ll have the helm at a thousand metres off the mine. ”
    Petrov’s jaw drooped with incredulity for a moment. “ What? Sir? ”
    Zagadko looked at him steadily. “ I hope you’re not intending to debate your captain’s command, lieutenant? ”
    He clearly wanted to do just that, but discipline overrode it. “ No, sir. Of course not. ”
    “ Good. ” Then to Kane, “ The helm position uses a perfectly standard yoke. You might want to run a couple of simulations before the real thing to get the feel of the vessel. ”
    Kane, who’d apparently been expecting some argument at least, was almost as taken aback by Zagadko’s agreement as Petrov. “ Yes. Yes, that would be helpful. Thank you very much, captain. ”
    Only Katya saw the captain’s expression when Kane turned away to set up a simulation and she didn’t like it at all.
    Kane, on the other hand, was too focussed on the work at hand to pay much attention to anything else. It was the work of only a couple of minutes to set up a simulation of the Novgorod approaching the mine from a range of a thousand metres, engines at full power and the nose pulling down harder than the rest of the sub could lift back. The one unknown was the exact proportions of the mine’s moon pool. “ We don’t have time to model it anyway, ” Kane told Tokarov who’d assisted in setting up. “ I’ll concentrate on hitting the outer entrance and then make up the rest as we go along. Going from full speed to a dead stop in perhaps a couple of hundred metres is going to be quite a party trick in itself. ”
    “ What if the entry tunnel is shorter than a couple of hundred metres? ”
    “ Then we’ll be making a dead stop no matter what I do. Ready? ”
    Tokarov checked a display and nodded. Kane pulled on a headset, braced himself in his seat and nodded. “ Let’s go, then. ”
    Katya stood behind him as the screen flared into light and movement. Novgorod was running fast and noisy; there was no possibility that the Leviathan could not detect them. Indeed, it was probably right behind them at that very moment. With stealth no longer a concern, the captain had given Kane leave to use active sonar on the approach. A little more noise would hardly make a difference . He’d set up a tight cone of rapid pulses to give high resolution to the imaging sonar. In the same way a terrestrial bat would build up a picture of its surroundings in pitch darkness by using sound pulses, the Novgorod ’s computers would be using the sonar returns to make a model of the mountain and the tunnel entrance.
    On Kane’s display, the rocky finger of the underwater mountain thrust up from the seabed six kilometres below. Four hundred and fifty metres below the sea surface, high on the mountain, the tunnel entrance stood out in pulsing red. The Novgorod ’s current depth was one and half thousand. Kane immediately paused the simulation. “ I know we’re at flank speed, but is that flank flank, or is there a little bit held back for special occasions? ”
    Tokarov shook his head. Kane nodded. “ Okay. This is going to be difficult. ” He toggled the speed display from kilometres per hour over to knots and started the simulation again.
    The mountainside flew towards them at shocking speed; Kane was like her uncle in preferring to work in knots but Katya was a kph woman herself. She did the calculation in her head quickly and grimaced. The Novgorod was doing one hundred and ten kph. They would cover the thousand metres in a little less than thirty-three seconds. Kane immediately started pulling back on the yoke, making the hydroplanes dig and the boat climb. They would have to climb over a thousand metres in a thousand metres of forward travel. Katya didn’t need to delve into sines and cosines to know that was at least a forty-five degree climb. She looked around her, looking for a bulkhead