This is an authorized, official spinoff of CorruptingPower's Quaranteam universe. All concepts, characters and ideas are used with permission from the creator.
All characters in sexual situations are 18 years or older.
Chapter one
USS Boise, SSN 764
June 3rd 2020
Somewhere in the North Atlantic
I frantically sprinted through the decks and compartments, opening valves, flipping breakers, and realigning equipment. I had minutes before I had to be back at the sticks to steer the ship, and still, there was so much I needed to do to get her ready to surface.
Schmidt was back aft in the engine room, doing all he could to keep the reactor going, keep us steaming. He was running a fever of 102, half out of his mind with delirium, and so congested that he was almost constantly wracked with wet, phlegmatic hacking, but so far he had kept everything going. He and I were the only two sailors left alive on the entire submarine. A crew complement of 150 submariners, dead in their racks. A submarine crew is meant to have no less than 50 men on watch at any given time, the bare minimum number of men necessary to operate the myriad, complex and interconnected systems. We had two. And soon, it seemed, we wouldn't even have that.
Sliding into the helmsman's chair, I pulled back on the sticks, causing the bow planes to shift, bringing us shallow. I reached over to the mike, keying up the 1MC.
"Surface, surface, surface." I rang the diving alarm twice, the obnoxious aoogah klaxon bringing none of its usual comfort.
I glanced at the spread-out pile of manuals sitting open around me, looking for the next steps of the surfacing procedure, before reaching over to the Chief of the Watch chair and starting up the Low Pressure Blower. I prayed I hadn't screwed up the sequence of operations.
The machine started up without a hitch, blowing air into the Main Ballast Tanks, and I heaved a sigh of relief. I was a fucking Radioman! A communications technician. Never in my nine years of Navy training had I ever been prepared to take on half of the equipment procedures I had just performed, let alone performing them all solo.
Oh sure, eventually I'm expected to qualify as Chief of the Watch and Diving Officer of the Watch, the men who trim and drive the ship, but I was nowhere near high ranking enough for it. That was still years in my future. Still, we had shit to do, so I needed to do some shit.
"Maneuvering, control."
Nothing.
"MANEUVERING, CONTROL, TEST."
Silence.
"Schmidt, it's Hart. Please answer me, man."
Goddamnit. Schmidt was gone. I gritted my teeth, hard, fighting down the panic and despair with practiced iron will. I tried not to think about how Schmidt's last moments had to have gone.
As I tied the yoke in position, shifting the rudder to cause the ship to circle, I reached over to the Ballast Control Panel and raised the High Data Rate Mast. I trudged aft towards Radio, the communications room, my normal domain, and did the job I was actually trained for.
I worked my magic on the console, and within fifteen minutes, I had 128 kilobytes per second internet and access to an open voice net. I prayed that there was still someone on the other end of the line to answer.
"COMSUBLANT, this is Boise, over."
COMSUBLANT, or Commander, Submarine Forces Atlantic, was our parent command, the fleet that we belonged to. Twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, someone was supposed to be manning that station. Every fiber of my being hoped that someone was there, that someone, anyone, was monitoring the net. That there was any other soul left alive on the planet.
For several long minutes, I heard nothing, and I felt despair creeping on like a cold, black fog. Nothing on this earth is as isolated, as alone, as a submarine crew underway. And I was alone on the crew. The last swingin' dick on this giant metal machine.
The radio crackled to life, and my heart leaped in my chest.
A female voice spoke. "Last station, this is COMSUBLANT, say again?" Odd, there were vanishingly few women in the submarine force; the pilot program for integrating women onboard had started barely a year before. I was used to hearing men over the comms.
"COMSUBLANT, this is Boise, over."
"Boise?! Boise, this is COMSUBLANT, it's good to hear you! Go ahead, over."
"COMSUBLANT, this is Boise. Ship has suffered a mass casualty event, break. Majority of ship's company is Davy Jones, break. Remaining crew is insufficient to fully operate, navigate or fight the ship, break. Request your station advise, over."
"Boise, this is COMSUBLANT, Roger, break. Request your station pass ship's posit over secure chat, over." I slid over to my console, and with a few mouse clicks, pulled up a secure chat feed. I typed in the current ship's positional coordinates, then slid back over to the handset.
"COMSUBLANT, this is Boise. Ship's posit passed over secure chat. Standing by for instructions, over."
"Boise, this is COMSUBLANT Actual, over." Holy shit! The admiral herself was on the horn! Which was just as odd, last I knew, none of the female officers from the women in submarines pilot program were admirals yet. "Request Boise Actual to radio, over."
"COMSUBLANT Actual, this is Boise, command triad, wardroom and chiefs quarters are all Davy Jones, over."
"Boise, COMSUBLANT Actual, who am I speaking with? Over."
I wiped suddenly sweaty palms on the legs of my poopy suit. Sure, I'd spoken to officers a lot, given my rate, I was on first name terms with the commanding officer for Pete's sake. Still, admirals were another level entirely. "COMSUBLANT Actual, Boise, speaking with Petty Officer Second Class Hart, Charles S. Ma'am, break. I'm the senior man, correction, only survivor, present ma'am. Over."
"Jesus H. Christ, sailor. Everyone else is..."
"Gone ma'am. I had one of the nukes back aft, running the reactor, but I've heard nothing from him in hours. I was busy surfacing the ship solo, haven't had the chance to go back and check on him. Over."
"Well fuck me dry. Son, I won't lie to you, the fecal matter has hit the rotary cooling device shoreside. Brace yourself, sailor, this news ain't gonna be pleasant."
"Standing by ma'am." Sweat poured off of me in rivulets. Unconsciously, I started to unzip my poopy suit. It was so hot in here.
"We've lost contact with all underway submarines. A global pandemic is running roughshod over the entire planet. Casualties are staggering. Frankly, it's a miracle that you're alive, son. And a further miracle that you're in a state well enough to have preserved the submarine. We were able to recover our Strategic Defense Missile Assets, the boomers are all home, but by the time they were able to return to home port, their entire crews were dead or dying. In total, we've lost twenty fast attack submarines with all hands, and the crews of every other boat in the fleet have been utterly decimated."
"Fuck." Twenty subs, 150 men and officers each. A sickening number of men left on eternal patrol, their souls forever on watch in the depths. Boomers, or Ballistic Missile Submarines, were our nation's strategic deterrents. They were the subs that carried nuclear missiles. While it was a relief that no missile had gone missing, thousands of sailors in the submarine force were just... gone. For reference, the US Navy had 54 fast attack submarines in active service. We had just lost almost half of them.
"Fuck indeed petty officer."
"Orders ma'am?" I could feel the weight of the panic settling back in. I'd been running ragged for days, and I could feel the despair and fear settling in on my chest like constricting bands of iron. But, there was still more to do. I forced down the feeling of constriction and focused again.
"Hold fast, sailor. Help is on its way. We have your posit, the USS Kearsarge is en route with an emergency relief crew. ETA 20 hours and counting. Stay on the net sailor. You are Priority Only at this time. All other efforts are on hold until Boise is recovered. Remember, this is a secured net. Do NOT discuss this or anything else when you get shoreside. You're being given some time off post-deployment. You'll need it."
"Roger-" I had to stop briefly as hacking coughs wracked my chest. "Roger that COMSUBLANT. Boise standing by." I wiped my mouth, that cough had been painful. I looked down at my hand. "Is that... blood?"
Immediately, I heard shouting in the background, a flurry of motion. I could hear the admiral screaming at someone as a wave of dizziness swept over me.
"ETA TEN HOURS AND COUNTING! Someone scramble a helo, we need to get him out of there yesterday! Move it move it move it!"
I faded in and out, memories and nightmares fuzzing together.
********************************************************
It had started innocuously enough, sniffles, coughing. We thought it was the typical boat crud, the inevitable sickness that comes when you cram 150 men in close quarters into a giant tin can.
Then people started coughing up blood. Within a week, an entire watch section, one of three, was SIQ, Sick in Quarters, while doc, our sole corpsman, frantically tried to figure out what was happening.
By the time the second watch section started to cough blood, the initial wave was starting to die in agony, their bodies burning in fever as something tore them apart from the inside out. The ship was put on emergency watch standing, all nonessential watches were secured so that the few healthy men could eat and get a few hours of sleep.
Soon even that wasn't enough. The captain was coughing up blood himself when the decision was made to abandon the mission and return to port. By the time we were out of mission waters, we had a 20 man skeleton crew left alive, and most of them were sick.
We had to take turns loading almost one hundred bodies into the torpedo tubes, before we shot them out into the ocean. The most half-assed burial at sea ever, but it was all we could do. Normally a submariner underway who dies is kept in a body bag in frozen food stores, basically a giant freezer. There were just... so many. Too many.
In four days, an entire crew had been decimated, and the few of us left fought to get the ship home. Me and Schmidt ended up being the only two crewmen left alive by the time we were close enough to surface
*******************************************************.
I was so hot.
I heard muffled voices coming from dead men's lips. But the voices were female. A loud banging sound split my head apart, and shadowy winged figures with bloody fangs flew out, circling. Circling. I opened my mouth and sand poured out. God I was thirsty. Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink.
