Chapter Text
Statement Begins.
I was raised in the Soviet Union, to a respectable, party family, of the all too common sort that was as much politically committed to the party as to their own advancement and comfort. And so, as part of his duties, my father diligently worked to crack down upon black market smuggling whilst reaching accommodations with those self-same criminals to ensure those self-same luxuries found themselves on our table.
And really, to look back on it, it was men like him that ensured the Russian Federation ended up the way it did. Oh, for sure, the USSR was doomed past a certain point. Afghanistan, Gorbachev, Helsinki, decide for yourself. But when it died, and it was time to build something new… The black marketeers and the gangsters broke through the thin crust of men like my father with contemptuous Ease.
I’m getting slightly ahead of myself, but it’s still important to note that this was the backdrop of my decisions. I’m, well, not exactly proud of them, but I don’t know what I could have done differently at the time.
Everyone was conscripted into the military in the USSR, more or less. And as the scion of a Party Family, there was no chance of weaseling out of it. So I volunteered instead, on a long term service contract rather than the three or four years the Conscripts got. It wasn’t that I believed in the grand revolution against the Imperialist West, or to earn the pride of my father or win prestige for the family. It was more that I was sick and tired of them, every single one.
I’d always been a somewhat private person, which was not a good fit with them. I’ve got half a dozen siblings left now, and I long since stopped bothering to keep track of the cousins. Which is why, of course, I volunteered for the Navy. Being at Sea was the perfect excuse to not see them.
I think I was the happiest man in my training camp when I first reported to Submarine training. Under the sea, there was no chance they’d expect me to keep in contact.
After the endless training, I was finally let loose to sea on one of the 671’s. Victor Class, to use NATO terminology, as a Life Support technician, with my specialty in managing the oxygen distribution and Carbon Dioxide management systems. It’s one of those many things that sounds tedious and boring if you’re on the surface, but it’s terrifyingly vital on a Submarine.
What I will say for that sub is that it definitely honed my skills, and taught me that I took quite well to Submarine life, even the part wear you wear each pair of underpants four different ways before washing them. And despite everything going on around that time, I was elated to find out that I was being transferred to the about to commission TK-17 (Typhoon Class to NATO ears.) She was a beauty of a vessel when she was new, I can tell you that now.
I was, I think happier than I had ever been aboard her, even as the political conditions got worse, even as the barely read letters from my family told of bread lines and increasingly scarcity of, well, everything.
And then the World ended. That may sound like an exaggeration, here and now, but you don’t have the benefit of hindsight when you’re living through it. The world as I had grown up in, the world I understood, collapsed before my eyes. The Warsaw pact slipped away. The Union itself was sundered, the Baltics and the Steppe States shaking themselves loose, even Ukraine and Belarus. Suddenly, we weren’t Soviets, we were Russians. And, well, let’s just say that when the Tanks were sieging the Kremlin, there were some very private conversations and duty and loyalty.
Now, I said the world ended, and for us Submariners, it was, more or less. Literally hundreds of boats unceremoniously dumped, Nuclear Hull after hull left to rot. 17 Subs were even given to Pepsi as payment. Old ones, yes, but still. We were quietly outraged. We were on the newest Submarines in the fleet, and even we weren’t safe. Tk-210 was cancelled on the slipway, and we… We suddenly found ourselves without a Submarine, ordered home and off ship, and she was towed to the Drydocks.
I still remember watching them drain the dock, her sleek black body being revealed inch by inch. I thought it was the last I ever saw of her. I wish it had been.
I had thought it funny, at the time, that my pay hadn’t been stopped. Far from being summarily dismissed as so many others had, I was on ‘Indefinite leave, pending deployment’. What that meant, though, was that there was no Bunk in a naval base with my name on it, so I gritted my teeth and went to stay with my family, figuring that I’d be reassigned eventually or finally culled from the ranks. It wasn’t like I could get a job in the meantime: Things were very bad back then. Practically, there was no organised government in the towns and cities: The Gangsters ran things now, and I didn’t quite fit in to the world as they ran it. But I had my paychecks and nowhere else to go, so for a while I could pay their tribute.
Six months later, February 1992, an American knocked on the door of the family home, looking for me. He spoke fine, if thickly accented, Russian, and he represented a Private Consortium of businesses who had purchased TK-19 for Conversion into a Cargo Submarine, an oil tanker to be precise, running high quality refined Oils, Avgas in particular, from Russia to much of the northern hemisphere, able to run all year round, underneath the Arctic ice.
I was desperate to get away from my family again, and the Navy had finally kicked me out. So I said yes, without much of a second thought. I didn’t even have to ask to be paid in Dollars. Not much stock in the Rouble those days. So I signed on for the maiden voyage of the Cargo Submarine ‘Arkhangelsk’, Murmansk to Victoria. Personally, I thought it was a stupid name for a Submarine, especially one that had never even been based there. But it wasn’t my boat any longer, and I could hardly complain.
The first thing I noticed when I returned to her was how much nosier she was. Submarines were never quiet places in board, but it looked like they’d ripped out most of the equipment and replaced it with cheaper, nosier stuff. The crew was a lot smaller as well, though that made sense. No need for Torpedo and missile techs on an unarmed vessel. And the name‘ Arkhangelsk’ was stenciled on everything in this garish green stencil. I also thought that we were lighter on crew than we should have been, even accounting for the fact that we operating to a merchant crewing standard. That’s one of things with Submarines. Everything’s much more vital. Things that can be left broken on a ship for a few hours or days just can’t on a Sub. We didn’t even have the consolation prize of a better amenity to man ratio. Most of them had been ripped out in the conversion, some of them, seemingly needlessly. I recall more than one pointlessly empty room. The weight savings must have been minimal at best.
Most of the Crew were ex-Soviet Boaters like me, all except the Captain, one Richard Berryman, who was clearly the Consortium’s man. His Russian wasn’t that good, though he seems to know his craft. Probably one of the guys we’d have been dueling with, if it ever came to that.
Honestly, something felt wrong ever since we took on our Cargo. I say cargo, not Avgas or oil or ‘refined petroleum products’ or whatever, because I never actually saw the stuff, though I could feel it every second underway: The center of gravity of TK-19 had shifted dramatically, and she always felt slow and sluggish to me with that stuff aboard. And it was definitely some sort of fluid, you can feel it shift against it’s containers every time we made a course correction.
There was nothing but the usual troubles at first, though I must admit I was getting somewhat agitated with some of the new equipment. Well, all of it, really. Some bright spark had only provided English copies of the technical manuals, and my old knowledge was practically useless, given that all the equipment I had been trained on was… Wherever it was. Not on Arkhangelsk. Thankfully, the cook, of all people, had purchased a hefty Russian-English dictionary, and between that, tinkering, bodging and a bit of careful guesswork, it all seemed to work.
I should note, of course, that the cook’s dictionary was a prized commodity aboard, as my experience was being reproduced everywhere else aboard (asides from the reactor. No one had been dumb enough to mess with it.) This was terribly unsafe. If not everything’s working on a Submarine, you are in danger. Improper operation of the toilet is a hazard to the boat. I am not exaggerating.
But still, we managed well enough until we slipped beneath the Arctic ice. It was then I started to notice a persistent… Flaw with the air filtration systems. Whilst the air mix didn’t seem to be altering, nor the humidity or the temperature, I could have sworn that the air started to feel… Heavier. Now, the air quality always suffers something of a decline as you spend time under the surface, but this was… Different. At first, I put it down to a harmless quirk of the new equipment, paranoia induced by the unique nature of the work I’d been putting into the systems, or just a side effect of the nightmare I’d been getting.
I can assure you, I was not alone in the nightmares, which was very odd. As a rule, if you’re nightmare prone, or an insomniac generally, you don’t last on Subs. And yet, everyone, save the reactor crew, got them. Everyone got their own variations. The pressure hull failing was always a popular topic, of course. As was the murder-dreams, where the dreamer would wake up to find the crew had butchered each other. Sometimes it was the cook looking to fill a stewpot. Sometimes it was the Reactor crew, who’d started worshiping the Reactor as a god, killing to appease it. Sometimes it was no reason at all.
Morale was, shall we say, quite low, and the vodka was broken into early. Berryman ruled with an indifferent, distant fist, and when I finally bought my concerns about the air systems to him, he told me in no uncertain terms that I was imagining things and I was not to waste my time investigating further.
Like a good little sailor, I followed orders. For a week, I ignored the steadily heavier air. I thought the Captain had a point, actually, because whenever I bought it up, no one else could feel it. I thought I was imagining things, indulging my paranoia about the new equipment.
Then, I noticed another thing had changed. The new systems was designed to feed new oxygen into circulation continuously, rather than at set intervals like some of the older systems did. This was fine by me, though, of course, it both contributed to and got lost in the noise.
But after a week, as I was checking one of oxygen ducts that introduced fresh oxygen to the boat, I realised that the duct wasn’t expelling air at a continuous rate like I had presumed. Every few seconds, it was expelling, then… It was intaking. It was very slow, minutes of expulsion and intaking at a time. I was there frozen for a good half hour, just listening, trying to fathom what I was listening to.
I was listening to the boat breathing.
At first, I literally pinched myself. After so many nightmares, I thought this had to be another. Then I checked if I was drunk. To my recollection, I wasn’t. And I hadn’t been drunk two days ago, when I had last checked this vent, and it hadn’t been doing this then, at least, I thought it hadn’t.
It suddenly occurred to me that I had never seen on the plans how the boat now dealt with Carbon Dioxide. It occurred to me that I hadn’t seen the plans in full at all. So, I admit, I panicked. I scampered for main Engineering, by the reactor, desperately digging around in the tiny library they had there, desperately looking for a complete set of plans, or just the Carbon dioxide scrubbers.
I never found them. I don’t know if they were there to be found. I do know the Captain turned up with some haste, castigated me for abandoning my work, and relieving me on the spot. Unfortunately for him, there wasn’t a brig, and you couldn’t exactly confine us to quarters, given that we were hotbunking. Neither of us mentioned the torn out, empty rooms, though I’m sure we both thought about them. To be honest, things as there were, the unpopular captain imprisoning a crewman for looking for technical plans? I don’t know how things would have gone, and neither did he. So instead of imprisoned, I was just unutilised.
So that night, I said bollocks to it, and starting poking around when the captain was asleep. The noise worked with me here, as no one could bloody tell I was up to something. I started with my ‘lighthouse’ as I called it, and tried to follow it to their origin point, and when I couldn’t follow that one, I picked the next one. None of them were large enough to crawl through, you understand. I was digging up walls, floors and ceilings to follow them.
And beneath the surface level I had been kept busy with, I found… Well, I don’t know what I found, because it didn’t make sense. As I worked, night after night, I found Vents that didn’t… There are only so many ways humans can fit out submarine vents with a hope of having humans maintain them. These vents were done up like none of them. In school, I had read about Nazi tanks in WWII: Big, lumbering expensive machines that were so overengineered that slightest hitch would put them out of action for months. I would have far rather maintained a Tiger than this nonsense design.
The air exhibited more of that… Heaviness I had noticed previously, though I scarce paid attention to it until my fifth night of exploration, when I found a fresh cluster of interlocking, intertwined, ‘breathing’ vents, the furtherest fore, towards the upper cargo spaces, I had ventured. Except, these vents weren’t… Still. I don’t know how long I simply watched and stared at them, expanding and contracting, very slowly, perfectly in time with the expulsion and intake of oxygen I had observed.
Eventually, some mad conviction overcame me, I felt, I knew, that I had to touch it. I don’t know where the conviction came from, I don’t know from where I found the strength, but I did, slowly and carefully as I had with my baby cousins. The vents they would have been pleasantly warm to the touch if they weren’t meant to be warm at all; if they didn’t have give and play to them like they were made from thin layers of rust and fabric.
Or flesh.
I wish I had never had that thought. I can’t help but feel like that thought was responsible for what happened next.
I rushed to cover up my work and slip back to my bunk, the main shift was nearly on duty. Typically, I slept during the main shift ‘the day’, but I couldn’t. The air was heavier than it ever had been, and finally the others seemed to notice. They were busy with other tasks, however, and I couldn’t openly take up tools to investigate. I should have been exhausted from my nightly activities. I was exhausted from them. But I couldn’t sleep, no matter how hard I tried, because I could feel the boat now. I could feel it breathing, ever so slowly. I could feel it expand and contract beneath my feet when I stood, and beneath my head when I lied. I could no more sleep than I could have if a wolf stood over me, slavering.
I found myself drawn further and further forward, towards the Cargo spaces, and the air got heavier, and the temperature and humidity grew. Maintenance failure due to my enforced absence could have been an explanation, but I knew it wasn’t. And the further fore I went, the more I saw the change, until my feet began to sink, ever so slightly, into the deck beneath me. At last, I found myself at the final bulkhead, hatches firmly sealed with a dozen warnings against opening. Beyond lay the Cargo Spaces, full of fluids of some sort or other, and opening the hatch would unleash the contents upon the inhabited sections of the boat. As I lay my hand against that final hatch, I knew it was metal in appearance alone: There was nothing but flesh beneath my palm.
I don’t know how long I stood there, palm against the hatch, but it was long enough for a pulse of a heartbeat, and as it shuddered through the hatch, it engulfed me was well, and I understood. Not everything, but… Enough. I forgot almost all of it as the pulse subsided, for which I am eternally grateful, but I knew enough.
There was something on the other side. The Captain knew, but That-on-the-other-side and grown tired of him. It had drawn me here. And it wanted me to open the hatch. I think… I think it could have worked it’s way through eventually. But it was bored and hungry.
I… Don’t know how I resisted. I think, mostly it was because it had… Changed the hatch. It wasn’t metal any more, and it wasn’t capable of opening any more. I had to… Leave it’s… Presence. Find cutting gear. But once I was far enough away from it I… Formed a different plan.
You see, TK-19 had a number of internal pressure hulls, and the remaining inhabited sections were in their own hull. So I didn’t acquire cutting gear. I acquired a wrench, and beat Richard Berryman and the helmsman on duty to death on the bridge, and sealed myself inside. Then, I was able to work the controls. Everything had been clearly labelled by the helmsman because it was all new, unfamiliar, and no longer subject to military discpline.
I brought TK-19 to Test depth, 400m below sea level and lower still. I was perfectly fine with killing everyone on board, you understand. It had to be done. But I was lucky. At 427m, the outer pressure hull gave. The inner pressure hull, the inhabited section, survived. But I felt the boat lurch. The Cargo section must have had it’s own pressure hull removed to make room. But I didn’t know if it was enough.
But at 435m, I felt the most awful sound I ever heard, and ever will. It is etched into my mind, and I cannot forget it, no matter how hard I try. It was not just a death cry. It was a cry to me, personally. That-on-the-other-side felt… Betrayed with me. As though I had reneged on a bet that it had won.
After that, I thanked God TK-19 was solidly built enough that she could still rise after that. I was able to stabilise depth at 200m. Then I opened the hatch.
I thought they would lynch me, but they just looked ill. They had heard the death scream as well, and they knew I did the right thing, though they couldn’t possibly tell you what it was.
From there, we gave the helmsman a burial at sea, then chucked Berryman out into the ocean, and docked at the nearest port we could find. Aberdeen. I haven’t been on a boat since.
Statement Ends.