Apparatus 33 by Lawston Pettymore (bearly read books TXT) 📕

of the center dials of the dashboard confirmed he was two meters too deep. The laws of buoyancy commanded the craft to rise slowly to its set buoyancy level in the fresh, slowly moving water of the Spree. NIX would begin to float higher as it reached the denser, saltier water near the North Sea.

Under guidance of the sequencer, and Zerrissen’s supervisory gaze, NIX headed downstream. The tail was calmly and silently flipping its way on a path that would terminate in the Netherlands. As it was a moonless night with slack tidal conditions in the North Atlantic nearby, the journey would take 10 hours.

Water gurgled along the hull outside, which was fine as long as it stayed outside. The only other sounds were whines of the gyroscopes as the craft moved through the still water, it was a feat that made him feel some pride. His sequencer, his other pride, issued the occasional correction to the tail flip centroid, and adjusted the arrival time clock on the dashboard accordingly.

Zerrissen’s mood improved as he looked for signs of failure and finding none. Only small amounts of water accumulated in what would have been the bilge (had this been a real submarine). His breathing was sending into the ambient air, but the scrubbers were keeping it under control. Current from the two batteries was consumed as planned, the voltage was holding at twelve volts. In a half an hour, the sequencer would command the tail to flip a path change to the Elbe River.

First, however, NIX had to pass two GDU border guard stations before reaching its turn at the junction with the Elbe. The guards were armed, bored, and known to be as drunk as they were trigger happy, with no penalties for shooting first and asking questions never.

Zerrissen’s stopwatch dead reckoning told him he was near the first guard station, but on this moonless evening of celebration, a black painted NIX, one meter beneath the water, would surely be impossible to see. His hunch was confirmed when he heard guards laughing and talking loudly as drunks do, even above the gurgling of the water slipping past NIX’s hull. No doubt they were resentful of the short straws they had drawn to work that evening. His confidence subsided, however, when he thought he heard a guard shout, “Alarm!’ If he were seen, he would soon be perforated with test fire from their rifles. When no such rifle fire commenced, Zerrissen struggled to convince himself it was all in his mind, when he noticed the depth gauge. By pumping out the water collecting at the bottom of NIX, he had increased her buoyancy and allowed her to expose a few inches of her hull above water. Even a drunk guard could not ignore a black cylinder with a hatch and eddies of water forming around its swishing tail, even if only illuminated by starlight.

At the second guard station, another guard leaned his rifle against the exterior of the shack, fumbled for his zipper and stomped his heavy waffle-pattern shoes towards the riverbank, looking for a strange object that was reported to him by phone from the guard station upstream. Urinating into the river in the freezing April night air, he watched for the black cylinder in the light reflecting from the western side of the riverbank, and upon sighting it, decided it was only an old oak tree that had fallen into the river, but nonetheless a decent target. It moved at two knots, which gave him just enough time to grab his rifle and pull off a round into the center of the exposed portion. The sound of the rifle awoke his comrade guard inside, but it was the sound of a ricochet that sobered them both up a bit. Bright search lights on top of the station threw light on the water, and both guards emptied their 9 mm magazines into the strange tree trunk of steel.

As it moved out of range, the guards lit cigarettes and let it vanish as fly fishermen watched a targeted trout slip away. Neither concerned himself with the responsibility of letting it go, nor with the paperwork that interrogations about such things invited.

“Loch Ness Schlange,” one guard remarked to the other, laughing. With the target gone, they lowered their rifles, lit each other’s cigarettes, and continued their patrol, the incident already forgotten.

The episode did not pass so benignly inside NIX; the instruments (and a bit of flesh) had received the rifle fire. Zerrissen’s attention was spread across too many points of failure to be on top of any, or to even be aware of the sound of water passing beneath the hull. He could not see the swords of light from GDU guards probing the strange mass floating in the Spree, and he was thus stunned by a loud whipcrack reverberating through the tube. This was followed by a whine of high velocity, which sounded like the ricochets in American Western movies.

Sacrificing precious battery power, he flipped on the internal lights to look for the source of what could have only been an explosion, even though nothing pyrotechnic was on board. The fact that there was no smoke and no water leakage intensified the mystery. Had NIX struck another ship? How could it? It was a meter beneath all other traffic. Then he heard another whipcrack, then a whine of a snapped piano wire striking a note of ricochet. A hole appeared inches behind his head in the soft aluminum tail section, admitting a stream of high-pressure water that doused the tail flip mechanism and the aft scrubber. A second stream, more powerful and diametrically opposed to the first, opened underneath him.

The incoming water was solving his buoyancy error too slowly. NIX was still exposing a full half meter of her hull above the surface. He slammed the depth control forward to drop another meter only to find that the maneuver increased the flow of water through the two openings. Sounds of zippers