Polaris Read Free Page A

them into the ground about international politics. Unfortunately, on a submarine that had been on patrol for far too long, that was much less important than being able to keep a main feed pump working, or the generators going. At least in Captain McCallister’s eyes.
    But that’s why she was here; that’s why the Alliance had put her onboard, made her second-in-command. Because she believed in the mission with the same kind of purity Ramirez had tried to get out of his roaring evaporators. From the cold murk of the ocean that surrounded them, he could produce water a thousand times cleaner than anything available on land, a requirement for his nuclear power plant. That’s what was required with ideology, too; it had to be even purer at sea than anywhere else, to hold up under the relentless pressure that constantly tested them all. Ramirez had never believed that, and neither had the captain. But now: she was in charge.
    She looked down at the display and checked again for the two undeniable realities in their ocean at the present time: the next step of their mission, represented by the two bright, straight lines of the degaussing range fifty miles ahead. The lines were superimposed electronically on the screen, essentially drawn on by the computer. It was a motionless, silent structure that was invisible to their sonar, or anyone else’s. The bright lines on the screen conveyed certainty, but they were just the coordinates they’d inputted, a visual representation of where the range was supposed to be.
    The upside-down V behind them on the screen represented less certainty, but was at least the result of real acoustic information, the thin but steady stream of noise that came to them from their shadow, the other submarine that had dogged them for days. Despite what she told Frank, she was certain she was a Typhon boat, based not only on her menacing posture but also on that noise: she was too loud to be an Alliance boat. A modern Alliance craft in their baffles like that would be silent and invisible. She sat down on the small foldout seat in front of the console, fiddled with the range, and realized for the first time how exhausted she was.
    *   *   *
    It was hard to believe that just three years earlier she’d been a high school teacher. Business and Econ, her only responsibility a roomful of disinterested eleventh graders in Oak Lawn, Illinois. It was a working-class area, the kind of area that the military had always fed on: patriotic kids without a lot of options. So when the war heated up, Oak Lawn sent its share to all three services, and Ms. Moody was one of the teachers who encouraged them, making her a friend to the recruiters that periodically swept through the halls giving away ARMY OF ONE T-shirts and promises of upward mobility, college tuition, and adventure.
    At first, like most of the teachers, she was conflicted about sending the kids away. Even though she believed deeply that it was the right thing, she knew many of them would end up in harm’s way, and some of them would end up hurt, or even dead. Many of the teachers quietly discouraged kids from joining for just that reason, although they soon learned to keep their mouths shut about any doubts they had. Teachers were public employees, and public employees who were labeled as unpatriotic soon found their careers limited. Especially as the enemy had one success after another in the Pacific, and the war seemed to close in on them all.
    But as time went on, Moody began to actually envy those kids. The war consumed all the media, and it was clear, as the Alliance coalesced in a last-ditch effort to defeat Typhon, that democracy itself was at stake. Many of her former students were in the fight, doing something about it. They would come back to school occasionally, with their uniforms and their ribbons, and sometimes even with their wounds, and she could see it in their eyes: their lives had purpose in a way