Dark Transit

“Yes, sir,” Vlasenko said, leaving and shutting the door behind him.

“I’d better check the charts and current, Captain,” Misha Dobryvnik said, standing and putting his cup away in the bin. Orlov waved, taking a pull from his tea. He figured Irina Trusov would leave the wardroom as well. It would give him time to review the news files and see what was going on in the Gulf of Oman. Perhaps there was some context to this oddball mission.

But Trusov remained behind, refilling her cup, blowing on the hot tea and looking over the rim at Orlov, smiling at him with her eyes.

“Did you see the dispatch on the hack, Captain?” she asked.

“No,” he said, embarrassed that there was something he’d missed. “Was it addressed to us?”

“No, Captain, just a general update message. But it’s serious. The Northern and Pacific Fleet’s air and surface warfare systems all got some kind of worm that shuts down their computers. They can’t fly and the surface ships can’t even start their engines. It’s severe.”

“When did this happen? Do we know where it came from?” Orlov should have known about something this major. It might be a reason why their operational orders were delayed getting to them.

Trusov shook her head in disgust. “Who could it be, Captain. The damned Americans, of course.”

“Did the update say it was a state actor that originated this worm, like Stuxnet?”

“Yes, Captain.”

“It might not have been the Americans. The Chinese are making things difficult now. After they pulled out of the joint space mission, things have been pretty chilly with them.”

Trusov pursed her lips. “It’s the Americans, Captain. It’s always the Americans. You know my uncle went down on the Kursk, right?”

“Vlasenko told me,” Orlov said, hearing his own voice become gentler. “I’m sorry.”

“You know the intelligence agencies think the Americans sank her.”

“If they did,” Orlov said, “it was the perfect crime. There’s no evidence. It’s a conspiracy theory, Irina.” Suddenly it felt strange to address her as ‘Weapons Officer’ or ‘Miss Trusov.’

“Maybe so, sir, but it does fit a lot of facts about the Americans.”

“Do you ever wonder sometimes,” Orlov asked, “about the American submarine force? Their sailors, their officers, their ships?”

Captain Lieutenant Irina Trusov looked over the rim of her cup at Orlov again. “Only in passing, I suppose, the way I think about the Americans in general.”

“And how’s that, Irina?”

“They’re villains, Captain. They remain the glavny protivnik, the main adversary. They never go a year without starting a war, sometimes two, or continuing a war that never should have happened. Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Iraq, Bosnia, Somalia, Libya, Afghanistan. Every day their bombs rip apart the bodies of women and children, destroying schools, bridges, bus terminals, causing starvation, disease and death everywhere they go. They pretend to be proponents of peace while their intelligence agencies assassinate anyone who is in their political way. Captain, Mother Russia is the only force that stands between the Americans and total world domination.”

Orlov looked at her indulgently. “I know about one point four billion Chinamen who would disagree with that last point.”

“It’s the hypocrisy, Captain,” Trusov continued, ignoring his comment. “The Americans pretend to be a moral force for good, yet the sheer extent of racism in their culture is baked in. They eliminated slavery, but the descendants of their slaves live in ghettos. Meanwhile, their ultra-elites light cigars with hundred dollar bills while their media and entertainment industries crank out the vilest, most immoral and shocking content. It’s enough to make a red-blooded Russian girl sick. I’m friends with the first officer of the Voronezh, Anastasia Isakova. She was a mentor to me, recruited me into the force, back when she was in the Pacific Fleet. She told me her father lived in Star City and worked at the Baikonur Cosmodrome. He told her a hundred stories of how the Americans won the space race by cheating.”

“Cheating? In the space race?”

“Sabotage. They blew up more than a dozen of our rockets, one of the explosions killing the first chief designer. They even shot down our cosmonauts. The Americans are a wretched culture of killing and death and evil, Captain. The world would be a better place if they just stopped existing between breakfast and lunch.”

Orlov smiled. “Remind me to keep my nuclear release codes locked up tight, Madam Weapons Officer. Still,” he said, looking into the distance. “Consider if you will one of their submarines—”

A knock came at the door and Engineer Kiril Chernobrovin stuck his head in. “Captain, we are in the final hour of testing. We should be ready to answer all bells in fifty-five minutes, sir.”