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he left the wardroom to go below. Jeffrey knew that Torelli and his people might soon be frantic with effort to keep themselves and the rest of the crew alive.
    They’re a hardened, steely-nerved bunch now that they’ve got their sense of purpose back. Intercepting incoming fire, and putting weapons on target, required exhausting teamwork as intricately choreographed, and as thoroughly rehearsed, as any ballet. Every torpedo or cruise missile weighed thousands of pounds, much of that volatile engine fuels, high explosives—and fissionable cores of uranium or plutonium. Crush injuries and toxic spills were a constant hazard. A fire or explosion could spell disaster. Operating each tube correctly was a tricky task in itself. Bad flooding through one would doom the ship.
    Damage control in Torelli’s department was taken tremendously seriously. Sessions, as XO, had assigned the Seabee passengers, when at battle stations, to be an extra damage-control party stationed outside the torpedo room; their talents at improvising machinery repairs during combat might give a decisive extra margin for survival if worse came to worst. One of Challenger ’s chiefs from Engineering was with them as the man in charge, since the Seabees weren’t qualified in submarines.
    Lieutenant Willey, the engineer, stopped by while Jeffrey finished gulping his coffee. “Greetings, mein Commodore.”
    “Ahoy there, Enj,” Jeffrey razzed him back—a ship’s engineer often got the nickname Enj. Willey was respectful, but he did have an offbeat, sometimes edgy sense of humor. Tall and lanky, his face always seemed pinched and his posture slightly stooping, as if carrying a heavy load. Right now he had stubbly five-o’clock shadow and extra-bad coffee breath, and looked like he’d been awake for twenty-four hours straight, at least. His eyes were sunken and bloodshot, but sharply focused.
    Jeffrey sympathized: he’d been an engineer on his own department head tour. The hours were especially grueling; the responsibilities never let up. Overseeing the safe and reliable running of a sub’s nuclear reactor, and all the rest of the propulsion plant and other mechanical systems, took commitment and heart as well as tons of book smarts and common sense.
    Willey wolfed down a slice of sausage casserole, and hurried aft. Jeffrey left the wardroom, stepping into the passageway. The enlisted mess, on the opposite side of the galley, was doing brisk business. Captain Bell had passed the word that he’d be going to battle stations soon. This could be the crew’s last chance for a hot meal for a while.
    The mess management specialists, normally very attentive to their customers and renowned for their cheerful service, seemed unusually eager for everyone to finish eating and leave. They needed to clean up, then specially sanitize these spaces: in emergencies, the ship’s wardroom doubled as an operating theater, and the enlisted mess was the triage area.
    A corkscrew twisted in Jeffrey’s stomach momentarily, and he knew it wasn’t the food. He was remembering times on previous missions when there’d been human blood on the floor here in puddles, and bodies or parts of bodies stored in a sealed-off section of the ship’s freezer.
    Jeffrey walked forward into the control room, pushing these macabre recollections from his mind. He sat and activated his console, arranging windows on the two large screens, one above the other, to show the data he would need: a copy of the navigation plot and the tactical plot. A copy of the ship’s gravimeter display, which used sophisticated sensors and computer algorithms to measure the three-dimensional gravity fields around the ship, and from that derive a picture of the local sea floor and coastline topography. The gravimeter was nice because it was passive, not needing to make emissions that could give away Challenger ’s presence. It could see through solid rock, because gravity reached through solid rock. It also was