May 24^th, 1636, Somewhere in the West of the Feplarian Coast, 12:04 P.M.

Captain Elmar breathed a sigh of relief. The control room felt hot and stuffy. After an oddly agonizing two hours on the surface, his sub, the HMFS Ploaton was back under the cover of the waves. Oddly agonizing, because normally one would be happy to taste fresh air after staying in a cramped steel pipe for so long.

The crew were on their stations, working the instruments. Ploaton had been retired once already, refitted, then recommissioned into service. The HEC had needed a sub for their dirty work, and the Ploaton had been chosen for the job.

Upgrades and modifications had been bestowed upon the sub, courtesy of the HEC. The sub had a brand-new sonar from Arbelladon Instruments, the latest toy out of the Holy Navy’s box of wonders. Propulsion systems were upgraded, with new engines and electric motors. The forward torpedo room was modified to accommodate some research equipment in exchange for dropping the number of torpedo tubes from four to two, and the aft torpedo tube had been removed entirely.

The crew was operating in shifts. There was no rush here. The boat wasn’t engaged in active combat, neither were they actively searching for targets of opportunity. Hopefully.

Elmar shifted slightly on his feet, his unease ever so slightly leaking from his otherwise calm demeanour. The source of his unease were his new orders. He wasn’t unaware of all the things happening, after all. He was part of the entire thing as well, the skipper of one of the few boats and airships allocated for this task. His sub had been the one ferrying all sorts of things back and forth from home, as well as resupplying the stationed teams along with the Escil.

He had mentally prepared himself when he first signed up for this, but part of him now regretted that discussion, inwardly venting his frustration at agreeing for this. He wasn’t a stranger to civilians barking around absurd things and expecting to get them done, but he was no stoic man. The frustration was still there, always nagging him persistently.

The area the Ploaton was heading to had been uncharted territory for the most part. The locals feared this side of the ocean for “being the edge of the world”, hence apart from the small barbarian outpost located at a small island chain, there was very little shipping in this part of the world. Hence, any kind of expeditionary force wanting to step into these waters needed a bunch of ships to map out the area first. One of the many different specialities in the Ploaton’s resume.

“Skipper, we are at one-hundred-and-fifty feet.” A sailor called out. His long ears glistened from sweat beneath the bangs of unkempt blonde hair.

“Up five degrees on the dive planes. Rudder right ten degrees, come to new course two-seven-five.” Elmar gave out orders. Nothing new or out of ordinary. Nothing out of ordinary rarely ever occurred on a sub like this.

“Up five degrees on the dive planes, aye.”

“Rudder right ten degrees, aye. Coming to new course two-seven-five.”

The aged submarine slowly began turning right, levelling out under the surface. At the depth it was, little light reached its metal hull, with a ray of sunlight occasionally reaching the forward deck gun and the conning tower.

In the absence of anything important to do, Elmar’s mind ran in circles. A few days ago, he had been delivered an urgent message from Dr. Horith himself. Somebody, something, had appeared to the west, where the Far West island chain, as the locals referred it to – they didn’t have any official name for it – was. The dark elves reported making contact with some unknown ships, and before they knew it, that entire sector had suddenly gone dark. The message said that available evidence indicated presence of the ‘Centrals’ – used to refer to the members of the Center Civilization recognised under the Ailwin-Alur Treaty – having been the ones behind it. Elmar was to take the Ploaton there, and recon the area.

If it was only that simple, Captain Elmar thought to himself. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. The Ploaton also had to map out the area as well, and that involved using its new sonar. And while he certainly didn’t admire the idea of running his submarine onto the seabed during a hasty manoeuvre, the idea of blasting his sonar in what was, for all he knew, very likely hostile territory didn’t sound any better.

Immediately after receiving the message, Elmar had replied that it was quite risky and ‘idiotic’, that asking a sub to perform reconnaissance and mapping out the ocean at the same time were ‘simply unthinkable’, and that these two kinds of missions rarely ever went together when it came to surface ships, and the Escil should have been assigned this duty. The reply was stern, saying Escil was invested in important duties elsewhere, and that time was of the utmost importance here, hence they couldn’t wait for the airship to arrive.

Elmar cursed that fool dearly. Sonars were loud, and using sonar meant announcing one’s location in a very large region, including people one would rather prefer to keep in the dark regarding just about anything. Sure, the sonar was indeed new, and admirals and military planners back at home were still coming up with new and interesting ways on how to use it, but to Elmar it wasn’t entirely alien. At the very least, if nothing else, he knew about the sonar’s perils and dangers from his own experiences in using it. More than civilian officers to whom sonar seemed like a do-it-all magic spell, and who knew not a thing about the complexities of civilized naval warfare.

 The sub was moving around in large circles, shifting around fifty nautical miles towards the west with each new turn. A sprint-drift tactic had been applied, where the sub would at twelve knots for a while, then slow down to creep speed and use her sonar to map the area, then speed up to twelve knots again. This had been tactic to map and search the area in the least possible time for the past few days, and they were now slowly getting closer to the target area.

Elmar checked the gauges, then checked his watch. It would be another three hours before his sub needed to surface. Until then, he was safe under the surface of the water. After he had seen the sub levelled out in the water, he stepped through the bulkhead leading to the forward officer’s quarters, and lay down on his bed. The mattress felt stiff, nowhere near as comfortable as the ones at home, but it didn’t bother him. At least it helped him catch some shut eye, and that was all a bed needed to do.

As he closed his eyes to catch a nap, his thoughts raced once more. What if, hypothetically, an enemy ship had seen his boat? On paper, the High Elves were at war with no one, but here that was different. All the frail formalities and niceties associated with the civilized world crumbled the moment one stepped outside the reach of the civilized world. Here, there was no diplomacy, no morality, only raw greed and ambition masked by transparent veil of the sense of inherent superiority.

Elmar closed his eyes. He was too tired to think about such things. If they come across any boat that has hostile intentions, they will torpedo it and be done with it, that was the conclusion his mind came to before sinking in a slumber.

 

 

May 24^th, 2036, Off the coast of the Far West island chain, 2:15 P.M.

“Bridge, sonar. He’s maintaining course and heading, sir. Still in a shallow right turn.” The sonar operator of the Nilgiri class frigate announced on the comms. The bridge was sunny and well lit from the sunlight. Towards the west, off the port side of the bow, was land, an uneven strip of round green shapes sitting on top of the horizon. The water was clear, and possessed a cerulean blue hue. All that was missing was a bunch of civilian yatches, Captain Advani mused, and it would be impossible to tell this place apart from Goa or the Andamans.

His frigate was east of the newly-acquired islands. There was heavy military activity in the region. Despite having annihilated the pointy-ears on land, there was still uncertainty and paranoia regarding the local wildlife. As such, security was tight, and round-the-clock surveillance was the norm. There were multiple ships and aircraft patrolling the area, keeping a keen eye and a sharp ear on the waters below, and the skies above.

Advani squinted his eyes as gazed into the distance. There was another ship patrolling the area a few miles ahead of his own, a little off to the starboard side of the bow. Probably another Nilgiri, looking from the silhouette. There were more, out of sight but visible on the tactical display. An airbase was being constructed on an island fifty nautical miles away, which the Navy had decided, after much deliberation it seemed, as being rather safe. Another small island around thirty miles away, was being used to build a dock. INS Vishal was in the region, while INS Vikrant had returned home alongside to her sister ship INS Varun to resume her upgrades.

Too bad, the Captain thought, they might have to pack up and pull out from this place if things didn’t go nicely. The Lok Sabha had voices questioning the invasion and occupation of the island, and already there was a case filed in the Supreme Court against the ‘massacre of innocent locals in the new world’. The outrage over the Defence Minister’s decision to attack the locals and occupy what was their territory without any solid reason, still hadn’t subsided, and small protests demanding his resignation had popped up in some parts of the country. Opposition parties, in their usual fashion, had already gone ahead and made at least one, probably two, controversial statements, apart from demanding the army’s complete withdrawal from the islands. Still, just like always, the wave of nationalism and the surge of positivity from the news of the successful ‘invasion’ reigned supreme. Patriotism had always been a powerful tool in Indian politics.

None of that mattered for now, however. As far as they were concerned, they were still technically engaged in war with another state, now identified as “Feplaria”. As such, the usual procedures were to be followed, regardless of what went on in the country’s political sphere. They were here to stay, unless the order to retreat was given.

The frigate was part of a screen of warships monitoring all traffic in the region. There were a wide variety of ships and aircraft in the region, with destroyers and frigates sweeping the surface and everything below it. In the air, Neptunes and UAVs swept the skies, and Romeos and Dhruvs from various ships sometimes conducted routine patrol. The Nilgiri’s own Dhruv was parked in the aft hangar, its crew resting after a good day of patrolling.

“Acknowledged, sonar.”

The captain put down the phone. Right now, every ship in the area was listening and tracking one contact. One contact, its bearings, course and position transmitted to the displays of every Navy asset in the area.

Why wouldn’t they? In an open ocean teeming with ships, submarines and aircraft straining their eyes, ears and sensors for the slightest of twitches in the waters, a bozo had marched blasting his sonar at the loudest possible power setting, and being very noisy in general. There was simply no way to miss such a juicy contact.

It had first appeared six days ago, when a Neptune patrolling about a few hundred nautical miles off the coast of ‘Feplaria’ detected a submerged contact through its MAD. The crew were rather excited; routine patrols like these were deathly boring, rarely was there anything worthwhile popping up on the sensors. And when it did pop up, it was usually some civilian vessel. A submarine contact was rarer.

Immediately, an alert was sent out, and in a few hours, there were at least three vessels on the contact along with two aircraft apart from the ship’s own helicopters, each with a firing solution ready. Others were on standby, the crews now wide awake and alert. There could be other subs out there that they didn’t know about.

Since then, the contact was being monitored closely. Advani had seen the tactical displays, with the subsurface contact – designated SKUNK 1 – marked, along with all the Indian Navy and aircraft. He could not fathom just how this guy had managed to stay oblivious despite everything happening around him. SKUNK 1 had, quite interestingly, not changed his movement pattern. The unknown sub was tracing a large circular shape gradually shifting westwards. The sub had adopted a sprint-drift pattern, where it would sprint for a few miles at around fifteen knots, then slow down to creep speed and blast its sonar, then repeat. There had been no change to the pattern since then.

From the sensors, it was clear that the contact was a sub, and a rather sizable one. Around forty metres long, and noisy. Very noisy. There was more than enough noise to be able to easily track the contact from a sufficiently safe distance. Far more noisy than even the targets they trained against during training.

Right now, a Shivalik class frigate was shadowing SKUNK 1 more than twenty miles off its stern. The stealth guided missile frigate had been quietly creeping behind the contact for quite while now, and another frigate was moving in station to relieve it. It was easy for the rotating ships to reestablish contact with the sub once they got on station, since the sub’s behaviour so far had been extremely predictable.

For most of the ASW guys in the Navy, this was less of an operation and more of amusement. Rather, it was less of shadowing or tailing, and more about ‘bullying’ the target contact. The fact that a sub like this could just waltz in unannounced and pretend that the hundreds of ships monitoring it didn’t exist, was simply too amusing. No one knew if the boat’s captain was just really stupid or really confident, or both.

Numerous ships had tried coming close to the target. Sometimes to gauge the target’s reaction and see if it can detect them, or sometimes just for plain fun. INS Khanderi, diesel-electric attack submarine, had once slipped underneath the thermocline layer and creeped up to the sub while she was transitioning from a drift to a sprint with her sonar turned off. Khanderi had gotten very close to the sub, until at one point she was vertically underneath the unknown sub, just underneath the layer. It had then proceeded to show up less than a mile behind the sub’s stern up to periscope depth, and there it had stayed for several minutes, before going back down. Even FOCINCWEST (Flag-Officer Commander-in-Chief West) had trouble concealing his amusement when he read the report.

“Sir.” The executive officer called out. “We got something from headquarters. You might wanna see this.”

“Is it about our noisy guest?”

“Seems like it.”

The two walked down a set of stairs towards the CIC. The cool breeze greeted them as they stepped outside. It was funny. It was the same, familiar breeze that the sea had always greeted them with, even when they were supposed to be in a place that was unfamiliar and alien. Only a few experienced sailors could taste the tiny sense of novelty and familiarity in it.

The captain took off his aviators as the two entered the CIC. A stark contrast to the bridge, the CIC was dark. There was rarely any outside illumination here. The only source of the light were the dim glows of the displays and the buttons, casting a dull-blue glow in the room. Yet it wasn’t enough to light up the entire compartment, and a fair bit of the CIC, as such, was dark.

The XO went ahead and picked up a brown folder from the plotting table. “They have a bird in the sky, and about an hour ago, they took some photos. Here.”

The photos were neatly laid out on the table. A few of them, at first glance, depicted nothing more than the vast sea, save for a long, grey shape in the middle, with a wake aft of it. The rest were zoomed in, showing the contact in clear detail.

“That is a pointy-ear alright. And quite a big gun, too.” Advani pointed in the photograph. The elves’  long ears were easy to make out among the duller colours. “Wonder what he intends to do with that.”

“Another one of their – what did they call it – another ‘gifted weapon’, I think.”

“Quite persistent, these pointy-ears. What’s with that hull design? Reminds me of the older Kalvaris. What’s his status, by the way?”

The XO peeked over at the displays. “Course two-nine-three, speed seven knots. Depth is fifty feet. He is coming up. You are right, sir. That does resemble the older Kalvari in a way. A smaller Kalvari, even.”

“A slower and noisier Kalvari with a deck gun. Any guesses about the calibre of that thing?”

“Around five inch? That is just a guess, I could be wrong too. Wait,” the XO put his hand on his chin, seeming as if he remembered something. “that conning tower. I remember seeing that conning tower in a history documentary, something about Uboats. Yeah, that is more of a Uboat rather than a downgraded Foxtrot. They too had those five-inch guns on the deck.”

“So we are up against Nazis now? That would make for quite a PR campaign.” Advani commented as he looked at the plot. SKUNK 1’s path had been drawn up, including the expected path he would take if he continued the same pattern. The westward shift seemed greater than before. He was getting desperate to get here, it seemed.

“If he continues, he will be popping up right off our starboard the next circle. I don’t like this.”

“Satpura is on station and has reestablished contact. We could get a torp in the water any time, unless, you know, the ROE…”

The XO replied with a hint of uncertainty. Killing the target was not difficult. Right now, they seemed to have the element of surprise on their side. The sheer number of assets ready to intercept the target meant the probability of kill was more than good enough. Plus, SKUNK 1 was noisy and slow, at least from their sensors, and thus the target track was solid, so reacquiring the target in case of a miss wasn’t going to be a real hassle.

Still, Advani was skeptical. There were still some uncertainties in it. This confidence in their ASW boy’s capacity to hunt the contact was full of assumptions, as far as he knew, and assumptions alone could be lethal. What if that wasn’t the full speed of the sub, for example? Or what if it could dive much deeper? And while it was true that just these alone would still not be a problem, Advani knew better than that.

“Do we have a bird in the air there?”

The XO looked on the display again. “Affirmative, we have a Neptune patrolling the sector. He’s fully loaded, it seems.”

“Call him up. See if he can give our guest a warm welcome.”

 

 

 

 

Aboard the Ploaton, the situation was still the same, boring and yet tense at the same time. Boring because most aboard the ship didn’t expect to do anything other than watching from a distance, and tense because the remaining few prayed desperately that their gut feeling was wrong about this entire operation after all.

Elmar was in the attack centre. He was seated, commanding the boat. Years of experience still had failed to get him accustomed to the stress of combat, and as such he had been blessed with less-than-ideal rest. Still, he convinced himself, that was more than enough.

The sub was pitching up in the water, surfacing. Compressed air was being blown, and slowly the seawater in the ballast tanks was replaced by air as the Ploaton gained positive buoyancy, and rose towards the surface.

“Skipper, we’re at twenty feet.” A sailor read out the readings from the depth gauge. They would be reaching periscope depth soo-

“Sonar! Sonar! Skipper, we’re being pinged by sonar!”

The sonar operator shouted. At the same time the words left his mouth, the sound of sonar pings hitting the hull came. The loud pings reverberated throughout the hull. Everyone in the sub could hear them, regardless of what they were doing.

A chill ran down Elmar’s spine. “What in God’s name…..” He didn’t have time, however. Alarms rang out. High Elves ran to their battle stations, dropping everything they were doing before. As the pings echoed throughout the hull, the boat became noisy all of a sudden, as panicked elves rushed to their stations, remembering the numerous drills they had done.

“Take her down! Blow the tanks! Down twenty degrees on the dive planes!” Elmar shouted orders as the crew quickly settled. He felt relieved seeing his crew perform brilliantly in the face of possible danger. Perhaps not everyone was incompetent.

“Down twenty degrees, aye!”

The submarine’s ascent stopped, as the ballast tanks were hastily filled with water. Negative buoyancy returned, and the Ploaton began diving, pitching down as it did.

The sub needed to charge its batteries and refill its air, and since the dwarves had, as of yet, not invented any contraption that could provide the same under the surface of the water, the sub needed to surface routinely. Right now, however, there was enough power in the batteries and more than enough air in the tanks. Just enough to slip away from a suspecting enemy.

Elmar silently crept towards the sonar operator. The young lad was sweating hard, and the tips of his pointed ears could be seen dripping with sweat.

“Where’s that bastard?”

“He’s directly aft of us, bearing zero-five-two.”

He looked at the plot. They were getting close to the suspected island chain. Apart from the islands, there was no landmass here, save for a group of tiny, uninhabited islands far off in the south. Assuming there were Central Civilization naval assets on the islands, they would probably set up at least some coastal patrol units to guard the waters around. However, the Ploaton was too far out in the sea. At this range, it was probably safe to fire her sonar, unless a ship happened to be staying far out in the sea. However, it was one thing to detect a sonar contact, and it was entirely another to fire one’s sonar at it. Had a ship detected Ploaton, they would have first sent out a boat to investigate the contact, and inevitably it would have been spotted. And while it was true that sonar was still a novelty among the Central Civilization’s navies, one thing was clear, and that was that one didn’t fire one’s sonar unless they had a clear idea of the contact and were ready to engage it. Which meant…

Elmar felt his skin crawl. Bastards had been shadowing us! He had sailed right into what was very likely an ambush, and had missed a surface ship that was very likely sitting still listening to them. Now, that ship was directly behind him. It wouldn’t take too long before depth charges would begin battering his boat’s steel hull.

He looked at the depth gauge, contemplating. They were crossing hundred feet, and in a few moments, they would reach their maximum safe depth of about two hundred feet. His options were few. Ploaton was slow, vulnerable, and took her damn sweet time to run. She was neither agile, nor fast enough to maneuver in a combat situation. Neither was she sufficiently armed; with only two forward torpedo tubes with two reloads each, there wasn’t much she could do against a target that had got the drop on her. She might stand a chance if it was just one ship, but….

No, Elmar reasoned. There was simply no way in hell there was only ship out there. There was no way that one ship had not transmitted his sub’s position to its allies, and the possibility of running into more than one enemy ship was now very high. There was absolutely no way the Ploaton was getting out alive if it decided to engage the contact.

“Right rudder full. Up zero degrees on the dive planes, come to new course three-two-zero, all ahead one-thirds.”

“Right rudder full, aye. My rudder is full right.”

“All ahead one-thirds, aye. Engine room answers one-thirds.”

Elmar let out a breath of relief. He could still hear the sonar pings pounding his boat. He hoped the boat was silent and far enough to slip away from the surface vessel. The sub was moving farther, and he could feel the sonar pings grow quieter slowly. He hadn’t heard any depth charges going off, neither had the hydrophone operator reported hearing any concerning noises. There had been no explosions indicating the presence of hostile ships trying to depth charge his boat and miss. For now, all there was were the distant ominous pings from the unknown contact.

“Get me a bearing on that damned boat.”

“Aye sir. Bearing is zero-eight-five, range is….around five miles, I think.”

Five miles, Elmar calculated, and they had travelled around four ever since the pings started. Which means…..

Elmar felt a chill again. They were almost right on top of us! It wouldn’t have taken long for them to pick up speed and come right on top of the sub, and before they’d knew it, they would have been at the bottom of the sea in some unknown part of the world full of god-knows-what.

“Anything on the hydrophones?”

“No sir, nothing at all. Apart from the sonar ping, of course. No screw noises, no machinery noises.”

Elmar’s brain ran into overdrive as the young elf returned to his work at the listening station. It was odd. The lack of any noises at all meant one thing only: the surface ship was sitting still in the water. Ordinarily, it would have been a juicy target, but not right now. Elmar didn’t see the point. The only reason he could think of was that the ship was transmitting his location to other ships in the area. Possibly because it lacked the sufficient armament to engage it, and that there were other ships nearby that were also well-armed and close enough to defend the ship. Otherwise, it didn’t make sense for such a ship to stay still in the water knowing there was an unidentified submarine contact near it.

A frown appeared on his face. There were too many things that didn’t feel right here. Too many unknowns, too many important things unaccounted for. There were a fair number of things that were not making sense here. Why sit still in the water and blast your sonar? And why not chase a contact that was so close to your ship? Sonar was new, sure, and a large number of warships of the Central Civilization had not yet been equipped with them, but most of those were older and outdated ships relegated to either training or near the shoreline…….

No wait, Elmar thought. It was not entirely possible, he thought. After all, the High Elves had done the same thing too. What was stopping others from arriving at the same idea and outfitting an older bluewater ship with a sonar for, say, an expedition such as this? It was entirely possible an older ship had been refitted, and the probability of the ship lacking anti-submarine capability was certainly not zero.

His mind skimmed through memory lane. He had no target picture, no data like target speed, heading, what the target looked or sounded like. His only clue was that the surface ship was slow, and too old to be equipped with anti-submarine equipment.

A few ships came into mind. All of them were old, and almost all had ‘CENS’ in their names. There were probably others from other countries, but these were the only ones he remembered. Elmar didn’t like it one bit.

The Ploaton continued speeding under the surface near its maximum safe depth of around two hundred feet, travelling in an irregular zigzag course for a while. Eventually, the alarm went quiet, and the crew could breathe a sigh of relief. For now, it was over, it seemed. Elmar ordered a final turn towards starboard, towards the east. They had patrolled enough, and he deemed it best to withdraw and head home. They had managed to collect a fair amount of data anyway, even if they failed their initial objective.

In his quarters, Elmar sat down with huff on the desk, tired. He pulled out the drawer, and took out a pen to write a report. He was tired, sure, but work was work. Besides, this contact report was important. At least, he had managed to confirm that a player from the Central Civilization was here, and based on what he knew, probably the Thronoetians. The HEC needed to know this.

Lying in his drawer, was his service pistol. A new semi-automatic pistol. Its seven-round magazine was loaded, but put on safe. Elmar rarely had ever used it outside of the shooting range. He had never shot a real person with a gun, but right now he wished he could shoot that doctor dead.

 

 

“Two hundred and fifty feet. That’s the deepest he could do in that crash dive? Pretty disappointing.”

“Speed is seven knots, depth two-hundred. Quite a slow mover, sir.”

Captain Advani just shrugged. On the screen he could see the active sonobuoy ping away continuously at the target. A ‘v’ shaped blip was on the display, circling the contact just outside visible range. It was the P8I Neptune, which had dropped the active sonobuoy off the contact’s stern.

The Shivalik was still on the contact’s tail, and its sensors were transmitting data to every ship in the area. Both the ship and the ASW aircraft were in constant contact, and data had been continuously exchanged between them. Unlike usually, tracking the submarine was way too easy, and all the Neptune pilot had to do was to dive down and fly low over where he needed to drop the sonobuoy. The rest was straightforward.

“I’d rather not drop a torpedo on this guy. It’ll only make me feel bad about hitting such an easy target.”

“Well, good for you sir, he seems to bolting out and away, from the looks of it.”

Captain Advani yawned. This was not real ASW work. He had experience working against Chinese subs in the Indian Ocean, as well as practicing against US subs during exercises, with more than enough simulated kills to talk about. He had seen just how intense, stressful and how gripping actual submarine-hunting could get. This was nothing like hunting those boats, where the skipper knew what he was doing very well. Had this been real ASW, he wouldn’t have been in a position to yawn in the first place.

Eventually, he decided it was too much effort to think about it. Orders from above didn’t say much other than shoot whatever pointy-eared turned at your doorstep with a pointy-stick, but right now one was running away. It was a win-win, in his eyes. The pointy-eared gets to live another day, we get to not engage in the boring paperwork, and also get to save our precious ammo. All that is good, stays good. Perfect. Captain Advani thought as he finished writing his daily report. Everyone else was having their fun, and here they were, stuck with the same daily patrols and whatnot. Even the Vishal was having fun occasionally blasting wooden boats using planes. Boring days, yes, but certainly not unwelcome. He’d take boring days like these any day over getting blasted by anti-ship cruise missiles.