Gundam Fire Still

"Then perhaps this mission is very important." Bernard nodded as he pulled up a couple of routes on his chart from Australia to the Zaft occupation zone in North Africa, to say there could be a major event in the vicinity would be nothing less than the impending offensive of the joint Eurasian North Africa, "Dive to 50 meters, increase speed to 25 knots, course unchanged, I think I know where to go."

Just as he had predicted, catching the enemy on the horse wasn't difficult, and as he went to check around the torpedo bay and the unmanned submersible launch bay and walked into the sonar room, one of the monitors happened to raise his hand in a gesture of keeping quiet. The colonel looked over the sonar officer's shoulder and saw that the sonograms on several computer screens hadn't changed much, so it was clear he'd just heard something very slight.

"Bearing about 30 to 60 degrees, distance unknown, very soft sound,"

"What's that noise?"

"The sound of something making contact with the water, some kind of large fish or dolphin leaping out of the water, or maybe something dropped from the air, or maybe even trash thrown down from a ship."

"I don't think we've heard anything from a surface ship."

"That's right, this area isn't patrolled by Union or Zaft anti-submarine aircraft either, only large transports or bombers can take off from the mainland and fly here."

"In fact we're not even sure if Zaft has anti-submarines and airborne sonar buoys."

"There's nothing wrong with being careful," Bernard stared at the waveform on the screen for a few more minutes, there didn't seem to be anything unusual, but there were no fishing boats nearby and nothing else that could have made that kind of noise, except for the Zaft submarine that might have been nearby. A good submarine commander needed to be suspicious and cautious while still daring to make a judgment call, "Process the recordings from earlier, filter out the background we can filter out and gain on the rest, they could be the ones messing with it."

"Listen to this," a moment later the analyst handed over his headset, after the gain he too could indeed hear some sort of water sound, but it was a little different from anything he had ever heard before, leaping dolphins or sonar buoys falling into the water, and so on, he slowly frowned, it did sound like a sound, he had heard a similar sound during a maneuver he had done a long time ago when he had broken the rules of the maneuver but managed to force another submarine to surface, only it was lower and longer lasting than then, after all he was looking for a huge underwater aircraft carrier.

I think we've found it."

------- Here is the author's parting line -------.

To spell out the SEED original, what did a submarine, or submarine, have on to catch up to a flying thing? Or did the comedians on the Archangel have some kind of a brain that this ship that can float forward in the desert is going to be soaked at sea? If you can take advantage of the ground effect on the ground, you can obviously do it at sea, and the drag of air is pretty much negligible compared to the drag of water. How did you get caught up twice (or was it three times?) by a submarine? The? But for a spaceship to have sonar is amazing enough on its own.

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Old Sea Wolf (below)

The target was still too far away, and it would be a long time before he could send his opponent to the bottom of the ocean with a single torpedo, but the underwater battle had always been so slow and rhythmic, and now he had plenty of time to think about why this distant counterpart had surfaced, and what the extended message was all about. Obviously, the reason it had surfaced was probably related to the message, and for a submarine that needed to stay underwater as long as possible, trying to remain extremely concealed, there were a limited number of things it had to surface to do, and one of the more likely ones was to get supplies, and he knew that Zaft had some odd-looking long-range transports, so it wasn't as if it was assumed that they had the ability to hover and conduct aerial resupply Impossible, and the one thing he was more than certain of was that a submarine that had obtained emergency supplies in the middle of the ocean was apparently going to war.

Fifteen hours later.

The distance between the two submarines had closed slightly, and the Zaft submarine, which had stopped and drifted, had started its engines and dived, but presumably due to the limited depth at which the MS could fight, the huge submarine remained at a very shallow depth at all times, a dangerously shallow depth where suspicious shadows in the water could be seen from aircraft or satellite photos, with the Nautilus located at a slightly deeper depth, well behind it.

"Should we increase our speed a bit, we'll have a hard time catching up to them this way." The co-captain asked as he stepped through the hatch of the boat that had made another round of the tour.

"We haven't been spotted, have we?"

"No, it's not like they're gaining speed to lose us, at this distance we'd be hard to locate us directly even if we were spotted, they'd put out a towed sonar or MS, they'd be more like, going somewhere in a hurry."

"What's their course?"

"Nothing has changed in five hours."

"I think I understand," Bernard pulled up the chart on the screen, and a quick glance over his shoulder had led him to the conclusion that, just as he'd expected, the Zaft's submarine was running wildly at very shallow depths with no one by its side (but really no one either), not hiding its intentions in the slightest, as if it thought the entire Indian Ocean was covering it and it was the only underwater unit in the area, and it was heading straight for the Andaman Sea.

"Malacca?"

"Yes, presumably to intercept one of our ships, or an escort?" Bernard shrugged, it didn't really matter to him what it was, a submarine couldn't cover and save his people like a real warship could, all he could do was sink that target.

"Isn't that where the Equatorial Union is?" The mate looked hesitant.

"Nobody cares about the attitude of the Equatorial Union these days, mate, but there's a problem," he pointed to a dotted line on the chart "It's a bit close to the ORB patrol circle, and the ORB navy, perhaps lacking in aggressiveness, is pretty good at offshore anti-submarining, and the The water depth is shallow, better for MS who don't dive deep enough to fight."

Like most submarine commanders, he subconsciously hated chaos, and if he ran into the ORB fleet using active sonar, the irregularly reflected sound waves on the offshore sea floor would likely mistakenly illuminate his formerly well-hidden self. What he didn't know was that the intercepted target, the Archangel, which already had some notoriety in the Atlantic Federation, was just as likely to be involved in the fight; he didn't know that one of the reasons the submarine needed to receive an air supply in the center of the ocean was that it had already taken out half of its carriers by its target in the battle in the Gulf of Aden.

"Incremental speed 5, maintain course," the colonel picked up the comm, "the mess hall is ready for dinner, have the duty officer change shifts, then grab some rest."

"Time for you to get some sleep, too, old man," said the lieutenant commander

"At their airspeed, we can be in firing distance in about eight hours, and then we can..." Bernard drifted off as if he hadn't heard, still scratching at the screen.

Seven hours.

The distance had closed to the point where the Nautilus had to keep a silent course, and the pursuers had reduced their speed to 10 knots for safety, during which time the tracked dive mothership had not changed course, heading straight for the Andaman Sea, the only open water before the Straits of Malacca.

"We'll have to be vigilant, once we spot them first we're basically screwed, the water depth here is perfect for their MS," said the second-in-command, pointing to the chart.

"As long as we don't make a mistake, there's no reason they'll spot us first."

"Not necessarily, but if they have a ship very quietly lurking along side all the time, we could still be spotted." The old man came from the back and splashed the officer on duty with cold water, "There are some nearby hiding spots and temperature leaps that can be taken."

"So, we should slow down a bit?"

"That's right, slow down to 8 knots and put out UUV's on tubes 1 and 2, we need to widen the point listening range."

"Then we'll have a hard time catching up to the guy in front of us in short order."

"Yes, but it won't get away, what I'm afraid of now is what else might be hiding around here."

The officer of the watch felt that his skipper was being a little paranoid, but he gave his orders accordingly. He knew that such paranoia was a normal phenomenon among submarine officers; unlike the Army, submarines had the opportunity to retreat and recover after sustaining certain losses, and basically no one could escape if something went wrong in this underwater tin can.

Two unmanned submersibles with wires slid out of their silent, dedicated transmitter tubes, both equipped with passive sonar subarrays that allowed the sub to pick up sound waves from multiple angles, thus making it easier to calculate distances.

"The target is accelerating," the sonar trooper reported in a low voice, "and some sort of faint metallic crashing sound has been heard."

"Presumably they're preparing the MS for a strike, that's a really hard job to silence."

"Accelerating again? We won't be able to keep up if we keep this up."

"No, don't speed up yet, turn off the desalinator, it can reduce the noise slightly, sonar continue to pay attention to listening."

The vice captain was a little puzzled, the target was current, why did the old man suddenly become conservative, in his opinion, the situation at the bottom of the sea was already clear, releasing a UUV whose speed couldn't keep up with the submarine itself was an act of limiting its own speed.

There was a sudden flashing light signal from the listening room, followed by the sonar chief opening the bulkhead door abruptly.

"Starboard side, new sound, seems to be the opening of a torpedo tube."

The command room seemed to stall for a moment, the next response to opening the torpedo tubes was necessarily to fire the torpedoes, and the action of opening the tubes meant that the adversary must have taken aim at a target, and the only possible target nearby was the Nautilus itself.

Whether or not the shadow of death had arrived overhead, the old man's previous paranoia instantly reflected brilliant foresight.

"What's the distance?" Bernard's face remained unchanged as he asked the question, such a possibility had originally been on his mind, but he didn't feel like he'd been discovered, even by a cunning enemy.

"About 15 nautical miles, only 10 nautical miles from Manta 1 (UUV's code name), bearing about 75. etc., there's the sound of machinery operating."

Bernard grabbed his headphones and held his breath for a few seconds.

"That's not a torpedo tube, it's an MS strike port, and they're firing MS," Bernard said, standing up and addressing the pale looking command room crew.

"High-speed propulsion sound! Not torpedoes, not firing sound waves; number 3, no, 4, the last one has a different sound than the one before. It's moving away from us." The monitor's voice came over the ship's intercom into the command module, "It's MS!

As if the idea had been confirmed, Bernard nodded.

"Away from us?"