Class-A Submarine Tempest
South Atlantic Warzone
Nathan Henshaw didn’t believe in luck.
Luck was what people called it when they survived something they shouldn’t have. Luck was what had failed his brother. Luck didn’t belong in war.
He adjusted his stance, fingers resting lightly on the command console of the Tempest as the situation unfolded in front of him.
A Kraken-class Eurasian Bloc attack submarine floated in the abyss ahead of them, still as death. Silent running. No active sonar. No pings.
It was waiting.
"Depth holding steady at four hundred meters," XO Lieutenant Carson reported, his voice low, professional. "Enemy still holding. No change in position."
Henshaw exhaled slowly. Two hours. That’s how long they had been locked in this quiet, suffocating standoff. Neither vessel moving. Neither is willing to give away their position.
Most men cracked under this kind of pressure. Henshaw had seen it happen—officers making desperate calls, rolling the dice on risky maneuvers that turned them into ghosts.
He wouldn’t make that mistake.
"Commander?" Carson asked, shifting slightly. "Orders?"
Henshaw watched the silent blip on the sonar screen. They could sit here for another two hours, another ten, and still, the moment someone made a move, it would all be over in sixty seconds.
His brother had made the first move once.
And Julian Henshaw had never surfaced again.
Nathan had been stationed thousands of miles away when the Battle of the Azores happened, but that didn’t matter. The war had stolen him anyway.
Julian had believed in right and wrong, in clear distinctions between enemies and allies. He had believed that honor meant something, even in war.
And he had died for it.
Nathan had learned a different lesson. War wasn’t about honor. It wasn’t about right or wrong. It was about outlasting the other guy.
Henshaw straightened. "Adjust heading by two degrees starboard. Reduce engine output to fifteen percent."
Carson hesitated. "That’ll put us right in the thermal layer, sir."
"Exactly."
The crew moved without argument.
The Tempest eased into the natural thermal gradient, its hull temperature blending into the deep-sea currents. The enemy would lose them on sonar for just a few seconds—just long enough.
Then the Kraken shifted.
A course correction. A subtle adjustment. They had lost them.
Henshaw didn’t hesitate.
"Fire decoy pod. Erratic pattern."
The decoy detached, its small propulsion system mimicking a crippled submarine struggling to escape.
A minute passed. Then—movement.
The Kraken took the bait.
"Stand by torpedoes," Henshaw ordered.
The enemy sub launched first, firing a torpedo at the decoy.
Henshaw exhaled. "Fire. Now."
Their torpedo shot forward, invisible in the abyss. The enemy had committed to an attack and left themselves vulnerable.
A heartbeat later—impact.
The enemy blip vanished from sonar. Gone.
The crew didn’t cheer. They never did. There was no glory in this. Just another kill to mark in a war with no end in sight.
Carson exhaled, shaking his head. "That was clean, sir."
Henshaw nodded. "Set course for home."
He turned away from the console, his mind already shifting.
He didn’t belong here anymore. His war was over.
The encrypted message arrived an hour later.
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
Immediate reassignment. Report to USS Deep Crown. Effective immediately.
Henshaw stared at the words, unreadable.
The crew didn’t know yet, but Carson had been with him long enough to see the shift in his posture.
"Sir?"
Henshaw shut off the screen. "Fleet Command’s pulling me."
Silence.
Carson’s expression flickered between shock and something else. "Now? Right after—?"
Henshaw nodded.
Carson exhaled, shaking his head. "Where are they sending you?"
"Somewhere classified."
Henshaw wasn’t sure if he meant the location or himself.
"Who takes the Tempest?" Carson asked.
"You."
Carson blinked. "Sir—"
"You heard me." Henshaw met his eyes. "She’s yours now."
A long silence. Then Carson nodded. "Aye, sir."
The words were firm, but the unspoken ones lingered between them.
Why now? After everything? Why pull you from the fight?
Henshaw didn’t have an answer.
He only knew one thing. Whatever this new mission was, it wasn’t a reward.
The rain lashed the streets of London like a relentless tide, drumming on the pavement, slicking the rooftops, pooling in the gutters. The air smelled of wet concrete, car exhaust, and something older, deeper—like history exhaling its damp breath through the veins of the city.
Nathan Henshaw pulled his collar up against the cold and strode across Trafalgar Square, cutting between slow-moving tourists huddled under umbrellas. His footsteps echoed against the stone as he descended the narrow stairwell into the underground. He moved like a man who had done this before—because he had. The city above was a world of pretenses; the city below was where true power shifted hands.
The meeting place was unmarked, hidden within an old service tunnel that had once been part of the London Underground’s abandoned extensions. To the average passerby, it was just another rusted gate, another forgotten piece of the city’s skeleton. But Henshaw knew better. He pressed a sequence of numbers into an aged keypad concealed behind a loose brick. A soft beep. The gate was unlatched.
Inside, the air was thick with dampness and dust. Flickering overhead bulbs buzzed, their light casting restless shadows across the long table where three men were waiting.
"Henshaw," one of them greeted without looking up, his voice edging impatiently. "You're late."
Henshaw smirked, removing his damp coat and shaking off the excess water. "London traffic."
"London traffic, my arse," came the gruff voice of Sinclair, a broad-shouldered man with graying hair and the cold, assessing eyes of a veteran intelligence officer. "You don’t get to be late when discussing national security."
Henshaw took his seat at the table and exhaled slowly. Across from him, Director Crane of the Ministry of Defense folded his hands, his expression unreadable. Next to him sat Dr. Elizabeth Ward, a woman whose reputation in classified military research preceded her. Henshaw knew her work well. She was the type of scientist the government kept in the shadows—where the real discoveries happened.
A leather folder slid across the table toward him. "We have a problem," Crane said, his voice calm, deliberate.
Henshaw opened the folder. Inside were grainy images taken from deep-sea probes—jagged structures resting beneath the ocean, too symmetrical to be natural, too ancient to be man-made. His brow furrowed as he flipped through them, the tension in his jaw tightening with each page. Then, the final image—a massive, dark silhouette moving within the abyss, dwarfing the surrounding rock formations. It was blurred, indistinct, but unmistakably alive.
He looked up. "Where was this taken?"
"Coordinates place it in the North Atlantic, deep within the Reykjanes Ridge trench. Depth: sixteen thousand feet," Ward answered, her voice clipped, professional. "The probe that captured this image was lost twelve minutes later."
Henshaw’s fingers drummed against the folder. "Lost how?"
Sinclair leaned forward, his eyes sharp. "Crushed. Like a tin can. Whatever’s down there, it didn’t want company."
A long silence settled over the table. The room felt smaller, the walls closer. The weight of classified information always did that.
"We need eyes down there," Crane finally said. "And we need them yesterday."
Henshaw already knew where this was going. "You want to send Deep Crown."
"That’s what it was built for, wasn’t it?" Ward shot back. "A submersible designed for deep-sea exploration beyond human limits. This is what all that funding, all that secrecy, was leading to. The only question is—" She locked eyes with him. "—are you still capable of commanding it?"
Admiral Calloway entered the room with the kind of presence that commanded silence without asking for it. His uniform was immaculate, adorned with commendations from past wars that no longer mattered. His sharp eyes scanned the room, calculating, assessing.
Henshaw had met men like him before. The kind of officer who spoke about sacrifice but had never left a body behind.
Crane greeted him with a respectful nod. "Admiral Calloway, thank you for making the time to be here."
Calloway took his seat at the far end of the table, opposite Henshaw. He didn’t acknowledge him immediately, instead fixing his gaze on the holographic display in the center of the room.
The deep-sea probe footage flickered, showing the anomalous structure sixteen thousand feet beneath the Reykjanes Ridge Trench.
Elizabeth Ward continued her briefing, her tone clinical. "The architecture is precise. Too perfect to be natural. We suspect an artificial origin."
Calloway steepled his fingers. "And you believe this is a research mission?"
The room shifted subtly. Ward hesitated for the first time. "That’s the assumption, yes."
Calloway smiled, but there was nothing warm about it. "Assumptions get people killed, Doctor. This could be a threat. And threats must be handled accordingly."
Henshaw finally spoke, his voice even. "You’re saying we’re going down there armed?"
Calloway leaned back, his expression unreadable. "I’m saying we should be prepared for any possibility."
A tension settled in the air. Henshaw could see Crane shifting uncomfortably, as if Calloway’s presence had tipped the balance of the room.
Ward straightened. "With all due respect, Admiral, this mission is about discovery. Not conflict."
Calloway gave a slow, measured nod. "Of course, Doctor. But discovery and survival are not mutually exclusive."
Henshaw knew what that meant. Calloway had no interest in exploration. He wanted control.
Crane leaned in. "We’re not giving you a choice, Nathan. We’ve already deployed Deep Crown to the site. You leave in forty-eight hours."
Henshaw let out a slow breath, feeling the walls press even closer. The shadows seemed deeper now. There was no walking away from this. "Then I guess I’d better pack," he muttered.