Lindbergh Sub sunk by Bendixen

Lindbergh Sub sunk by Bendixen

Eric Olafson, Neo Viking Chapter 22: TYR

Ulfred Lindbergh and his crew dies after the Bendixens use Tech Stop

--Scene-

Ulfred Lindbergh stood in the tiny control room of Sea Snake Three, the newest and biggest Hunt Sub of the Lindbergh clan. New was of course a relative term as this boat did already more than eighty years of service, but Subs were very expensive and only perhaps thirty clans still had Hunt subs.

The boat was a reliable piece of New Sweden technology. Like most subs on Nilfeheim it was kept clean and scrubbed and the boat owners prided themselves to always have the boats well painted. On the other hand real engineers were rare, clan sons did not want to learn off world technology and get their hands dirty with manual labor and Freemen did not go to any further schooling after basic school was completed, so the technical knowledge was usually handed down in a practical apprenticeship. Not that there was really much to do. The reactors were guaranteed to produce power for 500 years and most sub accidents happened when the boat hooked a big Tyranno, and not hitting the mark, but even that was rare.

Normally the Sea snake should be on her way to the Uhim grounds and hook a few Tri Fins or a Tyranno or two, but instead of going south they went north east towards the Bendixen grounds. There was nothing really special there so it seemed. The Bendixens fished and harvested crabs and shellfish for generations and never been an important or rich clan, but ever since Brunar had taken that had changed. That upstart arrived at the last clan Leader meeting in a brand new Saab Lux-454 flier, purchased no less than five bran new Submarines in only ten years. Not hunting subs but models with manipulator arms to tend their underwater crab farms. Everyone knew the colorful catalogs displayed at the XChange Café with the latest Submarine models one could order. Those Manipulator boats cost almost 2 Million Credits each. All this sudden wealth and the generous gifts Brunar had showered the Elders with to get his father elected went along with the Bendixens asking the Circle of Elders to declare the Bendixen grounds legal real estate. He already had set up buoys in the Bendixen colors and banners warning trespassers. Oceans on Nilfeheim were free and no one was allowed to declare a part theirs.

If this would be allowed, then someone else could claim the Uhim Grounds private!

There had to be something there that explained both the sudden wealth and the wish to keep others away. Adolph his father told him to take a closer look. Today he would not back down and float all the way to Bendixen rock and check out what was so special about the ocean grounds there.

He was now less than a klick away from the first Bendixen buoy. The Computronic enhancing the sonar images to a clear two Dee read out showed three of the five manipulator boats busy with cage boxes. The Bendixens had leveled the rocky ocean floor and large Duro-Crete foundations with even rows of hundreds of pillars on each. Some of these concrete pillars were encrusted with shell fish and immobile crabs.

The light flickered and the Sonar suddenly went dark. Now the light went out completely! He didn’t even know they had emergency lighting until now as the red lights came on.”What in Odin’s name? Who of you idiots leaned on the light switch panel?”

Magne the forty year old Freeman who was the boats engineer came up the ladder. “The reactor is out! We have no power. The red lights flickered now and then it was completely dark.

Ulfred and his small crew suddenly felt fear. There were no emergency procedures; no one had ever drilled for an emergency evacuation procedure. They weren’t even deep enough to be really dangerous for them. They all were Neo Vikings and even though some of them had not taken a dive since their childhood, they still had gills, but not even the Engineer of the boat knew that there actually was an emergency exit. The handle for it had been cut off and hatch painted over with many layers of paint, there even was an emergency blow out valve that would release pressurized air into the ballast tanks. It was a mechanical valve and not affected by any electronic system failure, but the purpose for the red painted hand wheel had been lost with the engineers handbook ever since the previous engineer, threw all manuals out, as he didn’t like to read and the manuals took room away from the bottles of ale he had stashed there

The boat sank towards the ocean floor. Even though it was not very traditional Ulfred had a modern PDD connected to GalNet.

PDD’s that could connect to GalNet from anywhere in Union Space were very expensive, almost unknown on Nilfeheim. The Elders considered the uncontrolled exchange of Off-World Ideas the worst threat to Nilfeheim Culture and prohibited the use.

Ulfred could not explain why this reliable piece of tech was as dark as the rest of the boat. Magne remembered that the air system did more than just make the air cold or hot; it also refreshed it with oxygen and removed Carbon monoxide.

Ulfred and his small crew suffocated about six hours later, shortly after that the lights came back on.