“I’m not getting any blade beat Sir. None at all. In fact I’m getting no machinery noise at all. No pompholugopaphlasmasin.” The sonar operator got the odd word out without missing a beat. He was referring to the odd selection of pops, hisses, squeaks and rattles made by machinery as it went about its daily tasks, an odd selection that was a clear signature to a passive sonar system. “I’m getting broad-band flow noise and that’s about it.”

“Biological?” Whales, clouds of shrimp, schools of fish, all got give strange sonar readings. Pompholugopaphlasmasin was the sonar operator’s best tool to distinguish man-made equipment from the natural sounds of the sea. And there wasn’t any. That would normally point to a biological but the one thing these times were not was normal. There was a body in the submarine’s freezer to prove that. The Ship’s Chaplain had committed suicide when the full implication of The Message had sunk home.

“Not at 12 knots Sir. A biological will either drift or move slowly at random directions. One holding 12 knots would be attacking something and this one isn’t. Then, there’s it’s course. Straight for London, never changing. No Sir, this isn’t a biological but that doesn’t change the fact that we can’t pick up anything on our narrow-band demodulated noise tracker.”

“You don’t suppose it could be…” Lieutenant-Commander Michael Murphy adopted an exaggerated expression of terror. “… the Red October.” Across Astute’s control room, the duty crew rolled their eyes in disgust, then shook their heads. That wretched author had caused so much trouble…

“No Sir. But respectfully Sir, we are on trials. FOSM may have slipped us a weirdness just to find out what we would do with it.”

Murphy nodded. Flag Officer, Submarines was known for doing things like that.