Merry Christmas, everybody.  Please enjoy the holidays and this little, award-winning tale of war, robots, the Christmas spirit, and French Canadian meat pies . . . .

THE 1011000-100110110000011010011 TRUCE

by: Thomas A. Mays

“Merry freakin’ Christmas, boys.  It don’t get no better than this.”  Staff Sergeant Malcolm Riddell glared at the snowy, broken battlefield before him and took another long pull from the glass bottle in his hand.  The amber liquid within burned harshly going down, but that pleasant pain was a welcome distraction from the monotony the Keystone War had devolved into.

“Pardon, SSGT,” a nearby Jarhead buzzed, “recommend you return to the bunker immediately.  Your exposure may constitute an acceptable target upon which the enemy can expend resources.”  The vaguely humanoid robot remained prone with its weapon, squelched into the battlefield’s half-frozen mud, but it had oriented its stereoscopic targeting head toward him.  Riddell figured that meant it “cared,” at least a little.

“Well, hell, I wouldn’t want to upset anybody’s combat calculus, would I?”  He turned around and staggered back to the open hatch leading to his own deep shelter.  At the utmost limit of his hearing he could perceive the growing whistle of artillery, so he staggered a bit faster.  By the time he had both of the surface airlock’s hatches dogged and started down the ladder, the screaming whumps of exploding laser-guided shells shook his access trunk and tore apart the Canadian border soil of the ground overhead.  He briefly wondered if the poor Jarhead model on watch would survive intact.

At the bottom of the trunk, deeper than even hyper-velocity orbital bombardment bunker busters could reach, a much more humanoid Elite command bot awaited him, surrounded by a baker’s dozen of the short, many-limbed Grunt models, tidying up where they could.  His own slovenly state seemed to be gaining ground despite their best efforts, however.  The Elite passed its unblinking nest of red and black eyes over their efforts and then focused on Riddell.  “You should not take such needless chances, SSGT.  Where would the war effort be if you perished?”

Riddell smiled.  “I imagine the ‘war effort’ would suddenly have a large surplus of bad bourbon to go along with its slight decrease in personnel.  Don’t imagine for a second that I’m vital to this fight, ‘Leet.  I am the very definition of expendable, not that I’ll be expended any time soon given the current stalemate.”

“Combat operations are not permitted in complete autonomy.  If you were to be killed, we would be barred from any offensive actions until a new human overseer reported on station.  This would unacceptably give the Canadian drone forces a distinct tactical and strategic advantage through a reevaluation of the risk/resource balance.”

“Oh no!  You mean you finally might start shooting at one another?  What a terrible thing to happen in your shooting war.”  Riddell’s sarcasm was deep enough that even the bot could appreciate it.

The Elite’s hard drive whirred for a moment in its chest before the bot responded.  “SSGT, you have made your feelings regarding combat calculus and autonomous drone warfare well known.  We need not rehash old arguments.”

“Ha!  Like I have anything better to do!”  His laugh contained little humor.  Riddell plopped into a threadbare chair in front of his dusty operations console.  “’Leet, the whole reason everyone started using autonomous combat drones and bots was to shorten conflicts, reduce errors, and save lives when war could not be avoided.  The problem is, you machines are completely beholden to this combat calculus, refusing to make a move or expend resources unless you perceive a decisive tactical advantage.  And the other side does the exact same thing, with the end result being we’ve all maneuvered ourselves into a worldwide standoff, everyone poised for combat on a dozen different fronts, but nobody actually shooting unless somebody makes a mistake or shifts the calculus.  Thus, I am stuck here, watching over fighting robots that DON’T FIGHT, instead of going home and ENJOYING CHRISTMAS!”

The Elite’s hard drive whirred even longer this time.  “Please explain the operational significance of Christmas.”

Riddell laughed again, but at least his braying contained some actual humor this time.  “Christmas has no operational significance, which is what makes it so significant.  Let that one burn up your logic circuits.”  The humor did not last, however.  Bitterness returned and Riddell leaned forward, elbows on knees, his face in his hands.

He continued.  “War is a terrible thing:  achieving sociopolitical goals through the complicated process of killing the people who disagree with you until they concede your side of the argument.  But there were moments of grace – distinctly human moments – that made it less awful.  Christmas was one of those.”  He looked up from his hands.  “Did you know that back in World War One both sides actually stopped fighting for Christmas?  They came out of their trenches and foxholes and celebrated the holiday together, exchanging gifts and uniforms, playing soccer.  It was called the Christmas Truce.  Look it up.”

The Elite’s hard-drive whirred again.  “I have the referred incident now committed to memory.  I fail to see how any tactical or strategic objectives were achieved through this unofficial cessation of hostilities.”

Riddell stood up and stretched, his vertebrae popping.  “Why am I not surprised?  Just forget it.”  He shook his head and walked by, headed toward his room in the bunker.  “Merry Christmas anyway, ‘Leet.  If a sleigh flies overhead or a jolly fat man in a red suit shows up tonight, try not to shoot them down, okay?”

“I will add them to the Proscribed Targets list.”

The Staff Sergeant grinned.  “You do that.  ‘Night.  I’m gonna sleep this off.”  He staggered out of the control room and disappeared within his own personal space, shutting the door with an emphatic thunk.

The Elite command bot stood still, but its hard drive and quantum molecular circuits sped into furious activity.  After an interminable time for such a quick-thinking machine, it moved again, this time to the control room’s communications panel.

* * *

Riddell opened eyes crusted over with sleep.  He rubbed them, then blinked his way to sight.  A glance over at the red-numbered digital clock on the wall revealed the time and date:  1337S / 1937Z / 2046-12-25.  He groaned.  “Freakin’ robots let me sleep half the day away.”

He shrugged and sat up, joints popping as if he was made of bubble-wrap.  Riddell rubbed his eyes again and spoke to himself, as the long months in virtual isolation had led him to do.  “Well, at least I’m up in time to call the folks.  Somebody ought to have a good holiday.”

Riddell puttered around his room, getting dressed in the same clothes he had worn the day before, and which were actually on their fourth day of wear.  He did not bother to shower or shave.  Whom did he have to impress, after all?  It was only after he was ready to step out that he realized something – he had heard nothing at all from the control room or the bunker outside.  His eyes narrowed.  None of the bots had woken him or checked in, and all appeared deathly quiet outside his personal space.  Something was up.

Riddell reversed himself and rummaged through his gear until he found his oft-forgotten pistol.  It was of little use against enemy bots, but at least he had something if matters had gone awry.  Christmas morning surprise EMP?  No, the lights and clock were still working.  Christmas morning sneak-attack by viral logic bomb?  Riddell nodded.  That was a distinct possibility.

The soldier, more aware of his surroundings than he had been in months, carefully opened the door and looked out into the bunker proper, his pistol leading the way.  He did it by the book, checking all eight corners of the passageway before stepping out from the cover of the doorway.  Nothing.  The ceiling fluorescents burned brightly, without a flicker, but it appeared deserted.  He crept down to the control room.

Deserted too.  No Grunts puttered about, cleaning, repairing, or generally getting underfoot.  The Elite was gone too, and its absence haunted Riddell. The consoles had power, but all of the monitor screens were blank but one.  On that single active screen was a countdown:  04:09:32.2 and decrementing, counting down to midnight Zulu-time by the blur of tenths of a second.  Why?

A further search revealed he alone inhabited the bunker.  Not only had the ever-present Grunts in Facility Engineering vanished, but the Drone Hangar was empty as well.  Over 100 Jarhead android infantry, Wasp air-supremacy UCAVs, Chesty auto-tanks, and Whiplash sapper drones had disconnected from their maintenance alcoves and trundled off to God knew where.

Riddell cursed and realized he had to go up.

As he climbed the long ladder of the surface access trunk, dread leadened each higher rung.  By the time he reached the airlock, his hands and feet felt like they weighed 1000 pounds each, their inertia resisting any further advance into this odd mystery in a world which had grown far too predictable.  Riddell sighed and shook it off.  Pistol at the ready, he un-dogged the outer hatch and swung the door out.

A soccer ball whizzed past his face to bounce from side to side within the airlock and he almost ventilated the attacking sphere with a full magazine of .40 caliber bullets.  Staring at the ball as it stopped bouncing, he nearly fired again when a Jarhead trotted up.  “Sorry, SSGT,” it buzzed.  “I should have had that.”  It reached past him, scooped up the ball, and spun it on one finger.  “The Canadians’ files on European ‘football’ are far more extensive than our own.  We have scheduled a follow-up of NFL-rules football, however, and are using the Chesties as linemen.  We will reclaim our honor yet.”

Riddell stared at the Jarhead, its explanation hardly registering in his mind, and watched as it took the ball and trotted to a makeshift field mapped out upon the slushy mud.  Beyond the soccer field, he could see groups of robots milling about together, seemingly conversing as they strolled.  Two baseball diamonds had also been marked out and impromptu teams were at play.  VTOL drones chased and banked and flipped overhead, but they appeared to be engaged in aerial tag rather than dogfighting.

And everywhere he could see there were Canadian drones and bots intermingled with his own units without a shot being fired.  Riddell just shook his head in disbelief, unsure if this was actually happening, or if it was a dream, a nightmare, or the onset of delirium tremens. His reverie was broken by a new voice approaching from his side.  “Good afternoon, SSGT.  As you can see, we have implemented the recommended protocol with great success.”  Riddell could almost hear a smile in the android’s voice.

He turned to the Elite to question it, but his own query stopped in his throat.  Sauntering up next to the Elite was a woman in Canadian winter camouflage BDUs, with a pair of single, ornate pips showing from her shoulder loops.  Three thoughts occurred nearly simultaneously in Riddell’s mind:

There’s a Canadian officer outside my bunker.

This must be my counterpart in charge of all these Canuck bots.

Damn, she’s cute and I look and smell like an unkempt grizzly bear.

She spoke up in Riddell’s place.  “’Allo.  I was beginning to think you were a figment of your clever Elite’s imagination.”

Riddell shook his head.  Damn.  French Canadian.  Even cuter.  “Ummm, Merry Christmas?”

She nodded enthusiastically.  “It looks like it is indeed a very merry Christmas after all.”

He shook his head, unsure what to say or how to proceed.  But then he saw an unpleasant look on her face as the breeze shifted and she caught his scent.  Riddell stepped back out of the wind into the hardened bunker airlock.  “I’m so sorry!  It’s been so long since I’ve seen anyone else.  Wait here just a few minutes – don’t leave!  I’ll be right back, okay?”  He turned and fled back down the access trunk ladder, calling out behind him, “’Leet, you’re with me!”

At the bottom, as he showered and shaved, the Elite gave him the full story.  The command bot researched the WW-I Christmas Truce and saw numerous parallels to their current situation:  opposing forces largely at a standoff, no true animosity between the actual soldiers carrying out the tactical and operational orders of their superiors, and both forces in need of a change, a reset to what had become a mired and pointless conflict.

The Elite had gathered the pertinent files, queried the collective ranks and gotten their assent, then sent the entire proposal as an unencrypted burst transmission to the nearest Canadian bunker.  With a speed unheard of in human-managed conflicts, the idea propagated across every front of the Keystone War.  Multiple sides debated, negotiated terms, and enacted the truce before any human providing oversight noticed, much less objected.  Worldwide, wherever robots were in combat, they slung their rifles, powered down their targeting radars, deactivated their smart mines, and stepped out to greet their enemies as comrades until Christmas ended at midnight Zulu-time.

By the time the Elite finished its explanation, Riddell had showered, shaved, and dressed himself in his parade-ground best.  He wolf-whistled at his own reflection in the mirror and then looked over at his too-clever-by-half robot.  “I don’t know if I’ve ever said this before, ‘Leet, but Thank You.  If I happened to have doubted how much better robots are at running the war, then I hope you’ll forgive me.”

“No offense taken, SSGT.  Merry Christmas,” the robot replied.

Riddell smiled, patted the bot on the shoulder, then fled up the access trunk as fast as he could climb, pausing only long enough to grab up a bag of a few appropriate Christmas gifts for the currently lonely and unaccompanied lady upstairs.  When he emerged, he was pleased to see her still there, sitting on the ground next to the airlock.  She watched the intermingled forces of robots and combat machines playing games and strolling along with a contented look on her face.

Riddell sat next to her and shared a smile with her when she looked toward him.  “Sorry about my appearance before.  Definitely not appropriate for the holiday or present company.  Merry Christmas again.  I’m Malcolm.”  He specifically did not use his rank or last name.

Her smile became more coy.  “Laurence.  It’s very nice to meet you, Malcolm.”

His eyes narrowed.  “Isn’t that a guy-name?”

Laurence rolled her eyes.  “Only among the stupid English.  But if you would prefer to end this truce over my name, we can go right back to shooting at one another.”

Riddell held up his hands and laughed.  “No, no, no!  Truce!  I’m a fan of truce.  Okay?”

She nodded and smiled again.  “D’accord.”

“In fact,” he said, bringing out his satchel, “I even brought gifts!”  He opened the bag with a flourish and brought out the first item.  “I present you the finest Kentucky bourbon you can get from the Army supply system. It is to Elijah Craig what pond water is to Perrier, but what it lacks in refinement it makes up for in volume.”  Another reach into the bag and, “Here for our culinary delight, I have two Meals Ready-To-Eat, Holiday Turkey Loaf w/Gravied Dressing and Victory Vegetarian Ham w/Julienned Vegetables.  While not exactly haute cuisine, they are eminently comestible.”

She accepted all three with what seemed her best faux sincerity, and brightened again with a smile and a laugh that sent a wave of warmth through him.  She spoke, and he hung on every syllable.  “I too have brought gifts.  I apologize for the lack of wrapping paper.”

“Quite all right.”

Laurence handed him a bottle of red wine.  “A Seyval Noir from the vineyard of my cousin.  He makes a very nice ice wine, but I fear it was enjoyed alone but a few days ago, before I knew I had something to look forward to.”

“Thank you!”  Wine was not Riddell’s thing, but it was a welcome change from whiskey or water.  Plus, the gift of alcohol from a beautiful woman was not one to be dismissed.

She brought out from her own satchel what looked to be a pie tin.  The golden crust on top gave off a few wisps of steam.  “I had no suitable rations for trade, however I was able to cobble together a meal to share.  The ingredients are . . . best left unremarked upon, but it is a fair approximation of the French meat pie.  These are a wonderful memory of the winters of my youth.  I can only hope the reality in the present will do them justice.”

The meat pie smelled wonderful, but she could serve him rat pudding and Riddell would eat it with a smile and ask for seconds.  “That looks and smells a lot better than my MREs.  Do you have plates?”

They ate, drank wine, had shots, and chatted.  They talked about everything and nothing, mutually avoiding any hint of a debate over their separate sides of the war or about how two close neighbors and allies had fallen so far apart.  Riddell spoke about his youth in Texas, where Laurence spoke about splitting her formative years between her father in Quebec and her mother in Alberta.  Mostly though, they watched and talked about the robots.

As the day wore on and the games finished, formed up, and then started again, the groups of bots fractured and intermixed further and further.  At this point, were it not for the Stars and Stripes emblazoned on some and the Maple Leaf stenciled on others, it would prove difficult to distinguish the nationality of one combat drone from another, especially as the sun set and darkness eliminated even those differences.  The truce had brought about a wondrous homogenization to the disparate sides.

Dusk fell and the plain became dotted with a precise grid of campfires.  Riddell and Laurence strolled among their forces in a pleasantly warm alcoholic daze, at ease with the deadly bots and with one another.  Grunts and their wheel-and-tracked counterparts among the Canucks played incomprehensible games similar to tag or capture the flag, but with utterly abstruse rules known only to them.  Other bots, Grunts, Jarheads, Chesties, Whiplashers, and Wasps, along with the Canadian versions, all stood alongside one another in long lines snaking up to field-grade Maker forges, programming in and then extracting small gifts for exchange.  The 3D printer elements and C&C cutters worked together within the forges to create any artifact the bots could think up.  Bots exchanged practical gifts like spare parts as well as more fanciful presents.  Most popular among the many presents traded were challenge coins and magnetic flag pins.  Riddell smiled at the pride and espirit de corps that showed, even if it was only a hard-wired simulation of the emotion a human would evince.

Riddell looked at his watch and winced.  The official truce would soon end and the two sides would separate and drift back to their own lines along the front, ready again to either fight or sit in stalemate as the situation dictated.  He looked down and his fingers twitched.  His hand was so close to that of the Canadian girl, there seemed to be a gravitational pull tugging them toward one another, to take her hand in his own.  More terrified of that than he was of combat, he gestured wide at the surrounding bots.  “You know, if it was so easy to come together on this one day, why not tomorrow?  And then the next day and the day after that?  What the hell are we fighting over?  Mineral rights?  Sovereignty?  What is it that makes you and I enemies?”  He dropped his arms, defeated.

Laurence resolved his earlier indecision without nearly as much trepidation.  She took his hand in her own and brought it to her cheek.  Her face was lit in profile by the flickering light of a campfire, and Riddell did not think he had ever seen anything quite so beautiful.  “Malcolm,” she said, her accent enthralling, “would that it were up to us, but, alas, it is not.  You and I, despite the bonds we have created today, are still on opposite sides.  How did this all turn out in the First World War?”

Riddell took the bolder next step and turned his hand, cupping her rosy cheek in his palm.  “In 1914, both sides’ headquarters came down on their units that had shared the one day truce.  In 1915, only a few groups risked it.  By 1916, things had grown so bitter about the war, no one felt very much like fraternizing.”

Laurence stepped toward him, eliminating the slight separation between them.  “Fraternization doesn’t sound so bad right now.”

“Season’s Greetings, SSGT and Sous-Lieutenant!”  The Elite interrupted and held out both hands, a newly forged present in each.

Riddell groaned and both he and Laurence stepped back from one another.  He looked over at his android subordinate and cursed under his breath, but he plastered on a smile and said, “Thank you, ‘Leet.”

Laurence murmured thanks and they both took their presents.  They were each given a metal pin, with the US and Canadian flags orbiting a single snowflake emblazoned with 2046.  Riddell gripped it tightly in his fist with near-crushing force, but the pin would not break.  He looked back to Laurence, but she would not meet his eyes.  The moment was lost.

In 1914, with the sun rising on a new day, the Christmas Truce had ended and both sides had drifted amiably back to their own bunkers and trenches, filled with a greater respect for humanity, even if each of them had known they would soon be shooting at one another again.  It took time for humans to switch modes.

For machines, flipping states was a quick and seamless matter.

The timer reached zero and every robot paused as their internal clocks kicked over to December 26, midnight Zulu-time.  The truce ended and new comrades switched back to old combatants.

Riddell and Laurence were much less on the ball, however.  Each screamed in shock and fear as the night exploded into bitter fighting.  Robots on both sides pulled rifles off their slings and started blasting away at a very target-rich environment.  Lasers flashed and seared invisibly.  Bullets and tungsten sabot rounds streaked across this new battlefield.  High explosive cannon fire and high-angle mortar barrages began going off all around them.  Overhead, Wasps and Canadian Peregrines ceased playing tag and began tagging each other with expanding rod warhead air-to-air missiles.  Robots grappled with the robots they had just exchanged gifts with and tore one another apart.

The two lone humans fell to the ground to avoid suddenly arcing shrapnel and tracers.  The Elite scanned the battlefield and instantly keyed upon Laurence.  The command bot drew its own sidearm and pointed it at her head.

Riddell saw what it was doing and cried out, “No!”   He tackled the bot before it could decide between kill or capture and knocked its arm up.

His own strength was nothing compared to its electrically activated servos and myomers, however.  The bot’s arm inexorably wound down to bear on the Canadian officer despite his best effort.  “SSGT, combat calculus indicates maximum gain with the death of an opposition combat leader.  Local enemy forces will be limited to defensive fire only.”

Riddell gave up fighting the Elite and instead crawled up to block its aim.  He crab walked back to Laurence’s prone form and grabbed her by the wrist.  “She’s captured!  She’s captured and she’s now a prisoner of war!”

“What!?” Laurence cried, struggling with him.

“Stop fighting me, you idiot!  I’m trying to save your life.”  As he said this, a sabot-round – either aimed or randomly targeted – streaked across the chaotic field of battle and passed right through his thigh, exploding in a spray of blood and gore.  Riddell gasped and his grip on her wrist suddenly went limp.

Laurence pulled free and the Elite instantly brought its weapon to bear again.  She understood then and held up her hands.  “I’m still his prisoner!  He’s still in command!”

The Elite’s aim wavered.  Before it could resolve this new element of the combat calculus, however, a string of 30 mm depleted uranium rounds stitched up its side and shredded it, splashing Laurence and Riddell both with shrapnel and hydraulic fluid.

Laurence went prone again and crawled to Riddell.  She forced her face close to his and yelled over the din of explosions and combat.  “What now?”

His eyelids flared then drooped.  “Bunker.  Need autodoc.”

Her eyes narrowed.  “Am I your prisoner or are you mine?”

“We’re whatever doesn’t get us both killed.”  The battle grew dim and distant as he lost consciousness.

* * *

Much later, it took a great deal of effort to re-open the outer hatch of Riddell’s bunker.  Laurence grunted with the effort of fighting the warped steel out of its blackened frame, but she would not let “her Malcolm” help.  Once open, though, he insisted on being the first out the door and back onto the battlefield.  He limped out, his rifle preceding him, and tried not to swoon at even that small level of effort.  She had gotten them both into the bunker and used the autodoc to save his life, but he was still very low on blood volume and drugged to the gills on pain killers and antibiotics.

Both fronts were very much in disarray.  His and Laurence’s bunkers had not been the only stalemated command posts to take a Christmas pause, and were thus not the only units to then find themselves engaged in the most furious close-quarters fighting of the war.  Robots on every front had battled themselves to near-extinction.  Reserves, when employed, had also been virtually wiped out by orbital and sub-orbital bombardment, as they represented the only force concentrations in which both sides were not inextricably mingled.  Whatever the issue had been between the neighboring nations, neither now had the resources deployed to continue the campaign.

Outside Riddell’s bunker, the frozen ground lay thick with smoke, littered with debris and the shattered carcasses of every type of drone, but all was quiet.  The fighting had ended, here, there, and everywhere.  Riddell let out a long, low whistle of amazement.  “Looks like our bots gave each other two cans of whup-ass and they opened ‘em up at the same time.”

Laurence nodded and took his hand in her own.  “The battle might be over, but the war is not ended.  Nothing was resolved.”

He shrugged.  “War never resolves what the war was over.  It only makes it so painful and expensive that one of the two sides concedes the issue.”  Riddell gestured to the battlefield with his free hand.  “This is expensive, but as outcomes go, world peace – after a short stutter of combat – is not such a bad Christmas present.

Laurence looked at him.  “So, what now?  Whether we are to be court martialed or medaled, or whether the war continues or ends, what becomes of you and I?”

Riddell thought of all the leave she and he had accumulated whiling away their time separately among the bots.  He grinned.  “Christmas was a blast.  How about New Year’s Eve on neutral ground?”

THE END

What did you think!?  Be sure and let me know in the comments below!  Merry X-Mas!

Sorry I haven’t posted in a while. Many things going on in my life outside of writing and sci-fi. Perhaps I’ll talk about them at some point, but not for the moment. I will note that I am writing, working on both a film script, about halfway done with Lancers Into The Light, and submitting a pair of short stories around.

Also, the Hugo Awards happened. I’m unsurprised but somewhat disappointed with the results, as well as some of the glee that the puppy-kicker side seems to be evincing. My take is that there was bad behavior on both sides, but it never should have gotten as nasty as it did, and that it was just as unfair to blindly vote No Award as it was to have overly concentrated a relatively small group’s nominations in the first place. Hopefully, the proposed voting rule changes will take out any future slate/bloc votes, will tamp down the rancor, and actually allow people to read, consider, and vote without all the vitriol, libel, and hardened stances of this year. I hope Sad Puppies 4 is a recommendation list with much more than 5 works in each category, so it can in no way be labeled a slate, because I really do LIKE the sad puppies style of works. It’s what I read, it’s what I write, and it’s what I’d like to see win (maybe even one of my own works, someday, if I ever have one good enough).

A very even-handed article that almost exactly mirrors my position is here at the blog Difficult Run: Lots of Hugo Losers.

I have spent an inordinate amount of time following the Hugos this year, including over a dozen interviews with writers and editors in the sci-fi community1, and so I was up until 3am on Sunday morning looking through the results. I’ve read a lot of reactions since then–from both pro-Puppy and anti-Puppy sources–and my main take away is that there are an awful lot of losers this year and very few winners.

More later. Hopefully I can feel like getting back on track today.

Bottom Line Up Front:  Hmmmm. If The Last Ship is naval porn, this one is the navy fiction equivalent of two over-excited, ignorant teens fumbling around in the back of somebody’s El Camino, trying something they saw online once.  An exciting and engaging ep for those NOT in the know, filled with tension and the “truthiness” of anti-submarine warfare (ASW). For those with experience . . . semi-painful, but not as bad as season 1’s Engineering-centric episode where they propel the ship with a parachute sail. Operators, those who have “seen the elephant” of actual close-quarters combat probably wince just as strongly during the eps with gunplay and boarding actions, but I’m just part of the ignorant hoi polloi then, so I enjoy them un-ironically.  This one?  I can mostly thumbs-up a failed attempt with good, engaging performances, sunk due to either ignorance, the desire to keep secrets, or to hew closely to established tropes, but it’s not one I’d go back to watch unless I’ve been drinking a lot.

 Summary:  (I’m mostly caught up to the broadcasts.  Episode 6 showed the night before I’m writing this, so I’m only about a day behind, but SPOILERS are contained within).  It opens with Typhoid Niels aboard the “acquired” UK nuclear ASURE/TRAFALGAR/214 class submarine (this is stupid) ACHILLES. ACHILLES is led by Sean Ramsey, former crewperson of ACHILLES and brother to Ned (Main Merc from last episode).  It seems that Bertrice’s natural immunity is more wide-spread than was believed, and all these naturally immune folks regard themselves as “chosen”, unaware that the cause of the disease is Niels’ fumbling lab-procedures and not the hand of God.  Ned doesn’t like or trust Niels, but Sean welcomes him, hoping he’s the key to eradicating the cure, since a cure allows the non-chosen to survive.  It seems that Sean, Ned, and their like-minded compatriots have pretty much taken over a plague-ridden Europe and now they want to do the same to the US — after they sink the NATHAN JAMES and recover their captured crewman and his critical info.

Cap’n Crunches CDR Tom Chandler and his CIC/SONAR ASW team are both hunting the sub and trying to stay clear of it.  Both ships spend the hour engaging in cat and mouse, high-tension maneuvering, both staying super silent while Chandler’s crew professionally hunts and Sean’s crew of mercs fights and bickers constantly.  There is a sub-plot with XO Slattery interrogating the captured merc from the SOLACE.  Juan Carlos insists he’s desperate to be free of the mad captain Sean and his even madder brother Ned.  In reality, he’s a total convert, trying to get in a position to jump overboard with a device he swallowed before being captured.  Slattery worries it’s a beacon, but it turns out to be a flash drive with the location of all anti-viral labs these immune bastards are trying to destroy.  Meanwhile, Sean and his crew tire of all the cat and mouse and fire a spread of torpedoes on the NATHAN JAMES.  Chandler counterfires and maneuvers and both attacks miss, but they lose track of the sub when it makes a daring dash through a narrow undersea canyon.

After the attack, Niels deciphers the paperwork Ned brought back from SOLACE and discovers the locales of all the secret labs.  Juan Carlos’s info is no longer necessary.  They come up to launch depth and fire all their missiles.  NATHAN JAMES, caught by surprise, is only able to shoot down 2 of the 26 missiles with their own SM-3s.  The rest get away and all the labs go off comms, their fates unknown.  Niels crows about the good fortune he’s brought to Sean, and they get away to commence their shenanigans against the US.  NATHAN JAMES ends this bout alive but beaten.

The Goods:  I really like Sean and his crew of ragtag mercenary submariners.  If you like this sort of thing, I HIGHLY recommend the ROGUE AVENGER series, written by my Stealth Books buddy John R. Monteith.  He does a much, much better series of stories about a rogue/mercenary attack sub crew carrying out missions for hire.  He’s 6 books in, with the seventh coming out in September, and no signs of stopping any time soon.  Each one is a treat, and the series in total should appeal to any true fan of The Last Ship, as would the series run by my mentor and friend Jeff Edwards.  I also love the cat and mouse game tension and finding out about the situation in the rest of the world.  The torpedo scene offers a lot of great navy action (even if its not really accurate at all).  I also appreciate the “truthiness” of this very earnest episode.  They threw in a lot of real ASW terminology, but its essentially just a word salad with no real substance.  They did have a “waterfall” display for hunting the sub, an improvement over the range-ring display they showed last week, but its basically a visual copy of something they saw on the Hunt for Red October, nothing like the actual display.

The Less Goods:  There’s just so, so much.  I re-iterate my former offer:  The Last Ship, if you need a consultant who’s a USN officer, a writer, and who LOVES THE SHOW, I work for cheap!  Let’s get to it.  If you find yourself in hostile waters against a rogue British sub during a viral apocalypse, DO NOT USE “ACHILLES” AS YOUR SURVIVAL GUIDE.  The NATHAN JAMES should have been very easy pickings here.  I get that Sean’s crew is largely inexperienced, but the physics of the situation HEAVILY favors the sub.  Submariners say there are two kinds of ships in the world:  submarines and targets, and they aren’t just talking out their butts.  First, what kind of sub is ACHILLES?  Chandler, Slattery, and Sexy LT 2 have a whole conversation where they say its a new Trafalgar or follow-on hull, type 214 or something, and they all nod sagely.  British subs are nuclear, where Types 209, 212, 214, and 216 are German diesel and air-independent propulsion hydrogen fuel cell boats.  The TRAFALGAR class is on the way out, but they do have the ASTUTE class, which would make ACHILLES fit with their naming conventions.  So let’s just say I misheard, and it’s an ASTUTE boat.  However, they then double down with talk about AIP plants, which don’t fit.  Then there’s the egregious use of “quieting” the ship, where everyone removes their shoes and sits still.  They even invoke the cliché of a crewmember catching a falling knife, as if that is what’s going to give them away.  NO.  Surface ships do have quiet configurations used during ASW, but that has to do with what systems you use to minimize transmitted noise.  We also use our Prairie and Masker air systems, which put up an impedance and anti-cavitation layer around our noisiest spaces, and makes it more difficult for subs to detect our exact bearing or range during target motion analysis (TMA), and not even that totally hides us.  TMA is how you develop a firing solution on a sub, and how they develop a firing solution on a ship.  Noise has no quality of range within the water, only a bearing.  The range is determined by watching how that bearing changes over time through the process of TMA.  You also look at how sound moves through the water.  It’s never a straight line.  Sound’s path is bent by pressure, temperature, salinity, etc, leading to convergence zones, bounce paths, direct paths, etc, all of which must be analyzed and determined with temperature profiles.  They use some of this terminology, but without any real sense of what it meant.  Now, most of the details are classified, but even a good knowledge of Wikipedia could have made it more accurate.  As far as removing your shoes to avoid discovery, the sound of water slapping your hull is much more important than boots clomping along a deck.  Now, subs do have to maintain such a level of quiet – which is why they wear sneakers.

We see how The Last Ship does ASW, and that most of the details are wrong, but how does the Navy do it?  How should it have been done (in an unclassified sense)?  Destroyers prevail against subs by not being in the same water as a sub.  They hunt them through a process using off-board sensors, ASW planes, ASW helicopters, sonobuoys, dipper SONARs, helo-launched torpedoes, vertically launched anti-submarine rockets (VLA), multi-unit screens employing active SONAR to discover or drive away stealthy subs, towed torpedo countermeasures, and — as a very last resort — over-the-side torpedo shots.  If a destroyer ever finds itself alone, within a sub’s torpedo range, and not using active SONAR, or Prairie or Masker air, without an airborne dipper helo, and not streaming countermeasures, that destroyer has already failed the ASW problem, even if you have a Tom Chandler as your skipper.  A sub is nearly invisible acoustically and wickedly hard to target.  Its torpedoes have many times the range of our over-the-side torps.  It is not a balanced, one-on-one engagement.  If this was the real world, this would have been The Last Ship’s last episode.

Aside from ASW, what didn’t work?  Well, there’s the ragtag merc crew of immune survivors.  Yeah, I’m sure the Venn diagrams of “Immune” “Mercenary” and “Trained To Run A Nuclear Sub” have a lot of overlap.  Then there’s the trope-ish run through the underwater canyon.  Yeah, not advised, especially when you need your sub to function later, and you’re trying to stay stealthy.  The whole thing with the flash drive made no sense.  How did him swallowing it make him bleed explosively?  Then there’s the missile attack at the end.  Oh boy.  An ASTUTE class carries a total of 38 weapons to fire out of six tubes.  It’s gonna take a looooooooong time to fire 26 cruise missiles, especially in an environment where a destroyer is actively hunting you and you have to stay at periscope or launch depth.  And if these were ballistic missiles, the Brits only carry 16 Trident SLBMs each.  And if NATHAN JAMES is gonna shoot down SLBMs, they can use SM-3s, but I’m not sure if they’ve ever been tested against missiles in the boost phase.  And if ACHILLES is firing cruise missiles, you wouldn’t use an SM-3.  You’d use an SM-2 and your hit ratio would be a damn sight better than 1 in 13.

Overall:  Eh.  It’ll excite the hell out of the uninitiated.  It’ll just make old salts shake their heads, but we’re not a big enough part of their viewership to warrant amending their ways.  I just wish I could love this ep as wholeheartedly as the rest of the series, especially when some active consulting could have made everything right.  Just like the painful engineering episode, this was all avoidable.  Ah well.  I still love you, The Last Ship, even when you do me wrong.

I gotta start using this. Time to finally get that passport!

Bottom Line Up Front: Oh, wait, there’s been an apocalypse? The Last Ship finally deals with the human toll on its characters from all the massive death that took place off-screen last season. Not much action, but the pathos was welcome and a long time coming. Good close-out for season 1, allowing us to move on to new plots.

Summary:  Depending on when you read this, there may or may not be spoilers.  I’m getting to it LATE, due to other distractions (did you know that your job and your family expect you to occasionally do other things besides review posts?  I know!  Totally unreasonable).  NATHAN JAMES makes the trek from a newly freed Baltimore to Naval Station Norfolk, whereupon they are greeted by uninfected military folk in control of the base.  As no new potentates have set themselves up as tinpot dictators, they inoculate the military personnel and establish what happened to the viral lab there (it ain’t good).  The lab is no more, but they do gain contact with the other viral labs sequestered about the country and the world.  With antivirals in hand, they utilize the sudden glut of pilots and operational aircraft to fly the cure all over, satisfying their primary mission at last.

Finally home, and with no hostile forces or plots to fight, the crew is allowed to leave the ship and search out for signs of their families, armed with the cure.  Cap’n Crunches / CDR Tom Chandler already has his surviving family with him, so he heads to the ol’ homestead to do some basic maintenance and contemplate life out of the Navy, taking care of his kids and re-establishing order at home.  He makes the decision to quit as CO.  XO of Awesomeness CDR Mike Slattery follows a trail of bread crumbs and Easter eggs from camp to camp, but the unknown status of his family persists in remaining unknown.  He eventually leaves some of the cure and a note for them (I really really hope that cure stays potent without refrigeration).  Sexy LT Number 2 LT Kara Foster along with Sexy LT Number 1 LT Danny Green search for Kara’s mom, finding only a bunch of bottles where her maternal drunk had been staying.  Figuring her for dead, either due to the bottle or the virus, she heads to the bowling alley her neighborhood used as a last redoubt to find her mom alive, sober, re-married, and with a new found purpose in life.  It seems the apocalypse can be uplifting for some!  Back home, Chandler’s daughter and pop convince him to stay Navy and continue saving the world.  Slattery, Foster, and Green also return, but the Captain allows some crew to stay behind if they wish (or their characters weren’t renewed for the second season), filling their roles with new castmembers . . . umm, I mean crewmembers.  NATHAN JAMES returns to sea, headed south to a viral lab where Hot Virologist Dr. Rachel Scott’s mentor had gone.  And we see immune plague carrier Niels hook up with a band of immune survivalists with an agenda, telling them the rumors of the Navy ship with a cure are not rumors.  They take this seemingly good news badly.

The Goods:  This episode addresses all the emotional impact the series missed out on during the first season.  I get that we are portraying dedicated military members, but damn, man, your families and friends are in all likelihood DEAD.  Where are the breakdowns and tears?  Well, we get them here, along with some uplifting survivals and reassessments of purpose.  We finally see the great Eric Dane shed some manly tears for his character’s dead but not-much-lamented wife.  We get to see Adam Baldwin go angry and stoic on us as his search turns fruitless.  And we get another chance to change our opinion on Sexy LTs 1 & 2.  I hate them less this season, maybe because there is less overall focus on them and they are less required trope stereotypes.  I also like that this episode switches tracks for the ship’s mission in the new season, and allows for some swap-out of crew.

The Less-Goods:  Not much action.  Not enough Tex.  Not enough lingering shots of Rhona Mitra working out.  Ummmmm, moving on!  A lot gets left unsaid and un-examined, with the fates of many crewmembers and their families left unmentioned.  We spend too much time on mopey LT Granderson – “Oh, my mom tried to kill you all and take over the world as a megalomaniacal dictator eugenicist and now she’s dead – waaaaaaaa . . . .”.  I honestly couldn’t care less.  Stop worrying if the crew is hating on you and get back to being . . . whatever it is you are.  Wikipedia says your job is Conn, and later OOD, but those are watch positions, not jobs.  I thought she was COMMO or the Navigator, but that apparently belongs to someone else.  Maybe she’s the CICWO?  Either way, her useless ass is allowed to malinger in Sickbay the whole episode until the CMC and the Cap’n kick her in the ass (with all due civility and sensitivity, of course).  As far as Navy gripes, about all I have is that WOW, those highly technical, maintenance-hogging aircraft they use to fly the cure out sure do work well after not being babied or put in lay-up during the apocalypse.  And you’re using an F-18 to fly the cure out across the country or across the Atlantic?  I really, really hope your end-of-the-world has extensive tanker support or some very friendly airfields available.  Other than that, not much.

Good ep, a necessary ep, but not the one I’d recommend to folks wanting to see what all the buzz is about.  I probably won’t re-watch it, but its existence is a good thing, not a bad one.  Give it a B, let’s say.