Cyclops

By William C Barnes

Travel aboard the largest and most powerful research submarine yet known to man that is run by a temperamental Artificial Intelligence.  You will encounter sea monsters, aliens, a mummy's curse, and a man trying to help his father as he sinks into oblivion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: William C Barnes
• Release date: Mar 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393062516

Book preview

CYCLOPS pitched her bow upwards exposing her underside.  The bay doors amidships opened slowly as if it were beckoning us to come in. I thought: Come into my parlor said the spider to the fly.

CHAPTER ONE

MY FAMILY HISTORY TO DATE

My name is Wayne Frederick Penniworth, IV, PhD. I was born in 1960 when my father, Wayne Frederick III a double PhD. was 32.  He married my mother, a Naval Captain named Karen Davis.  She headed up the Deep-Water Diving Team for the Penniworth Institute of Marine Research, here-to-fore known as PIMR. My father was head of the Penniworth Shipbuilding Company.  We primarily build submarines on the east coast.

During the third trimester of her pregnancy mother was diagnosed with stage four metastatic breast cancer.  Because of the pregnancy she could not undergo chemotherapy.  Despite her diagnosis my mother held on for five amazing years.  When I was two and a half, she taught me to read. As a little boy I could not understand why mummy had to leave us. Her absolute grit and tenacity to stay alive and be a mother is inspiring to say the least.

My father was dealt quite a blow by her death and went into seclusion for six months afterwards, giving almost total control of PIMR and the Shipbuilding Company over to George Lewis, The Assistant Director, to allow himself to grieve.  After mother’s death, my Aunt Betty, Dad’s unmarried younger sister, came to live with us and raised me as if I were her son.

I was some sort of prodigy, completing high school at age 10 and gaining my PhD in marine architecture with specialization in submersibles. by age 19. Through special permission by the government, I attended submarine school in Groton Connecticut –the same place we built our boats.  I then went to England to learn about commanding a boat through their International Commanders’ Training Program.

My father felt that in doing so I could better understand the workings of a submarine on a mission.  Like my father I knew subs from stem to stern. Like my father, I acquired A Master’s License.

Father referred to me often as number 4 since I was Wayne Frederick the 4th.  In turn I would affectionately refer to him as number 3.

My father was a multi billionaire, worth over 300 billion.  He made his money as a building contractor for ships and submarines.  PIMR was his pet project.  He built his own small deep diving subs, some of which visited the TITANIC, and BISMARK wreck site.

CHAPTER TWO

USSXN 377

USSXN 377 (X for experimental, N for nuclear powered) began her life in 2001 as a Black Government Project. $5 Billion was spent on her simply to test out a new design of propellers that would make no sound nor send out a trail behind them.  Now the bigwigs could have just installed the propellers on an existing sub, but no.  They had to build a new one.  Your tax dollars at work!

Also, the orders came for the sub to be powered by one huge electric motor run off a generator that was powered by three reactors.  If they wanted it to be quiet, why did they insist on electric motors that vibrated even with padded mounts to mitigate vibration?

Well as Titanic’s famous shipbuilder Thomas Andrews often said: "Though the client be a fool, do what he wants but get it in writing."

In 2004, after testing was completed the nuclear core was removed from the reactors and she was put into moth balls.

Father, President of Penniworth Naval Construction was disappointed that so much went into her—time and money.  She was so big she actually had roomy hallways on either side of the interior of the boat.

We still know much more about the moon than we do about our oceans, and in father’s visionary mind, he saw her as a giant submersible platform for scientists all over the world to use for marine study.  One other reason father chose USSXN 377 was because it was built with a full double hull made of four-inch titanium.  She could go 4 times as deep as a conventional sub.  We even discussed taking her to the TITANIC wreck site!

At any rate father wanted USXN 377 to act autonomously with only a crew of 15—that being a Captain or Institute Head trained in submarines and 14 other men. So, in 2006 he bought her for $300,000 dollars and agreed to pay all expenses to re-moor her.  The government sold her on condition they could call her back into service should the need arise. The one thing my father hated was red tape.  He didn’t want as he put it: 100 proctologists examining me at the same time.

Father used his money and influence with politicos to ensure that a nuclear core would be reinstalled into the reactors. Refit was expensive. Unfortunately, the core would only be good for 10 years.

REFIT

USXN 377 was towed to the new dock a year after her purchase and moored there. Sluice gates were closed, and the water pumped out of the mooring USXN377 settled on to movable supporters. Father had a special dry/graving dock built under a grotto somewhere on the East Coast near Boston. It’s location at that time was secret.  It was not a naturally made grotto, so father had it dug out and constructed to accommodate the large submarine. 

The mooring/graving/dock was over 1500- feet long and 150-feet wide It could more that accommodate the boat’s 590-foot length and 70-foot beam.  An Ohio class sub—among the largest boats in the U.S. arsenal could fit inside her with room to spare! She was BIG, displacing 52,000 tons.

I have no idea why the sub was built so big.  It would make it difficult to lay in shallow water off the coast of a given country.  Going under the arctic ice cap was out of the question, so that limited her in doing Arctic research.

By sandblasting, rust was removed from her hull as well as the thousand barnacles encrusted on every part of her hull that was exposed to the sea.

Using a high-powered laser, the boat was cut into six100 foot long sections and separated them by thirty feet to make it easier to remove old hardware and put in the improvements and designs father had in mind. 

Did I say six sections? Actually, I meant seven. A thirty-five-foot diameter section of the boat’s nose was removed and then sold for scrap.  The forward part of the sub was the torpedo room and that was completely stripped out. The sonar array that used to emanate from her nose was relegated to two exterior devices that were cylindrical in shape with the tops rounded-off. placed just behind (above and below) the 35-foot section that was removed.

When it came time to bring three sections together, father brought in the company’s robots to do the welding.  They have a 99.9% accuracy rate.  The welds were then subjected to laser light inspection to test for any part missed. 

Once the welding was complete pressurized air was put in the boat for a couple of days and was monitored for leaks.  The weldings were perfect and actually the strongest part of the hull. The boat was given two coats of primer, and three coats of black paint.  Then a bright yellow/orange-colored poly urethane/urea coating one inch thick was put onto X’s hull to not only ensure water tightness but to decrease the boat’s signature on sonar or radar. Also, her color would announce she was not a ship of war when we were surfaced and seen by another vessel.  In black paint on the sail—or conning tower, was painted the acronym PIMR Her name was to be added later.

Also, while under refit, bulkheads were torn out and replaced with circuitry behind new bulkheads that fed into a single central computer hub in the control room which itself had terabytes of terabytes of memory and software to go with it.  Almost every square inch of X’s bulkheads was composed of circuitry inside them.

Because of her weight given the double hull, X377 sat very low in the water. The waterline was barely ten feet below the conning tower.  There was very little open deck space.

PHOTONIC ARRAY

The sail or conning tower was in the forward part of the boat 80 feet behind the bow to allow for greater stability underwater and to cut down on resistance. The conning tower had a rudder in back to keep the boat upright and stable should emergency hard overs be ordered.

The photonic array was really a fourth-generation photonic camera relay, that allowed the entire control room’s crew a 360-degree view of what was around the boat, coming through television monitors. Since the unit was released by5 inch thick cable, no photonic array well was necessary in the control room. A photonic array well is the area of the sub where the photonic cameras were stored when not raised.  The photonic camera relay was able to extend up to three hundred feet. And even though we had powerful sonar aboard X the unit It was also capable of night vision in the darkest of nights and had a radar unit to detect any nearby ships on the surface. 

The other advantage was you could arrange the control room how and where you wanted and were not hampered by having to be under the sail. Also, we could look at anything at any light spectrum such as night vision or infrared.  We could take these images and overlap them on screen for whatever desired result we needed. These types of  photonic arrays are put on attack subs, but since the Government claimed rights to call us into temporary service, Father managed to fenagle one for X377.

CONTROL ROOM DETAILS

An array of sensors was fitted into the hull to send information to the main computer’s A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) as to the boat’s weight, displacement, for neutral buoyancy and pitch and yaw. We could program