What if Little John could see beneath the bravado to the real reason Smyke was not on duty this morning? What if this suddenly formidable man realized his first officer had got himself into this state precisely so he could avoid going down into the tank today?
Suddenly the ship’s emergency siren exploded in three short blasts: trouble in the tank. John Higgins forgot all about his useless first officer and burst into the cool of the bridge at a run.
And behind him, on the bridge wing he had just vacated, Lieutenant Cecil Jolyon Carruthers Smyke, R.N. (ret.), first officer, Prometheus (ret.), opened his mouth to call out and threw up all over himself.
As he ran onto the bridge John looked down, automatically setting the stopwatch function on his wristwatch. He knew the bridge so well, and dictated the positioning of everything on it so precisely, that he did not need to look where he was going. The zeros flashed up, the hundredths spinning. Four minutes to go and every instant crucial. John’s mind was working as busily as the figures on his watch dial. Smyke was bloody useless. Everyone else was extra busy and would be slower because of it. Should he send Don Edwards, his third lieutenant? No, he’d better do it himself. Hell! it never rained but it…
He was through the bridge, past the collision alarm radar, round the central bank of instruments, and out into the bridge-deck corridor before the thought was completed. Kerem Khalil, senior general purpose seaman aboard, and unofficial chief petty officer, was standing by the lift holding the doors open. Shoulder to shoulder they leaped in. The little car was in motion almost before the doors were closed, while Kerem’s broad finger was still hovering over the A-deck button.
“Who’s called…” The words were torn from John like a curse. No one should be using this lift except the crash team. But it was Asha Quartermaine. She had called it from C deck where her cabin was. “Sorry,” she said, pushing her doctor’s bag in first, then straddling it. “Caught me with my pants down.”
Literally, thought John, his mind sidetracked to her for a moment. Unself-consciously, she stood in the elevator next to them buttoning up a white cotton boiler suit under which there seemed to be nothing but her powerful body. She must have been in the shower when the alarm sounded so she just leaped into the suit and some shoes and ran. The shoes were unlaced, the cotton suit threatening to go transparent where it was wet.
Asha swept the red mane of her hair out of her startling russet eyes. Her gaze met his and she grinned: an irresistible flash of strong white teeth. Then she was down on one knee tying her laces. She was the most extraordinary ship’s doctor John had ever sailed with but he could not imagine any other he would prefer to have with him now.
The lift reached A deck and the three of them burst out at a dead run. They sped out through the bulkhead door onto the main deck. Here for the first time they hesitated for an instant beside a rack of adult-size BMX bikes. Had the emergency happened farther away, they would have used these to speed down the quarter-mile of Prometheus’s deck. “No!” John made the decision at once. “Quicker to run!” He was off first but the other two kept up with him even though Asha still carried her doctor’s bag.
John checked his watch at the open tank top—ninety seconds and ticking—as the waiting seamen strapped oxygen tanks to their backs. Then his hands were in motion again, adjusting the face mask and holding the tank’s raised metal rim as he swung his brawny leg inside it, pushing his foot down onto the first step. Little more than two minutes left to find the second officer’s team and the chief engineer who was with them, and to find out what was wrong and to put it right. In any ship’s hold a difficult task; in one of this ship’s tanks almost impossible.
The midship tank her captain was now entering, like an ancient miner going down some massive subterranean gallery, plunged nearly one hundred feet sheer to the keel. It was half the ship wide — more than one hundred feet again — and nearly one hundred fifty feet long. One and a half million cubic feet: volume enough to contain a modest cathederal. And, like a cathederal, it was divided into aisles, chapels, and choirs by great walls and buttresses of steel designed to stop the cargo from moving with too destructive a force; designed to stop it from tearing the ship apart. The buttresses reached in from the sides of the tank, broke away to become full columns here and there, plunging to the dark serrations of the floor where partial walls arose in series like giant pews facing invisible altars bow and stern, steel pews, eight, ten, twelve feet high. Each pew was pierced by holes but such were the demands of their dangerous, restless cargo that none of these could be made big enough to admit even the slimmest body wearing an oxygen tank.
One hundred seconds and counting. John hesitated on the first balcony — scarcely bigger than a table — and glanced up from his watch. Asha was climbing down above him. He turned away; tore himself away: he could not pause to gaze up at her now. He crossed the platform with one stride and stepped out over space. The crash team followed him one by one. They were well practiced. With the exception of lifeboat drill, this was the most regularly rehearsed emergency. And the one everyone was most terrified of doing for real.
These thoughts served to take him across to the relative security of the steps down the tank’s sheer side, across the yawning gap he hated most. Pausing with the familiar slick steel so warm and reassuring by his right shoulder, he paused for a micron to look back, then ran on downward with what he had seen still imprinted on his retina.
The ladder came vertically from the tank top to that tiny platform six feet square suspended impossibly in that cavernous vastness, lit simply by the vertical spotlight of Gulf brightness plunging down until it was dissipated by the darkness far above the tanker’s serrated floor. Out from that platform, moving at once into darkness, reappearing under increasingly vague pools of illumination from the open Butterworth plates — bright moons fading to faint stars in the vault of the roof beside the hard-edged sun of the tank top — came the one delicate arch of the steps he had just crossed. Light and dark they curved, like ballistic motion frozen in steel, down to the platform he had just vacated. Fifty feet — sixty, allowing for the slope — of steel step and steel rail looking like thread and seeming to sway as Asha began to cross toward him.
Two mins. thirty and counting…He was only a third of the way down to the tank floor — and that floor was fifteen thousand square feet of sludgy, echoing maze with walls made out of steel. He plunged down the steps, running his right hand along the slick wall while his left held the banister, like a frightened child. He was gasping oxygen at a dangerous rate, almost feeling sympathy for Smyke, who needed oxygen for quite different reasons.
“…Dr. Quartermaine here. On platform two, descending. Over…”
Hell! He had forgotten to check in. He bloodied his knuckles on the transmit button of his built-in radio. “Captain here. Past platform two, descending. Ten seconds ahead of you, Doctor.”
“Khalil here. On platform two. Five seconds behind Dr. Quartermaine, descending.”
“Dr. Quartermaine here. Who’s down there?”