They swam slowly to the edge of the collapsed deck and Finn stopped suddenly, brought up short as she found herself suddenly looking down to the ocean floor as the hull dropped away. The sense of size was almost dizzying; even under water it was almost enough to give her vertigo, regardless of the fact that she couldn’t actually fall off the edge of the ship.
“Intense,” said Hilts, treading water beside her.
She nodded and launched herself over the side, her legs and hips moving in a smooth undulating technique that was meant to reduce silt disturbance. She planed down the side of the hull, breathing evenly, enjoying the full face mask and the fact that she didn’t have to keep a mouthpiece clamped between her jaws. The oddest sensation was the ebreather’s lack of bubbles. The simple, even hissing of the unit and the boiling sensation of the bubbles’ release around her was vaguely claustrophobic; it was almost too quiet. On the other hand, the silence let her glide through the local schools of bluefish and cobia almost without notice. In the distance she could see a smaller group of silvery barracuda swimming in their distinctive, nervous zigzags, but she ignored them; she knew the needle-toothed creature’s reputation was built more on appearance than actual danger. On the rare occasions that the predatory fish attacked humans it was because they’d been attracted by some glittering piece of jewelry or a brightly reflective watch.
She planed down, aware of Hilts beside and just behind her. She kept her eyes to the left, watching the weed-and-barnacle-covered deck plates, the steadily strengthening surge moving the wrack back and forth like waving fingers. Regular lines of portholes ran off into the distance, most of them still intact, the thick glass covered in a crust of silt and growth, the cabin interiors on the other side of the barrier dark and unwelcoming. The ship was dead, not even a ghost; this was no Titanic with the specters of a thousand passengers still hovering nearby; this was a burnt-out hulk.
“There,” she said finally, pulling up short and pointing ahead and down. A dark hole gaped in the side of the hull. It was close to a perfect square, the edges softened by a dense mat of sea growth. “The main entry hatch. It’s wide open.”
“They would have taken off the passengers through there while they still had the time. Easier to load the lifeboats from here.”
Both Finn and Hilts were carrying high-intensity twin lights, one lamp fixed to their back plates, the other clipped to their belts. Both were powered by battery packs that had a charge life of almost two hours. They switched on and the entranceway was suddenly lit up brightly. They had agreed on position and protocols the night before, so there was no need to discuss it again now. Because Finn was smaller, Hilts would go first to assess their best route; if he could get through a space, then it stood to reason that Finn could follow. Finn on the other hand would be the one keeping track of the time, regularly checking the dive computer dangling from her vest. It would be easy to get so far into the wreck’s interior that they would run out of time; it would be up to her to call the cutoff point no matter how close they’d come to their objective.
“Top to bottom,” said Hilts. “We start with the Vatican guy.”
“Augustus Principe, the bishop. Upper Promenade Deck, Gelderland Suite. Cabin number seventy-one.” Finn reached down, pulled up the dangling computer on her vest, and set the elapsed time function. The computer would let out a loud buzz at the halfway point-their signal to turn back, no matter what. The digital display began to count down. “Go.” She dropped the computer. Hilts eased forward, keeping his swim-fin motion to a minimum to reduce disturbance of the accumulated silt that had settled on board. He kept one hand extended, sweeping his hand light back and forth. Finn came in behind him and a little above, pacing herself to him.
Ten feet inside the entrance was a pile of debris, rotted wood, metal, and a pile of something that might have been a heap of life preservers, now reduced to a layer of black muck forming an environment for half a dozen kinds of weed and deep-sea undergrowth. In the light from Hilts’s lamp Finn could see that there had once been a set of interior doors that swung on a central hinge in the middle of the entranceway.
Hilts kept moving. Finn followed him into the interior of the midships lobby. A school of small, flashing fish turned and slid quickly away from the searching light. There was a faint haze of hanging algae in the water. On the walls, covered with silt but still clearly visible for what they were, Finn saw a series of aluminum ornaments, each one depicting a different zodiac sign. She’d seen pictures of how they’d once looked in Mills’s photo albums. Once upon a time the walls had been wood-paneled and the deck covered in some sort of nonstick tile, but all of that had long since been eaten away, leaving nothing behind but a dark, unwholesome vegetable skin. On the left the light picked out the open counters of the chief steward’s office and the purser’s office. The night before they’d discussed the possibility of checking the purser’s office, but eventually had decided against checking it out. The purser would no doubt have a safe, but it was unlikely that Devereaux or even his colleague, Bishop Principe, would have kept anything valuable there. They’d check it if they had the time, but only as a last resort.
Above their heads the false ceiling had sagged, revealing a tangle of pipes and electrical conduits. Some of the panels had collapsed and others looked half melted. The heat from the fire if not the fire itself had reached this far. They pushed a little farther, passing what appeared to be Sagittarius. A door sagged. Hilts shone his light. A row of empty dentist’s chairs looked into a row of blank, silt-covered mirrors.
“Barbershops?” Finn guessed.
“Or beauty salon,” Hilts responded, his voice crackling in Finn’s earpiece. Another few feet and they had their answer. A second room and a second row of weedy chairs. A further scattering of armchairs tangled in a heap. Mirrors cracked from side to side, silt and muck inches thick on the floor, visible here and there in patches of black and white geometric tile. A chessboard. There’d been a postcard in one of the souvenir books. This was the men’s barbershop, which meant the first had been the women’s beauty salon.
“Stairway next,” Hilts’s voice murmured in her ear. “I’m going to attach a line if I can find a tie-off.”
“Hey!” Finn yelled, pulling up, a dangerous flash of livid green appearing out of the corner of her eye.
Disturbed by the movement of the divers or perhaps the light, a huge green moray eel surged up out of the ooze and silt beneath one of the barber chairs, huge teeth bared in its beaklike head. A yard long and shaped like a thick, fleshy sword blade, the bright green horror twisted between them, snapping its powerful jaws, then whipped away into the gloom at the edge of the cone of sharp illumination thrown by Hilts’s light. The moray, had it struck, could have easily taken her hand off. Even a small laceration could have led to a vibrio bacterial infection that could cause gangrene within hours.
Finn let out an explosive breath, fogging her mask for a few seconds. Her pounding heart began to slow to something like normal again. She gritted her teeth and kept on swimming, turning toward the wide staircase that opened before her, caught in Hilts’s light. Who knew how many sharp-toothed horrors lay along the path of their explorations.
“Tuesdays with moray,” she muttered, embarrassed by her jerking reaction to the eel.“Pardon?”
“Nothing,” Finn answered. “You had to read the book.” She took a breath and let it out slowly. “Let’s keep on going.”
Hilts nodded. He unclipped the Dive Rite primary reel from his vest, attached it to the end of the aluminum stairwell banister, and clipped the no-snag device back onto his vest. It held two hundred and fifty feet of braided nylon line that would guide them back to the main lobby on their return if their visibility was obscured by too much silt.