“Hold on.”
After speed-lacing her boots, she moved into the dark passage, where she flitted her light back and forth over the smooth black bulkheads.
“X, what happened?” she asked. She got no answer right away. Not even Timothy replied.
Because the system is down, she realized.
“X, where are you?”
“Right here.”
She directed the beam behind her.
“No, up here.”
The beam hit his face. He was bending down from the upper level. “We just lost our battery power. Come on, I need your help.”
Magnolia felt a twinge of dread at the news. This wasn’t that much different from diving through a storm. They were at the mercy of Mother Nature until they got back online.
The boat swayed, and she hit the bulkhead with her palm to keep from falling. She found the rungs after a few steps and made her way up into the staging area, where X was already suited up.
“We have to go out and fix this ourselves.” He put his helmet on and tossed her a bag of gear.
She moved over to the rack where she stored her suit, armor, and helmet. Holding the butt of the flashlight in her mouth, she shined the light on the equipment.
Miles barked from the passage below.
“Calm down, buddy,” X said. “We’ll be back in a little while.” Holding two bags in his hands, he glanced over at Magnolia. “Meet me outside.”
She dressed as fast as she could, but by the time she was finished, X was already climbing into the engine room on the deck. Smoke rose out of the opening, toward the mast and into the dark sky.
A fire down there could mean a few different things, all of them bad.
“Let’s go!” he shouted.
A light drizzle hit her as she stepped outside. Waves slapped the hull, rocking them from side to side. She balanced herself by holding her arms out and moving in a straight line to X.
Smoke sneaking past him, he popped his helmet out of the opening to see where she was.
“Where’s the other bag, Mags?”
She cursed and went back inside the boat to grab the tools. Two minutes later, she was climbing down the ladder into the cramped engine room—essentially a utility closet with an overhead barely four feet high.
Getting down on her kneepads, she crawled after X, trying to see through the smoke and using her hand to brush it away. Her knees scraped over the metal deck and through puddles of salt water.
X rounded a corner and ducked into the passage where the batteries were stored. Magnolia used her headlamp to scan the area, but the inky smoke was hard to penetrate.
“Hand me that bag…”
X reached back with one hand but kept his helmet light directed at the mechanical equipment ahead. Magnolia glimpsed engine one and the two lithium-ion battery units encased beside it.
She pushed the bag forward, and X dug inside for several moments while she held her light steady. He pulled out the small computer they used to diagnose mechanical issues—the same one that had failed to diagnose the first bad battery. This time, though, X managed to find the issue quickly.
“It’s a bad wire,” he said. “I should be able to fix this right now and bring the power back on. Battery still has fifty-five percent juice, too.”
“Thank God,” Magnolia whispered.
“Still doesn’t tell us what’s creating the smoke,” he said. “I’ll deal with that next.”
After a half hour of cursing and clanking, he had the new wiring in place.
“All right, should be good… to… go.” He let out a grunt, and the lights suddenly came back on, filling the space with a white glow.
A confused voice immediately came over the comms.
“What happened?”
“Didn’t think I’d be happy to hear your voice again, Pepper,” X said.
“Thank you, sir.”
“I’m going to try and get the engine back online,” X said.
“Can I help?” Magnolia asked. She crawled after him toward the still-smoking engine. Her hands slipped in a puddle—not water this time.
“Careful, X,” she said. “We got oil.”
“I’ve just run a quick scan of the boat,” Timothy said over the open channel. “Unfortunately, it looks as though engine one is damaged beyond repair.”
X directed his helmet light inside the engine.
“We have a melted corner of a piston crown,” he said after he opened the casing. Several curses followed.
He played his beam over several areas while fanning away the smoke. “Looks like that last wave hit us so hard, it destroyed the compression ring lands and piston pin. I bet a lot of the metal is inside the crankcase and has contaminated the bearings and oil passage.”
“What does that mean?” Magnolia asked.
He twisted to face her. “Means we’re hosed unless we can get the sails up.”
Or unless the divers find a boat in Cuba, she thought.
Michael crouched next to Erin. They had taken refuge on the deck of the ITC ship docked outside Red Sphere. Interference from the storm made it impossible to reach Command. Worse, they didn’t have a path home. It was one thing to dive through a pocket of electricity like that, but rising back up through it with a helium balloon was suicide, pure and simple.
“Drink,” he said, bringing a bottle to Erin’s lips.
She opened her thick lips and took a gulp, coughed, and reached up to wipe her mouth.
“I can do it on my own,” she said, taking the bottle from him. “I’m not paralyzed.”
No, but you’re still stubborn as ever, Michael thought.
Erin was in bad shape, there was no denying it, and Michael had a feeling she wasn’t being honest about just how bad. They didn’t have any way of knowing whether she had internal injuries from the lightning.
The suits were designed to help mitigate and distribute the three hundred kilovolts of energy from an oblique arc, but they couldn’t save a body from a direct strike. She was lucky to be alive. There was likely a lot of damage he couldn’t see, including burst blood vessels that could cause major problems later.
What he could see was the burn mark on her back. They had already rubbed cream on the wound and applied a cool patch to help dull the pain, but it was still bothering her.
“It itches,” Erin whispered.
Layla thrust her fist in the air. “Everyone quiet.”
The three divers sat in silence in the dark, listening to the clatter and groan of constantly shifting metal all around them as waves rocked and jostled the ship.
Michael checked the time again. Les should have been back. He stood up with his rifle and moved over to the hatch. Not wanting to break radio silence, he decided to take a look for himself.
“I’ll be right back,” he whispered.
Layla’s helmet dipped once, and Erin gave a thumbs-up.
Michael gritted his teeth as he walked into the hallway. Erin wasn’t the only one injured. Smacking into the ocean had hurt both his legs. His right was really bad—a sprain or maybe even a hairline fracture.
Keeping low, he moved down the passage.
Water dripped from the overhead, collecting in a puddle on the floor. He stepped around it, cautious not to make any extra noise. The NVGs provided an eerie, narrow green view of the passage ahead. He headed for the bow, where Les had last gone to scope things out.
Halfway down the hall, Michael froze at a noise that could be footfalls. He listened to the echo, trying to home in on their location.
Turning, he saw a hulking figure at the other end of the hall.
A flash hit him in the face shield.
“Just me, Commander,” Les said.
Michael raised a hand to block the light and clicked off his NVGs. If Les was using his helmet light, then he thought the coast was clear.