The Command

The lights flickered off. Everyone looked up. Then they came on again. At least for the moment. But the ship was protesting. Unsettling cracks and bangs reverberated around them, conducted through her bones. She was settling deeper into the water. Giving up, no, being overwhelmed, smothered, dragged down, inch by inch and gallon by gallon.

Slowly winding the sea around her like a deep blue shroud.

* * *

Cobie was back in the passageway, bent over and coughing helplessly. They had to seal off the engine room while the Halon snuffed the flames. At high temperatures bromotrifluoromethane turned into poison gas. If anyone went in after this, they couldn’t crack their mask at all. Even if they needed a restart. She felt in her coveralls to make sure she had her little SEED, the pint-sized cylinder of canned air meant for emergency escape. She rubbed her neck, where the mask hadn’t protected. Her hand came away black with soot and grime and fuel. Meanwhile Helm and Chief Bendt were arguing over why the fire-main wasn’t holding pressure. She hadn’t been thinking about it, but suddenly she knew.

“You saw it go?” Bendt asked her. “Sure?”

“The flexible coupling, the one that goes from the fire pump to the manifold? It sprayed me when I was trying to get past. It’s fucked, all right.”

“That might be where all this fucking water’s coming from, too,” Bendt said.

Helm mused, “If the flex coupling’s busted, you’ll have flooding from two directions at once. Up from the sea chest, down from the firemain system.”

“Sure, we’re pumping it in at the top, it’s running out at the bottom. That’s why it’s not holding pressure,” Bendt said. He took the sound-powered phones from one of the talkers, spoke to Central. Then gave it back, looking grim. “The remote valve doesn’t work on the sea chest. None of the remote valves are working. The hydraulics are fucked.”

Helm looked around, past her, pointed to Sanders. “Richochet. Remember where the fire pump discharge valve is? Yellow wheel? Lower level? Under the main engine enclosure?”

“Uh — sort of.”

“Sort of. And the suction valve?”

He shook his head. Helm looked frustrated. Finally he looked to her. “Okay. Cober. You remember where the fire pump discharge valve is?”

She nodded. “And the sea suction valve’s the red one, with the wheel. Under the deck plates, by the fire pump.”

He studied her. “We got to close both those valves. First the yellow one. Then the red one. You up for going back in?”

“But it’s flooded down there.”

“I know. But we’re all gonna be playing tag with the sharks if we don’t get those valves closed.”

She was scared. She didn’t want to go back in there. But Mick was right. They had to do it. She put her head down and shrugged.

* * *

Hotchkiss called down that Radio had rigged a whip antenna and raised a merchant out of Cyprus. She was asking him to relay the information about their sinking condition to any warship that answered up. Dan said that was fine, would he alter course to stand by them? Hotchkiss told him the master said he had to request permission from his owners to alter course more than ten miles. Dan thought this was bullshit, but couldn’t think of anything he could do about it. He told her to keep trying to pass traffic to Moosbrugger and Kocatepe. “How’s the flooding?”

“It’s not going too great down here, Claudia. We’d better start a life raft inventory.”

“I sent Yerega out to check, but I don’t want anybody exposed outside the skin of the ship long. He says most of the rafts got blown over the side. Some of the containers are cracked but they might still inflate.”

“Faith? Fear?”

“Gone. Wait one.” She went off the line, then came back. “Bad news from the radiological team. There’s heavy alpha contamination all the way up the starboard side. Very heavy — some patches count at three hundred rads an hour.”

“Three hundred?”

“Uh-huh. So it was a nuclear burst, all right — and a really, really filthy one. We’ll stay at Circle William and try to get the washdown system going. Are we going to have firemain pressure anytime soon?”

“That’s kind of up in the air right now.”

“Okay, but we got to get this stuff washed off. The longer it stays, the higher dose we’re accumulating. I’m stripping everybody who was topside and sending them through decon. I’ve got to rotate my radiological team, they’re over safe stay time already. Everybody else needs to go to deep shelter stations, right now.”

Dan held the phone, overcome by a sense of disorientation. The U.S. Navy had drilled and trained for nuclear war for nearly fifty years. Now, just as the enemy they’d feared most had gone away, he was facing it for real.