The Command

She took another step. Then stopped again. Grabbed the mask and wrenched at it with both hands, forcing her face down into it. Sucking desperately at the smoky dregs.

Then she turned around, and waded back to the ladder. The water came to her knees again. Then to her waist.

She heard a gurgle as she sucked, and knew the water had reached her breathing tubes. OBAs weren’t made to be submerged. She panted rapidly. Getting all the air she could. Before there wouldn’t be any more.

She groped in her coveralls, and her gloved fingers felt the rounded hardness of the SEED.

* * *

Under the deck it was blacker than a starless night in Louisiana. She still had the heavy waterproof battle lantern in her hand. She waved it back and forth as she pushed her way under the steel deck, caught a gray smooth gleam ahead.

Unweighted now by the heavy breathing apparatus, she kept floating upward, to bump the back of her skull into the steel above. There was only about four inches of air space between the surface and the cables and valves that hung down. She pushed away quickly, afraid of snagging her coveralls. She was floating above the lower-level walkway. She pulled herself toward the engine. She’d left the OBA hanging back on the handrail. She’d better not get turned around. No matter how dark it was, or how confusing. This was for real, and nobody could help her if she fucked up.

Her kicking steel-toes slammed into rounded metal domes. The coa-lescers, with only a narrow air space above them. A tide of fuel-covered water slid out of the darkness and covered her face. She clawed oil out of her eyes as they started to burn. She strained to lift her head but hit steel again. No room to go over the coalescers. If she got snagged she’d panic, she was barely hanging on as it was. The fuel was really starting to hurt even with her eyes squeezed shut. So she dog-paddled to the right, and twisted around the coalescers and her outstretched fingers brushed the rough steel webbing that held up the main engine.

She was under it now. Her face was crammed right up against its foundations. Her searching fingertips felt the fire-pump manifold where it rose out of the water. She felt the sea currenting up around her kicking legs. This was where it was coming in, right below her. She opened her eyes a second, moaning with the pain, and saw yellow at the level of her face. She scissored her lantern between her legs, grabbed the handwheel with both hands, and cranked around on it.

It didn’t move. She tried again, but couldn’t brace herself. All she was doing was twisting her own floating body instead of turning the wheel.

No, she thought. It’s not working. And she only had a couple of breaths left. Fuel was leaking around her clamped teeth, a sickening nauseating taste. She yanked angrily at the wheel but anger didn’t work either. It just wasn’t gonna turn, that was all.

Okay, but this wasn’t the only valve … and the yellow one wasn’t the most important one, either. The red one, on the sea chest, was the one that really absolutely had to be closed. That was where the sea was coming in from. The water she felt cold under her legs, reaching up under her coveralls. That valve was below her. Under the water. Under the deckplate. Open to the sea.

She was thinking about that when the air stopped. All at once. She’d figured on getting some kind of warning, but there wasn’t any. Just suddenly … no more. She sucked so hard pain knifed her chest, and got maybe a quarter lungful.

So that was that. She opened her teeth and let it slip out. Time to go back and try to find her OBA, before the Halon got to her. She just might make it.

But then the ship’d go down.

Her ship. That she was supposed to be down here saving. Her. Cobie Kasson.

So that instead of going back, knowing that doing this she might not make it back, she duck-dived under the water and started pulling herself down.

Into black black darkness. No, there was a glow… her lantern, where it’d fallen from between her knees when she was wrestling with the firemain valve. It lay on the deck plates. Yellow light parabolaed the finned cylinder of the fire pump. She pulled herself down to it and got her hand on the fire pump and pulled herself the rest of the way down.

She couldn’t see. Her eyes were going. But she knew where that deck plate was. Right at the base of the fire pump. Which she had her right hand tight on. She groped out with her left and felt over the diamond patterns in the metal till her fingers hooked in the lift hole. The plate came up slow-motion under water, and she pushed it away to clang somewhere off in the dark, and reached down till she felt the smooth cold rim of the handwheel.