Ким Робинсон - Pacific Edge

The ship was struggling in a different way. Sluggishly. The bow slewed off to port. Shouts came from above. Long minutes passed. Sonam Singh staggered by on hands and knees. “We hit something!” he cried at Tom.

“I saw it!” Tom said. “Wreckage—lumber, maybe.”

He couldn’t tell if Singh had heard, he was shouting something about the sea anchor.

Then the room rolled onto its side. Tom found himself hanging by his seatbelt. Only his hipbones saved him from being cut in half. Muffled roar, underwater again. In the gloom people shouted. Singh was over on one wall. The ship shuddered violently, turned, righted itself. Some noise and light returned. Tom glanced through the window as he freed himself from the seat. Another white mountain smoking toward them, in the mind-numbing howl. Mainmast and second mast were both bent, held in a tangle of alloy and rope rigging. The deck around the foremast was twisted, perhaps buckled. The ship listed to port.

He got the seatbelt undone and hung from the chair back. Time passed. People behind him were shouting, but he couldn’t turn his head to see. Then Sonam Singh grabbed him. Captain Bahaguna was crawling down the ladder from the bridge, followed by Pravi and the helmsman.

They had a shouted conference: “—lifeboats!” Singh said into the captain’s ear. Then mouth collided with ear, hard, and they both cried out, held their heads.

“No lifeboat could survive in this!” Tom shouted loudly, suddenly afraid.

Singh shook his head. “They’re submarine, remember? We go under. Then wait.”

“The ship won’t sink,” Bahaguna said. He didn’t like the idea.

“No, but we don’t know what compartments might flood. The bows are breached, and the other masts might go. More dangerous here than in the boats. While the launch bay is still clear perhaps we should be getting out. We can come back when the storm has passed.”

Inundated again. The ship listed far to port. Slowly water washed away from the glass. White foam, a moving hill of water. Under again. There were red lights all over the panel. The glass cleared and was instantly covered with water again.

A few more swells, sluggish response of the ship. Getting worse. A few more.

Finally the captain nodded, looking grim. “Okay. Abandon ship.”

They all crawled to the passageway leading aft. Suddenly they were in the muffled dark again, crawling on the wall. Sonam Singh was cursing. “Damned lumber ships, they lose their deck loads—” He saw a group of tumbling bodies ahead, raised his voice to a bellow: “Slow down up there! Slow down! Everyone to launch bays!” But the bodies rushed on. The lifeboats were near the stern, Tom had remembered all about them. They would be fired out like ejection seats in an old jet fighter. He and Nadezhda had been given a tour—oh my God, he thought. Nadezhda!

Their cabin was just below and behind the second mast.

He turned down the steps to the tweendecks, ran forward on the meeting of wall and floor. He had been a sprinter most of his life, and now it all came back to him. A real scramble. He had done something to his left wrist, the hand wouldn’t move well and the wrist hurt with a stabbing pain that went up his arm. He came to the passageway that led to their cabin. Several inches of water slopped over deck or wall, whichever was down. Thrown down, and on that hand again. He yanked open their door. The cabin was empty. Good. Water sloshed at knee height. The ship was permanently on its port side, but he needed to get starboard and aft, where the launch bays were. Storm muffled, ship underwater, he could hear his breath surging in and out of him in big gasps. Nadezhda must already be back there. This intersection of passageways didn’t look familiar. Shit, he thought. Not a time to get lost! He held a railing, tried to recover his breath. Up steps, water sloshing, the compartment had been breached, or not sealed off from breached compartments further forward. Around a corner, down another passageway, up steps. Water followed him. Shocking to have water inside the ship. He cracked his forehead, a nice hard spot that, no harm done. Needed to get starboard, water at thigh level and his left hand didn’t work. He was tired, arms and legs like blocks of wood, they didn’t want to move. Okay, a long passageway fore and aft, hustle down it aft, almost there. Sonam Singh would be mad at him, but he had had to check.

The passageway turned and ended in a closed hatchway. Good enough, beyond that would be an unbreached compartment. But he had to get it open and get through. Warmish salt water foamed up around his waist as he worked the dogs of the hatch one-handed, left arm thrust under a railing to hold him. So many locks on these bulkhead doors! He was in danger of getting knocked over, drowned while inside the ship. Had to go under foam to get to the bottom dogs, and they were stiff as hell. Okay, last one. Flash of triumph as he put his weight on the handle and pushed out. The door was snatched from his good hand and the water behind him shoved him over the coping and right out the door—onto the open deck of the ship. Wrong hatch! He dug with his feet, trying to get a purchase and get back inside. Then water surged up around him and he was off and away, swept away helplessly. His leg hit something and he grasped for it. Caught it, had his grip torn away. Then he was tumbling underwater, thrashed in a soup as if body surfing. Instinctively he clawed upward, broke the surface with lungs bursting, took in a big gasp of air and foam, choked and was rolled under again.

Free of the ship, he thought. Probably so. Fear took all the air out of his lungs. Desperately he swam, up and up and up. He got to the surface and trod the boiling surface furiously. Yes, free of the ship. Couldn’t see it anywhere. Overboard in a hurricane, “No!” he cried out, the word wrenched from him. Then under again and reeling, lungs burning as he held on. Drowned for sure, just a matter of time. He clawed madly to the surface, too frightened to let go. Another breath, another. He looked around for the ship, saw nothing. Too tired to move, and at the bottom of a trough with a wave forty feet high over his head. Hell.

Under again and somersaulting. Punched in the stomach. No way to tell up from down. This had happened to him body surfing as a kid, he had almost drowned three or four times. Swim to shore. He forced his eyes open. Green white black. He had to breathe, he couldn’t breathe, he had to breathe and it was water he breathed; feeling it he choked in panic and thrashed upward and held his breath again, and then breathed in and out and in and out and in and out; and all of it water. Helpless to stop himself. He felt the water heavy inside him, lungs and stomach both, and marveled that he was still conscious, still thinking. You really do get a last moment, he thought. What do you know.

And indeed he felt an enormous liquid clarity growing in him, like a flash of something or other. It was quiet and blue black white, a riot of bubbles flying in every direction around him, glowing. Blue capture plate, white quarks. Done for. Relax. Concentrate. He cast his mind deliberately back to his wife, her face, his baby held easily in his hands, and then the images tumbled, a forested cliff over ocean, a window filled with blue sky and clouds, swirling like bubbles of nothing in the rich blue field of the life he had lived, every day of it his and Pamela’s, and the crying out of his cells for oxygen felt like the pain of all that love given and lost, nothing of it saved, nothing but the implosion of drowning, the euphoria of release—and all the blue world and its blue beauty tumbled around him, flashed white and he snapped alert, wanting to speak, pregnant with a thought that would never be born.