The good captain, p.24
The Good Captain, page 24
Bill froze with fear. Her mouth hung open. She wanted to cry. She wanted to scream. Her eyelids refused to blink. She watched Rena climb into the captain’s chair and was shocked by her apparent calm. She seemed like a monster – more cold and deadly than Bill could ever have thought possible.
Rena watched the advancing aircraft and told Idu to hold her hand. ‘What’s happening? Why is Nina crying?’ asked Margit as Karen tried to reassure them all that everything was going to be fine; there was nothing to worry about. So long as they were together they would always be safe.
‘They’re firing!’ shouted Mel as a bright orange streak blazed underneath both jets.
The concrete in Bill’s veins melted as the two missiles shrieked towards them – faster than she could follow – then vanished inside a deafening explosion and blinding light that engulfed the world with a force that suspended time and sucked oxygen from the air as Mama was heaved out of the water like a toy boat plucked by a child’s hand, then slapped back down into the bath with a jolting, quaking thud. Bill’s neck whiplashed and her arms flew towards the overhead as the seatbelt tore into her abdomen. Waves of seawater and jellyfish slapped against the windows of the bridge, followed by a deluge of tentacles, slime and foam splattering down onto the main deck and the surrounding sea. Screams of terror and pain rose up from below as people slammed against bulkheads and unsecured personal items became sharp projectiles. Rena had been tossed forward and landed on top of the bridge control panel. Mel had been hurled in the opposite direction and lay unconscious on the deck as Mama rolled back and forth, back and forth, each time teetering towards the perilous angle that would see her capsize. Bill listened for the sound of the hull tearing itself apart; blaring alarms announcing the presence of fire; water inundating the engine room and lower decks. But none of it materialised. Inexplicably, with each passing moment Mama recovered more and more stability, and as the slobbering remains of seawater and jellyfish drained from the windows Bill confirmed that the vessel was still intact. Had the missiles drifted off course? Exploded prematurely? It seemed impossible that no flames were charring the deck and no jagged fissures were letting in the sea. She unfastened her seatbelt and hurried to the interglow, but no combination of taps or swipes would connect her with the rest of Mama. Rena slid from the control panel and crawled across the deck to nurse Mel’s head in her lap. Turso appeared at the top of the wheelhouse stairs – a cut above his left eye trickling blood down the side of his face.
‘Get me a damage report,’ shouted Bill. ‘And send anyone who can still walk down to the lower deck to look for breaches in the hull. And tell Fanc she’s needed on the bridge.’ The midshipman checked whether the two aircraft were preparing to make a second attack, but instead saw both of them struggling against the draw of the cyclone, making correction after correction and giving the impression that a modern jet engine was simply too fast and too powerful to lose such a contest. An assumption the pilot of the lead plane no doubt believed until his multimillion-dollar machine veered sideways and vanished behind the curtain of torrential rain. Seconds later a dull yellow flash shone like a distant sheet of lightning as the tension between high and low atmospheric pressure tore the military aircraft apart. Its companion seemed destined to suffer a similar fate – steadily losing ground and traction and control until it somehow found a lull in the deadly draft that enabled it to break free and make a rapid retreat south.
Christopher hurried to the top of the wheelhouse stairs, took in the situation and moved towards Mel who by that time was starting to revive – as surprised and relieved as everyone else to find that somehow, miraculously, she was still alive.
31.
‘Don’t get me wrong, I’m not ungrateful.’ Ken looked up from the catalyst differentiator that underscored the isolation edifice of Mama’s main engine. ‘But a little notice might have helped me to avoid some of this mess.’ His arms and neck and forehead and chin were smeared with Gusto and Impulsion – two plant-based lubricants – one green, one yellow – that cooled and facilitated the engine’s internal components. A headlamp had bunched his curly black hair into a bouffant on top of his head, and the clasp on his crooked nose protected against the irritating scent of decaying waste that lingered around the machine’s deciduous organs. At fifty-three, the chief engineer had a vaguely mournful expression that might have been described as fragile, verging on vulnerable, but only by people who had never witnessed his resilient optimism in the face of certain doom, or the hostility he reserved for any new recruit who brought aboard a sense of entitlement. ‘What the hell was in that box? I’ve never seen an engine so disenchanted.’ He gestured inside the dark cavity of the turbine casing. ‘The purification transistors are contorted beyond recognition. And every magnet filter is crawling with respiration blisters.’
Frustration – and the nose clasp – had endowed Ken’s voice with an untypical volume, and with both of Mama’s engines currently out of commission Rena was able to catch almost all of what he said. ‘Should I get the twins down here to explain what it did?’
‘I know what it did. I can see what it did. It reversed all operational values and concentrated their anticipation lines into an incoherent delirium. No wonder those missiles veered off at the last minute. Their static must have strangled itself. Mama’s certainly did.’
‘We should be thankful we’re still alive,’ reminded Pali – relieved that for once she was not required to repeat what Ken was saying. Along with the engines, her static eye had also been undone and now sat functionless in her face as she reached inside the opposite end of the catalyst differentiator and tried to keep hold of the redemption wardens that were wet and cold and squirmed between her fingers.
‘I didn’t say I wasn’t thankful. I’m extremely thankful. Who wouldn’t be? I just didn’t know the twins could build something like that.’
Rena was confused as to how Ken wanted her to proceed. ‘So that’s a yes?’
His attention had already returned to his work. ‘What?’
‘Sonja and Gaiek should come down to help?’
Ken saw Pali furtively shake her head. ‘No, leave them where they are. I expect they’re busy enough securing the workshop.’ At last he felt the transducer fragments he had been searching for. ‘And the less people down here the better. There’s too much work to do. We don’t need anyone getting in the way.’
The captain remained oblivious to the hint. ‘How long until Mama is ready?’
That the question had been expected made it no less frustrating, and Pali stepped in before Ken said something he would later regret. ‘At the moment, Skipper, it’s more a matter of if Mama is going to start again, not when.’
The idea of being adrift did not disturb Rena as much as the engineers might have expected. Even if motorised propulsion had been possible, the force of the storm would have permitted it to play only a minor role in the coming hours. Karen insisted – and Nina agreed – that steering was going to be a much more important factor to their survival. But as she stepped outside the engine room Rena argued that reaching the far side of this weather system in one piece was going to require more luck than anything else.
A glance along the lower deck passageway confirmed that Mama was already heeling six, maybe eight degrees just under the strength of the wind. The captain steadied herself with the ladder to the upper deck – admired the impressive angle – and after a few minutes confessed a budding love for every element of the storm – every gust and jerk and bump and swish and pummel and roar of every wave that brandished deliberate malice for anything that stood in its path. How could anyone not be amazed by what the ocean could do? For days, over hundreds of nautical miles, she had observed signs of the cyclone’s approach, and now at last they were being plunged into its furious clockwise motion – a turbulence that hammered and seethed and writhed and proclaimed itself invincible. Luckily Mama was small enough to follow the shifting shape of the water and respond quickly to the storm’s vacillating intentions. A larger vessel would have been slower and more rigid and therefore harder hit. Rena had seen it happen before – an endless cave or captain’s intent rising to an unstable height where the wind sheared off its crest and dropped hundreds of tonnes of water through the air to stove in hatches, crumple bows, tear off railings, shatter perspex, flood engine rooms and sometimes sweep away an entire bridge.
Prior to Mama going ancient Sook had reported that the tropical cyclone already occupied eight degrees of latitude, and as Rena climbed she suspected it might eventually grow to fill as much as ten or even eleven. Once upon a time the fiercer the cyclone the smaller the area it covered – an intense onslaught that was over in a matter of hours. No longer. No longer. Old measurements and meteorological truths had been left behind. There were now new variations that moved with greater velocity and took alternate pathways. ‘Eccentric’ might describe their behaviour, but ‘random’ was closer – ‘unknowable’ even better. The seas had become too warm; too easy to evaporate; too abundant with energy that could be converted into mechanical power – strong high-pressure winds that gyrated rapidly around a low-pressure centre to create a spiral arrangement of thunderstorms bright with lightning and heaving with slashing rain. In the past, a cyclone’s passage across the ocean would mix cold waters from below that kept its size in check. But now the warm water went so deep that in open seas – where no land could impede its progress – a cyclone had the potential to grow as wide as a large island and climb as high as fifty thousand feet.
In a storm of such size and strength there would be no way for Rena to recalibrate her mental maps. For days and nights they would roam without GPS, compass or the language of the sea that she had known her entire life. Unable to follow the stars, listen to the wind, read the complexities of the infinite sine waves that randomly combined within the ocean’s surface – feel the internal currents that travelled the interface between different densities of salinity and temperature – she would become truly lost – and hopefully learn something new about the wider world. She remembered that being lost made the ocean larger – more unknown – and that an absence of control brought with it a sense of freedom and adventure and the possibility of transformation – an event she had lately grown impatient for. Her years as Rena had been as many as Margit and almost as long as Karen, and a change now might mean becoming part of the sea. Was this her time to return to where her life had begun? Where all life on this planet had begun? No one could say for certain. All she knew was that the outside world was about to disappear, hopefully causing any satellites hooked into Mama to lose their grip and conclude that she and her crew had sunk to the bottom of the ocean.
At the top of the ladder stood Mel with a bandage around her head, waiting to descend. The ship’s routine was in full swing and she was double-checking all storm protocols were being observed and that none of the crew were in need of assistance. Behind her, Buddy nodded to the captain before he also took the ladder to the lower deck to help inspect the equipment room and the armoury and to test the vacuum seals on the ballast and freshwater tanks and to ensure all handles to the battery system had been left flush. The pair would then inform Gaiek and Sonja of the crew meeting in the lounge at eleven hundred hours, while at the same time looking for any evidence of the twins celebrating their latest success with a new batch of vivid.
‘I was just dictating you,’ called Fanc as the captain passed the door to the sick bay. The shrieks of wind and clamour of waves were louder on the upper deck, making it necessary to shout.
Rena looked inside and recognised Salka and Euan beneath the spirals of red mist – strapped to their treatment beds.
‘He is sedate,’ explained the surgeon. ‘The vomiting and disorientation was worse, and I fear it plays with his mind. Over and over he says it is his turn to name the cyclone. So I think sleep is better until the sea is done. For Salka as well. She cannot help. And falling against bulkheads or stairs would not heal her injuries.’
As Rena continued along the upper deck passageway a reckless trench – voluptuous and frenzied – muscled beneath the keel and veered her towards the mess where she saw Aino collecting condiment bottles from the boxes built into the end of each table, and Turso carrying jars of starter cultures and spices from the galley into the storeroom where thick, hand-knitted pouches hung from the overhead to cradle them against any sudden tip or lurch or item that managed to shake loose from the tightly packed shelves that stood underneath. The steward nodded at Rena to reassure her that all would soon be secure, but her attention was already on Papa making no attempt to stay at ninety degrees to the roll as he strode towards her with a hand on his cheek and glasses askew.
‘I’m sorry Captain, but you’ll have to find someone else to help with your prisoner. I know I’m only a guest on your ship, and I want to be of assistance any way I can, but I don’t deserve to be treated like this. I’ve done everything I can to make that man’s time aboard your ship more comfortable, but still he refuses to treat me with respect. I just need a break. Some time to clear my head. How can anybody be so unreasonable? Anyone would think I created the storm myself! All I was trying to do was make him safe, and he lashes out like an angry child.’
Papa refused to stop. There was a chair in the lounge with high cushioned arms that were perfect for wedging between, and he wanted to win the seat before the crew arrived for their meeting. Rena also did not pause, and subsequently heard only fragments of his passing rant. Something about a guest. Something about a break. It was hard to hear above the cry of the wind and the screams of the cargo as the first mate pulled him away from the railing of the wheelhouse stairs. ‘Wait. Please. If we’re going to sink I want to be near a door. I don’t want to be trapped in that cabin. Hey, you’re not listening to me. We’re all going to die. We’re all going to die.’ Christopher dragged him along the passageway towards the workshop stairs as Rena hurried up to the bridge. Without steering or engine power there was no need for a pilot to be on duty, and with Mama ancient Sook had moved below deck to prepare his cabin for the storm. Those not doing the same or helping to secure the rest of the ship tried to sleep before it became impossible. Rena, however, was determined not to miss a single moment and pressed her forehead against a window in unrestricted delight for the escalating commotion of the cyclone.
Prior to visiting the engine room she had witnessed the wind commence its great exchange with the ocean – an interaction between friction and water tension that set in motion thousands of tiny waves which quickly achieved their maximum height before toppling over and being absorbed by larger, slower, more stable mounds of water that paraded in every direction at varying speeds with no identifiable purpose and were so conventional and so familiar that she had moved below deck with the confidence that Mama was drifting easily. Upon her return to the bridge she realised, however, it had all been a ruse. During the intervening minutes the ocean into which they were being drawn had become something entirely different – a pageant of chaos that swelled and brawled and bucked and lunged and roiled with an opulent violence and inexhaustible enthusiasm to wield it. Onrushes yoked to faceless men had morphed into hip sways of vast proportions and begun to encircle Mama to flaunt their emerging power and ridicule her flimsy defences. The sea had become intoxicated with itself. An unrepentant force crudely acting in concert with a querulous deluge pounding the wheelhouse roof and a wind so strong – at least forty knots – that it tore the skin off waves and turned it into a lacerating spray that scoured away the final smears of jellyfish still stuck to the windows of the bridge. Never before had she or Karen or Nina or Margit or Idu seen diplomats and crossed swords move shoulder to shoulder, knit together into an unflinching wall of water, drive sideways, then detonate with such supreme abruptness. Rolling spume pranced from crest to crest. Endless caves broke and swallowed their own foam. Every wave was different. Every wave was unique. Rena began to acknowledge an unprecedented sea. Not confused. Not illogical. This was no pandemonium. This was something new. All six degrees of freedom were suddenly in play beneath her hands and feet, tethering her to every roll and pitch and heave and sway and surge and yaw that Mama made as they were pulled further into the water’s circular motion. An internal vibration then joined the mix and she looked over her shoulder to find Mel in the pilot chair operating the helm. Ken and Pali must have revived one of Mama’s engines – they could now try to navigate a path across the storm. The carpenter would soon learn, however, that the only true progress in such a tempestuous sea was surviving the next few minutes. All she needed to do was maintain a low speed and keep in synch with the water to reduce their impact with the waves and decrease the risk of Mama driving into the back of a reckless trench and being swallowed in a single gulp.
Unfortunately, a slow speed also deprived them of the mobility to avoid collisions with any large debris being cast through the wet and salty glass. The captain had already spotted abandoned life rafts and fish pens and pieces of light aircraft and derelict shipping containers and if Mama collided with something big enough to rip open her hull there would be nothing the pumps could do to keep her afloat. The sea was already trying to undermine their buoyancy with opaque hearts thrusting Mama into the air, or holding her down so long that the main deck momentarily disappeared beneath the water’s surface. Rena marvelled at it all. The enflamed bulges spilling water down their fronts like drooling giants; the clouds that bayed and clapped just a few metres above her head; the wind that atomised spray into a spindrift sharp enough to flay human flesh; the wilted swans that skidded Mama sideways as if the ocean’s surface had suddenly turned to ice. She would not fear what she could not control. If it was time to drown then what better place? This was the ocean at its greatest spectacle – at least the greatest she had ever seen. Deranged, opulent, limitless, remorseless and unchallenged. Refusing to be contained. Devoid of any flattery. Motionless, Rena stood on the bridge watching the rampaging spires of dark blue water, while the noise of the wind became an incessant riot in her ears that suspended time, warped consciousness and helped her to forget that Mama even existed. Occasionally a bang and flash would wake her from the enchantment, but they were too low and too bright to be mistaken for thunder and lightning. Rena knew that bad buoys had been drawn into the cyclone – she just felt no impulse to convey it to the crew. If another one attached itself to Mama’s hull there would be nothing they could do. It would be over in a matter of minutes and she would not have her exhilaration intruded upon by the fears of landsmen. Or by floating explosives. Or by the abrupt formation of elongated diplomats – engorged with surplus energy and brandishing wrathful intent. Giant waves that suddenly materialised right beside Mama were to be expected. Bulbous upward forces followed by counterweight depressions were now the tradition. Mama had entered a wayward dominion that neither contained nor affixed nor superimposed any sense of order. Unpredictability was the only uniformity – its principle characteristics: impermanence and arbitrary outbursts that could writhe and barge and ruin and spurt and totter and maul and heave and prowl and smash with ludicrous hyperbole and bloodless antagonism. Every wave was a masterpiece, and their extravagant gestures held Rena so transfixed that only when Mama’s floodlights were switched on did she notice the sky had rotated away from the sun. There was more than enough drama just beyond the edge of the deck to ignore a shortening visibility, and the pugnacity of every shake, dip and dash against Mama’s stoic frame had not diminished in accordance with a withering light. Similarly, the only change brought about by the appearance of the floodlights was to the character of her view – a fresh emphasis on the speed at which spray and rain moved through the air, and a sparkling detail added to the billowing plumes of water that crashed down onto the deck and drained away through the port and starboard scuppers. Yes, it confirmed how dishevelled the ocean’s surface had become, but she already knew how formidable its curtains of water could be; how impossibly high its rolling hills had grown. Just because the arcs of waves now shone brighter did not mean their intent was any less barbed; did not suggest the calibre of the storm was any less cataclysmic. An enhanced view of the waves strewing themselves across Mama’s bow was nothing more than an embellishment to the vibrations that Rena had felt, uninterrupted, for hours on end. The only true value to be gained from the floodlights was an occasional glimpse of Mama’s length – a simultaneous view of stern and bow that revealed the vessel had not passed the day unscathed. Some pieces of equipment had clearly been dislodged and washed away, while other fixtures had acquired new and baffling angles of expression. The floodlights also confirmed Rena’s suspicion that Mama was listing to her starboard. In water that refracted in so many different directions it was difficult to ascertain to what degree – five? maybe ten? – but that the vessel’s equilibrium was off there could be little doubt. Had equipment on the lower deck shifted position? Was the ballast in need of redistribution? If so, it would have to happen soon as they were entering the cyclone’s oldest, most established province. Where the wind blew fastest, in the smallest rotation, and no object was permitted to thwart its progress through the air. A testimony was written in the water – all dull movements had been shed or absorbed. To bob or lull or flounder in such a place was to lose a role in a voracious power of wind and waves that ascended in tandem to unleash a crescendo of atmospheric disturbance. Mama had been forewarned and there could now be no withdrawal from a realm where she might be torn apart or prevail to sail another day. Who could say for certain? Not Rena. Not Mel. Not the satellites. The captain felt the propellers spin in the white suds beneath the stern as the vessel was vaulted into the air and ushered in whatever direction chance had deemed appropriate. Not even the storm could decide upon a fate for Mama, so desire for certainty was a futile hope. Dreading death – an equally minor response. When Mama was struck with a high cross swell Rena did not tremble with horror or feel revulsion for what awaited her in the surrounding dark. Turn off the floodlights. What did she care? This was nothing more than a manifestation of what the cyclone had always promised to be, and she would savour every thunderous bellow – every gulping hole – every veil of spray blown across Mama’s path – then set to work imagining the details too small or distant to distinguish. The water particles being churned in giant elliptical orbits by waves passing through the cyclone and into the wider ocean – beyond the wind that had created them – to bring about a transformation into something longer, rounder and more symmetrical that ultimately disappeared below the ocean’s surface and travelled fifteen to twenty miles per hour for days or weeks until encountering the friction of a slowly rising seabed. A continental shelf that wedged them back up towards the surface and into sinusoidal trains that grew more uniform in length and height and period until the ocean’s depth equalled half the waves’ length and the water particles found it difficult to complete their oscillation. To create more room the waves stood steeper – then grew unstable – kinetic and potential energy became uneven – the top of a wave moved faster than the section below – preventing the water particles from completing a full orbit and forcing the structure to collapse onto itself and release all its energy in an avalanche of white water that battered the beach, dislodged sand and scattered the garbage that lined the coast. Plastic bottles, fishing nets and food containers all shuffled along the shore as each of the day’s eight thousand waves arrived and readjusted the surf zone. Rena knew it didn’t matter what shore they broke upon – a steep beach with coarse sand, a flat beach with fine sand, an isolated beach with plastic sand – the results would be the same – deep erosion that not even tetrapods or a seawall would survive. No matter what coastal engineering had been put in place the captain foresaw beach houses – previously thought safe – swept away. Traditional villages pulled into the water and drowned. Seaside towns cut in half. Cliff faces made structurally unsound. Boardwalks lost to memory. Even after such destruction a portion of the energy would return to the sea in small reflected waves, which Rena imagined travelling back to the cyclone and rejoining the fold as she reinstated her attention to the far side of the bridge windows where the water passing through the air and the arc of the floodlights looked like a display of moonlight-spawning coral. Behind it she saw vague silhouettes of slow-moving aquatic mountains, and ordered Mama’s floodlights switched off in the hope of sharpening her view. But nothing happened. The captain turned to check if Mel had heard her instructions over the howl of the wind, and saw that Bill was now steering Mama into the oncoming waves. Papa’s daughter looked terrified, and shut off the floodlights as soon as the request was repeated. It took a few minutes for Rena’s eyes to adjust, but eventually her view stretched deeper into the storm. It was better this way. Less light meant she felt more through her hands and feet – a deeper connection to the ocean and Mama’s passage across its turbulent surface. She wondered if at last she was developing an understanding of the tropical cyclone – its nature and intent – the language that it spoke. But after a few more minutes of staring into the menacing swell Rena conceded that she knew nothing of the sort, and this was a sea she still could not read.
