She found Chips waiting for her at the cargo hold bulkhead in the forward battery room on the bottom deck of the boat. Chips had a large wrench with her and as soon as Percy arrived she banged with it on the bulkhead. “Well Capt, it sounds fuckin’ hollow to me. Still air on the other side of the fuckin’ bulkhead at least.”
Percy cranked open the hatch, the rusted sealing wheel squeaking painfully in her ears. The lights were out in the cargo hold, so they were looking into blackness. But the air smelled damp and they could hear many drips echoing in the huge empty space.
Percy reached around and flipped on the lights. The white overheads glared. The steel grating of the floor led down a gentle slope and disappeared into an oily, black subterranean lake. A couple of empty wooden crates floated like lost Viking craft, accompanied by a film of black frothing grease that wafted by in patches like bergs among the Viking ships. Any sound Percy and Chips made echoed back and forth from hull to hull over the water.
“That’s the fuckin’ raw material of nightmares,” said Chips.
“We probably did more damage to her when we pressed her bow into the sea floor — like levering apart the bones of a carcass. We don’t have much time before this whole hold is flooded — in which case we’ll never get off the fucking bottom. What do you need, Chips?”
“Ah, just send fuckin’ Owen back down. This time it looks like I’ll be breathing through a fuckin’ hose while I’m stitching the fuckin’ gash back together.”
“Alright. I’ll get Gregory and Bastian looking for more portable bilge pumps. They can run hose down and see if we can’t get some of this water into the trim tanks and back out into the ocean where it belongs.”
“Fuckin’ right.”
Percy found Gregory and Bastian crawling into their bunks in crew quarters, having been released from control duty by Hemi. Their eyes were slitted and bleary and there was no grace in their attempt to climb into their racks.
“Come on, you can’t fucking sleep yet. Get some coffee and then go find some portable bilge pumps. We need to get this boat pumped out, or you’ll never wake up from your little naps.”
She left them groaning and headed to the galley, thinking coffee sounded like a good idea. There was a metal cup sitting upside down in the drying rack, a blue tin cup with the white flecks. The outside of it had been dipped in rubber for use on submarines. Even when well-washed, the cups always added a piquant taste of metal and oil to the coffee. The one in the dish rack was relatively clean, just retaining the usual semi-permanent brown ring stains.
The coffee in the pot had been on the warmer for hours. Maybe days. She poured it into her cup and added a couple scoops of sugar. The taste was foul, like what she always imagined “sweet crude” must taste like. Her taste buds rebelled, but the rest of her body knew better, and she felt an immediate wash of relief from the fatigue beginning to plague her.
Their situation was dire, but she was feeling better. If being flooded and bottomed had been the worst thing to happen today, she would have been upset. But somehow their relative safety right now compared to where they had been an hour before — when they were slowly sinking over a bottomless hole — made Percy feel surprisingly relaxed. Relaxed enough to enjoy a cup of burnt coffee, at least.
Percy found another relatively clean tin cup behind the rails of the dish cabinet and filled it with coffee. She brought it to Hemi at the navigation station.
Hemi took the cup and held it to his lips, blowing the acid smell off the surface. His glasses steamed up. “Does Chips have a handle on the leak?”
“Eh. It’s under deep fucking water in the hold now. She’s going to have to dive down there to weld it.”
“Unpleasant.”
“That’s one fucking word for it.”
“Even if we get it sealed,” said Hemi, “even if we can manage to pump out, even if we get to the surface, things do not look good. I looked at the chart, and we are approximately nowhere at the moment. And we have no fuel or battery remaining to speak of.”
“Still’d rather be nowhere on the surface than sunk on the bottom of somewhere — in this case that ‘somewhere’ being a fucking rarely-charted and never-visited undersea mountain.”
“We are in a situation where we need to overcome a whole series of challenges, each in order. I am just trying to get ahead of the problem.”
“OK, Hemi, you do the thinking ahead. You let me know if I’m not considering something that impacts our future survivability. Otherwise, I need to focus on surviving our situation right now. And that currently means getting some of this foul black water out of my boat. Right?”
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Hemi nodded.
“OK. Back to the cargo hold I go then.”
In the cargo hold, Bastian and Gregory were laying out the heavy cloth-covered hoses down the center of the space and hooking them up to portable electric bilge pumps the size of small refrigerators. Multiple black hoses and thick electrical cables snaked across the floor grating, making navigating the space treacherous.
Owen had his own electric pump — a smaller one that pumped air — down at the edge of the black lake, and he was feeding an air hose to Chips, who was wearing a diving mask connected to the hose. She was kicking to keep her head above water while holding up a welding stick with one hand. The welding stick was connected by its own lines to the welding rig propped next to the pump at the edge of the lake and powered by yet more heavy electrical cables running up the deck of the cargo hold. Chocks kept the wheels of the rig from rolling into the water.
Chips dove down, and there was a quiet moment before a hot blue light lit up the surface of the water from below, wavered for a moment, and then died away. This repeated a few times before Chips’ head broke back through the surface. She ripped off the diving mask. “Owen! I need another fuckin’ piece of steel plate, and — fuck it — another brace too.”
“Alright!” called the kid from the shore, where the water lapped at the toes of his boots. Owen was wearing the same greasy-slick rubber waders Chips had had on earlier. He selected some metal bits from a pile of scraps on the grating next to the welding rig and waded into the cloying bilge to hand them to Chips.
Every sound in the cargo hold traversed from one exposed steel inner side of the pressure hull to the other, so everything was heard three times. That was normal, and Percy was used to it. But the mass of water filling one end of the cargo hold changed the sound of the space. It ate at her instinctive sense that her boat was far from healthy. It sounded like a room dominated by an athletic swimming pool. It was a quality of sound that should never be heard on a submarine.
She sipped her coffee and watched Chips dive again with the steel plates in one hand. More blue light from under the water. Percy had the idea to track down a meter stick and prop it in the water, so they could all see when the water started to lower. But then she thought better of it, considering the strong possibility of the water quickly rising over the top of the stick.
Instead, she helped Gregory and Bastian get the bilge hoses connected to the trim tanks and set them cranking. The hoses inflated with the pressure of the water running up the gentle grade from the pumps. She could hear it sloshing into the empty trim tanks, and the sound of it echoed between the hull walls.
The next time Chips came to find a patch piece from the scrap pile, Percy took the diving mask from her and waded into the water to inspect the damage personally. The water was the freezing and never-varying temperature of deep ocean water. It had picked up an unpleasant array of smells: a mix of petrochemicals and solvents, refuse, and old grease — the stuff that always contaminated a ship’s bilge — but that odor was strengthened to a nausea-inducing level by the sheer volume of water.
Plunging her head through the opaque boundary of the water’s surface, Percy could see the damage was bad. As Chips had said earlier: it was not one big split in the metal, it was a long string of short side-by-side cracks running in a line up a massive convex dent where the hull had been rammed. The thick steel of the hull had been bent to an astonishing degree, deformed without massive failure in a way that only high-tensile steel could be. But even steel could only be pushed so far without splitting.
She put her hand out in front of her mask, holding it over the cracks, and she could feel the onrush of the icy water against her warm flesh. Much welding was still required. Chips’ patches were pieces of curved steel that she would weld into place over the cracks. Chips was no expert at underwater welding, the welds were globulous and imprecise. It was starting to look like a mess, but nobody else aboard could do better.
Back out of the water, she stood shivering and dripping oily droplets that clung together in fatty globs on the floor grating. Percy always thought of herself as pretty tough. But in many ways Chips, with her foul language and bad attitude, was a lot tougher. Chips had never even mentioned the temperature of the water.
With the extra bilge pumps running, Percy let Gregory and Bastian stumble up to their racks for another attempt at getting some sleep. And indeed, they slept through the next six hours or so of work while she, Owen, and Hemi did whatever they could to help Chips get the hull welded back together. Since only one person could weld at a time, Percy, Hemi, and Owen found themselves standing around smoking and drinking coffee more than actually working, so Percy eventually sent Hemi and Owen to their racks, too.
She needed to sleep more than anyone. But she knew she would not be able to. Maybe once they got to the surface, but that seemed far off now — both physically and temporally. She consumed cigarillo after cup of coffee after cigarillo. When Chips needed something, she was there, but mostly Chips had her own method and did not want help. When Chips disappeared below the surface the cargo hold became totally silent. Percy looked at her watch — time had fallen to its knees and crawled forward only with desperate and gasping heaves. It took her more than an hour to realize that the water level had receded a bit, leaving a greasy black line on the pressure hull to indicate its high-water mark.
Percy allowed herself some small amount of hope.
The receding water level was everything. The boat did not need power or the high-pressure air system or a running motor to reach the surface — all she needed was that water level to recede; physics would take care of everything else. The way it was currently set, the boat wanted to float. It was merely being pinned down by a massive black liquid weight.
She waited for Chips to raise her head above the surface again. “Chips! The water level is dropping!” Percy shouted with one hand cupped to her mouth, pointing at the black line of grit marked on the pressure hull.
“Ah fuckin’ sure. With the fuckin’ quilt of patches I’ve laid down it’s about fuckin’ time.”
“I have to go up to the control room — there’s really no way to know when we’ll get buoyant again, and someone has to be there if we do.”
“Aye!” Chips huffed. She waved a hand at Percy and disappeared back under the dark surface.