As Percy passed through the crew quarters she shook the kid Owen awake again. “I have to go to the control room. Go down and watch Chips and make sure she doesn’t fucking die.”
Owen did not say anything but resignedly rolled out of his rack to his feet, rubbed his eyes, and stumbled toward the cargo hold.
Percy climbed to the control room and sat at one of the maneuvering stations with the familiar array of dials spread out in front of her. The readings had not changed at all since she last left them, for the obvious reason that the sub had not moved. She took in the reading from each gauge separately, adding it to her holistic picture of the situation her boat was in. But she was not learning anything new.
It suddenly occurred to her that the gauges were the wrong place to look for more input about the status of the boat. She would know the boat was rising before any of the gauges showed it. The water was being drained out so slowly that it was not like the boat would just pop off the bottom. First she would feel the leveling of the slight incline it had taken on as it had settled into the bottom. The boat righting itself would be the first indication it was rising, and she would not need gauges to know that was happening.
She returned to her feet, fished her control-room cigarillo pack from its nook in the wall, and lit up. With nothing important to look at, she started pacing back and forth. How long now? She looked at her watch, but realized immediately that that particular gauge was no longer important either.
She glanced over at the control gauges despite herself. This time, just as she did, she saw the angle-of-the-boat gauge waver slightly back and forth in its little glass tube. Ah! She was wrong. The gauges might know first! Seconds later she did feel it. The deck under her feet changed inclination slightly. She reached up and grabbed a strap, and then the whole boat slowly rolled a couple of degrees towards level, shaking off its lethargic repose. But rising from a dead weight on the bottom of the sea was all she did. The boat hung there, relatively evenly trimmed, but the bulk of its weight remained supported by the bottom.
“The trim tanks!” Percy remembered they had been pumping bilge water into them, but that water was still physically inside the Prospect. She looked at the ballast control panel. The gauge for the high-pressure air showed the system was severely depleted after their ballast blows. But there was still some residual pressure in the system, and the trim tanks were quite small compared to the big ballast and fuel tanks. She reached to the valve on the ballast panel that would blow bilge water out of the trim tanks and opened it.
There was the usual loud hiss, Percy counted a beat, and then the stern of the boat jumped off the bottom, followed quickly by the bow. The depth-under-keel gauge snapped up to two meters. She could hear suddenly-wakened crew members cursing loudly up at her from the crew quarters. She grabbed the boat PA mic. “Good morning, motherfuckers! We have positive fucking buoyancy.”
The sensation of moving up instead of down felt oddly terrific — a relief in the change of environmental accelerations that only someone who has acutely attuned themselves to three-dimensional space would recognize.
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As soon as Percy had blown out the trim tanks, there was no stopping the Prospect. It was a slow rise, weighted down by the tons of extra weight in water still sloshing around in the cargo hold — nothing like the violent rise that an emergency blow would elicit had the boat been functioning normally — but they were steadily moving upward.
Hemi popped up in the control room and stood watching the gauges, smiling a quiet smile of intellectual and mechanical satisfaction.
“Hemi, don’t just stand there like a giant fucking cow,” Percy said to him. “Sit at the controls and make sure nothing stupid happens.”
Hemi lowered himself into the planes control chair, already turning the dive plane wheel to achieve a more controlled angle of rise.
Percy balanced the trim tanks to keep them as level as possible. “Keep the bow slightly down, Hemi, otherwise all that water still in the cargo hold is going to wash right back to the engine room.”
A banging and cursing came up to them from the crew quarters, and a second later Chips climbed into the control room, leaving a small puddle of black water at the base of the ladder and a thin trail of the foul stuff behind her as she stepped up to Percy. She was holding a length of steel bracing pipe in her hand.
“Ya gaping and pustulated fucking asshole! Ya almost killed me! What fucking stupid idea came to your impenetrable head to blow the trim tanks with no warning? I was fuckin’ washed half-way down the fucking boat!”
“Back off Chips. I gotta deal with surfacing my boat. We can talk about proper emergency procedures later,” Percy replied, trying to keep her voice calm.
“Ya fuck yourself and your fucking proper procedures. I’m talking about my fucking life, you fucking swollen and carbuncled head of a syphilitic cock.” Chips raised the pipe and pointed it at Percy.
Percy did not even look at Chips, instead keeping her eyes on the depth gauge, which showed the boat steadily coming shallower. “Put that pipe down, Chips.”
Chips snapped. She rushed at Percy, swinging the piece of pipe in a long arc across the control room, just missing Hemi’s head but connecting with Percy’s stomach. Percy doubled over immediately and fell to the cold metal of the deck.
Hemi was out of his seat a second later and had Chips’ forearms taut in his huge fists, like bracing on the cables of a massive suspension bridge.
Percy was not down long. She got up to one knee before she fired Chips. “You’re off the boat,” she said quietly, between gasping breaths. “We get to a port, you take your gear with you when you get off, and never again befoul my boat with your black fungal attitude.”
“Ya? Fuck you, you vegetatively stupid sow. I’ll fucking be asleep in my rack while your fucking rusting shithole of a boat sinks around you. I don’t fucking care anymore. I’d rather die than save your bulbous fucking ass one more time.”
Hemi was steering Chips toward the hatch down out of the control room. He had to let her arms go for her to get down the ladder, though he kept the piece of pipe she had been holding. Hemi and Percy could hear her smashing and cursing her way forward to the crew quarters.
“We all need rest, Sylvia,” said Hemi.
“I need it more than anyone, but you don’t see me swinging pipes at people.”
Hemi nodded quietly. But he knew Chips was right on two counts: blowing the trim tanks without warning was incredibly dangerous. And they would never get to a port without Chips’s continuous help to patch the leaking hull.