Hemi found Percy sitting at the sonar station with the headset on, listening. When she saw Hemi, she pulled one earpiece off. “That go OK?”
“Yes. Shakes says he is going to do the welding on the Gnat, and Chips wants to keep working on the Prospect’s patch.”
“I’m glad she came to her fucking senses.”
“Her senses had little to do with it.”
Percy ignored that. “What’s next?”
“I wanted to look at the chart and run my numbers again.”
“Alright. We should put someone on radar; I don’t want any Authority craft sneaking up on us.”
“Put Gregory or Bastian on it.”
“Yeah. Alright, I’ll get Bastian in here. Better than fucking nobody.”
“Send Gregory out to help Owen and Shakes. Welding the mating collar onto the Gnat is going to be something of a tricky operation.”
“Right.” Percy climbed to the control room to rouse her crew on the PA.
On the forward deck of the Prospect, Owen had opened the watertight doors of the big cargo hatch. This left a wide hole down into the cavernous space of the cargo hold, which was the only way to get the heavy welding rig out of the boat. He had assembled a small tripod gantry over the hole, from which he had hung a hefty chain hoist. Gregory was down in the cargo hold, securing the end of the chain to the welding rig. When he had it ready, he gave Owen the thumbs up.
“Hey Gregory,” Owen called down to him, “while I’m hauling the welding rig up, take a look around: we still need the material for the mating collar. And get the gangway into position — I’ll need it to wheel this fucking thing across to the Gnat. Also get the long power cables for the welding rig, some heavy clamps, and a welding mask.” Owen looked across at the deck of the Gnat, where the chop washed over while Chips and Shakes drew lines on the top of the sail with a grease pencil. “Uh…better get those fucking rubber waders too.” He lit a cigarette and started hauling the welding rig up, hand-over-hand. “This isn’t going to be easy,” he said to himself through the cigarette hanging from his lips. Each long pull on the chain only eased the welding rig below upward by a matter of centimeters, as the lifting capabilities of the chain were both augmented and slowed by the wheels it looped through.
When he finally got the welding rig suspended over the deck, he gave it a little kick, and when it swung back, he let the chain out and grabbed the rig as it touched the deck and tilted back toward the hole. This was actually a two-person job: a mistake would mean a ten-meter drop into the cargo hold, and probably being maimed or killed.
Owen wheeled the welding rig away from the cargo hatch and aligned its wheels with the deck of the Prospect so it would not tilt off into the ocean. By the time he got back over the open hole to the cargo hold, Gregory had returned underneath with the gangway. Lashed to the railings of the gangway were the various other things Owen had asked for. Owen dropped the end of the chain down to him, and Gregory clipped it to one end of the gangway. “Hold on, I’ll come up and help you haul it.” He disappeared toward the stern of the boat.
With Gregory helping to pull the chain through, they hauled the gangway vertically up to the mouth of the cargo hatch and out onto the deck, and got it lashed into place connecting the higher deck of the Prospect to the low, wet deck of the Gnat.
Chips waved Owen over. “Thanks for doing that fuckin’ gangway. It’ll be a lot easier getting back to the Prospect.” She grinned her rarely-seen, wide-mouthed, slightly gapped-tooth grin at Owen. “Alright, look here, this is the plan Shakes and I got worked out, and ya should be glad Shakes is doing it. It’s going to be a fuckin’ nightmare if it works, and like a fuckin’ wet, squirtin’, languish in the head if it don’t.” She pointed to the top of the sail. “We fuckin’ lucked out, though. Shakes here built the sail fat enough across the beam that we can make the welds fuckin’ flat. Ya just need a piece of steel cylinder of the right diameter. Cut it even, then weld it around the hatch opening. And then weld those spare male docking clamps we got onto the sides of the cylinder.”
“How am I going to get a cylinder the right diameter?”
“Worst case, you have to weld it together out of overlapping curved pieces. But I think I might have a hunk of steel tube in the scrap pile left over from repairs to the mating collar on the Prospect a while back. In that case we might — if you’re a fuckin’ lucky son-of-uh-ho-ar — have something exactly the right fucking diameter already.”
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Owen nodded. “And how’re the docking clamps going to be activated? They’re electro-magnetic, right?”
“Yeah,” said Shakes. “We’ll need to drill some through-hull fittings. That sucks, but it shouldn’t be too hard to make them watertight to thirty meters, which is what I usually call the depth limit of the Gnat. And if they do happen to leak…well, they’ll be pretty small leaks. A boat that don’t leak isn’t a boat, it’s like, a fuckin’ airplane, or something.”
“Since we’re going to be dragging the Gnat along by the mating collar,” Owen said, “seems like we should also weld some supports on the outside of the collar, down the sail, and directly to the structural elements of the hull. It’ll be ugly as fuck, but less likely to leave the Gnat ripped away from the collar.”
“Ugly-as-fuck is my other name,” said Shakes.
“Listen to the kid, Capt’ Shakes. He’s gettin’ a fuckin’ touch for this stuff,” said Chips.
“Hey, offer all the advice you want, but I’m the one who puts the fuckin’ torch to my boat, got it?”
“Good by me. I’ll leave ya stupid fuckers too it. I got my own welding to do.” Chips gave them a casual salute and made her way along the gangway to the Prospect.
“I’ll get Gregory digging through that scrap steel, see if he can find that tube she was talkin’ about,” Owen said.
This was going to be an extremely tough job. Not as tough, Owen reminded himself, as welding the pressure hull back together under water, like Chips was currently doing, but nobody would do this job on the Gnat if they did not have to. Owen had wheeled the welding rig across the gangway, and that had only been modestly harrowing. Connecting it to the Gnat’s questionable electrical system and lashing it to the sloshing hull had been somewhat more so. Owen set Shakes up with everything he needed, handing him tools one by one like a nurse supporting a surgeon opening a consumptive rib cage.
The ocean chop was not horrendous, but it was enough that the Gnat rolled back and forth under them. Owen had locked huge iron clamps in place that held the work material to the sail. The water washing over the deck sometimes smacked against the sail and shot up right where Shakes was welding.
Shakes stood astride his boat, lolling in the surface of the sea just as someone might stand on a mountaintop. He took a pinch of dried leaves from the pouch in his jacket pocket and stuck them between his teeth. He lit a cigarette and put it to his lips. He leveled the mask on his head and slipped the heavy welding gloves onto his hands. He picked up the torch and, standing straight up, opened his arms wide and closed his eyes. He took long slow breaths through lips gapped beside his cigarette, his breathing rattling a little with the spittle coming up to digest the leaves in his cheek. He cleared his mind and focused on his breathing. He felt the swell and rhythm of the ocean, the time marked out by the clink of the adjustable wrenches hanging from his belt. He called the gods of steady hands and perfect welds to him.
He opened his eyes, spat the remaining half of the cigarette off into the ocean, leaned over, and flipped down the welding mask.
And with a flash of blue arc, he proceeded to lay down the foulest, globbing booger-weld Owen had ever seen. Smoking masses of material built up on top of smoking masses, curled over and gooped around in carbon-coated black curves. Shakes gripped the welding stick fiercely, the muscles of his forearms tensed. The tip wavered back and forth across the line the weld was supposed to follow so that it looked like he might be trying to sign the work rather than repair it.
Shakes welded, went back over his work, and welded more. It grew uglier and uglier, globs upon globs of congealed molten metal. The wash of the sea continually soaked the two men in cold water. Every few minutes Shakes had to stop welding so Owen could move the clamps. Since the seam needed to be watertight, Owen wanted to keep it press-fit in place with the clamps at all times. He knew that that starting and stopping like that was bad for a welder who wanted to make a clean, strong weld. But since Shakes’s welds were about the worst he’d ever seen, that seemed like the least of his problems. The hot welds steamed when the water ran over them, which Owen was pretty sure would not contribute to the strength of the welding.
“You…built this boat?” Owen asked Shakes when he raised his head up for a break.
“Aye fuckin’ ya. On a mountain top.”
“And…it doesn’t leak…too much?”
“Ah well, ye know there’s always gonna be ‘nother leak. I just patch em and keep fuckin’ movin’.”
“Lot of patches?”
“Sometimes it seems like it’s more patch than original boat. But then, since it was built from scraps, it has always been a fuckin’ quilty kinda thing.”
By the time they finished welding the support struts down the side of the hull, the new mating collar looked like a bipedal birthday cake, frosted by a toddler using a cancerous mixture of coke and pitch.
“You think that’ll hold?” Owen asked, looking at the mess doubtfully.
“Aw, hells ya. Look at how much material we welded into that thing! See, an engineer can build a thing to an exact fuckin’ spec and — if they’re a real right good fuckin’ engineer — that thing will perform the way they expect it to, in all the situations they expect it to. The thing is, that don’t mean it will perform in situations the engineer don’t expect. That’s why I always overbuild things, far beyond any spec — so I’ll be ready for what I don’t expect.”
Owen orienteered his way up and down following the thread of that logic, and eventually decided it made absolute sense. “Well, nothing like holding a welding project underwater and dragging it along at a few knots to test the quality of your work.”
“Aye, that’s what we’ll be fuckin’ doing fer sure, when once we got the Gnat set up dragging under your boat over there. Why don’t you go tell that big Hemi guy we’re ready here.”