7. GARBAGE GYRE
With darkness, Hemi was able to take a sighting from a star, and he calculated they had made about twenty nautical miles from the point where they had last heard the faintest echo of the depth charges. Percy felt that was enough of a cushion that they could start the diesels, and the engines were soon roaring below decks. Percy had them throttle up to fifteen knots, and Hemi calculated a precise easterly course that would bring them to the rendezvous point with Shakes. Percy kept a lookout in the ring throughout the night and gambled on not using the radar, feeling that it was too likely to give them away.
They ran through the night on too much coffee and not enough sleep. But they saw no other vessels, and there was no sign of the Grackle.
Even as the sun rose before them, Percy kept the boat on the surface, hoping to make the rendezvous with Shakes more or less on time. The sun was well above the horizon and they had clear visibility for something like ten miles from the lookout ring before Percy finally called for the submarine to submerge. There were only a few more miles more to the rendezvous point with Shakes, and Percy had high confidence that Hemi would navigate them with his usual high precision to the correct spot.
A few hours later, Hemi announced they had arrived at the rendezvous point. They leveled the boat at twenty meters of depth and shut down the motors to wait. Everyone except Cassandra passed the midday and afternoon hours in lazy recuperation, catching up on sleep. Cassandra was stuck listening to sonar, trying to detect Shakes’s approach. In the late afternoon she caught the far-off sound of a loud diesel engine, and by the time ten minutes had passed she was sure it was the Gnat, approaching the rendezvous at a high speed on the surface.
At a few miles off, the sound of the diesel disappeared. Cassandra assumed Shakes was diving before approaching the rendezvous point. Percy called Hemi up to the control room. An hour later Shakes’s voice came in over the ship-to-ship. Hemi arranged with Shakes to mate the Gnat to the underside of the Prospect. It took another hour to execute the delicate maneuver.
Hemi sent Bastian down to the lowest deck of the Prospect to open the hatch to the Gnat. Even as he climbed up through the hatch, helped by Bastian’s strong grip, Shakes was already thinking about food.
“Bastian! Good to fuckin’ see you again. It’s about dinner time on this fuckin’ vessel, ain’t it?”
“Sure it fucking is, Captain Shakes,” said Bastian, through a cigarette in his mouth. “I think I smelled Gregory working on some fucking sticky glop or other in the galley when I was making my way down here. You’re hungry?”
“Submarining is fucking hungry work, Bastian. Let’s go see what that feller is burning.”
They made their way up the decks with the wrenches hanging from Shakes’s belt clanking loudly each time they ascended one of the ladders or steep stairways. In the galley, Hemi and Percy were sitting at the table and Gregory had a big curved steel pan from which smoke was rising. They all sat, and Gregory delivered a heavy meal of boiled oats and cabbage with small bits of slightly-charred canned ham sprinkled throughout. The oats had enough texture still left to them that the little grains popped between their teeth. Hemi brought a bowl in to Cassandra, who was still on sonar duty.
After Shakes ate his third bowl, Gregory poured everyone a cup of the requisite coffee. Percy leaned back into the corner of the galley bench, stretching her arms.
“I see you made it out of that fuckin’ Stilt City,” said Shakes. “When that sub turned off the channel to follow the Prospect into that narrow waterway, I thought maybe our partnership was fuckin’ done for.”
“Yet you still managed to make the fuckin’ rendezvous point,” said Percy.
“Well, the last job working for you was so fuckin’ profitable, I wasn’t going to let that go just because I thought y’all were fucking dead.”
Percy chuckled.
“So what’s the fuckin’ plan now? Is there a next job?” asked Shakes.
“For the moment, the plan is to put as much distance between ourselves and the last place we saw that fucking Grackle as possible. If there’s even a chance they are still swimming, we’ll have to lose those fuckers for good before resuming business as usual. I can cut you loose if you like, Shakes — it’s mostly our fuckin’ headache, not yours.”
Shakes stirred a number of spoonfuls of sugar into his coffee. “And what if I’m willing to make it my headache too?”
“Regardless of what fouled spring from which our continuous fuckin’ bad luck flows, I’d be happy to have you along if you’re fuckin’ willing. Having the Gnat around could prove useful again.”
“So you’ll keep me on fuckin’ retainer?”
“Sure, if you like.”
“Alright,” said Shakes. “With the condition that you make Gregory continue to feed me, I’ll stick with y’all for now.”
“You know I do take care of a few other things on this boat besides the fuckin’ food,” said Gregory.
Percy ignored Gregory. “Once we’ve covered some significant expanse of ocean without crossing paths with the Grackle again, we’ll put into a port somewhere and start looking for work. And hopefully we’ll be able to include the Gnat in whatever new endeavor we take up.”
When the clock indicated that it was fully dark above the waves, Percy had them drive the Prospect up to the surface. Hemi and Shakes got the Gnat disconnected and surfaced. Soon both boats were running parallel to each other across a black sea of modest swells. The sky was loaded with heavy clouds which brought with them a steady breeze that drove the waves against the boats. The clouds made the night dark. So much so that while it was easy to hear the Gnat’s diesel engine from the bridge of the Prospect, it could not be seen out there in the blackness, except for the occasional spark of fire that escaped from its exhaust pipe.
They kept a steady eastern course, moving deep into the central ocean. With both boats running their diesel engines, they could sustain high speeds. Maintaining a steady fifteen-knot average, they covered the vast distances of the open ocean relatively quickly.
Percy rode up on the bridge. Given the extreme darkness, she decided to forego putting a lookout in the ring. She had never felt like she had all the crew she needed to run the boat effectively, but having lost Owen and Chips, she was feeling more pinched than ever by too few hands.
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With no visibility on deck, and the sonar nearly useless over the volume of sound the diesel engines dumped into the water, the only real vision Percy had was on radar. So every twenty minutes, she had Cassandra turn on the radar for a few sweeps to make sure the ocean remained clear in front of them — and that nobody was tailing behind.
For the first few hours of the night, they settled into the monotonous drudgery of cruising. Gregory was in his rack, Cassandra listened to heavy noise in the sonar headset, Percy stared into the darkness from the bridge, and Hemi and Bastian stared at the wall of unmoving dials in the control room.
Toward midnight, Hemi climbed tiredly down to the sonar station and tapped Cassandra on the shoulder. She did not even look up, having been expecting Hemi’s signal that it was time to do another radar check. She leaned over and flipped the switch. The green light of the radar flashed across the scope, then swept slowly around, showing nothing behind or to the sides, except for the lone blip of the Gnat to starboard.
But as the radar passed to the front of the Prospect it laid down a sprinkling of green glowing dots, like fireflies above an evening field, that slowly faded away until the sweep came around a second time and lit them all up again. A few of the dots were only a mile or two ahead of the Prospect. Further away they increased in density to a number that could not be quickly counted.
“Hemi, what’s that? It looks like a fleet!” said Cassandra, her eyes going wide and reflecting the green glow of the radar display.
“Hmm. That is not alright. Bastian!” Hemi called to the control room. “Throttle back to five knots…and shut down the diesels!”
The sound of the diesels faded. Percy arrived in the sonar compartment soon after, having been directed there from above by Bastian. “What the fuck is going on, Hemi?”
He pointed to the scope as he adjusted the second sonar headset over his ears. “We are going to give that strange pile of radar contacts a listen.”
Percy flipped off the radar. “Let’s not give away our position more than we already fuckin’ have. What do you think, should we dive?”
“I don’t hear anything, Captain Percy,” Cassandra interrupted. “At least, not above Shakes’s engine.”
“For fuck’s sake. Ping him,” Percy ordered. “We need Shakes to shut down, and he might respond to a ping.”
Hemi reached over Cassandra and pressed the ping button on the active sonar. A second later the unit lit up.
“The active unit is showing dozens of contacts underwater as well as on the surface.” Cassandra kept one hand against the sonar earpiece. “Shakes did shut down — but I still don’t hear anything. It’s completely silent now.”
“It is extremely unlikely that there is a fleet of dozens of ships and subs just floating without engines running,” said Hemi. “Something else is going on here…”
In the sonar compartment they could hear Shakes’s voice crackling questions over the ship-to-ship in the control room and Bastian responding to him.
“I suggest we make use of our friend Shakes as a resource,” Hemi said.
“Send the reckless risk-taker to check out the frightening unknown objects? That’s my kind of fuckin’ plan, Hemi.” Percy climbed up to the control room and took over the conversation with Shakes. She explained the situation to him and together they came up with a plan where Shakes would move forward on battery and check out the radar contacts while the Prospect submerged to periscope depth and followed behind, staying within ship-to-ship range of the Gnat.
Fifteen minutes later, the Gnat was coming up on the first of the radar contacts. Percy watched the blackness where the Gnat was located ahead of them through the periscope. Soon a beam of light shot out from the water, and in the reflection of it she could see Shakes’s spiky head at the top of the sail of the Gnat. Shakes ran the light beam forward and back along a black wall that rode up and down on the ocean swell ahead of him.
At this range Cassandra was now able to hear the object on the sonar — water slapping against a steel void with the random regularity of ocean chop. She was convinced it was a ship.
Only a few minutes later, Shakes confirmed her guess over radio. “Yeah, Prospect, the object is a big empty cargo vessel. Rusting away and half sunk, it looks like. You think all those contacts are abandoned ships?”
Percy looked away from the periscope viewfinder at Hemi, who was holding the ship-to-ship radio mic. “What do you think, Hemi?”
“It is possible. I have heard rumors of such things: abandoned ships, among other refuse, float into some kind of slow gyre in the middle of the ocean where they sometimes circle for decades before they weaken enough for the ocean to draw them down.”
“Like a fucking ship graveyard,” said Bastian.
“A walk among those lost souls might be a fucking opportunity for a pair of boats that don’t want to be found,” said Percy. “Hemi, see if you can work out a way with Shakes that we might traverse this graveyard without physically encountering one of these ghosts.”
Hemi and Shakes chatted for a few minutes over the ship-to-ship. They decided that if they kept the speed low, they should be able to navigate through the sea of derelicts safely.
The Prospect surfaced and they pushed forward at three knots. The Gnat took up a position 100 meters or so behind. Shakes kept the Gnat’s diesel off as he followed in the Prospect’s wake so he could keep in constant contact with the Prospect over the ship-to-ship.
At first, Cassandra was able to steer them around the big pieces of flotsam using the sonar. Since the ocean was quiet, she could hear the Prospect’s diesel engines bouncing off the bigger floating pieces. But soon they entered an area so densely packed with wrecked hulks that they needed to use the active sonar to chart their way precisely through it. They started pinging at regular intervals a few minutes apart, and Cassandra would report obstructions ahead — both above and below the surface. Hemi noted her reports on a clipboard and worked out a safe route forward.
Percy ran a power wire up to the bridge and connected a hand-held spotlight. She swept a beam back and forth, scraping away at the blackness in front of her boat. Most of the contacts Cassandra was seeing with the sonar were partially or almost entirely submerged, held aloft over the thousand-meter-deep ocean by clinging to the last desperate bubble of buoyancy yet retained from when the ships were living. Under Percy’s light, the vessels were typically low, black, curved, and oily forms, riding threateningly just under the surface, awash with waves that passed over and obscured them. Alternatively, they would take the figure of a low wall in the water, still showing the distinctive outline of the pointed form of a ship hull.
As they made their way further, the debris in the water grew more abundant. The breeze they had been driving into earlier died away and the ocean flattened out, as if held down by the thick greasy blanket of refuse laying on it. Among the larger debris pieces of the derelict vessels there were rafts of smaller junk clumping together: rotting wood from ship decking and furniture, rusting barrels, bits of foam covered in bright cloth, frayed lines, bleached-pale buoys and fenders, pieces of masts, and tool handles. Anything that might fall from a ship or get tossed into the ocean and did not immediately sink seemed to have made its way to this huge gyre of garbage. Pieces bumped eerily against the hull of the Prospect with deep resonant thumps that could be heard throughout the boat. In many places an iridescent oily sheen sprinkled with clumps of floating grease reflected back in Percy’s light.
Gregory, in the lookout ring, suddenly turned to one side with a jerk. “Captain Percy, am I hallucinating? I think I saw movement up on one of those low-sunken ships off the port side.”
Percy immediately switched off the light. She peered into the darkness in the direction Gregory indicated. For a moment it was a futile effort to see where there was no light for her eyes to receive. But then, a bright blue light outlined the shadow of a hunched gaunt figure in the middle-distance, just off to one side of the point she had been staring at in the darkness. It took her a moment to realize that she recognized the light of a cutting torch.
“Scavengers, Gregory. Any source of scrap metal, no matter how remote, will also have someone who knows how to transform it into fucking treasure. It’s possible they live out here. Sometimes whole communities will develop around a resource like this.”
Percy turned the spotlight back on but did not shine it in the direction of the cutting torch, guessing that scavengers in a place like this would prefer to be left alone. A moment later the Prospect was slowly motoring past a low barge half loaded with a mound of rusting steel.