Castaway Resolution

by Eric Flint

  “Not bad. The waves have a period of several minutes—they’re moving fast, but really the only effect is like Tip said, I see the horizon going in and out. It’s really…strange.” She took a nervous breath. “Twenty minutes, Sergeant.”

  “I hear you, Saki. Just about ready.”

  Really we should let it cure twice as long just to be on the safe side, Whips thought, but we don’t have another fifteen minutes to wait. Although, in truth, if the stuff was even half as strong as it was supposed to get, it would be more than strong enough to take anything the excavator could throw at it.

  “That’ll have to do,” Xander said finally. “We’re out of time. Hook her up.”

  Whips lifted the heavy hook and slid over to the door, spray jetting through the narrow crack. He knew he was much more stable in this situation than anyone else. He couldn’t quite reach the eyelet, but he could hold the hook in easy reach for the sergeant and Tavana, who grasped it from either side and lifted it in one smooth motion to drop into the eyelet.

  “Set! Everyone out of here, now!”

  Technically that was an order, so Xander should have given it, but no one seemed inclined to argue about it. A piece of very heavy machinery was about to pull very hard on a really, really heavy and solid door. Any of the likely failure modes would involve big pieces of something flying around in an enclosed space.

  Whips was out first, by previous agreement; he needed the longest to strap in. Despite the awareness of time ticking by, he didn’t allow himself to hurry; making a mistake here, he already knew from painful experience, would not only endanger him but everyone else in the ship.

  By the time he locked down the last strap, all three of the others were in place. “Whips, secured!” he said.

  “Captain, you want to do the honors?”

  “Here goes.”

  There wasn’t, after all, much to it—just a go-code for a preprogrammed action by the excavator, in which it would pull on the door with steadily increasing pressure, and not stop once tension had passed five kilonewtons—roughly five hundred kilograms of force—unless and until one of a few conditions were met: first, if the arm had moved directly away from the rear of Emerald Maui by more than one decimeter, which was slightly more than the distance the pressure door needed to be moved to seal appropriately; secondly, if the tension suddenly dropped (indicating either a break or a quick reseat of the door); and thirdly, if there was any indication of movement or yielding on the restraints holding the excavator itself.

  Whips watched the indicators, which showed the tension steadily increasing, and the cargo area monitors, which showed the cable running straight as a ruled line between the excavator and the eyelet. Cable’s woven carbonan; it’s stronger than either the excavator or the eyelet. If anything breaks, it’s going to be the eyelet or the epoxy failing.

  Emotional tension rose along with that in the cable; he knew he was almost holding his breath, and suspected some of his human friends were.

  “Pulling over two tons of force now…” Tavana whispered quietly.

  By itself that wasn’t even very impressive. At just ten meters or so below the surface, there would be another atmosphere of pressure, ten tons of pressure on every square meter of surface. But that would be pressure evenly applied over the surface, against a door built to hold pressure in either direction. This was tension focused on one small area, meant to drag the door back into alignment.

  “Four tons.”

  Whips could hear the humming of the excavator’s motors now, transmitted through the restraints into the hull. The noise built in amplitude and pitch.

  “Seven tons. How much more can this thing take?”

  “Excavator’s built for heavy work. It’s got lots more to give, son. Just hope the door—”

  There was a cannon shot so loud it nearly deafened them, and the door at the end of the cabin was dented inwards by something striking it. Sakura jumped, and both Hitomi and Francisco cried out. The video was fogged by what looked like a cloud of dust.

  “It’s okay! It’s okay, it shut down,” Whips said. “What happened?” he asked Xander.

  “Looks like…the eyelet either broke or popped out of the epoxy. Or the epoxy tore off the door.”

  “Damn—”

  “But,” Xander went on, overriding the sergeant’s curse, “there was movement—sudden movement—before that happened. Take a look.”

  The dust or vapor was settling. And where there had been a dark line surrounding light, a gap to the outside, there was a smooth-looking seam.

  “Someone will have to go check, but I think what happened is she popped back into position and before the automatics kicked in, the sudden stop caused a transient tension spike, breaking the eyelet.”

  “Board’s green,” Sakura said in a whisper, then “Board is green, people! It’s reporting seal integrity restored!”

  “Now, that’s fantastic, Saki! Question is, can we make a dive?”

  “I guess we’d better find out,” she answered, “because it’s about time we did. Everyone still secure? Sing out!”

  Everyone reported that they were secure, and Laura and the sergeant confirmed the reports from their own telltales.

  “All right, then—hold on, everyone!”

  The remaining smart material on the sides of Emerald Maui was extended into the best diving planes possible; far stubbier than anyone would like, but not entirely useless. To make use of that, Sakura was going to have to time her acceleration so as to hit a wave hard enough to go under, and then keep driving down.

  This might be a little rough.

  Sakura judged the swells and troughs carefully. “Sergeant, you sure you don’t want to switch with me?” she asked suddenly.

  “Might could, if you want. Captain?”

  Xander looked over to her, and Sakura could see the question in his eyes—questions, actually. The obvious one was “do you want the sergeant to do it?” and the second was “and how cool are you with being replaced right now?”

  She smiled and nodded.

  “Switch over, Sergeant. We all know Saki did a hell of a job before, but for something like this, let’s have the guy who’s driven everything ever made.”

  “Yessir.” Campbell was out of his acceleration seat almost instantly; Sakura felt positively sluggish, even though she thought she’d unstrapped pretty fast.

  But honestly, I do feel better, she thought as she secured herself in the seat just vacated by the sergeant. If Sergeant Campbell can’t do this, I’d never have been able to. And we can’t waste time with me failing, then switching afterward.

  “Okay, everyone, brace yourselves. This is Emerald Maui, trying for one more dive. I’m going to do it from the crest of the third wave ahead…second…here we go!”

  Emerald Maui’s jet roared and the ship lunged down the slope, slamming into the base of the next wave. A wash of blue-green water surged up over the forward cameras, and Saki saw the dim depths extending endlessly before them, fading into a blackness sixty kilometers deep. She could sense the sway and balk of the big shuttle, as the buoyancy of her contested against inertia and the thrust of the jet.

  The engine’s sound became deeper, and vibrations ran through Emerald Maui, but Sakura could see the faint shimmer of the surface receding. If the tail submerges…

  “Come on, you poor battered old girl, once more, come on, dammit, dive!” Campbell growled. “Overriding limits, absolute maximum now!”

  The jet’s roar rose to a shriek—and suddenly Sakura felt Emerald Maui moving forward—forward and down, down into the depths, fully submerged. She gave a scream of triumph.

  “She still had it in her, by God!” Campbell said, grinning. “Reducing thrust…looks like we can hold this level at about three-quarters. Cruising at twenty meters.”

  “How does the seal look, Sergeant?”

  “So far, all green! Fingers crossed it stays that way.”

  “How much longer, Mel?”

  “Airb
last begins in…a minute? Five at the outside. Not sure of duration, though. The reverse blast will last longer.”

  A pinging noise caused Campbell to stiffen, and Sakura did as well; she saw Tavana mirroring both of them. That’s…a sonar alarm? From what?

  “Damn you, Lincoln,” Campbell said wearily.

  Chapter 52

  “Oh, that’s not good,” Sue heard Tip murmur as Sue passed them, en route to the rescue shuttle.

  That froze her in her tracks. “What isn’t good?”

  “Model just popped up one of the major secondary effects of the airblasts,” Tip answered. “Basically you have a Mach-speed pressure differential streaking over the surface, right? Well, that means high winds moving in one direction for the outward blast, and then back the other way for the inward.”

  Sue nodded. “Right, I understand that. What’s the problem?”

  “The problem is that because of the pressure differential, those winds are around three hundred kilometers per hour, maybe more.” When Sue just raised an eyebrow, Tip shook their head. “Three hundred kilometer-per-hour winds blowing unabated across thousands of kilometers of ocean mean waves. Very, very big storm waves, and ones that aren’t stretched way out like the tsunami.”

  “Crap. Double crap. That means we can’t do our rescue until these airblasts run down?” Sue was appalled. “Tell Emerald Maui right now.”

  “Can’t,” Tip said. “They dove a few minutes ago—somehow they must have sealed their rear door.”

  Sue closed her eyes. “Tip, check me on this. We can’t practically do the rescue now for…hours, at least. The airblasts will keep organized storms from forming over them, but they’ll be bringing king-sized waves that would make this like trying to do a pickup in the middle of a Cat 5 hurricane.”

  Tip looked like they really wanted to argue that, but they closed their eyes and nodded. “Can’t see any way around it, Lieutenant.”

  “And the Emerald Maui doesn’t know about the airblast waves.”

  “Not unless they rejiggered their own software to do the projections there, and I suspect they’re way too busy to have done that, especially after I gave them the new data.” Tip looked guilty. “They’ll have assumed I told them everything they needed to know.”

  “Oh, that’s bad. That’s very bad.”

  “It’s bad, yes,” Tip agreed, looking at her apprehensively, “but I’m guessing you’ve seen something badder than the bad I was thinking about.”

  “They’re caught between some dangerous choices. These waves are large enough that, at the depth they said they were planning on—twenty to thirty meters—there will still be a large effect from waves that may be twice that height. If they want to avoid that, they have to go deeper.”

  “And they can only go so deep. So either they’re going to be pushed up and down by the waves, which will stress the ship, or they have to go deeper, which could also stress the ship in a different way.”

  “It gets better,” Sue said, feeling her expression harden. “They managed to somehow force a pressure door back into alignment, yes, but that door isn’t anything like it used to be. It bent or buckled somewhere. There’s a weak spot, like a place where a piece of paper got folded.

  “What do you think is going to happen when it’s subjected to more increases and decreases of pressure?”

  Tip’s eyes shifted to the screen. “We’ll find out. Because that white line there?” They pointed. “The airblast’s hit.”

  Chapter 53

  Laura saw the reactions of the other three and Campbell’s tired curse. “What?”

  “Waves, that’s what. That much wind over that much ocean, stands to reason. And they’ll be here soon. I’m guessing they’re thirty meters high, top to bottom. Maybe bigger.”

  “But we’re safe here, right? That’s why we dove. And even if they pass over us, the emergency depth was, what, up to ninety meters?”

  “When in good shape—but this poor girl’s been beaten around a lot. And if a few of them crash, might get a rogue wave two, three times higher, and that will be past our known threshold.”

  “It’s not that bad,” Melody said.

  “What? How you figure that, Mel?”

  “I looked up wave action. Seems that the pressure changes should be tied mostly to the position changes—that is, we’ll be bobbing up and down with the wave, staying at the same pressure level. Real problem is that with big waves we’re going to be bouncing up and down a lot—at least as much as being in a small boat in heavy seas.”

  “What can we do?” Laura asked, as the others stared at them from their secured seats.

  “Not a damn thing,” Campbell said. “We don’t want to surface, and my guess is we’d have to dive to twice this depth to really damp out the motion. Just sit tight…and pray.”

  “First waves going to pass over soon,” Whips said. “We won’t feel it much down here…I hope.”

  Laura gripped her armrests, thinking about her whole family, trapped inside this metal-and-composite bubble in the alien sea of Lincoln, and her gut tensed and churned. We’re so close. So very close to rescue. We just have to survive a few…

  As Emerald Maui gave a rolling lurch, she said, hearing her own voice unnaturally casual in her ears, “Sergeant, if the waves are that bad, will Sherlock be able to make pickup when scheduled?”

  He was silent far too long, and Laura knew the answer before he spoke. “I…can’t see that they could, Ma’am. I don’t see that they could. It’d be way too dangerous.”

  Another up-and-down motion, and something creaked in Emerald Maui’s superstructure. “That one was thirty-five meters high,” Mel reported, trying not to sound frightened. “Based on the motion, sonar, and our depth, anyway.”

  “How many of these will there be?”

  “Probably several minutes of them,” Mel answered. “The airblast isn’t instantaneous, so it’ll pile up a lot of waves.”

  Emerald Maui rose and dropped again, with a faint twisting motion evident—and as the drop happened, there was a loud SPANGGG! from the cargo compartment.

  Instantly alarms screamed and Campbell cursed violently. “Damn door popped! We’re taking on water fast! Ain’t got a choice now—hold on, we’re going up!”

  The waterjet screamed as Campbell pointed the nose of Emerald Maui straight up and accelerated towards the surface as fast as he could make her climb. Laura could feel, already, that she wasn’t quite as responsive, and shuddered at the thought of how many tons of water must be coming onboard, how fast Lincoln’s ocean must be filling the cargo compartment, and glanced back, wondering how long the cargo compartment door could keep them dry.

  “Hang on!”

  Emerald Maui breached like a whale, flying entirely free of the sea, water trailing from the damaged cargo door. The impact with the sea would be impressive even under ordinary circumstances, Laura knew.

  But these were far from ordinary.

  The shuttle blasted from the side of a wave into winds exceeding two hundred kilometers per hour, screaming white foam obscuring all vision. Emerald Maui heeled over on her side despite everything Campbell could do, and Laura saw the ocean coming up to meet them—

  WHAM!

  The straps felt like they were cutting into her even with the padding as they struck the seething ocean. She heard grunts of pain and a low hoot from Whips. I hope that doesn’t tear anything open in him.

  But Emerald Maui wasn’t giving up. She rolled back upright, clearing the viewscreen—somehow the cameras had stayed attached and operating—just in time to show a massive wall of wind-lashed green thundering towards them.

  “Aw, crap…hold on again!”

  Somehow Campbell forced Emerald Maui to turn to meet the wave bow-on, coaxing performance from the stubby wings and the nuclear jet that Laura thought should be impossible.

  They rose to the crest, to see a chaotic mass of ocean, titanic breakers as far as the eye could see in the howling mists; the shuttle nearly
went airborne again as the wind tried to claw her into the sky.

  “Emerald Maui calling Sherlock,” Campbell said, his voice as calm as though he weren’t fighting hill-sized waves for survival, “please answer, Sherlock, over.”

  The response was as fast as they’d come to expect. “Emerald Maui, this is Sherlock, what’s your status?”

  “Not good, Sherlock. Seal popped again and we are…hold on…” another crest sent a shockwave of white spray across the viewscreen before they careened down the slope, “as I said, we are now on the surface and the waves are way too big for surfing, wind’s trying to make a kite out of us, and we’re taking on water. Advise as to pickup?”

  There was no response for a few moments. “Emerald Maui,” Sue’s voice said finally, “We cannot safely attempt field pickup before 08:30 your local time tomorrow, according to calculations. Conditions will still be poor, but better than current.”

  That’s…sixteen hours from now. Dear God.

  “Kinda figured that, Sherlock. We’ll try to keep in contact. Emerald Maui, out.”

  Laura heard a higher hum that had risen to prominence. “What’s that?”

  “Environmentals. It’s hot out there now—forty Celsius, according to the readouts,” Mel said, her voice squeaky with fear but still speaking with precision. “It’ll get real cold when the backblast hits.”

  “Sergeant,” Xander said, face deadly pale under his tan, “How’s Emerald Maui holding up?”

  Campbell was still wrestling with the controls as they skidded down the back of one wave, heading for the next. “Not…good, son. That door’s popped way open now. We’re gonna sink, sooner or later—whenever I can’t manage to keep her up. No way to dump the rest of the cargo now, ’less it just breaks free and goes out on its own—and I’d have to open the door to let it out. Not sure it will open now. Might be jammed.”

  “Sink?”

  The word silenced everyone for a moment, as Campbell continued his battle against wave and water. “What do we do?” whispered Pearce.

  “The only thing we can do,” Xander said hoarsely. “Prepare to abandon ship.”