Beneath and beyond all of which, Edie is apparently going mad, because she seems to hear choral music. When the door opens, she realises that no, someone is actually singing, low and weird and deranged, deep in the hull.
“Commander Banister?”
Edie is wearing her uniform and moustache, since she may in theory be called upon to do something devious if they surface and surrender. And here is Frankie Fossoyeur, that same desirable, distracted expression on her face as she explains that she thinks the Cuparah may be overcooking it, may be about to implode.
Implode. A very, very bad word indeed. Edie had believed, until she heard it down here, that the worst bad words were Anglo-Saxon in origin and referred to parts of the body. Not so. Not one of the unspeakable sexual terms she has heard is anything like as bad as bleak, measured, Latinate implode.
“Do you think they will continue this…” Frankie waves her hands “… this dropping?” A wrenching impact causes the ship to heel over, and Edie is thrown upright. Frankie is holding onto the frame of the door, so they are suddenly very close. Edie nods.
“I’m sure they will, yes. If they have the charges.”
“The boat is strong. Remarkable, even. But not like this. The repeated stresses accumulate. The hulls will not hold.” Frankie stares into space as if she can actually see the fractures, the stresses.
Edie, ungifted mathematically, is nonetheless inclined to agree. Cuparah’s groaning has taken on a distinctly frantic edge, a shearing, fatigued sound which is far more ominous than the bell-like tone it emitted when the first charge went off a few moments ago.
“Well,” Edie says, “then we will probably die.”
Frankie Fossoyeur stares at her.
“That is not necessary,” she says after a moment. “It is wasteful. There is much we have left to do. Boff.” She throws her hands up, as if all this drama is so typical of the silly people she has to deal with. “I will not permit it. Accompany me, please, Banister.”
Since the alternative would appear to be waiting alone for the inevitable rush of icy water and ensuing death, Edie follows.
Frankie is slight and determined, and Edie’s uniform counts for something on Amanda Baines’s ship, so they pass smoothly through the mill of shouting, frightened men doing their best to be cool under pressure. Also, the place they appear to be going to is not anywhere any of the sailors needs or wants to be. It is the place the weird, disturbing singing is coming from: Cuparah’s decoding chamber. Frankie opens the door and steps inside.
The Ruskinites are praying. The coding machine is shut down—no need for it at the moment, obviously—so they are kneeling on the floor in front of it, facing one another to avoid the appearance of worshipping the machine, which is very much not what they’re about, and chanting like Gregorians. It’s monotone, and very sad. Now that she is inside the room with them, Edie recognises the chant as a prayer for the dying.
Hear us, O Lord, and issue not the decree for the completion of our days before Thou forgivest our sins. There is no room in death for amendment. Deliver us not unto the bitter grave. Lord, have mercy.
She shudders. There’s nothing like religion to make you feel utterly doomed.
“Eh, bien,” Frankie Fossoyeur says, clapping her hands. “Ça suffit. That is enough. There is work.” The Ruskinites stop chanting and stare at her, a bit annoyed. Frankie in turn finds their lack of compliance vexatious, and grabs the nearest one by the cheeks and shouts into his face. “Get up! We. Have. Work. To. Do!”
And whether it is because they take her sudden arrival as the answer to their morbid prayer, or because in all honesty they are just people looking for a way to divert their minds from the imminence of crush-depth and the endless drumming of the enemy above, they get to their feet, and Mockley asks what is to be done.
“This,” Frankie says, waving her hand at the coding machine. “It gets hot?”
“Yes,” Mockley says.
“And you cool it with?”
“We have ice-makers. Poseidon’s Net.”
“Excellent. And we have my compressor for additional cold. Good. And do you also have wood? No, wait. Kelp. We have kelp for the elephant.”
The Ruskinites look a bit shifty. The issue of the elephant has not been a happy one. They have been required to vacate some research space for him in Cuparah’s forward hold, and one very rash person suggested sotto voce that perhaps elephant steak might make a nice change from cod. Songbird chanced to overhear, and nearly throttled him. Edie’s team are a little irrational about the elephant, because so many of his relatives were injured or killed in the business of saving them from Shem Shem Tsien, and because without him there is every possibility that they would be hanging on hooks on the walls of the Opium Khan’s palace.
“Yes,” Mockley says, “we have kelp.”
“Bon. Then we must… hacher… the kelp, into little pieces, and make pulp. Slime. Yes? And then add water, very cold. Supercold. Then squirt it in the pipes. There are pipes everywhere, yes? Squirt squirt. Then we must overload the pipes. They will burst outwards? Good. How good are the pumps? Never mind, they are not good enough, I must make them better. Make kelp, what is the word? It is Scottish and disgusting, not haggis, the oats, yes: porridge! Make porridge, quickly! And you,” she adds, with a keen eye for the would-be eater of elephants. “Hoses! I will need all the spare hoses.”
“What are we doing?” Edie asks, as she throws her jacket onto the floor to sit on it, and Frankie rips the cover off the first of Mockley’s refrigeration units.
“We are making a new submarine,” Frankie Fossoyeur says, “before the old one is broken.” A particularly loud roar sounds through the boat. “Which will be very soon. So.” She gestures to the machine in front of her. “We work.”
And they do. Edie’s fingers get red and her nails chip, threading washers and nuts onto bolts by hand, grabbing pliers and spanners to finish the job, passing the tools to someone else and starting again. Splice, fix, rotate, tension, and all the while the boat is dying around them, screaming and shuddering.
Cuparah yaws and rolls all the way over. Edie clings to the compressor and Frankie clings to Edie, the two of them clinched together. Edie’s arms do not have time to hurt. Then the boat slams back over and they fall to the deck. One of the Ruskinites has cut his own finger almost entirely off in the confusion. He holds it up for inspection. Frankie tells him to pull it off and keep working, because he can live with nine fingers, but not with multiple atmospheres of water shattering his body like an empty eggshell. He shrugs, and does as he’s told. Shock. Or courage. Edie isn’t sure there’s a difference. Being dead is a sure remedy for pain… She suddenly remembers being very young, hearing an old woman say:
Tes a zertin cure, Mam, I ’zure ’ee, starps ’ey bagg’rin’ wetchess f’om g’wen te zay in eggbote.