And for just a fraction of a second, they were seemingly weightless again. The view in the canopy showed the water drop away for a moment—
— and then they dug in hard, metal screeching and squealing and half of the secured objects coming loose and flying about the bridge. Karam heard the air come out of his lungs like a bellows as he slammed forward against the straps — but he was smiling, even as he felt his sternum wiggle uncomfortably: made it. Hit the right contact angle and skipped the hull like a stone on a lake. Only one hop, but that’s all we needed to surviv—
“Karam.” It was Phil Friel. Hushed but strident.
“Talk,” Karam answered; Puller was now drifting through the water, listing to starboard, with waves lapping up its long narrow nose toward the bridge windows.
Friel’s voice was low. “I’ve seen one wet ditch like this, with a hot power plant. I know what happens if this chamber floods all at once.”
Shit. Just what I was afraid of. “Tina?”
“I shifted to a private circuit. This is you and me.”
Jeez. Calm, unassuming Phil Friel can get all business when he has to. “I get it. But you can gradually flood the compartment if the inflow vents are still functioning—”
“They’re not. I checked them as soon as I got out of my couch. I’m guessing that during the fight, the hit on our fuel tankage warped the valve housing. So I don’t have any way to gradually cool the plant. Which will eventually blow on its own.”
“Or shred itself and us if it’s suddenly immersed in a rush of cold ocean water.” Damn it, I didn’t want to have to ask this. “Phil, I don’t know how to say—”
“You don’t have to say anything. Get Tina out of here. I can crank open the emergency depressurization vents. That will let the water in a bit at a time.”
“Yeah, but don’t stay a second longer than you have to.”
“I have no intention of being parboiled, Karam. Now, get Tina out of here so I can get to work.”
Karam watched the water edge up over the cockpit canopy, switched to the open circuit. “Tina?”
“Yeah?”
“We have to evacuate through the dorsal hatchway. You’re closest; check it, make sure it’s full-function, and pull the water-landing kits.”
“I’m on it.”
Lymbery and Sleeman were already at the bridge hatchway. Karam unstrapped, rose. His rueful and sardonic “Abandon ship” did not diminish the alacrity with which they entered the aft-leading corridor.
As they made their way back to the dorsal hatchway, Puller showed herself much worse for the wear. Lockers had sprung open, freshers were running and overflowing, access panels hung and swayed from both ceilings and bulkheads. But they reached the hatchway swiftly, helped Tina open it into a stiff breeze that mixed the smell of salt with that of musk.
“Where’s Phil?” Tina asked as she handed up one of the inflatable rafts.
Karam handed the raft down to Sleeman. “He’s coming.” Puller had settled on the bottom just after the water had risen up over the top of the bridge windows. Lymbery was standing on the hull, just beyond the reach of the lapping wavelets.
Tina Melah frowned. “He should be here by now. What’s he doing?”
“I asked him to secure the electronics,” Karam lied. “If we’re going to have any chance of raising this craft and flying her again, I can’t have a systemwide shortout. We’ll inflate a second raft, leave it behind for him.”
Tina nodded as Sleeman and Lymbery avoided her eyes and inflated the second raft. As they clambered into their own slightly larger one, she glanced behind at the dorsal hatch.
Karam and Sleeman began paddling toward a small chip of rock that was almost an island. It actually had a single, wind-bent cone-tree on it. “I make that land about four hundred meters off,” Karam commented conversationally, hoping to distract Tina.
But her eyes never left the stricken Puller. “Something’s wrong,” she murmured. “We should go ba—”
She was interrupted by a sudden plume of steam hissing up from Puller’s stern, like the spout of a gigantic, superheated whale. Except that this spout did not relent; it grew in volume and intensity as the water around the back of the ship growled and hissed.
Tina’s eyes widened. She rounded on Karam. “You bastard. You left him behind to cool the plant — and die. You lying bastard.”
Karam looked away. “Phil is a top hand at his job. If anyone can get himself out in time, it’s him.”
“Fuck you, you lying bastard. You made him—”
“Tina. He called me. He asked. He didn’t want you to be in there. He—” Karam stopped: if she didn’t already know that Friel was as quietly smitten with her as she was almost comically smitten with him, there was no point bringing it up now.
But Tina had turned from Karam to glare at the steam-spewing wreck of the Puller. “Well, Phil’s a lying bastard, too.” A single tear ran the length of her gracefully curved cheek. “A damned lying bastard.”
* * *
Caine Riordan stumbled into the small glade he’d designated as Point Bug Out: the place where the survivors had stored their gear before dispersing to their various defensive positions. There was water here, and he’d need it if he was going to…to…
Suddenly, the sun was glinting directly down through the trees. Riordan discovered he was on his back, gasping. Couldn’t breathe, despite the filter mask. He’d obviously lost consciousness and fallen, but couldn’t remember it. And still couldn’t breathe: his lungs worked, but his mask wasn’t allowing in any air—
He pulled off the mask, drew in a breath: ragged, tight, insufficient, but he could feel his ability to reason returning. The smell of the environment rushed in at him as he sat up, turned the mask over to inspect the filter warning indicator: had the filters failed, clogged?
The indicator’s small panel was still green. But whatever else was happening, it wasn’t allowing air into his lungs. Protocol was to never crack the hermetic seal on the filter compartment, but the resulting contamination wasn’t going to kill him any faster than outright suffocation and he had to get moving. No time for a better plan: he popped open the filter compartment.
The first thing he noticed was that the wires leading from the filter sensor to the indicator had been cut and reattached so that the sensor had no power and the indicator would always read green. In the next moment, he saw that the filters were resting low in the compartment, almost as if—
He pulled out the filters: they had been shaved to half thickness, and the back side of them, the part that was in contact with the native air, was caked with green mold. Riordan shuddered, tossed the mask away, felt nauseous: there are a lot of ways to die, but betrayal by a friend, a teammate, may be the worst.
So: the traitor had gotten hold of his filter mask at some point, sabotaged it. But when, and who? Caine tried to think back along the events of the past two weeks—
But couldn’t. Possibly because he was still bleary from the pain and near-asphyxiation, but also because he was unable to still the contest between his most primitive impulse—screw this; you’ve got to run now! — and his rational impulse—take a few seconds, because if you run into the traitor, you’d better know it.
He closed his eyes, tried to push his mind past the fog that kept him from disciplining it.
But nothing. And even when he abandoned trying to figure out who had done this to him, he was too tired to think of any course of action, any plan, other than running as far and as fast as he could. The mind that had always been ready with options and alternatives was now just a froth of disorganized facts and memories. He kept trying to pull up a stratagem, a new approach to the current crisis, but it was like trying to draw water from a well that you could see was dry: no matter how many times you lowered the bucket, that repetitive act just didn’t bring up any water. He tried to rise, discovered that his limbs were all at once heavy but somewhat insensate, wondered how long he’d been sitting, dazed.