The barge’s interior lighting circuits had failed on the lowest level, and they dropped into a darkness lit only by the glow of a few emergency battle lanterns. Dropping from the ladder, Amanda found herself standing calf-deep in seawater.
Ahead, down the passageway, a lantern beam blazed in her face. “Captain Garrett? Glad you’re here, ma’am. We got trouble.”
“So I see.” Amanda sloshed toward the light, bracing herself against the moisture-slick bulkheads. “Who do we have down here, and how much of a problem do we have?”
“Petty Officer First Trevington, ma’am, Damage Control Four Delta.” The battle lantern made a circle around a group of tense DC hands. “We got impact damage in the frames just forward of here.”
“Let’s have a look. Do we have pumps working on this water?”
“Yes, ma’am,” the team leader replied, leading Amanda and Tehoa forward along the starboard quarter of the barge. “The barge pumps are on line and the drain valves are open. We’re holding for now, but if it gets worse…”
They folded themselves through another small watertight door, entering the next passageway section. Here a solid sheet of water cascaded down the face of the outboard bulkhead. Amanda pushed a hand into the flow, gauging its intensity. “We’ve got a cracked weld,” she said after a few seconds’ study. “Do we have any vertical separation or plate fractures yet?”
“No, ma’am. So far we just got that one seam unzipping along the top of this bulkhead frame, but it’s widening and getting longer. We’re going to get involvement in the next compartment pretty quick.”
As if to emphasis the DC hand’s point, the barge shoulder butted its neighbor, the impact striking through the heavy steel plates like a cannon discharge. Amanda found herself thrown back against the far bulkhead, her arm numbed to the shoulder by the shock.
Chief Tehoa caught her before she could go to the deck. “You okay, Captain?”
“Pretty much,” she replied, trying to shake the numbness from her paralyzed limb. If she’d been leaning with her weight against that arm, bones would have shattered. “We’ve got to get this shored up before a plate caves in.”
“Bracing and shoring team is already on the way, Captain,” the DC man reported.
“Shoring’s only going to be a temporary fix, ma’am,” Tehoa added grimly, setting her back onto her feet. “The platform’s going to open up like this at every impact point within the structure if we don’t do something about the way she’s riding. We can’t take these quartering seas for much longer.”
“I know it, Chief.”
“Gangway! Make a hole!” The shout reverberated down the darkened passageway as the bracing and shoring team arrived on site. Bearing their array of sledgehammers, four by-four timbers, and plywood panels, they sprang to the task of reinforcing the forward angle of the barge hull.
“Chief,” Amanda said, sidling out of the way. “You stay here and see what you can do to get this secured. I’m going up to the tower to confer with Commander Gueletti.”
“Okay, Captain. We’ll do what we can. I just hope you and the Commander can come up with something.”
“Me too, Chief. Me too.”
If anything, the winds had grown in intensity while Amanda had been below. The transit back to the core barge could be made only thanks to the lifelines and the intermittent patches of protection afforded behind the deck modules. Entering the base of the platform control tower, she paused only long enough to press a few handfuls of water out of her sodden hair and khakis, then climbed for the command center. The erratic lurching and rolling of the core barge, noticeable enough on the weather deck, grew with each level climbed, forcing Amanda to maintain a death grip on the ladderway railings.
Emerging on the command deck, she suddenly froze at the head of the ladderway. Lord God! Down on the weather deck you were too close to it. But up here you could see!
As Amanda looked beyond the tower windows, a hypervelocity gust momentarily tore the curtain of rain away.
The sky glowed an evil and diseased verdigris, lightning crawling about in its boiling belly. And the waves, a vast curving front of gray storm-driven combers, marched in from the horizon, their arched backs hoary with wind-riven spray. As each wave reached the windward corner of the platform, it curled over to butt like an enraged bull elephant, perishing in an explosion of water that buried Floater 1’s decks. Waves of compression and release could be seen radiating through the platform structure with each blow.
The next supersquall hit and a roaring wall of precipitation cut off the view. It was a very rare thing for Amanda Garrett to be afraid of the sea, but she knew fear now. Floater 1 couldn’t take this kind of punishment for long. No mere man-made structure could.
In the far corner of the command deck, Commander Steve Gueletti leaned over the shoulder of one of his systems operators, fighting a desperate delaying action.
“How much room do we have in the stern bunkerage tanks of number one?” he demanded, his voice raised over the sound of the storm.
“Twelve thousand gallons, sir.”
“Initiate high-speed fuel transfer from bow to stern bunkers. Twelve thousand gallons.”
“Initiating transfer,” the S.0. replied, her voice emotionless. Her fingers danced across her keyboard, feeding commands into the ballasting system. “Barge 1 systems acknowledging, fuel transfer initiated.”
“Onboard sewage system. Purge all storage tanks to sea.”
“Sewage system purge initiated. All storage tanks blowing to sea.”
Concerned or not, Amanda looked on with interest. This was seamanship of a kind she was unfamiliar with.
“Barge 1 again,” Gueletti continued, staring down at the tankage control displays. “Storage cells K4 and K8. Pump to sea.”
The S.O. looked up. “Verify, sir. Those are drinking water storage. We have over four thousand gallons in each cell.”
“I know it. And I know there won’t be anyone left around to drink it if number one gets driven under. We’ve got to keep her leading edge up. Pump to sea!”
Using the handrail around the central chart table, Amanda made her way around to the ballast control station. “You’ve got more of a water problem than you know, Steve. I’ve just come up from number four. You’ve got some seams opening up down there.”
“Tell me about it, Captain,” the Seabee replied. “We’re taking water in one and two as well, and I’m expecting flooding reports from the other barges at any time. She’s starting to hammer herself to pieces. This quartering sea is killing us. We take much more of it and she’s going to come apart like a soggy cardboard box.”
Amanda tightened her grip on the rail as the tower swayed under the impact of another macroburst. “What can we do about it?”
“That’s just it, Captain. There’s not a solitary goddamn thing we can do.”
“Commander,” another systems operator called from his station. “The computer’s finished the ride simulation. This doesn’t look good, sir.”
“You’d better have a look at this, Captain,” Gueletti said, arming his way around to the simulation console. “I’ve had my people run a structural analysis and projection on the cumulative storm damage. This will give us an idea where we’re going to stand in another couple of hours.”
Amanda joined him at the shoulder of the sweating S.O. “Run the ride analysis,” Gueletti commanded.
The systems operator hit a key sequence. A phantom outline of Floater 1 appeared on the computer monitor; nine rectangular barges in three ranks of three, afloat on a gridwork sea.
“Initiate standard projected storm action.”
The gridwork ocean humped up and rolled. Arrows rezzed into existence, stabbing at the bow of the platform, indicating the impact points of wind and wave. Smoothly the interlinked raft of barges sequentially rode up and over the incoming waves.