A vibration soon rang through his elbows; it meant the riser had collided with the seabed and was on its way in.
Earlier, Izar had told derrickhand Deneb that he’d be directing the crew; he saw now that they did not need direction—together, they formed a well-oiled machine. He was redundant—the thought made him smile, for it meant Zaurak had trained them well.
Slowly, in ones and twos and threes, the crewmen completed their tasks and turned to face him. Izar strode to the base of the derrick, his knees stiff and creaking, protesting their first movement in hours. He looked down through the four-foot-wide borehole through which the men had passed the riser pipe. At the top of the borehole, on level with the floor of the drillship, lay the ram blowout preventer; below that, just underneath the hull, in the water, lay the annular blowout preventer. The two valves were more crucial than their size would suggest: Their donut-like rubber seals, reinforced with steel ribs, would prevent the riser from exploding under the erratic pressure of oil. Essentially, they formed the security guards of the drillship.
When Izar had been designing Dominion Drill I, a crucial decision had related to choosing blowout preventers. “Most oil spills are caused by malfunctioning preventers,” Zaurak had told him. “Don’t assemble your drillship of shiny new toys from the most expensive manufacturers in the world. And don’t trust anyone or their streams of warranties. Test everything yourself.” Izar had nodded and tested many makes of preventers, subjecting them to double the pressure they’d be subjected to during even the most tumultuous of oil drills. Only two had passed the test—he’d placed an order for both immediately. These were the two he stood examining now.
And yet the annular blowout preventer looked slightly different than usual, its metal less gray. It must be because of the clouds overhead, Izar thought.
“Any word from Zaurak or Serpens?” he asked Deneb. He did not need to turn his head to know that the twenty-two-year-old stood just behind him, like a stray puppy who’d found an owner.
“No,” came the reply from just over Izar’s shoulder, as he’d expected.
Izar stepped away from the borehole and did what he always did just before the commencement of an oil-drill—he wrapped his hand around a rung of the derrick. The ninety-five-foot-tall turret of metal would momentarily supply the strength to haul thousands of barrels of oil from the depths of the ocean, and Izar would obtain a measure of power from grasping its power. Were Zaurak here, he would have stood next to Izar, but, rather than clasping a rung of the derrick, he would have leaned against it, to alleviate some weight from his right leg. Their ears would have been instinctively keened below, even though they’d both learned on their very first drill two years ago that the rush of oil was something felt rather than heard, like a heartbeat.
Izar did not need to give an order to start the drill; the workers knew it from his clasp of the derrick, and they put the levers in motion. The floor of the drillship vibrated, and the pressure radiated up the soles of his boots until it swirled in his knees. It resembled the vibration of an airplane before takeoff, except much stronger. He closed his eyes and rested his head on the inside of his arm. He knew he wouldn’t be able to see oil flowing into the storage tank below, but he still craved to feel it—and he did. He never knew how he knew, but he smiled as he identified the precise moment when oil started surging up the riser pipe, flying past the blowout preventers, and settling into the storage tank beneath the hull.
He continued to stand there, eyes closed, in a meditative silence, losing track of time. When he eventually glanced at the luminescent hour markers on his watch, he saw that more than an hour had passed, as smooth as any he’d ever spent on the drillship.
Then, a sudden tremor shot through his fingers. He frowned, lifted his head from his arm. The tremor vibrated through the fingers wrapped around the derrick. He withdrew his hand, as though burned. Staggering away from the tower, he frowned down through the borehole at the two blowout preventers. The flow of oil seemed to be turning temperamental and uncontrolled, but its pressure could not possibly exceed that of his laboratory tests. But then he heard it—sputters and chokes, like a man coughing to death. The riser pipe that connected the drillship to the seabed was shaking manically, he saw through the borehole, so manically that it was creating huge waves. The floor of Dominion Drill I shuddered like a dog shaking off fleas.
Losing his balance, Izar tumbled forward and would have plummeted straight down through the borehole into the ocean had a hand not grasped his arm and pulled him back. “Watch out!” shouted Deneb from behind him.
“This is the second time you’ve saved my life in as many days,” Izar said, turning his head to flash a brief smile at him.
Then, in a single, fluid movement, Izar fell to the platform in the position of a push-up, his hands beneath his shoulders, his fingers clutching the round rim of the borehole, his head peering down. He placed both hands upon the ram blowout preventer. It was cool and strong and steady—nothing was the matter with it. He gazed farther down at the annular blowout preventer, close to the top of the riser pipe, in the water. It should have been still as an iceberg, but it was shivering like a man in the throes of a final fever, the steel ribs around its rubber seal beating violently.
He hadn’t been able to tell while he’d been standing, but he recognized now that the annular blowout preventer was different than the one he’d had installed on the drillship two years ago—that was why its color looked duller. Someone had switched out the original, and the new one looked similar enough to go unnoticed unless one stared at it closely. But who could have switched out the preventer?
It would have been the man who’d tried to kill him yesterday, through the collapse of the derrick. But who was that man?
“Shut everything down!” Izar hollered, raising his head from the borehole. “There’s a problem—”
The steel ribs of the preventer exploded like a dozen belts, the rubber seal beneath them dissolving into flaccid fragments. The vertical, two-foot-wide riser pipe that connected the seabed to the storage tank cracked open, as smoothly as though struck by a saw. Blackness gushed out in all directions like blackberry juice. Izar felt as though he’d been stabbed and was watching his own blood spill out of him. But who had stabbed him?
Even if it killed him, he would learn the answer, he determined. He thought of what the drunkard Rigel had said on the island of Mira—that he was a pawn in a game. Could it be true? If so, who was playing this game against him, and to what end?
The platform quivered, as the earth might just before an earthquake. With the preventer broken, the drillship would sink in a matter of minutes, Izar recognized.
The workers, who did not have his background in engineering and physics, sensed it instinctively. With bull-like bellows, they leapt into a stampede of activity, hauling lifeboats onto the platform from over the rails. Working in pairs, they connected the lifeboats to mechanical pumps. The boats should have started inflating automatically, like tires connected to bicycle pumps, but they remained flat. One of the men knelt on the platform and thumped his hand along the fabric. “Someone knifed the material!” he cried.
Similar cries erupted from bow to stern throughout the drillship. All sixteen lifeboats had been ripped, it turned out. Like pin-pricked balloons, they could no longer be used.
“But I checked every one of them yesterday!” Deneb said.
“I believe you,” Izar muttered. Zaurak had checked them as well, for the “lifeboats” line-item, like all the others, had been marked off on the checklist he’d placed on Izar’s desk. Whoever had knifed the lifeboats must have done it in the middle of the night, when no one was there.