The Fire Ship Read Online Free PDF Page A

hundredths spinning. Four minutes to go and every instant crucial. John’s mind was working as busily as the figures on his watch dial. Smyke was bloody useless. Everyone else was extra busy and would be slower because of it. Should he send Don Edwards, his third lieutenant? No, he’d better do it himself. Hell! it never rained but it…
    He was through the bridge, past the collision alarm radar, round the central bank of instruments, and out into the bridge-deck corridor before the thought was completed. Kerem Khalil, senior general purpose seaman aboard, and unofficial chief petty officer, was standing by the lift holding the doors open. Shoulder to shoulder they leaped in. The little car was in motion almost before the doors were closed, while Kerem’s broad finger was still hovering over the A-deck button.
    “Who’s called…” The words were torn from John like a curse. No one should be using this lift except the crash team. But it was Asha Quartermaine. She had called it from C deck where her cabin was. “Sorry,” she said, pushing her doctor’s bag in first, then straddling it. “Caught me with my pants down.”
    Literally, thought John, his mind sidetracked to her for a moment. Unself-consciously, she stood in the elevator next to them buttoning up a white cotton boiler suit under which there seemed to be nothing but her powerful body. She must have been in the shower when the alarm sounded so she just leaped into the suit and some shoes and ran. The shoes were unlaced, the cotton suit threatening to go transparent where it was wet.
    Asha swept the red mane of her hair out of her startling russet eyes. Her gaze met his and she grinned: an irresistible flash of strong white teeth. Then she was down on one knee tying her laces. She was the most extraordinary ship’s doctor John had ever sailed with but he could not imagine any other he would prefer to have with him now.
    The lift reached A deck and the three of them burst out at a dead run. They sped out through the bulkhead door onto the main deck. Here for the first time they hesitated for an instant beside a rack of adult-size BMX bikes. Had the emergency happened farther away, they would have used these to speed down the quarter-mile of Prometheus ’s deck. “No!” John made the decision at once. “Quicker to run!” He was off first but the other two kept up with him even though Asha still carried her doctor’s bag.
    John checked his watch at the open tank top— ninety seconds and ticking —as the waiting seamen strapped oxygen tanks to their backs. Then his hands were in motion again, adjusting the face mask and holding the tank’s raised metal rim as he swung his brawny leg inside it, pushing his foot down onto the first step. Little more than two minutes left to find the second officer’s team and the chief engineer who was with them, and to find out what was wrong and to put it right. In anyship’s hold a difficult task; in one of this ship’s tanks almost impossible.
    The midship tank her captain was now entering, like an ancient miner going down some massive subterranean gallery, plunged nearly one hundred feet sheer to the keel. It was half the ship wide—more than one hundred feet again—and nearly one hundred fifty feet long. One and a half million cubic feet: volume enough to contain a modest cathederal. And, like a cathederal, it was divided into aisles, chapels, and choirs by great walls and buttresses of steel designed to stop the cargo from moving with too destructive a force; designed to stop it from tearing the ship apart. The buttresses reached in from the sides of the tank, broke away to become full columns here and there, plunging to the dark serrations of the floor where partial walls arose in series like giant pews facing invisible altars bow and stern, steel pews, eight, ten, twelve feet high. Each pew was pierced by holes but such were the demands of their dangerous, restless cargo that none of these could be made big