The Fire Ship Read Online Free PDF

enough to admit even the slimmest body wearing an oxygen tank.
    One hundred seconds and counting. John hesitated on the first balcony—scarcely bigger than a table—and glanced up from his watch. Asha was climbing down above him. He turned away; tore himself away: he could not pause to gaze up at her now. He crossed the platform with one stride and stepped out over space. The crash team followed him one by one. They were well practiced. With the exception of lifeboat drill, this was the most regularly rehearsed emergency. And the one everyone was most terrified of doing for real.
    These thoughts served to take him across to the relative security of the steps down the tank’s sheer side, across the yawning gap he hated most. Pausing with thefamiliar slick steel so warm and reassuring by his right shoulder, he paused for a micron to look back, then ran on downward with what he had seen still imprinted on his retina.
    The ladder came vertically from the tank top to that tiny platform six feet square suspended impossibly in that cavernous vastness, lit simply by the vertical spotlight of Gulf brightness plunging down until it was dissipated by the darkness far above the tanker’s serrated floor. Out from that platform, moving at once into darkness, reappearing under increasingly vague pools of illumination from the open Butterworth plates—bright moons fading to faint stars in the vault of the roof beside the hard-edged sun of the tank top—came the one delicate arch of the steps he had just crossed. Light and dark they curved, like ballistic motion frozen in steel, down to the platform he had just vacated. Fifty feet—sixty, allowing for the slope—of steel step and steel rail looking like thread and seeming to sway as Asha began to cross toward him.
    Two mins. thirty and counting …He was only a third of the way down to the tank floor—and that floor was fifteen thousand square feet of sludgy, echoing maze with walls made out of steel. He plunged down the steps, running his right hand along the slick wall while his left held the banister, like a frightened child. He was gasping oxygen at a dangerous rate, almost feeling sympathy for Smyke, who needed oxygen for quite different reasons.
    “…Dr. Quartermaine here. On platform two, descending. Over…”
    Hell! He had forgotten to check in. He bloodied his knuckles on the transmit button of his built-in radio. “Captain here. Past platform two, descending. Ten seconds ahead of you, Doctor.”
    “Khalil here. On platform two. Five seconds behind Dr. Quartermaine, descending.”
    “Dr. Quartermaine here. Who’s down there?”
    “Deck here, Doctor, Cadet Perkins…”
    “Captain here. All right, Mr. Perkins. I have the list.” He was relieved to be able to say it—it put him back in charge somehow. It was written on a plasticcoated notepad dangling from his oxygen tanks, both pad and tanks like those used by a deep-sea diver. It was very much like going diving, in fact, for the environment down here could be every bit as deadly as the most dangerous deeps of the ocean.
    John did not pause on platform three, halfway down the staircase. Instead, prompted by Asha’s question, he scanned the list while he hurried deeper into the tank. Four familiar names registered in a flash. He had held the board so that he could see his watch at the same time and when he hit the transmit button by his left ear his voice was betraying increasing tension. “Captain here. Past platform three. Three minutes and counting. Doctor, about that list…”
    A vagary of wind—the huge tank had its own microclimate—made the flesh stir on his naked forearms and abruptly he envied Asha the protection of her semitransparent cotton. No one could ever be quite sure what the air down here contained. It could be poisonous, corrosive, explosive—anything. Normally, under power, the empty tank would be full of inert gas from the ship’s engine pumped in here to smother the faintest possibility