“Power’s gone!” the captain said.
The sea flashed again, a beautiful and deadly blue that raced outward in all directions. Another trough began opening in front of them, the waters parting like the Red Sea.
The ship was still moving as the lip of the disturbance raced underneath them. She dropped once again.
In the darkness it was terrifying, a free fall that lasted for seconds but seemed endless. As the ship hit the bottom of the trough, the jarring impact was accompanied by the sound of wrenching metal. Rivets popped as high up as the bridge and, somewhere deep, the keel broke. As if to finish them off, the towering walls of seawater slammed together around the Orion like giant hands clapping.
This last act of the angry sea might have killed everyone on board, except that the two great hands spent most of their energy smashing each other. As they rebounded off each other, the current they created dragged the stricken vessel to the surface.
She came up for only a minute and was soon awash and sinking.
The bridge was flooded from the impact, with the remaining windows smashed out. The water was frigid, cutting into one’s skin like knives.
Kurt still had his arm around Hayley. In the glimmer of the emergency light, he saw Joe opening a life-raft container, and Captain Winslow desperately trying to order the crew to abandon ship.
Kurt grabbed a life jacket, pulled it over Hayley’s head and cinched it tight.
“Stay with Joe!” he shouted.
She nodded as Kurt waded to where the XO had fallen. Heaving him up, he passed the unconscious man to the captain and then glanced at the stairwell to the lower deck.
He saw a crewman staggering upward as the water flooded down upon him. The man was injured. He could hardly fight the current. Kurt pulled him up and passed him to Hayley, who helped him into a life jacket of his own. Holding the rail, Kurt began to climb down.
“There’s no use,” the crewman said, “they’re all gone. Those that weren’t pulled out when she broke are drowned. It’s all water below this deck.”
Kurt ignored him, splashing down into the stairwell and diving into the icy black liquid. He inched forward, one hand on the wall, the other outstretched and numbly feeling around for any sign of a crewman. He found no one and turned back.
When he came up, water was pouring in through the shattered windows again. The top of the bridge was all that remained above water.
Joe grabbed him under the arm and yanked him free of the stairwell. “I’m not going to let you kill yourself,” he shouted, dragging Kurt to the hatch and toward the inflated orange raft.
Joe flung Kurt onto the raft and jumped on behind him. His momentum carried them away as the Orion sank beneath the waves. It vanished to the sound of random, muffled explosions as the last air pockets in the ship were purged one by one.
Kurt glanced around. Aside from the single crewman who’d struggled up from belowdecks, only those on the bridge had escaped.
The hexagonal life raft rolled up on one of the low swells, and Kurt stared into the dark, his eyes straining for any sign of another raft or anyone in the water. He saw nothing. But neither did he see another flash like those that had preceded the strange ruts appearing in the sea. “Do we have any flares?”
Joe dug into the raft’s survival kit. “Six,” he said. “Three white, three red.”
“Fire a white one,” Kurt said. “We have to see if anyone else is out there.”
Joe pointed the flare gun skyward and fired. With a whoosh, the blazing little sphere rocketed upward, casting a harsh glow across the rolling waves. Kurt stared and stared, his eyes darting about, as the moving carpet of the swells stretched out before him.
Plenty of wreckage and debris had come to the surface. Insulation, packaged stores, and unworn life jackets, anything with buoyancy. He saw no sign of another raft but spotted two people bobbing among the wreckage.
“There,” he said, pointing and grabbing an oar.
The flare only lasted another ten seconds, but Joe had also found a flashlight. He kept it trained on the floating crewmen as Kurt and Captain Winslow rowed the life raft in their direction.
Kurt hauled the first crewman onto the raft. She was a young woman he recognized from the radio room. The second survivo
r was the boatswain’s mate Kurt had seen on the previous night’s watch. Neither one appeared to be responsive. Two others were found, who Kurt didn’t know by sight.
“Are… they… alive?” Hayley asked through chattering teeth.
“Barely,” the captain said. “They’re all but frozen. Hypothermia doesn’t take long in thirty-eight-degree water. We’ve got to get them warmed up.”
“With what?” Hayley asked.