Chapter 4 - The Rogue Watch
I didn't go to my quarters.
I took the crew service ladder up to Deck Eleven, slipping through the darkened observation lounge until I reached the auxiliary navigation station located directly beneath the primary bridge wing.
This room was supposed to be empty during routine coastal transits, used primarily for chart storage and harbor pilot staging. But sitting in the dim, red-lit glow of the secondary radar repeater was Third Officer Maya Lin.
Maya was twenty-six, brilliant, and the only bridge officer on board who hadn't been bought by Drake’s marketing department. In the timeline I had survived, Maya had been on the bridge when the collision occurred. She was the one who had pleaded with Sterling to sound the general alarm immediately, only to be overridden by Drake until the list reached fifteen degrees. She had drowned trying to manually release Lifeboat Six.
The door clicked shut behind me. Maya spun around in her rolling chair, her hand instantly dropping toward the internal comms handset.
"Who's there—Nathan?" She relaxed slightly, taking in my grease-stained uniform and wild eyes. "What are you doing up here? I just heard a priority message over the bridge circuit. Sterling put out an APB for you. He said you lost your mind in the ballroom."
"Maya," I said, locking the heavy steel door behind me with the manual deadbolt. "Look at the bathymetric radar."
She frowned, glancing back at the circular sweep of the green phosphor display. "The charts show fifty fathoms through the eastern channel. We're on the designated track line."
"The bathymetric sounder isn't reading the charts, Maya. Look at the real-time return on the bottom transceiver."
She hesitated, her brow furrowing. She reached forward, adjusting the gain knob on the Raytheon acoustic depth unit.
The digital depth reading flickered: 52 fathoms... 48 fathoms... 39 fathoms...
Maya gasped, her fingers freezing on the dial. "That's... that's impossible. The Queen Charlotte channel is a deep-water trench. It shouldn't be shelving like this."
"It's the Rose Spit gravel bar," I said, stepping up behind her chair, pointing at the faint, ghostly green mass rising from the bottom of the sweep like an underwater mountain. "The undersea landslides from the November earthquake shifted forty million tons of sediment into the shipping lane. The Canadian Coast Guard issued a marine safety notice six days ago. Drake’s operations desk in Seattle intercepted it and buried the bulletin so they wouldn't have to re-route around the outer banks and lose eighteen hours."
Maya stared at the screen, her chest rising and falling in shallow, panicked breaths. "We're drawing thirty-two feet at the stern right now because of the speed squat. Nathan... at this rate of approach, we clear that ridge by less than four feet."
"We don't clear it," I said flatly. "The hydraulic pressure in the starboard stabilizer is bleeding out. Look at the rudder angle indicator."
She flicked her eyes to the brass dial above the radar. The needle was shuddering, listing two degrees to starboard. The ship wasn't holding the center of the trench. It was crabbing sideways, slipping toward the highest spine of the granite reef.
"I have to call the bridge," she said, lunging for the red primary phone.
I reached out and caught her wrist. "Sterling won't listen. Drake is on the bridge right now with two of his private security guards. If you call, they'll assume you're conspiring with me and lock you out of the navigation system."
"Then what are we supposed to do?!" Maya cried out, her voice cracking in the red-lit gloom. "Let the ship run aground?!"
"No," I said, pulling a small, heavy black box from my jacket pocket—a master diagnostic jumper I had taken from Henderson’s workshop. "We can't stop the ship from here. Sterling holds the engine telegraphs on the bridge, and the bridge is locked down. But we can prepare the evacuation before the hull tears open."
Maya looked at me as if I were speaking an alien language. "Evacuate twelve hundred people? Without an order from the Captain? Nathan, that's mutiny. That's federal prison."
"It's only prison if we survive, Maya," I said, my amber eyes burning into hers. "And if we do nothing, twelve hundred people are dead by midnight. Your choice."
She looked at the radar screen.
The digital readout dropped again: 31 fathoms.
The steel deck beneath our boots gave a subtle, microscopic shudder—a sickening, low-frequency hum that vibrated through our teeth. The ship was feeling the shallow water. The hydrodynamic suction was pulling the thirty-thousand-ton hull downward toward the rock.
Maya swallowed hard, pulled her radio from her belt, and set it to the emergency crew frequency.
May you like
"What do you need me to do, Nathan?" she asked.
"Call every deck steward, every purser, and every off-duty engineer you trust," I commanded. "Tell them to wake the passengers on Decks B, C, and D. Tell them we're conducting an unannounced drill. Get them up to the Promenade deck in lifejackets. And do not, under any circumstances, let anyone step into the central elevator shafts."
