Mated to the Drowning Alpha

"Pull him out."

The shift engineer doesn't look up. His hands keep working the valve, the same three motions over and over, like stopping is what starts something.

"Captain runs the dive."

"The captain's in a can that's losing air." I hold the clipboard where he'd have to look at it, if he were going to look at anything. "Three percent every ten minutes. I don't write that down. I stop the job."

"Nineteen days he's been down there."

"Then somebody's had nineteen days to fix it."

He spits into the water. That's the whole answer.

There's a thermos wedged in the frame beside him, lid off, gone cold. Nobody on this deck has stopped long enough to drink anything.

I take the pen off my clipboard.

"Then I'll do it the slow way." I start writing. "I signed this rig fit to operate at six this morning. I can unsign it in about forty seconds. Then nobody works, not the dive, not the cranes, not the yard. No insurer covers a hull I've pulled."

Now he looks up.

He's twenty years older than me and he's got a face like a wall with a door in it, and the door just opened.

"You won't."

"Watch the pen."

"You won't." He wipes his hands down the front of his coveralls, slow, taking his time about it. "Because we asked for a surveyor and they sent us you. We know what you are. Everybody in Piraeus knows what you are."

The rail is cold under my other hand.

I don't put the pen down.

"Then you know exactly how little I've got left to lose by using it."

Something behind his eyes does arithmetic. I've watched a lot of men do that sum. Most of them get it wrong.

He gets it right.

"Medic's up top." He turns back to the valve. "It's his name on the dive, not mine. Go bother him."

I take the ladder. The rust comes off wet on my palm, gritty as sand.

Halfway up, a deckhand comes down past me with a coil of hose over his shoulder and I press flat to the rail to let him by, and my body does the thing it does, every muscle from my jaw to my heels going quiet and ready, the way an animal goes quiet.

He's polite. He says συγνώμη (sorry) and keeps going.

I stand there another second before I climb the rest.

The viewing room is one flight, a sick green light, and the smell of hot electronics.

Vasilis, the fleet medic, the only man on this ship who hasn't slept, is locked to the monitors. Knuckles white on the console edge.

He doesn't tell me to leave. That's how I know how bad it is.

"Your engineer says your signature stops the dive."

"He's right."

"Then stop it."

"No."

I come around where I can see the screens. He doesn't move to block me, which is its own kind of answer. Either he's too tired to bother or he wants a witness.

The readouts are wrong. Not the equipment kind of wrong. The other kind.

"His pulse is one ninety."

"Sensor drift."

"For nineteen days?"

"Long saturation does strange things to the numbers." He says it the way you'd read out a weather report.

"Core temperature thirty nine four."

"He runs hot."

I stop writing.

Nine years of this. Ninety one hulls. I have pulled men out of chambers with numbers half this bad and watched them carried off on a board, and I have never once heard a doctor argue with his own machines.

I set the clipboard down on the console, face up, where he has to see the page.

"Doctor. Either your equipment is lying, or you are."

He looks at me. First time since I came through the door.

And for a second, one second, and I'd swear to it in a hearing, he is going to tell me.

His mouth opens. His hand comes off the console.

Then it goes back on.

"Sign it or don't," he says. "Just don't stand in front of the glass."

So of course I look through the glass.

The captain has his back to me. Bare to the waist, skin wet through with the heat of the tank.

Shaking.

Not the shake of a cold man. A fine, fast tremor running under a body that size, in a rhythm nothing living should keep. It doesn't slow. It doesn't cluster and pass. It just runs, like something is drawing current through him.

I hold three feet of clear deck between me and the door. Old habit. Expensive one.

Behind me Vasilis says, quiet: "Don't."

"Don't what?"

He turns.

Not the medic. Him.

He crosses the tank in three strides and stops with his palms flat on the inside of the glass. That's as close as he comes. He holds there with his arms locked and his shoulders set, and I understand, on no evidence, on nothing but the way a man holds his own body, that the stopping is costing him something.

His eyes find mine and my ears pop. A pressure change I feel before I understand it.

Dark green. That's all. A man's eyes in a man's face, and they have not moved off me since he turned.

The tremor is gone. All of it. Cut, like somebody pulled the power.

Behind me, very softly, Vasilis says: "Oh, no."

Then the deck screams.

White gas blasts sideways into the machinery below with the force of a shotgun. Someone down there is already running, already shouting. The alarm starts and dies halfway through, and what's left is the sound of the air going out of the ship.

The console goes red from one end to the other.

I look at the gauge, because that's what I do, because it is the only thing in this room I know how to hold.

The number isn't sliding. It's falling.

When I look up, the red light has flooded the tank and it's all over him, his shoulders, his forearms, his hands still flat against the glass.

His eyes stop being dark green.

They come up amber. Lit, moving, rising from somewhere under.