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“Oh,” said Cindy, a predictable note of judgment in her voice. Angi had heard it from her mother a dozen times. A baby was supposed to be baptized without delay. And she didn’t even know when Danny would be back, couldn’t put it on the calendar. But she was doing so much alone. She wasn’t about to do that without Danny.

Mario leaned in, sensing the uncomfortable quiet. He put his hand on hers. “I think that’s great, Angi. And Danny will be home soon enough to enjoy it.”

“Let’s hope so,” said Angi, once again surprised at Mario’s ability to bring her close to sentimental tears.

He was still looking at her with concerned eyes when his phone startled them with five short blasts.

• • •

Usually Kincaid couldn’t wait to pull his EAB off, the damn thing was uncomfortable, smelled bad, pulled his hair, and was just a general pain in the ass. You couldn’t move more than about three feet without taking a deep breath, unplugging, and plugging in somewhere else. It was difficult to understand people who talked to you through the small plastic diaphragm that allowed speech while maintaining the mask’s air tight integrity — and impossible to understand those who hadn’t learned yet that it didn’t work at all when you shouted. The clear plastic mask fogged up when you exerted yourself. No one could wear one for long without getting an unbearable, unreachable itch on the nose. The black rubber of the mask irritated his skin. But Kincaid, like everyone else in the missile compartment, had suddenly fallen in love with his EAB when they confirmed the presence of phosgene. Fucking phosgene: nerve gas. One of those things where a single molecule could kill you in seconds. A drop could kill a whole city. Shut down your whole central fucking nervous system. The thought made him reach back and tighten the straps of his mask behind his head again, they were digging into his skin now, but still he worried that a molecule might sneak by. He was ready to wear the EAB the rest of that patrol if necessary.

Kincaid was the man in charge in Machinery Two. He’d sent almost everyone else forward once they’d gotten Howard’s body out of there, there was just not much else to do. He still couldn’t quite believe what had happened. He’d been at sea with a dead guy once before, on his first patrol back on the USS Mendel Rivers, when some kid started throwing up one night, and didn’t stop until two days later when he was dead: they never did figure out what was wrong with him. They were somewhere in the Atlantic, somewhere they weren’t supposed to be, this was back when submarines still were the tip of the spear. Captain Rorbaugh didn’t want to have a burial at sea, and shoot the kid out of a torpedo tube, because they couldn’t afford to make that kind of noise. So instead they zipped him in a body bag and stuck him in the freezer. During his two week stint as a mess crank that patrol, Kincaid had to brush up against the thick, olive drab plastic that covered the body as he retrieved twenty pound boxes of tater tots and slabs of frozen hamburger.

“Control requests a status update,” said Petty Officer McCormick, his phone talker and one of the two other people left in the compartment. Yaksic was the other, he’d returned and was now periodically checking the air with ampoules, small glass vials that took one-time readings of specific airborne contaminant contaminants. Freon was still out of spec, as they could see by the dark blue stain inside the broken ampoule. About a million fucking times the legal limit. They had boxes and boxes of Freon ampoules, could check it once an hour for the rest of the patrol if they needed to. But Phosgene was different, they only had six of those: apparently no one at the Bureau of Ships thought nerve gas was a big concern to a modern submarine at sea, they were probably lucky to have any. They’d used two when they initially confirmed that phosgene was present — mainly because nobody could believe the first one. Kincaid still wondered exactly how Jabo had figured that out from the conn, and how close they’d all come to being facedown on the cold deckplates like Howard, a ghost ship. They’d decided to save the remaining ampoules for after they’d ventilated. They had no other way of testing for phosgene, and they couldn’t afford to waste them. But until then, there just wasn’t anything else to do in machinery two, so he’d sent everyone else forward, beyond the shut missile compartment watertight hatches, where they might be nominally safer.