Terminal Run

An uneven explosion suddenly shifted the ship beneath him. He found himself hitting the opposite side of the hatch opening. The escape trunk lurched away from him and slowly faded into the cloud of smoke. He caught his breath, panicking as he realized he was being hurtled into the hull. He felt himself falling and tipping backward, the open maw of the escape trunk invisible in the renewed violent cloud of smoke tinged in orange flames. The regulator dropped from his mouth, the smell of the toxic gas slamming into his senses. In his panic he felt his heart thud hard in his chest, and he actually feared for a moment that he was having a heart attack. In the middle of the half-formed thought he hit the water, smashing his back on something large and cylindrical. Pain flashed up and he took a breath to scream, but he was underwater, the flames of the compartment gone, the smoke gone and only the cold black water around him, with just a slight lightening over his head.

He fought his way up to the brackish surface and took a huge breath, coughing out a lungful of water and vomiting the lunch he’d eaten before donning his wet suit. The air in the space was like putting his face in an old bus’s exhaust pipe-hot and foul and laced with toxic chemicals. Just the smell of it made his mind hazy. He floundered in the water, his vision tunneling to a single point. The dim sounds of a roaring fire in the background were punctuated by his coughs and a distant scream, and the scream reminded him of the escape trunk and his scuba gear, and with a last ounce of strength he found his regulator hose and put it into his mouth and took four deep breaths of the canned dry air.

His head immediately cleared enough that he could make out the yellow body of the battle lantern that had fallen with him. He lunged for it and shined it out over the water around him, his breaths coming four times a second in his terror. The water had receded, leaving more of the compartment visible. Before the water had been halfway up the lower level, but now he could see the lower-level bilge frame bay. But that couldn’t be true, he thought, and then realized that the ship had taken a drastic down angle, making the waterline fall forward. The surface was at a thirty-degree angle to the snarled remains of the deckplates still fastened to the hoop frames in a few places. The aft bulkhead had a few feet of the middle-level and upper-level deck platforms hanging from it, but the explosion from the torpedo room had blown most of the upper levels into the overhead, crumpling the thick steel deckplates as if they’d been tin foil. The escape trunk was now invisible, obscured either by flames and smoke or by the rising water level. The hatch of the trunk was located at the midpoint of the forward compartment, and if it were underwater, not only had the water risen drastically but the down angle had grown catastrophic. It would not be long before the ship was plunging vertically downward. Pacino’s ears popped again, harder this time.

Another explosion suddenly rocked the vessel, but this one came from aft. The angle suddenly eased slightly, then went back downward. Pacino heard a scream, this one a man’s. He couldn’t make out the words. His panic eased just enough to let in one rational thought — what the hell was he going to do now? The ship had been ravaged by weapons explosions after the torpedo hit. It was plunging to the bottom, and it was possible they could be too deep for the trunk to work. He had to try to swim to it anyway, he thought. He started to swim, and in the darkness of the smoke-filled space, he lost his bearings. The escape trunk had to be ten or fifteen feet underwater by this time. He had to find it before the ship sank any further.

Pacino looked forlornly around him at the dark, explosion ravaged space. He had been wrong to come back inside, that much was obvious. The escape trunk was lost, and all that remained was less than half of the forward compartment. His ears slammed again as the pressure increased, the smoke so thick he could barely see. A small kernel of reason remained to him. He tried to listen to it. If he followed the surface of the water till it ended, he would either find a slanted frame bay from what had been the ship’s hoop steel sides or the flat bulkhead of the compartment wall. He picked a direction and swam, hitting the sloping side of the hull. He followed it in the dense smoke until he reached a corner, then followed the flat surface — the compartment bulkhead — past jagged pieces of metal and the wreckage of equipment until he found himself at the shut hatch to the next compartment.