Unsinkable
The ship is sinking.
It didn't make sense, but then, nothing did. Her head was swimming, and so was the rest of her. Limbs numb, fingers senseless, she was breathing water as much as air. She couldn't tell which way was up and which was down; she only knew side to side when she collided with something hard and felt the impact in her ribs.
The ship is sinking.
It didn't make sense, but there it was. She became aware of a sharp sensation from her left leg, and blinking from the shock almost revealed where she was for the first time. Everything was still a vague outline, but it didn't look like the outline of her stateroom. More industrial — though not by much — and full of shiny metal rather than painted, and she wondered if she'd been swept down into the boilers at the moment the current dragged her into a corner and forced itself up over her.
She spluttered, she kicked, she pushed back out of the water and the dream. One more blink, and she saw what she saw in full.
It was the boiler room. And the ship was sinking.
Sparks fell from a distant ceiling, dancing around fallen beams and streaming dust. There was broken glass everywhere, glittering like ice in the water around her, and a hooting noise in the air, and red lights flashing. Her bed was nowhere to be seen, but she had to have been asleep, because only now was she awake.
And she was naked.
She never slept naked. It wasn't a good idea in the kind of place where she was used to stealing her few hours' sleep.
She pushed her bare back up against the wall, noting that the water really was rushing toward her, that the floor was canted, that it was all draining down somewhere because the level didn't rise as the seconds burbled past, and she finally took a moment to piece things together.
She'd been dreaming of a messy young man in strange clothes with a sad face. He was very apologetic, but insisting they debark. Something to do with the War. The Captain had said it was fine; for England, he'd told them. She'd wrinkled her nose when she thought nobody was looking, but it wasn't like she was some German sympathizer. She'd do her part for King And, no matter the inconvenience.
Now the dream was over — the dozens of tiny abrasions on her exposed flesh made that painfully clear — and the inconvenience had been trebled, at least.
Slowly, shakily, she stood. She pulled herself into a hug, for warmth, for modesty, to note the new scrapes and bruises. Her muscles felt strange. Her mind was still fuzzy. Behind her, a wall more solid and cold than steel. Ahead, the water — and it wasn't cold, why isn't it cold? — and row on row of silent pillars extending into the intermittently spark-lit darkness. Some sort of machinery. She didn't know the first thing about it; she was a street performer, and a scullery maid, but she was by no stretch of the imagination an engineer.
No matter where her cabin was situated.
You're putting on a lovely performance now, she chided herself. Soaking wet in the natural for all to enjoy. So she straightened her back, resolved to stride up the ramping floor to see what was what—
—and an awful clanging and splashing reverberated through the room, the vast chamber of strange technology, and a dark form wrapped itself around the nearest shattered stanchion before breaking free and sliding straight toward her. She had just time enough to grab at a strange box on the wall — the lid popped open, and a bright red cylinder fell out — before the man slapped violently against the space where she had landed moments prior.
Her first thought, as he fought the artificial undertow, was that he was one of the black gang. The coal stokers. She'd never seen one before, even though her berth was so deep in steerage she half expected each night to find it co-opted for more valuable, more literal ballast. Her second thought was that the man's discolouration was entirely too uniform to have come from a day at the fires, though the tiny stubs of hair on his chest were certainly testament to their fury.
Her third thought, and it really showed how rattled she was that this didn't occur to her first, was that the man was as naked as she.
Two impulses fought for control. Reach out, and recoil. Reach out, and recoil. Her muscles tested each out in turn, waiting on the brain's decision.
She chose not to decide. She lunged forward, and pulled the black man out of the water.
He stumbled back against the wall, blood streaming down his face from a gash in his forehead. He wiped it out of his eye, and cried out, and she saw that now there were little pieces of glass embedded in his palm. Saw it because he saw it, too, was staring at it in confusion and dismay.
She crouched down beside him and arranged her limbs as best she could, waiting for the man to recover his own senses. It took a moment, and then one hand darted down to where Maggie hadn't been looking, and she saw in his eyes that he'd reacquired the knowledge of good and evil.
"Hello," she said.
"Hello," he said back, then after a moment of looking her up and very briefly down, he added "miss."
She glared at him, willing his eyes to meet hers. They did. She couldn't tell what colour they were in what passed for light down here, but they were light enough that she could make out the irises. Big, as she imagined hers were. Frightened in the dark.
"Are you in the black gang?" She had to raise her voice above the rushing of the water. Where was it going? If the ship was sinking — and it had to be, unless someone had bombed out the first class swimming pool — the room should have been filling up, not filtering out.
He nodded curtly. "Good guess. Passenger?"
She laughed, and made sure to let a little extra lilt into it before asking: "What class, do you reckon?"
His face broke into a grin. "You might be second class."
"On land, maybe." She smiled back at him. Why not? Why not do anything. "At sea, only third. Maggie Donne."
"Maggie what?" The big man — well-built, though a bit slender, and probably quite tall — frowned in confusion. "Maggie Done?"
"Maggie," she repeated. Everything was absurd. "Donne."
He stuck out his free hand, rough and calloused, then thought better of it when he saw she had twice as much to handle and therefore nothing free with which to return the gesture. "John Hext. Where the… where are we, Miss Maggie?"
She almost turned her back on him, then realized she'd need a third arm to do so. Anatomy had felt like a curse before, but never so keenly as now. "I don't know. I thought this was the boiler room."
He shook his head, glancing up at the dim chaos; sparks swirled in his eyes. "No, ma'am. This isn't any place I've been before. And I've seen all the boilers, and the engines too."
The strange hooting still echoed wall to wall, and the red light with no apparent origin continued its steady throb. She narrowed her eyes. "Should we get out of the ditch, John?"
He shrugged. The ease in the gesture was all theatre, and he was no great actor. "May as well? Might be we see something I recognize if we get moving." He glanced down, then hurriedly back up. "Gonna be slippery. Easier with our hands free. Ah, maybe if we promised, ah…"
"Not to look," she said.
"Yes." He nodded vigorously.
She nodded back. "Okay. But you go first."
He considered this a moment, then nodded unhappily. "Okay. You're the passenger."
That didn't sit right, somehow, so she took a deep breath and said "Let's have that hand again."
Now his eyes were very wide. "Ma'am?"
"We can keep each other steady, side by each. That way you won't come sliding into me, and put us both back in the drink."
She assumed this new look was one of concern. She found his features difficult to read. "Ma'am, I think your friends might get the wrong idea if you and me came out of here hand in hand, and bare as babes to boot."
"Why's that?" she challenged.
He blinked. "Ma'am," he tried again, now in the tone one would use to explain that the sky was blue, "I'm black."
"I've been called the same," she snapped. "And I'm no passenger. I work the kitchens, so you and me both shovel fuel into furnaces for a living. Daresay I'm no less scorched at the end of the day than you, John Hext. So let's quit pretending at proper and get out of this fix, shan't we?"
His mouth opened, brows furrowed as though he meant to protest further. Instead, he simply said "All right, Miss Maggie Donne," and extended his hand once more.
She took it. He could have broken her wrist if he'd wanted to, she was certain, but a fireman's grip was made for hours of grasping without strain. She was safe in his hands, she was sure.
It was the only thing she was sure of.
The Irishwoman was the most pleasant company he'd had on the higher decks.
It wasn't that the passengers and crew had wasted time looking down — or up — their noses at him, or making his life more difficult, or worse. They simply hadn't seen him. It was not unlike the Bronx; there were things in the gutters one didn't observe, didn't dignify with attention, even though one certainly knew they were there, knew that gutters and their trash were necessities natural to the city and contributing to its splendour in their own filthy and unmentionable way. Steamships ran on coal. Coal ran on the black gang and their sweat. The black gang ran on sleep, and their sweat ran on food and drink, and if you didn't watch where you were walking you were bound to pass them on their way to satisfy one need or the other. The best thing, the only proper thing, was to avert one's eyes and whistle.
Maggie was averting her eyes, of course, as was John, but the aim was to avoid offense rather than imply it. It wasn't the temptation it should have been anyway, because their way out of the… the large room already demanded the lion's share of their concentration. The floor was slick — he'd never seen tiles so smooth and perfect — and badly aslant, and the stanchions presumably keeping the cavernous ceiling from falling in were prone to spark and sputter and even come tumbling down towards them at the worst possible moment. Several times he almost put his free hand on a jagged piece of glass, and once on something soft and sensitive he hadn't realized was there until Maggie cleared her throat with ominous import. Twice they had to quickly slide out of the path of a piece of pinwheeling metal. They took to pausing after gaining each column, backs to the floor and flood, feet against a surface that ought to have been vertical, heaving and gasping and clasping hands.
John shook the water off his shaved pate — not that it mattered, he was still leaning in the stream — and pointed down the way they'd come. "Aquariums, do you think?"
Maggie narrowed her eyes, the way she did every time she looked at something in the background while his body was in the fore, and frowned. "Glass, sure. But they look… steamed? Maybe frosted."
"Could be the cold," he mused doubtfully. The water still wasn't cold, nothing like sea water. Then again they were in the Mediterranean, famed for its summer heat. He'd been assured it was lovely and tropical above decks, though he didn't actually know anyone who could give such assurances believably. The sort he associated with had formed a kind of underground city on the ship. The sewer rats…
Apparently seized with similar misgivings, Maggie shook her brown curls to slapping against her cheeks. "Ain't that cold. They do look like little freezers, though, don't they?"
He had to admit that they did.
At the end of the massive room, the buckling floor miraculously straightened out its act to form a sort of landing where they could finally stand upright. The water poured down from a series of breaks in the walls and ceiling around it, but this particular swathe seemed mostly sound. There was a single metal door flush with the tiles, and John seized on the shiny valve handle immediately — but not immediately enough to actually seize it, as Maggie darted forward to essay a crank. Kitchen maid, he reminded himself.
It was embarrassing and not a little emasculating, her turning the handle in the rough while he stood there trying not to gawk, so he looked back and downward instead. From above, the ruins looked even less like part of the ship than they had from below. Then again, it wasn't like he had comprehensive access. Less than the actual rats, in point of fact.
Rats. Why did he have rats on the brain?
Because the ship is sinking, and you haven't seen any.
"It won't budge," Maggie grunted. John gave her a moment to slump to the floor and stop wheezing, at which point he reasoned she would have arranged her limbs for maximum modesty. He turned to see her slouching against the wall and pulling her legs to her bare chest with one hand, pointing with the other at a little black box beside the door. "There's… a light. In there," she rasped. She must have been pulling at the valve something fierce. "What does that… mean?"
John knelt in front of the box, examining it. It was…
…it was…
"What is it?" He scratched at his chin where the stubble was evolving to something more complicated. The material resembled shellac, like they used to make records, but more consistent and not translucent. The surface was incredibly fine and he could spy no obvious tool marks, and it didn't catch the light the way ceramic would. Matte. A clear bubble near the top was, indeed, emitting light. Red light.
"Hmm," he said.
Out of the corner of his eye, he could tell Maggie's were riveted to him. "It's part of the ship, right? Do you know how it works?"
"It's a warning light," he ventured. "Means something inside is broke."
"Can you fix it?"
He snorted with a confidence he didn't feel. "My old gran used to say I can fix anything." Never mind that this was no thing he'd ever seen before. His gran had never specified.
He looked even closer. In the relative gloom he'd missed the thin vertical slit, off-centre. The light was obviously electric, so it stood to reason the lock was, too. Pretty fancy stuff. If there was a circuit in there, linked to the door, it was obvious he needed to interrupt it, and the obvious way was to insert something in the slit. It was positioned like a lock and keyhole, only beside the portal rather than a part of it. So, what was the key?
He looked down, then turned his gaze to where the floor buckled behind them. He knelt, forgetting for the moment to preserve his dignity. He picked up a stray sherd of tile, and used it to pick away at its broken fellows until he found what he was looking for.
He stabbed the concealed wire, hard, with the ragged edge of ceramic. Stabbed it again. Again.
There was a strange sound behind him, like a bird chirping, and then a gentle click, and Maggie laughed in disbelief.
When he turned 'round again, he wasn't surprised to see that the light had gone out.
"They wouldn't want it stuck if the power went off," he began to explain, but she was already putting her back into the valve again.
The ship had finally consented to conform to her expectations.
The wooden corridor looked right. Gorgeous oak panelling, brass railings and fittings, and a parquet floor. Precisely what she'd expect to see near the first-class accommodations.
Somewhat incongruous leading into and out of a tremendous engineering hall, of course, but she was willing to let that pass as a curiosity. Willing to meet reality halfway, if that was the best deal on offer.
They were holding hands again, though both of them knew it would occasion comment if they ran into anyone native to a rarefied space like this. Their state of dress being what it was, that sort of thing was inevitable anyway. For the first stretch of hall they were able to pretend that the disaster, whatever it was, had been isolated to the chamber of columns… but turning a corner revealed the sad facts in a manner tailor-designed to chill the heart of any sea-going person.
"We've run aground," she breathed.
This new corridor had been wrenched out of shape, and where the panelling had broken, it revealed soaked stone. The cabins had been smashed into splinters on some titanic rock, which now protruded into their path and plugged what had to be an unspeakable rent in the outer hull. It was keeping the flood out, but just barely; thin trickles down every striation were thickening by the second, and a growing flood was pooling on the parquet.
As though in response to her words, the little pool became a river. It flowed in their direction.
"That's not natural," John muttered.
"I don't hold with it," she agreed. A silly thing to say, but it felt right.
"Oi!" the water burbled, and both of them stepped back. "Blodger and bonnet!"
What died on her lips. She saw John mouthing the same.
"No shivering Jennys in the hall! Get your gaffs some place else!"
"I know that voice," John said. "Not Charlie?"
"Long John Hext," the puddle proclaimed, still creeping along the grain in their direction. "Puttin' Nebuchadnezzar out to grass, are you? Not on the nob's dime, you take that mollisher down the nethers where's you both belong!"
"You know this… water?" Maggie started as her rump struck the brass rail; they would need to turn back the way they'd come to retreat further, and there was nothing for them in that direction.
"Half-rate bluebottle name of Charlie Porter. Carries bags and keeps the griddlers below decks where we belong."
"So, a porter?" Maggie's eyes were sore from widening. "A porter named Charlie Porter?"
"A puddle named Charlie Porter, ma'am," John reminded her.
"I don't pay mind to superstitious nonsense like that," she snapped back. They were more than holding hands now, as the flood water began rising faster than the trickle should have possibly supplied. "It ain't natural, and I ain't havin' with it."
"What would you know about natural, haybag?" the puddle taunted her. "You and your Hector been passing flash notes? Out on a lurk?"
"This water," Maggie declared, "is obstreperous. I don't aim to put up with that." As John stared at her, astonished, she cleared her throat and recited:
Make us firm, aid us, and subject to us this sea, as Thou did subject the sea to Moses…
The puddle recoiled, bubbling and frothing in sudden contempt. She kept going.
…and the fire to Ibrahim, and the mountains and iron to David, and the wind, the Satans, and the jinn to Solomon…
Now it was in active retreat, sliding back down the hall and through the rocks which had birthed it. John's grip tightened in hers as she completed the recitation.
Put in subjection to us every sea of thine in earth and heaven, in this domain and the celestial, the sea of this world and the sea of the next.
"And your old man!" John added, as the last drop of water fled through the cracks in the wood.
Maggie blew out a breath, and laughed. "Litany of the Sea," she explained. "These waters fear the Mussulman's magic. There were Moors on these waves before Englishmen, you know."
John shook his head in astonishment. "Mussulman? As in, Arab? Where ever did you come across that bit of scripture, ma'am?"
Her cheeks burned with the flush of victory. "Done a bit of street preaching," she explained. "And Her Majesty's empire takes all sorts."
Wedging themselves single-file through the rift in the wall whence the water had come, they entered yet another expanse of ruined wood. There were portholes here, and John could see more damp rock through their lenses — the ones that weren't shattered by protruding breakers. The corridor terminated in a service stairway leading down, but they couldn't go that way, because it was filled with water rushing up. The water was an unnatural green, like a painted picture. And it flowed strangely, too slow, too certain…
At the top of the stairs was a solid industrial door which offered no complicated resistance to their passage. On the other side…
They emerged on a catwalk over a space even more cyclopean than the one in which they'd awoken. It was filled with water to just below the mesh which cut into the flesh of their feet; the water was even more verdant than it had been in the stairway, and the waves formed strange shapes as they explored the contours of the walls. Like a caged beast testing the limits of its enclosure, testing them for weaknesses.
Beneath the water, John saw the boilers. Massive, towering cylinders with roaring fires within, bubbling to the surface as a gang of stokers fed them heaps of sodden coal. Above, the reciprocating engines, like the bones of a running god, pistoning up and down on bearings the size of a diving bell, filling the engine room with an almost unbearable clamour.
All of it was green. The boilers, the engines, the stokers, the water. Green and translucent, sparkling like stardust, giving off its own sickly light.
"Ghosts," she said.
"Ghosts," he agreed. It simply wasn't British to ignore the obvious. One's duty was to grin and bear it. Old Vicky would accept nothing less.
John crept along the causeway, watching as the once-black gang went about their sweaty work. Fine droplets of whatever substance made up the gothic display were rising from their taut muscles, the perspiration of the damned; had they flooded the entire room this way? All of them naked, just as he and Maggie were.
"I think—" she said, and before he could turn and clap a hand to her mouth, every one of the spectres in the drink paused their labours to peer up at the pair of interlopers.
"On the randy, John?" a familiar voice rumbled up from the deep. The only one of the ghastly forms without a shovel in its hand was glaring at him with eyes that burned like swamp gas. Nick Stokes, the gang boss. His boss.
"Just passing through," John answered weakly. "Showing this passenger back to her cabin."
"Showing her to your deb, more like," cackled Hank Doolittle from the rear. His shovel was sparkling clean, as it always was.
"That one's a buck cabbie, miss," Stokes agreed. "You'd do best to button and blow."
"Ah," cried Olly Oxenfree, "she's just a dollymop anyhows."
"More of a toffer," Stokes laughed, squinting at Maggie in mock examination, "by my reckoning. Need me advance you a deaner, John boy?"
He didn't look at her. He didn't think he had the courage. Instead, he cleared his throat — it had seemed to work wonders for her confidence earlier — and spoke directly to the foreman's ghost. "Nick," he said, very reasonably he thought, "old Nick, sir, is the ship sinking? Only it seems to us like it's sinking. You haven't got word from above?"
Stokes shrugged. "Dons been silent on the matter, though I do admit the watery side's more in than out these last few hours. Ever since we woke in the gaol, I reckon."
"The gaol?" John repeated.
Olly pointed at a submerged door on the far side of the room. "Those drunk tanks yonder. Never did take it for literal, but that's what you get on a fancy tub like Her Giantess."
"Tanks," Maggie repeated. "John, they woke up in tanks. Do you think—"
"You'll want to be movin' along," Stokes called up to interrupt her. "Gonna catch the glim if you gets your feet wet, like we did, an' now we can't walk up above no more. Doesn't suit a man of your ambitions. Did he tell you, miss, his old gran said John Hext was a man could fix anything?"
"He told me," she agreed. Her voice was quavering.
"You want to skip this crimping shop then, John boy? Do us a favour first."
"What's that?"
Stokes pointed up at the reciprocating engines, still churning away, and John suddenly realized how unnaturally clear the voices were carrying over the din of their motion. "Tamp that racket down, would you? They turn no matter if we stoke or not, and we'd rather they didn't. Driving us to drink, as it were. Drive you to drink as well, and then you'll have to stoke too."
"Why don't you stop?" John asked. "Just stop stoking entirely."
"Wouldn't stop them turning, I told you." The gang slowly resumed their work, collecting dark green coal in their pale green shovels and feeding them into the flaming green fire. "Stokers gotta stoke, but it don't need to drown the rest of you." Stokes pointed at another underwater door, on the opposite end of the hall from the one Olly had indicated. "That's where you want going, I figure. Wouldn't recommend you take a swim."
John turned to Maggie. Her eyes were wide as portholes. "I'm going to try and fix the engines so they stop," he said. "If we can drain the water down…"
"I could try talking to it," she suggested.
He nodded. "Might help." He scanned the far walls of the chamber, the parts above the rising waterline, and spotted a burst pipe in the far background, behind the see-through pistons. That was where the flow was coming from. If he could divert it…
He closed his eyes, and schematics popped into his mind. He drew them on the backs of his eyelids. If he'd designed the overflow, where would he…? If he was to insert a valve… store safety equipment… if he'd designed this ship — absurd! who would ever have hired him to do that? certainly not Garland and Vulp — how would he…
"Oh," he said. "That's easy, actually."
It was simply a matter of edging along the upper wall, popping a few panels where the rivets had already rusted, and wrangling with tubes and wires the origins of which he couldn't begin to guess at. Of applying concepts he'd known since childhood, whenever that was, to forms so far outside his experience they might as well have been ghostly themselves. Of convincing the apparatus to stop filling the engine room with green death, and allow filtering mechanisms whose existence he could intuit from the arrangement of each circuit to do their jobs.
Deep in the guts of the ship, behind panels of polymers strange and thin but never-the-less solid, he could hear an alto voice keeping rhythm with the mindless ethereal engines.
They that go down to the sea in ships,
that do business in great waters;
Maggie intoned, keeping the emerald bath at bay while he worked,
These see the works of the Lord,
and his wonders in the deep.
and he joined in with her, knowing the words by rote,
For he commandeth, and raiseth the stormy wind,
which lifteth up the waves thereof.
and he turned the wrench, and he kicked at the pipes,
They mount up to the heaven, they go down again to the depths;
their soul is melted because of trouble.
and when he heard the engines cease, he crawled back out of his filthy dug-out, and found the waters had all gone, receded into nothing, and he was hanging over a dingy grey hollow filled with water tanks glowing where the vanished apertures had only moments ago been hungrily accepting the sacrificial offering of dead men who had, in fact, melted away to nothing.
"I think I know where we are now," she smiled. "If anyone else made it past the engines, it's where they'd want to go."
As she'd expected, this final hall opened up — through a set of heavy double doors adorned with gorgeous scrollwork — on the magnificent vista of the Grand Staircase. Outrageously expensive inlaid woods and marble sculptures, crystal chandeliers supplying a haze of orange light, a glass-domed ceiling and a gently ticking clock no doubt worth twice her village back in Old Éire.
What she hadn't expected was the shock of lightning that streaked from a crack in the dome to blast the shiny floor, arcing from tile to star-inlaid tile, singing the wicker furniture and wrapping around the sculpted columns, forming into dozens of human-like figures which staggered and jolted from wall to wall like men turned ping-pong balls turned men again, opening their mouths and howling with static discharge. Rich, poor, passengers or crew, she couldn't tell. She could tell they were naked, except for their blackening life-vests.
And she could tell they were angry, ball-lightnings of agonized fury, from the charge in the air around them.
"What in God's name," John whispered. She barely heard it over the sound of the nearest revenant abruptly burping blue flame, as it turned to face them.
It struggled to put one foot in front of the other, jerking like a flip-book with pages missing, like a zoetrope gone wild.
"Perhaps another bit of doggerel?" John suggested through a sudden lump in his throat.
They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wits' end
she recited; she hadn't finished the passage before, and it seemed even more apropos to this.
Then they cry unto the Lord in their trouble,
and he bringeth them out of their distresses.
He maketh the storm a calm—
"Not-in-this-life-you-duffer," the shuddering creature stammer-shouted at her, and the few dry hairs she had stood all on end. Its voice was like the snapping of relays. It wheeled on John, who stumbled backward to the wall in surprise. "Drop-you-in-the-drum-with-the-rest-of-the-flue-fakers!"
"Everybody seems to know you." Maggie edged around the nearest column, reluctant to surrender ground even as more of the sparking spectres began ambling their way.
"I think this one just thinks he knows my type." John was casting about for something to defend himself with. The thing he'd offended took a sudden swipe — its fingers came apart for an instant, the tips darting to John's flesh, searing the stubby hairs and racing to the floor to ground themselves before reforming on the black-wire bones — and he slipped to bang his knees on the tile.
"Fawney-dropping-snoozer," cried the attacker, and something in the diction of its herky-jerky speech triggered an instinctual response in Maggie. This was no ordinary electric ghost.
This was an upper class electric ghost. If it had had pockets, they would have been lousy with bills and loose change. She couldn't have had them for the begging, but for a song…
She took a deep breath, puffed out her chest, and intoned:
Eternal Father, strong to save
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave
The belligerent stopped mid-lunge, neck craning with an internal spiral of sparks as it searched for the source of the hymn. One by one, dozens of desperate shock-filled faces turned to face her. She steadied herself on the column, and continued:
Who bid'st the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep
They were all frozen in place, now, though the electricity that made them up still stuttered and shone. Their mouths hung open in rapture, twitching, almost singing along. She let the notes hang long enough to stumble to John's side, and pull him up. The ghosts kept their distance, as though Christ himself blocked their passage.
When they were halfway to the stairs, she finished the verse:
O hear us when we cry to Thee,
For those in peril on the sea.
"Amen," John half-sang as they raced up the stairs.
The ghosts let them go, up the steps, past the clock and its statues of Honour and Glory crowning that king of all concepts, Time. They shot across the mezzanine, leaving wet footprints on the once-immaculate floors, and slammed through the nearest door.
"Where did you learn your trade?" John demanded, leaning against the other side with all the weight of suppressed exhaustion. "You don't sing like a washer-woman, that's for certain."
"Black Irish learn to make ends meet," she smirked. "'cuz all that's left for us is ends, when the others have had their go. So I know a bit of this and that, they say."
His grin was one of naked — quite naked — admiration. "What else do they say about you, Maggie Donne?"
She flushed, and made no effort to hide it. He wasn't surprised; there seemed little point, given the circumstances. "That I always know the best tune for plucking on every heart-string."
He nodded, bemused. It was not unlike his gran's own testament…
Hands finding each other with the ease of urgent habit, they pushed down yet another strip of the ship's now-ragged connective tissue. This time, there wasn't any panelling. The tiles were strange again, like the ones in the tank-chamber; white and unadorned. There were electrical panels on the walls with a sophistication he couldn't begin to understand… no, no, he knew he could, actually. He was quite certain he could figure them out, even though all the indicators were red. Even though he was simply a stoker, and not more than a mate at that. He'd been Mr. Fix-It to the rest of the black gang, after all, when he wasn't Mr. Fetch-It…
He barely had time to recognize that a rectangle of steel flush with the tiles looked rather like a door before a muffled voice called through it: "Is someone in there?"
John barrelled across the corridor like a shot, pulling Maggie along with him, and hammered his free fist on the smooth surface. "Hallo! Yes! Are you a rescue party?"
A pause, and then: "Yes! But the door won't open from this end."
John glanced to the side, where he was gratified to see yet another alien panel. He shot a cocky smile Maggie's way — she winked at him — and then mimed rolling up a pair of invisible sleeves.
The door slid open — what kind of door was that? — to reveal the sad-faced man from her dream. No longer young, but somehow even sadder. Grey and silver, drawn and bleary, white coat grimy with grease and dust and wet, it was still unmistakeably him.
Something about the eyes.
"How'd you get out?" Those eyes were narrowing at the sight of John. John, who was naked, with Maggie, who was naked. John, who was…
She moved to put herself between the two men, but the sad-faced white-coat was in motion before her. He reached over his shoulder, and a hand belonging to some unseen assistant placed a strange device in his. Something sleek and shiny, of a similar material to the electric key-box. He waved it in front of John's chest, and it chirped. The sad-faced man glanced at it through his very strange spectacles.
"Hext," he said. "John. Stoker."
This time Maggie managed to wedge herself in edgewise. The older man recoiled, obviously cognizant of the absence of her wardrobe. This was no time for propriety. "Begging your pardon, sir, but he meant no offence. I made him leave his post and come with me. He's been nothing but kind and proper. Wouldn't hurt a fly. He's kept me safe, and I wouldn't have made it here without him. He's just as much right to the lifeboats as you or I, and I won't hear anyone say different."
She looked up at John with a smile, and the startled gratitude on his face brought colour flooding back to her cheeks.
The thing chirped again, and Maggie turned to see the sad-faced man consulting it once more. "Donne, Margaret." He reached into his pocket to produce a battered paperback; there was a sinking ship on the cover, unmistakably of the same class as the one they were on. He paged through it halfway, and nodded. "The Unsinkable Maggie Donne. Titan and Giant both, lucky you. Scullery maid and street performer, heart-string tugger, et cetera. Well, we might could use some entertainment, but it's definitely not a priority, and we're weeks from anything like a cleanup phase. Mr. Hext, though," and he turned a suddenly glowing grin on John, "what was it your old gran said? You can fix anything? Just like old Noè. Well, Amelia will be glad to know you. We've got a lifetime's worth of stuff needs fixed."
"Okay," said John. He obviously understood this no better than Maggie did. "If you say so?"
The sad-faced man tapped John's bare chest with the book. "You're lucky you didn't get any lines. I shudder to think how a Victorian-era novelist would have rendered your speech. You could've been stuck as a racist caricature for life." He glanced at Maggie, and winced. "You, though, I'm afraid you're stuck with that Stage Irish accent. Not that it'll matter for long."
A voice from behind the sad-faced man, a woman's, spoke up. "You're not seriously going to keep them out of containment?"
The sad-faced man shrugged without turning around. "Just him. We've still got that F-Class Personnel proposal somewhere, don't we? Flag it for before Eileen gets the system done handshaking. By the time it actually goes out, and they deny it, we'll have gotten at least some of the rubble sorted." He stepped aside, and a pair of tall men strode past him to reveal a very short woman in a very strange uniform. They were all wearing strange uniforms, actually. "Hext we'll take," said the sad-faced man. "Donne goes into backup storage."
"Hey." John threw off the hand one of the men in blue placed on his naked shoulder. "Hey. Do you mean steerage?"
The white-coated man almost smiled. "Something like, actually. Don't worry, she'll be safe. Won't even know what she's missing."
"She won't be missing anything." John pointed at Maggie as firmly as his shaking hand would allow. He was almost hopping mad. "You want my help fixing this boat? She comes too."
"And does what?" the white-coated man sighed. "The supply situation's going to suck, I don't mind telling you. We need everybody pulling their weight, and a floor show doesn't make the grade."
John didn't know what the other man was talking about, and he didn't much care. "She told the sea to back off, in Arabic, and it did," he snapped. It was only a slight exaggeration. "She stopped an army of ghosts with a song."
"Is that right?" The scientist — he did look like a scientist — now seemed intrigued. "What song?"
"Eternal Father, Strong to Save," Maggie told him.
Now the scientist allowed himself an actual smile, though only a little one. He opened his mouth, and with obvious self-consciousness nearly sang:
Thus evermore shall rise to Thee
and Maggie joined him for the closing line,
Glad hymns of praise from land and sea.
"Amen," John said.
The whitecoat raised a brow, then sighed yet again. It became a weak laugh halfway out. "Alright, fine. Hext's on maintenance; God himself could not sink this ship, but we got worked over by two of them, and we're still taking water. Among a hundred other things. I'm hoping Robertson's pataphysics was lazy enough that your tech affinity's not period-based, but we'll throw a few quick tests at you to make sure."
"He stopped the engines," Maggie declared. She almost sounded proud, and John's throat closed up. "Got right into the walls and made everything right."
"Fantastic." The scientist glanced at Maggie, keeping his eyes firmly above her invisible neckline. "And you can do Theology?" He nodded at the second guard. "Get her over to Mike for a rundown. With luck," and his expression turned sour on that last word, for some reason, "maybe she knows what to do about Zoroastrian double-ghosts. Christ, I miss Brenda."
As the big men took their shoulders, one each, the apparent leader of this strange little group flashed them both a sad smile. "Welcome ashore," he told them. "And welcome to Superfund Site-43."
