The research cruise. Part 4.
(4/4) A lesson in buoyancy.
[Navigation station: here are the previous parts of this story: 1, 2 and 3. For lots of other stories, here’s a great big Table of Contents.]
How does a luxury cruise liner react when it is rammed by a refurbished 17th-century pirate ship powered by two huge underwater turbines? It's hard to say, because such a ludicrous thing had never happened before.
Until now.
We would have to leave the side of Pete and Harrison and Hans to observe precisely the outcome of the collision, but there's no need to do that. We can a make pretty good guess. The cruise ship Sabine was vastly more massive than the pirate ship, so the only object that could alter its course in the least would be another cruise ship — or land. The pirate ship, much smaller but travelling at high speed, would tear directly into the cruise ship like a stupid child sticking their finger into a paper lantern. In fact, this was an ideal analogy, because just as the stupid child might suddenly find their finger in the midst of a candle's flame, so the prow of the pirate ship might now find itself located in the midst of the ship's engines. The place where the analogy breaks down is that the kid, unless they were exceptionally moronic, would immediately yank out their finger and stick it in their mouth. The pirate ship wasn't going anywhere.
Pete and his companions could not know where the pirate ship struck or where it ended up, but we can take a quick peek ourselves and discover that the pirate ship was indeed now lodged among one of the engines. This could have started a catastrophic fire, but fortunately, although a raging fire did immediately erupt moments after the collision, the fire resistant materials of the ship, and the state-of-the-art fire doors, and miscellaneous other fire-prevention precautions, meant that the fire would have very little chance to spread before it was extinguished by the ship sinking.
Back in the dining room, a lot happened while our gaze was distracted.
Harrison had leaped to his feet and pointed at Pete and screamed, “It was you! It was you! You gave away our location!”
Hans, with that high five-figure salary still at the forefront of his mind, also leaped to his feet. “How dare you accuse him!”
Most of the ship's crew who were in the dining room rushed to their emergency posts, meaning the life rafts, but a few stayed back to ensure that justice was done. They took hold of Pete, Harrison and Hans and bundled them out of the room.
“Where are you taking us?” demanded Hans.
“Where you can't do any more harm.”
“We have to get off this ship before it sinks!”
“It's not going to sink,” said Officer Mallet. “The breached area will be sealed off.”
This would have been true if the breached area in question did not contain a vessel full of pirates who were heavily armed with guns and explosives and were, among other things, determined not to be sealed in the part of the ship that was rapidly filling with water.
The crew members did not know that, so they felt no special urgency in taking their three captives down to the lower deck that housed the famous vibration isolation lab, and escorting them up the stairways and along the gantries and among the scaffolding that surrounded the lab itself. Within an entire cargo deck — a vast chamber that could have housed many ordinary-sized ships, or a shopping complex, or that warehouse at the very end of Raiders of the Lost Ark — there was a labyrinth of suspensions and hydraulics and supports, which held another only slightly smaller chamber, which in turn was filled with a thick, dark oozing liquid, and in the liquid floated yet another chamber, spherical in shape, and itself large enough to hold the headquarters of a medium-sized bank, or a single billionaire's mansion. It was this that constituted the heart of the vibration isolation lab.
As they passed into the main lab through a tunnel that resembled the jet bridges that connect airliners with airport terminals, they felt the shuddering and shifting and tipping of the cruise liner become ever more serious. But once they were sealed inside the lab and the tunnel was disconnected, they felt no movement at all. The lab was a huge sphere submerged within the great pool of oozing liquid, and from now on they would have no idea if the ship was shaking, or rocking, or even if it was tipped on its end or upside down. They had no idea, for example, when the fighting reached the ballistics lab, and the back end of the Sabine was blown off.
They were finally locked in a sparse cabin with a teenage boy. The cabin was strewn with food wrappers and game consoles, and the teenage boy, thin and sullen, dressed in a grubby grey track suit, lounged on a grubby grey sofa.
The teenager greeted them with incomprehensible mumbled yelling, while at the same time he focussed most of his attention on a video game. “Whaddaya fookin cunts fookin want? Fookin shit!”
Pete and Harrison and Hans stared at him.
“That must be the Welsh whizz kid,” said Hans.
“That's right,” said Officer Wrench. “This is Gryff.”
“A whizz kid?” said Pete. “He looks like a hooligan.”
Gryff was immediately on his feet and gesticulating at Pete. “I'll smash ya fookin shit face you fookin cunt don't you fookin fook I'll fook you.” Then he slumped down again and continued to play his game.
“What did you do to him?”
“He was like that when he arrived. Didn't you hear? He's from an extremely impoverished part of the country. That's simply the natural result of a community subjected to decades of sustained economic and educational deprivation.”
“Then how do you know he's a whizz kid?”
“That was obvious. Given his school, home and social environment, there was no other way he could have achieved his advanced level of mathematics proficiency.”
“How advanced?”
“Adding fractions.”
Harrison whistled. “Those are hard!”
“Fook off!”
The crew members did as instructed, and left the three traumatised passengers alone with Gryff. And locked the door.
So here we are, having caught up to the point where we started: Pete is locked in the bizarre “seismic isolation lab” with an incompetent reporter, a sell-out scientist, and a maladjusted Welsh whizz kid.
“The ship is going to sink and we're going to die!” wailed Harrison.
“Nonsense,” said Hans. “As they said, the ship won't sink, because the breached area will be sealed off. And even if it does, we will be protected inside this isolation lab. I wouldn't be surprised if this lab, alone, could keep the entire ship afloat. We just have to wait for someone to rescue us. We can play some X-box.”
“Fook off!”
We know that Hans was wrong about the sealing of the breach. The question was whether he was wrong about everything else. One by one each of the decks filled with water and tried to sink below the waterline, but the fantastic buoyancy of the huge lab on the lowest cargo deck pushed back. Slowly its need to stay afloat fully capsized the rest of the ship, so that eventually only that erstwhile lowest deck bobbed alone above the surface of the ocean. It remained there for almost thirty minutes before finally the remainder of the ship was so completely flooded that its great weight pulled the last deck, and the spherical lab within it, slowly down towards the bottom of the ocean.
Pete and Hans and Harrison and Gryff were buried alive.
But it could have been worse.
Most of the passengers on the cruise ship Sabine drowned. Some escaped on life rafts, which were large ocean-going vessels in their own right. Among them, miraculously, were several scientists from the most inaccessible deck on the ship, who had narrowly made it out after the twin calamities of first a band of pirates shooting and dynamiting their way in to steal some of the lab’s most prized samples, and then the water flooding in to smash up everything else.
The most inaccessible deck on the ship was, of course, the virus research lab, and by the time the life rafts made it to the nearest port, most of the passengers were unwittingly infected with a host of state-of-the-art viruses.
Fortunately, some of the scientists from the pirate ship escaped, too, and they were extremely excited by the opportunity to test whether their own state-of-the-art vaccines worked against the state-of-the-art viruses.
They did not.
Pete and company were unaware of any of this.
“We're going to die down here!” Harrison continued to wail. “And there's no way for me to file a single story about it!”
“There is one hope,” said Hans, whose own personal buoyancy exceeded even that of the lab. “Given the irrefutable evidence that Gryff is a nascent genius, we just have to train him in the key aspects of advanced mathematics, physics, chemistry, and engineering — once we have also taught him to read and write — and then there is a small chance that his brilliant mind can discover a way out.”
Pete gaped at the sullen figure playing X-box on the sofa. “You call that a hope?”
“There's nothing else to do until we run out of Doritos, sausage rolls and blackberry squash.”
So they set to work.
It’s hard to believe that’s the end, isn’t it? Maybe it is not? Maybe there is more to come? Maybe, if enough people sign up as paid subscribers, I’ll publish a sizzling paywalled extra episode in which Pete foolishly stumbles on the Carnal Pleasure Lab? Or just tell you what happens to these four misfits, and the virus-stricken world far above them. Either way, you should at least show your appreciation through the little heart button, and copious sharing, and generously gushing comments. It can’t hurt.
More!