Drift

Chapter 1: The Koronis

The storm didn't announce itself the way the old hands said it would.

There was no slow drop in the barometer, no gradual thickening of the horizon. One moment the Koronis was running north under a sky the color of pewter, her nets hauled and her hold half full of albacore, and the next the wind came screaming out of the east like something released from a cage.

Imogen Ortega was on the bridge when the first gust hit. She felt it in her knees before she heard it—a sudden lurch that sent the coffee mug sliding off the chart table and shattering against the bulkhead. The anemometer needle swung hard and stuck at sixty-two knots. Then it went higher.

"All hands!" she shouted into the intercom, but the words were swallowed by the groan of steel as the Koronis rolled twenty degrees to port. She grabbed the overhead rail and held on.

Captain Henning was below, in his cabin. He'd been down there since noon with a migraine that turned his face the color of ash. In his absence, the bridge belonged to Imogen—first mate, ten years at sea, the only woman aboard. She'd run the Koronis through squalls before, but this was something else. This was a cyclone that had jumped its predicted track by three hundred miles and was now sitting directly on top of them.

She punched the engine telegraph to full ahead, trying to bring the bow into the wind. The Koronis was a hundred and twelve feet of aging steel, built in a Busan shipyard in 1998 and refitted twice since. She was tough but slow, and she complained about everything. Right now she was complaining about the sea.

The waves came in sets of three, each one bigger than the last. The first lifted the bow and dropped it with a shudder that Imogen felt in her teeth. The second came over the port rail and flooded the working deck, sending loose gear tumbling against the scuppers. The third—the third was a wall.

Imogen saw it through the bridge windows, a dark mass rising against the sky with a crest that curled and broke in white foam. She had time to think: That's forty feet. Then it hit.

The Koronis went over on her beam ends. Imogen was thrown against the console, her ribs cracking against the radar housing. Alarms screamed. The emergency lights flickered on, painting everything in sick yellow. Through the bridge windows she could see only water—green and churning, pressing against the glass like a living thing.

Then the ship righted herself, slowly, groaning, and Imogen pulled herself upright and looked at the instruments. The gyrocompass was spinning. The GPS showed their position: 33°47'S, 174°12'E. Two hundred miles north of New Zealand. Two hundred miles from anything.

The intercom crackled. A voice she recognized as Paul Engström's, the chief engineer, shouted through static: "Fire in the engine room! Fire in the engine room!"

Imogen's blood went cold.

She hit the general alarm—three long blasts, then the fire signal. Then she was moving, down the ladder from the bridge, through the companionway that was now ankle-deep in seawater, toward the engine room hatch. Smoke was pouring through the seams, thick and black and chemical-smelling, not like burning oil. Like something else.

Crew members appeared in the passageway. Tommy Wen, the bosun, his face tight with fear. Diego Salazar, one of the deckhands, barefoot and bleeding from a cut on his forehead. Behind them, Michael Knox—the kid, the new one, twenty-three years old and green as grass—looking like he'd just woken from a nightmare into something worse.

"Get the fire suppression going!" Imogen ordered. "Tommy, get the CO2 system activated. Diego, get everyone topside. Michael—" She looked at the kid. He was shaking. "Stay with me."

They fought the fire for eleven minutes. Imogen would remember that number later, because she'd been counting in her head the way she always did in emergencies, a habit she'd picked up from her father, who'd been a firefighter in Auckland before his lungs gave out. Eleven minutes of smoke and heat and the ship rolling beneath them and the sound of the sea trying to get in.

The CO2 system failed. Tommy Wen pulled the lever and nothing happened—no hiss, no discharge, nothing. He pulled it again. Nothing.

"It's empty," Paul Engström said, appearing from somewhere behind them. His face was black with soot, his coveralls singed. He was holding his left side, wincing. "The cylinders are empty. They weren't recharged at the last service."

"That's impossible," Imogen said. "I signed off on the maintenance log myself. You told me—"

"It doesn't matter what I told you!" Paul shouted. "The ship is on fire and the suppression system is dead. We need to abandon."

He was right. She knew he was right, even as the words hit her like a fist. The fire was spreading. She could feel the deck getting hot through her boots. The smoke was thickening, and somewhere below, something structural gave way with a sound like a gunshot.

Imogen made the call.

"Abandon ship. All hands, abandon ship."

She said it clearly, the way she'd practiced in drills, the way she'd never believed she'd have to say it for real. Then she was moving, pushing people toward the deck, toward the life rafts.

The Koronis carried two inflatable life rafts in canisters on the boat deck—six-person units, bright orange, designed to deploy automatically when submerged or manually with a pull of the hydrostatic release. Imogen reached the starboard canister and yanked the release. The canister split open and the raft inflated with a bang that was lost in the wind.

The port-side canister was gone. Torn away by the wave that had rolled them, or never properly secured—she'd never know. One raft for eleven people.

The next wave came.

It didn't give them time. It came over the stern like a collapsing building, and the Koronis—already listing, already burning, already dying—went down by the bow. The deck tilted to forty-five degrees, then sixty, and people were sliding, falling, grabbing at anything.

Imogen saw Tommy Wen go over the rail. She saw Diego Salazar reach for a stanchion and miss. She saw Captain Henning appear in the doorway of the superstructure, his face white and confused, and then the sea took him.

She grabbed Michael Knox by the collar of his life jacket and pulled him toward the raft. He was screaming something she couldn't hear. Paul Engström was already there, hauling himself over the inflated tube with one arm, the other pressed against his ribs.

Imogen pushed Michael into the raft and threw herself in after him. She cut the painter with the knife from the raft's survival kit—one clean stroke—and the current took them away from the Koronis.

They were fifty meters away when the ship went under. She went bow-first, her stern rising out of the water until the propeller was visible, still turning slowly in the air. Then she slid down, and the sea closed over her, and there was nothing left but foam and debris and the sound of the wind.

Imogen counted heads in the raft. Paul. Michael. Herself.

Three out of eleven.

She looked back at the place where the Koronis had been. The sea was already smoothing over it, as if the ship had never existed. Somewhere out there, in that black water, were eight people she'd worked with, eaten with, argued with, laughed with. Tommy Wen, who'd taught her to splice wire rope her first year at sea. Diego Salazar, who sent money home to his mother in Valparaíso every month. Captain Henning, who was gruff and impatient but fair. The others—Jun-ho, Aleksei, Pete, Rangi, Callum—men she knew by name, by habit, by the way they took their coffee.

Gone.

Michael was vomiting over the side of the raft. Paul was curled on the floor, groaning, his arms wrapped around his torso. The raft was pitching wildly in the swells, the canopy flapping, water sloshing in through the entrance.

Imogen checked the survival kit. A waterproof bag, clipped to the inside of the raft. She opened it with hands that were steady despite everything.

Inside: six sealed water pouches, each containing half a liter. A packet of glucose tablets. A small first-aid kit. A hand-held signal mirror. A whistle. A packet of seasickness tablets. A bailer. A repair kit for the raft. A small waterproof flashlight.

No flares. The flare kit was supposed to be in a separate compartment, but the compartment was empty. Either it had never been stocked or it had been lost in the deployment.

No EPIRB. The emergency position-indicating radio beacon was mounted on the bridge of the Koronis, designed to float free and activate automatically when the ship sank. But Imogen had seen it during the evacuation—the mounting bracket was bent, the unit jammed. It had gone down with the ship.

No one knew they were here.

She looked at the three liters of water, the glucose tablets, the mirror. She looked at Paul, who was breathing in shallow gasps. She looked at Michael, who had stopped vomiting and was staring at her with eyes that were too wide and too young.

"Okay," Imogen said. Her voice was calm. She made it calm. "Here's what we're going to do."

The wind howled. The raft rose on a swell and dropped into a trough. The sky was black from horizon to horizon.

Imogen Ortega, first mate of the Koronis, began to give orders to the only crew she had left.