The Fire Ship Read Free

gone.
    Richard paused, looking around. He stood in a well between the back of the bridge-house and the bulk of the sterncastle—a couple of hundred square feet of splintered planking raised here and there into hatches. Aft of the well deck, two sets of steps rose ten feet astride a series of sagging, broken doors. The poop deck was worse, from what Mariner could see—the hatches up there were belching smoke like the bridge-house and the forward areas, but the wind that had brought Katapult here was still pulling most of it away to the north. Richard was standing in one of the few areas aboard that were relatively clear. Even so, there was a stench strong enough to bring tears to his eyes.
    “Robin?” he called, but his deep voice was lost in the sullen roaring that made the deck vibrate like a drumskin beneath his feet.
    “Where she at?” asked Hood suddenly at Richard’s shoulder.
    “Dunno.”
    “Hokay…” The tall American hesitated, very well aware that Richard’s instinct was to go in search of her. Hood never had much of a family life, but he had vivid memories of a quiet father and a strong, cheerful mother who had loved and supported him until the car crash that only he had survived. The rock-solid strength he remembered in his long-lost family he recognized in Richard and Robin Mariner.
    Richard Mariner stood six feet four, strong andstraight-backed. His black hair had a hint of gray at the temples—a sign of age belied by the agile vigor of his frame. It was a tanned, fit-looking face, a tan acquired in vigorous outdoor life, not on some sunbed in a health club. And, Sam Hood guessed shrewdly, the flat belly and broad chest resulted, like his own lean strength, from exercise that had purposes beyond mere fitness.
    The power of the Englishman was held in check now by the only cause that could make him hesitate: he was calculating the action best designed to help his wife.
    Robin Mariner was a woman such as Hood had rarely seen. Keen intelligence coupled with a physical strength every inch the match of her husband’s. The beauty of her youth had lasted through to her midthirties. She had the physical grace and inexhaustible energy of a woman in her first flowering. The gamin charm bestowed by the windswept, salt-curled hair suited her exactly even though it hardly seemed to equate with the reality that she was a full ship’s captain, with all the papers to prove it.
    All in all, they were a startlingly unusual pair. No, not a pair—a unit: two halves of one being, bound together at the soul, like twins. Not even the distance unconsciously created by their Englishness and their total absorption with each other could disguise that.
    “She’ll be all right,” Hood prompted, unaware that Richard’s concern was not for his wife as much as for the unborn child she carried. “She knows what she’s doing.”
    Richard started talking suddenly, to cover his anxiety. “She fell off a supertanker once,” he said, coming to life again. “Went down to a wrecked felucca looking for a sick child screaming down there. Turned out to be a parrot, not a child at all.” He moved forward, ice blue eyes busy, toward the bridge-house. “The felucca wasstuck on the front of my ship Prometheus. Collided in the night and wedged there. She heard the screaming. She went aboard. Felucca fell off.”
    He gestured toward the only door nearby. They crossed toward it knowing it would lead them up to the bridge.
    “She knew what she was doing then, too, but she was lucky to survive.”
    He opened the door.
    “Saved the parrot; would have saved the child, if there’d been one.”
    In front of them was a short passageway leading forward to a corridor. There was a door immediately on their left, open to an empty room; tables and chairs in disarray, as though recently, rapidly deserted.
    “Like the Marie Celeste, ” observed Hood.
    “I don’t think the Marie Celeste was strafed by aircraft,” countered Richard.
    “True.”