The old man’s eyes crinkled in amusement. He thought I fussed too much. He had served as a medical officer aboard the Trouble Dog during the ship’s military days in the Conglomeration Fleet, and had stayed aboard when she was decommissioned and transferred to the House of Reclamation. On my first day as captain, he’d been the one to give me the tour of the ship, and he’d shown me the secret nooks, patches and workarounds that only someone who’d lived and served on the ship for years could have known. Apparently, I reminded him of his daughter, a lawyer living back on Earth with two kids and a crippling mortgage. I’d met the woman once, during an unscheduled layover in Berlin, but hadn’t been able to grasp any similarity; whatever had led the old man to conflate his feelings for us was beyond my capacity to fathom.

“Don’t worry about me, Captain,” he said. “You concentrate on getting us out of here before the whole mess sinks to the bottom.”

I cast a wary glance at the horizon. I didn’t like the look of those clouds. “I’ll do my best.”

By the time Clay’s circle was complete, the wreck had settled lower in the water and the wavelets had advanced another half a metre up the deck. The breeze had begun to pick up. Time was running out and we all knew it. We weren’t carrying the equipment necessary to operate below the surface. If we could get these two out, they would be the last survivors pulled from the Hobo before it took that long, final spiralling fall into darkness and silence. The rest, if there were any, would be lost.

We had done all we could.

Clay switched off her torch and laid it aside. “Captain,” she said, “do you want to do the honours?”

Thunder growled in the distance. Those clouds were the leading edge of the oncoming storm. The circle’s molten outline burned like an ember. I raised my right boot and stamped down on its centre. Metal cracked and scraped, and the entire section fell away, splashing into the seawater flooding the compartment below. For a moment, we stood paralysed, waiting for movement, a voice, anything. Then Alva Clay swore, and slid through the hole, boots first.

When she reappeared, moments later, puffing and blowing air and water from her lips, she had her arm clamped around a young man’s neck. They were both kicking to stay afloat. I lay on the wet deck and reached down and, with Walker’s help, managed to pull the kid up into the sunlight.

We rolled him onto a stretcher.

“Is he injured?”

A sudden wind blew across the deck, chilling my exposed skin. Walker checked the kid’s pulse with one hand, waved me away with the other. “Go on, I’ve got this.”