My Last Continent: A Novel(58)
“Well, according to my wife, we should treat all these animals as humans,” Richard says. “Whales and penguins and even krill.”
“Kate has a point,” I say, in as friendly a way as I can manage. I’m not sure whether my arguing with Richard is better than Kate arguing with him, but it doesn’t feel quite as uncomfortable. “Animals are no less valuable to this planet than humans.”
“Of course they are. There’s a hierarchy involved.”
“A hierarchy developed by humans,” I say. “Take sharks, for example. Most people think of sharks as nothing more than props in a horror movie. But they may well be extinct in the next few decades, and they’re the ones that have been keeping the marine ecosystem in balance for four hundred million years. Once they’re gone, everything changes.”
“It sounds like your idea of a perfect world would be free of people altogether.” Richard’s face is crimson, and his left eye is twitching. He rubs his hands across his eyes.
“That’s not such a bad idea.” This comes from Kate, murmured so low I almost miss it.
“Why does that not surprise me?” Richard says, his voice tinged with bitterness.
“Stop it, Richard,” she says quietly. She pushes her chair back.
Richard grabs her arm. “Wait.”
Kate tries to free herself from his grip, but Richard rises to his feet, upending his chair and tipping a couple of full wineglasses as he pulls her up with him. I look again at the medicated patch behind Richard’s ear and know something’s very wrong. I scan the room, catching Thom’s eye. I can’t tell what he’s seen, but he reads my expression and pushes his chair away from the table, ready to come over if I need him to.
I’m standing up myself when the ship turns hard to port, catching us all by surprise. I grip my chair as plates slide off the table into people’s laps and as the servers, barely managing to stay on their feet, try to keep their trays from crashing to the floor. Spilled wine is spreading across the tablecloth like a bloodstain. Glenn runs past us out of the dining room.
I turn back to Kate and Richard—Richard is on the floor, using one of the chairs to stand. Kate isn’t helping him.
“What happened?” someone asks. “Have we hit something?”
“No,” I say. “We’ve turned around.”
Thom is next to me by now, and when I look at him, he nods, a sickening confirmation that he, too, knows why.
South of the Antarctic Circle
(66°33'S)
According to international maritime law, a passenger ship must be capable of launching all survival craft, fully loaded with passengers and crew, within thirty minutes of the captain’s sounding of the abandon-ship signal.
But there’s a difference between being theoretically capable of a task and accomplishing it. No matter how many times crew members go through the drills, even if they take into account the possibility of rogue waves and tipped icebergs, they can’t predict how long it might take to guide twelve hundred passengers and four hundred crew from a wounded ship in ice-choked waters below the Antarctic Circle, where lifeboats may have nowhere to float.
Nobody can know. It has never happened—until now.
I stand next to Amy among the hastily assembled expedition staff and crew on the bridge, where Glenn is giving us another briefing. As he’d told us earlier, the Australis has struck a submerged object, likely ice, in the Gullet and is taking on water. Glenn and Captain Wylander have been coordinating rescue efforts with the Argentinian Coast Guard, the Chilean Navy, and two other cruise ships.
The Australis has not yet given the abandon-ship signal, and this gives me hope. The Cormorant is the closest ship, and we’re ten hours away—ten very critical hours—but the Australis still has electrical power, and her captain estimates she’ll stay afloat for another twelve hours, depending on weather conditions.
All of us, of course, have received emergency training, in everything from CPR to evacuating the Cormorant. But putting together a rescue plan for a sinking ship of sixteen hundred, without knowing what the conditions will be like until we get there, is next to impossible. The Cormorant, nearly at capacity, can safely take on no more than two hundred people.
Of course, not every ship that strikes ice is destined to sink; a seaworthy cruise liner is equipped with life preservers of her own: airtight bulkheads, bilge alarms, compartment seals, escape tubes. When all safety measures perform as intended, a debilitated ship may list at an odd angle for days or even weeks without sinking.
Yet the Australis, we’re learning now, has suffered extensive damage. “Apparently there was a serious malfunction in two of the bulkhead doors,” Glenn says. “The failures occurred when they were stuck in fast ice and tried to force their way out. The next closest ship is another eight hours behind us.”
Which means that for the next eighteen hours, the Cor-morant is the Australis’s only real hope.
“Any casualties?” Nigel asks.
Glenn says simply, “Yes.”
I try to stand still, to breathe evenly. I know that when it comes to the rescue efforts, I don’t have the luxury of choosing which life is more important than the next, not when so many are in danger. But I also know that the minute we have the Australis in our sights, only one person will matter.