The Fire Ship by Peter Tonkin

debris.
    The subliminal rumble, half sound, half sensation, came again. Richard checked the damaged topworks once more. Letting his eyes follow the curved sails down, along the blade of the mast to the ball-and-socket joint where the whole mast sat in its steel mast-foot, just below the swellings that housed the retractable telescopic booms, three feet above the deck. He knew the mast was stepped in a ring of steel embracing the central hull at this point. Could there be anything wrong there? He frowned, trying to pick up that sound again.
    Robin screwed the eyepieces of the binoculars into her eye sockets; they seemed to magnify the blinding dazzle without helping her to see farther at all. She dropped them and brushed the sweat out of her eyes with unaccustomed anger. Somehow, during the mayhem that had come so close to destroying even Katapult, all the men had ended up in a huddle on top of her. Their wounds were due to flying debris—her painfully twisted knee was due to their clumsy attempts at gallantry. She didn’t know whether she was more vexed with them for hurting her or with herself for being so ungrateful.
    Katapult smashed into a breaking crest and leaped playfully with what sounded like a roar of joy. She flexed automatically and gasped in pain. God! What a bunch of schoolboys! Here she was, perfectly capable of looking after herself, trying to maintain the last of her independence before motherhood shackled her down, and she found herself surrounded by a would-be James Bond and the Macho Twins. Great!
    She pushed the binoculars back under her brows and suddenly forgot all about her rage. There it was—in full view, surprisingly close at hand. She fine-focused automatically, her breath suddenly short with excitement. Oil-smeared, battered, perhaps empty, certainly showing no sign of life at the moment, but at the near edge of the oil-track, thank God, it was less than a mile away.
    “Richard, come starboard a point or two. There’s a lifeboat less than a mile ahead.”
    “Any sign of life?” His excited voice lost in the rumble of a wave against Katapult ’s flank.
    Robin was scanning it carefully now. The ravaged lifeboat was low in the water, floating at a strange angle. One gunwale of the boat was lower than the other so that it showed one side, but not its contents. Beyondthat, nothing seemed wrong. Perhaps there was someone lying over on the lifeboat’s port side. Several people, their weight distributed unevenly, might make it ride like that. But Robin wasn’t convinced, her initial feeling of excitement killed by her common sense. More likely it was the wind playing tricks with an empty hull. Robin noticed the wind was freshening, pushing Katapult over more. Her starboard outrigger sank deeper, the narrow delta of the aquadynamic composite down deep enough to gain a green tinge from the foundations of a glassy wave. The threatening wind made Robin glance down from the lifeboat to consider the craft she was riding on. Katapult ’s two outriggers curved out and forward athwart the raked mast plunging past hinges, where the shrouds were tethered, to enter the water on either side of Katapult ’s lean central hull. Deep below the surface, the outriggers spread into two Concorde shapes that cut through the sea as efficiently as that great airplane hurtled through the sky, their angles controlled by the computer controlling Katapult herself. At the moment the electronic system kept her steady in the face of the freshening wind and the threatening chop.
    Robin suddenly felt at risk up here on the deck. She swung round, licking the salt off her lips, hissing in sudden pain as she put her weight on her damaged leg. One step along the freeboard and she hopped in over the coaming down into the cockpit beside him.
    “Shall I call the others?” she asked. “We may need their help.”
    “Not yet.” His voice was distant.
    “Rick…” She said his pet name almost shyly. It was something she almost