Chapter 4 - Inside the Veins of the Ship
Delaney moved through the pitch-black service corridor on her hands and knees, the heavy air tank banging rhythmically against her shoulder blades with every forward heave. The HUD inside her mask glowed with a steady, pulsing yellow light, warning her that her air supply had dropped to the ten-minute mark. The heat here was different from the open ward; it radiated outward from the internal bulkheads like the inside of a brick kiln, turning the sweat inside her scrubs into a scalding second skin.
She kept her left hand touching the ribbed surface of an electrical conduit running along the base of the wall, using it as a blind guide through the pitch-black labyrinth. Her mind wasn't on the heat, or the smoke, or the threat Garrett Holloway had made about her brother Wes. It was fixed entirely on the architectural schematic she had memorized during her four years in the military—a schematic that matched this civilian conversion hull down to the last structural rivet.
Three meters to the junction box, she thought, counting her crawls in her head the way she used to do during night patrols. Two meters to the service ladder. Then a sharp left turn through the auxiliary air duct that bypasses the sealed bulkhead door.
She reached the junction box, her gloved fingers sliding over the cold, riveted iron. But when she pushed against the access grate leading to the auxiliary duct, it didn't budge. The heat from the fire had warped the metal frame, expanding the steel until it had fused seamlessly into the surrounding bulkhead.
"Damn it," she muttered into her mask, the sound of her own ragged breathing echoing loudly in her ears.
She braced her boots against a floor bracket, hooked her fingers into the narrow drainage slit of the warped grate, and pulled with every ounce of strength she possessed. Her shoulder muscles screamed in protest, and an old, hairline fracture in her left wrist—sustained during a rough transfer back at the hospital years ago—flared with white-hot pain. The metal didn't move.
Think, she told herself, forcing her heart rate down as the HUD warning light shifted from yellow to a fast-blinking amber. If the frame expanded outward, the structural stress point is at the upper right corner where the latch pin is seated.
She reached into her utility pouch, pulled out the heavy titanium spanner the fire captain had given her, and jammed the tapered handle directly into the corner seam. Using the bracket as a fulcrum, she threw her entire body weight downward. With a deafening shriek of tearing metal, the latch pin sheared clean off, and the iron grate popped inward, tumbling away into the darkness below.
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She wriggled through the narrow opening headfirst, scraping her elbows against the jagged edges of the rent steel, and dropped straight down into the secondary lower passage that led directly beneath Deck 1.
The air here was cooler, but it was thick with the unmistakable smell of ozone and leaking hydraulic fluid. And right beside her boots, sprawled across the metal grating near the base of a bronze plaque mounted to the bulkhead, lay a man in a tailored dark suit, his face pale, his eyes closed, and his fingers resting inches away from a heavy brass door latch that had been welded shut from the outside.
