really wrong here? Binning is not setting up the device anywhere here. He’s gone, Jason.’
Mansfield could not ignore her or the situation any longer. She was right.
‘I’m not going to wait for him,’ Rowena said, taking hold of the ladder. ‘I want to know where he is and that he’s placing the device. You stay if you want to.’ He grabbed her hand. ‘Don’t try to stop me, Jason, or so help me . . .’ Her expression was one of pure anger.
‘I’m not trying to stop you,’ he replied in a deliberate, calm voice. ‘We’ll both go but if we simply bimble around we could end up on the news ourselves. There’s no point in that, right?’
Rowena could see the sense of this.
Mansfield took out his pistol and held it firmly pointing upwards. ‘Let me take the lead, please.’
She hesitated, a long-time critic of the gender-weakness thing.
‘Consider it a condition of me letting you go up there at all.’
She gave in and let him go ahead of her up the ladder.
They reached the level below the machinery deck as the rain and wind whipped at them.
‘He’s not here,’ Rowena said loudly above the noise of the weather.
‘Perhaps he set up the G43 and then went off to help Stratton.’
She considered the possibility. ‘How can he do this without telling us?’ she said in frustration.
Jason began to have a change of heart. ‘Rowena! Tell me why we’re risking our lives for them. They’ve chosen to do this. We should go back down, get into the water and rendezvous with Jackson at the mini-sub, just as Stratton said. You forget why we’re here.’
‘Forget why we’re here?’ Rowena repeated, stupefied. ‘I don’t have a goddamned clue why we’re here, other than to satisfy your and Binning’s egos. We’ve lost Smithy. God only knows if Jackson’s still around out there. We can’t do anything about them but we might be able to do something about Binning. I can’t stand him but he’s still one of us.’ It did not look as if she was getting through to Jason. ‘If you don’t know what to do, ask yourself what Stratton would do,’ she shouted finally. The comment stung him, as it was meant to. ‘There’s another difference between you and Stratton,’ she continued. ‘He knows when it’s time to forget what you’re supposed to do and try to save the life of someone else instead.’
Rowena took out her pistol and was about to move to the narrow staircase when she paused to say something else. ‘I’m too damned scared to go back down. I don’t think I’ll be any less a victim by jumping back into that ocean and floating off into the beyond in the hope that someone might find me.’
She walked on up towards the next level. Jason gripped his pistol, exhaled tiredly and marched on after her.
Stratton let the outer door close behind him and opened the inner one slowly and smoothly. No one. He stepped inside and allowed the door to close quietly against his back. The hum of ventilation pipes. Suppressed sounds of weather or machinery.
He padded along the corridor, leaving a line of wet footprints behind him. Doors on either side, some closed, those open revealing compact bedrooms, toilets, showers. Personal items on the floor in rooms and along the corridor signs of a hurried departure by the occupants.
He came to the end door and opened it carefully. Another corridor ran across his path.
Stratton couldn’t remember the living deck too well, not having spent much time in the private quarters of the platform during his time here. He’d trained on the Morpheus, concentrating on familiarising himself with the main operations deck and on practising climbing the structure. But he knew there were a couple of places large enough to keep a hundred and sixty men out of the weather. The first he planned to check was the galley. A simple diagram of the deck and its main locations was posted on the opposite wall.
He walked along a wider corridor past soft-drink machines, a water fountain, snack dispensers and cupboards of emergency equipment. Up ahead was a pair of swing doors, a clear glass panel in each of them. After them another corridor and the galley. As he approached the swing doors he kept tight to the wall.
Stratton lowered his body and placed an ear against one of the doors but he could hear nothing above the sounds of air vents and humming machinery. He decided to take a