Free No Higher Honor by Bradley Peniston

flame-suppressing Halon gas. Nothing happened. Within seconds, the enclosure sensors were reporting temperatures beyond two thousand degrees.
    Then the propulsion control console died, all seven feet of it. From below the waist to the overhead, lights went out, gauges fell to zero, and indicators slumped behind glass shields. Walker spun around to the electrical control panel. It, too, was mostly dead, though some lights still flickered. What the hell was the matter? The consoles were designed to survive a total power failure; they were hooked to a battery pack in the main engine room. No juice from the uninterruptible power supply system meant there was something going seriously wrong under their feet. “Holy shit,” said Walker, Bent, and Wallingford, more or less simultaneously.
    Without the control consoles, the CCS team was blind. They had spent thousands of hours mastering prescriptions for confronting hundreds of engineering emergencies. They had proven at Gitmo and since that they could diagnose almost any problem by studying the panels and could fix many of them by manipulating their controls. But those troubleshooting recipes proceeded from the assumption that the panels would provide vital information and control. They had never trained for a scenario in which their central diagnostic device disappeared. 29
    FIVE HUNDRED POUNDS of high explosive had detonated within twenty yards of Alex Perez’s seat. Faster than thought, superheated gases filled the main engine room and vented up the stack. The sea rushed in through the truck-sized hole in the hull, rising to the upper-level catwalk in aneyeblink. The gas turbine enclosures became cockeyed islands in a burning oil slick. In an instant, Perez’s well-ordered engine room had become a dark and surreal hole lit by flame.
    Perez missed his one-second introduction to hell, because the initial blast knocked him out and flipped him off the catwalk. He plunged into a maelstrom of black water. Somehow, he bobbed to the surface. When he regained consciousness, the chief found himself under the upper-level grate—the very thing he’d been standing on a moment ago. He was trapped by mangled railings and compressors and other gear. Only a few inches of space remained between the burning water and the grate. When he gasped for breath, a superhot mist of smoke and burning oil and seawater scorched his lungs. “One minute I was sitting at the console and the next, it was all dark and I was down below,” Perez said later. “I thought I was lost. It was all dark, and all I could see was the fire from the burning engine. I thought I was going to drown.” Fighting the pain from his damaged throat, he began to yell for help. 30
    TWO OTHER ENGINEERS had already gotten out of the engine room. The blast had surrounded Dave Burbine in a roaring bonfire, the loudest thing he’d ever heard. The engineer had a dim glimpse of lower-level machinery embedded in the overhead, and he vaguely wondered whether the reduction gear’s sheer bulk had saved his life. He grabbed Wayne Smith by the shirt, dragged him out the hatch and across a passageway, and stepped into Central Control.
    The injured engineers’ appearance momentarily quieted the growing pandemonium in the engineering space. Everyone turned to stare at them. Burbine looked down at himself. His fuel-soaked dungaree shirt was in tatters. Chunks of raw flesh were hanging from his arms. He could barely see, and when he ran his fingers through his hair, it came off in clumps. “I’m hurt bad,” Burbine told Walker.
    The chief stared back. Gobbets of flesh were peeling off a burned face that looked like it belonged in a horror movie. It took Walker a moment to recognize the young petty officer he’d known for five years.
    Burbine remembers Walker telling him to take a seat on a nearby table, and everything would be okay. So he sat, dribbling fuel over engineering logbooks. He