Free Perpetual Winter: The Deep Inn by Carlos Meneses-Oliveira Page B

“We’re taking on water, we’re sinking.” The sky immediately was lit up by Louis’s Very lights.
                  “I’ve never seen anything like this in thirty years at sea,” the captain confessed, as laconically as stupefied. He had realized nothing.
                  “It was a plot,” John assured him. “A plot by a very powerful group, Cliff.”
     
    * * *
     
    Louis Marcé knew nothing about sailing. He was up the creek without a paddle. But as the storm took shape, he realized that he had to point the bow at the waves. The waves quickly reached more than fifteen meters of pitch black, as if the ocean wanted to shake the unwelcome parasite off its fine, shallow skin. When they advanced, they looked like a concrete wall, the ultimate compacting machine. It was death without the comforting hand of a friendly soul. How the boat rose above them was inexplicable.
                  One could say that, compared to the storm of magma that Theia’s first passage brought forth from the Earth’s entrails, making it split, spitting part of it into space and giving birth to the Moon, this was no more than the sea gargling. Even confronted with watery mass’s surge during the tidal wave that swept through Lisbon’s lowlands in 1755, this would be a tempest in a teacup. But it is well known that the only difference between a grain of sand and the highest mountain range is the dosage of the mountain and, in its own scale, that grain has enough mountains doses to bury you.
                  For a simple man’s size, that shock was, yes, the promised return of Theia, threatening to drown him with no time for last words and without the sky gaining a new moon out of it. As Lucas realized the lifeboat actually floated, his terror became mixed with traces of pleasure. He was confronting the elements. The ocean was testing Lucas without his having to make the ocean bleed. It had come dressed as a behemoth at the bottom of the sea, a silent behemoth, a stray wolf that can be overcome without the pack perishing so it can test other men in the future, until either men or the ocean are done in. After the first half hour, Lucas was convinced he had been born for this. Sailing in an eternal struggle against the great lake. Each angry wave was an adversary and the rain and cold were music for his face and his hands, again with blue fingers, but blue from the coldness of freedom. He’d always liked the cold and had never been a sweet sugar person who would dissolve in water.
                  Lucas had passed his life between close walls and only now realized nature’s amplitude. Freedom was not moving from this to another cell in the large prison that was Lisbon. To visit one or another prisoner who saw himself as free and to choose a lunch menu, a gift for your girlfriend or a movie in the evening. Freedom was the space with no horizon. A night in the sky’s darkness and another night in the darkness of the sea.
                  He needed to turn on the G.P.S. and the compass, since he knew neither where he was nor where he was going. Not that it made a big difference at that point, but he couldn’t even think about turning his back on the waves. He took the instrument from underneath the oilcloth still covering part of the boat. It was simple and intuitive. It found him in the sea and showed him the continents; he was heading straight to the State of Virginia in the United States. Unexpectedly, between the Atlantic rain and the liquid desert, he saw another boat being offered up to the sky by the fist of a wave in front of him. His heart raced—a boat from the collier.

Chapter 7
    Death in the Storm
                                                                         
     
    They must not have seen him as they were focused on the waves. He had the upper hand. How many lifeboats could be nearby? He