Chapter 20: The Tank

The Rask test tank sat at the end of the yard, a steel cylinder as tall as a four-story building.

By midnight, three hundred people stood behind a rope on the gantry.

Press lights lit the water inside, green and still.

The production hull hung from a crane above it, wrapped in sensors.

Navy engineers in gray coveralls moved around it with clipboards.

Rask's own crew held the wrenches, as the commander had said.

None of them would look at my father.

He stood at the rail in his dinner jacket with his hands in his pockets.

He hadn't said a word since the hangar.

Quist stood two places down from him, in the front row of the gantry, with a fresh folder.

His face was gray.

Beside me, Joan checked her tablet.

"Navy sensors are live," she said. "Forty gauges on the joint alone."

"Good."

"They'll run three cycles. Surface to thirty-five thousand feet equivalent, hold, back up."

"I know."

"They'll find it on three, won't they?"

"It's the bonded joint," I said.

"It fatigues past thirty thousand feet."

"The first cycle opens the bond a hair, and the second loads it."

"The third is the one it can't hold."

"Same as the flange."

"The flange was cut to fail. The joint was never going to hold. They just needed the Navy not to look."

The commander raised a hand.

"Cycle one," she said.

The crane lowered the hull into the water.

A hiss of air came up as the tank sealed.

Gauges ticked on the screens.

Pressure climbed.

A Navy engineer read numbers aloud in a flat voice.

"Twenty thousand feet. Twenty-five. Thirty."

Keep reading free with an account. Start My Brother Called From the Ocean Floor, So I Hung Up from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.