Stranded by Bracken MacLeod Read Free Book Online Page A

of his mind kept him up, even when he couldn’t focus his eyes or even easily keep them open. He lay in his bunk and thought about dying in his sleep.

 
    7
    He awoke with a start and a heart beating with panic as his last thought shoved past the disorientation of sleep into clarity. You will die if you sleep.
    But of course, he hadn’t. He’d merely slept. Feeling somewhat better rested but still weary and beaten, Noah pushed himself up onto his elbows and checked his wristwatch. “Figures,” he mumbled, tapping at the stopped timepiece with a fingernail. He only wore it when he was working; the rest of the time it sat in a box on his dresser where his preschool daughter coveted it. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had the battery changed. The clock on the desk across the cabin was blank. He tilted his head and saw it was unplugged.
    Climbing out of his bunk, he took a moment to orient himself. The cabin was at once familiar and alien. He felt like he’d wandered into the wrong cabin and passed out. He rubbed sleep from his eyes and tried to look out the window, hoping the haze had thinned or even cleared entirely. It hadn’t. He stared into a solid field of white that discomfited him. The fog outside mirrored that in his head, solid and impenetrable, while the brightness of it confounded him. He had to have slept at least a couple of hours, but at this time of year, and this far north, a couple of hours should have meant darkness outside. The light through his window, while filtering through fog, was bright. He couldn’t have slept until morning. Could he? Noah stood feeling unmoored and adrift. At least the sea was calm. It was too calm, in fact.
    He tried to feel the movement of the Arctic Promise with his body. He’d become accustomed to the movements of the ship beneath his feet—had his sea legs—and was conscious of the pitch of the ship and roll of waves in the same way he was conscious of his own breathing. If he stopped to think about it, it was there. If he focused on anything else, the feeling receded into the unconscious background where his brain filed the sensation somewhere between the feeling of wearing a shirt and knowing twelve came after eleven. But now, standing still and concentrating on it, he didn’t even feel the subtle movements of forward motion in calm waters. He could hear the engines. They were working, but the vessel wasn’t moving. He might as well have been standing on dry land.
    The view out the porthole window was obscured in a gray haze that showed neither depth nor movement. For a brief moment, he wondered if he was still asleep and dreaming. He tried to reason himself out of uncertainty. The presence of the frost flowers meant that the Old Man would have to slow their progress to avoid damaging the ship as the ice in the water grew thicker. The Arctic Promise had a reinforced hull but it wasn’t an icebreaker. If they went too fast, the ice would damage the ship. Noah knew they’d have to decrease their speed eventually. And in whiteout fog, moving at all was hazardous. He reminded himself that Brewster had years of experience in these seas with vessels like the Arctic Promise. He knew better than Noah how his ship would perform in all conditions. Intellectually, Noah understood that Brewster knew how it would hold together and how to proceed. But experience was a hard teacher, and Noah was certain of one thing: Brewster’s clearest thoughts were about what he wanted, and never about what that would cost anyone else.
    Noah pulled on his boots and walked out of the cabin hoping to find out where they were—and what time it was. First, however, he needed something warm to drink. Coffee had lost its appeal; he wanted the J&B Martin had offered. He headed down to the lower deck, hoping he’d catch the man in his off-rotation hours. As before, the typically busy ship was abnormally quiet.
    The door to