thymoit
Star
- Joined
- May 11, 2009
Chapter 1 - The Wreck of the Cassandra
The Cassandra was a beautiful ship, a swan among ducklings, twenty meters in length, two upper decks and one below. She normally ignored the waves cutting through them. However, the ocean is a bitch and the Cassandra couldn’t ignore the storm that was upon her. The storm swells ran ten meters in height and the normally graceful lady was surging up and down like a porn star riding cock. Down in the engine room, Trent rolled with the bumpy ride. This wasn’t his first storm, or his worst. It would make the top three, but the Cassandra was a big girl. She could handle a rough and wet ride better than his father's fishing boat that he’d cut his teeth on. The Cassandra's engines were purring away, and they were far from any shore. They’d be fine. He was keeping his eye on the bilge pumps. They were taking on a little water, but nothing the pumps couldn’t happen.
The first warning sign was a thump beneath his feet as they troughed out, and the Cassandra plunged down onto her lover the sea. The thump was wrong. Very wrong. Cassandra should be doing a smooth up and down on Neptune’s cock, not the bump and grind. They’d either had the bad misfortune to hit floating garbage like a discarded cargo container, a whale... or they were shallowing out. Trent was still processing this when Cassandra plunged down again and did another bump and grind on something. Once could have been something floating in the water. Twice was landfall. He knew Captain Joeff was a asshole who cared more about schmoozing the clients than the crew, but how big a moron did you have to be in this day of GPS and depth gauges to run the ship into the shoals?
Trent sprinted for the intercom. “Bridge! What the fuck is – ”
The Cassandra plunged down hard and instead of grind there as slam as she bottomed out. Trent was thrown bodily across the engine room and slammed into a pipe. The Cassandra didn’t rise again. Instead she wallowed back and forth in a way that no ship her size should do. That wasn’t a sunken container half-filled with water or a whale. They’d run aground, or at least into an underwater sea mount or reef. Trent picked himself up feeling like he'd just been tackled by a gorilla. He rushed to check the gauges, but halfway there everything went dark. Holy fuck, they’d just lost power! He’d only been Second Engineer for a few weeks, but he still knew his way around the engine room. He felt his way through the room in the pitch dark and found the emergency locker. He opened it, grabbed a life jacket, and donned it with the ease of long practice. Fortunately, it was one of the fancy life jackets with a built in light. He turned it on and spun the wheel on the watertight hatch to the belowdecks corridor. Even when he spun the wheel all the way the hatch didn’t want to open. He put his weight into it and pushed the door open a crack.
Water flooded through the gap. The water pressure almost slammed the door shut and he had to strain against it to force the door wide enough for him push his way through. Fear gave him strength. If he stayed in the engine room, he would die. He wasn’t going down without a fight. He pushed through and into a corridor already up to his knees with water and rapidly growing deeper. As he pushed his way forward the Cassandra rose up again with a swell. Instead of coming down she listed starboard and fell over onto her side. Trent was thrown about again, but he splashed down in water. He picked himself up to find that tall narrow corridor was now slanted as the Cassandra foundered on the shoals. That was bad. The beautiful girl was going down fast. The corridor was now slanted, making the water up to his thighs, but he pushed himself along. He had to get out of the belowdecks, up to the deck, escape... No, and save the passengers. The first duty of any sailor in a shipwreck. Save the passengers first.
Trent waded through the warm rising seawater. Step one get out from the belowdecks. He reached a rent in the hull and pushed past, more swimming than wading and managed to make to a flooded stairwell and up to the maindeck. He was in the passenger quarters. Some of the doors were open, some were closed. Some passengers were just milling about without their lifejackets. Where was the crew helping them to the lifeboats?
"Everyone! Don your lifejackets and make for the lifeboat at the prow of the ship." Because the stern was already sinking. Some listened, others didn't, but he started helping them all to the prow. Where was the rest of the fucking crew?!