The Weeping Keelson

Cold bilge water had no business smelling like rotten beef, especially forty feet below the North Sea tide line in a warship that had never cleared harbor. Halldor wedged his shoulders through the twenty-four-inch oval manhole of ballast cell three, intent on finding whatever seam Brandsk's caulkers had botched so he could drop the repair bill on their union desk before the evening whistle. Basin Two's granite cradle was freezing, the iron skin of the dreadnought Drakansk pulled the warmth straight through his woolens, and he had no desire to keep his riveting gang shivering on the dock floor for another unpaid shift over someone else's bad pitch.

"Keep that draft-flue cracked, Kolskegg," Halldor called back through the oval ring. His voice clanged flatly inside the hollow compartment. "If the caulkers left their tallow tubs uncapped again, the vapors will drop us both before we find the leak."

Outside on the staging plank, nineteen-year-old Kolskegg leaned his smudge-streaked face against the hatch coaming. The boy held the braided safety lanyard in one fist and a brass carbide lamp in the other, his knuckles raw from the basin wind. "Brandsk swore his lads drove every inch of oakum true, Master Halldor. Said if water is standing in the double bottom, it came from the culvert pumps backing up."

"Brandsk would swear a cracked steam pipe was a brass whistle if it saved his lodge ten copper marks," Halldor muttered, wriggling forward onto his stomach. "Mind the lanyard. If I give two sharp tugs, drag the air-hose clear."

The space between the Drakansk's inner floorplates and her outer hull plates gave a man thirty-six inches of clearance from bottom to ceiling, bisected every four feet by transverse floor frames. Halldor dragged his tool sack and his own carbide lantern by the brass bail, his heavy leather apron scraping against cold iron. Rivet heads stuck down from the overhead deck like blunt iron teeth. Thirty years of crawling these horizontal coffins had taught his ribs to slide over the flanges without catching, but the air here was thick, greasy, and sour. It tasted of sulfur, stale tallow, and brine that had sat too long in the dark.

Two inches of stagnant muck coated the bottom channel. Halldor unhooked his eight-ounce ball-peen hammer from his belt. An iron hull spoke in tones every certified riveter trusted more than blueprint drawings. He swung the round head against the first floor frame.

Clang.

The steel answered with a bright, singing ring that vibrated cleanly through the shaft into his palm. Solid. No air pockets, no loose shanks.

He crawled another six feet, dragging through the black sludge. The liquid felt wrong against his boiled-leather mittens. Normal bilge runoff was thin sea-seepage mixed with mineral machine oil. This slurry had the consistency of warm mutton fat, slick and curdled, clinging to his cuffs in pale grey threads.

He struck the lower flange of frame eighteen.

Tunk.

Halldor stopped. The ring had died. Instead of steel singing under hammer-blows, the iron answered with the dull, sodden thud of rotten timber.

He swung again, harder, driving the ball-peen squarely into the corner where the vertical keelson plate joined the outer skin. The hammer did not rebound. The iron felt soft, almost spongy beneath the blow, yielding a quarter-inch with a wet, squelching crunch.

Halldor raised the carbide lantern, adjusting the drip-valve until the acetylene flame flared bright and white.

The keelson was weeping.

Along twelve feet of the dreadnought’s centerline girder, the hot-rolled imperial plate was buried under a thick crust of ridged grey shells. They grew packed together like barnacles on an old harbor piling, but their shells were mottled with sickly purple veins that twitched beneath a greasy film. From the cracks between them, a thin, greenish fluid dripped steadily into the bilge channel, hissing softly wherever it touched bare metal.

Where the green droplets pooled, the one-inch iron plate had dissolved into a pitted, foaming honeycomb. The structural rivets holding the frame to the keel stood stripped of their conical heads, their shanks eroded down to pencil-thin needles of grey slag.

A sudden tremor tightened Halldor's throat. For thirty years, iron had been the fixed law of his trade: hard, stubborn, obedient only to fire and pressure. Seeing an imperial keel plate rot like wet cedar shook the ground under his boots.

He leaned closer, holding the lamp beam steady. The grey crust was not dead scale. In the circle of harsh white light, tiny translucent tendrils, fringed with black barbs no thicker than horsehairs, uncoiled from the mouths of the calcified shells. They waved blindly in the cold draft from the limber holes, greedily lapping at the greasy slurry on the floor.

"Kolskegg," Halldor called, keeping his voice level.

"Aye, Master?" The apprentice's voice sounded small, muffled by the twenty feet of iron channel between them.

"Reach into the gear crate. Fetch the heavy tongs and a spare tallow tin. The round iron one with the screw lid."

"Did you find Brandsk's bad seam?"

"No," Halldor said. "The caulkers didn't do this."

He unclipped his cold chisel from the tool roll. Resting the hardened edge against the base of an isolated barnacle cluster, he struck the chisel butt with a single measured tap of his hammer.

The entire six-foot carpet of grey shells shuddered.

A wet hiss rose from the keelson channel. The mass flexed outward, contracting toward the center like a tightened muscle. From dozens of jagged shell apertures, black-barbed tendrils shot into the air, whipping furiously against the iron ribs. A jet of foul green liquid sprayed from the fissure, spattering against Halldor's leather sleeve. The oil-soaked hide began to bubble and smoke instantly, giving off the sharp reek of burning horn.

Halldor did not flinch. He wedged an iron drift-pin under the loosened cluster, levered the two-inch mass off the corroded frame with a crisp pry of steel, and caught the calcified lump squarely on his flat chisel blade.

The detached organism writhed, its pale underbelly oozing green slime that hissed against the cold chisel. Halldor fished the empty tallow tin from his apron pocket, rolled the creature inside, and jammed the iron screw-cap down until the threads bit tight.

The proof was his. No naval inspector or yard superintendent could claim this was ordinary rust or dockyard carelessness. Something living was eating the crown's dreadnought from the inside out, turning forty tons of armor into porous chalk.

A low, metallic groan reverberated through the double bottom.

Halldor froze on his knees. His palms were pressed flat against the floorplates, and through the iron he felt a slow, rhythmic pulse, like water surging through a locked pipe.

Then came the impact.

Thump.

A heavy blow struck the watertight bulkhead separating cell three from cell four. It was not the light rap of an inspector's hammer or the ping of settling rivets. It was a massive, deadened thud that rattled the loose tools in Halldor's sack.

Silence followed, thick and suffocating.

Then, from the dark void behind the sealed iron wall, came a slow, wet scraping, the sound of something broad and heavy dragging itself across the bottom plates.