Chapter 3. Cracks in the Crew

The Santa Clara's hold didn't open quickly or easily. Three centuries on the bottom had done their work: the stern planking had collapsed inward during the wreck itself, burying the main cargo under a mass of beams, ballast stone, and what had once been bulkheads, now fused into a shapeless mass by silt and coral growth stronger than any cement.

Leyla Farouk spent three hours at depth setting charges with the precision of someone excising a tumor rather than blasting an obstacle. Each charge was calculated to shift exactly what needed shifting and not a gram more — an excessive blast could collapse the remaining hull and bury the gold under tons of rubble permanently, this time with no hope of recovery.

"Three minutes," she said over the dive comm, rising to a safe distance. "Everyone in position?"

Voices confirmed one by one. Eva and Owen waited at the entrance to the hold, on the side from which the blast should open a passage rather than seal one. Morten stayed topside, watching radar for uninvited guests — after Hale's visit, no one considered the horizon empty by default anymore.

An underwater explosion doesn't look like a surface one. It's more a blow — a soundless pressure wave that squeezes the chest, followed by a cloud of silt rising so fast that for a few seconds visibility drops to zero, and all that's left is trust in your own calculations and the people beside you.

When the silt settled, the passage was open.

What lay beyond it made even Eva, who had seen dozens of wrecks over her career, freeze with the regulator in her mouth a beat longer than usual. The Santa Clara's hold didn't just contain gold — it was packed with it: bars stamped with the crown, coins that had sifted through rotted crate boards over the centuries into a layer thick enough on the hold floor to look less like a treasure and more like a seabed entirely paved in metal.

"God," Owen said, and there wasn't a trace of his usual irony in it.

But between the gold and open water stretched a narrow, broken passage — part of the hull still holding together on faith alone, and it would take just one wrong move, one snagged tank, to bring down what little was still holding the collapsed beams aloft. Raising the cargo would have to be done by hand, in small batches, threading each bar through a gap that barely admitted a person in full gear.

That meant not hours of work. It meant days. Possibly weeks — against the forty-eight hours Hale had given them before Meridian Salvage stopped considering itself bound by politeness.

Disagreement started that same evening, when the crew gathered on deck to work out the real timeline.

"At this rate of extraction," Morten said, running a finger down his calculations, "we need at least twelve days to bring up even half the cargo. And that's if the passage doesn't collapse again on its own."

"We don't have twelve days," Leyla said. "We might not have twelve hours once Hale realizes we're not leaving."

"Then what are you proposing?" Morten asked, sharper than he probably intended. "Risk the passage for speed? One wrong charge and we don't just lose time — we bury the entire gold under tons of stone forever, and then it won't matter who kicks us out first."

"I'm proposing we not sit here calculating perfect safety while Hale's people bring in a second ship," Leyla shot back. "I didn't set those charges so we could spend twelve days carrying gold out with a teaspoon."

"Your job was to open the passage, not decide how fast we risk our lives afterward," Morten said.

"Enough," Eva said, before the argument could grow further. "We're not going to solve this by shouting at each other. Morten's right that the passage is fragile. Leyla's right that we have less time than we'd like. So we work at a reasonable pace — not the first speed, not the second, somewhere between."

No one looked entirely satisfied with the compromise, but no one argued further either — at least not out loud.

Saskia hadn't said a word through the entire exchange, unusual for someone normally opinionated about anything touching deadlines and risk. Eva noticed it only after the others had dispersed, when she found Saskia alone at the rail, staring at her tablet with an expression that had nothing to do with geology or explosives.

"Trouble with the numbers?" Eva asked, stepping closer.

Saskia flinched — barely, but enough for Eva to catch it — and quickly closed whatever had been open on the screen before answering.

"Just recalculating the expedition budget against the delay. Twelve extra days is twelve extra days of fuel, provisions, and equipment depreciation we're renting, by the way, not for free."

"That bad?"

"Bad enough that if we don't stay within a reasonable timeline," Saskia said, and for the first time on the entire expedition something like real anxiety, not professional concern, crept into her voice, "part of this expedition's funding stops being my problem and starts being the problem of people I'd rather not deal with twice."

She didn't elaborate on what she meant by "people I'd rather not deal with twice," and Eva, worn down by a long day and an even longer argument between Leyla and Morten, didn't press further — a mistake she would remember later, under considerably less convenient circumstances.

"We'll manage," she said instead. "We always have."

Saskia gave her a long, strangely appraising look, as if weighing whether to say something more, then simply nodded.

"Of course," she said. "We'll manage."

She said it in a way that, had Eva been a little less tired and a little more attentive at that moment, would have registered not as agreement but as doubt, carefully hidden beneath an even, professional tone. But she didn't hear it, and the night passed quietly — as quietly as any night can pass on a ship anchored in waters that three governments and one private army of lawyers had already claimed as their own.

Before dawn, Leyla woke Eva with a knock on the cabin bulkhead — three short raps that had come to mean, on the Kestrel, one thing: check the radar, don't ask questions, just go.

On Morten's screen glowed a single point, moving in a slow, deliberate course along the edge of the designated quadrant — not straight toward them, but not away either, the particular tack of a ship on patrol rather than passage.

"Second Meridian Salvage vessel," Morten said, not looking up. "Smaller than the one Hale came on. Fast. Looks more like a patrol boat than a salvage ship."

"They're not salvaging," Eva said. "They're watching."

She stared at the dot longer than necessary, trying to guess from speed and course alone whether this was routine patrol of a claimed zone or something more targeted, aimed specifically at the Kestrel. Radar couldn't give a definite answer. But the mere appearance of a second vessel, barely a day after Hale's visit, was itself an answer to the question the crew would have preferred not to ask aloud: the forty-eight hours of politeness were running out, and politeness was running out with them.

"We keep working," she said aloud, to everyone now gathered on deck, roused by the same knock on the bulkheads. "We change one thing: from now on, someone's always topside at the radar, in shifts, and we halt dives at the first sign the boat's changing course toward us. No exceptions, even if it means dropping a line with half a load of bars still on it."

Leyla nodded first; Morten a beat later, still carrying a shadow of yesterday's irritation but with no real objection. Saskia said nothing, watching the horizon where the patrol boat held its slow course, as if tracing an invisible line across the water that no one aboard the Kestrel was meant to cross.