The iron gate of the bunker’s freight elevator locked open against the wet granite wall of Pier 14.
Julian stepped across the rain-swept quay apron, meeting Elena Rostova and Track-Walker Silas as they guided Clara’s wheelchair down the timber ramp toward the inner slipway berth. Across the broad timber bollard that divided the pier, two vessels rocked in the dark harbor swell like machines from different centuries.
On the outer berth lay Nautilus-04, sixty feet of welded charcoal-black steel streaked with yellow salt crust. Her twin Caterpillar marine diesels throbbed at a dragging fifty-eight cycles per second, and her automated embarkation pedestal blinked amber beside the locked wheelhouse door.
On the inner berth, moored ten feet away across the wet granite apron, sat the red-hulled standby harbor tug Marrow-09. Warm yellow light glowed behind her clean wheelhouse windows, and a thick black coaxial umbilical cable snaked down from Studio B’s fourth-floor waveguide chute to a directional microwave dish bolted atop her masthouse.
“Watch the flange on the iron gangplank,” Silas said, planting his brass coupler key against the lower cleat of Marrow-09’s brow. “The swell is running four feet against the pilings tonight.”
Mac Cole gripped the left frame of Clara’s wheelchair with his good right hand while bracing the dock rail with his brass spanner. Julian took the right frame. Together with Elena, they lifted the chair smoothly up the cleated gangplank onto the tug’s aft deck.
