Chapter One — Yaz
The light in La Paz at six in the morning has a particular color, somewhere between rust and honey, and Yaz Cordero had learned a long time ago that it lasted about eleven minutes before the sun cleared the hills and turned everything the flat white of an interrogation room. She had the camera up for all eleven of them.
"Departure day," she said to it, low, walking backward down the dock so she could keep the Corriente in frame. "Ninety-one feet of steel, a diesel smell you will taste for a week, and a crew list that reads like somebody built a personality test out of people. Let's meet them."
She swung the camera without breaking stride, the way she'd learned to on rigs before this — never stop moving, let the wobble read as verité instead of what it actually was, which was a woman who'd rather be doing anything with her hands than standing still with them.
Bram Oquendo was first up the gangway, which made sense, since Bram had been aboard since four a.m. running continuity checks on gear he'd already checked twice the night before. He had a Pelican case in each hand and a third one wedged under his chin, and he was talking to nobody in particular about a CTD sensor that had thrown an odd salinity reading in the shakedown two days ago — three-tenths of a percent off, nothing, noise — except Bram didn't believe in noise, not really, not until he'd personally interrogated it and made it confess to being nothing.
"Bram," Yaz said. "Camera."
He looked up, startled, like the lens had appeared out of the fog rather than been eighteen inches from his face for the last four minutes, and the case under his chin slid. He caught it against his hip with a motion that looked practiced only because he'd dropped that exact case at least six times before and this was simply the seventh iteration of the recovery.
"Sorry — sorry, is this — are we rolling?"
"We've been rolling."
"Oh." He considered the implications of this with visible effort, decided there weren't any worth pursuing, and went back to the sensor. "It's probably a calibration drift. I want to check it against the backup unit before we're forty miles out and it's academic."
"Very few things are academic once you're forty miles out," Yaz said, to the camera more than to him, and moved on.
William Wolfgang Talbot came up next, and you could tell from thirty feet that his duffel had been packed by a man who alphabetized his own toiletries. It had a brass buckle on the strap, worn smooth at the edges the way a thing gets when it's been touched by the same hand ten thousand times, and stamped into it, small and formal, three letters: W.W.T.
"Morning, Bill," Yaz said, purely as an act of scientific inquiry.
William stopped so fast his duffel kept going for a second before the strap caught it. "Why would you call me Bill?"
"It's a nickname. People do it."
"Do I look like a bill?" He said this the way another man might say do I look like a criminal, genuinely wounded, genuinely certain the accusation had legs. "It's William. The whole thing. Every time."
"Every time," Yaz agreed, and got it on camera, because she would need this footage later, possibly for evidence, possibly for a highlight reel at whatever function they had for people like William Wolfgang Talbot when they finally, inevitably, snapped.
"And it's not short for anything you're going to guess," he added, apropos of a question nobody had asked out loud, which told Yaz this was a conversation he had with himself more than with other people. "The middle name. I know what you're all doing. I know there's a pool."
There was, in fact, a pool. Yaz had eleven dollars in it on Ansgar, for no reason except that she liked how it sounded when she imagined Solá, of all people, ever having to confirm it.
Heath Trevithick didn't come up the gangway so much as arrive at the top of it already mid-sentence, having apparently started talking to the dockhand below sometime around dawn and simply continued talking as he climbed, the dockhand left behind like a stage a rocket had cleared.
"— because the Spanish already had a version of it, is the thing nobody teaches," he was saying, to Yaz, to the camera, to the gulls, it was never entirely clear which audience Heath was performing for since as far as Yaz could tell the answer was all of them, equally, forever. "San Elmo's fire on a ship's mast, and every sailor from here to Cádiz knew exactly what it meant even though not one of them could've told you a volt from a valve. They just knew: charge moves, and when it moves somewhere it isn't supposed to, you pay attention."
"Good morning to you too," Yaz said.
"It is," Heath said, entirely sincere, and clapped Bram on the shoulder hard enough to nearly send the last Pelican case over the rail, then went below without any apparent awareness that he'd said something that sounded, at six in the morning, on a boat, like the opening line of a much longer speech he intended to deliver at some point over the coming weeks whether anyone asked for it or not.
Amaleto Vintimilla came up last of the science crew, unhurried, a canvas tote over one shoulder that Yaz happened to know held three different offline reference texts she didn't trust any shipboard database to have loaded correctly. She paused at the top of the gangway and looked back at La Paz for a second — not sentimentally, Yaz thought, more like a woman doing a final inventory of a room before she left it — and then came aboard with a small nod to no one that somehow still managed to look like she was granting the ship permission to exist.
"Morning," she said to Yaz, warm, easy, the kind of warm that made you feel good for about four seconds before you remembered you hadn't actually told her anything yet for her to be warm about.
"Morning. Sleep okay?"
"Wonderfully," Amaleto said, and smiled, and the smile did not reach any further than exactly her mouth.
Captain Solá was already on the bridge and had been for an hour, and Yaz didn't bother filming him going up, because Solá going up the gangway wasn't an event, it was a fact that had already happened before anyone else's day began. Chief, his dog, sat at the rail above like a figurehead somebody had carved a little too well, tongue out, tail going, radiating an approval of the entire morning that seemed both unearned and completely correct.
Nobody could find the cat.
This produced eleven minutes of a specific, low-grade shipboard panic — not real fear, more the performance of fear people do around something they already suspect will resolve itself — Bram checking every open case on deck on the theory that Curiosity might have folded herself into one, William insisting loudly that cats did not, as a rule, disembark voluntarily and therefore the search should be systematic, Amaleto quietly checking the places a cat would actually go rather than the places a nervous crew imagined one might, until Bram came up from the wet lab two decks down holding her against his chest like a man surrendering, and she looked out at all of them with the flat, unbothered patience of a creature who had never once considered herself lost.
"She was on the salinity bench," Bram said. "Sitting on the sensor."
"The one that's drifting?"
"The one that's drifting."
Nobody thought anything of that at the time. Yaz got it on camera anyway, because you never knew.
Dinner that first night was in the mess below, seven plates and Chief under the table working the floor like it owed him money, and Solá did not sit down with them — took a tray up to the bridge instead, the way Yaz had already heard he always did, some rule about a captain who eats alone and a crew who doesn't wonder why. It left an odd, table-shaped gap at the head of things that nobody filled, though Heath came closest to filling it just by volume.
He was good at this part. Yaz would give him that later, off the record, to the camera, in a tone she'd never use to his face: whatever else Heath Trevithick was doing on this boat — and three days in, nobody, including apparently Solá, seemed entirely sure what that was — he was very good at a dinner table. He had a story about the Grand Canyon's missing red dust half-loaded before the first course was cleared, something about a plateau and a discharge and where all that color had actually gone, and Amaleto shut it down at the third sentence with a single question about erosion rates that should have ended it, and somehow, by dessert, didn't.
"You watch too much television," William told Bram at one point, apropos of a sensor calibration joke that had somehow become a referendum on Bram's media diet, and Yaz, without looking up from her plate, said, in a voice that landed exactly as flat as it needed to:
"Dude, you were just dreaming."
Three people laughed. William did not, on the grounds — stated at some length — that he did not watch that show and did not appreciate being quoted from it as though he had agreed to participate in a bit he had never consented to.
"It's a good bit, though," Yaz said.
"It's beneath the mission," William said, with total seriousness, and went back to his rice, and Yaz filed that away too, because a man who thought a joke could be beneath a mission was going to be either the funniest person on this boat or the least funny, and there was no way to know yet which.
[Cordero, personal log, unlabeled cassette, timestamp approx. 23:40]
Okay. Day one. Real talk, camera, just us.
Bram already lost an argument with a Pelican case, in public, with witnesses, and I love him, genuinely, but that man is going to end this trip having broken something expensive and having learned something important from breaking it, and I don't think those two things are related in the order he thinks they are.
William will not tell anyone his middle name and has decided this is a battle of wills he is currently winning. He is not currently winning. Nobody has asked him in four hours. He brought it up himself. Twice.
Heath talked for eleven straight minutes tonight about a canyon, a rock, and dust that isn't missing so much as "everywhere," and somehow I walked away from that conversation feeling like I owed him an apology, and I don't know what for.
Amaleto smiled at me this morning in a way that I am choosing to interpret as friendly, but if she ever smiles at me like that over a dataset I generated, I am going to throw myself into the Cayman Trough on principle.
The captain eats alone and I have decided not to ask why, because I get the feeling the answer is either extremely boring or extremely not, and I'd rather find out the hard way like everybody else on this boat apparently has to.
Cat's missing, cat's found, cat was sitting on the one sensor that's already lying to us. Probably nothing.
Everybody keep saying that.
Cordero, out.