"Twenty feet isn't enough. If one of those lines parts under that kind of load, the end comes back along the line of pull and then it whips, and it can cover the whole dock out to forty, fifty feet either side, and it'll take a man's leg off at the knee. I want every one of your people off the face of the wharf. Get them behind the line shed, or behind something steel. Nobody in front of the bollards, nobody between the bollards and the ship, nobody standing in a straight line with any of those lines. Don't touch the eyes. Don't try to throw anything off. I'll handle the lines from the ship."
"Copy. Copy, Pilot. Everybody back of the shed. Beau! Tommy! Back of the shed, now, leave it, leave it!"
She came around the last corner of the storage lot and the wharf opened up in front of her, and the Corvina Star filled the whole windshield.
Up close, under the sodium lights, the ship was a wall, a sheer white cliff of steel that went up and up until it vanished into the dark of the sky, and she was moving. Not much. A few feet. But a ship that size was not supposed to move at all at the dock, and the Corvina Star was swaying, slowly, out and back, out and back, with a terrible deep groaning from the mooring lines as they came taut and eased and came taut again. There were twelve of them, thick braided synthetic ropes as big around as a man's forearm, running from the ship's high sides down to the iron bollards on the wharf, and the forward ones were stretched so tight they had gone thin, and they were humming. Up near the bow, one of them was smoking where it ran through a steel fairlead on the ship's side, pale wisps blowing off in the wind like breath on a cold morning.
Behind the line shed, a low corrugated metal building halfway down the wharf, she could see a cluster of men in orange vests and hard hats pressed against the wall, six or seven of them, one of them very tall, one of them holding a radio. On the open concrete where they had been standing a minute ago there was nothing but a dropped pair of work gloves.
The gangway was down near the stern, an aluminum ladder-bridge with railings that slanted from a door low in the ship's side down to the wharf, and it was moving too, its wheels scraping back and forth on the concrete with every surge of the ship. At the top of it, in the lit doorway, a Filipino seaman in an orange coverall and a life vest was waving at her with both arms.
She parked the Honda as far from the edge as she could get, grabbed her bag, and ran.
The wind hit when she was halfway to the gangway. It did not build. It arrived, all at once, like a door slamming open, a solid wall of hot air from the northwest, from the land, full of grit and leaves and the smell of wet dirt from somewhere miles away where it was already raining. It shoved her sideways two steps. Her hard hat lifted on its chinstrap. Her hijab snapped and pressed flat against the side of her face, and she was glad, in a small distant part of her brain, that she always pinned it tight on shift.
She grabbed the gangway rail and climbed. The gangway lurched under her feet, scraping, and for one second it lifted an inch off the wharf at the bottom and slammed back down. The seaman at the top grabbed her wrist and hauled her the last three steps into the doorway, and she was inside the ship, out of the wind, in a white steel corridor that smelled like diesel and paint and cooking rice, and the ship was groaning around her like something alive.
"Captain on bridge," the seaman shouted. "Elevator no good, we go stairs. Fast, Pilot!"