"Bow thruster full to port," Rania said. "Dead slow ahead. Port twenty."
The deck under her feet began, very faintly, to vibrate.
She would remember the next nine minutes for the rest of her life, and she would also, if anyone asked her, have trouble describing them, because they were made almost entirely of small numbers. Heading. Rate of turn. Speed over the ground, which was the number that told her whether the ship was going where she pointed it or where the wind wanted. The distance on the laptop screen between the ship's stern and the bow of the Aldora Spirit, which went from three hundred meters to two hundred and forty to two hundred and ten as the wind shoved the whole ship sideways down the channel even while the engine and the tugs fought to turn her, and then held at two hundred and ten, and held, and then, very slowly, began to open up again, two-twenty, two-thirty. She gave orders and Bautista repeated them and the helmsman, a young man with a wispy mustache whose knuckles were white on the small steering wheel, repeated them back. Port ten. Midships. Starboard ten. Slow ahead. Evangeline, more weight. Bayou Rose, ease off, ease off, now stop. She talked to the tugs in the same voice she used to tell Yasmin to brush her teeth. She did not raise her voice once. She had learned on her first ship, from a German master who never raised his, that fear on a bridge travels faster than any order.
She was afraid. She was very afraid. She kept it in her stomach, where it belonged, and let it go no higher.
At seven-oh-nine, the bow of the Corvina Star came up into the wind. The ship stopped sliding sideways. The tugs held her there, head to the weather, the engine turning slow ahead just enough to keep her from going backward, and the rain hammered on the windows and the wind howled in the mast, and the ship sat in the middle of the channel like a horse that has finally stopped bucking and stands, trembling, with its head down.
"Steady," Rania said. "Steady as she goes."
"Steady," said the helmsman, and his voice cracked, and somebody on the bridge laughed, once, a shaky, startled laugh, and then everybody was quiet again.
Bautista took off his reading glasses and wiped them on the inside of his raincoat, slowly, and put them back on. "Captain Mansour," he said. "If you would like coffee, I will make you coffee."
"Captain Bautista," she said, without taking her eyes off the screen, "I would like coffee more than I have ever wanted anything in my life."
She picked up the terminal radio.