“The bridge was mostly empty when it started,” said Zara Paldar, one of the survivors of the Maria Segunda, during her debrief. “Captain Nájar showed up just a few minutes before and was reviewing something on her board. I have no idea why she was there, because the entire crew was supposed to be asleep.”
But it seems, at least according to Paldar, no one slept well that night. Something made them all uneasy, or so it seemed in hindsight. Or maybe, as one scholar suggested later, they were all so excited to be on Madreperla near the mysterious crater, that they simply couldn’t close their eyes.
Paldar’s debrief goes on for a long time, describing details of the ship and who stood where and what happened when. But the pertinent information to this project comes almost an hour in as she describes the maelstrom.
It rattled the ground, like an earthquake almost. And the captain was aware that we were on an ice shelf, so she was afraid we would tumble into the crater. She gave the order to hover the ship before the ice shelf collapsed, but the force of the engine exhaust melted part of the ice shelf. It fell apart, with large chunks of it falling into the water in the crater, splashing against the sides, and surprising us.
We thought the blackness we had seen was the darkness of a deep hole, not the edges of water. We thought the water started several meters below the rim of that crater.
We were surprised by that. We were surprised by a lot of things.
The maelstrom started from one of those splashes. A dagger of ice plunged into that water, and then an eddy started and it grew bigger and bigger, rising out of the crater.
By then, the captain had given the order to return to orbit, but the maelstrom engulfed us.
We’re not supposed to hear anything small that hits the ship, but we could hear this, banging and clattering and slamming against us as if trying to get in.
Then there was the high-pitched hum, the strain on the engines, the tension in the body of the ship itself.
It felt like the ship would vibrate apart, and I thought for a while—what seemed like a while—that it would.
We were yanking our way out, like you would if your foot was caught in a vise. We were trying to pull ourselves upward, but that vise was tugging downward.
There was yelling—we had to yell, because the pounding and the hum and the vibration made it almost impossible to hear—but at the same time everyone seemed really calm.
That was Captain Nájar. She and First Officer Chandy, they acted like they had done this a thousand times before. They barked orders, and we followed them, and it kept us focused.
When the ship separated from the maelstrom, we zoomed upward and out so fast that the captain was worried we wouldn’t be ready to launch into orbit. But we did, somehow, even though the ship was damaged. Even though the ship probably shouldn’t have survived it.
That separation—it wasn’t easy and it wasn’t smooth. It was almost like the maelstrom let go. One moment we were being pulled downward, and the next, we were propelled forward, the way you are when someone is holding you back and they let go, but you’re not ready for that release, and you stagger forward much too fast.
It felt like a contest of wills. We wanted out more than it wanted us.
That’s how it seemed to me. Like we fought a live thing. And won.
Zara Paldar was not the only one who makes that analogy. Marina Vasilu, an engineer who was the only survivor of the Illiana, which broke apart in orbit after its encounter with the maelstrom, told the rescuers who pulled her from the escape pod:
Get us out of here! It’s trying to kill us! It wants to destroy us!
She said nothing else about her experience, and refused to talk about it ever again.
The handful of survivors all described noise and pounding and the incredible force of the maelstrom.
The Gabriella probably experiences the noise and pounding as well. The extreme pull of the maelstrom most likely tugs at the ship from all directions. The water and debris scour the exterior, first tearing the shields and then gouging into the ship herself.
If Ferguson remains true to form, he is calm on the bridge. He is probably yelling instructions at his crew due to the noise, although the interior noise might not be as loud on the Gabriella. The main engines are already shut down, and the smaller engines do not make the same kind of sounds.
The infinity shape probably twists and bends, maybe even tears apart. The Gabriella will seal any severed sections, but if the ship’s exterior has too many holes, the ship will not be able to respond quickly enough to stop a full environmental failure.
Has Ferguson required his crew to suit up before they entered the atmosphere? He hasn’t done that in the past, so most likely not. By the time there is the first sign of trouble, the chances for suiting up are probably gone.
Maybe some of the crew—those who are off-duty—run for the escape pods, but everyone who ever served with Ferguson doubts that.
“Giles liked people who faced problems head on, not people who ran from them,” Imelda told me, and she was not the only one.
“The one thing I can guarantee,” said Richard Hessecord, who served with Ferguson on other vessels, “is that everyone was working their tails off to the very end.”
The Gabriella has enough crew members that each could patch a certain area, while others pour more power to the engines, maybe even try to run the small engines and the large one at the same time. Someone is probably boosting the shields.
But the Gabriella is being spun around inside the gigantic storm, being buffeted by extreme winds her shields are not built for, and being pummeled by water, debris, and metal fragments.
Most likely, say the experts (and the judges at three of the inquests), the ship breaks apart before her exterior scours off. But there is no way to know this. Maybe the exterior of the ship simply vanishes, leaving the bridge crew—maybe the entire crew—open to the elements.
In those conditions, the human body will last for perhaps fifteen seconds. Fifteen seconds sounds like a short time, but it is hellishly long as water whips your face, ice and rock sting your skin, and wind pulls your limbs apart. You cannot breathe, not just because of the water, but the wind makes breathing impossible as well.
You are not falling but you are not floating either. The wind holds you in whatever position it wants you in, until it disassembles you bit by bit.
No one has ever lived through this. No one has come back to report.
We can only assume, based on knowledge of human anatomy, knowledge of the ways wind strikes the body, knowledge of water spouts and wind-born debris, that—unless you fall unconscious as you tumble out of what remains of the ship—your last fifteen seconds are the most painful and terrifying of your entire life.
This is not an easy death. There is no easing into unconsciousness. Your lungs fill, your chest hurts, your eyes bulge, you swallow everything coming at you, and you cannot draw breath.
You are alone in this maelstrom. Even if your shipmates tumble out of the ship beside you, you cannot see them or hear their cries. You might not be able to hear your own cries. You might not even know you’re yelling. Or you might not be yelling at all, in this last desperate struggle to survive.
Do you wish for death or are you clawing at what surrounds you, trying to find purchase, maybe thinking you can get back into the ship, that someone will find you and pull you to safety?
All that is clear—not to you, but to us, and to all those inquests—is in a situation like that, as extreme as that maelstrom was, no ship will survive. No human will survive.
Humans will be broken into bits as small as the bits of dirt that spin inside this maelstrom, and even if those bits are carried away from Nájar Crater and fall on the ground, they will be impossible to recover.
The Gabriella is forever lost, as her crew is forever lost, as her story is forever lost.
What happened to her, and we can only guess, belongs to her alone. No matter how hard we search, we cannot find answers. Only more questions.