Angry Moon

Chapter 1b

There was a small knot of passengers at the bow, crowded up against the railing, but they didn't block their view of the wind turbines towering above them up ahead, one of them directly in their path. "Shit!" said Eddie with feeling. "This could be bad."

The ferry was still turning and the huge steel structure was slipping slowly to the side, but not fast enough. The ship gave a lurch as the engines were put into reverse, but their forward movement was scarcely affected. "They say a supertanker takes twenty miles to stop," said Ben, staring at the wind turbine as it grew menacingly ahead of them. "I wonder how long a cross channel ferry takes to stop?"

The passengers at the bow began to back away, some of them running for the imagined safety of the nearest hatch inside. Ben and Eddie merely took a firm hold of the handrail of the staircase leading up to the next deck. "I know we're in little real danger," said Eddie, "but I still find myself wishing for a life jacket."

"This ship and the turbine both have vertical sides," agreed Ben. "The impact, if there is one, will be above the waterline, and it'll be a sliding contact. The turbine might suffer some serious damage, but the worst that'll happen to the ship is that there'll be a long stretch of hull in need of a new coat of paint. You're right, though. The brain seeks reassurance."

A woman standing nearby stared at him and nodded vigorously, then turned to share Ben's words with her friends. They looked relieved for a moment, but the moment they looked back at the turbine Eddie saw the fear return to their faces. The thing was just too huge, just too tall, like a giant out of a fairy tale. Until you got this close to one, it was impossible to understand just how gigantic they were. A vast, overwhelming presence that could only mean bad things for anything that dared to approach.

The impact, when it came, though, was just as Ben had said it would be. A steel staircase running up the side of the turbine's base was torn to ruin as the ferry brushed past it, and then the shaft of the turbine itself came into contact with the ferry's hull. The ship rocked with the impact and the two men held on tight to prevent themselves from being thrown from their feet. Then the ship steadied itself, although it sat at a slight angle in the water as it continued to move on.

     The scream of friction as the two steel surfaces rubbed against each other was deafening, but neither structure seemed to suffer any serious damage. It might have been different if they'd been passing the turbine on the side in which the blades were facing, since the ship's highest structures were almost at the same level as the downward pointing blade, but luck was with them and they were on the turbine's other side. A young man was trying to say something to his wife, they saw, but the din was so great that she couldn't hear him, even though she leaned closer so that her ear was right next to his mouth. They could only wait, hands over their ears, until the ferry and the turbine parted at last, the ship righting itself to float upright in the water once more.

A dozen different conversations broke out at once as silence fell, and almost everyone was pointing their phone cameras at the receding turbine, one side of which, they saw, was now buckled inwards and gleaming where the paint had been stripped from the freshly exposed steel.

"I'm no structural engineer," admitted Ben, "But I reckon they'll be wanting to take a look at that. The structure's been seriously weakened. Looks like it might buckle and fall in a high wind."

"Looks expensive," agreed Eddie. "What about the ship?" He looked over the side, trying to see the damage. "I can't see anything. I would imagine they make ships stronger than wind turbines. They move, after all, and carry passengers."

Ben nodded. "The only danger, I think, will be if the hull plates have separated, letting water in. I'm afraid my knowledge of ship design is sorely inadequate. So long as we're not taking on water, though, we should be okay." He looked ahead. There was nothing but open water ahead of them now, and the engines were put back into forward gear as the bridge crew tried to get the ship out of danger. "Quite an adventure, all in all. Something to tell the grandkids about. I don't imagine we'll ever find out what happened. Someone on the bridge fell asleep, probably, or the ship's navigation developed a nasty glitch. These things happen, after all, and more often than people like to think."