"This is the bridge," Andrei announced. It looked like a television studio, dozens of monitor screens, assorted cryptic banks of knobs and switches, a navigator’s table with elbowed lamps and cradled telephones. Through a glassed-in wall above the monitors, the deck of the ship stretched out like a twenty-four-lane highway. There were little patches of ocean, way, way down there, looking too distant to matter much. Glancing through the windows, Laura saw that there were a pair of big cargo barges on the supertanker’s port side. They’d been completely hidden before, by the sheer rising bulk of the ship. The barges pumped their loads aboard through massive ribbed pipelines. There was a kind of uneasy nastiness to the sight, vaguely obscene, like the parasitic sexuality of certain deep-sea fish.