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turbines beneath our feet, you didn’t need to know sign language to tell we were shit-scared. Our faces were screaming it out loud and clear. The edges of the hole were shiny-bright scratches in metal and inside it was as dark as diesel. The light seemed to catch sight of those scratches and say to itself, “I’m not going any further.” Fred had taped his flashlight to the barrel of the shotgun and he poked it in and shone it around. I couldn’t help thinking the hole was way too big for a rat, they didn’t need it that big, it was big enough for a human to use…
    Fred squeezed through on his belly, the flashlight beam waving in front of him. Benjamin followed and barely managed it. I said he was big, didn’t I? I lied. He was enormous. I was next. Fred had said he wanted me in front of him, supposedly because I was skinny and might be useful for getting into tricky places, but I think he wanted to keep an eye on me. I wasn’t making any secret of the fact that I was terrified, pants-brown terrified. Then again, I don’t think any one of us wasn’t. You can’t hate something enough not to be scared of it. I was carrying a shovel, its cutting edge sharp as a razor and clean as chrome, and I considered it the best weapon there was, after Fred’s shotgun. If you couldn’t cut the buggers in half with my shovel, you could flatten them.
    The other guys slid through and we found we could stand up. In the light of the flashes there was this narrow passageway spread out in front of us, rising so high above us you couldn’t see the top. The sides were reinforced with bolted girders separating the engine room from the starboard gas tank. I’ve seen this on the ship’s specs. The gas tanks (fuel tanks, whatever you like to call them) take up the best part of the stern section, close to a billion gallons. There’s the engine room and the turbines sorta run through under the tanks out to the propellers. The passageway is in fact a safety precaution. If one of the tanks should decide to rupture, it gives us about an hour’s grace to get the fuck out of here before we drown in gas. It runs for the best part of a mile toward the stern. The turbines were even louder in there, kinda echoing in the confined space and getting through our ear-defenders and making our ears sing. I felt sorta dizzy. And while I was feeling dizzy, an odd thought struck me, kicked me when I was down, so to speak. Why, if so many rats had been at work on the hole, were there no remains, not one corpse? Had they cleaned up after themselves? It seemed unlikely.
    Fred prodded me forwards. I had been elected to take point, about which I should have been proud, but I could only think it put me first in the firing line if anything went wrong. I don’t know why, but I was beginning to imagine the rats as an enemy army under a genius general who was steering us exactly where he wanted us. God knows, we should credit animals with more intelligence than we do. Remember when those whales attacked the ship last year? I didn’t see it myself but people who did said the things were actually throwing themselves against the sides and knocking themselves silly. People said, “How dumb can you get?”, but you put yourselves in the whales’ places. What if this huge iron and steel monster came flying over your home? I’d try to beat the crap out of it if I was them. The best defence is sheer terror, if you get my drift.
    I mean, these rats had survived down here for several years with little or no food. I can’t believe they made it up to the mess or the dining-hall or the food stores or the greenhouses, but then again, who knows? Clearly they had something going for them, something that kept them organised and alive, something that ordered them to bite through solid steel until they died.
    “I thought they were supposed to steal babies out of cabins when their mothers weren’t looking. Isn’t that the story?” I ventured. Charlie had filled my glass