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Frank invites their local department liaison back to the Geosciences office to discuss what the crew had found from the boat. The equipment packed up, the agents warm and on dry land, if a bit smelly from river gunk, Rizzo suggests they order out for lunch so they can concentrate on the case. Sitting in the conference room, in between mouthfuls of pastrami, he asks Kordecki, "Okay, what'd you make of those chips?"
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Vince twirls a plastic fork. "Looks like the whats left of my Gran-dad's old car." He munches some food as he thinks. Rust on a boat was very unuasual. Maybe the Boat had just been to rust out to float on much farther. He grabs for the files on the Boat inspections. Rust damage might have been recorded.
Might not. Obviously this boat was pretty unsafe.
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The flakes are powdery, now that they're dry. And they feel old. Like dug it up out of a firepit old. Nothing like the hatch Vince went through, or the solid handrail that caught his regulator.
Vince wastes some more time reading what he's already read twice before.
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Frank examines the flakes. They looked like he felt. "The rest of the boat...inside...was it in as bad a shape as this stuff here?" he asks Patolli. It was like the exterior had rot...err, make that rusted? Damn boats. People ought not be in the water, any damn way. Fish are crazy, for one.
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"Look I can guess at this or I can head back to my office, use my equipment and see what I come up with. I also have an anomaly in the boats booking history to follow up with." Kordecki says shortly with real strength to it.
"Did we get any pictures down there, where there any obvious signs of failure?"
I mean really.... rust. This is making he cold cases look exciting.
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As they're handled, unlike rust which cracks and flakes, these now disintegrate like chalk, or charcoal.
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"Errr," Frank starts, thinking of the paperwork. "Patolli," Rave Boy oughtta know, he looks the sort, "Don't we have such equipment for Kordecki to use here? Easier than fillin' out a' 894 fer this pile of..." Frank looks at the now crumbled ashes of his precious, "Shit."
Frank has another bite of his sandwich. It was damn good.
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"I'm sure we do, Some where." Vince tosses a paper plate the catch the chalky ick. "Inside, I was not able to get far before I met the river bed. The boat was buried. I don't recall seeing that stuff inside."
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"Really filled with river bed? I am not certain, but I thought it would take years to fill with silt and mud.... interesting."
Kordecki heads over to their lab. He plops down behind a microscope and careful places an intact chip for examination. Determined to make a good first impression, he focus intently. Better to work hard at first so everyone assumes you got all your shit in one sock.
Science
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Kordecks sees Officially Interesting Shit®.
The chips, which initially may have been thought to be rust, are still in their cubic molecular structure; they aren't flaking and shearing like a crystalline structure.
They're just... disintegrating.
The edges show extreme decay, as if their half-lives have been rapidly accelerated by a factor of thousands.
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