“I don’t see anybody out there,” Darren said.

There was nothing but the green and lace waves stretching out into the haze.

They continued onto the larger foredeck. Rows of deckchairs were tumbled over each other. No one seemed to care to clean any of the mess now. Two small semicircular bars rung around a large hot tub, sitting half empty and dead. They walked to the railing and looked out.

The ship was moving, Travis thought. The sun was at a different angle tonight.

I hope this sunset doesn’t bring more surprises, he thought.

“There’s a lounge there,” Corrina said. “Let’s check it out.”

They walked through the glass doors into a gleaming white piano bar. The room seemed more orderly than the exterior deck. The heavy furniture had been less upset. The salon had most of its ceiling as glass, open to the sky. The blue of the bar and tables, the black of the grand piano, gleamed immaculately in the light filling the room through the glass ceiling and walls.

“Play something,” Darren said.

Travis sat at the piano. He knew only how to play rockabilly style, simplified Jerry Lee Lewis. He couldn’t play something so happy, so his fingers just sat on the keys for a moment.

“I don’t feel like playing, Darren,” he said. “I’m too tired.”

He saw the disappointment further sap the energy and hope from the boy.

“Travis!” the father barked in a mock rendition of Corrina’s rough voice, “Don’t bang the piano! Take a lesson before you play that thing!”

Darren brightened. Travis’s impersonation was unmistakable; the voice, accent and cadence sounding just like his ex-wife’s, but more so.

“Travis! Why do you hate my ears? Stop that banging!” Travis said, leaning his forehead in to Darren’s. “That’s what Mommy said.”

Long, long ago, he’d used jokes and impersonations to make friends, to make people laugh. To make his father laugh. It got him through high school and college. He’d become so serious at some point in his adult life, and so sad when his marriage had ended, but he always kept that part of himself for Darren. He shared laughs with his boy, almost as a secret, like his father, a living room clown, had shared with him.

“Maybe we should stay here tonight,” Corrina said, “The seats are like couches.”

“We could look at the stars,” Darren said.

Gerry and Claude sat on the wall of an indoor garden in the Atrium.

“Do you wonder what kind of world we’ll be going back to?” Gerry asked Claude.

“I try not to,” Claude said in his smooth growl. “I’d like to delay returning as much as possible, myself. Until I get to thinking what a real delay would start to look like on the Festival. I do believe we may be nostalgic for this quiet moment soon. I do believe all our possible futures will be… unpleasant.”

“I think I’ll take my unpleasantness on dry land, if I have the choice,” Gerry said.

“Dry land is a lot further away than it used to be,” Claude said, looking out at the darkened mass of refugees in the Atrium.

22

Brenda and her team worked through the night. Once the freezers had been powered, wiring other circuits in the galley was more straightforward, so she’d turned her attention to the Atrium. Then, the Chief Electrician had seemed better equipped with his knowledge of the ship to lead that effort, so she’d turned to running water.

She thought of the thousands above dependent on this water, and how, out of those thousands, there would not have been more than a handful like herself who could, from scratch, deduce the principles and working of this complex and badly damaged system and bring it back to life.

She worked solidly for close to twenty hours, along with a core crew. Colonel Warrant proved to be as helpful as he was demanding, sending good food regularly and, when they finally took break from what they considered a very successful first shift, they finished with fine cigars and Scotch.

Brenda went back to her family and slept in the loud Atrium for ten hours before returning, getting caught up by Colonel Warrant, and getting back to work, still trying to repair the water system, still trying to expand the reach of their emergency power.

As each day went by without rescue, the work took on the feel of a full-time job. The longer they were on the ship, the more they had to think ahead. As it became a full-time job, the cigars and Scotch became an end of shift ritual. The supply on board was immense, and Colonel Warrant had commandeered it, treating his invaluable engineering team to the best of the best.

While Hesse and Warrant daily added to the list of necessities for the ship, Brenda began a side project, her own idea of redundancy. There was a full tank of fresh water still to be tapped, and a seemingly endless supply of bottles packed for the three-week cruise. Still. There was a double-load of humanity aboard, and no end-date on their occupancy. She never communicated her idea to John Hesse or Colonel Warrant. It had been threatening rain all day. Brenda remembered the weather report calling for heavy storms along the coast. So she set a crew up on a water collection project. They built dozens of large catch basins topside, and used a series of hoses to collect the water in a giant reservoir down near the desalination room.

Within three days of her starting work, Hesse asked her about the vast tubs of metal, plastic and nylon scattered on the top deck.

He didn’t give his blessing to the work. But Hesse didn’t want to push his ownership of Brenda’s efforts too far. He was sensitive to the idea that the only basis for his leadership was the goodwill of everyone involved.

Then she began to tinker with the communications system. Here, the Chief Electrician aboard had little help to offer. He’d never himself worked in the radio room. The Chief Radio Officer and his staff were missing. Brenda began surveying the equipment. Doodling diagrams. Thinking about it, while working on her ‘proper’ tasks.

Brenda freelanced like this because, as they finished those first urgent tasks, and she talked with Hesse and Colonel Warrant of what work to continue with next, she was never completely in agreement with the game plan.

The ship would never move under its own power. So the only way out was through outside help. To her, it was straightforward.

“Who cares about light? What have you all got to see?” Brenda White said on the third day.

“We have thousands of people scared to death on this ship, and we don’t know how long we’re going to be stuck here. If we want to avoid panic, we need light,” Colonel Warrant said.

“Well, I’ll need access to the Theater to find the main line in.”

“Look,” Colonel Warrant said, “they’ve got that guy with the gun. If he knows about your work, who knows what he’s going to want to do. We need to keep him in the dark.”

“Except you want me to turn on his lights,” Brenda said.

“We have to take care of everybody,” Hesse spoke up. “Just find a way to get power to the Theater, and the Italian galley, and try to avoid the guy with the gun.”

“Sure, standard work,” Brenda said. “Look. Let’s think about this. This amount of wiring is days of work. Maybe weeks. If we want to get the communications going, that’s a huge project too. We need to devote time to it.”

“We need to take care of the people on this ship,” Colonel Warrant said.

“But what we could find out with radio contact could change everything.”

“How?” Warrant said. “Whether a rescue is coming today or next week, we should be preparing for the worst, and that means making this ship habitable. I’ve seen that satellite equipment, it is broken beyond repair and we’ll be wasting time trying. You told me yourself you know next to nothing about satellite receivers and we have no crew left with experience.”