Travis had considered searching for Gerry, but he’d realized the futility of it quickly. Gerry wouldn’t be long, and Colonel Warrant’s mission could wait another hour. He had all night to get in position. Travis wondered if Gerry had gone to the Theater. They might have lost both Gerry and the gun. Or Gerry might have made Warrant’s mission obsolete.

So Travis stayed with his family and waited. Nothing to do but wait and listen to the music.

Blue days

All of them gone

Nothing but blue skies

From now on.

The door from the deck crashed open and with it the sounds of the wind howling. In the grey silhouette was Lee Golding with Colonel Warrant over his shoulders. Lee Golding bent and jerked and tossed Warrant off to the ground. He stepped in over the body and his wife came in behind him. There were the usual handful of groups and solos spread around the lounge, and they reacted with one long, loud wordless exhalation

“That’s your Army boy,” Lee Golding said. “He wanted war. Well, he got it. For God’s sake, the rest of you be smarter than Army boy.”

Travis was on his feet moving in when he realized he was the only one.

“Take it easy, man,” Professor Claude said.

“You’re sick!” Travis said. “You’re worse than the pirates! You’ve never felt so good about yourself, have you?”

Lee Golding held the gun up, but casually.

“Note that I could kill you. I could kill your kid and your wife. Note that I do not. Yet. It will be for all of you to decide. You can stay here, and live as best you can as long as you can, and hope. If you want to kill yourself, the ocean’s out there. Don’t drag everyone into your suicides.”

A shot came from elsewhere in the salon, and the wall-length window behind Lee Golding exploded. Screams came from the two score refugees here who dove for the ground, or burrowed into the hidden couches in their booths.

Travis was on the floor and crawled on his belly back to his booth, wrapping himself over Darren and Corrina on the floor. Lee Golding was on his knee, looking for cover and the shooter. Jessica crouched behind him. He had his gun up. He didn’t know where to fire. He began to back up out the door, pushing Jessica behind him. He switched the gun to automatic fire. He rose to his feet, one arm grabbing Jessica, the other holding the gun up behind him. He fired a burst randomly. The other gun fired again, a distinct voice in the room. Lee Golding screamed as he disappeared from sight.

Gerry sprinted across the lounge, past his wife and her son, and Travis. He went out the door, scanning the deck.

The room was immediately colder as the wind filled it through the open window. Heads popped up between the booths. Gerry returned.

“He’s gone,” Gerry said. “We’d better get down to the Atrium. He could come back.”

With the howling wind, the group seemed silent as they gathered themselves together and quickly made their way from the room that had changed so quickly from a shelter to a corrupt and dangerous place.

Gerry and Claude and Travis looked at each other, and turned and went back to throw Colonel Warrant’s body to the sea. Claude and Travis picked him up while Gerry covered them with the gun. Darren and Corrina waited by the door. Darren did not cry now.

Lee and Jessica ran along in that wind, astern. The ship had grown much more dangerous for them. There was another gun. Lee Golding was no longer super-powered.

54

 

Brenda White never knew of Warrant’s plan to kill Golding. She knew only her work.

Brenda had been, for weeks, a Dr. Frankenstein, working in a dim windowless lab, more and more isolated and alone. She was a tourist on the cruise, and she felt like a tourist in this lab. Communications and power generation were far from her expertise. She was writing freshman Kirchhoff diagrams trying to get the best bang for the buck from the emergency generators. It wasn’t much.

She wondered if the there was a Nobel Prize in Foraging and Scavenging Unknown Technology.

After the initial epic work on power and water, she’d devoted herself these several weeks to communications. Here the equipment had been pasted together from the remnants of the original radio room. It had been painstaking, working out methods to bypass or recreate destroyed circuits had been a devil’s task. After days of frustration she’d changed tactics, working out her own equipment from first principles. The ship had had two distinct physical systems for satellite communication, one for the on-board phone and data connections, one for Internet use. Brenda combined the systems, and where she found broken elements, she bridged them from scratch rather than attempting repairs.

Brenda worked long hours again. She’d begun talking to her tools and equipment. She’d built special relationships with her multimeter and soldering gun.

She had been in this room a long time, but now she would go back to the Atrium, because she just might have a working receiver. For the first time, she felt her work might save them, might get them off the ship.

Brenda turned the cabinet of electronics on with a switch. Her headphones crackled. She felt electrified: she’d done it. She’d made a connection. No one but her, of the thousands aboard, could have done this.

The voice of the satellite was there:

THIS SERVICE IS DOWN. PLEASE TRY AGAIN LATER.

THIS SERVICE IS DOWN. PLEASE TRY AGAIN LATER.

Brenda’s knees buckled and she fell to the floor, sliding the headphones off.

She was an engineer and she saw the world as problems to be solved. Now, she knew the problems were bigger than any solutions, and their rescue had never been in their hands. She sobbed, and her body quivered on the ground in front of the great wall of wires she had devoted her efforts to.

When she finally arose, she looked at that wall as she gained control of her breathing. She grabbed her chair by the backrest and swung it smashing at the electronics until the lights in the wall were dead, screaming all the while.

55

“Golding killed Warrant,” Travis said.

Hesse did not speak. His eyes opened wide, then his face hardened.

They couldn’t go to Hesse’s office. Everyone was yelling at Hesse, if they had closed a door, someone would have knocked it down.

Travis and the others from the lounge had arrived in the quiet Atrium. The amount of time it took for Travis to reach John Hesse was the same amount of time it took for news of Warrant’s death to spread around the room.

That trust in Hesse and Colonel Warrant, that combination each had of charisma and projected competence, had kept all these desperate, starving people from challenging them in any way. Now Warrant was dead. The trust in Hesse was shattered.

As the news spread, the shouting started.

“Hesse!”

“Hesse!”

“We’re lost! Where are you taking us?”

“I’ll kill him,” Hesse said.

“No way,” Travis said. “I have the gun, Hesse.”

“Hesse!

“We’re watching them kill us!”

“Where are you going to find him? He’ll have sentries, you won’t be able to get near him.”

“Hesse!”

“What are we doing?”

Hesse snarled at the crowd

“Can you all be quiet? For God’s sake, I need a minute to think, then I can tell you what we should do, and you all can tell me to go to Hell or we can fight back. But I need this minute.”

He turned back to Travis.