“Doctors, come here.”

It was Hesse calling him from his new office. It was an art gallery, in the line of shops behind the wood columns. There was a desk near the front, where Hesse sat, calling through the open door. The door frame had been cracked around the bolt where Hesse had kicked it open. On the window, the name of the shop read, “Inspiration”.

They walked towards him, filling their mouths with the sandwiches.

“Look to the left,” Hesse said as they entered the room. “They brought down a few cases.”

On the floor was a tub of ice and beer bottles, below two modernist, jazz-inspired beach scene paintings. Conrad reached down and took two, passing one to Travis.

“I remember you,” Hesse said to Travis. “Your boy’s ok?”

“Yes,” Travis said.

“When you guys get cleaned up and rested come back and we’ll catch up,” Hesse said.

Travis was not ready to return to his family yet. He felt, as he walked along the wall of the Atrium with Conrad, like the two of them were separated somehow from the crowd that still filled the room, just as he’d always felt separated from the refugees he worked with in Sudan.  They were the desperate, he was there to help. They found a quiet sitting area under a staircase and sat down on the couch.

“Good work,” Travis said.

“I can’t believe we saved that man,” Conrad said. “I’ve read about that technique, but I’ve never done it. I just… with all the death today, I wanted one man to live that fate wanted to take away.”

“You did it,” Travis said. “You saved him.”

“At least for now. If he can escape infection, or internal hemorrhaging or anything else that could go wrong with a cracked sternum.”

It was so sudden, the return of Conrad’s face to that horrible exhibition of pain.

“Are you alright?” Travis asked. “Are you… did you leave family behind in New York?”

Conrad couldn’t reply. He nodded his head and made a noise through his closed lips.

Travis waited.

“I left them all behind,” Conrad said. “I couldn’t find them. I… yesterday morning, when it all happened, I called and couldn’t find them. I called home and there was no answer. I called my wife’s cell and there was no answer. I have two kids and I don’t know what happened to them. I left them. I left them to die.”

“Joel, it’s not your fault. It’s not your fault. Look at me, Joel. It’s not your fault.”

Joel Conrad looked at him as he tried to hold back sobs. “I was with another woman.”

Travis could not hide his reaction. His eyes opened wide and his head jerked back under Conrad’s stare.

“I was with… I was with a woman. I’d worked until three a.m. and went to her apartment and we were together when we heard the noise all around us, and we looked out the windows. The sun was just coming up and people were pouring through the streets. That’s when we turned the news on. It was already too late to find my family. That’s how I left my family, Travis.”

“Jesus, Joel. I’m sorry. But you’ll find them again, Joel. You have to believe that.”

Conrad breathed deeply, and he allowed a softness to return to his face.

“Do you have a family?” he asked.

“Yes,” Travis said. “They’re here with me. My son and… my ex-wife and her husband.”

“Why were you and your wife divorced?” Conrad asked.

“I had an affair. She found out.”

They stopped looking at each other.

“I was in Africa,” Travis began. “I was volunteering with the Red Cross in Sudan. I was there for two months that time, but it felt like years. She was a doctor from Italy. We worked closely together and my wife was back in New York, and her husband was in Florence. We fell in love, we were… in another world there, surrounded by death, fighting against it. There was a childish feeling of adventure. It wasn’t real love, that was what I had with my wife. It was the idea of falling in love there, in a faraway land, with a faraway woman who had come there for the same reasons as me. I don’t even know exactly how my wife found out. The woman had gone back to Italy before me, and when I came home my wife was gone, my son was gone. I realized the gap then between what I felt for that woman and how much I love my wife. I’ve been living in a kind of prison since then. Separated by just a few miles from the two people I love.”

“So now you’re here with her husband.”

“Yes.”

Conrad wiped a tear from his eye. He held up his bottle and the two men clinked them together.

“Life is horrible,” Conrad said.

“It’s what we made,” Travis replied.

19

“First things first,” Colonel Warrant said to his Chief Engineer. “Power the freezers. Next, we need some light in the galley and Atrium. Next, stoves and ovens. Then running water. I’ll come for an update tonight. I’ll bring sushi.”

The engineer, Brenda White, stood next to him in the main engine room. The room was cavernous, three decks high. There were banks of machinery, metals of silver, brass and gold curved into pipes, cabinets, and coils. There were glass gauges, and red control dials on wall-length desks. It was all in disarray. Equipment and electronics shelving were knocked over. Bullet holes riddled the huge metal cylinders. Somewhere, something was running. Most of the equipment here was dead.

Brenda White had spent hours already looking things over here and in the emergency power room, talking with crew and refugees she’d enlisted who knew one thing or another. The bodies had been cleared before Brenda got there, but there was a lot of blood, everywhere she looked. Which explained why there were so few remaining of the engineering staff.

The Colonel left and she looked at the twenty entirely male ship’s crew and volunteers waiting for her plan.

She wasn’t Chief Engineer at the start of the cruise. She was a passenger. But the Chief Engineer who started the trip was dead or gone overboard, and Brenda White was an elite  electrical and mechanical engineer, used to designing systems for some of the biggest factories in the Americas. But she was more used to boardrooms than factories for some years now. Now Brenda White was Chief Engineer of the Festival.

It would have taken weeks of study for Brenda to understand the Festival, but they were fortunate that a few of the specialists were still alive and on board. Most importantly, the Chief Electrician.

There were also refugees on the ship who were good at fixing things: electricians, mechanics, engineers, technology technicians of all type, plumbers, welders and general repairmen. There was no one resource that could really help Brenda unravel the ship’s mysteries, but together they were able to do great things.

The biggest problem took little time to understand. The main generator room, which supplied power to the ship, was closed off in a flooded compartment. Without the generators to transfer power from the engines to the propellers, the boat would not move. The generator room lay forward of the engines and desalination area, in the section of the ship breached by the collision. The watertight doors had been sealed; there was no going in or out, not just the generator room, but all the cabins and halls directly above the generator room. The exterior walking deck at the Atrium level did not extend back past that closed section, so passing from the bow of the ship to stern required climbing to one of the top two enclosed levels, the Penthouse and Resort decks, or the open Sky Deck above that.

Below the waterline, even the areas they had access to, the engines, desalination plant and control room, were in disastrous condition from the collision and being shot up by the pirates. Most of the systems required the generators in any case.

But the pirates evidently had not gone to the emergency generators above.

The emergency generators were running. They powered the emergency lighting on some decks, where other damage had not knocked the systems out. Ventilation and other key systems should have been running off the emergency generators as well, but there seemed to be other breakdowns somewhere.