“I can figure it out,” Brenda White said, frustrated. “I need time to do it.”

“When we have stable water. Stable power to the galleys.  Emergency lighting to get safely around this damn ship. Ventilation and toilets so we don’t all get sick. Then communications,” the Colonel said.

It was a massive ship, and there was not enough spare wire to simply rig new lines as they had with the first freezers. They had to find the breakdowns, or scavenge and join together unneeded wiring systems.

She wondered if the communication gear would do any good anyway. If there were anyone there to listen, anyone there to help, wouldn’t they have as likely been found by now by search efforts? This was a big ship, you could see it a mile off. If they’d done air sweeps, like after the tsunami, the ship would have been spotted by now. It was a day and a half later. What was taking so long? Just how bad were things back home?

So she plodded along with her work, and the systems kept breaking down or overloading.

Everything Hesse and Colonel Warrant needed was always urgent. She did as she was told. She was happy to be occupied, though it was hard on the family, her being away this much with the work. They just sat around in the Atrium.

The girls were going a bit crazy, Brenda thought, and her husband as well, but she had to do this work. Somebody had to. She worked on the communications stuff every chance she got, but it was far beyond her experience and there was a lot of damage to overcome. Brenda had had no experience with this kind of equipment since college, and what training she had was far out of date.

She rigged a powerful spotlight to the deck, pointing up at the clouds.

That Colonel Warrant, he was micromanaging the amperes. With such limited and inconsistent power, Warrant wanted to know how every bit of that resource was used.

Brenda knew it would be a long time before the satellite communications would work, and she also knew they weren’t getting off this thing without help, so the spotlight was her other secret, after the water basins.

The spotlight, and its 10 kW and 45 amps, was a secret in plain sight.

The spotlight was obvious at night, beautiful in fact from the deck. But no one ever asked her about it.

23

In the next days, Travis, Gerry, Corrina, and Darren had less contact with the crowd of refugees who stayed mostly in the Atrium. To the refugees in the Atrium, their little spots on the floor, on the couches, or on spread-out blankets, were their homes. Travis and the group, including Claude Bettman, stayed in the piano lounge. Vera had invited them to stay in her room; Corrina had answered that they would stay in the lounge but come to visit her. Gerry and Travis disposed of the bodies of her husband and the gunman.

They were not alone. The tourists that knew of the lounge, who had been using it before the flood, would stop in in small numbers simply seeking a comfortable place away from their rooms, especially when it was cold on deck. Then a few other refugees discovered the room and moved in. Each individual or group kept to their own section. Some of them became acquainted with their new neighbors. Most of the forty strong population kept to themselves, and at night it was whispers in the dark.

The second night in the lounge was especially clear-skied, and Darren stared up at the great spill of stars above him, his father nestled behind him, pointing up, drawing silly made-up constellations in Darren’s imagination, telling silly stories about the characters in the stars. Darren trying not to laugh out loud, burying his face in his father’s shoulder and chest.

Darren took a liking to Claude Bettman. Claude could see that the kid was withdrawn; maybe that was the way he always was, maybe it was this situation. Claude was a widower. His daughter and grandkids were in Indianapolis, so he had only to worry for himself living to see them again. He was a professor of ancient history at New York University. He kept Darren entertained with his tales of ancient cultures and legends.

Darren listened, and Professor Claude drew him out, testing him with questions on the meaning of the stories he told. Somehow, in the midst of this Great Flood swallowing up the Earth, the kid still found magic in tales of dragons. It seemed to Travis, listening, as though the ship itself were slipping through the mists out of the everyday world and into myth and magic, of No Time and No Place.

Travis went every day to John Hesse’s shop; nothing was changing, except that people were getting anxious each day that nothing changed. Out of the several thousand gathered in the Atrium, there were always a few crying at any given time. Travis picked a Crier of the Day. The competition was tight; crying alone wasn’t usually enough. Anyone could cry, release a bit of the stress. To win Crier of the Day usually required out-loud sobbing of one’s thoughts, a public display that one had lost control.

Hesse had located the keys to most of the shops; those with any food had been raided, their shelves empty like the stores Travis had run past just a few days prior in Brooklyn. A few, like the jewelry, wine and cigar stores, had been smashed and raided by the pirates while others, like the fashion boutiques and gift shops, had their security and integrity respected still.

The officers and crew that remained had not quite lost their identity as a group. Some slipped off their uniforms and joined the waiting lives of the refugees, but most enlisted in Hesse’s efforts, and were put to useful service by Hesse, or Colonel Warrant or Brenda White, each of whom oversaw specific projects. There were musicians aboard, and some gave impromptu concerts. One magician dressed up twice for kids shows, in a corner of the Atrium.

Brenda’s team had yet to succeed in bringing power to the Atrium other than the original emergency lighting system. The skylights helped, bringing triangles and rectangles of light to most of the public parts of the ship, but in the evenings it was very dark, with just those emergency lighting tracks along the walls near floor level.

The wounded were brought down to the medical clinic. Travis and the medical squad tended the bedridden and changed dressings. The ship’s surgeon came by each day to check on the in-patients, and he kept office hours for any others to come see him with new problems.

Perhaps the most valuable were the chefs, many of whom remained from the original crew and were reunited, efficiently running a galley with no power and no running water initially. Everyone on board was well fed. Power availability increased, and portion sizes were shrunk compared to cruise norms, but the meal quality made everyone feel a little less besieged and desperate. They had lobster and prime rib with a garlic crust that was the talk of the ship.

Food service was an enormous effort. There were two shifts of galley workers, including the chefs, servers, dishwashers and others, and they rotated each of the three meals, with two buffet servings per meal.

They had, over days, accumulated the food stocks from the French bistro, the American burger joint, the Mexican taqueria, the Thai-Fusion dining room, and every other food shop on board – save the Italian restaurant. At last, running water reached the galley, which made cleaning much easier.

They kept the same servers at the buffet table for each of the two meal servings, to help discourage repeat customers. Still, they let clients take away multiple servings for their families or friends in other parts of the ship. Hesse had reasoned it best to encourage satellite groups, to keep things more efficient in the food service. He also, as time went by, followed up on the supposed groups that consistently came for extra meals to take away. They told where they were staying, and here and there, Hesse went to check them out or sent others to.