“A tout a l’heure Captain.”

Claude returned to his notes. It was clear that Jake’s audience was at an end. He left the kitchen relieved. It looked like he’d won Claude over, but there were so many others still to see.

• • • • •

The next person Jake wanted to visit was the head of housekeeping. New Yorker Tania Bloom had held that post for as long as Jake had been on the ship. Like so many from her home town, she was a straight talker. Likeable, and friendly once you got to know her, she presented a tough exterior to the outside world. Her shoulder pads were legendary, as were her heels.

Jake wasn’t sure where he would find her. He tried her office on deck seven, but it was locked and his knocks failed to elicit any response. He made his way down to her cabin on deck three, but it was the same story. Thinking that perhaps he should see if the medics had seen her, he headed back up a level to the gym. It was quieter than he expected, a few people he didn’t recognise, presumably passengers, were seated on the side of the room waiting to be seen. One nurse was on duty, Jake recognised her as Kiera, he knew she had briefly dated Martin. Grau was with a patient, securing bandages to her arm. As soon as he was done he waved Jake over to join him on the far side of the gym.

“How is your hand, Captain?” he asked quietly, but his voice still echoed around the impressively voluminous space.

“Fine, fine. But never mind that, how are you doing down here?”

“I think we’ve dealt with the most urgent cases. We lost three this evening, they’re down below, along with those who were DOA. It looks like it was smoke inhalation from the dust cloud. Mostly it has been burns though. Burns, and quite a lot of cuts and bruises from broken glass. Many windows blew in.”

“Have you had any rest, Grau?”

“I’m about to go and get some sleep now. Kiera and David have got everything covered here, now it has calmed down.”

“That’s good. Listen, do you know Tania Bloom, and have you seen her down here? She’s not in her office or cabin.”

“Yes, I know Tania, but I haven’t seen her. Let me check the log in case one of the others has.” Grau opened a thick notebook and ran his finger down a list of handwritten names. “These are the people we’ve seen since we have been here. We didn’t get to log everyone we saw before moving to the gym, it was just too chaotic. No, it doesn’t look like she has been down here.”

“Okay, thanks Grau. I have other people to see, hopefully I’ll run into her on my way around.”

“There is another possibility, of course. I know we don’t want to think of it, but it wasn’t just passengers that were caught in that cloud, there were crew out there too.”

“You think she could be dead? Do you have a list, of the…deceased?”

“Yes, and she’s not on it. But she could be one of the unknowns.”

“The unknowns?”

“You know, the John Does, or the John Smiths, whatever you call them. Unidentified. Our list only carries the names of those positively identified by their families who brought them to us. At least a third of the bodies down there, we don’t know who they are yet.”

Jake suddenly felt sick at the thought. He hadn’t considered the question of the dead any further than just holding a service and then disposing of them respectfully.

“Don’t panic,” Grau said, clearly sensing that Jake didn’t know what to do. “People are already coming to us when they can’t find family or friends. We have got names for at least a dozen bodies that way. But a lot of the crew members won’t be missed by anyone for some time. And there are many couples who died together, they may not have anyone else on board who will miss them. We need the passenger and crew manifest and then we must go through and find out who is alive and who is dead. We may not be able to match all the names to bodies, but at least we will know. We cannot bury these people at sea until we know who they are, or at least have made every effort to find out.”

“No, you’re right of course. It’s a morbid affair, but yes, it has to be done. It won’t be easy to organise. Unless…” he pulled up a chair and sat down opposite the doctor, lost in thought. “I kind of had this idea that we should find out more about who we have on board, who these people are. If we are…if the rest of the world has…if there’s nobody else out there, then this is it. This boat could represent the last community of people. If there are no towns left, nowhere to settle, then we will have to build a new home. We cannot live on a ship indefinitely, and even if we are stuck at sea for weeks or even months, we will have huge challenges to overcome. We will need to produce food and energy. Every person here will need to pull their weight, to do their bit. And that means we need to know who these people are and what they can do.”

“You are thinking of a census?” Grau was nodding slowly.

“Yes, a census. But we don’t have to call it that, because we don’t want to cause people to panic. It’s probably easier for them not to think too far ahead. Right now, we’ve survived, and that fact alone is enough. When reality really sinks in, that’s when our problems will begin. If people think there is no future, no hope, then who knows what they will do? So we don’t want to encourage them to think about the future, not yet.”

“So we dress up our census as part of a crew and passenger roster. Interesting idea. But you think people will give you personal details without question?”

“It depends how we ask for those details,” Jake said, thinking hard. “Rather than just checking names off the passenger list and saying ‘by the way, what do you do for a living?’, we must reframe the whole exercise. We tell people that the passenger list was destroyed by fire. We say that we need to know who is on board so that we can calculate the food rations, that kind of thing. So we say we’re recreating the passenger manifest.”

“Yes, this could work, it gives us a reason to talk to everyone on board. A true census. We would have to insist everyone returned to their cabins for the duration of the exercise, to be sure that they got counted.”

“Right. And we issue them with a piece of paper to say that they have been processed, that their name is on the list. Make it that they must present the paper to get their meal ration. So it’s in their interest to make sure they are counted. We’ll send out a team to take the census. We’ll ask the minimum questions we can while still gathering useful information. Name, date of birth, country of residence, profession.”

“You’ll need many people to do go knocking door to door, this needs to be done quickly.”

“If I can find Tania, I can mobilise her team. The housekeeping folk know the ship inside out, they spend their days going round every cabin on board. They will be perfect, and it will give them an important role to fulfil.”

Jake stood up and walked over to the wall, where a telephone was mounted. He picked it up and dialled a three digit number.

“Hey, Lucya, it’s Jake. I need you to put out a ship-wide call for Tania Bloom and Barry Nickelson to contact the bridge. If and when they do, can you send them both down to Barry’s office. I need to talk to them. Thanks.” He hung up and returned to his seat.

“Barry Nickelson?” Grau asked.

“Entertainment manager.”

“Oh, that Barry. I’ve heard about his parties. Not so much my, how do you say, cup of tea?”

“Barry’s okay. His team is one of the biggest on board, I really need to brief him on what’s happening.”

Twenty

MAX MOOTING WAS not happy. He had always been loyal to Ibsen and Hollen, and now suddenly he had to answer to some young upstart. It was true, he thought to himself as he roamed the ship, that young Noah was coping pretty well considering he had been thrown in the deep end. He just wasn’t convinced that he truly had the new captain’s ear. Young men always seemed to have something to prove, to show the world that they could go it alone. They were so often too proud to ask for help, or accept it when offered. He’d lost more than one soldier that way, men who with a bit more experience and training would have been fine officers. Sent to war too soon and too young, their naivety and ego were their downfall. Would Jake suffer the same fate? He wasn’t ready to be captain, hadn’t got the formal training, and much more importantly, didn’t have the hours at sea. If Jake screwed up, then they were all in trouble.