A dead silence rolled back at us.
We took the passageway that led forward. It was lined with doors. We tried one. It opened, and we looked in at a small compartment. Couple of chairs. A display screen. A fold-up bed.
I pulled the door shut. Shara looked frightened. God knows what I looked like. “Where the hell are they?” she said.
The ship was cold. Seriously cold. How could that have happened? We put our helmets back on and adjusted the heat in our suits.
The bridge figured to be up two or three decks. We kept going toward the front, passed one elevator, and stopped at the second. It wasn’t working, which didn’t matter because I wouldn’t have wanted to take a chance on getting caught in it. I called Richard. “Hypercomm for John Kraus.”
“Okay,” he said. “Whenever you’re ready.”
“‘John, we are on board the Grainger. They have a power outage. Haven’t located JoAnn and Nick yet. Will let you know as soon as we have something.’” I looked at Shara. “Anything else?”
“Yes. Richard, tell John that it’s seriously cold over here. Hard to believe this thing was under power just a few minutes ago.”
“I have it,” Richard said. “Will transmit immediately.”
Eventually, we came across a ramp connected to decks above and below. It was steep, designed for low gravity. In zero gee, we could float up the thing. And we did.
There was a theater on the next deck. We entered in the rear and looked past the seats up at a stage. There would have been a screen there somewhere as well, but it wasn’t visible. We played our lights across the chairs, hoping to see some movement.
We had to take off our helmets to call their names. Which we did. There was no response.
We went back out into the corridor and continued the process. We were reaching a point at which I think if someone had answered, I’d have been seriously spooked.
“I can’t believe,” Shara said, “that they didn’t mention the cold.”
We went up another ramp into an area that included a large dining room. It had long portals, so occupants could have looked out and seen the stars. And one more deck took us, finally, within range of the bridge.
It was dark, and empty, and didn’t look as if anyone had been there ever. I sat down in the captain’s chair, leaned over the controls, and tried to turn the power on. Nothing happened.
“Look at this,” I said, pointing to the comm system.
Shara’s brow creased. “What am I looking at?”
“It’s an allcomm. The captain uses it to speak to the entire ship. Provided he has power.” I looked for an activator switch, found one, and used it. The panel lit up. Bingo.
“JoAnn,” I said, “Nick. We’re on the bridge. Where are you guys?”
Our voices echoed through the ship. After a while, we shut the lights down again. Don’t ask me why. It seemed like the cautious thing to do, and that’s my middle name. We walked around some more, or floated around, really, and opened more doors. We came across a couple of storage rooms, places where they had blankets and pillows and dishware. A few cabinets were open, and some of the materials had been removed.
We were sitting in a lounge area when Richard informed us we had another transmission from John: “Get off the Grainger immediately. If it goes under again, I don’t want you guys going with it. We have a team on the way. They’ll take it from here.”
The SRF vehicle arrived within hours. They told us they’d been instructed to give it another day. Then, if the Grainger still seemed stable, they would board and begin a shipwide search. We were to go home.
So we started back. “I’m not sure how I let this happen,” Shara said, as we left the Grainger behind.
“You’re not responsible.”
“Chase, I knew the risk was greater than JoAnn was letting on.”
“So did she, probably.”
“She did. She hated taking Nick over there, but she had no choice. But I doubt she thought anything like this could happen.” She stopped and heaved a desperate sigh. “Damn it. There had to be a better way to do this. Or not do it.”
John and several of his colleagues were waiting when we arrived at Skydeck. They crowded around us, asking if we were okay, telling us how sorry they were. We retreated into a conference room, and they began looking for details. Had JoAnn changed any of the protocols? I had no idea. We had a record of everything she’d done until the moment when the Grainger went under and communication was lost. Shara insisted JoAnn would not have changed anything without letting her know.
So the experts took over the Casavant to begin analyzing the data while we retired to a conference room and described the experience in painful detail to a group of about fifteen people. They asked a few questions and told us not to talk about it. And they ultimately fell into absolute silence, save for a couple of coughs.
At the end, John sat with his head propped on folded hands.
Thirty-one
Whoever loved that loved not at first sight?
Alex was at the terminal when we got off the shuttle. He looked worried. “You guys okay?” he asked.
“We’re all right,” I said. But I walked into his outstretched arms and hung on to him. He didn’t have the details, but enough had already gotten out to alert the media and the rest of the world that something had gone terribly wrong and that JoAnn and Nick were assumed lost. Shara joined us in the embrace and we stood in the concourse for a long moment while the crowd passed. “I’m sorry, guys,” he said. “What happened?”
Shara just shook her head. “Let’s get away from here.”
We walked out to the skimmer. The sky was gray and overcast. We took our seats while he put the luggage in back. “I assume,” he said, “they don’t want you to talk about it.”
I looked up at him and nodded.
“It won’t go any farther,” he said.
Shara and I looked at each other. “No way,” she said, “we can keep this to ourselves.”
“Yeah,” I said.
We told him everything. We just sat in the parking lot and talked, tried to describe what it had felt like passing through that empty cruise ship. He listened quietly. Closed his eyes. Finally, when we were finished, he asked if we were okay.
We both said yes. We’d lived to come back. But I, for one, knew I would never be the same.
Nobody wanted to go home, so we headed over to Bernie’s Far and Away. “Some of the people on HV,” Alex said, “were criticizing JoAnn for rushing things.”
“Who was doing that?” asked Shara.
“A couple of physicists. They were on several shows this morning. Saying she should have taken her time.”
Shara made an angry noise in her throat. “We didn’t have any time, damn it. That was just a preliminary run. If it had worked, there would have been a lot more research to do before we could have tried using it on the Capella.”
“Hey,” said Alex, “it wasn’t me talking.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry. I just wish these idiots, when they don’t know what they’re talking about, would keep their mouths shut. Do you know who they were?”