“You’re sure about this?”
They were down to their last ten thousand pounds of fuel.
“Please,” Lore said, “don’t argue with me. It’s not like we have a choice.”
Rand raised the radio to his mouth. “That’s it, gents. We’re powering down. Weir, switch the generator to the auxiliary bus—bilges, lights, and desalinators only.”
A crackle, then Weir’s voice came through: “Lore said that?”
“Yeah, she said it. I’m looking right at her.”
A moment passed; the thrumming ceased, replaced by a low electrical hum. Above them caged bulbs flickered, failed, then, as if with reluctance, sparked back to life.
“So that’s it?” Rand asked. “We’re dead in the water?”
Lore had no answer to that.
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said it that way.”
She made some vague gesture. “Forget it.”
“I know you did your best. Everyone does.”
She had nothing to say. They were twenty thousand tons of steel, drifting in the ocean.
“Maybe something will still work out,” Rand offered.
Lore ascended through the ship to the deck and climbed the stairs to the pilothouse. It was the morning of their thirty-ninth day at sea, the equatorial sun already blazing like a furnace. Not a breath of wind moved the air; the sea was absolutely flat. Many of the passengers were camped on deck, huddled in the shade of canvas shelters. On the charting table were the sheets of thick, fibrous paper on which Lore had run her final computations. The currents when they’d rounded the Horn had nearly stopped them cold; running at full throttle, they had barely powered through, huge waves blasting over the deck, everybody vomiting helplessly. They had made it eventually, but day by day, as Lore watched the fuel gauges drop, the cost grew painfully evident. They had stripped everything they could and jettisoned it into the sea: pieces of bulkhead, doors, the loading crane. Anything to reduce weight, to buy one more mile with the fuel they had. It wasn’t enough. They had come up five hundred miles short.
Caleb entered the pilothouse. Like Rand, he was shirtless, the skin of his shoulders and cheeks flaking with sunburn. “What’s going on? Why did we stop?”
From the helm, Lore shook her head.
“Jesus.” For a second he seemed dazed, then looked up. “How long?”
“We can keep the desalinators running about a week.”
“And then?”
“I really don’t know, Caleb.”
He had the look of a man who needed to sit down. He took a place on the bench by the chart table. “People are going to figure it out, Lore. We can’t just turn off the engines and not tell them anything.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“We could lie, I guess.”
“There’s an idea. Why don’t you come up with something?”
Her sense of failure was overwhelming; she had spoken too curtly. “Sorry, you didn’t deserve that.”
Caleb took a long breath. “It’s all right, I get it.”
“Tell everyone it’s just a minor repair, nothing to worry about,” Lore said. “That should buy us a day or two.”
Caleb stood and put one hand on her shoulder. “It’s not your fault.”
“Who else is there?”
“I mean it, Lore. It’s just bad luck.” He tightened his grip, giving her a sharp squeeze that offered no comfort at all. “I’ll put the word out.”
After he’d gone, she sat alone for a time. She was exhausted, filthy, beaten. Without its engines, the ship felt soulless, inert as stone.
I’m sorry, Michael, she thought, I did everything I could, but it wasn’t enough.
She dropped her face to her hands.
—
It was late in the day when she descended into the hull. She met Sara as the woman was closing the door to Greer’s cabin.
“How is he?”
Sara shook her head tersely: not well. “I don’t see how things can go on much longer.” She paused, then said, “Caleb told me about the engines.”
Lore nodded halfheartedly.
“Well, let me know if I can do anything to help. Maybe it just wasn’t meant to be.”
“You’re not the first to say that.”
When Lore said nothing else, Sara sighed. “See if you can get him to eat. I left a tray by his cot.”
She watched the woman move down the passageway, then quietly turned the handle and stepped inside. The air had an unwashed smell of sweat and urine and sour breath and something else, like fermenting fruit. Greer was lying faceup on his bunk with a sheet pulled to his chin, his arms lying at his sides. At first Lore thought he was dozing—he slept most of the time now—but at the sound of her entry, he rotated his face toward her.