Lucas read the message at least a dozen times before he forced himself to look away from the monitor and think about what the words meant. His father was alive?

It had to be a sick joke. Bridger had said there were no survivors; he'd been sure of it. Lucas couldn't even begin to imagine what would compel someone to lie about such a thing, but he knew from personal experience that people frequently did cruel, terrible things to each other. He narrowed his eyes at the monitor and punched out a reply.

I don't believe you. My father is dead. Whoever you are, find someone else to play with. Leave me alone.

Lucas frowned at the words. They didn't quite seem to do justice to his disgust, but he was tired and his headache was pounding between his eyes. It was the best he could do right now. He was about to send the message when a knock came at his door. Lucas had just enough time to send the message before he looked over his shoulder and saw Bridger in his doorway, a timid smile on his face.

"Hope I'm not disturbing you."

Lucas swirled around in his chair to face Bridger.

"Um, no," he said, thankful that the fever was probably hiding the blush he could feel growing on his cheeks. He felt strangely as though he'd just been caught misbehaving. "I was just getting ready for bed."

Bridger looked at the computer and then at Lucas, who was still fully dressed.

"I see," he said. "Do you mind if I sit down for a minute?"

"Sure, go ahead," Lucas said. Bridger swept some clothes off the top of Lucas' bunk and sat down.

"How are you feeling?"

"Not great," Lucas admitted.

"Yeah, I bet," Bridger said, a sympathetic frown crossing his face. "Well, Dr. Westphalen said you should be feeling better in a few days."

Lucas nodded slowly and coughed.

"I wanted to talk to you about the funeral," Bridger started, leaning toward Lucas, his hands folded. "It's coming up, right?"

"It's a memorial service," Lucas corrected. The UEO had managed to turn his father's funeral into a giant political shindig.

"I know," Bridger said. "Your father was a pretty big deal to a lot of people."

"Yeah, I guess," Lucas said with a mild, unconvincing nod.

"Look, I know this isn't an easy time for you," Bridger said carefully. "So I thought, if you wanted, that maybe I would go to the service with you."

"You didn't even know him," Lucas said.

"I know," Bridger answered. "But, Lucas, funerals, or memorials in this case, aren't for the dead, they're for the living. I would go for you, if you want me there."

When Lucas didn't answer right away, Bridger leaned forward and cupped Lucas' cheek, the captain's eyes searching his face. Lucas swallowed hard and looked around his room, trying to avoid Bridger's stare. He appreciated the captain's offer, and he was grateful that this man he had come to respect so much in the past year was willing to support him and look after him right now. Truth be told, a part of him wanted to give in and accept that help and let everything go. But a greater part of him felt so tired, ill and completely lost that he wanted nothing more than to fall into his bed and sleep for days.

And then, for seemingly no reason at all, Lucas felt his eyes prickling with tears and he blinked rapidly, staring at the floor and trying to will away his emotions. He felt a sob creeping up in his chest and he swallowed hard. There was no way he could answer Bridger now. He silently cursed himself for losing control. Why now? He'd been so strong these past few days, able to restrain his emotions. He wasn't ready to give in like this.

"Lucas," Bridger's voice was soft, and Lucas felt the tears welling now, threatening to spill down his cheeks. He was so tired. "Hey, it's okay, kiddo. It's all right. Everything's going to be all right."

Now Bridger was kneeling on the floor in front of him, reaching for Lucas and pulling him into a hug. But Lucas refused to give in to his emotions. He sucked in great breaths and forced the sobs down. He squeezed his eyes until he was certain they were dry. Finally he pushed back at Bridger and pasted a weary smile on his face.

"I'm okay," he managed, his voice cracking just slightly. Bridger leaned back on his heels, studying him a moment before he sat back on the bed. He looked mildly disappointed.

"I know," he said. "I know you're okay. But it's okay to grieve a little, Lucas. It's okay to let go."

Lucas didn't say anything, just nodded and looked away.

"Well, just think about the memorial," Bridger said. "You can tell me later if you want me to go with you."

He stood up and walked slowly to the door. Before he opened it, Lucas called out to him.

"Captain, are you sure my father couldn't have made it out?"

He wasn't sure where that question had come from. Surely he wasn't taking the message he'd received seriously. It was a joke. His father was dead.

Bridger took a moment to turn around. Lucas could imagine him collecting his thoughts, figuring out how to handle his question gently but firmly. He knew he shouldn't have asked, but he realized that he needed desperately to hear Bridger's answer. Bridger finally turned and kneeled again in front of Lucas.

"I'm sorry, Lucas," he said. "But there's just no way. We would have seen him leave before the facility went down, and afterwards, well, no one could have survived that."

Lucas nodded, but then he found himself asking another question.

"What if he was trying to escape without anyone noticing? Would it be possible? Could he have gotten by the WSKRS if he was trying to avoid us?"

Bridger shook his head.

"You know how the WSKRS work," he said gently. "We would have picked up anything moving in or out of that facility."

"Okay," Lucas said, barely whispering.

"It's going to take time, Lucas," Bridger said, craning his neck so he could look into Lucas' face. "You just have to give yourself time to accept this. Trust me."

"I know," Lucas said quietly.

"You should probably get some sleep," Bridger said, squeezing Lucas' knee before rising to his feet again. "I'll check in on you in the morning, okay?"

"Yeah," Lucas said. He didn't watch as Bridger let himself out of the room.

When the door had shut and Lucas was sure Bridger was long gone, he took a deep breath and tried to compose himself. Then he swung around in his chair and stared at his monitor. His head was spinning and he needed to calm down, relax. He spent a few minutes trying to trace the address of the person who had pretended to be his father, but as expected, the trail bounced all over the world, buried under countless layers of security. People were too cautious with their mail these days, Lucas mused. Under different circumstances – if he were bored and looking for a challenge – he might have tried harder to find the sender, but he felt terrible, and he didn't see the point of searching anyway.

Finally, his head still spinning and his thoughts unfocused, Lucas got ready for bed. He found his bedclothes buried under a rumpled pile of dirty laundry in a corner of his room and within a few minutes he was collapsing onto his bunk. He couldn't remember the last time his bed had felt so comfortable, the sheets cool against his flushed skin and the pillow wonderfully soft. Lucas burrowed his head under the blankets. His last thought before drifting off was that he would ask the captain to attend the memorial with him. With that, he was certain everything would be better in the morning.

xxxXXXxxx

In fact, things were far from better when Lucas woke up the next morning. He opened his eyes to the fuzzy, distorted face of Westphalen, who was hovering over him and saying something he couldn't understand. He couldn't remember ever feeling as miserable as he did at that moment. He was unbearably hot, his body felt too heavy to move and the pounding in his head was painful enough to make him think that his brain had outgrown his skull and was now about to burst through his temples. And all the while, Westphalen kept talking to him and shaking him at the shoulders. Lucas moaned a long, desperate "no" and tried to bury his head under a pillow.

"Lucas," Westphalen said, her voice sharp and crisp. "Lucas, I need you to wake up."

"Go away," he managed, his words muffled by the pillow over his head.

"I'm sorry, but you have to get up now," she said, grabbing Lucas by the shoulders and rolling him onto his back. Lucas cracked his eyes open again but closed them immediately when the light in his room cranked up the throbbing in his head another notch. He threw an arm over his eyes and muttered another "no."

Westphalen sighed, reaching out to feel his forehead. She pushed his hair back from his face.

"Lucas, you need to go to the medical bay. Your fever is too high," she said patiently, as though explaining something to a small child. "If you don't get up now, you'll have to be taken there on a stretcher."

He didn't say anything, too tired to argue with her. He heard Westphalen heave a great sigh and felt her shift on the bed.

"Okay, we're going to give this one more try," she announced.

She leaned forward again and slid her hands under his armpits, wrapping her arms around him and pulling him toward her as though in a hug. He struggled as she picked him up, realizing as his head lulled against her shoulder that his body felt extraordinarily heavy. He felt as though he could barely move, even with her help. Finally upright in bed, his legs dangling over the side, he slouched against the doctor, his head drooping onto her shoulder.

"Well, a lot of good that did," Westphalen muttered.

"C'mon, just another hour," Lucas moaned, and she caught him as he started to lean back toward his pillow.

"No way, not after that effort," Westphalen grunted, pulling him back up. He cracked his eyes open and found her looking at him appraisingly. "How are you doing?"

"Not so good," he mumbled sleepily.

"Do you think you can walk?"

Lucas nodded briefly.

"You're sure?"

He nodded again, closing his eyes.

"I can still call for a stretcher."

He shook his head hard at that, wincing.

"Okay," she said. "You ready to stand up?"

"Just a minute," he whispered. "I just need a minute."

"All right," Westphalen said. She rubbed his back as they sat quietly for a moment.

"I thought this was just the flu," he muttered. "No big deal."

"Well, it's not supposed to be a big deal when you take your medicine," Westphalen said, leaning over him to grab something off his desk. He cringed when she opened her hand and showed him the pills, two aspirin, he hadn't taken the night before.

"Oops," he said.

"Oops indeed," she said, slipping the pills in her pocket. "You ready to go now?"

He sighed deeply and nodded. "Yeah, let's go."

xxxXXXxxx

An hour later, Bridger watched as Lucas suffered through a fitful nap in the med bay, a cooling blanket tucked around his body and damp cloths pressed against his neck and face. His fever had spiked at 104.7 degrees, but already Westphalen had seen it drop to a safer 102. Lucas was still uncomfortable, alternately kicking off his blankets while asleep and then waking to complain that he was too cold, but he would be fine in a few hours. Confident with his progress, Westphalen and Bridger left the med bay to attend a meeting with the visiting scientists. Apparently their preliminary report on the disaster at the World Power Project was complete.

When Bridger arrived in the conference room, three of the visiting scientists were already seated around a long, oval table; they were waiting for a fourth to arrive. Ford were standing at the head of the table, watching the scientists carefully with his hands clasped behind his back. He looked up when Bridger and Westphalen entered.

"How's Lucas?" Ford asked.

"He'll be fine," Westphalen said. "I don't know what he was thinking, skipping his medication like that."

"What happened?" Ford asked.

"Lucas forgot to take the aspirin I gave him for his fever," Westphalen explained. "When you skip doses like that it can make the fever suddenly spike, and that's exactly what happened. He was practically delirious when I found him this morning."

"I thought you said the flu wasn't dangerous," Ford said.

"Well, ordinarily it's not," Westphalen said. "But of course with Lucas, all bets are off."

Bridger and Ford laughed softly at this, and Westphalen smiled briefly, then her face fell serious.

"Really, the flu is rarely serious for healthy adults, but it certainly can turn more serious and even lead to pneumonia if you aren't careful," she said. "And given Lucas' recent health, the fact that he hasn't been sleeping or eating well, his emotional state…Well, I should have been more careful."

"Hey, don't beat yourself up," Bridger said, squeezing her shoulder. "You said he'll be fine."

"Of course he'll be fine," she said, giving Bridger a teasing glare. "But I should have been paying closer attention."

Before Bridger could respond, the fourth scientist jogged into the room with a quick apology. Bridger gave the doctor's arm one more affectionate squeeze, then they all sat at the table, the three crewmembers facing the four scientists.

"So, I understand you have some conclusions for us," Bridger said, opening the meeting.

"Yes, yes we do," said Dr. Rebecca Strung, the scientist sitting directly across from Bridger. She quickly passed a thin packet of papers around the table and flipped her own open to the second page. "But before we give you our conclusions on what exactly happened at the World Power Project, there is a more pressing matter to attend to."

Bridger looked up at her, noting the tension in her voice. The doctor, a heavy middle-aged woman with her hair pinned into a messy bun on the top of her head, was frowning deeply at him. The scientist to her right, Dr. Rudolf Schroeder, was tapping his fingers loudly on the tabletop and fidgeting in his chair.

"Okay," Bridger said slowly. "What's going on?"

"To put it simply, the crevasse in the ocean floor is opening again," Strung said. "If we don't find some way to close it, we'll be facing an environmental disaster on a global scale."

"We can't stress enough just how critical this situation could become," added the man to Strung's left, Dr. Albert Tome. "Entire cities would drown, Australia would turn into an island the size of Hawaii-"

Bridger held up a hand. "Yes, we're well aware of the possibilities," he said. "How do you suggest we close up this hole? And permanently, this time."

"Bombs," Strung said. "Lots of nuclear bombs."

"Bombs?" questioned Ford. "How exactly would bombs close up a hole in the ocean floor? I thought bombs were used for making holes, not closing them."

"Well, it's really basic physics," started Strung. "The inertial force of the blasts would act as an equalizing-"

Bridger held up a hand, interrupting the scientist's explanation with a firm shake of his head.

"Let's put the physics lesson aside for now," he said. "You need bombs to close the hole. Fine, we'll take your word for it. How much time do we have?"

"We can't say for sure," Strung said. "It could take weeks for the hole to reopen to a point where it would become dangerous."

"Or it could be just a matter of a day or two," Tome said, running a shaking hand over his thinning hair.

"It will take at least a day to get those kinds of explosives here," Ford said to Bridger.

"Well then let's hope these scientists aren't under-estimating that hole," Bridger said. "Just in case, I'd like to start evacuations again. I want nothing more than a skeleton crew in 12 hours."

"Yes, sir," Ford said.

"So we'll wait it out here until the bombs arrive, and then we'll let the explosives guys do the dirty work," Bridger said, clearly not pleased with the situation at hand. "If you guys don't mind, I think I'll let you save your report on the World Power Project for the UEO officials. It's not going to do us a lot of good here."

Three of the scientists nodded, clearly relieved that they had gotten their message out. They began to tuck their papers back into briefcases and Bridger began to stand up.

"Well, if that's all-" Bridger started.

"Um, Captain Bridger, excuse me, but that's not all."

Bridger looked at the end of the table where the voice had come from. The fourth scientists, Dr. Ling Wu, was actually raising his hand, as though waiting to be called on to speak. Bridger recognized Wu as the man who had arrived on the seaQuest with the flu – apparently fully recovered now – and treated him to a glare that the scientist didn't notice. Bridger looked around the table and sat back in his seat. Westphalen and Ford followed his lead.

"Go ahead," Bridger said, nodding at Wu. He saw that the other scientists were beginning to look nervous again.

"Sir, my esteemed colleagues believe we have well over 24 hours before the next lava eruption breaks out, but I believe that is a far too conservative estimate. From the tests I've run, I believe we could be in extreme danger from that lava flow in less than 12 hours, and certainly within a day."

Bridger took a moment to digest this new information. There was no way they could get enough nuclear bombs to the site within 12 hours.

"You must know that it would be impossible to transport the explosive materials we would need in that short a time frame," Bridger began.

"Yes, I'm aware of that," Wu said.

"So, assuming your analysis is correct, how would you propose we stop that hole from re-opening?" Bridger asked.

Westphalen noticed that now the other scientists were staring hard at the table, refusing to make eye contact. Wu also looked afraid, but didn't look away from Bridger.

"Between the nuclear missiles and the engine itself, the seaQuest would have enough explosive material to close-"

"Are you suggesting that we dive the seaQuest into the bottom of the ocean?" Ford asked incredulously, starting to rise out of his seat.

"Hold on, Commander," Bridger said. "Is that your proposal, Doctor?"

"I'm sorry, sir, but yes it is," Wu said.

"Surely there must be another option," Westphalen said, her words firm but betraying no emotion.

Wu shook his head lamely. "None that I can think of," he said.

The room settled into an uncomfortable silence, Wu now joining his colleagues in a careful study of the tabletop. Ford sat fuming in his chair, his hands balled into fists in front of him. Westphalen rested her chin in her hand, looking thoughtful.

"Well, I guess we just hope that it doesn't come to that, don't we?" Bridger said, standing. Westphalen looked up at him in surprise.

"Sir, you can't be seriously considering sinking the seaQuest," Ford said, the words coming out as a low hiss.

"Unfortunately, I am. If you have any better ideas, you know where to find me," he said to Ford, then turned to the rest of the group. "Thank you for your help. I'd recommend you return to your quarters now and pack. We'll all be leaving soon."

Bridger turned sharply and walked out, leaving behind a room full of surprised faces.