Adonis Cassedine, the ship’s master, stepped out from the bridge. Unlike his handsome mythological namesake, Cassedine was a sour-looking man with an unshaven face and rodent-sharp eyes. His nose was askew from being poorly set after a break, so the smudged glasses he wore tilted off one of his cauliflower ears.

“I just got a report from a container ship a hundred miles in front of us.” Sunset was still hours away and already his breath smelled of the cheap gin he swilled. To his credit, however, he didn’t slur his words and his body only swayed a little. “They are encountering Force Four conditions with winds out of the northeast.”

“The storm is forming,” Singer said. “And just where we need it to be. Not too far out that it has settled on its course, but not too close that it could fail to coalesce.”

“I can get you there,” Cassedine said, “but I don’t like it.”

Here we go again. Singer was already angered over Makambo’s failure. He didn’t want to hear another complaint from this washed-up rummy.

“This ship, she is old. Her hull is rotting and what you have in her holds, it’s too hot. It is weakening the metal.”

“And I showed you the engineers’ reports that say the hull can take the thermal load.”

“Bah.” Cassedine dismissed the statement with a wave. “Fancy men in suits who know nothing of the sea. You want to take us into a hurricane and I say the ship will break in two when we hit Force Six.”

Singer moved closer to the captain, using his superior height to intimidate the Greek. “Listen to me, you damned lush. I am paying you more money than you’ve seen in your lifetime, enough to keep you in a bottle for decades. For that I expect you to do your job and stop bothering me with your predictions, your concerns, or your opinions. Do I make myself clear?”

“I am just saying —”

“Nothing!” Singer roared. “You are saying nothing. Now get out of my face before your breath makes me sick.”

Singer kept glaring at Cassedine until the captain backed off, as he knew he would. Singer believed most alcoholics were weak, and this one was no different. He was so far gone he would do just about anything he was told in order to keep up a constant state of inebriation. He felt no qualms exploiting such weakness, just like he’d felt no qualms exploiting the naïveté of Nina Visser’s eco-crusaders or Samuel Makambo’s greed. If that was what it took to make people stand up and notice the destruction they were doing to their planet, so be it. Hadn’t Geoffrey Merrick exploited Singer’s own genius to create their invention? Singer had done the lion’s share of the work while Merrick had taken the credit.