It was three days since the slaughter of the ship’s guards. Indra, wrapped in his plastidown blanket, sat on the deck. Smears of blood from when the guards’ bodies were dragged to the gunwale and thrown into the sea were still visible, fading in the steady rain.

Eiko sat next to him, stripped to the waist. The rain was cold, but it felt good on his overheated skin. He had been with several of the others belowdecks, trying to find access to the engine rooms.

“There must be vulnerable points somewhere.”

Indra bared his teeth in an expression nothing like a smile. “Yes. There are. And the Sea Wolf has found them.”

On the morning of that first day, when the Sea Wolf had turned east toward land, there had been elation. Celebration. The men danced with one another. The feeling lasted all day. And that night, the sea celebrated with them: the water glowed with phosphorescence, lighting the exulting faces of the men on the deck. The wake of the Sea Wolf was a glowing arrow pointing shoreward to freedom.

But in the morning of the second day, Eiko woke to a hissed argument outside the barracks door. Turning over, he saw Son was already up.

“What is it? What is happening now?”

Son was staring at the ceiling. He had not joined in with the others’ celebrations much. He had nodded and smiled, but was holding something back. Now he said, “We are headed south again. And there was no food distributed in the mess for breakfast.”

Indra strode into the barracks, followed by two of his lieutenants. “I need a group of men who can help me find a way into the engine room. We need to show this ship we mean business. It thinks we were making empty threats. Who is with me?”

Son and Eiko both volunteered. But when they got down to the engine room, they found it sealed off by reinforced steel plates, like the armored wheelhouse. The plates were an emergency security measure controlled by the Sea Wolf’s AI mind, activated in the middle of the night after the attack on the guards, the tempered steel sliding silently out of slots in the bulkheads in a dozen places aboard the ship. With them in place, there was no access to the engines, the freezer holds, the bow thrusters, the rear ramp room: anywhere access had been to the guts of the Sea Wolf was now sealed off by plates too thick for anything but an industrial torch and a lot of time. The crew battered and pried in frustration.