No food was distributed on the second day. By evening, their mouths watered at the thought of the tasteless compressed cakes of fish protein and vitamin supplement they had been eating for months. But starvation would take a long time. They could hold out, find a way to convince the Sea Wolf they meant business. Find a way to force it to correct its course again, take them home.

On the third day, the Sea Wolf shut off the freshwater pumps. Indra called for an emergency inventory of water supplies. Piling together all the scrounged plastic bottles from the crew, plus the guards’ personal supplies and an emergency tank in the galley, they estimated they had a hundred liters of water.

There were twenty-seven of them.

“How long?” Indra asked.

“Days,” Eiko said. “Not even a week.”

“There has to be a way into the engine room. Eiko—I’m relying on you.”

Eiko led the team down, but he knew it was hopeless. The steel plates were designed for exactly what was happening now. After an hour of hammering uselessly, just to demonstrate that he and his team had given it his best, he went back to report his failure to Indra.

On deck, the rain was coming down harder. Crew members milled around aimlessly. Every container they could find was being used to catch rainwater for drinking.

“What if we lowered someone down on a rope behind the stern, tried to get at the propeller seals that way?” someone asked.

“Suicide,” someone else said. “You do it. It’s your bright idea.”

Indra stood up. “Give me that gun,” he said to a lieutenant. “The grenade launcher we got from the guards.”

The lieutenant ran off and returned with it a moment later: an ugly, blunt little thing, its stock cut down, its barrel sawed back to almost nothing. It had belonged to the Monk. They found it in her locker, wrapped in oilcloth along with six fragmentation rounds.

“The wheelhouse isn’t all steel: it’s hardened glass, too. I wonder how that glass will stand up to this.”

“Come on, boss,” the lieutenant said. “We disable the wheelhouse, we founder and we all die. All the lifeboats are sealed behind steel as well. The Sea Wolf knows what she’s doing.”

“Or she calls for help.”

“She can’t call for help. She’s an illegal vessel. A slave ship. A dozen patrols will pick her up on their radar, and you know she has a huge bounty on her head,” someone said.

“She wants us to fish,” another voice said. “That’s what she wants.”