It had to be that way, or it wouldn’t be worth it for the company to own the ship, feed the crew, hire the guards. That was why the automated ships were no longer fully automated: the robots had been too expensive to repair. They had disrupted the system. The enslaved crew and the guards needed to keep them working were cheaper to maintain. So, they ripped the robots out.

There were incidents like the senseless killing of the man aboard the factory ship that violated the economy, that were extravagant, and accidental, but for the most part everything functioned with cost in mind.

Including violence. Violence was something executed within the confines of that economy: kill too many crew members and it became too expensive; it couldn’t be cheap to pay the black-market operatives for new abducted crew members. Violence was to be used sparingly. Injury to crew members was a violation of the economy. And Eiko was sure that this economy was expressed everywhere: They were fed what they needed to be fed, set by a cost estimate that determined what was needed to keep them healthy enough, but no more. They were given medicine if they got sick, but there would be a limit to that, too. There would be a point at which a sick or injured crew member would be discarded. He hadn’t seen it happen, but he was certain it could happen. The Sea Wolf would make a calculation: it had these algorithms of profit and loss in its brain. Everything extended from those calculations.

During their stay at the factory ship other crew members came aboard the Sea Wolf: men who repaired the bulkheads, the holes riddled in the crew cabin walls by the Alaskan pirates. Men who performed maintenance on the ship’s engines and equipment.

They traded rumors and news: there had been a coup on the Security Council at the UN, with the Republic of Istanbul replacing the Chinese Federation as a permanent member. There had been a tsunami off Java, and one of the AI ships had ended up stranded on a beach. The crew had escaped, but when they had turned themselves in to the authorities, the authorities had arrested them for illegal immigration, returned them to the AI ship, and towed them back out to international waters.

They traded horror stories: A ship had docked at the factory ship with nobody aboard, its hold full. Not a trace of the crew or of the mercenaries who were supposed to have been watching them, until the crew of the factory ship had opened the hold and found them all there, neatly stacked and frozen, crew and guards alike. The ship had failed to catch any fish, and gone mad, decided protein was protein. The ship’s AI mind had to be decommissioned.