Then the crew crept down the passageway to the guard barracks. Each berth was surrounded by three or four crew members. With a signal from Indra, it was carried out at once—the crew members falling on them, stabbing and bludgeoning.

One guard, a big Kazakh named Nursultan, woke up when the first blow hit him, and leapt from his bed.

It was his scream Eiko and Son had heard, cut short by a rain of blows to the head and a knife in the throat.

It didn’t take much to kill a person.

Eiko and Son were fully dressed when Indra came back into the crew barracks. His clothes, face, and hands were smeared with blood, as were the clothes, faces, and hands of the crew members who came in with him.

“It is done,” Indra said.

“Why were we not told?” Son asked.

“Practicalities. The ship had to watch someone. And it was clear enough the two of you were plotting something. I guess you thought you were being subtle with all your whispering.”

The grin in his blood-spattered face was phosphorescent in the half dark of the barracks. Indra was still breathing hard. The iron bar in his hand was coated with gore.

“Bloody work, but it had to be done. The others are collecting the arms and dealing with the bodies. Now”—he turned to the crew members with him—“we go to the AI and tell it to put in for the next port. We’re going to be free.”

As he was saying it, they felt the ship lurch as its engines slowed, then came to idle.

“It knows already,” one of them said.

Indra shrugged. “All the better. We weren’t planning on keeping it a secret.”

A few minutes later they were on deck. Indra and the two or three who were closest to him—all Indonesians, and all of them already on board when Eiko was kidnapped—gathered around the armored steel door of the wheelhouse. The sea was calm, the ship drifting, its engines a hum. Indra banged on the door with the bar. The rest of the crew was below, on the processing deck. There were streaks of blood from where the bodies of the guards had been dragged to the gunwales and dumped into the sea.

Son, Eiko noticed, had said nothing at all since waking.