7. The Satellite Phone Fragment

The fishing operation began with a scream of hydraulics.

Aldric stood in the engine room, his hand resting on the control panel for the main winch, watching the gauges flicker as the massive drums began to turn. The trawl net was being deployed, a monster of synthetic cable and steel chain that would descend into the dark water and sweep up everything in its path. The Iron Horizon had been designed for this moment, every system in the ship converging on the single purpose of extracting biomass from the sea.

But the ship was not ready. Aldric knew it. The winch motor was drawing fifteen percent more amperage than it should, the bearings screaming under a load they had not been maintained to handle. The hydraulic pressure was fluctuating, the pumps struggling to maintain flow through lines that were clogged with decades of accumulated sediment. The ammonia system was holding, but only barely; the repair he had made to the elbow joint was a temporary fix, and he could already hear the faint hiss of gas escaping from another pinhole somewhere in the overhead piping.

If any of these systems failed during the trawl, the net would be lost. And if the net was lost, the catch would be lost. And if the catch was lost, the captain would hold someone responsible.

"Aldric."

He turned. Felix was standing at the engine room hatch, his face pale, his hands gripping the doorframe with a tension that was unlike him.

"It's Pavel," Felix said. "He's dead."

The words landed with the flat, uninflected weight of a fact that could not be argued with. Aldric closed his eyes for a moment, seeing the bandaged head, the seeping blood, Tegan's steady hands injecting mannitol into the IV line. A man he had never spoken to, whose face he had never seen clearly, whose name he knew only because it had been written on a medical chart. Dead.

"When?" Aldric asked.

"An hour ago. Tegan tried to revive him, but the swelling in his brain was too severe. He stopped breathing at oh-four-hundred." Felix's voice was carefully controlled, but Aldric could hear the undercurrent of something else beneath it. Not grief. Not shock. Anger. "The captain wants him disposed of before the crew wakes up."

"Disposed of?"

"Burial at sea. Standard procedure for deaths aboard." Felix's mouth twisted on the word "standard." "The first mate is preparing the body now. They'll hold a brief ceremony on the stern deck at dawn."

Aldric walked past Felix without speaking, climbing the ladder toward the main deck. The ship was rolling heavily now, the seas building as the weather system that had been threatening all night finally began to close in. The wind was picking up, a cold, damp wind that carried the smell of rain and the deeper, more ominous smell of open ocean.

The stern deck was empty except for two figures. One was the first mate, Goren, his thick body silhouetted against the gray sky. The other was a long shape wrapped in canvas, lying on a plank that had been laid across two sawhorses. The canvas was stained with old fish blood and newer, darker stains that Aldric did not want to examine too closely.

"Mr. Voss," Goren said, his voice as flat and expressionless as his face. "Come to pay your respects?"

"I came to see what happens to the dead on this ship."

Goren shrugged, a small, dismissive movement. "Same thing that happens to the dead on any ship. They go over the side. The sea takes them. The sea takes everything eventually."

"Did anyone notify his family?"

Goren looked at him then, and his expression was something between amusement and contempt. "Pavel had no family. None of them have family. That's why they're here."

It was a lie. Aldric knew it was a lie. Every man on this ship had come from somewhere, had left behind parents or wives or children, had signed a contract that promised to send money home. The company had simply chosen not to notify anyone, because notification would create a paper trail, and paper trails led to investigations, and investigations were the one thing the Iron Horizon's owners could not afford.

"The ceremony," Aldric said. "The captain mentioned a ceremony."

"Here it is." Goren raised his voice, not shouting but projecting with the practiced authority of a man who was accustomed to being obeyed. "We commit this man to the sea. May his soul find peace in the depths. Amen."

He tipped the plank, and the canvas-wrapped shape slid off the end and into the water with a splash that was swallowed almost immediately by the wind and the waves. Aldric watched the body float for a moment, a pale shape just beneath the surface, and then it was gone, dragged down by the weight of whatever had been wrapped inside the canvas with it.

It had taken less than thirty seconds.

"Back to your stations," Goren said to the small group of crew members who had gathered at the rail. "The trawl net is deploying. The fish won't wait for your mourning."

The crew dispersed, their faces blank, their shoulders hunched. Aldric watched them go, these hollow-eyed men who had just watched one of their own disappear into the sea with less ceremony than they would give a broken piece of equipment. They did not speak to each other. They did not look at each other. They simply returned to their stations, to the processing deck and the fishmeal plant and the freezing tunnel, to the machines that consumed their labor and their health and eventually their lives.

Aldric did not return to his station. He walked instead to the medical cabin.

Tegan was sitting at her desk, her face buried in her hands. The examination table was empty, the sheets stripped, the IV stand pushed into a corner. The mannitol vial sat on the counter, still half full, a medication that had not been enough to save a man whose injuries should never have been fatal.

"I'm sorry," Aldric said.

Tegan looked up. Her dark eyes were rimmed with red, but her voice was steady. "He was conscious at the end. The swelling receded just enough for him to wake up for a few minutes. He knew he was dying."

"What did he say?"

"He asked me to tell his wife that he loved her. He asked me to tell his daughter that he was sorry he couldn't come home." Tegan's voice cracked on the last word, but she did not cry. "I told him I would. But I don't know his wife's name. I don't know his daughter's name. I don't even know what country he was from. The company doesn't keep records of the crew's families. They don't want records. Records are evidence."

Aldric sat down on the stool beside her desk. The ship rolled through a trough, and something in the cabinet rattled, a small, metallic sound that was swallowed by the deeper rumble of the engines.

"How many?" he asked.

"How many what?"

"How many have died since you came aboard?"

Tegan was silent for a long moment. When she spoke, her voice was flat and distant, as if she were reciting a list that she had memorized long ago. "Eleven that I know of. Pavel makes twelve. There were probably more before I arrived. The previous medic didn't keep records either, but I found some notes that he had hidden in the back of the supply cabinet. He listed seventeen deaths in two years. The notes stopped six months before I replaced him."

"What happened to him? The previous medic?"

"He requested a transfer. The request was denied. A month later, he was found dead in his cabin. The captain said it was a heart attack." Tegan paused. "He was thirty-two years old."

Aldric felt the coldness in his chest spread outward, into his limbs, into his fingers, into the base of his skull. A thirty-two-year-old man did not die of a heart attack on a ship where men were regularly beaten, regularly starved, regularly thrown overboard when they became too sick to work.

"The locked compartment," Aldric said. "Below the bilge deck. Do you know what's inside it?"

Tegan's expression did not change, but something behind her eyes went very still. "Why do you ask about that?"

"Because I tried to look inside it on my second day aboard. The captain stopped me. He told me it was a storage locker. He told me the lock was to prevent theft. He lied about everything else on this ship, so I'm assuming he lied about that too."

"I don't know what's inside it." Tegan's voice was a whisper now. "But I know that men who go in there don't come back out. Dreyer went in there. A week later, he was dead. Before him, there was a deckhand named Samir. He went in there looking for something he said he had lost. The next morning, he was gone. The captain said he had been transferred to another ship, but Samir had told me the day before that he was afraid of being transferred. He said the transfers were a death sentence."

"Did he say why?"

"No. He just said that the men who were transferred were never seen again. He said they were taken to a place where the company disposed of the ones who couldn't work anymore." Tegan met Aldric's eyes. "I think that place is the locked compartment. I think that's where they take the ones they're going to kill."

The ship rolled again, harder this time, and the lights flickered. Somewhere in the distance, a man shouted something that was swallowed by the wind. The trawl net was still deploying, the winch still screaming, the ship still grinding forward through seas that were building toward something ugly.

Aldric stood up. "I need to see the communications room."

"The communications room is on the bridge level. It's locked. Only the captain and the first mate have keys."

"I'm aware of that."

"Why do you need to see it?"

"Because someone on this ship needs to send a message to the outside world. And I'm the only one who knows what needs to be said."

He left the medical cabin and walked through the dim corridors toward the ladder that led to the upper decks. The USB drive was still in his pocket, its weight a constant reminder of what Karsten had given him. The registration numbers of six ships. The names of the shell companies. The last known positions. Data that could, if it reached the right hands, trigger an investigation that would bring the entire operation down.

But first he had to get it off the ship. And to do that, he needed access to a communications system that was locked behind a door that only Strakhov and Goren could open.

The bridge level was quiet. The fishing operation had drawn most of the officers to the processing deck and the trawl control station, leaving only a single watch officer on the bridge. Aldric could see him through the glass door, a young man in a blue uniform who was staring out the window at the building sea with the vacant expression of someone who was not expecting anything to happen.

The communications room was aft of the bridge, a small compartment marked with a sign that read COMMS — RESTRICTED ACCESS. The door was solid steel, the lock an electronic keypad that required a code. Aldric studied it for a long moment, cataloguing the make and model. It was a standard maritime security lock, manufactured by a company in the Austran Confederation. He had installed a dozen of them on other ships, back when he had been a consulting engineer for the Meridian merchant marine.

The code would be four digits. The default factory code was 0000. If Strakhov had not changed it—and Aldric had seen enough of the Iron Horizon's maintenance practices to suspect that he had not—then the door would open with four keystrokes.

He pressed 0-0-0-0. The lock beeped once and clicked open.

The communications room was small and dark, lit only by the glow of the equipment racks that lined the walls. A satellite communications terminal. A VHF radio. A computer that was connected to the ship's internal network. And, on a shelf above the computer, a satellite phone.

Aldric stared at the phone for a long moment. A satellite phone was a direct line to the outside world, a way to make a call from anywhere on the planet without going through the ship's official communications logs. If he could use it, he could call the Meridian maritime authorities. He could call the journalist whose name Karsten had given him. He could call anyone, anywhere, and tell them what was happening on the Iron Horizon.

But the phone was not there. The shelf was empty. The phone's charging cradle was still connected to the power supply, but the phone itself was gone.

Aldric searched the room methodically, opening drawers, checking cabinets, looking behind the equipment racks. The phone was not there. It had been removed deliberately, probably on Strakhov's orders, to ensure that no crew member could ever make an unauthorized call.

But the computer was still there. And the computer was connected to the satellite terminal.

Aldric sat down at the desk and woke the computer from its sleep mode. The screen flickered to life, displaying a login prompt. He typed ADMIN for the username and tried the same four zeroes for the password. The system accepted it.

Strakhov had not changed a single default setting on any piece of equipment on the entire ship.

The email client opened, and Aldric began to type. He addressed the message to the journalist whose contact information Karsten had included on the USB drive—a woman named Sorensen who had been investigating labor abuses in the distant-water fishing industry for years. He attached the files from the USB drive: ship registrations, shell company names, last known positions. And he wrote a description of what he had seen aboard the Iron Horizon: the broken men, the dead medic, the crew members who disappeared, the locked compartment below the bilge deck.

His fingers moved quickly, the words pouring out of him in a flood that had been building since the moment he had stepped aboard. He wrote about Pavel. He wrote about Mirek and his broken hands. He wrote about Dreyer and the steel bar in the compressor and the three men from the Kestrel who had come aboard and disappeared into the officers' quarters. He wrote until his hands were shaking and the cursor had filled three screens with text.

Then he pressed send.

The computer thought about it for a moment, the progress bar creeping across the screen. Then a message appeared: TRANSMISSION FAILED. SIGNAL BLOCKED.

He tried again. Same result. The satellite terminal was working—he could see the signal strength indicator on the display—but the data connection was being filtered somehow, the outgoing messages blocked by a security protocol that he had not noticed when he logged in.

He dug deeper into the system settings, following the network configuration menus through layer after layer of arcane technical options. And there, buried in the firewall rules, he found it: a whitelist of approved recipients, a short list of email addresses that the system was allowed to communicate with. The company's offices in Valdosta. The supply ship Kestrel. A handful of other trawlers in the fleet. And nothing else.

Strakhov had not changed the default passwords, but someone else—someone more technically competent—had configured the communications system to ensure that no message from the Iron Horizon could ever reach the outside world.

Aldric sat in the dark, staring at the screen, the USB drive cold in his pocket and the failed transmission still blinking on the monitor. He had the data. He had the means to send it. But he was trapped behind a firewall that he could not break, on a ship that was sailing deeper into international waters with every passing hour.

He deleted the draft message and cleared the browser history. Then he shut down the computer and slipped out of the communications room, locking the door behind him.

The ship rolled through another trough, harder than before, and Aldric had to brace himself against the bulkhead to keep his footing. The wind was screaming now, a high, keening sound that cut through the rumble of the engines. The sea was building, and the Iron Horizon was not handling it well.

He descended the ladder toward the engine room, his mind working through the problem. The satellite phone was gone. The email system was blocked. But there had to be another way. There was always another way. An engineer's mind was a machine for finding paths through systems that seemed closed.

And then he remembered something. Something Tegan had told him on his first day aboard, when he had been cataloguing the ship's equipment and learning the layout of the compartments. A small detail that had seemed irrelevant at the time but that now took on a sudden, urgent significance.

The previous medic had hidden notes in the back of a supply cabinet. Notes that had survived his death. Notes that Tegan had found.

A medic could hide notes. An engineer could hide something else.

He reached the engine room and found Felix standing at the main control panel, his face tense, his eyes fixed on the gauges that were flickering in the red zone.

"The hydraulic pressure is dropping," Felix said. "The winch is struggling. If we don't get the net back aboard soon, we're going to lose it."

"Then let's get the net back aboard."

Aldric moved to the control panel and began the sequence that would reverse the winch and begin hauling the trawl net back toward the ship. The motors screamed in protest, the amperage spiking, the bearings groaning. But the drums began to turn, slowly, painfully, dragging the massive net through the churning sea.

And as he worked, Aldric's mind was elsewhere. It was in the medical cabin, looking for a place to hide a satellite phone that had been removed from the communications room. It was in the dim corridors and the locked compartments and the spaces between the bulkheads where a man who understood ship systems could conceal anything.

The trawl net was coming aboard. The fish were coming with it. The processing deck was about to become a factory again, a machine for converting living creatures into frozen fillets and fishmeal and money.

But somewhere on this ship, Aldric was certain, there was a satellite phone. And somewhere on this ship, there was a way to use it.