The locked compartment was not a storage locker.
Goren shoved Aldric through the hatch, and he stumbled down three metal steps into a space that was larger than he had expected. The compartment extended beneath the bilge deck, a rectangular chamber perhaps eight meters long and four meters wide, lit by a single fluorescent tube that flickered with the same irregular pulse as every other light on the ship. The walls were lined with pipes and conduits, the ceiling low enough that Aldric had to duck his head. The air was cold and damp, saturated with the smell of rust and salt water and something else, something organic that Aldric recognized but did not want to name.
In the center of the compartment, shackled to a pipe with a pair of rusted handcuffs, was Mirek.
He was alive. That was the first thing Aldric registered. Mirek was alive, his pale eyes open and fixed on Aldric with an expression of exhausted recognition. But he was not the same man Aldric had spoken to in the fishmeal plant three days ago. His face was swollen, one eye closed by a purpled bruise that extended from his brow to his cheekbone. His lips were cracked and bleeding. His broken hands hung limply from the cuffs, the bandages gone, the misshapen fingers exposed to the cold air.
"Mirek," Aldric said.
"He told me you were coming." Mirek's voice was a rasp, barely audible. "The captain. He said he was bringing you down here. He said you were going to die with me."
"I'm not going to die. And neither are you."
Goren laughed. It was a short, ugly sound, without humor. "The engineer is an optimist. I like that. It makes the end more satisfying."
He shoved Aldric toward the far end of the compartment, where a second set of handcuffs hung from a pipe. Aldric's mind was working furiously, cataloguing the space, searching for anything that could be used as a weapon or a tool. The pipes were old, some of them corroded, some of them leaking. The floor plates were warped, the welds cracked. The fluorescent light was powered by a cable that ran along the ceiling, its insulation frayed.
"We've been doing this for seven years," Goren said, as he fastened the cuffs around Aldric's wrists. "Did you think you were the first? The first engineer who tried to be a hero? The first crew member who thought he could outsmart the captain?" He tightened the cuffs until the metal bit into Aldric's skin. "There were others. Dozens of others. They all ended up here. They all ended up in the sea."
"What is this place?" Aldric asked.
"It's a holding cell. The company calls it the transfer station. Crew members who are too sick to work, too troublesome to keep, too dangerous to leave alive—they come here. They wait. And when the supply ship comes, they're transferred."
"But the supply ship doesn't take them to a hospital."
"No." Goren's smile was thin and cold. "The supply ship takes them to the Valdostan Deep. The water is very deep there. Five thousand meters. It's a long way down."
He turned and walked back toward the hatch, his boots ringing on the deck plates. At the base of the steps, he paused and looked back.
"The captain will be down in a few hours. He wants to talk to you before the transfer. I'd tell you to use the time to pray, but there's no God out here. Just the sea. And the sea doesn't care."
The hatch slammed shut. The lock clicked into place. And Aldric was alone with Mirek in the cold, damp darkness beneath the bilge deck.
For a long moment, neither of them spoke. The ship rolled through a gentle swell, and the pipes groaned around them, and the fluorescent light flickered. Aldric tested the cuffs, pulling against the pipe, feeling the metal bite into his wrists. The cuffs were old but solid, the kind used by law enforcement in a dozen countries, and they were not going to break.
"The captain knows everything," Mirek whispered. "The meeting. The plan. He knew before we even gathered in the fishmeal plant."
"How?"
"There's a traitor. Someone in the crew. Someone who's been feeding information to Strakhov for years." Mirek coughed, a wet, rattling sound. "I don't know who it is. But the captain has always known. Every escape attempt. Every work stoppage. Every time someone tried to fight back. He knew about all of them."
Aldric felt the coldness in his chest deepen. A traitor. Someone who had been at the meeting, who had heard the plan, who had carried the details directly to Strakhov. Twenty-three men had gathered in the fishmeal plant. One of them was a spy.
"Do you know who?" Aldric asked.
"No. But it has to be someone who's been on the ship a long time. Someone the captain trusts." Mirek closed his good eye. "It doesn't matter now. We're going to die here. Like all the others."
"We're not going to die."
Aldric's voice was steady, but his mind was racing. The program was still on the external drive in his pocket—Goren had not searched him. The satellite phone was hidden beneath his mattress, but Tegan knew where it was. The vial of midazolam was in Emil's possession, waiting for the breakfast service at oh-six-hundred. The plan had been compromised, but it had not been stopped.
"The captain thinks he's won," Aldric said. "He thinks he's stopped the mutiny. But he doesn't know everything. He doesn't know about the backup program I hid in the engine room. He doesn't know about the sedative. He doesn't know that Felix and the others are still out there, still waiting for the signal."
Mirek opened his eye. "What signal?"
"I was supposed to trigger the sabotage at oh-four-hundred. If I don't trigger it, Felix will know something went wrong. He'll activate the backup plan."
"What backup plan?"
"The one I didn't tell anyone about. The one I hid in the engine room's diagnostic computer, where only Felix would find it." Aldric pulled against the cuffs, testing the pipe they were attached to. It was an old water line, corroded, its mounting brackets weakened by years of vibration. "If I can get free, I can still trigger the sabotage. I can still take the ship."
"How? You're handcuffed to a pipe."
Aldric looked at the pipe. It was a standard galvanized steel water line, perhaps five centimeters in diameter, running from the deck plates to a junction in the overhead. The mounting brackets were rusted, the bolts holding them to the bulkhead eaten away by years of exposure to salt water and neglect. If he could break the brackets, he could slide the cuffs off the end of the pipe.
"The brackets," he said. "They're corroded. If I can put enough pressure on them, they'll shear off."
"That's a steel pipe. You can't break it with your bare hands."
"Not the pipe. The brackets." Aldric braced his feet against the bulkhead and pulled. The cuffs bit into his wrists, the pain sharp and immediate, but he ignored it. The bracket creaked. Rust flaked away from the bolts. But the metal held.
"Again," Mirek said.
Aldric pulled again. The bracket creaked louder. One of the bolts shifted, a fraction of a millimeter, but it shifted. He pulled again, and again, and on the fifth pull, the bolt snapped with a sound like a gunshot. The bracket sagged, and the pipe dropped half a centimeter.
"Again," Mirek said.
It took twenty minutes. By the end, Aldric's wrists were raw and bleeding, the cuffs slick with blood, and his shoulders burned with a pain that went deep into the joints. But the brackets were broken, all three of them, and the pipe was hanging free from the bulkhead, supported only by its connection to the overhead junction.
Aldric slid the cuffs off the end of the pipe and stood up. His hands were still shackled, but he was no longer attached to the ship.
"Now what?" Mirek asked.
"Now I get you free."
Mirek's cuffs were attached to a different pipe, a thicker one that ran horizontally along the bulkhead. The brackets on this pipe were in better condition, less corroded, and Aldric knew he would not be able to break them with brute force. But the cuffs themselves were the same model as the ones on his wrists, and the lock mechanism was standard.
He knelt beside Mirek and examined the cuffs. The keyhole was small, the internal mechanism hidden, but Aldric had seen this model before. It was a common law-enforcement handcuff, manufactured in the Austran Confederation, and it had a vulnerability that he had learned about during his years as an engineer.
"The lock has a release pin," he said. "A small lever inside the mechanism that opens the cuffs if the key is lost. If I can reach it with something thin enough, I can pop the lock."
"With what?"
Aldric looked around the compartment. The floor was littered with debris: rusted bolts, pieces of broken equipment, the accumulated detritus of seven years of neglect. Near the bulkhead, half-hidden in the shadows, was a length of thin wire, probably a piece of electrical cable that had been discarded during one of the ship's many patchwork repairs.
He picked up the wire and straightened it. The end was thin enough to fit into the keyhole, and after several minutes of careful probing, he felt the tip catch on something inside the mechanism. He pressed gently, and the release pin clicked. The cuff opened.
Mirek pulled his hand free, and Aldric unlocked the second cuff. The fisherman's hands were worse than Aldric had imagined, the fingers twisted at impossible angles, the skin covered with old scars and newer wounds. But Mirek flexed them anyway, a small, painful movement, and looked up at Aldric with his one good eye.
"Thank you," he said.
"Thank me when we're off this ship." Aldric stood up and moved toward the hatch. "Can you walk?"
"Slowly. But yes."
The hatch was solid steel, the lock on the outside. Aldric pressed his ear against the metal and listened. No voices. No footsteps. The officers had left the bilge deck unguarded, confident that two men in handcuffs could not escape a locked compartment.
But they had not counted on an engineer who understood corroded pipes and defective handcuffs.
Aldric examined the hatch. The hinges were on the inside, a design that allowed the door to swing inward. The lock was a heavy padlock, similar to the one he had seen on his first day aboard. The hasp was welded to the frame, the weld crude but solid.
"The hinges," he said. "If I can remove the pins, the door will fall out of the frame."
"With what tools?"
Aldric looked around the compartment again. The debris on the floor included a length of steel rod, probably a piece of a broken pump shaft. It was heavy, solid, and one end was flattened from years of wear. A makeshift chisel.
He inserted the flattened end of the rod into the gap between the hinge pin and its housing and struck the other end with the palm of his hand. The pin did not move. He struck it again, harder, and felt something shift. He struck it a third time, and the pin slid upward, a fraction of a centimeter.
It took another thirty minutes to remove the first hinge pin. The second pin came out in fifteen. When both pins were free, Aldric wedged his fingers into the gap between the door and the frame and pulled.
The hatch came free, tilting inward, and cold air rushed into the compartment. Aldric peered through the gap. The bilge deck was dark and empty, the only light coming from the single incandescent bulb at the base of the ladder. The guards were gone. The officers were somewhere else, probably preparing for whatever Strakhov had planned for the scuttling of the ship.
"Come on," Aldric said, and helped Mirek through the gap.
They moved through the bilge deck slowly, Mirek leaning on Aldric's shoulder, his broken feet shuffling on the warped deck plates. At the ladder, Aldric paused and listened. The ship was quiet, but it was a different quiet than before. The engines were still running, but their rhythm had changed, the load reduced. The Iron Horizon was slowing down.
"He's preparing to scuttle the ship," Aldric said. "We don't have much time."
They climbed the ladder to the main deck, emerging into a corridor that was dim and empty. The crew quarters were silent, the mess hall dark. It was still before dawn, the hour when the fewest crew members were awake, and Aldric realized with a cold shock that the oh-four-hundred deadline had passed. The sabotage had not been triggered. Felix and the others would be waiting, wondering what had happened.
"Mirek, go to the medical cabin. Tegan will hide you. Tell her the plan is still active. Tell her I need Felix in the engine room immediately."
"What are you going to do?"
"I'm going to trigger the sabotage." Aldric pulled the external drive from his pocket. "Strakhov thinks he's won. He thinks the mutiny is crushed. He's about to find out he's wrong."
Mirek nodded and limped away down the corridor, his broken feet making soft, shuffling sounds on the deck plates. Aldric turned and walked toward the engine room, his bleeding wrists leaving small drops of blood on the floor, his mind already calculating the sequence of failures that would bring the Iron Horizon to a dead stop.
The engine room was empty. Felix was not there. Aldric moved to the diagnostic computer, the one he had used to write the original program, and inserted the external drive. The screen flickered to life, showing the ship's systems schematic, the same diagram he had marked with red annotations two days ago.
He pulled up the backup program and began the activation sequence. The ammonia pressure relief valves. The fuel pump controllers. The main engine cooling water intake. The desalination plant power supply. The satellite communications terminal. Seven systems, seven failures, all timed to trigger simultaneously.
His finger hovered over the execute button.
"Mr. Voss."
The voice came from behind him, and Aldric's hand stopped. He turned slowly, knowing what he would see.
Captain Strakhov was standing at the engine room hatch. Goren was beside him, the pistol in his hand. And between them, his arms twisted behind his back, his face bruised and bleeding, was Felix.
"I told you," Strakhov said. "I know everything that happens on this ship."
"No," Aldric said. "You don't."
He pressed the button.
The engine room lights flickered. The main diesel coughed and sputtered. The ammonia pressure alarms began to scream. And somewhere in the darkness above, the Iron Horizon began to die.
Strakhov's pale eyes widened, and for the first time since Aldric had come aboard, the captain looked afraid.
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