"All right," she said.
The crew mess on the Coriolis was on the lower deck forward, below the waterline, a long low room with a laminate table bolted to the sole and benches on both sides and a flat-screen on the bulkhead that was showing, with the sound off, a Premier League match from the weekend that somebody had recorded. A whiteboard on the aft bulkhead had the week's duty roster written on it in three colors of marker, and someone had drawn a small, careful cartoon of a crane with a sad face in the corner, and someone else had drawn a heart next to the word HAMISH.
There were nine of them around the table when she came in. Aled had sent the word around on the radio. They stood up when she came in, all of them, the way crew stand up for a captain, and she said, "Please don't," and they sat down again, uncertainly.
She knew some of them by name from paperwork and some from crew lists and two from before. Solveig Mikkelsen, the chief stew, a Dane in her late thirties with white-blond hair scraped back so tight it pulled the corners of her eyes, had been a second stew on a boat Octavia audited in Palma six years ago and had once spent twenty minutes showing her, with great seriousness, the correct way to fold a fitted sheet. Lachlan Bairstow, the bosun, an Australian built like a refrigerator, with forearms covered in faded tattoos of swallows, she had met at the Fort Lauderdale boat show when he was trying to decide whether to go for his officer's ticket. The chief officer was a slight, quiet woman from Mauritius named Celestine Joubert who had been on the Coriolis only since July. The chief engineer was a Geordie named Cheswick who said hello and then looked at the table and did not look up again. The rest were young deckhands and stews.
Octavia sat at the end of the bench and put her hard case on the table and did not open it.
"I'm not here to get anybody in trouble," she said. "I want to say that first, because I know that's what everybody's thinking, and I want you to hear it. I'm the DPA. Some of you know what that means, some of you don't, and that's fine. What it means today is that this boat doesn't leave this pier until I sign a piece of paper saying it's safe to. And I can't sign that piece of paper until I understand what happened on Friday night. All of it. Not the version on the form. What happened."
Nobody said anything. The footballers on the flat-screen ran silently back and forth.
"Nineteen years ago," she said, "I was a junior stew on a boat called the Kittiwake. Some of you have heard of her. She's in Turkey now, I think, with a different name. My captain was the man upstairs. I came on board through the same gate I came through today, the one past the dumpsters, and on my first morning I cleaned grout with a toothbrush for nine hours, and on my second morning the chief stew told me that if I ever lied to her about anything she'd have me on a plane home before lunch. And she meant it. And I never did." She looked around the table. "I'm asking you the same thing. I'm not going to lie to you. Don't lie to me."
It was Solveig who spoke first. She said, in her precise Danish English, "We have been nine crew since Nantucket. We are supposed to be fourteen."
"I know."