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Willy snarled, his Edinburgh accent sharp as vinegar and thick as molasses. “That man was no Scot, he was a bluidy Canadian, and this is no
cludgie
starship—that’s fer dammit sure. So you can shut yer
geggie
!” He hawked over the side again and stared belligerently up at Hanson.
    William Tung McSeveney was, according to him at any rate, the result of the unlikely mating of a red-haired Scottish clerk working for Jardine-Matheson tallying opium profits in the 1800s and a whore from Macau named Tung Lo May, a name that always reminded Hanson of something you might find on a Chinese take-out menu. The combining of the nationalities continued enthusiastically for several generations, the final result being Willy, raised in the slums of Fountainbridge in a Chinese laundry and enrolling in Sea Cadets at Bruntsfield School where Sean Connery had gone some years earlier. His only dream had been to get out of Auld Reekie, the Smoke, Edinburgh, as rapidly as possible. At fourteen he’d signed on the SS
Lanarkshire
as an unlicensed engineer, fourth grade, bound for Africa and Asia. He’d never set foot in Scotland again, working on fifty different Straits Trade ships from Hong Kong to Rangoon until he finally found a home and a set of old Scotch boilers on the
Batavia Queen
.
    The
Queen
was older than anyone aboard her. Originally built as a Flower Class Corvette K-49 at the Vancouver Shipyards on Canada’s west coast, she was lent to the Royal Australian Navy and spent the war years dodging Japanese torpedoes and carrying troops through MacArthur’s Philippines from Darwin to Rabaul. After being paid off at Subic Bay at the end of the war, she was bought by Burns Philips, given the name she still bore, and spent the next twenty years as an interisland trading ship, her belly torn apart to create a crude cargo hold.
    In the sixties she was transformed again—this time into a salvage and survey tug traveling the same routes in search of wrecks and sunken ships from the war that could be raised and floated for scrap. The scrap business eventually self-destructed and the
Queen
went back to being an interisland trader once more, being passed from owner to owner over the years like an old streetwalker in decline, eventually finding herself carried on the Boegart List almost as an oversight.
    Barely two hundred feet long and thirty-three feet wide, she had a draft of eleven feet when the pumps were operating. Originally equipped with depth charges, a four-inch gun forward, antiaircraft pom-poms, and a pair of twenty-millimeter cannons, she’d long ago been stripped down to a rusty hulk with only an old twelve-gauge in the captain’s cabin for protection and a few other bits of weaponry hidden here and there just in case. Originally designed for a crew of seventy, she now got along with eleven, from Hanson on the bridge to McSeveney in the engine room and his hulking, mute Samoan wiper, Kuan Kong. There was a single lifeboat in case of emergency: a twenty-seven foot vessel dogged down on makeshiftdavits in the stern, where the depth charge rails had once been fitted. At best she could barely make twelve knots’ headway but usually cruised at closer to seven.
    Originally painted in blues and grays, the
Queen
had suffered through a number of color changes over the years from black to green to dull red and back to black again, the superstructure white, the funnel scarlet with a large black B, and everything streaked with rust. The bow and stern quarters and the bridge were wooden-decked and desperately worn while the rest was riveted plate steel. It was a credit to her builders that she was still afloat after almost seventy years of battling through wars, storms, and pounding seas, even though she obviously and sometimes noisily showed her age.
    Almost as though in defiance of Hanson’s bleak line of thought, there was suddenly a racketing roar from the bowels of the ship as the ancient copper-pot cast-iron steam engine rumbled