Chapter One

Somewhere in the Pacific Ocean floated one whitened rubber duck. Its cheerful face was intact: puffed-up cheeks, half-moon pupils, duck-bill smile. Three decades of salt and sunshine had worn a hole from its neck to the tip of its debonair tail. The duck bobbed unevenly (face down, sideways, upside down); it was particularly buoyant plastic. The duck’s dawn horizon was vast and empty save for the Cargo Jane, which was as high as a modest office tower and moved at a rate roughly equivalent to suburban traffic. Its crew of fifteen was just sitting down to a meager breakfast of cold toast and coffee with powdered milk.

It was a time of changing strangeness. The crew members’ cell phones, connected to the Internet via a weak satellite link, beamed them the news of the day: billionaire mayor drops out of US presidential race; climate change blamed for Australian wildfires; ten people dead in a fire at a Gaza Strip refugee camp; production of the new James Bond movie delayed by the spread of the novel coronavirus. One of the crew shared a month-old news video. A camera panned unsteadily across a nighttime city; voices called out into the dark. The city was Wuhan, the subtitles said, and the people were shouting “add oil”: stay strong.