Viktor Dityatin threw open the door of the small, cramped cabin he shared with his wife. He stormed through and slammed the door shut behind him. He took off his green croupier's cap and threw it across the room.  Yebat!" he swore violently.

Becky, who knew what the word meant, winced. "What is it?" she asked. "The overtime again? They gave it to someone else again..."

"I've been relieved of duty in the Vinland Casino," Viktor interrupted her, pacing furiously back and forth across the threadbare carpet. "Travis Dixon accused me of fiddling the roulette wheel."

"Relieved of duty?" said Becky, staring at him. She had to speak louder than she normally would to be heard above the sound of the ship's engines, just a few bulkheads away and separated from them only by the desalination plant and the machine shops. She was still wearing her maid's uniform. She'd only just come back from cleaning the bridge and hadn't had time to change yet. "Ben couldn't possibly believe you'd do something like that."

"He had to pretend to believe," said Viktor, still pacing. He had too much anger to stop. It made his Russian accent so thick that Becky almost couldn't understand his words despite having known him for two years. "You can't accuse someone as rich and powerful as Travis Dixon of lying. So now I'm transferred to the cleaning staff until he disembarks. It took me three years to get my license, and now I'm mopping floors and making beds like a common maid."

"Like me, you mean," said Becky, her eyes narrowing.

Viktor didn't notice. "Ben said that, so long as I'm doing a maid's duties, I can only be paid a maid's wages. Level four wages."

"Will you be back in the casino when he gets off?"

"Yes, but if he ever comes aboard again Ben says I'll have to be bumped back down to housecleaning again. In case he recognises me."

"As if he would recognise you," said Becky, the contempt in her voice aimed at the Billionaire. "You could be right back there at the roulette wheel and he wouldn't know it was you. We are nothing to a man like that. Less than nothing..."

She broke off at the look in his face and tried a different tack. "At least you're aboard the ship," she said. "Someone else might have just sacked you, like Dixon wanted."

"Someone else might have told Dixon to sling his hook."

"Come on, you know he couldn't do that."

"He could have shown a little backbone. Instead, the useless dick just folds like a house of cards in an earthquake. It made up my mind, though. When we get back to Southampton, we're quitting. Getting jobs aboard this ship was a mistake for both of us. We're getting off. I'll get a job in a city casino and you can... Do something. Work in a hotel, maybe. The same kind of thing you're doing here. We both need to work to pay the mortgage."

"We're quitting?" said Becky, her eyes narrowing again.

"You want us to be together, don't you? You want to be alone aboard this ship while I'm back in England? Or perhaps we could go back to Latvia. You'd like it there..."

"I like it here." Becky hated how defensive her voice suddenly sounded.

"You like this?" Viktor waved a hand around the tiny room, something he could hardly do without banging it on the wardrobe and the shower stall. "It's like living in a metal box."

"Our house back in Southampton isn't much bigger."

"At least it's got windows." He jabbed a finger at the painted steel wall. There was no porthole. Even if the room had been against the outer hull, which it wasn't, it was below sea level. "This place is claustrophobic. In this room I feel like I am buried alive. I hate it here! The only reason I took the job was because of the money, and now I'm only getting a housekeeper's wages."

"You'll be back in the casino for the trip back to Portsmouth," said Becky. "Making your good money again. Travis Dixon will be off the ship, and you'll likely never see him again. Think about spending a few days in Rio. Isn't that something to look forward to?"

"Have you ever been to Rio?" asked Victor. "Or any of the big tourist cities?"

"This is my first time outside the UK. You know that."

"Big tourist cities like Rio are expensive. We don't have the money to go to any of the good places. We'd be slumming it with the common tourists, the ones who come in on a bus. The parts of the city we can afford to go, we are likely to get mugged or murdered. Rich, tourist cities are only safe for rich people, and you and I are not rich."

"We've still got the scenery. Come on, we live on a luxury cruise liner now. Most people would..."

"You call this luxury? Is this really what you were expecting when you signed up?" He waved around at the tiny room again. A room almost filled by a double bed, a washbasin, a wardrobe and a shower cubicle. "We eat whatever is left in the kitchens after the rich passengers have eaten their fill..."

"So does the rest of the crew," Becky interrupted him. "So does the Captain himself."

"And the sound of the bloody engines drives me mad! It never stops. I can't sleep because of the endless, bloody noise!"

Becky stared at him helplessly. "You get used to it," she said weakly. "After a while, you stop noticing it." She took Victor's arm in her hands and gave it a squeeze. "You're just upset because of Travis Dixon. Forget about him. You were happy yesterday, and we were right here, in this same room."

"I have to report to David Williams to get a steward's uniform. Tomorrow I have to report to Sally Jones for my new duties. The same woman you report to."

"Perhaps we can work together," said Doris, brightening at the thought. "Do the same rooms together. That'll be fun, won't it?"

Victor just swore in Russian, though. "Better go get my new uniform," he said, opening the door again. "Don't want to make a bad start to my new career by keeping him waiting."

"It'll be all right," Doris called out to him as he stormed off through the door. "It's just for a few days..."

There were people walking along the narrow corridor, though. People in the uniforms of stewards, cooks and entertainers going to and from their equally small crew quarters. Doris didn't want to make a scene in front of them, and so she just watched in silence as her husband strode off along the antiseptic, white corridor, shouldering aside anyone who didn't get out of his way fast enough.

"Everything all right?" asked Tracey Underhill, one of the swimming pool attendants. The two women had met in the canteen on their first day aboard and become good friends. She had been passing by in the corridor, but now she paused at the sight of Doris's worried face.

"Fine," Doris replied, trying to put on a happy look. "Just fine." She turned to go back inside.

Tracey ran over to put a hand on her shoulder. "Sometimes it helps to talk about it," she said. "To someone who understands. When I took my job, I thought it would be so wonderful. Exotic locations, bright sunshine. If I had known what it was really like..."

Doris opened her mouth to tell her that everything was all right. She wanted to go back into her cabin and shut the door, to create a warm little bubble in which she could pretend that her life was perfect. She wanted to turn on the small, wall-mounted TV, lay on the bed and watch a mind-deadening soap opera that would allow her to forget her husband's anger for a while. Tracey was staring at her with such genuine compassion, though, that she couldn't just brush her off. The fact that someone cared about her so much touched her somewhere deep inside, and so she nodded and invited the other woman into her tiny cabin.

She made cups of tea for them both, and while it was brewing she told Tracey what Victor had just told her. "I think sometimes that the French had the right idea," she said as she poured the hot, steaming liquid into the tiny porcelain cups. "We should build a guillotine and cut all their stinking, greedy heads off."

Tracey giggled as she took her cup. Doris offered her milk and sugar, and Tracey said yes to both. "At least you don't have to sit on the edge of a swimming pool in a skimpy swimsuit all day every day," she said, taking a sip. "The children aren't so bad. I like children, but the fathers seem to think that I'm one of the ship's amenities, provided for their entertainment and pleasure. I get propositioned twenty times every day, and not all of them know how to take no for an answer. Less than an hour ago, I had to call security to pull a fat German off me. And his wife was right there, watching! She didn't care! Her husband was groping me and trying to take my top off and she just didn't care!"

"I've had some of that," Doris told her. "The maid's uniform doesn't help. It makes me look like something from a cheap porn movie. The men think they only have to snap their fingers and my clothes will just fall off."

"It wouldn't be so bad if some of the girls didn't encourage them," said Tracey, her fingers growing white where she was gripping the tiny teacup. "They encourage the men so they'll spend money on them. I've heard that some of the maids... No, never mind."

"Some of the maids what?" asked Doris, looking at her intently.

"I would never suggest that you were one of them," said Tracey, looking guiltily down into her teacup, "but there are rumours that some of the... The female staff aboard this ship are actual prostitutes. That they are hired on the understanding that'll sleep with any man who wants them."

Doris stared at her. "You can't be serious," she said in a quiet whisper.

"The logical part of me says it can't possibly be true, that any cruise line that did such a thing would be ruined if the truth came out. What respectable person would want to sail on a ship that was basically just a floating brothel?"

"And yet the rumours persist?" said Doris. Of course they do, she told herself. They always do.

"Some of the girls certainly act like it," Tracey told her. "Either they really are prostitutes, or they're doing their very best to make the passengers think so."

Probably they're just sluts," sausage Doris. "They got jobs aboard a cruise ship just so they could leech off the rich passengers."

"I'm sure you're right," Tracey replied, stirring her tea with the spoon. "They're just sluts."

Suddenly they were both laughing, and Doris felt wonderful as all the anger and worry poured out of her. "The biggest sluts in the world," she said.

"The whores of the high seas," Tracey agreed, and they were both rocked by new waves of laughter.

Neither of them spoke for a while after that. They were content to bask in the happy moment while they sipped their tea and felt the gentle swaying of the great ship under them. After a while, though, the silence began to grow awkward, and Doris looked for something else to talk about. "So," she said. "Did you see the news this morning?"

Tracey said that she had, and they began discussing the scandal surrounding one of the world's most famous actors.