Ship Breaker Read online

  And then abruptly the street slipped into the water, dipping down. Boats and river taxis were moored, men sitting with their oared skiffs and tiny scrap sails, waiting to ferry anyone who needed to move into the Orleans beyond.

  “Dead end,” Nailer said.

  “No.” Nita shook her head. “I know this place. We’re close. We have to go through the Orleans, to get to the deep-sea platforms. We’ll need a water taxi.”

  “They look expensive.”

  “Didn’t Pima’s mother give you money?” Nita asked. “I’m sure it’s more than enough.”

  Nailer hesitated, then pulled out the wad of red cash.

  “Better to save it,” Tool said. “You’ll be hungry later.”

  Nailer stared at the brackish water. “I’m pretty thirsty now.”

  Nita scowled at him. “Then how are we supposed to get out to the clippers?”

  “We could just walk,” Nailer said. Some people were wading out into the water, which seemed only waist deep. They moved slowly through the green and oily murk.

  Nita stared at the water with distaste. “You can’t walk there. It’s too deep.”

  “Spend your money on water,” Tool said. “There will be a way for the laborers to get to the loading platforms. The poor will lead us.”

  Nita reluctantly agreed. They bought brownish water from a water seller, a man with yellow rotting teeth and a wide smile, who swore that his water was salt-free and well boiled, and after they had bought, he cheerfully directed them. He even offered to row them there, but he wanted too high a fee and so instead they went the long way, threading around drowned and rotting streets, down floating boardwalks. The reek of fish and petroleum came in waves, making Nailer’s eyes water and reminding him of ship-breaking yards.

  Eventually they reached the shore. A series of buoys stretched out into the placid water.

  Nita stared at the water with distaste. “We should have taken a boat.”

  Nailer grinned at her. “Afraid?” he asked.

  She gave him a dirty look. “No.” She stared at the water again. “But it’s not clean. The chemicals are poisonous.” She sniffed. “There’s no telling what’s in there.”

  “Yeah, well, that’ll kill you tomorrow, not today.” He waded out into the gunk and slime of the water. A thin, jewellike oil sheen covered it. “It’s better than around the ship yards. This is nothing at all in comparison to that. And it hasn’t killed me yet.” He grinned again, enjoying taunting her. “Come on. Let’s go see if there’s a clipper waiting for you.”

  Nita compressed her lips but followed. Nailer wanted to laugh at her. She was smart, but it was weird how damn prissy she was. He watched as she waded deeper into the water, enjoying the fact that the swank was about to drag herself around in the filth like a normal person for once. As soon as Lucky Girl was in, Tool waded after her, his huge form pressing a ripple in the lily pads and petroleum murk. They all started forward, walking slowly. The water deepened, rising to their chests.

  Ahead of them, someone had tied plastic buoys, marking a lane for people without boats. One of them was orange, another white. As Nailer passed one, he spied the faded image of an apple stamped on its surface along with letters. Another had an ancient automobile embedded on its face. The path of discarded containers led them out to where the last portions of housing foundations disappeared and where much of the wreckage was gone, and still the path went on.

  They waded carefully through the waters, following a stream of struggling bodies that waded, swam, and splashed forward toward the far docks. At one point, Nita lost her footing and went under. Tool grabbed her and pulled her up and set her back on the careful path that everyone else followed.

  She pushed long wet strands of hair off her face and stared to the distant ships and their docks. “Why don’t they just use boats?”

  “For these people?” Tool looked around at their fellow waders. “They are not worth it.”

  “Still, someone could make a boardwalk. It wouldn’t even cost that much.”

  “Spending money on the poor is like throwing money into a fire. They’ll just consume it and never thank you,” Tool said.

  “But it would probably save money, for people to have easy access.”

  “The water doesn’t seem to stop them.” And indeed, there was a steady stream of people ahead of them; a few of them had scavenged plastic bags wrapped around some possession that they wanted to keep dry, but mostly the stream of people seemed unconcerned that they were forced to swim through the brown waters and green algae. Nita waded on, grimly determined, Nailer thought, not to show how disgusted she was by her circumstance.

  Every time Tool spoke, his words were like a whip, lashing her. Nailer wasn’t sure why, but he liked to see her embarrassed. Part of him sensed that she thought of him as something like an animal, a useful creature like a dog, but not actually a person. Then again, he wasn’t too sure that she was a person either. Swanks were different. They came from a different place, lived different lives, wrecked whole clipper ships just so one girl could survive.

  “Why are you even here, Tool?” Nita asked suddenly. “You aren’t supposed to be able to just walk away from your patron.”

  Tool glanced at her. “I go where I please.”

  “But you’re a half-man.”

  “Half a man.” Tool looked at her. “And yet twice the size of you, Lucky Girl.”

  “What are you talking about?” Nailer asked.

  Nita glanced at Nailer. “He’s supposed to have a patron. We take them on their oaths. My family imports them from Nippon, after training. But not without a patron.”

  Tool’s eyes swung to focus on her fully. Yellow dog eyes, predatory, examining a creature he could destroy in a moment if he chose. “I have no patron.”

  “That’s impossible,” Nita said.

  “Why’s that?” Nailer asked.

  “We are known to be fantastically loyal,” Tool said. “Lucky Girl is disappointed to discover that not all of us enjoy slavery.”

  “It can’t happen,” Nita insisted. “You’re trained—”

  Tool’s huge shoulders rippled in a shrug. “They made a mistake with me.” He smiled slightly, nodded to himself, enjoying a private joke. “I was smarter than they prefer.”

  “Oh?” Nita challenged.

  Again the yellow eyes evaluated her. “Smart enough to know that I can choose who I serve and who I betray, which is more than can be said of the rest of my… people.”

  Nailer had never thought to wonder why Tool was amongst the ship breakers. He had just been there, much as the boat refugees had been. The Spinoza clan and the McCalleys and the Lals had all come to work, and so too had Tool. They were there for the work.

  But it was true what Lucky Girl said. Half-men were used for bodyguards, for killing, for war. Those were the stories he had heard. He’d seen them with Lawson & Carlson’s bankers. Seen them clustered around the blood buyers when they came to inspect the yards. But always with others. Swanks. People who could afford to buy creatures mixed from a genetic cocktail of humanity, tigers, and dogs. And they were expensive. The human eggs that jump-started their development were always in demand, and commanded a high price. The Life Cult often supported itself on the ovum of its devotees, and the Harvesters were always buying.

  “Where’s your master, then?” Nita asked. “You’re supposed to die with your master. That’s what ours always say. That they’ll die when we do, that they will die for us.”

  “Some of us are astonishingly loyal,” Tool observed.

  “But your genes—”

  “If genes are destiny, then Nailer should have sold you to your enemies and spent the bounty on red rippers and Black Ling whiskey.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “No? But you descend from Patels, and so you are all intelligent and civilized, yes? And Nailer, of course, is descended from a perfect killer and we know what that means about him.”

  “No. I
didn’t mean that at all.”

  “Then do not be so certain of what my kind can and cannot do.” Tool’s eyes bored into her. “We are faster, stronger, and whatever you may think, smarter than our patrons. Does it worry the swank girl to run across a creature like me, running free?”

  Nita flinched. “We treat your kind well. My family—”

  “Don’t bother. My kind will serve you, regardless.” Tool looked away and kept wading. Nita fell silent. Nailer pushed on through the waters, thinking about the strange conflict between the two of them.

  “Tool?” Nailer asked. “Did they train you? Did they make you have a patron?”

  “A long time ago, they tried.”

  “Who?”

  Tool shrugged. “They are dead now. It hardly matters.” He nodded at the approaching docks. “Do you recognize any of the clippers?”

  Nita looked out at the ships against their floating docks in the distance. “Not from this far.”

  They made their way closer, slogging through the water. The water’s cool was a relief from the tropic heat, but Nailer was tiring from wading. It was a slow process.

  The water deepened, and they finally came to floating docks, where they were able to pull themselves out of the water. Lucky Girl wrung the brackish water out of her clothes with distaste, but Nailer enjoyed the breeze on his wet skin. Out in the distance, the clippers were sailing. From this vantage, the whole world stretched before him. Clippers and freighters at their anchor slips. The blue hulls of England, the Red flag of China North. He had memorized many of the flags from the old wrecks the ship breakers worked, the hulls painted with nation and merchant tags. The mass of shipping here was a catalogue of the world.

  A small patrol boat, burning biodiesel and kicking up fumes, moved between huge sailing vessels, carrying pilots out to ships that waited to be guided in to dock. All around them the docks bustled. Swanks came down out of ships and were put on water shuttles to make their transfer upriver or to the rail lines inland. A pair of half-men guarded a yacht of some swank, staring at Tool with an open challenge in their eyes and guttural growling of acknowledgment as he went past. All around them, coolie people swarmed—black, pink, brown, blond, redheaded, black-haired, tall and short, all of them with labor tattoos and levy ensigns—working cargo down into shallow-bottom rafts for transfer. More shallow bottoms moved out from the drowned wreckage of the city, sailing in a slow wallow to the big ships.

  “We could have just hitched with the freight,” Nailer muttered, nodding at rail containers wallowing their way toward the clipper ships. Some of the cargo barges were old broken sailing vessels, but others were larger, more massive. Built to burn coal and also to take advantage of wind. Huge finlike wind wings stuck up along their lengths, harnessing the breezes to help move the lumbering ships and their scrap loads of nickel, copper, iron, and steel.

  The activity was intoxicating, busier even than the ship-breaking swarms of Bright Sands Beach. Nita craned her head over the crowds of people. Pointed. “Those ships over there,” she said.

  Ahead, a line of clippers lay anchored. A schooner, a catamaran freighter, and a yacht, all of them lying across a bridge at a separate dock. They were beautiful, the fastest things on the high seas, equipped with rocket cannon and small missile systems for pirates, armed and deadly and fast, and nothing about them like the rusting wreckage that Nailer had always known and worked to disassemble. Comparing the clippers to those old-world wrecks was like squinting into daylight after coming out of a rust hold.

  As they got closer, Nita scanned the ships and said, “They’re not mine.” She slumped, obviously disappointed.

  Nailer felt a stab of disappointment himself, but stifled it. If he was realistic, it was unlikely they’d find a friendly ship immediately. Still, the river port was full of traffic. Ships were arriving all the time. Even as they watched, one of the clippers was unfurling its sails, long rippling canvas streams swishing down into place on fast pulley systems. They snapped in the breeze as the ship cast off and slipped away from the dock.

  “We’ll come back tomorrow,” Nailer said.

  Lucky Girl nodded, but still she scanned the ships as if hoping one of them would magically turn into something else. Finally she nodded and they went back through the shallows and down along the dock bridges, making their way back into the Orleans as dusk fell.

  That night, they bought rats on a stick from a boat seller, and watched the street river traffic. Small boats poled past, carrying food and laborers and shore-leave sailors. From somewhere in the distance came a mournful sound of brass instruments, a death dirge echoing over the water. A few children played in the black water. Nailer took the children to mean that their current place was as safe as any could be. The serious drunks and crystal sliders were somewhere else.

  The noise of crickets and cicadas filled the dark air. Mosquitoes swarmed around them, biting. The insects were much worse than on the beaches. There, the sea breeze blew many away, but here, amongst the still air of the swamps they swarmed close and tore at them, a misery of biting insects. Nailer and Nita slapped at the bloodsuckers, while Tool watched amused. Nailer wondered if Tool’s skin was exceptionally thick or if there was something about him that scared even mosquitoes away.

  “How much money did Sadna give you?” Tool asked.

  “A couple reds and a yellow back.”

  Nita asked, “That’s all?” then bit back her words.

  “That’s two weeks’ heavy crew,” Nailer said. “What, you spend that in an afternoon shopping?”

  Nita shook her head, but said nothing. Tool said, “Tomorrow you will need to work if you wish to keep eating.”

  “Where?” Nailer asked.

  Tool gave him a yellow-eyed stare. “You’re not stupid. Think for yourself.”

  Nailer considered. “The docks. If we work at the docks, we can make money and keep an eye out for her people.”

  Tool grunted and turned away. Nailer took it as agreement.

  18

  GETTING WORK WASN’T HARD. Getting work that paid as well as ship breaking was impossible. Only Tool had easy access to work, acting as muscle on valuable goods as they transshipped to the Mississippi and the rail yards. Without a clan system or union contact or a family, Nailer and Nita were left with the dreg work, running messages, hauling small items, begging. A man in an alley offered to buy their blood, but his hands and needles were filthy, and his eyes said he wanted to harvest more than their veins. They ran from him, and were relieved when he did not follow.

  A week passed, and then two. They settled into poverty-ridden routine as they watched ship after ship arrive and then depart, making way for a new disappointment to come gliding in on white canvas wings.

  Nailer had expected Nita’s prissy distaste for the slums of the Orleans to continue, but she adapted quickly, with a fierce attention to whatever Tool and Nailer taught. She threw herself into work, contributed her share, and didn’t complain about what she ate or where they slept. She was still swank, and still did weird swank things, but she also showed a determination to carry her weight that Nailer was forced to respect.

  One early morning, with Nailer and Nita both elbow deep in blood as they gutted black eels for a grub shack, he admitted what he’d been thinking.

  “You’re okay, Lucky Girl.”

  Nita filleted another eel and dropped its carcass into the bucket between them. “Yeah?” She was only half listening as she worked.

  “Yeah. You work good,” Nailer said as he yanked a fresh eel from another bucket and handed it across to her. “If we were still at the ship-breaking yards, I’d vouch you onto light crew.”

  Nita took the eel and paused, surprised. The eel coiled around her wrist, thrashing.

  Nailer stumbled on. “I mean, you’re still a swank, but, you know, if you needed work, I’d stand for you.”

  She smiled then, a smile as bright as the blue ocean. Nailer felt his chest contract. Damn, he was crazy. He was actually
starting to like this girl. He turned and fished out another eel for himself and slashed it open. “Anyway, I’m just saying you do good work.” He didn’t look up again. He felt his skin darkening with a blush.

  “Thank you, Nailer,” Nita said. Her voice was soft.

  “Sure. It’s nothing. Let’s get these eels done and get out to the docks. I don’t want to miss the first work calls.”

  Nita had given Nailer and Tool a bunch of names to memorize, writing them in the mud for Nailer so that he could memorize the pattern of their letters. She described the flag her company flew, so that they could look for the ships and between the three of them be sure of spotting any likely candidates.

  None of her instructions turned out to matter.

  Nailer was running a message to the Ladee Bar from the first officer of the Gossamer, a sleek trimaran with fixed wind-wing sails and an impressive Buckell cannon on its foredeck, when everything went wrong.

  The message was a sealed envelope, waxed and marked with a thumbstrip as well, and Nailer had a chit for payment on delivery, if the captain was willing to thumb it. As he ran down the boardwalk to the deep swim he was already thinking about the annoyance of having to make the passage back to the Orleans with one hand above water. If he soaked the letter, he might not get a tip from the captain—

  Richard Lopez appeared like a ghost.

  Nailer froze. His father’s pale bare head bobbed above the crowds of laborers, an apparition of evil with his red dragon tattoos running up his arms and curling about his neck. His pale blue eyes stared at everything that went past, taking in the docks. Nailer’s mind screamed at him to run, but at the sudden sight of his father he was filled with terror and couldn’t move.

  Two half-men were with him. Their huge bodies pushed through the crowds, towering over everyone else. Their blunt doglike faces stared at the people with contempt, their noses twitching for a scent, their dappled dark skin and yellow eyes watching hungrily. After weeks in Tool’s company, Nailer had forgotten how frightening a half-man could be, but now, as these great beasts moved through the crowd, his fear returned.