Ship Breaker

by Paolo Bacigalupi

  “Pyce wants my father to allow something he disagrees with. If Pyce controls me, my father has to acquiesce. Pyce stands to make billions, and not in dollars. Chinese red cash. Billions.” Her dark eyes bored into him. “That’s more money than your ship-breaking yards will make in their entire lifetime. It’s enough to build a thousand clippers.”

  “And your dad’s against that?”

  “It’s tar sands development and refining. A way to make burnable fuel, a crude oil replacement. The valuation has gone up, because of carbon production limits. Pyce has been refining tar sands in our northern holdings and secretly using Patel clippers to ship it over the pole to China.”

  “Sounds like a Lucky Strike to me,” Nailer said. “Like falling into a pool of oil and already having a buyer set up. Shouldn’t your dad just take a cut and let this Pyce run with it?”

  Nita stared at him in shock. She opened her mouth. Closed it, then opened it again. Closed it, clearly flummoxed.

  “It’s black market fuel,” Tool rumbled. “Banned by convention, if not in fact. The only thing that would be more profitable is shipping half-men, but that of course is legal. And this isn’t at all. Is it, Lucky Girl?”

  Nita nodded unwillingly. “Pyce is avoiding carbon taxation because of territory disputes in the Arctic, and then when it goes to China, it’s easy to sell it untraceably. It’s risky, and it’s illegal, and my father found out about it. He was going to force Pyce out of the family, but Pyce moved against him first.”

  “Billions in Chinese red cash,” Nailer said. “It’s worth that much?”

  She nodded.

  “Your father’s crazy, then. He should’ve done the business.”

  Nita looked at him with disgust. “Don’t we already have enough drowned cities? Enough people dying from drought? My family is a clean company. Just because a market exists doesn’t mean we have to serve it.”

  Nailer laughed. “You trying to tell me you blood buyers got some kind of clean conscience? Like making some petrol is different than buying our blood and rust out on the wrecks for your recycling?”

  “It is!”

  “It’s all money in the end. And you’re worth a lot more of it than I thought.” He looked at her speculatively. “Good thing you didn’t tell me this before I burned the boat with my dad.” He shook his head. “I might have let him sell you after all. Your uncle Pyce would have paid a fortune.”

  Nita smiled uncertainly. “You’re serious?”

  Nailer wasn’t sure how he was feeling. “It’s a lot of damn money,” he said. “The only reason you think you’ve got morals is because you don’t need money the way regular people do.” He forced down a feeling of despair over a choice that was made and couldn’t be gone back on.

  You want to be like Sloth? he asked himself. Do anything just to make a little more cash?

  Sloth had been both a traitor and a fool, but Nailer couldn’t help thinking the Fates had handed him the biggest Lucky Strike in the world and he’d thrown it away. “So how’d you end up in the storm, if you’re so valuable?”

  “My father sent me south, to keep me out of reach if there was violence. No one was supposed to know where I was.” Her eyes got a faraway look. “We didn’t know they were coming. We didn’t suspect—” She corrected herself. “Captain Arensman said we needed to run. He knew. I don’t know how. Maybe he was one of them and changed his mind. Maybe he had a feel for the Fates.” She shook her head. “I don’t know. I’ll never know now. But I didn’t believe him, and so I delayed. And our people died because I didn’t believe I was at risk.” Her face hardened. “We barely got out of port, and even then they were after us, chasing us all day and all night.

  “When the storm came, we didn’t have any choice. It was either try to run the storm, or surrender. Captain Arensman gave me the choice.”

  “You couldn’t make a deal?” Nailer asked.

  “Not with Pyce. That man doesn’t negotiate when he’s already won. So I told Arensman to head into the storm. I don’t know why he agreed. The sea was already high.” She made a motion with her hands. “Waves coming over the decks, almost impossible to walk, and no clear winds, just a storm howl, all around us, tearing us to pieces. I was sure I was going to die, but if we surrendered to Pyce it would have been the same.”

  She shrugged. “So we turned into the storm and the waves kept coming and our sails snapped and we lost our masts and the waves came in through the windows.” She took a shuddering breath. “But Pyce’s people turned back.”

  “You risked everything,” Tool rumbled.

  “I’m a chess piece. A pawn,” she said. “I can be sacrificed, but I cannot be captured. To be captured would be the end of the game.” She stared out at the greenery. “I have to escape, or die, because if I’m captured they will have my father, and they will make him do terrible things.”

  “If your father wishes to sacrifice himself for you,” Tool said, “perhaps he knows best.”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “I understand that you sacrificed an entire crew to a storm.”

  Nita stared at him, then looked away. “If there had been another choice, I would have taken it.”

  “You have loyal people, then.”

  “Not like you.” She said it with surprising venom.

  Tool blinked once, slowly, yellow eyes bright. “You wish that I was a good dog-man? That I had kept allegiance to Nailer’s father, maybe?” He blinked again. “You wish that I was a good beast like the ones on your clipper ships?” He smiled slightly, showing sharp teeth. “Richard Lopez thought your clean blood and clear eyes and strong heart would fetch an excellent price from the Harvesters. You wish I had stayed loyal to that?”

  Nita gave Tool a dirty look, but her knuckles were pale as she clenched her fists. “Don’t try to scare me.”

  Tool’s teeth showed bright and sharp. “If I wished to scare a spoiled rich protected creature, I would not have to try very hard.”

  Nailer interrupted. “Cut it out, you two.” He touched Tool’s shoulder. “We’re glad you came with us. We owe you.”

  “I didn’t do it for your debt,” Tool said. “I did it for Sadna.” He looked at Nita. “That woman is worth ten times whatever your wealthy father is worth. A thousand times what you are, whatever your enemies may foolishly think.”

  “Don’t tell me about worth,” Nita said. “My father commands fleets.”

  “The wealthy measure everything with the weight of their money.” Tool leaned close. “Sadna once risked herself and the rest of her crew to help me escape from an oil fire. She did not have to return, and she did not have to help lift an iron girder that I could not lift alone. Others urged her not to. It was foolhardy. And I, after all, was only half of a man.” Tool regarded Nita steadily. “Your father commands fleets. And thousands of half-men, I am sure. But would he risk himself to save a single one?”

  Nita scowled at him, but she didn’t reply. Silence stretched between them. Eventually everyone settled down to sleep as well as they could in the creak and jolt of the train.

  The great drowned city of New Orleans didn’t come all at once, it came in portions: the sagging backs of shacks ripped open by banyan trees and cypress. Crumbling edges of concrete and brick undermined by sinkholes. Kudzu-swamped clusters of old abandoned buildings shadowed under the loom of swamp trees.

  The train rose into the air, rail pilings lifting it over the swamps below. They passed over cool green pools full of algae and lily pads, the white flash of egrets and the whir of flies and mosquitoes. The entire elevated track system was reinforced against the city killer storms that rolled into the coast with such astonishing regularity, but it was the only evidence that any people successfully inhabited the jungle swamplands now.

  They sped above the mossy broke-back structures of a dead city. A whole waterlogged world of optimism, torn down by the patient work of changing nature. Nailer wondered at the people who had inhabited those collapsing bui
ldings. Wondered where they had gone. Their buildings were huge, larger than anything in his experience at the ship-breaking yards. The good ones were built with glass and concrete and they’d died just the same as the bad ones that seemed to have simply melted in on themselves, leaving rotting timbers and boards that were warped and molded and sagging.

  “Is this it?” Nailer asked. “Is this the Orleans?”

  Nita shook her head. “These were just towns outside the city. Support suburbs. They’re everywhere. Stuff like this goes for miles. From when everyone had cars.”

  “Everyone?” Nailer tested the theory. It seemed unlikely. How could so many people be so rich? It was as absurd as everyone owning clipper ships. “How could they do that? There’s no roads.”

  “They’re there.” She pointed. “Look.”

  And indeed, if Nailer scrutinized the jungle carefully, he could make out the boulevards that had been, before trees punctured their medians and encroached. Now, the roads were more like flat fern and moss-choked paths. You had to imagine none of the trees sprouting up in the center, but they were there.

  “Where’d they get the petrol?” he asked.

  “They got it from everywhere.” Nita laughed. “From the far side of the world. From the bottom of the sea.” She waved at the drowned ruins, and a flash of ocean. “They used to drill out there, too, in the Gulf. Cut up the islands. It’s why the city killers are so bad. There used to be barrier islands, but they cut them up for their gas drilling.”

  “Yeah?” Nailer challenged. “How do you know?”

  Nita laughed again. “If you went to school, you’d know it, too. Orleans city killers are famous. Every dummy knows about them.” She stopped short. “I mean…”

  Nailer wanted to hit her smug face.

  Tool laughed, a low rumble of amusement.

  Sometimes Nita seemed okay. Other times she was just swank. Smug and rich and soft. It was those moments that made Nailer think she could have learned a thing or two on Bright Sands Beach, that even Sloth with all her greed and willingness to betray him had been better than this rich swank who still looked pretty even after living amongst them all, as if she weren’t touched by the grime and pain and struggle that the rest of them felt.

  “I’m sorry,” Nita said, but Nailer shrugged away her apology. It was clear what she thought of him.

  They rode in silence. A village showed through the jungle, a clearing carved from the trees and shadows, a small fishing community perched amongst the bogs, dotted with slump shacks like the ones that Nailer’s own people constructed, with pigs and vegetables in their yards. To him, it looked like home. He wondered what Nita saw.

  At last the jungle parted, opening on a wide expanse where the trees were lower and the height of the train gave them a view. Even from a distance, the city was huge. A series of needles, piercing the sky.

  “Orleans II,” Tool said.

  17

  NAILER CRANED HIS NECK to see over the tops of the trees and take in the mangled metropolis. “There’s got to be good scavenge there,” he said.

  Nita shook her head. “You’d have to knock down the towers. You’d need all kinds of explosives. It’s not worth it.”

  “Depends how much copper and iron you can pull,” Nailer said. “Put a light crew in the building, see what’s what.”

  “You’d have to work in the middle of a lake.”

  “So? If you swanks left a lot behind, it would be worth it.” He hated the way she acted like she knew everything. He stared out at the towers. “I’ll bet all the good stuff’s been stripped, though. Too good to leave lying there.”

  “Still”—Tool nodded at the many buildings spread out and covered with greenery—“a lot of scavenge if someone organized.”

  Again Nita disagreed. “You’d have to fight with the locals for scavenge rights. Fight for every inch. If it weren’t for treaties and the trading militias, even the transshipment zone would be contested.” She made a face. “You can’t bargain with people like that. They’re savages.”

  “Savages like Nailer?” Tool goaded. Again his yellow eyes flickered with humor as Nita blushed and looked away, pushing her black hair behind her ear and pretending to watch the moving horizon.

  Whatever Nita thought of the scavenge opportunities, there was a lot of abandoned material spread out before them, and if Nailer understood correctly, this was just Orleans II. There was also the original New Orleans, and then there was Mississippi Metropolitan—aka MissMet—what had been originally envisioned as New Orleans III, before even the most ardent supporters of the drowned city gave up on the spectacularly bad luck enjoyed by places called “Orleans.”

  Some engineers had claimed it was possible to raise hurricane-resistant towers above Pontchartrain Bay, but the merchants and traders had had enough of the river mouth and the storms, and so left the drowned city to docks and deep-sea loading platforms and slums, while they migrated their wealth and homes and children to land that lay more comfortably above sea level.

  MissMet was far away upriver and higher in elevation and armored against cyclones and hurricanes as none of the others had been, a city designed from the ground up to avoid the pitfalls of their earlier optimism, a place for swanks that Nailer had heard was paved in gold and where gleaming walls and guards and wire kept the rest of the chaff away.

  At one time in the past, New Orleans had meant many things, had meant jazz and Creole and the pulse of life, had meant Mardi Gras and parties and abandon, had meant creeping luxurious green decay. Now it meant only one thing.

  Loss.

  More dead jungle ruins flashed past, an astonishing amount of wealth and materials left to rot and fall back to the green tangle of the trees and swamps.

  “Why did they give up?” Nailer asked.

  “Sometimes people learn,” Tool said.

  From that, Nailer took him to be saying that mostly people didn’t. The wreckage of the twin dead cities was good evidence of just how slow the people of the Accelerated Age had been to accept their changing circumstances.

  The train curved toward the hulking towers. The shambled outline of an ancient stadium showed beyond the spires of Orleans II, marking the beginning of the old city, the city proper for the drowned lands.

  “Stupid,” Nailer muttered. Tool leaned close to hear his voice over the wind, and Nailer shouted in his ear, “They were damn stupid.”

  Tool shrugged. “No one expected Category Six hurricanes. They didn’t have city killers then. The climate changed. The weather shifted. They did not anticipate well.”

  Nailer wondered at that idea. That no one could have understood that they would be the target of monthly hurricanes pinballing up the Mississippi Alley, gunning for anything that didn’t have the sense to batten down, float, or go underground.

  The train flew over its pylons, curving toward the center of the trade nexus, speeding over brackish water, bright with leaked waste oil and scrap trash and the stink of chemicals. They shot past floating platforms and transshipment loaders. Massive containers were being loaded into clipper ships via cranes. Shallow-draft Mississippi river boats with their stubby sails were being loaded with luxuries from across the oceans.

  The train rolled past scrap and recycling yards, men and women’s backs sheened mirror bright with sweat as they stacked hand carts with purchased scrap and moved it to weighing platforms for sale. The train began to slow. It shunted onto a new series of tracks, dipping down to a barren zone of rail yards and slum shacks, before shunting again. Wheels squealed on steel and the train cars shuddered as the brakes were applied. The ripple of the slowdown thudded back through the cars to the tail of the train.

  Tool touched their shoulders. “We get off now. Soon we’ll be in the rail yards and then people will ask why we are here and if we have the right.”

  Even though the train was going slowly, they all ended up falling and rolling when they hit the ground. Nailer stood, wiping dust from his eyes, and surveyed the area. In man
y ways, it was not much different from the ship-breaking yards. Scrap and junk, soot and oily grime and slumped shacks with people watching them, hollow-eyed.

  Nita surveyed her surroundings. Nailer could tell she wasn’t impressed, but even he was glad they had Tool with them, someone to protect them as they threaded between tightly packed shacks. A few men were lounging in the shade, tats and piercings showing unknown affiliations. They watched as the three interlopers moved through their turf. Nailer’s neck prickled. He palmed his knife, wondering if there would be bloodshed. He could feel them evaluating. They were like his father. Idle, crystal sliding probably, dangerous. He smelled tea and sugar. Coffee boiling. Pots of red beans and dirty rice. His stomach rumbled. The sweet reek of bananas rotting. A child ahead of them urinated on a wall, watching them with solemn eyes as they slipped past.

  At last they poured out onto a main street. It was full of junk and scrap dealers, men and women selling tools, sheets of metal, rolls of wire. A bicycle cart rattled by, full of scrap. Tin, Nailer thought, and then wondered if the driver had purchased it or was selling it, and where it might be going.

  “Now where?” Nailer asked.

  Nita frowned. “We need to get to the docks. I need to see if any of my father’s ships are there.”

  “And if they are?” Tool asked.

  “I need to know the captain’s names. There are some I know I can trust still.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  She hesitated. “There have to be a few.”

  Tool pointed. “The clippers should be in that direction.”

  She motioned Nailer and Tool to follow. Nailer glanced at Tool, but the massive man seemed unconcerned at her sudden authority.

  They trudged down the thoroughfare. The smell of sea and rot and crushed humanity was strong, much stronger than in the ship-breaking yards. And the city was huge. They walked and walked, and still the streets and shacks and scrap bunkers went on. Men and women rode by on rickshaws and bicycles. Even an oil-burning car slipped through the broken streets, its engine whining and grinding. Eventually, the hot open slum gave way to cooler tree-covered lanes and large houses, with shacks around their edges and people going in and out. On them were signs that Nita read out to Nailer as they went by: MEYER TRADING. ORLEANS RIVER SUPPLY. YEE AND TAYLOR, SPICES. DEEP BLUE SHIPPING CORPORATION, LTD.