Ship Breaker

by Paolo Bacigalupi

  The blood bond was nothing. It was the people that mattered. If they covered your back, and you covered theirs, then maybe that was worth calling family. Everything else was just so much smoke and lies.

  22

  THE RAY WAS a sleek yacht with a small crew. Dauntless stalked her with Captain Candless making small talk over the ship radios and making friendly observations on the state of the weather during hurricane season.

  As they drew closer, the captain’s confidence increased. The ship was lightly crewed, and he was not frightened by what he saw. It took the yacht a long time to guess what Candless was planning and start to flee in earnest.

  When the Ray finally shook out its sails and began to flee before the wind, the captain laughed, delighted. “Ah! Mr. Marn isn’t quite as stupid as we supposed,” he said. “Now we’ll have a nice little chase.”

  He shouted at his crew to prepare for speed. More sails unfurled and Dauntless surged after its quarry. Dauntless was a larger ship and much faster and the captain laughed at the Ray’s attempt at flight. “Like a tiger chasing a kitten,” he crowed.

  Still, the other captain, Mr. Marn, was clever. He veered, he dodged, he forced them to overshoot once, and the men on his deck fired their pistols across the gap. But it was only a matter of time before Dauntless overtook them and grappled.

  “Heel over or I’ll sink you and leave you swimming!” Candless roared, and the other ship gave up the fight.

  Before they even were fully reefed, Candless’s crew was leaping across the gap, hunting, pistols in hand. They swarmed across the deck and poured below. After a few bated-breath minutes, the rest of the Ray’s crew came up on deck with their hands on their heads. Half-men guards and cooks and stewards and finally, Captain Marn. They glared across at the Dauntless.

  “Where’s Miss Nita?” Candless shouted.

  Marn grinned and shouted back, “If you can’t find her, you’ve got no business with her, you mutinous bastard!”

  “Mutinous?” Candless muttered. “I’m not the one who lapped red cash out of Pyce’s hand.” He turned to his lieutenant. “Reynolds, take the ship.” He made his way down the steps with Nailer following. The jump from one ship to the other was nerve-racking, but Nailer was determined not to show any fear. He leaped and landed badly on the moving deck, but at least he was aboard.

  Captain Candless surveyed the deck. “Go see if you can sniff out Miss Nita, boy. She’s got to be somewhere.”

  Nailer slipped down into the bowels of the ship, making his way from state room to state room, but every place he looked revealed no sign of Lucky Girl. Nothing. She wasn’t in any of the astonishingly large staterooms. She wasn’t anywhere. Others were searching this ship as well, Knot and Vine and Cat, and all of them were increasingly nervous as they went through the rooms.

  “What about secret places?” Nailer asked.

  “Wouldn’t she make a racket?” Cat wondered.

  “Not if she’s drugged or tied.”

  Cat made a face of distaste. They continued their search. Finally they came back on deck.

  “Nothing,” Cat reported. “We’ve got nothing anywhere.”

  The captain cursed and turned on Marn. “Where is she?” He poked his finger in Marn’s chest. “If you free her, I won’t drop you over the side. Which is better than you deserve. You’ve gone against all your clan oaths, and you should be hung.”

  “From where I sit, there’s only one person against his clan oaths and it’s you, you piratical bastard.”

  Captain Candless scowled and turned to shout at his crew. “Take it apart! Take the whole damn ship apart. Take it apart piece by piece! I want Miss Nita found and then I want this ship sunk.” He glared at his opposite. “You had a chance to do the right thing. More than enough chances.”

  Suddenly Captain Marn grinned. “We always suspected you of not being loyal. You couldn’t have been. Not after what happened to Ms. Sung. We always knew. But you were more careful than most of them. Biding your time. Keeping your head low. Some people thought you deserved the benefit of the doubt.”

  Candless smiled tightly. “Mighty grateful for that.” He tipped his hat. “I’ll think about your kindness while I’m watching your boat sink under you.”

  “Don’t bother with thanks,” Marn laughed. “Now that we know where you stand, we’ll hunt you to the ends of the earth.”

  “Not once the board convenes. You’ll be gone and I’ll be back at sailing.”

  Captain Marn grinned and shook his head. “I’m amazed at you. You used to be such a clever bastard.”

  Candless’s eyes narrowed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Marn shrugged. “Just that you’re not as sly as you used to be. You used to have a sixth sense. I was sure you’d smell a trap and never fall into it, and then you came all the way in, just like they expected.”

  “Like who expected?” Captain Candless stared at Marn. A look of fear flitted across Candless’s face, an anxious thought; then the captain roared, “Reynolds!”

  “Captain?”

  “What’s our horizon?”

  “Clear, sir.”

  “Check again.”

  A pause, then Reynolds called down, “I’ve got a sail.”

  “Identify!”

  Another pause and then she was shouting over the side. “It’s Pole Star, sir! It’s Pole Star for certain!”

  Captain Marn and his crew grinned as the news went through Candless’s crew. “If you surrender now,” Marn said, “we’ll treat your crew as combatants rather than mutineers.” He said it loud, so that everyone could hear. “You can go free if you surrender now! Or you can die like dogs with your captain. Your decision!”

  Captain Candless stared at the decks full of his crew around him, his face white. His first attempt at an order came as a croak. He tried again, and this time his voice was there, loud and angry, “Back to the ship! Ready sails!”

  Already his crew was streaming back, but not all of them. Cat and three others stood by the rail watching. Cat gave a sad wave to them, and then he was allowing himself to be disarmed by the crew of the Ray.

  Candless wasn’t done yet. “Vine! Knot! Destroy their nav.”

  Dauntless’s gun swung around. Marn started to protest, but Candless just pointed his pistol in the man’s face. “I’d sink you, but your crew doesn’t deserve to drown just because you’re a lying dog.”

  The gun fired and the con exploded in flames. Vine and Knot ran to the sails with torches and suddenly silk and ropes were burning. Flames rose high. Mutters of anger ran through the Ray’s crew. The flames leaped into the sky. The rest of Candless’s people leaped aboard and Dauntless heeled away from the burning ship.

  “Full sails!”

  Nailer looked to where the ship was closing on the horizon. Even without Dauntless’s scope, it looked large.

  “Pole Star’s a fighter,” Candless said. “All we can do is hope they want the ship as a prize, or they’ll blow us up where we sail and we all die.”

  Nailer watched the ships. “Why would they let us live?”

  “We don’t have their armaments. It makes them confident.” Candless glanced back at the Ray, where the crew was pumping seawater onto their burning sails. He smiled without humor. “So now we’re the kittens being hunted.” He turned and shouted orders.

  “What are you going to do?” Nailer asked.

  “We’re going to run for the coast, and then see if we can make them make a mistake. They’ve got the jump on us, but it’ll be a long chase.” He looked out at the ocean. “We’ll just have to see if we can maybe make some trickery.”

  “What kind?”

  Candless was smiling, but to Nailer it looked forced. “I won’t know until I see it.”

  He hurried up to his con, and Nailer, without any specific task, followed. The captain and Reynolds spread out maps, looking at the depths of the ocean.

  “Our draft is shallower than Pole Star,” Candless muttered. “We have
to find some place we can sneak into and hide.”

  “We could try going up the Mississippi,” Reynolds suggested.

  “They’ll radio down reinforcements for sure. I don’t want to be trapped into fighting on that river.”

  Nailer stared at the maps, trying to make sense of them. The captain pointed to lines on the map. “These are our depths. Anywhere deeper than six meters, we’re okay. Shallower…”—he shrugged—“we run aground.” He pointed to a spot on one of the charts, deep in the Gulf’s blue water lines. “We’re about… here.” He pointed to a distant bit of shore. “That’s your old beach.” He returned to his discussion with Reynolds.

  Nailer stared at the map, at the letters that made up Bright Sands Beach, and was surprised that he could actually make out words. He ran his finger along the depths and indicators, reading the numbers. The island where he and Pima had found Nita’s wrecked ship showed as a point of land, still connected to the mainland. “Are these maps old?” he asked.

  “Why?”

  “The depths aren’t right. This should be an island, at least at high tide it is.”

  Reynolds and the captain exchanged amused glances. “Actually, you’re right. The real numbers are all deeper than when the maps were made, but the ratios are the same, even with the rising sea levels. So everything will be deeper than what you see on the map.”

  Nailer absorbed this, studying how the island used to be connected before the sea rose and isolated it, comparing his memories of Bright Sands Beach mapped against this paper version from long ago. He frowned.

  “Your map’s still wrong.” Nailer pointed to the waters off the edge of the island, where the Teeth lay. “This whole area, it’s wrong. It’s not more than a couple meters’ clearance, even at high tide.”

  “Oh?” Candless studied the map, then looked at Nailer, speculative. “How do you know?”

  “Ships get hung up there all the time.” Nailer’s finger traced the area of the Teeth. “There’s a bunch of buildings down there. We call them the Teeth; they chew the hell out of anything that comes into them.” He pointed. “You have to come in around this way if you don’t want to get sunk.”

  “Is it possible?” Reynolds asked doubtfully. “Someone missed a whole city?”

  “Maybe.” Candless looked thoughtful. “People were abandoning all sorts of real estate when these maps were being made. Rising waters and famine were taking a toll. If the city was abandoned, it might have been deleted from the overlays. It didn’t matter to these people. They didn’t know we’d be sailing over it in another hundred years.”

  “They missed a lot,” Nailer said. “There’s a whole city down there. All kinds of buildings and iron poking up. The depth isn’t anything like that.”

  “How deep?”

  “At high tide?” Nailer shrugged. “Maybe a meter or two?” He shrugged. “You can see bits of the tall ones when the water’s low. They stick up.”

  Reynolds still looked skeptical, but Candless said, “It’s not a major shipping area. It would be easy to make a mistake.” He jerked his head toward Nailer. “And none of his kind would complain. Even if they did, who would listen? Half that coast has been given up as drowned wilderness. Just malaria and convicts now.”

  “Chavez has the same maps,” Reynolds observed.

  “That’s right.” Candless smiled, suddenly feral. “Company issue.”

  “You’d have to time it.” Reynolds was thoughtful. “Tricky bit of sailing.”

  “I’ll take tricky sailing over an impossible fight any day.”

  Candless motioned Nailer close. “Now, tell me, boy, just how does this city of yours lie? And where are all the sharp and pointy bits?”

  23

  AFTER NAILER EXPLAINED the layout of the Teeth, Reynolds turned against the idea.

  “This is risky. You don’t know if the boy is right about the depths. And trying to come in with the tide at night?” She shook her head.

  “You have a better idea?” Candless asked mildly.

  She didn’t, but she wasn’t willing to say so. They were back in the con, under the peep and whine of radar systems after Captain Candless had ordered Dauntless onto a course for Bright Sands Beach. The captain had judged the winds acceptable to use the high sails and the boom of the Buckell cannon had shaken the ship.

  The cannon’s missile, trailing its gossamer tow line, arced high into the sky and then its parasail unfurled, red and gold, bright in the sky with Patel Global’s colors. Dauntless shuddered and leaped onto her hydrofoils, rising above the waves. The ship’s main sails rippled and furled, and suddenly Nailer felt wind on his face. He hadn’t notice it before, but now, suddenly the wind was strong.

  “The wind’s slower down here than up there,” the captain explained. “Before, we were going with the wind, so you didn’t feel the breeze so much. Now we’re with those winds up there.”

  The ocean rushed beneath their hull. When Nailer looked down into the glitter refraction of the waves it seemed that all the light and shimmer of the water had merged, a blur of motion too fast to understand.

  “Fifty-two knots,” the captain said with satisfaction.

  Behind them, Pole Star fired its own high sails. The boom resounded across the water.

  “If we’re lucky,” Candless said, as they watched the missile rise, “she’ll tangle and we’ll get the jump on them. Damn ticklish to catch a wind. Once you’re up, it’s fine, but damn ticklish to start.”

  But Pole Star’s sails caught. Through the long glass of Dauntless’s nav system they watched as the ship heaved itself up onto its own hydrofoils, its feral bulk skimming above the water.

  “Why don’t they just shoot down our sails?” Nailer asked.

  “They may. Once they’re within a mile, they can torch the parasail with a chemical round.”

  “But they won’t light us up the same way? Sink us?”

  The captain exchanged glances with Reynolds. “Chavez is greedy. If she can take us as a prize, she’ll call us pirate. If she wrecks us, tangles us, and sinks us, she doesn’t get the money.”

  The two ships sliced across the ocean. Sometimes it seemed as if Dauntless had gained a little ground, but when Nailer looked again, always the pale ship on the horizon had grown. He shivered at the sight of the other clipper, hunting them like a shark.

  The captain pointed again at the map. “If Nailer’s right, we can slip these Teeth here, and it will even look as if we’re intending to hide.”

  “If he’s right,” Reynolds emphasized.

  “I am,” Nailer insisted. “I know that water.”

  “Ever sailed it?”

  Nailer hesitated. He wanted to tell them that he had. That he knew the waves. That he knew he was right.

  “No,” he admitted. “But I know the Teeth. I’ve seen them at low tide.” He pointed at the numbers on the map. “If your charts are right about the old depths, at high tide, you can run straight across. Right here.” He pointed to the edge of the island. “Between the island and the Teeth, there’s a gap.”

  “It’s an invitation for a sinking,” Reynolds said. “High tide won’t be until dark, so you won’t have much for landmarks, and GPS margin of error might not tell us we’re wrong until we’re dead on some old I-beam.”

  “I know where it is,” Nailer said sullenly. “I know the gap.”

  “Yeah?” she asked. “In the dark? With only moonlight? With one chance to get it right?”

  “Let the boy alone,” the captain said.

  Nailer glared at her. “You’ve got a better idea? You’re dead either way, right? What are you going to do? Surrender? Let them call you a pirate and string you up?” Nailer scowled. “You swanks are damn soft. You’re afraid to gamble even when you’re already dead.”

  The ship lurched underneath them. Everyone reached to catch their balance. Candless and Reynolds exchanged a look. All afternoon the seas had been thickening, and now, as they came out on deck, the water was running high and
rough. The hydrofoils kept the Dauntless above much of the chop, but as the waves grew higher, the prow of the ship was starting to bury itself in foam. Candless studied the high-altitude parasails where they flew against gathering clouds.

  “We’re not going to be able to stay up on the foils much longer. Not with the ocean running like this.”

  The ship surged through another wave, rocking. Water rushed over the decks as the ship plowed out of a trough. The deck tilted abruptly as one of the foils lost its grip in the foam. Nailer grabbed a railing for support. The ship righted itself and lunged forward again, dragged by the parasail high overhead. The storm clouds darkened and roiled like a seething cauldron of snakes. Lightning flickered in their bellies.

  “Is this a city killer?” he asked.

  The captain shook his head. “No. But still a complication. Makes everything more ticklish.”

  “We can dodge them in the storm,” Reynolds suggested.

  “They’ll have their radar on us, pinging us the whole way,” Candless said. “The only way we escape is if we leave them wrecked.”

  “You could get Miss Nita killed if she’s aboard.”

  Candless scowled at Reynolds. “You think I don’t know it?” He looked away. “It’s an ugly business. We’ll put a crew of boarders on, try to pull her off in the confusion.”

  “You don’t know it will work.”

  “Thank you, Reynolds. I appreciate your input. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to let us all die because we’re too squeamish to take the one advantage we’ve got.”

  Dauntless hurtled through the storm. When the winds became too uncertain, the captain ordered the high sail reefed. It came down, its monofilament wire ripping and squealing as the cannon reels dragged the flapping parasail toward the deck. A shriek rose over the lash of the storm. The reel jammed. Knot and Vine and Trimble hurried for the cannon. The parasail whipped sideways in the wind and Dauntless heeled with the sudden shifting drag.