Ship Breaker (Ship Breaker #1)(19)

Still, Nailer couldn’t help wishing that he’d ended up with Sadna and Pima, and not Richard Lopez. He wondered what it would be like to live in their shack all the time, and not just when his father was sliding high. To know that he wouldn’t have to leave after a day or two and return to his father’s place. To live with people you could count on to protect your back.

The undergrowth opened. They stepped out amongst the tide pools and jagged rocks of the island’s tip. Granite intrusions poked above the water and formed a sort of breakwater that defended the island from some of the worst of the new storms. Pima started scooping up storm-stunned croakers and small redfish, throwing them into her bucket. “There’s a lot of fish. More than I thought.”

Nailer didn’t answer. He stared at the rocks beyond. Between them, something reflected like glass, glinting and white.

“Hey, Pima.” He tugged her shoulder. “Look at that.”

Pima straightened. “What the hell?”

“That’s a clipper ship, isn’t it?” He swallowed, took a step forward. Stopped. Was it a mirage? He kept expecting it to evaporate. The white boards and fluttering silk and canvas remained. “It is. It has to be. It’s a clipper.”

Pima laughed softly behind him. “No. You’re wrong, Nailer. That’s not a clipper ship at all.” Suddenly she dashed past him, sprinting for the ship. “That’s scavenge!”

Her laughter floated back to him on the wind, teasing him. Nailer shook himself from his stupor and dashed after her. A whoop of joy escaped his lips as he ran across the sand.

Ahead, the gull-white hull of the wreck gleamed in the sunlight, beckoning.

8

The ship lay on its side, swamped and broken, its back snapped. Even destroyed, it was a beautiful thing, utterly unlike the rusting iron and steel hulks they tore apart every day.

The clipper was big, a ship used for fast transit and freight on the Pole Run, over the top of the world to Russia and Nippon. Or else across the rough Atlantic to Africa and Europe. Its hydrofoils were retracted, but with the carbon-polymer hull shattered, Nailer could see into its workings: the huge gears that extended the foils, the complex hydraulics and precision electronic systems.

The ship’s deck was tilted toward them, showing a Buckell cannon and the high-speed reels for the parasails. Once, when Bapi was in a good mood, the man had told Nailer that the big cannon could send a sail thousands of feet into the air to catch high winds that would then yank the ship up onto its hydrofoils and take it skimming across the waves at speeds faster than fifty knots.

Nailer and Pima stopped short, staring at the looming wreckage. “Fates, it’s beautiful,” Pima breathed.

Even dead it looked like a regal hawk, cracked and shattered, but with a beauty still inherent thanks to the feral grace of its lines. It had the sleek, aerodynamic design of a hunter, every angle purpose-built to reduce drag to the merest fraction. Nailer’s eyes swept over the broken clipper’s upper decks, the pontoons and stabilizers and the cracked remains of the fixed-wing sails, all of it white, almost blazingly white in the sun. Not a bit of soot or rust anywhere. There wasn’t a drop of oil leaking, despite the shattered hull.

Back at the ship-breaking yards, the old tankers and freighters were nothing in comparison, just rusting dinosaurs. Useless without the precious oil that had once fueled them. Now they were nothing but great wallowing brutes leaking their grime and toxins into the water. Reeking and destructive when they’d been created in the Accelerated Age and still destructive even after they were dead.

The clipper was something else entirely, a machine angels had built. The name on the prow was unreadable to either of them, but Pima recognized one of the words below.

“It’s from Boston,” she said.

“How do you know?” Nailer asked.

“One of my light crews worked on a Boston Freight ship, and it had the same word. I saw it on every single door in the whole damn wreck while we were taking it apart.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“It was before you got on crew.” She paused. “The first letter’s B, and it’s got the S—the one like a snake—so it’s the same.”

“Wonder what happened?”

“Had to be the storm.”

“They should have known better, though. They have satellite talkies for those ships. Big eyes down on the clouds. They should never get hit.”

It was Pima’s turn to look at Nailer. “How would you know?”

“You remember Old Miles?”

“Didn’t he die?”

“Yeah. Some kind of infection got into his lungs. He used to work galley on a clipper ship, though, before he got thrown off. He knew all kinds of stuff about how clippers work. Told me they’ve got hulls made of special fiber, so they slide through the water like oil, and they use computers to keep level. Measure water speed and wind. He definitely told me they talk to the weather satellites, just like Lawson & Carlson do for when a storm’s coming.”

“Maybe they thought they could outrun the storm,” Pima guessed.

Both of them stared at the wreckage. “That’s a lot of scavenge,” Nailer said.

“Yeah.” Pima paused. “You remember what I said a couple nights ago? About needing to be lucky and smart?”

“Yeah.”