Ship Breaker (Ship Breaker #1)(50)
“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 many 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.