Ship Breaker (26 page)

“Your half-man Tool was correct in one thing. If we’re going to bring Miss Nita back to us, there will be a fight. Pyce’s people won’t let her go easily.”

“You think you can take them?”

“Of course. Pyce took us once unawares, but we won’t make the mistake of underestimating him again.” He clapped Nailer’s shoulder. “With a little luck, we’ll have Miss Nita back and safe in no time.”

The ship was starting to dip into deep water, the waves churning under it as it made its way out of the safety of the bay. Nailer swayed unsteadily in the passageway, trying to keep his footing. The captain watched him. “You’ll get your sea legs soon, don’t worry. And when we’re up on the hydrofoils, it’s almost like standing on dry land.”

Nailer wasn’t so sure of that. The deck came up under his feet and sent him stumbling into a wall. The captain watched amused, then strode down the corridor, untroubled by the surge and roll of the deck.

Nailer staggered after. “Captain?”

The man turned.

“Your guy Pyce might be bad, but don’t underestimate my dad, either. He might look just like me, all skinny and cut up, but he’s deadly. He’ll kill you like a cockroach if you don’t watch him.”

The captain nodded. “I wouldn’t worry too much. If Pyce’s people haven’t killed me yet, your father won’t either.” He turned and led Nailer up onto the deck.

Wind ruffled Nailer’s face as they came up into the dawn. The sun’s light increased, a golden wave reaching across the ocean.
Dauntless
buried herself in the glittering waves, slicing for deeper waters.

Hunting.

W
HITE SPRAY EXPLODED
over
Dauntless
’s prow and showered Nailer in cool shimmering drops. He whooped and leaned far over the rail as the ship plunged into the next wave trough, then surged skyward again.

What had always looked so smooth and sleek on the horizon was a rough adventure when experienced from the prow of the
Dauntless
. Waves flew toward him, huge surges that exploded in spray as the low-density hull slashed through. All across the decks, crewmen called and labored under the hot sun, orienting sails, drilling for fire attacks, clearing deck materials as they readied for the fight that they hoped would come.

Dauntless
was patrolling the blue waters just a few miles off the Orleans, hoping for a glimpse of their potential quarry. Everyone hoped it would be the
Ray
holding Nita.
Dauntless
was more than a match for that soft target, but the other ship,
Pole Star
, everyone feared. Even the captain was worried about that one. Candless was too good a leader to admit that he was frightened, but Nailer could tell from the way his face turned stony at the mention of the cross-global schooner that it represented an unequal fight.

“She’s fast, and she’s got teeth,” Reynolds said when Nailer asked about the ship. “She’s got an armored hull, she’s got missile and torpedo systems that can blow us right out of the water, and we’d hardly have a chance to pray to God before we died.”

She explained that
Pole Star
was a trading vessel but also a warship, accustomed to fighting Siberian and Inuit pirates as it made the icy Pole Run to Nippon. The pirates were bitter enemies of the trading fleets and perfectly willing to kill or sink an entire cargo as revenge for the drowning of their own ancestral lands. There were no polar bears now, and seals were few and far between, but with the opening of the northern passage a new fat animal had appeared in the polar regions: the northern traders, making the short hop to Europe and Russia, or over to Nippon and the wide Pacific via the top of the melted pole. And with the disappearance of the ice, the Siberians and the Inuit became sea people. They pursued their new prey the way they had once hunted seals and bears in the frozen north, and they hunted with an implacable appetite.

Pole Star
was a vessel that relished these encounters, baited them even.

Still, despite Nailer’s warnings, Reynolds said they would most likely encounter the
Ray
. “
Pole Star
is on the far side of the world,” she said.

“But Lucky Girl—”

“Miss Nita could have been mistaken. In a storm, under pursuit, anyone could make a mistake.”

“Lucky Girl’s not stupid.”

Reynolds gave him a hard look. “I didn’t call her stupid. I said she could have made a mistake.
Pole Star
’s shipping schedule puts her just out of Tokyo, and that’s assuming the winds have been favorable. No closer.”

The work on the decks continued. An astonishing amount of the ship ran on automation. They could raise and lower the sails on winches electronically with power from solar batteries. The sails themselves were not canvas at all, but solar sheets, designed to feed electricity into the system and add to the power available already from roof skin solar cells. But even with the electronics and automation, still Captain Candless drilled everyone on how to reef a sail if everything was dead and how to work the hand pumps if the ship was sinking and the power failed. He swore that all the technology in the world wouldn’t save a sailor if he didn’t use his head and know his ship.

The crew of the
Dauntless
knew their ship.

Sailors clambered up the masts, checking winch hooks and loop points for rust or repair. Near Nailer, Cat and another crewman were loading the huge Buckell cannon that was set near the prow, fitting the parasail into its barrel and checking the monofilament tether line—gossamer thin and steel strong—that sat in a shining reel beside the gun.

If anyone cared about the loss of crewmen ashore when they sailed, no one said anything. The captain muttered that a few of the crew still on board would probably have preferred another master, but that hardly mattered now. They were on the waves and if they had a grumble they kept it to themselves. Candless’s core of loyal followers kept everyone in line and so
Dauntless
surged through the waves of the Gulf, patrolling and waiting for its target.

On the first night, Nailer had slept in a soft bunk and woke with his back aching from it, unused to sinking into a mattress instead of lying on sand or palm ticking or hard planks, but by the second day he felt so spoiled that he wondered how he would sleep when he went back to the beach.

The thought troubled him:
when
he went back?

Was he going back?

If he went back, his father or his father’s crew would be waiting for him, people who would look for payback. But no one on the ship was indicating that he would be able to stay on
Dauntless
, either. He was in limbo.

A splash of water shook him from his reverie. The ship plunged through another wave crest, dousing him and shaking him from his perch. He skidded across the deck until his life line caught him short with a jolt. He was hooked to the rail to keep himself from washing overboard, but still the huge blue-green waves that surged over the bow and poured off the sloped deck were astonishingly powerful. Another wave rushed over them. Nailer shook seawater out of his eyes.

Reynolds laughed as she saw him climbing to his feet again. “You should see what it’s like when we’re really going fast.”

“I thought we were.”

“No.” She shook her head. “Someday, if we use the high sails, you’ll see. Then we don’t sail, we fly.” Her eyes took on a faraway look. “We truly fly.”

“Why not now?”

She shook her head. “The winds have to be right. You can’t fire the Buckell cannon unless you understand the high winds. We send up kites first to test, to make sure, and then if the water’s right and the high winds are right.” She pointed at the cannon. “Then we fire that bad baby and she jumps out of the water like she’s been shot.”

“And you fly.”

“That’s right.”

Nailer hesitated, then said, “I’d like to see it.”

Reynolds gave him a speculative look. “Maybe you will. If we have to run, maybe we’ll all be skating the ocean.”

Nailer hesitated. “No. After we save Lucky Girl, I mean. I want to come with you. Wherever you go. I want to go, too.”

“Careful what you wish for. We’d work you.”

“Is that all?” Nailer made a face. “I’m not afraid of work.”

“All I see you doing is standing on a deck and riding waves.”

Nailer locked eyes with her. “I’ll do anything you want, if you take me on. You just say it. I’m not afraid of any work.”

Reynolds grinned. “Guess we’ll have to send you up the mast and see.”

Nailer didn’t blink. “I’ll go.”

The captain came up behind her. “What’s all the conversation?”

Reynolds smiled. “Nailer here wants a job.”

The captain looked thoughtful. “A lot of people want to work on the clippers. There are whole clans dedicated to it. Families who buy the right to get on as deckhands and hope to move up. My own family has worked clippers for three generations. That’s a lot of competition.”

“I can do it,” Nailer insisted.

“Hmm,” was all the captain said. “Perhaps this is a conversation better saved for after we’ve located our Miss Nita.”

Nailer wasn’t sure if Candless was trying to put him off or if he was just saying no in a polite way. Nailer wanted to press the issue, but didn’t know how without angering the captain. “You really think you can find Lucky Girl and get her back?” he asked instead.

“Well, I’ve got some tricks,” Candless said. “If the captain of the
Ray
is still Mr. Marn, then we’ll be over their gunwales before they know what’s hit them.” He smiled, then sobered. “But if it’s Ms. Chavez, then we’re in for a rare fight. She’s no fool and her crew is hard and all our decks will be bloody.”

“It won’t be
Pole Star
,” Reynolds insisted.

“Do they both use half-men?” Nailer asked.

“Some,” the captain answered. “But
Pole Star
has almost half its crew staffed with augments.”

“Augments?”

“Your half-men. We call them augmented because they’re people-plus.”

“Like Tool.”

“A strange creature, that one. I’ve never heard of a salvage company that would bond that sort of muscle.”

“He wasn’t with Lawson & Carlson. He was on his own.”

The captain shook his head. “Impossible. Augments aren’t like us. They have a single master. When they lose that master, they die.”

“You kill them?”

“Goodness no.” He laughed. “They pine. They are very loyal. They cannot live without their masters. It comes from a line of canine genetics.”

“Tool didn’t have a master.”

The captain nodded, but Nailer could tell he didn’t believe. Nailer dropped the subject. It wasn’t worth making the captain think he was crazy.

But it did make him wonder about Tool. Everyone who was familiar with half-men and their genetics said that Tool was an impossible creature. That no independent half-men existed. And yet Tool had walked away from many masters. He had worked for Lucky Strike and Richard Lopez, had worked for Sadna, had worked to protect him and Lucky Girl, and then had simply walked away when it no longer suited him. Nailer wondered what Tool was doing now.

Nailer’s thoughts were broken by Captain Candless drawing a gun. “I almost forgot,” the captain said as he handed it to Nailer. “I promised you this before. Something for when we find our ship. You’re going to need to practice with it. Cat will be drilling the crew, and you will drill with them. Boarding actions and the like.”

Nailer held the lightweight thing in his hand, so different from the sorts of pistols he had seen others use. “It’s so light.”

The captain laughed. “You can swim with it even. It won’t drag you down. The ammunition is a penetrator. It doesn’t use weight to enter the body—well, not as much—it uses spin from the barrel. You’ve got thirty shots.” He offered Nailer a fighting knife as well. “You know how to cut someone?” He indicated the soft parts. “Don’t worry about a killing blow and don’t go for the head. It will extend you. Go low and hit them in the belly, the knees, behind the legs. If they’re down…”

“Cut their throat.”

“Good boy! Bloodthirsty little bastard, aren’t you?”

Nailer shrugged, remembering Blue Eyes’s blood hot on his hands. “My father is pretty good with a knife,” he said. He forced the memory away. “When do you think we’ll fight?”

“We’ll patrol here. We should get a visual on anyone within fifteen miles. We’ve got the scopes to get a good look at them, and then we can decide if we want to chase or play friendly.” He shrugged. “We don’t know what they’re up to. Maybe they’re going to stay for a little while, lie low down south while they wait out the boardroom tactics up north, but I doubt it. They’re going to run north and try to make contact with Pyce.”

The captain turned and headed for the conning deck. As he departed, he nodded at Nailer’s pistol. “Practice with it, Nailer. Make sure you can hit what you aim at.”

Nailer nerved himself up and called after the man. “Captain!”

When Candless turned, Nailer said, “If you trust me with a gun, maybe you could trust me with some work, too.” He waved at the busy ship. “There must be something you can use me for.”