Ship Breaker (30 page)

“Captain!” Nailer shouted. “They’re not—”

Pole Star
stopped moving forward. It hung in the waves, stilled, even as water rushed around it. A wave crashed against it. Another. A bustle of activity on the decks was suddenly visible. An ant mound of people suddenly kicked to life. The ship swung slowly sideways, then stopped. A huge wave smashed into it. Another. The ship turned completely broadside and then it snagged again, caught on another spire from the deep. A huge wave smashed into its hull and the entire ship heeled.

Reynolds laughed and clapped Nailer on the shoulder. “They’ve got their hands full now!” she shouted over the storm roar. “Let’s finish this!”

They ran for the launches, Nailer piling in behind Reynolds. The little raft swung above roiling seas, dangling from a pair of drop clips. Knot and Vine and Candless and a half-dozen other crewmen were all in with him. Down the length of the ship, two other launches dangled over the side, full of
Dauntless
’s crew. The high whine of biodiesel engines firing live carried over the storm’s rush. Prop blades blurred as motors revved. Their own launch’s motor fired alive, vibrating.

The boats ahead of them cut free. They dropped like rocks into the waves, engines screaming. They hit water and shot forward, arrowing for the sinking
Pole Star
.

“Clear!” Reynolds shouted. Drop hooks snapped open. Their launch plunged. Nailer’s stomach flew into his mouth. Free fall. They slammed into the ocean. Nailer jackknifed forward and slammed into Vine’s broad back. Pain blossomed. He’d bitten his lip. Their raft surged forward, and he grabbed for balance as they accelerated.

“Weapons check!” Candless shouted. Nailer reached for the pistol strapped to his waist. He could feel his heart pounding. Trimble grinned beside him.

“Nothing better than a storm boarding, right, boy?”

Nailer nodded sickly. Their tiny boat hurtled through foam and breakers under Reynolds’s sure hand. They shot up beside the tilting
Pole Star,
coming at her from the stern. Enemy crew were out on the deck. Nailer thought he saw the captain clinging to a rail, trying to send her people out to stabilize the wreck. He felt a stab of victory. One moment she must have been so confident, and now she was frantic. He laughed in the rain, feeling water gushing down his face. He’d done that.

Their launch slammed up against
Pole Star
’s hull. Knot hurled a rope ladder grapple up over the rail, then rushed up the side with Vine close behind. They surged over the rail with their guns and machetes, followed by the rest of the crew.

Reynolds slapped Nailer’s back. “Move it, boy!”

Nailer grabbed the ladder and clambered up. He came over the side in time to see Captain Candless grappling with the other captain. He twisted his body and the woman plunged over the rail. She landed in the sea, splashing for survival. Candless pointed his sea pistol at the remaining crew.

“Stand down and surrender!” he shouted over the roar of the storm and even if his voice wasn’t clear, the gun was. Nailer looked down into the surging surf and wondered what had happened to the other captain. She was simply gone, sucked under in the Teeth.

They’d taken the
Pole Star
.

Nailer turned to smile at Reynolds when a wave of half-men boiled up from the hold, guns firing. Candless went down in a spray of blood. Reynolds threw Nailer aside and her gun cracked beside him. Nailer lifted his own pistol, shooting through the rain, sure that he was missing and yet squeezing the trigger anyway. A huge wave hit the ship.
Pole Star
’s deck tilted sideways. Combatants went sliding into the sea.

Nailer grabbed for the rail as he went over the edge. His gun plunged into the water. He dangled half off the deck. Storm surf surged up around his legs, grasping and eager to take him under. Nailer dragged himself out of the vortex and clung to the rail. The great clipper, so seemingly impregnable, had become impossibly small. It was sinking.

Reynolds was shooting at someone in the darkness, but Nailer couldn’t see who. She caught sight of him. “Get Miss Nita!” she shouted as bullets ricocheted around her.

One of
Pole Star
’s half-men rose up from the water beside them. Unkillable, they seemed. Reynolds turned her pistol on the creature and shot him in the chest. He sank back. Nailer couldn’t see any of
Dauntless
’s half-men at all. Maybe Knot and Vine and their kin were already dead.

Reynolds’s pistol cracked again. She glared at Nailer. “Go!”

Nailer drew his fighting knife and fumbled his now-useless ammunition over to Reynolds. He scrambled for the nearest hatch, praying that he wasn’t about to run into another lot of half-men, and dove through.

The storm’s fury muted. Nailer wiped his face frantically, clearing his vision, blinking in the sudden stillness. Emergency LED lights lit the corridor, running on current from the ship’s batteries. Nailer couldn’t help inanely calculating scavenge value of the lighting systems as he made his way down the corridor. He passed brass fittings and steel doors, noting easily stripped service lines. The corridor tilted, rocked by the storm waves outside. Nailer staggered.

Focus, you idiot. Find Lucky Girl and get out
.

Nothing moved in the dim red glow of the corridors. Somewhere above, guns were still firing, but the interior was strangely silent. Nailer made his way deeper into the ship, listening to the creak and rush of water outside, his stealthy footsteps and the rasp of his own loud breathing. He paused, trying to get his breath back. He listened for signs of movement ahead.

Nothing.

He crept farther down the corridor, his knife held ready beside him. He couldn’t be alone down here. Lucky Girl had to be around, and where she was, there would be others, too.

Once again, Nailer wondered at his capacity for suicidal stupidity. Betraying his father had been colossally stupid, but hunting around in a sinking ship topped it. If he’d been smart he would have let the whole thing go when Lucky Girl disappeared in the Orleans. He could have found other work. He could have walked away without a problem. Gone up the Mississippi. Anything. But instead he’d been swept up in the loyalty that her people displayed: Candless and Reynolds and Knot and Vine… and if he was honest, his own silly fantasies about the beautiful swank girl had played a part, too.

Nice going, hero.

He shook his head. Here he was, back at Bright Sands Beach, where he’d started, worse off than ever, and about to get his head shot off by a half-man because he thought some swank girl—

Movement ahead. Noises. Nailer pressed against the corridor wall. Muffled shouts echoed to him. He peered down the corridor. A ladder led down. He slipped closer and stuck his head close to the hole, listening.

“Get me another seal! No! There! Not there! Here! Here!” More shouts. Crew trying to contain the damage. Trying to block the rushing sea as it poured into the ship.

Nailer peered through the hole. Down below, the corridor was filling with water. Men and women splashed through the water, knee-deep in its embrace. More water sprayed from the walls, and still the crew labored. Nailer wished he had a gun. He could have shot them all… He stifled the thought. It was insane to pick a fight with people who didn’t care about him one way or the other.

One of the crewmen turned. His eyes widened. “Hey!”

Nailer jerked his head back up the hole and ran.

“Boarders!” The cry went up. “Boarders!”

But Nailer was far down the hall. Boots clanged on the ladder as he ducked into a cabin and closed the door. He was in a crew cabin, bunks and gear strewn wildly by the heaving of the ship. Boots pounded past.

Nailer took a deep breath and slipped back out. The tilt of the ship was making it difficult to move around. The corridors were all canted so that the door in the wall was slowly turning into a door in the floor. He actually had to lift the door in order to slide out of the room, and then he slid to the far side of the corridor before getting his footing. The ship was trying to turn turtle. He scrambled for the ladder, praying that he wasn’t about to run into more crew.

Climbing down was an odd experience of scrambling nearly sideways. The entire ship was almost on its side. Water poured around him. He ran past where the crew had sealed off a part of the cargo hold, headed deeper into the belly of the torn ship, searching desperately through cabins and storerooms. He found no one. Everyone had to be abovedecks or busy fighting to control the flooding. He was alone. Finally he gave up on stealth and simply shouted.

“Lucky Girl! Where the hell are you? Nita!”

No response.

She had to be higher up; that was the only answer. He’d somehow missed her.

Or else she’d been drugged.

Or she’d been taken off already.

Or she’d never been here at all.

He grimaced. She could have been left back in the Orleans. Or killed. He slogged through water, trying to find his way out. The water was in all the decks now. The wall had become the floor, and he was having a hard time keeping his orientation as the ship went onto its side. The ship jerked. The world turned again. Water sprayed. He yanked open a door and was rewarded with a flood of water that sent him sprawling and sliding down the corridor before he came up gasping and managed to get to his feet. He fled the rising waters.

“Lucky Girl!”

Still nothing. Water was everywhere. LEDs were shorting out, sending portions of the ship into blackness. The ship was sinking. He had to get out. Judging from the empty corridors and rooms, even the crew had run. He wondered what had happened with the fight. Who had won?

He scrambled through corridors made topsy-turvy by the ship’s cant. The smell of oiled machinery was strong in his nostrils, reeking. It was like being back on one of the ship-breaking wrecks. Like being trapped in the oil room.

He pushed open another door and crawled through. He was lost all right. Inside, the hydrofoil gearings for the
Pole Star
sat in red dimness, clicking gears and whirring automation mechanicals for the sails and hydrofoils and parasail reels. Warning signs said:
SPEED MECHANICALS IN USE! WATCH HANDS AND LOOSE CLOTHING
. Nailer was amused that he could actually make out the meanings now. He was going to drown, but hey, he could read.

On one wall, flashers and safety overrides blinked to indicate that there were electric malfunctions and topside failures, probably from having the conning deck go under. The mechanicals were almost exactly the same as the ones he’d had to lubricate under Knot’s supervision on
Dauntless
. Bigger, but the layout was awfully similar. As the ship had gone onto its side, the service panels that had been in place on the floor had come loose and fallen free, revealing the huge gears and interlocking hydraulic systems. It looked like ships in the Patel Global fleet were almost the same. Nita wouldn’t be here. He turned to keep searching. The ship groaned and shifted under him again. Nailer wondered if he was going to end up like Jackson Boy after all. Dead in a different bit of scavenge, but dead just the same.

“Nita! Where the hell are you?”

He broke into a new corridor. The ship was trying to turn upside down, kept from capsizing only by the strength of its masts where they tangled in the Teeth. If the ship turned turtle, he’d have to swim out. He wondered if he’d be able to make it up through the waves and wreckage.

“Well, I’ll be damned.” A familiar voice interrupted his thoughts. “Hello there, Lucky Boy.”

Nailer turned, his skin crawling.

His father stood in the soaking corridor with Nita slung over his shoulder, gagged and bound at her wrists and ankles. Water ran slick on his face and a machete gleamed in his hand.

Nailer stepped back, horrified. His father smiled. Even in the dimness of the red LEDs Nailer could tell the man was sliding high. He had the bright, wide eyes and the feral grin of an addict deep in his drugs.

“Goddamn,” Richard Lopez said. “I didn’t think I’d run into you here.” He dumped Nita unceremoniously on the ground and swung his machete in an experimental arc. “Didn’t think I’d ever see you again.”

Nailer tried to shrug, tried not to show his fear. “Yeah. Me either.”

His father laughed. The sound echoed in the cramped space. The dragons stood out stark on his bare arms, curling up around his Adam’s apple like spikes. His ribs showed over the ripple of his fighter’s muscles.

“You gonna just stand there?” his father asked. “Or you gonna help me?”

Nailer hesitated, confused. “Help you? You want me to help with the girl?”

His father grinned. “Just kidding. I should have let you die when we found the scavenge. Should have known you’d be an ungrateful little bastard.”

“Just let her go,” Nailer said. “You don’t need her.”

“Nope.” His father shook his head. “I don’t need her. But I’m not going out empty-handed, and she looks like the best scavenge here.”

“They’ll catch you.”

“Who?” His father laughed. “No one gives a damn anymore. Every man for himself and all that.” He shrugged. “Anyway, they don’t really care if she’s alive or dead. If I sell her for spare parts to the Harvesters, it’s all the same to them.” He glanced at her. “She might have been a swank once. But she’s scavenge now.”