Paolo Bacigalupi - Ship Breaker

From the height of the tanker’s deck, Bright Sands Beach stretched into the distance, a tarred expanse of sand and puddled seawater, littered with the savaged bodies of other oil tankers and freighters. Some were completely whole, as if crazy sea captains had simply decided to steer the kilometer-long ships onto the sand and then walked away. Others were flayed and stripped, showing rusty iron girder bones. Hulls lay like chunks of cleavered fish: a conning tower here, a crew quarters there, the prow of an oil tanker pointing straight up to the sky.

It was as if the Scavenge God had come amongst the ships, slashing and chopping, dicing the huge iron vessels into pieces, and then left the corpses scattered carelessly behind. And wherever the huge ships lay, scavenge gangs like Nailer’s swarmed like flies. Chewing away at iron meat and bones. Dragging the old world’s flesh up the beach to the scrap weighing scales and the recycling smelters that burned 24-7 for the profit of Lawson & Carlson, the company that made all the cash from the blood and sweat of the ship breakers.

Nailer and Sloth paused for a moment, breathing hard, leaning against the heavy spool. Nailer wiped the sweat out of his eyes. Far out on the horizon, the oily black of the ocean turned blue, reflecting sky and sun. White caps foamed. The air around Nailer was hazed with the black work of shoreline smelters, but out there, beyond the smoke, he could see sails. The new clipper ships. Replacements for the massive coal- and oil-burning wrecks that he and his crew worked to destroy all day long: gull-white sails, carbon-fiber hulls, and faster than anything except a maglev train.

Nailer’s eyes followed a clipper ship as it sliced across the waters, sleek and fast and completely out of reach. It was possible that some of the copper on his spool would eventually sail away on a ship like that, first hauled by train to the Orleans, then transferred to a clipper’s cargo hold, where it would be carried across the ocean to whatever people or country could afford the scavenge.

Bapi had a poster of a clipper ship from Libeskind, Brown & Mohanraj. It connected to his reusable wall calendar and showed a clipper with high-altitude parasails extended far above it-sails that Bapi said could reach the jet streams and yank a clipper across smooth ocean at more than fifty-five knots, flying above the waves on hydrofoils, tearing through foam and salt water, slicing across the ocean to Africa and India, to the Europeans and the Nipponese.

Nailer stared at the distant sails hungrily, wondering at the places they went, and whether any of them were better than his own.

“Nailer! Sloth! Where the hell have you been?”

Nailer jerked from his reverie. Pima was waving up at them from the tanker’s lower deck, looking annoyed.

“We’re waiting for you, crewboy!”

“Boss girl on the prowl,” Sloth muttered.

Nailer grimaced. Pima was the oldest of them, and it made her bossy. Even his own long friendship with her didn’t shelter him when they were behind quota.

He and Sloth turned their attention back to the spool. With another series of grunts they heaved it over the ship’s warped decking and rolled it to where a rudimentary crane had been set up. They hitched the spool to rusted iron hooks, then grabbed the crane cable and jumped aboard the spool as it descended, swaying and spinning to the lower deck.

Pima and the rest of the light crew swarmed around them as they hit bottom. They unclipped the spool and rolled it over to where they’d set up their stripping operation near the oil tanker’s prow. Lengths of discarded insulation from the electrical wire lay everywhere, along with the gleaming rolls of copper that they’d collected, stacked in careful lines, and marked with Bapi’s light crew claim mark, the same swirled symbol that scarred all their cheeks.

Everyone started unreeling sections of Nailer’s new haul, parting the lengths out amongst themselves. They worked quickly, accustomed to one another and the labor: Pima, their boss girl, taller than the rest and filling out like a woman, black as oil and hard as iron. Sloth, skinny and pale, bones and knots of knees and dirty blond hair, the next candidate for duct-and-scuttle work when Nailer got too big, her pale skin almost permanently sunburned and peeling. Moon Girl, the shade of brown rice, whose nailshed mother had died with the last run of malaria and who worked light crew harder than anyone else because she’d seen the alternative, her ears and lips and nose decorated with scavenged steel wire that she’d driven through her flesh in the hope that no one would ever want her the way they’d wanted her mother. Tick-tock, nearsighted and always squinting at everything around him, almost as black as Pima but nowhere near as smart, fast with his hands as long as you told him what do with them, and he never got bored. Pearly, the Hindu who told them stories about Shiva and Kali and Krishna and who was lucky enough to have both a mother and a father who worked oil scavenge; black hair and dark tropic skin and a hand missing three fingers from an accident with the winding drum.

And then there was Nailer. Some people, like Pearly, knew who they were and where they came from. Pima knew her mother came up from the last of the islands across the Gulf. Pearly told everyone who would listen that he was 100 percent Indian-Hindu Marwari through and through. Even Sloth said that her people were Irish. Nailer was nothing like that. He had no idea what he was. Half of something, a quarter of something else, brown skin and black hair like his dead mother, but with weird pale blue eyes like his father.

Pearly had taken one look at Nailer’s pale eyes and claimed he was spawned by demons. But Pearly made things up all the time. He said Pima was Kali reincarnated-which was why her skin was so black, and why she was so damn mean when they were behind quota. Even so, the truth was that Nailer shared his father’s eyes and his father’s wiry build, and Richard Lopez was a demon for sure. No one could argue that. Sober, the man was scary. Drunk, he was a demon.

Nailer unwound a section of wire and squatted down on the blazing deck. He crimped the wire with his pliers and ripped off a sleeve of insulation, revealing the shining copper core.

Did it again. And again.

Pima squatted beside him with her own length of wire. “Took you long enough to bring out this load.”

Nailer shrugged. “Nothing’s close in anymore. I had to go a long way to find it.”

“That’s what you always say.”

“You want to go into the hole, you can.”

“I’ll go in,” Sloth volunteered.

Nailer gave her a dirty look. Pearly snorted. “You don’t have the sense of a half-man. You’d get lost like Jackson Boy and then we’d get no scavenge at all.”

Sloth made a sharp gesture. “Grind it, Pearly. I never get lost.”

“Even in the dark? When all the ducts look the same?” Pearly spat toward the edge of the ship. Missed and hit the rail instead. “Crews on Deep Blue III heard Jackson Boy calling out for days. Couldn’t find him, though. Little licebiter finally just dried up and died.”

“Bad way to go,” Tick-tock commented. “Thirsty. In the dark. Alone.”

“Shut up, you two,” Moon Girl said. “You want the dead to hear you calling?”

Pearly shrugged. “We’re just saying Nailer always makes quota.”

“Shit.” Sloth ran a hand through sweaty blond hair. “I’d get twenty times the scavenge Nailer gets.”

Nailer laughed. “Go on in, then. We’ll see if you come out alive.”

“You already filled the spool.”

“Tough grind for you, then.”

Pima tapped Nailer’s shoulder. “I’m serious about the scavenge. We had downtime waiting for you.”