Axis

once the crew had been evacuated. The ship's steel would end up in re-rolling mills downcoast, the ship's miles of wiring and aluminum piping would be extracted and sold in bulk lots, even the ship's bells, Turk had heard, would be marketed to local Buddhist temples. This was Equatoria, and any manmade thing would find a use. It didn't matter that beaching a vessel as enormous as the Kestrel could be a violent, destructive process. None of these ships would ever float again.

He went belowdecks when the signal sounded and found Tomas waiting in the crew mess, grinning. Turk had grown fond of Tomas's bony grin—demented-looking but genuine. 'End of the road for Kestrel,' Tomas said, 'and the end of the road for me, too. Every chicken comes home to roost, I guess.'

'We're positioned off the beach,' Turk said. Soon the captain would start the engines and engage the screws and send the ship dead for shore. The engines would be shut down at the last practical moment and the prow of the ship would gully into the sand while the tide was high. Then the crew would drop rope ladders and scurry down the hull; their kit bags would be lowered; Turk would take his first steps in the grit and wash of Breaker Beach. Within a month Kestrel would be little more than a memory and a few thousand tons of recycled iron, steel, and aluminum.

'Every death is a birth,' said Tomas, who was old enough to get away with such pronouncements.

'I wouldn't know about that.'

'No. You strike me as somebody who knows more than he lets on. End of Kestrel. But your first time in the New World. That's a death and a birth right there.'

'If you say so, Tomas.'

Turk felt the ship's elderly engines begin to throb. The beaching would be violent, inevitably. All the loose gear in the ship had already been stowed or dismounted and sent ashore along with the lifeboats. Half the crew was already ashore. 'Whoa,' Tomas exclaimed as the vibration came up through the deck plating and the chair legs. 'Making some speed now, you bet.'

The prow of the ship would be cutting a knife-edge through the water, Turk thought, as it did whenever the vessel began to throb and surge like this. Except they weren't in open water anymore. Their slot on the beach was dead ahead, the continent rising beneath them. The captain was in radio contact with a shore pilot who would call in minor course corrections and tell him when to cut the engines.

Soon, Turk hoped. He liked being at sea, and he didn't mind being belowdecks, but he found he very much disliked being in a windowless room when a deliberately-engineered disaster was only moments away. 'You done this before?'

'Well, no,' Tomas said, 'not from this end. But I was at a wreckers' beach near Goa a few years ago and I watched an old container ship ground itself. Ship not much smaller than this one. Kind of a poetry to it, actually. It rode up the tideline like one of those turtles trying to lay an egg. I mean, I guess you want to brace yourself for it, but it wasn't violent.' A few minutes later Tomas looked at the watch that hung like a bracelet on his skinny wrist and said, 'About time to cut engines.'

'You got it timed?'

'I got eyes and ears. I know where we were anchored and I can tell by listening what kind of speed we're making.'

This sounded to Turk like one of Tomas's boasts, but it might be true. Turk wiped his palms on the knees of his jeans. He was nervous, but what could go wrong? At this point it was all ballistics.

What did go wrong—as he sorted it out afterward—was that at a critical moment Kestrel's bridge lost electrical power, due to some short or component failure in the antique circuitry, so that the captain could neither hear the shore pilot's instructions nor relay his orders to the engine room. Kestrel should have come in coasting, but she beached under power instead. Turk was thrown from his chair as the ship ground into the littoral and listed grotesquely to starboard. He was alert enough to see the brushed-steel cutlery locker break loose from the near wall and tumble toward him. The locker was the size of a coffin and about as heavy, and he tried to crawl away from it, but there wasn't time to pull himself out of the way. But here was Tomas, somehow still upright, grabbing for the screeching metal box and managing to snag the corner of it as it slid by, giving Turk enough time to scramble aside. He fetched up against a chair as Kestrel stopped moving and the ship's engines finally, mercifully, died. The old tanker's hull gave a ratcheting, prehistoric groan and fell silent. Beached. No harm done…

Except to Tomas, who had briefly taken the full weight of the locker and whose left arm had been sliced open below the elbow, deep enough to show bone.

Tomas cradled the injury in his blood-soaked lap, looking startled. Turk applied a handkerchief as a tourniquet and told his friend to stop cursing and keep still while he went for help. It took him ten minutes to find an officer who would listen to him.

The ship's doctor had already gone ashore and the infirmary had been stripped of drugs, so Tomas had to be lowered from the deck in an improvised rope-and-basket litter with only a couple of aspirin to dull the pain. The Kestrel's captain, in the end, refused to admit liability, collected his pay from the breaker boss, and caught a bus for Port Magellan before sunset. So Turk was left to look after Tomas until an off-shift Malay welder could be convinced to summon a genuine doctor. Or what passed for a doctor in this part of the New World. A woman, the skinny Malay said in broken English. A good doctor, a Western doctor, very kind to the breakers. She was white but had lived for years in a Minang fishing village not far upcoast.

Her name, he said, was Diane.

CHAPTER SIX

Turk told Tomas Ginn about Lise—a little bit about her. How they had connected when they were stranded in the mountains; how he couldn't get her out of his mind even when they were back in civilization, even when she stopped returning his calls; how they got back together during the ashfall.

Tomas listened from his tattered easy chair, sipping beer from a green glass bottle and smiling placidly, as if he had discovered some kind of windless place inside his head. 'Sounds like you hardly know this lady.'

'I know as much as I need to. Some people, it isn't that hard to tell whether you trust them or not.'

'Trust her, do you?'

'Yeah.'

Tomas cupped the crotch of his baggy jeans. 'This is what you trust. Every inch a sailor.'

'It's not like that.'

'It never is. But it always is. So why you want to drive up here and tell me about this woman?'

'Actually, I was thinking maybe I could introduce her to you.'

'To me? I ain't your daddy, Turk.'

'No, and you're not what you used to be, either.'

'Don't see what that's got to do with it.'

Turk had to tread carefully here. With the utmost delicacy, insofar as he was capable of it. 'Well… she's curious about Fourths.'

'Oh, my Christ.' Tomas rolled his eyes. 'Curious?'

'She's got reasons to be.'

'So you want to serve me up to her? Exhibit A or whatever?'

'No. What I really want to do is let her talk to Diane. But I want your opinion first.'

* * * * *

Diane—the Western doctor, or nurse, as she insisted on calling herself—had hiked to Breaker Beach from some inland village to treat Tomas's slashed arm.

At first Turk was suspicious of her. In Equatoria, especially out here in the backwoods, nobody was checking anybody's medical license. At least that was the impression he got. If you owned a syringe and a bottle of distilled water you could call yourself a doctor, and the breaker bosses would naturally endorse any self-appointed physician who worked for free, regardless of results. So Turk sat with Tomas inside a vacant hut waiting for this woman to arrive, making occasional conversation until the older man fell asleep despite the blood still leaking into his makeshift bandage. The hut was made of some local wood, round barked branches knobbed like bamboo