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  Voorst grunted and peered out as the copter punched beyond the dense smoke, the light like a change of season. Elevation two thousand feet. The dusty sun lay above the horizon less than an hour from setting. “If you don’t get secured,” he yelled to Stringer, “you’re gonna have another three, four hundred dead by morning. Look down there, you can see them swarming—people in the water. . . .”

  “Com’on,” Stringer said. “Just listen: so when I take her blouse off. She’s holding must be three hundred housing vouchers? I clap the restraints on her wrists, got ’em threaded around the weapons rack. Next thing I know like her brain fuses, she goes twitch wild. I think, well, the zimmer likes the restraints, right?” The copter lurched in a wave of heat; a red light flashed at the back of the cargo hold, matched by a flush infusing Stringer’s square, hairless face. “I go to pull off my holster and belt?”

  Only now does the Harbor Inspector, Voorst, look carefully at the mangled mass of cartilage at the side of Stringer’s head. “Something tells me I don’t want to hear how you lost it.”

  “I didn’t lose my ear. She bit it off. I mean, what are these people turning into?” Stringer pulled himself up and peered out the open door, holding the safety rails so tightly his knuckles showed white. “Man, what was this place?”

  “South of the industrial harbor, see? A big old passenger ship—Harbors database shows upper decks were a Sears-Daei Mall and a transit center, maybe two thousand people below. VNN’s saying Nomads came aboard a bulk carrier, set a fire, the people in the harbor started looting. . . . Jesus, they treat people like cattle.”

  “Nobody treats me like cattle,” Stringer grinned. “What’s the matter, pal? You afraid my people gonna hit you with the prods?”

  Voorst looked at him: red-eyed, one-eared. He took a deep breath: petrochemical air. “Stay out of my way, Stringer,” Voorst said, trying to keep calm. “I’ve got a job to do down there and I don’t want your men interfering. Stay out of my way.”

  * * *

  Voorst’s job was to clear the harbor of illegal vessels. The first step was to identify the most dangerously unseaworthy craft, hulls he’d mark with his orange “V” for the Corps of Engineers to impound and sink along the massive net of breakwaters. Most of the few vessels which could actually sail had done so when the fire had broken out, just sailed north out of the harbor mouth to some other mooring. The illegals left behind ranged from slimy inflatables rigged as sleeping quarters, to makeshift houseboats with small kitchens, to old tanker hulls that had been converted into twelve-story “apartments.”

  Walking the docks, by sunset he found only six boats he could clear. Two hours later he heard an appeal from a group of unwashed men and women and let slide the regs for a dozen trimarans moored under the tattered flag of the Ponape Yacht Club. Even as they spoke an illegal barge ghosted into an area he’d already inspected—the harbor changing amoeba-like around him. Still, he’d see to it the worst cases were sunk.

  At midnight Voorst found himself picking his way across the deck of a converted cattle ship docked near the VNN uplink. Behind him the Corps was already towing the first hull he’d marked. Now he stopped to watch the Army drive a crowd along the shore back through the lurid light. The water was littered with clothing, cooking utensils, bedding. The red plastic of a toy Mars Rover crackled beneath his feet when he shifted his weight.

  His heart went out to the people who needed a place to live, but what else could he do? When the big winter storms came slamming in from the Pacific, as they would in a month, the great breakwater itself a mile out wouldn’t hold back the rising seas. Even in good weather the utility hookups were rats’ nests and sewage fouled the waters for a click out. When the storms came, the collisions, capsizings, swampings—sheer overcrowding in the harbors killed thousands every year on this part of the California coast alone.

  Voorst sighed, looked around to take his bearings. He’d covered all of the northern quarter of the harbor except for a crumbling pier near shore. He told himself that’s where he’d quit for the night.

  He walked over. He started writing off a string of listing hundred-foot hulks, sheet metal and wallboard shacks on scow hulls, when he realized that one rusty hull, partly sunk, was blocking a dozen small boats moored to a pontoon dock along a hidden channel.

  That’s where he found the Swan.

  * * *

  She was an antique sailboat, a racing sloop from the 20th Century, Scandinavian-built, about forty feet on the waterline. He’d seen a boat like her in the museum in San Francisco once: a glass hull with fine, fast lines, a flush teak deck for quick sail changes, a tall mast with a narrow crosstree. Her gull-winged cockpit set her apart from other old racing boats and gave her away even from beneath a thick layer of grime. He’d never forgotten the words etched on the steel plaque in San Francisco: Nautor Swan.

  This boat’s reg numbers didn’t show up on his readout. She certainly was run-down: filthy, her decks gouged, her brightwork the washed-out color of driftwood. Her winches were crusted over and her rigging hung from the mast like an old spider’s web. But there was no disguising the heartbreaking sleekness of her design.

  “Hello!” Voorst called out from dockside, banging on the hull, hearing the fatigue in his voice. “Ahoy the Swan.”

  The boat had lost its rudder, seemed a bit low in the water. Still, he couldn’t just have her sunk. He calculated his alternatives and started writing out a warning notice to post on the hull when he heard the companionway hatch scrape open on its tracks. The hair rose on the back of his neck—in the red glow from a secondary fire, the harbor had turned weirdly quiet; he hadn’t met anyone for an hour.

  And now a girl emerged from the low cabin. She was wearing a T-shirt of a provocative blue beneath a khaki windbreaker. She was slim-hipped, high-cheeked, and pretty, but certainly just a girl. He guessed from the look on her face that she would have disappeared had she anywhere to go.

  “Are you Army?” she said. Her skin was smooth as a mannequin’s. Her hair was honey-colored despite the Oriental fold in her eyes and the flatness of her nose—someone’s exotic, beautiful daughter.

  “SoCal Harbors Office. Where’s your family?”

  “I’m older than I look,” she told him, lips tight. “Try twenty-two. Are you going to squander all the boats in the harbor? The way you did up in Seattle?”

  He grunted. “Who told you that?”

  “Everyone knows about it. There’s a pinch, the boats get condemned. The next thing you see, they’re sunk at anchor. Then the bay gets filled in by some developer and apartment blocks go up.”

  The story bothered him too. The trouble in Seattle, as he recalled, had been a petrochemical slick that had unfortunately ignited at the turning of the tide. “We’re not sinking anybody at anchor,” he told her. “You’re mistaking me for the FedHarbors people. But for your own safety . . .”

  His pager squawked and he stopped, took a message from ComNet: FEMA had scheduled a briefing at the fire’s source on Dock G North at 0600.

  He’d had to look down to read the message display and to shut his pager off. When he looked back up, the girl was gone.

  * * *

  At the morning briefing—he’d been right about the source, it was the Queen Elizabeth III, a floating flophouse belowdecks, the mall above—the Long Beach fire chief showed Voorst and the Army Evac Team where the blaze had started in the video department of the Daie store, around 4 P.M. on the previous day. Someone had set off a case of Lydex, the Army’s “sticky napalm,” fragments of the original container blown out into a passageway.

  The Lydex—left over from the “police action” in Mexico—was the signature of the New Nomad Terrs, Stringer chimed in during his five minutes: Stringer was apparently something of an expert on the terrorists, Voorst was surprised to learn. Stringer’s assistant placed the disruption to the QE III’s ComNet channel at 1602 hours.

  “So they lost video uplink from this ship from the start?” Voorst
asked.

  A black firewoman from Long Beach shook her head. “No way.”

  Stringer looked annoyed. “That’s what the scum do first, blow the links, give you false signals,” he said, but the black woman only shrugged.

  Voorst waited until the briefing was concluded and Stringer and his team drifted away.

  “Show me,” Voorst said to the firewoman in the yellow slicker.

  Up forward in the old first class theater one of the Virtual News Network’s “experience” rooms was still more or less in working condition, running three walls out of four. Voorst played back the holotape of what had gone out over the Net even before they’d flown out from Malibu, cutting the volume on the anchorman Tachikara’s familiar, avuncular voice. There it was again: the QE III fire was already superimposed on the Brazilian bulk cargo carrier, the Sea Angel, anchored in the industrial harbor just northwest. He’d seen that harbor choked with live-aboards too as they’d flown over, but as he watched the walls around him projecting VNN’s three-dimensional coverage, half the residential boats were gone, erased, digitalized out. Even the odor of the fire they were sending out over the Virtual Net was different, yes, incense sweet, a hint of burning wood from the tropics.

  He supposed they had their reasons. Maybe the police had a lead on the Nomad Terrorists which would be blown if everyone knew the truth. Still . . .

  “You believe this shit, what they do nowadays?” Voorst asked the black woman.

  She seemed rapt—on the screen, against the dramatic sights and sounds of the fire, a guy wearing a red bandana was pulling a comatose, semi-nude blonde out of water so oily it threatened to ignite. “This is better than what happened, man. I like this better.”

  Behind the slosh of the water and the crackle of flaming lumber and paint blistering a hatch an announcer murmured the station ID for VNN: Here’s There! he said. You’re Here! Voorst picked up the unerased string of scow hulls as part of the background on a side screen. Without giving it much thought he called up the screen controls and instructed the virtual-reality program to zoom in.

  You could hardly see the edit lines. Blue shirts swarming near a derelict sailboat. The Swan.

  “Hey,” the firewoman said, “lookit that. Maybe those’re the guys who started the fire.”

  Voorst shrugged. “Look at their bedrolls. Folded in a hurry. Look how those two are half-dressed, how their survival packs are a mess. That bunch is clearing out like they don’t know what’s going on.”

  * * *

  The Corps of Engineers had already brought in two large cranes, and now a dredge from the nearby Naval Shipyard was stationed in the harbor mouth. The harbor looked trashed—debris strewn, littered with derelict vessels, scum on the water thicker than usual—but because the Army’d come in strength, the transients weren’t swarming back as they had in Balboa, so today his own job seemed less urgent. Voorst ate a late breakfast with the Long Beach fire crew, a druggy bunch who shared Stim tabs with their coffee. Then he worked the Alamitos end of the bay out of a Zodiac for a while. Before long his eyes were burning from some toxicity in the air. He moored the Zodiac at an empty slip and walked over to the Swan.

  The Eurasian girl was kneeling on deck, scrubbing corrosion from a winch with a wire brush. The boat was still grimy, black-streaked along the waterline from the frayed truck tires used as fenders, but metal fittings shone along the route of the starboard running rigging.

  “It’s a start,” Voorst said.

  She grinned nervously. On the mast she’d posted the Provisional Seaworthiness Certificate he’d left on deck the night before. “I’m obliged for the thirty days,” she said.

  Voorst nodded toward the scow hull blocking the channel. “That hulk should be towed out tomorrow.”

  Now her smile relaxed. “F’ntastic,” she said. “That’s the one problem I could never solve. I’ve got propulsion—a set of metal film sails that’ve never seen wind, a cranky methanol inboard. . . .”

  He couldn’t quite place her accent: was she a refugee from the fall of Hong Kong? He was impressed, as she went on, by what she knew about sailing, by her ambition to take the boat out single-handed. “What are you going to do for a rudder?” he asked.

  She told him the original rudder was at the bottom of the harbor, just below the stern. “It’s a long story. My old boyfriend . . .”

  “. . . left when the fire started on the QE III,” Voorst told her. “You can see that on the VNN tape.”

  Now it was her turn to be surprised. “I’m the one who found this boat to begin with,” she said. “Stuck this way, filled with a dead man’s kip. All Dana did was lose the rudder when he tried to make room for a stabilizing vane he never did attach.”

  “So what are you going to do about the rudder?”

  “Dive for it,” she answered, grimacing at the slimy water.

  Voorst nodded. “You’re going to need some help.”

  She flushed, started to say no, I don’t, but something in her peripheral vision caught her attention. Voorst tracked her line of sight to a moving group a hundred meters away, above the debris-strewn beach, near a barricaded ramp to the docks: an Army patrol was prodding along fifty or sixty people dressed in the dingy old clothes of the homeless. The sergeant sauntering behind them hefted on his shoulder the distinctive barbed shape of a burn gun, the cruelest of the weapons.

  Now the infrared gun was waved, in a familiar way, at Voorst. He spit into the dark water.

  “I’m sorry I thought you were one of them,” the Eurasian girl said.

  Voorst ran his hand over a piece of coaming, thinking it just needed to be scraped, sanded, and coated to look like new. During the night he’d dreamed of the Swan far out at sea, beyond the greasy slicks and floating carcasses, heeled over in a stiff, open-ocean breeze. “Well, if you need some help. I’d like to see this boat saved, see? I’d like to see you sail out of here.”

  “Look,” she said, still watching the patrol on shore, “those soldiers make me nervous. You might as well come aboard.”

  Voorst stepped over a sagging lifeline and followed her down the companionway, not expecting much. But he found antique wood paneling, blue curtains shading the ports, a spotless galley. The beamy cabin was a museum of old-time comforts like teak book racks and built-in lockers. From the oversize electronics at the aft Nav station he guessed that the boat had last been seriously cruised fifteen years before, around the turn of the 21st Century. “My name’s Rawley Voorst,” he told her.

  “So I gathered from the notice. I’m Tiana Parker.”

  He saw the T-shirt she’d been wearing the previous night on the forepeak bunk. “Isn’t it kind of dangerous to wear Nomad blue?”

  She shook her head. “They’re just people without places to live, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Or people who set fires with Lydex.”

  “If you believe that . . .”

  “It’s not a religion,” he said, “It’s not a matter of belief.” He realized he was repeating sentences he’d heard electronically, and caught his breath. “You must watch CBS or VNN. You must listen to journalists like Tachikara. . . .”

  “I suppose you believe everything you see on VNN?”

  “No . . . This is what I mean: they can manipulate the screens, but an anchorman like Tachikara with a reputation to protect, he’s not going to fabricate . . .”

  “Unless he’s a construct, unless he’s fabricated himself by the Crays at VNN every day. Tako Tachikara. Christ.”

  He’d heard rumors. “VNN,” he sighed.

  “The technology’s a miracle,” she admitted, pulling off her workshirt, uncovering a sleeveless top and skin that glowed gold in the warm cabin light. “You know what would be splendid? Get some of that equipment, put it to use for human things. You know, people’s memories . . . Make a holotape of teaching a child how to walk, or fixing this boat up.” She leaned back against a bulkhead. “But they never let ordinary people get their hands on the equipment.”

&n
bsp; “They know how dangerous it would be to turn an unedited camera on the cardboard shacks of East L.A. . . .” In the silence after he spoke he could feel the hull bob gently from some disturbance in the harbor.

  “I’d be very grateful if you did help me,” she said.

  He thought he heard someone knocking around outside. “What do you need?” he asked her.

  “For starters, do you know how to mend an electronic compass?”

  Footsteps sounded above on deck. Voorst pulled himself up the companionway to find that the weapon-waving sergeant who’d been hiking on the shore, and who’d made his way, alone, across the littered beach, through a barricade, and across a series of jammed-together decks to land on the Swan’s, was someone he knew.

  “Hi,” Stringer said, looking past him to the girl, smiling unctuously. “Hi, zimmer.”

  “Jesus,” Voorst said. “You’re gonna get your other ear bitten off.”

  “Gimme a break,” Stringer said. “I’ve been up all night. My own men are startin’ to smell as bad as the people we move.” He smiled at Tiana, looking down into the cabin. “Nice in there.”

  She only nodded, fear in her eyes.

  “We’re here to protect you, see. I’m Sergeant Stringer. Where you goin’ when Rawley throws you off your boat?”

  “I wasn’t aware he was,” she said.

  Stringer nodded sympathetically. “Well,” he said, “you are now.” He rubbed the stubble on his chin. “We’re like brothers, see . . .”

  “Like Cain and Abel,” Voorst laughed.

  Now Stringer bit his lip. “Who the fuck’re they?”

  Voorst shook his head. “Abel was a shepherd—say, Sergeant, does that make him the first Nomad? Anyway—you’ll like this part—his brother Cain murdered him.”