"Sit on down," Tomas said, settling himself on a chair with a dent in the seat that had been worn into a mirror image of his bony ass. Turk selected the least-tattered cushion on his friend's ancient sofa. "Can you believe this shit falling out of the sky? I mean, who asked for that! I had to shovel my way out of the house yesterday just to go out and get groceries."

Pretty unbelievable, Turk acknowledged.

"So what brings you here? Something more than neighborliness, I expect, given the weather. If you can call it weather."

"Got a question to ask," Turk said.

"A question or a favor?"

"Well—starts with a question, anyway."

"Serious?"

"It might be."

"So you want a beer? Get the dust out of your throat?"

"Not a bad idea," Turk said.

* * * * *

Turk had met Tomas aboard an ancient single-hulled tanker bound for Breaker Beach on its final voyage.

The ship, called Kestrel, had been Turk's ticket to the New World. Turk had signed on as an able-bodied seaman at negligible wages. All the crew had, because it was a one-way trip. Across the Arch, in Equatoria, the market for scrap iron and steel was booming. On Earth a leviathan like the Kestrel was a liability, too old to meet international standards and useless for anything but the poorest kind of coastal trade, prohibitively expensive to scrap. But in the New World the same rusty hulk would be a source of valuable raw material, stripped and diced by the acetylene-wielding armies of Thai and Indian laborers who made their living unrestrained by environmental regulations—the professional breakers of Breaker Beach, located some hundred miles north of Port Magellan.

Turk and Tomas had shared a mess on that voyage and learned a few things about each other. Tomas claimed to have been born in Bolivia, but he had been raised, he said, in Biloxi, and had worked the docks in that city and then New Orleans as a boy and young man. He had been at sea off and on for decades, during the tumultuous years of the Spin, when the U.S. government had revived the old Merchant Marine as a gesture toward national security, and afterward, when trade across the Arch created fresh demand for new shipping.