These were recent arrivals, the work of their deconstruction hardly begun. For many miles more the beach was crowded with steel frames denuded of hull plating, cavernous half-ships in which the acetylene glare of the breakers' torches made a fitful light.

Beyond that lay the scrap-metal huts and forges and toolsheds and machine shops of the breakers, mostly Indian and Malaysian men working out the contracts that had bought them passage under the Arch. Farther on, hazy in the morning air, forested hills unrolled into the blue-gray foothills of the mountains.

He couldn't stay on deck during the beaching. The standard way to deliver a large vessel to Breaker Beach was simply to run it up the littoral and strand it there. The breakers would do the rest, swarming over the ship 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."