Free Axis by Robert Charles Wilson Page B

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