Long Beach and San Pedro

Two harbour towns facing each other across the water, and between them the largest port complex in North America. Everything the city eats comes through here, which is why the Corporate Court guarantees the place, and why it is the only ground in Los Angeles where several megacorporations hold sovereign parcels side by side and none of them will start anything.

It is also inside El Infierno. The Green Tide came up the coast from the south in 2056 and the harbour took the worst of it: the channels, the slips, the flats behind the breakwater, and everything up the river mouth. So the wealth and the ruin are not in different districts here. They share a fence, and in places they share a gate.

Terminal Island is the crown jewel — an actual island in the middle of the complex, container terminals leased one at a time, each one legally another country. Reachable by two bridges and nothing else. San Pedro climbs the hill on the west side: a fishing town for a century and a half, Croatian and Italian families who have been on the same streets for five generations, and the harbour's memory lives there rather than in any archive. Wilmington sits inland of the channel on top of one of the biggest oil fields in the country, which is why the refineries are there and why the air has never been anybody's priority. Long Beach proper is the east side: the airport that handles the port's cargo, the older downtown, and the Queen Mary at her berth.

A million people live inside the cordon. Most of them work in it.

Canon reference: Long Beach on the Sixth World Wiki, for the published version. Where it and this page disagree, this page is what happened here.

What the crew knows

• The port is the safest place in Los Angeles to be, and the most expensive place to be caught. Violence inside the guarantee costs every corporation money, so everyone's security is unusually restrained and unusually thorough. Nobody shoots. Everybody logs.
• Terminal Island terminals are separate countries with separate rules. Crossing from one lease to the next can mean different law, different search powers, and a different company's opinion of you. The bridges are the chokepoints and both are watched.
• The Queen Mary is neutral ground — hotel, bar, and the one table in the harbour where three corporations will sit down together. It is also a ship, which means one gangway and a lot of interior nobody has mapped since before the plague.
• Longshore work is organised, hereditary, and the union is older than any corporation in the harbour. They are not a gang and should never be played as one. They know what's in the boxes.
• Cargo diversion is the harbour's real economy. A container that never reaches its manifest destination is worth more than anything the crew could steal from a house, and the people who do it professionally have been doing it for generations.
• Air is a daily calculation. On a bad wind the outdoor work stops and everyone masks up, including the corporate security.
• Long Beach is a city that stays above the sea because somebody keeps pumping. The oil field under it sank the harbour district by up to twenty-nine feet before anyone worked out that injecting water back in would stop it, and that injection has been running ever since. The Tide poisoned the water it injects. Nobody says the programme is failing; everyone can see the streets.
• The airport is gone — not flooded, just finished. Brackish subgrade, heaved runways, and no operator willing to site a fuel farm on contaminated ground. The port's freight goes over the docks and onto the rail corridor, as it did before there was ever a field there.

Getting in

The towns are open city — drive in, walk in, take the Blue Line to Long Beach. The cordon around the poisoned ground is fencing, signage and a patrol schedule, and it leaks in a hundred places.

The port is the opposite and the difference is instructive: no wall, but a credential, a manifest, a berth assignment and a reason. Get hired, get subcontracted, or arrive as somebody's paperwork. Terminal Island needs all of that plus a bridge crossing that gets logged both ways.