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As his big shaggy head descended, she jammed the muzzle of her ZKR 551 target pistol into his open mouth. Teeth broke. Blood streamed freely where the big sharp-edged front site tore the roof of his mouth. So furious was the sturdily built black woman, the force of it straightened him back up.
Fear of what was coming overcame even the agony and airlessness of smashed balls. His eyes flew wide. Pleading.
“Fuck you,” Mildred shouted, and pulled the trigger. There was a short, sharp bark. His eyes bulged out farther, impossibly far, until one popped from its orbit and fell to bounce off a filthy cheek, staring crazily around. He sank to the deck. A clot of hair and brains remained on the housing. A slug trail of blood ran down beneath it.
Caught in the midst of kneeling to discover there were no more magazines in the satchel Isis had provided, Krysty saw an ax handle fast descending toward Mildred’s skull. She dropped the empty longblaster with a clunk and grabbed for her own snub-nosed .38 revolver. But her warning only gave her friend enough time to begin to dodge, so that she took a glancing blow to the side of her head rather than taking the whole sickening force full on the cranium.
She slumped against the housing next to the man whose brains she’d blown all over it. Her new attacker cocked his leg to put the boot in. Crouching, off balance on the dizzily tilting deck, Krysty knew she would never get her blaster in action in time to keep him from stomping Mildred’s skull in.
“Here, catch!” a voice cried from above. Krysty looked up to see Isis standing atop the front of the cabin. She lobbed a head-size dark object right at the pirate’s face, turned upward like Krysty’s to see who had called out.
Reflex betrayed him. He dropped the ax handle to whip up both hands to protect himself. The pirate fielded a package of what looked like gray clay blocks taped together.
Krysty launched herself between the pirate and his intended victim, with sufficient power and the proper angle to bodycheck him clean over the side.
A moment after his wildly kicking cowboy boots vanished from sight, the boat shuddered. A column of water shot skyward twenty feet, shot through with red and body parts. Krysty just recognized a single pointy-toed boot before the sea swallowed the whole mess.
Mildred picked herself up. She looked up at Isis. “Kinda took a chance there, didn’t you?”
“Life is taking a chance,” the captain said. “Anyway, I had faith in your resourcefulness. There were reasons we hired you.”
Krysty found time to wonder fleetingly what those reasons were. The mouth of the stream the fleet had been making for beckoned welcomingly not fifty yards from the lead ship’s graceful prow. It wasn’t much: it looked like a mere hole, scarcely wider than the narrow sailing yacht herself, hacked in a wall of green that would’ve looked brick-solid if it weren’t waving like grass in the gale.
The rain wasn’t currently heavy, but the drops hit like ice bullets. Raising a big pale wave of water before its bow, a big launch roared in from starboard, trying to cut the yacht off from entering the bayou’s sanctuary. Blasterfire flashed. Bullets cracked by Krysty’s head. She heard a despairing cry as one found a target. From the direction she knew at least it was neither her friend Mildred nor the exotic and coolly competent ship’s captain. Knowing it would be ineffectual, she held out her Smith & Wesson with one hand wrapped over her blaster hand to brace and emptied its 5-shot cylinder.
Then it was as if an invisible circular saw ripped diagonally across the rear third of the intercepting pirate launch. Blood fountained as jeering men were ripped apart. Both sides of the hull shattered.
A wave carried the stricken launch up onto its frothy peak. The engine’s weight promptly snapped off the stern. By the time the wave plunged into the trough, all that remained above the water surface was bobbing debris. Including half a dozen heads, with faces that gazed up at Krysty with despair and desperate imploring.
“I never thought I’d be happy to see people doomed to drown like rats,” Mildred said. “I hate even being happy seeing rats drown. I hate what this world has done to me.”
“Well, you can be grateful to Stork in Finagle for clearing the way for us,” Krysty said, meaning it to help. She often was unsure how to deal with her friend’s occasional episodes of remorse, despair and homesickness.
Isis stood atop the cabin, shooting a gigantic pristine Desert Eagle handblaster at the pirate boats that still sought to overtake them. Looking toward the enemy flotilla, Krysty saw a long black yacht, its masts bare like Egret’s, bearing down on them. Where Egret was spotless white, this vessel was painted black on every visible surface, hull, superstructure, even mast. A black-clad figure stood in the bow as if its feet were bolted to the deck, apparently unaffected by the violence of the waves. Its features were obscured by blackness as featureless at several hundred yards as the hull.
“Damn!” Isis exclaimed from overhead. “That ship’s the Black Joke, and there stands Black Mask his evil self. If only I had a decent fucking blaster!”
Krysty knew the rare handblaster was well-made, as such things went. She also knew what the Tech-nomad captain meant. No matter how good a handblaster it was, to reach out and have any chance at all of touching the pirate overlord, she needed range.
Mildred looked up from rummaging through the debris strewed about the deck for loaded BAR magazines. Krysty noted that not even pounding rain and the waves that broke over the railing with increasing frequency could wash all the spilled blood away.
“Speaking of blasters,” the physician said, “what’s that next to Black Mask?”
Krysty realized he stood beside a long tube laid horizontally on some kind of mount. It flared to a wider diameter at the after end. A wide steel sheet stood angled back behind it.
“Some kind of cannon—” Krysty began.
“Recoilless rifle,” Isis said.
Yellow flame and white smoke erupted out the rear of the tube to splash against the steel plate and boil out to all sides.
A blinding flash lit the thrashing cypress trees. A shock wave planed off the wavetops for fifty yards around.
Krysty’s breath solidified in her throat. Finagle’s First Law had blown up.
Chapter Eight
Someone was shaking Ryan by his shoulder. He wagged his head to clear the cotton that filled it. His hair slapped his cheeks and forehead like wads of seaweed freshly hauled from the sea. His knees were pressing down hard on something hard, and his face felt sunburned.
Also his head rang like an anvil, which was currently in use to forge red-hot iron.
“Ryan!” a voice called from the distance. He shook himself again. His sensory impressions, his very thoughts, whirled around him like shoals of little fish. Little flickering fish, their sides flashing silver in the yellow sunlight—
“Dear boy, please! The ship’s sinking. We have got to act upon the instant, or most assuredly perish!”
Whatever else could be said about Ryan, he was a survivor. He gave his head a final shake, short and sharp, and shook all those little vagrant fishes back into place.
He looked up to see Doc’s long face, streaming water, with raindrops exploding in little bursts all over it. His usually lank hair was plastered right down both sides of his head, making his skull look narrower than usual.
“Get up,” the old man urged. His words still seemed to cross some vast distance, although his bloodless lips moved barely the length of his long outstretched fingers from Ryan’s nose. “We must be taking our leave, and quickly.”
“Right.” Ryan gripped the other man’s forearm, and was glad of the unlooked-for strength with which Doc pulled him to his feet. He reeled, first from dizziness, then a second time because the deck was doing its level best to pitch him into waves that leaped up on all sides as if eager to receive him. Then he shook off his friend’s helping hand.
“What happened?” he asked, his voice a bone-dry croak without the water that covered every external inch of him.
“Boiler explosion,” Doc shouted. “A cannon shot from the Black Joke struck home. The steam Gatling has lost all power.”
It came back to Ryan, then: the flash and smoke as the recoilless rifle fired. The brilliant blue-white spot streaking like a renegade star toward Finagle’s fat stern. The flash and eardrum-torturing crack of a shaped-charge warhead going off. The answering yellow flash, followed by a sudden explosion of steam so hot it was initially invisible, and made the falling rain and spray sizzle as it expanded.
Then a scalding hot pressure wave had picked him up and slammed him down. Pain had shot through his head, accompanied by purple-white lightning. And then the world had gone out of focus.
“Didn’t lose consciousness,” he muttered. He tasted salt and copper. He’d cracked his head open on something, probably a metal bollard. “So mebbe my brain isn’t going to swell up until the inside of my skull implodes it.”
“Ryan…” Doc said.
Ryan became aware the deck was tilting sharply. He looked aft. A huge white cloud covered the whole rear half of the steamship, apparently proof against the efforts of wind and water to disperse it.
A figure walked out of the cloud. At first Ryan thought its clothes were hanging off it in rags, then he realized similar rags were dangling from its chin.
Even Ryan’s cast-iron stomach clenched in nausea and horror. The rags weren’t the man’s clothes at all. They were his skin, flash-boiled off him by live steam.
The man’s eyes met his. For a moment he thought the man was imploring him. Then he realized the other couldn’t possibly see him. The eyes were white, parched like eggs, sightless from the blast.
Ryan realized he still had a reassuringly familiar hardness gripped in his right hand. He did the only thing he could do: raised the SIG-Sauer P-226 smoothly in both hands, acquired his target, then squeezed his finger into a compressed surprise break. The handblaster cracked and jumped.
A dark hole appeared in the cooked red mess of that forehead. The scalded Tech-nomad folded to the deck. He had received the only relief possible.
The burly figure of Smoker, the ship’s captain, next appeared from the artificial fogbank that still hid the after half of Finagle’s First Law. The big black man didn’t look as if he’d gotten burned. But he was hurt, and badly, if Ryan was any judge—which he was. The right side of the big man’s coveralls were a darker shade than usual from midchest down. He clutched his right side and limped on his right leg.
But whatever had wounded him hadn’t damaged his voice any. “Abandon ship!” he bellowed like an enraged bull elephant. “All hands—we’re going down!”
A sudden line of bullets stitched fore-to-aft along the side of the cabin. Its path intersected the captain. He jerked, then sagged. Finally he collapsed to the deck of his sinking ship, where an outward roll of the hull sent him limply into the scuppers.
“Shit,” Ryan said.
“We had better seek out boats,” Doc said.
“Do you see any?” Ryan demanded. The two men had to hang on to lines against the ship’s heaving. “The lifeboats I remember were carried back by the stern. We may have to swim for it.”
“In this sea? That would be madness!”
“Mebbe,” Ryan said. They were shouting at each other to make themselves heard over the howl of the storm and the drumming of the rain. “Mebbe triple-stupe. But the way I calculate, if we swim, we may drown. We stay on this tub, we will drown.”
Another blast rocked ship. A yellow fireball rolled upward from the midst of the steam cloud that enveloped the stern. Black smoke poured after. Yellow licks of flame began to dart out the sides of the steam cloud.
“Or burn,” Ryan added.
Doc clutched his arm. “Perhaps there is another choice.”
It was on Ryan’s tongue to say he didn’t see it. Instead he looked where Doc pointed.
The New Hope, rotors spinning furiously in the wind, backed toward the sinking Finagle’s First Law. A small pirate boat tried for some unknown reason to dart between the ships and was crunched as the steamer rode it down. Ryan couldn’t see the impact of Finagle’s up-angled bow, but heard the screams of men being crushed.
Jak stood on the slippery brass railing of the rotor-sailer’s stern, his hair hanging down his face and shoulders like spilled milk. He held on to a guyline, riding the wildly pitching and rolling and yawing craft like some Western cowboy taming a bronco. He laughed into the face of the storm. J.B. stood beside him on the deck, preparing to throw over a rope in a very business-like manner.
“You know,” Ryan said as Jak threw back his head and uttered a panther-scream of exaltation, “that boy’s just having himself way too much fun.”
THE WIND DIMINISHED when they entered the river mouth, which wasn’t to say it cut off. Nor did the rain slacken. Rather it grew even fiercer, and lightning veined the sky in bluish white in an almost continuous pulsation. The thunder was one loud roar, competing with all the other noise.
One noise it wasn’t competing with was blasterfire, Ryan was pleased to note as he stood in the stern with his Steyr ready. The small pirate craft had pulled back and were being laboriously recovered by the larger vessels of the fleet. The ones that survived. It didn’t seem to him there were that many.
“Hard to imagine they’ll keep coming,” Ryan said, “after taking losses like that.”
Cold as the hearts of coldhearts were, they were, after all, mainly predators. And predators tended to seek easy prey. Or they didn’t survive to pass on their genes to baby predators.
“I don’t know,” Long Tom said worriedly. He stood in the stern with them, more concerned with pursuit than with the dangers of navigating a narrow, relatively shallow passage in a hurricane. Clearly he trusted Micro, his sailing master. “Once Black Mask catches the scent of a rich prize, he doesn’t like to let it go. He’s not a man who deals well with disappointment.”
On their last sight of the Black Joke, it had been tossed on massive waves five hundred or so yards astern. Perhaps half a dozen other large craft still clustered around it. That was less than half the fleet that first hove into view over the horizon.
Ryan was pretty sure the Hope’s rocket racks had only accounted for two or three of the enemy ships. If the Tech-nomad squadron boasted any other weapons able to sink a ship of that size, he hadn’t seen them used in the fight. More likely the other captains had chosen to cut and run, from the battle or from the storm.
“He doesn’t much care about losses,” Randy said. “Easy come, easy go. And the more casualties he takes, the fewer pieces the pie has to be cut into.”
J.B. had his hat off and was wringing water out of it. “Not the kind of employer I’d like to work for,” he said, clapping the fedora back on his head. Ryan couldn’t see it was an ounce less soaked than before he’d wrung it out.
“How does he get anybody to sign on with him, got an attitude like that?”
Randy shrugged. “As we told you, there’s no shortage of men without much other choice live along this coast. Not to mention the ones he signs on at blasterpoint. Anyway, he’s free with the jolt and red-eye. And with the women, they say, when they make landfall. Lotta men reckon a fast death with the Black Gang beats a slow death ashore.”
“Cast in those terms,” Doc said, “the attraction of his employ becomes, at least, more readily comprehensible.”
Randy nodded. Despite their circumstances, Ryan felt brief amusement. The black Tech-nomad himself was pretty plainspoken. But by and large the Tech-nomads were about the only people left on Earth who didn’t think Doc talked funny.
“Looks as if the Black Joke is making for the inlet,” a voice called from midships as the Hope fully entered the river. “Pursuing.”
Long Tom winced. “Great. Just what we need. Even with the real storm about to land on us like as asteroid from fucking space.”
“Thought you were the one pointed out this Black Mask slagger didn’t like to let go the trail of fat prey,” Ryan said.
“Doesn’t mean I can’t hope,” Long Tom said.
DESPITE THE LASHING of wind and rain, Ryan stood in the bow of the New Hope at him. J.B. stood by his side, hands in the pockets of his leather jacket. His hat was somehow crammed so hard down on his head the 60 mph winds couldn’t dislodge it. Their two other friends were inside the cabin.
“You know, this is crazy, Ryan,” he said. Actually, he hollered. It was the only way to make himself heard. “You know, when nature gets too much for even Jak to handle, it’s probably time to pack it in.”
“You head inside if you want to.”
The Armorer lifted his face to the rain. Ryan wondered how he could see a blessed thing. Even if the rain didn’t totally obscure his glasses, the round lenses were fogged white as Jak’s hair.
“Reckon I’ll stay with you a spell,” the little man said.
This bayou wove a tangled skein of waterways, ever-changing—and never changing faster nor more decisively than when a brutal storm blew in off the Gulf. Ryan had hoped the surviving craft could power directly upriver, put some quick distance between them and the Gulf. Hurricane winds were bad, but water was the big killer.
But they weren’t having that kind of luck. The channel here all but paralleled the coast; from time to time Ryan could see gray waves whipped frighteningly high by the storm through the trees. Sooner or later the water would rise and surge right over the trees at them. And what happened next he didn’t care to speculate about.
“Anyway,” J.B. said, “could be worse.”
“How do you reckon that?”
“We could be out there in one a them little bicycle boats.”
One of them had just appeared off the port bow, surging ahead of the New Hope along the landward bank. Normally the Hope’s wind-augmented electric motors would drive her faster than the water-strider boaters could pedal. But they were moving against the current here. Like their namesakes, the little outrigger-equipped craft skimmed the water. The current bothered them lots less than the bigger ships, shallow draft though they were.
The four surviving water-strider riders had all volunteered to go out despite the wind and the waves it drove up the bayou. They were hunting for some kind of side channel or passage that would allow New Hope and Snowy Egret to sail inland to a place offering better shelter.
“Got that right,” Ryan said. “These Tech-nomads are triple weird, but they’ve got balls, got to give them that.”
J.B. stiffened by his side. “Wait,” he said. “We’re comin’ up on the Egret’s backside mighty quick.”
Ryan looked. The Armorer was right. They were closing quickly on the yacht’s taffrail.
“Shit,” he yelled. “They’re aground!”
Chapter Nine
Tech-nomads swarmed around the grounded yacht like ants. Ryan and the companions stood in a group on a patch of ground high enough not to be boggy, although the way the rain was coming down the ground was getting soft anyway despite the roots of the tough grass that grew there holding it together.
Their packs lay nearby, covered in tarps held down by the packs’ own weight. Their weapons were wrapped in plastic that seemed to be of Tech-nomad manufacture. The companions themselves made no attempt to shelter from the rain. They weren’t going to be anything but soaked for the foreseeable future. As for the wind, they’d seen too many trees blown over in the half hour since a sudden shift in the wind had run Snowy Egret up onto the shallowly submerged bank to want to get too close to any of those. So they stood in an open area and let the hurricane’s rising fury beat on them.
