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Most of them had abilities that were useful to the vessel and her crew—even Doc, with his weird, eclectic old-days knowledge.
As a general rule, Ryan Cawdor did not hire his group out for sec work, unless survival was at stake, for one reason or another. When survival for himself and his small, loyal band of friends was concerned, anything and everything were always on the table.
The companions had been hired on the Queen as crew. There was always plenty of work to be done. Captain Conoyer was grateful for fourteen extra hands to do it, and willing to pay with room and board and a share in the proceeds of every transaction—the same deal she and every other member of the crew had. With differences in percentage, of course.
One of the conditions of the companions’ employment was that if—more likely, when—there was fighting to be done, they would be required to defend the ship. It just so happened that the new crew members were all ace at that particular skill.
But then again, that was pretty much an unspoken condition of every job, including just living day to day. They lived in the Deathlands, after all.
“Stickies,” the captain said. “Been colonies of them around the confluence of the Yazoo and the Sippi for fifty years, the old river folk say.”
“Do they ever attack boats?” Ricky asked, as he settled back down by the tarp on which the winch parts rested.
“Not if they keep well clear of the banks,” Trace said.
“What if there are snags on the river?” Krysty asked. “Or mebbe sandbars narrowing the channel.”
“Like I said—if they keep clear of the banks. Otherwise all bets are off.”
“Don’t forget the rads,” Myron said helpfully.
“Rads?” Krysty and Ricky said almost simultaneously.
“Oh, I was getting there,” Trace stated. “Not just rads, but heavy-metal pollution, big-time. You know how you always hear talk about strontium swamps? Well, they actually got stretches of that around here.”
Ricky eyed a flock of ducks starting noisily from some reeds on the right bank. “Does that mean those birds are muties too, if they can live around here?”
Trace shrugged. “Many of the creatures seem less affected by the rads than we are,” Myron said.
“Sounds like a double-bad place for shore leave,” J.B. said, approaching from astern.
“It’s not my idea of a vacation spot,” added Mildred Wyeth, who walked by his side. She was taller than he by a slight margin, which the battered fedora he wore tended to disguise.
“The rads won’t kill you,” Myron said. “Not right away. The swampers who live in these bogs will likely get you first.”
“Swampies?” Mildred asked.
“Swampers,” the engineer repeated, with added emphasis on the second syllable. “Not muties. People.”
“Of a sort,” his wife told them.
“Wouldn’t they have to be muties to survive if the rad count’s that high?” Ricky asked.
“They’re too mean for the rads to chill,” Santiago offered.
“How about them?” Ryan asked. “Do they go after vessels that are underway?”
“Not much when they stay clear of the banks,” the captain said. “Like the stickies. Like most things, come to that. That’s another reason we stay out in the middle of the channel when we can. The river’s lethal enough. We don’t need the grief that comes from land.”
“Which is her typically sour way of saying the river is our home, and we feel safest here,” Myron said. “Right, my love?”
That got a lopsided grin from the captain. “Anything you say, Myron.”
Ricky picked up a sprocket and held it up to the sun to be examined.
“I get it,” he said glumly. “Everything’s dangerous. Especially everything beautiful.”
Ryan winked at Krysty and grinned. “Pretty much.”
“The real danger is the darkness in the human soul,” said Nataly Dobrynin, the Queen’s first mate, emerging from the superstructure and walking up to join the others. She was on the tall side, taller than either Conoyer, and skinny. She wore her long, dark brown hair pulled back in a ponytail that emphasized the austere bone structure of her face, and her slightly angled gray eyes. She never smiled, and intimidated the hell out of Ricky.
Surely that can’t be right, Ricky thought. Stickies are double dangerous, for one thing. Rads and heavy-metal poisoning, for another.
He looked to Ryan for confirmation. He sure as nuke wasn’t contradicting the somewhat-scary mate.
But Ryan frowned thoughtfully.
“That’s true enough,” he said. “That’s what blew up the world, after all.”
“Some would blame the cold hearts of the whitecoats, lover, never mind the darkness of their souls,” Krysty said drily.
“That ‘some’ being you.”
She grinned; he shrugged.
“Well, ‘some’ aren’t wrong,” he said. “But they still had their reasons, which fieldstripped down to that.”
“I’d say it was the madness of shutting themselves off from the natural world in order to try to control it,” the redhead said.
“Sounds like the same thing, to me,” Nataly said. She turned to Trace. “Captain, we’re coming eight up on the confluence.”
Trace nodded. “Right. Everybody, get to your stations. Break time’s over. The big river’s mood doesn’t look bad today, but wrestling this bitch of a barge through the turbulence where the streams join could get triple ugly triple fast.”
“You best put your toys away and step lively too, Ricky,” Ryan said. “I think we need to have weapons in hand when we hit the Sippi. With the captain’s permission, of course.”
“Why’s that?” Myron asked. The bespectacled engineer sounded more curious than challenging.
“Junctions are good places for bad things to happen,” J.B. stated, settling his fedora more firmly on his head. “Like crossroads. Reckon rivers aren’t any different.”
“They used to say the Devil hung out at crossroads,” Mildred said. “Back in the, uh, day.”
Ricky turned his face down to hide his grin. The “day” she meant was back in the long-dead twentieth century, where Mildred had lived most of her life. She had undergone a routine abdominal surgical procedure and something had gone wrong. She’d been frozen in a cryogenic procedure and shipped to a cryocenter in Minnesota just as the balloon was going up on the Big Nuke.
Trace nodded. “You’re right, Ryan. Take your people to full alert. But stand ready to lend a hand if it turns out the river’s what we really need to be worried about.”
Ryan nodded.
“Get that winch back together double quick,” Myron said, all business now.
“But we haven’t finished cleaning it,” Maggie protested.
“Yes, you have,” Myron told her, his tone at once gentle and commanding. “You’ll just take it apart again and clean it after we’re headed up the Sippi for Feliville.”
“Aye-aye, sir,” she said glumly. Then she sat back on her heels, looked at Ricky and suddenly grinned.
When she did that she was positively cute, he thought.
“All right, champ,” she said. “Show me what you’ve got.”
* * *
THE DECK ROLLED beneath Ryan’s boots as the Mississippi Queen chugged into the joining of the Yazoo with the Sippi.
His Steyr Scout Tactical longblaster in hand, he stood at the bow, with Krysty at his side. The rest of the companions were spread out around the eighty-foot-long vessel’s perimeter, interspersed with armed members of the Queen’s regular crew. Doc Tanner, his LeMat combination handblaster and shotgun at the ready, held a position to Krysty’s right. J.B. was to Ryan’s left, holding his Uzi, and Mildred flanked him farther astern. Jak Lauren, their young scout, stood in the stern. He was ready to run down the thick hawser by which they towed a hundred-foot barge stacked high with lumber and bales of cloth and leap aboard to repel any would-be boarders with his knives and .357 Magnum Colt Python revolver.
Finally, Ricky Morales, having reassembled the power-winch to his stern task-mistress’s approval, lay on his belly on the flat roof of the main cabin, ready to snipe with the DeLisle replica carbine he had helped his uncle make by hand, in happier times on his home island of Puerto Rico. Although it couldn’t really be called “sniping,” since the weapon lacked a scope, the boy could consistently hit his mark with whisper-quiet shots out to a hundred yards.
In the event Ryan’s people had to reach out and touch somebody—as Mildred put it in her quaintly anachronistic freezie way—any farther than one hundred yards, Ryan’s Steyr, which did have a scope, could do the job.
Not that Captain Conoyer believed there’d be any trouble. But she hadn’t batted an eyelash when Ryan suggested turning out as many hands with blasters as possible to wait for it, just in case. Having hired him in part as a sec consultant, as she put it, she had the sense to listen to him on the subject.
Over a third as wide across the beam as she was long, the tug was surprisingly stable as she chugged confidently out into the crosscurrent from the Sippi. As ballast she carried tons of big metal scrap chunks, plus crates of weapons and ammo that were the actual prizes from this current voyage up the Yazoo. The cream of the crop was a Lahti Model L-39: a bolt-action antitank rifle firing 20 mm armor-piercing rounds, in cherry condition, consigned to a wealthy baron up the big river. Or so Ryan was told; sadly, Captain Trace had refused to open the crate despite the near-drooling entreaties of J.B. and his apprentice armorer, Ricky.
The Queen began its turn to starboard almost as soon as it cleared the banks to the north. Ryan glanced back over his right shoulder, along the vessel’s length toward the barge. He knew that getting it safely around the corner would be the trickiest part. But Trace had taken the helm herself, and just in their brief time aboard Ryan and his friends had learned she was expert in piloting the boat.
The one-eyed man was just as glad the Queen wasn’t a pusher-style Sippi tug, of the sort her crew told Ryan had dominated the river before the nukeday. Bigger and of all-steel construction, they used to push not just single barges, but sometimes two or more in series—each many times larger than the wooden one the Queen was dragging toward Feliville—with their square prows. He didn’t even want to try to imagine how pulling off a maneuver like this would have worked in such an arrangement.
He was unlikely to find out. Nukeday had triggered colossal earthquakes that had started shaking up the continental US even before the warheads stopped detonating. None was worse than the quake caused by the New Madrid Fault Line that ran by the Sippi from north of Memphis to St. Louis. The blasts, quakes and seismic water surges had smashed most of the vessels on the river into twisted junk, left them high and dry when the great river actually changed channels, and even tossed them inland, sometimes even into the hearts of major cities.
They had become mother lodes of fabulous scrap for generations of especially intrepid scavvies. Or for barons willing to enslave the people of the villes they ruled to the arduous and dangerous work of ship-breaking. These days most of the river traffic was wood-hulled, driven by steam engines or, as the Queen was, by scavvied Diesels. And when they hauled barges they were content to pull them.
As Ryan turned his face forward again, he scanned the seven-foot weeds that obscured the Yazoo’s north bank and the east bank of the Sippi. He wasn’t sure what he expected to see, but he expected to see something. His gut told him that trouble was coming.
But it gave him not the slightest clue as to what that trouble would actually be. Nor where it would come from.
He looked back out across the Sippi and saw a geyser of water shoot up into the air, fifty yards ahead and a little off the port bow of the turning tugboat. A heavy boom hit him with an impact as much felt as heard. It was a sound he was all too familiar with.
He spun to look south. Steaming up the river from the south came four boats, a quarter mile away and closing slowly. They were a ragged assortment, no two alike, and none as large as the Queen herself. They had a strange, ugly, bruised glint to them in the afternoon sun, and were gray mottled with red. Black plumes billowed from their smokestacks and were swept away east by a crossing breeze.
Yellow light flared from the bows of the nearest two, accompanied by giant puffs of dirty-white smoke.
“Red alert!” he turned and shouted toward the Queen’s cabin. “Cannon fire! We’re under attack!”
Chapter Two (#ulink_10661ffe-a292-590a-bbb1-7b9d616a295c)
Ryan heard a rushing roar pass overhead. Then a fresh column of water blasted up from the river right in front of the left side of the bow, drenching him.
A hand-cranked siren was winding from the tug’s cabin. Ducking reflexively behind the rail—as if that would offer protection from a cannon shot, either shell or solid ball—Ryan equally reflexively looked back to Krysty.
His lover was likewise crouched, her Glock 18C blaster looking especially futile clutched in her white hands. Her hair had retracted itself to a tight scarlet cap on her skull.
He felt the vibrations of the hull through his boot soles change. At the same time the growl of the Diesels grew louder and slightly higher in pitch. Trace had ordered full throttle. Her husband was doubtless belowdecks now, babying the powerful marine engines to keep them churning at maximum power. Ryan could feel the propellers straining to drive the vessel and the burden she towed faster. But there was no way to give hundreds of tons jackrabbit acceleration. Their accumulation of speed would go painfully slowly.
And the pursuing vessels already had a speed advantage, even though their steam engines were powering them against the Sippi’s sluggish but immensely powerful flow. If this was a race, they couldn’t win it.
And if this was an artillery duel—well, Ryan thought, the Queen was nuked, as the tug had no artillery. Accommodations were tight aboard the tubby vessel as it was—he and his companions slept on deck, when weather permitted, as fortunately it had most nights they’d been on the Queen. And every pound counted when your entire living was based on hauling cargo. The Conoyers could have mounted a black powder cannon, but they chose not to.
Even if they had, they would have been outgunned. The enemy cannoneers hadn’t yet hit the lumbering tug, but it was a matter of time.
Something cracked above Ryan’s head. He ducked even lower, instinctively. The crack was repeated, slightly less loud.
I know that song, he thought. Someone was firing a blaster at him—not a charcoal-burner nineteenth-century replica, but a smokeless-powder high-powered longblaster.
The longblaster shots, in their way, concerned him more than the cannonade. Most black powder cannon weren’t rifled, and therefore weren’t accurate, even though a metal ball weighing just a couple of pounds could do a shocking amount of damage to a body. While most blaster-shooters weren’t particularly accurate, either, there was always the chance that their pursuers would have a marksman in their ranks.
On the other hand, the Queen’s complement most definitely did. And his name was Ryan Cawdor.
He laid the Steyr’s foregrip on the rail and sighted through the low-power Leupold variable scope. He didn’t need much magnification to confirm what he already suspected: the weird, dully metallic stuff covering the oncoming boats looked that way because it was weird and metallic.
The vessels had been covered, at least up front, in plates and pieces of scrap metal.
“J.B.,” he called. He didn’t take his eye from the scope. “Get over here. I’ve got work for you.”
The attacking vessels were steaming in a V formation, with the lead boat on Ryan’s right. As he panned his scope across the vessels, he noticed activity on the bow of the one to his left. Men were swabbing out the barrel of their blaster with what looked like a wet mop and probably was, so that the fresh charge of black powder they were fixing to put in wouldn’t cook off the moment they inserted it.
Ryan sighted in on the nearest gunner and drew a deep breath. As the sight lined up he let half of it out, bit back the rest and squeezed the trigger.
The carbine bucked and roared. Automatically Ryan’s right hand left the rear grip to work the bolt, jacking out the spent case and slamming home a fresh cartridge from the 10-round magazine in his longblaster. The empty brass clinked off the deck boards and rolled out one of the scuppers, which was a shame, since the things were valuable for their metal, even if they were bent or otherwise unable to be reloaded. But spilled blood wouldn’t go back in the body, either. All that mattered to Ryan now was lining up the next shot.
As he expected, the four-person crew was hunkered down and frozen in place. A brighter smear on the improvised-armor plate above them and to the left showed where Ryan’s bullet had hit and knocked away a path of rust the size of his palm.
Also as expected. Like any master marksman, Ryan knew pretty well where a bullet would go when it left his longblaster—not an option except in aimed fire, of course. Though neither the Yazoo nor the Sippi were exactly racing today, the interference of their currents meeting did cause some chop, which in turn made the Queen wallow in a not-entirely-predictable way. But it wasn’t hard to compensate for the motion. And while she was still turning to starboard, into the bigger river’s flow, the enemy ships were coming pretty straight on, and not fast, either. That meant Ryan didn’t have to lead his target much to speak of.
The second shot wasn’t perfect, either. Because of the Queen’s motion he still pulled slightly off, though he reckoned the shot would take the swabber in the right shoulder. When the scope came back level, Ryan saw that his target was out of sight, and the short, skinny kid who’d been just to his right was spattered with red and visibly freaking out about it.
The other two shooters dived for cover behind the armored rail, which unlike the Queen’s wooden hull would reliably stop most bullets, possibly including his pointy-nosed, high-powered, 7.62 mm full-metal-jacket slug. It depended on the hardness of whichever chunk of scrap he happened to hit.
A quick examination showed all four boats carried but a single bow blaster each. It also showed a shocking bright flash of yellow fire from the one on the left-most craft, followed by a vast gout of smoke that instantly began to blow back over the hunchbacked, ironclad shape of the cabin in the breeze of its passage, as well as overboard in the crossing wind.
This time, the projectile’s moan punctuated with a shattering crash from somewhere astern.
“Is everybody fit to fight?” Ryan shouted. He still kept his eye to the glass. He was getting an idea.
“Everybody’s fine,” J.B. replied, crouching at his left side. “The shot blew a section of the starboard rail to glowing nuke shit, just aft of the cabin.”
“Reckon you can hit anybody with the Uzi at this range?”
A beat passed while J.B. considered that. Ryan continued scrutinizing the closing craft.
