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“Wait,” Ryan said.
Everybody looked at him. “You sound like a man with a plan,” Trace told him.
“I don’t know if I’d dignify it by calling it that,” he said. “Yet. Give me a minute to look outside.”
Suzan started to pull back away from the door as he headed for it. Then she ducked hastily inside at the thud and shudder of another impact.
Ryan’s nut-sack tightened in anticipation of the following explosion, which didn’t come. He poked his head outside.
The middle-aged deckhand had not been lying. Great clouds of white smoke were pouring out of the barge. He could see flames leaping to a height he judged to be higher than his head. He doubted their ability to put out the fire, even with power to drive water at good pressure through hoses stretched far astern. That wasn’t anything he knew much about, but his gut told him he was right. He trusted it.
The wind was still blowing out of the east and freshening slightly as the sun headed for the horizon behind the tall weeds of the western shore. There was already a respectable wall of smoke extending across the wide river in that direction.
The Queen was almost turned clean south. Ryan glanced upriver. As he feared, the half-dozen or so smaller craft giving chase were closer now, and at least three of them were big enough to be what he took for the so-called frigates, and armored.
They had one bit of luck: when he stepped briefly out to the rail to look astern, he could only see the easternmost of the bigger Poteetville ships now lying broadside to their fleeing prey. The rest were completely blanketed by a brown-gray haze of their own gun smoke. That was the thing about black powder weapons: unless you had a wind blowing up double brisk, you only had a few good shots before you were nigh-on blinded by a smoke screen of your own creation. The only bonus to that was that if your enemy was similarly armed, they had the same problem.
Good to know, but not particularly significant, Ryan thought. They were getting close to the point at which there was no sense wasting the powder and ball in hopes of scoring some lucky hits. In fact, he couldn’t see any muzzle-flashes from the stationary capital ships and frigates, even the one that was mostly clear because the breeze blew its gun smoke away. But the pursuing vessels all had bow cannon, even the patrol boats, and they were all banging lustily away as soon as their crews could reload them, which wasn’t fast, fortunately.
But now Ryan had his plan. He smiled and stepped back inside.
“It’s about time to straighten the rudder to run downstream, Captain,” Nataly said as he reentered the bridge. She had gotten her strength back and stood tall.
Trace had her eyes shut and her head back against the bulkhead, but she was awake and alert.
“You still have the helm,” she said, wearily but firmly.
“Keep us turning counterclockwise,” Ryan said. “Uh, to port.”
Nataly looked at him, shocked.
“Captain?” Arliss asked, sounding as if he thought the shock and the pain of her blasted-off arm had robbed her of her senses. “That’ll take us back toward their cannon.”
But Trace had raised her head upright and was gazing at Ryan with clear, brown eyes.
“Go on, Ryan,” she said. “I like where I think this is going.”
“Captain,” Arliss said, sounding pained that she was taking a landlubber’s advice, when it ran dead counter to every bit of his own riverman’s lore.
“Yeah,” he told the captain. “I got a plan. Bring the Queen as close as you can to the east bank and still safely sheer south. Then cut the barge free before you start your turn. I don’t know if that’s the right lingo, so I put it as plain as I know how.”
She managed a smile, albeit a thin one, and fleeting.
“Close enough for getting on with. Nataly—”
The helmswoman had subtly straightened her shoulders. “Aye-aye, Captain!” she said smartly. She had clearly grasped Ryan’s intention.
Arliss frowned, then he nodded and showed a gap-toothed grin.
“Good one,” he said. “If we’ve got to write off the barge, we can use her to lay us a smoke screen. And give those Poteetville bastards something to think about to get around it. You do know your shit, Cawdor.”
Ryan nodded once, briskly.
* * *
HE HELPED THEM beat down the fire. Fortunately only one of the rooms—which the Conoyers and their crew rather grandly called “staterooms”—was gutted. Sadly, Suzan had shared it Edna, and all their possessions were write-offs. That didn’t matter a bent shell case to Edna anymore.
It took Ryan, his friends apart from Krysty and Mildred, and the Mississippi Queen’s crew only minutes to reduce the flames to smoldering char. But they were intense minutes, and when they were done even Ryan had to find a cable coil to sit on while he caught his breath.
Krysty sat next to him, still seeming subdued. Though mostly concerned with keeping an eye on the captain, Mildred had not neglected to watch her concussed friend. She only let the redhead out of the cabin when the fire was out.
His friends found places to flake out on the deck or railing, as did the regular crew they’d been helping: Jake Lewis, tall and saturnine, Avery Telsco, Suzan Kenn, the cheerful bear of a South Plains Indian, Santee, a medium-sized dude named Abner MacReedy, who looked way too much like a rabbit, although he wasn’t particularly shy or skittish, and finally Arliss Moriarty, leaning back against an intact wall of the cabin smoking a corncob pipe. For some reason that gave Mildred the uncontrollable giggles every time she looked at him.
Jak, meanwhile, scrambled back onto the cabin roof. Unable to engage in his usual wide-ranging scouting, he settled for perching up there like a pelican, keeping watch at all hours of the day or night. He even slept up there. Aside from the fore and aft ends, both to portside, where shells had struck, the roof seemed pretty sound structurally. Ryan declined to worry about it. Jak of all people knew how to be careful where he put his feet, and not venture out on anything that wouldn’t support his slight weight. And anyway, it was his stupe neck.
“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc exclaimed.
He had been squatting on his long, skinny shanks, facing aft. All that was visible behind the tug was churning green water. Arliss and his red-haired crony, Sean O’Reilly, who was back helping Myron and Maggie nurse the engines as usual, had cut the barge loose at what Trace Conoyer judged the optimum moment.
By that time it was fiercely ablaze from one end to the other. Enough so that Ryan could feel the heat beating off it as he helped work the pumps. Had the wind not been blowing the sparks away from the Queen, they might well have set the tug alight too.
Now Doc drew himself up to his considerable height and flung out a long arm to point dramatically over the taffrail.
“The blackguards have found a way around the burning hulk, and are emerging from the smoke!”
J.B., who was sitting just aft of the cabin near a boat hung in davits with his back to the stern, barely tipped his head back and turned it to glance over his shoulder.
“Nothing shaken, Doc,” he said.
Ryan was surprised that J.B. could see over the stern, as short as he was. But the Armorer was the last person in their group to say more than he knew. “We knew it was going to happen sooner or later. They’re way out of range now, anyway.”
“Their frigates can’t keep up with us now,” Arliss said. No longer weighed down by the massive barge and her currently burning-to-nuke-shit cargo, the tubby little tug was making surprising time downriver. “They’re slow and handle like pigs, with all that armor. Unarmored patrol boats likely can’t catch us, even.”
That last bit of information was delivered with a note of unmistakable pride in his voice.
He shook his grizzled head.
“It’s lucky we got off as light as we did,” he said. “Except for poor Edna. We’re lucky, and that’s a fact.”
“Count no man lucky before his death,” Jake said.
Arliss put his hands on his hips and stuck his elbows out to the sides. “Well, aren’t you Captain Gloom ’n’ Doom? What, are you taking lessons from Nataly now?”
“It’s an old Viking saying. From my Viking grandmother, Freya.”
“She weren’t no Viking.”
“You didn’t want to tell her that.”
“Where are we going, anyway?” Ricky asked.
“Captain says she means to head back up the Yazoo,” Arliss said. “From there we’ll play it by ear.”
“So we’re basically in the clear?” The youth sounded relieved.
Krysty lifted her head and gave him a wan grin.
“Don’t ever say that, Ricky,” she said teasingly. “It’s only tempting fate.”
“Ships ahead!” Jak cried out from above. “War boats!”
Chapter Five (#ulink_e5364289-f12e-5a32-8a83-ecb2e724b8af)
“It’s the New Vick fleet!” Arliss exclaimed. “And they got their big tubs with ’em!”
Krysty climbed to her feet in alarm. Without even looking, Ryan stood up beside her and reached an arm to steady her.
Ryan gazed south, along the length of the cabin. Out beyond the prow of the Mississippi Queen a V of five blasterboats was steaming toward them with little mustaches of water by their bows. He knew that meant they were driving hard, although the slow but strong Sippi current’s flowing against them slowed them.
Behind the blasterboats came the main New Vickville fleet, darkened by the long shadows that stretched from the low bluffs on the west bank of the big river. It was still well beyond blaster range, but the ironclad ships looked huge, like a distant range of mountains.
“Fireblast,” Ryan said, almost conversationally. Another person might have taken it for resignation. Another man saying it under the circumstances might have meant it that way.
But not Ryan. Krysty knew that his tone meant he had already accepted the situation—and begun to plot how to beat it and survive, as he had a thousand times before.
“Blasterboats have already cut us off from the Yazoo,” he said.
“And the big boats are squatting right in the river mouth,” said Jake, who among other duties was an assistant navigator, though pretty much every member of the Queen’s crew could do pretty much everyone else’s job.
Krysty and her friends were exceptions, of course, although they were willing hands. All had been aboard ships a number of times. They did what they could and nobody complained. When it came to fighting, it was the river-boaters who were second string.
And she already knew that it would come to fighting. Because if the patrol boats or heavy ironclads didn’t sink them with their blasters, they would wind up having to seek shelter somewhere in the deceptively green, rad- and mutie-haunted countryside around them.
Plus it always came down to fighting, sooner or later. These were the Deathlands.
Ryan was already half carrying her forward at a good clip. Several of the crew raced on ahead, maneuvering carefully past to avoid jostling the pair. They were on good terms, along with being nominally on the same side, but none of the Queen’s complement was eager to cross any of the newcomers. Least of all their tall, one-eyed wolf of a leader. Or his woman.
The rest of the companions followed Ryan and Krysty. They were never eager to race toward danger, at least when that wasn’t called for. Except Jak, who scampered forward along the cabin roof like a white two-legged squirrel.
On the bridge Trace Conoyer was standing determinedly on her own, next to the wheel, where Nataly was still piloting the boat. The captain’s right arm had been safety-pinned to the captain’s shirt to discourage her from waving it around. Mildred hovered next to her, watching her like an anxious mother. “They’ve opened fire,” Nataly said in her flat voice. She never seemed excited.
A waterspout blew up out of the river right in front of them. Droplets struck Krysty in the face, without much force.
“Steady as she goes,” the captain said. She shouted into a speaking tube down to the engine room to maintain full speed.
“But, Captain,” Nataly said. For the first time her voice betrayed emotion. She sounded worried now. “We’re heading right into their cannon!”
“Poteetville patrol boats aren’t that much farther behind us,” J.B. called from the open door. The door-slam sound of the shot that had produced the splash hit Krysty’s ears.
“Steady as she goes,” Conoyer repeated. She was leaning forward, gripping the lower sill of the now-vacant front port with her left hand so hard her knuckles whitened. “On my word, turn her hard aport, smartly as you can.”
The mate glanced nervously aside. Her steely veneer was showing serious cracks now.
“Aye-aye, Captain,” she said.
Ryan, J.B., Doc and Ricky had pushed onto the bridge with Krysty. Jak was doing whatever he was doing, as he usually did. Under the circumstances, he was as helpless as the rest of them. Arliss had come in with them. The rest of the Queen’s crew had dispersed elsewhere.
Flashes flickered from the bows of the oncoming craft. “Get down!” Ryan commanded.
He did as he ordered, although he stayed just high enough to peer out the front port. Krysty did likewise. She realized he had likely ordered his people down to reduce the targets they offered. She doubted the wooden front of the cabin would offer any resistance to a solid cannonball. It had not been built for that.
“You too, Nataly,” Trace ordered. After a dubious glance her way, the mate hunkered as low as she could and still see to steer.
The captain stayed erect. “Mildred, stay hunkered down too, but please help me stand. I need to see.”
Mildred reached out and grabbed her hips to steady her.
A shot whined overhead, then the ship was racked by a shuddering crash that seemed to come up through the deck by way of Krysty’s knee and boot sole. Another crash came from somewhere astern.
“Captain,” Maggie called, coming up the hatch from below, “the bow’s been holed below the waterline. We’re taking on a lot of—”
Something moaned by Krysty’s head, between her and Ryan. A hot breath blew across her face. She saw a lock of her lover’s curly black hair tweaked briefly out from his head as by invisible fingers.
From behind she heard a strange squelching noise, followed by another sound of rending wood. Something like hot rain fell on her shoulders and back. She heard a sizable amount of liquid hit the planks of the deck.
She and Ryan both turned. His lone blue eye was wide.
Maggie stood a step away from the hatch below. Or rather her slight torso did. Her head was missing entirely. A pulse of blood shot up from the terrible vacancy between her shoulders, then her headless trunk toppled down the ladder.
Ricky puked. The stink of vomit, added to the reek of fresh blood, excrement, burned flesh and lingering peppery gunpowder smell, made Krysty’s head spin.
“Arliss,” Trace snapped without turning, “get every hand available to work the bilge-pumps.”
His wrinkled, sunburned face was white beneath his beard, but he bobbed his head. “Aye, Captain.”
He vanished below, slipping slightly in Maggie’s blood.
“Captain,” Nataly said in a strained voice, “those blasterboats are getting mighty close—”
“On my mark, start your turn to port,” the captain said. Nataly stood back upright, her hands white on the wheel.
“Don’t see much of a break, up ahead,” J.B. murmured.
Krysty didn’t, either. The summer-green reeds and rushes on the left bank waved in the breeze in a line unbroken as far as the eye could see. She realized Ryan was gripping her arm, tightly enough to hurt, but she didn’t say anything. It reassured her more than it felt bad.
“Three,” Trace said. “Two…”
“Captain, I don’t see—” Nataly began.
