by James Axler
Although he looked decades older than any of his companions, he was really about Mildred’s age, mid- to late thirties—if you stacked the years he’d actually lived through together. Like the physician, he was chronically displaced. He had been time-trawled from his own epoch, the late nineteenth century, by late twentieth-century whitecoats working for an ultrasecret project. Doc proved to be difficult. Tired of his antics, his captors sent him hurtling through time into the Deathlands. His time-trawling experiences had aged him so much that he looked to be in his sixties.
He and Mildred were by far the most extensively educated members of the party, in a formal sense—by Deathlands standards, almost ludicrously overeducated. His well-bred manners and pedantic manner sometimes irritated Mildred, as did his holding forth on a vast array of subjects. She considered his knowledge hopelessly out of date. Yet a lot of what he knew of history and natural sciences hadn’t been superseded by time, and he had learned a great deal unknown to his own period during his torment by the whitecoats of Operation Chronos.
Mildred flipped him an annoyed glance and turned her attention to the fire. “Sometimes I think some of the wild things have done better after skydark,” she said.
J.B. chuckled. “Like the killer sea cows,” he said. “Getting turned mutie and all giant and everything seems to have turned the tables for them.”
“GOT VID,” JAK SAID. “Tech-nomads.”
In his economical way the albino teen sounded as if he’d said all that needed saying.
Mebbe he did, Ryan reflected. True to their name the Tech-nomads lived and all but worshipped technology: a combination of tech preserved from the world right before the skydark, low-technology gleaned from millennia before even that, and the results of research and development they’d continued in their own secretive and eccentric way. They mostly tended to avoid contact with outsiders—as in, the rest of the world.
Which made this current gig the more a mystery. Ryan and his friends had brushed up against the Tech-nomads a few times before. The dealings had been peaceable: Tech-nomads avoided conflict. But as the crew had seen this day, they fought fiercely and with some skill when pressed.
“Wonder what they’re up to over there,” J.B. said. He jerked his chin toward the woods. Leaving only a couple sentries on each big vessel the Tech-nomads had trooped deep into a stand of live oak on the stream’s south bank. Glancing that way, Ryan could just make out the odd orange gleam of firelight through the trees and undergrowth.
“They said they were ‘sharing the water’ of their dead brothers and sister,” Mildred said. “Whatever that means.”
“Not want find out,” Jak muttered. He hunkered down by the fire, where the flamelight danced in his ruby eyes. He wore his customary camou jacket with jagged bits of metal and glass sewn into the fabric to discourage people, or other things, from grappling with him.
“They neglected to invite us,” Ryan said. “Just as glad, myself.”
“Look on the bright side, Ryan,” J.B. said. Ryan cocked an eyebrow at him. His old friend wasn’t known for looking on the bright side of anything. He was an ace armorer and tinker, though, and Ryan Cawdor’s best friend in this whole treacherous world. “At least they aren’t blaming us for the damage they took.”
“In fairness, they could scarcely do so, John Barrymore,” Doc said. “They knew when they engaged our services we lacked heavy weaponry.”
Darkness had settled in. The only thing left of day was a sour yellow glow in the western sky, shading quickly to blue and indigo overhead. The crickets began their nightly commentary. The tree frogs trilled rebuttal.
J.B. showed the old man a rare grin. “But you more than made up for that in the end, didn’t you?” He shook his head in admiration. “Thinking of using explosives to drive off the muties was pure genius.”
“You did your customary splendid job fabricating the bombs.”
“Not much doing, there. Mostly chopping up blocks of C-4, sticking in initiators, adding some short pieces of safety fuse, then lighting them and giving them to you to toss.”
“Don’t downplay your contribution, John,” Mildred said reprovingly. “I’ve tried patching back together the hands of farmers who got careless trying to stick blasting caps in dynamite to blow up stumps.”
J.B. shrugged. “Part of my job.”
“We all did well today,” Krysty said. She looked at Ryan, her green eyes gleaming. “I’m proud of you, the way you jumped on that mutie’s back, though I wish you wouldn’t do that sort of thing.”
“Do I do it if I don’t have to?” he asked.
He saw her ivory-skinned brow furrow, then realized he’d spoken a bit gruffly.
“Sorry,” he said. “Guess I’m still on edge. I only did what looked to me needed doing.”
Her smile dazzled him.
“Anyway,” he said, “Jak did it first.”
He slapped palms on the grimy thighs of his jeans and rose.
“I hope the Tech-nomads get their funeral ritual done with soon,” he said. “I could use some food.”
RYAN’S EYE snapped open. He was surrounded by darkness as tangible as a blanket with humidity and heat. He knew where he was at once—lying in his bedroll by the embers of their campfire, with Krysty’s comforting presence peacefully by his side.
Something had tapped lightly on his right upper arm. It was uppermost as he lay with his head cradled on his rucksack. He happened to be facing west; the stars were invisible for a third of the way up the sky above the blackness of the forests.
“Know awake,” Jak said softly. “Heard breathing change.”
Ryan sat up, scratching his scalp on the right rear of his head.
“Can’t get a pinch of powder past you, Jak,” he said. He realized the albino youth had awakened him by tossing pebbles at him from a safe distance. A wise idea for one so young. When awakened too suddenly people had a reflex to lash out.
Beside him Krysty grumbled and sat up. “What?” she demanded.
“We have to move on,” Mildred said grumpily. Her voice wasn’t fuzzed with sleep. The night’s rotation had her paired with Jak on sentry-duty.
“Why?” Krysty muttered. She could come awake with feline suddenness when danger loomed. But this night she was letting go of sleep’s shelter only reluctantly.
“Tech-nomads say there’s a big hurricane coming. We need to get out to the open water and beat feet east if we want to miss it. And we do.”
“Now, how do the Techs know a thing like that, Millie?” the Armorer asked, sitting up and reaching around for his glasses. “Sky’s scarcely cloudy.”
“Not a clue.”
“They’re the bosses,” Ryan said, standing. “If they say saddle up and go, we saddle up and go.”
Chapter Four
As the hot sun poured from the blue Gulf sky, the Tech-nomads and the companions raced east before the storm. The clouds began to pile up the sky behind them, black and ominous.
The companions had gathered on the lead ship, the New Hope, in the bow, sitting on the hot wood deck or leaning against the rail, talking with Long Tom, who was the squadron commander, though neither he nor any other Tech-nomad would use the term, and some of his crew. Ryan squatted in front of the cabin, admiring the curve of Krysty’s buttocks as she stood in the prow gazing forward. The movement of her long red hair wasn’t altogether in tune with the stiff wind blowing from their starboard quarter.
“So how did you know the hurricane was coming?” Mildred asked.
“Well, duh,” said Highwire, an overly wound Asian techie with prominent ears and horn-rimmed glasses. He was shorter than J.B. and wispier. “We talked to them others of our group by phone.”
J.B.’s own face tightened up a bit. It wasn’t a respectful way to talk to his friend, much less his woman. Ryan shot his friend a deceptively lazy look. These people were their paymasters, not to mention the fact they outnumbered the companions enough they could just pitch them over the rail for the sha
rks if they got pissed off, despite the companions’ weapons and proficiency at using them. And it wasn’t exactly a surprise when Tech-nomads showed bad manners, even by rough and ready Deathlands standards.
“So, do you use surviving communications satellites?” Mildred asked.
“Nope,” Sparks said. A wiry black kid—almost all the Tech-nomads were on the lean side—he wore shorts and a loose jersey, and his hair in dreads. “Use meteor-skip transmission. Bounce the signal off the ionized trails they leave. Reliable and easy. Don’t have to wait on satellite coverage. Which is pretty scant these days.”
“Meteors,” Krysty said. “But they’re not all that common except when the showers happen a few times a year, are they?”
“Always meteors falling,” said Randy, the fleet’s electronics ace. He was another black man, but big and powerfully built, with a shaved head and a surprisingly high-pitched voice. He always seemed pissed off about something and spoke in aggressive, staccato bursts. Dark lenses covered his eyes as if they were part of his face. That creeped Ryan out slightly, although he suspected that was the intent. “Whether you see them or not.”
“Who’d you get the word from?” J.B. asked.
“The Tech-nomad flotilla,” Long Tom said.
Ryan scratched at an earlobe. “What’s that mean, exactly?”
The captain shrugged. He lived up to his name. He was a long lean drink of water with muscles like cables strung along bone, a long narrow head with ginger beard and receding hair both shaved to a sort of plush.
“Lot of things,” he said. “It can refer to the seaborne Tech-nomad contingent, or even all Tech-nomads worldwide. In this case it refers to a group of seacraft passing across the mouth of the Gulf.”
“Tom,” said Great Scott, an overtly gay guy in a loose canvas shirt and shorts, who shaved his head and wore a tiny little soul patch. His voice had a warning tone.
He was another technical wizard of some sort Ryan didn’t even understand. Then again, that pretty much defined any random Tech-nomad. Even when they had some kind of readily defined and comprehensible specialty—like Sparks, the commo guy, or Jenn, who kept the Hope’s unconventional power train turning smoothly and was keeping to her cabin today, unfortunately incapacitated by grief at having watched her lover die the previous day—they usually had a raft of other skills. Almost always including ones Mildred and even Doc Tanner strained to grasp, and which went right by Ryan.
The captain scowled. “Blind Norad, Scott. They’re two hundred miles away. It’s not like these people know where they’re heading, or could pass along any information to anybody. And besides, they’re on our side. Remember?”
Long Tom smiled. He had what amounted to extraordinary diplomatic skills for a Tech-nomad. Ryan reckoned it had a lot to do with why he was boss of this traveling freakshow.
Great Scott just glowered. Ryan reckoned he could read that pretty clearly, too. There were Tech-nomads, and there were outsiders. Never the twain should meet.
And he could understand that, at least. It was the same way he felt about the little group of survivors he’d gathered around him, who’d become his family in a deeper and truer way than any blood kin ever had.
Voices pulled his attention aft. Doc was walking toward them talking animatedly with the squadron’s chief engineer, a pretty woman named Katie who wore incredibly baggy khaki coveralls with only a green sports bra beneath them. She had her brown hair covered by a red bandanna. Her normal gig was boss wrench on Smoker’s Finagle’s First Law. But her skipper had virtually built the ship’s steam-powered engines with his own hands, Ryan had been told. He could keep them turning smoothly while his mechanic spent much of her time doctoring up the eccentric and cranky rotor-sail-driven system onboard New Hope.
Doc and Katie were just passing the foremost of the three rotor-sails: tall white cylinders pierced with spiral whirls of holes that apparently could catch wind from any angle to turn the rotors. These in turn could either act somehow like sails, or drive propellers. They also turned generators to store power in batteries for when the winds died down. It was a mystery to Ryan, and it was fine with him if it stayed that way.
The sails tended to creak shrilly and annoyingly when a stiff wind turned them rapidly, as it did now. Everybody had to raise their voices to make themselves heard.
“What I’m endeavoring to understand, dear lady,” said Doc, who was in his shirtsleeves, the height of informality for him, “is, why do you not share the gifts of your wondrous technology with the world at large? It sorely needs them.”
The group of Tech-nomads at the bow went silently tense. “What do you mean by that?” Randy barked.
“Why, nothing deprecatory, friend,” Doc said, blinking like a big confused bird. “I merely…wondered. Oh, dear.”
Doc’s experiences being yanked back and forth through time had had effects other than prematurely aging him. They had fuddled his mind. It didn’t keep him from being brilliant, nor functioning at a very high level. For periods ranging from minutes to months at a time. And sometimes he was easily confused.
“I’ve been wondering the same thing, too,” Mildred said. “I mean, no offense or anything. But why don’t you share more of your knowledge with people? You could make a big difference.”
“You think we haven’t tried?” Katie asked with unlooked-for ferocity. Normally the wrench was among the most approachable of Tech-nomads, would’ve been considered affable by the standards of normal people. To the extent anybody in the Deathlands could be considered normal.
The others tossed a look around like it was something hot.
“Uh-oh,” J.B. said to Ryan under his breath. “We stepped on some toes, here.”
Ryan shrugged. However spiky the Tech-nomads could be, no one had ever called them quick on the trigger. While he was never going to take for granted they could never get pissed off enough to chuck him and his friends over the rail and tell them to walk from here, a Tech-nomad was more likely to get spit on your shirt screaming into your face than take a shot at you.
Long Tom wrinkled up his bearded face. “Don’t think we haven’t tried,” he said. “The problem is, people aren’t willing to listen.”
“Tom,” Great Scott began. “Are you sure—?”
“No,” Tom said. “It’s been a long time since I was sure of anything. But if we’re going to trust these people to have our backs in a fight I think we can open up a little with them.”
“Good thing we had them in that fight with the mutie sea cows,” Sparks said. “Without Ryan and the kid they’d’ve sunk us for sure yesterday.”
Jak looked fierce at being called a “kid,” but he didn’t say anything.
“Problem is,” Sparks said, “most people don’t want to know. Or the barons won’t let them learn. And we never teach to barons.”
“You don’t believe in law and order?” J.B. asked.
Sparks shrugged. “Mostly we don’t believe in rule.”
“When we give common people what I like to call tech-knowledge-y,” Styg said, “the barons steal it, suppress it, or both.”
Styg was a stocky Tech-nomad with curly brown hair, who carried a number of pens and mechanical pencils in an ancient, cracked, yellowed protector in the pocket of the long-sleeved blue, white and black plaid flannel shirt he wore despite the humid heat. He’d been introduced to the companions as, “Styg, short for Stygimoloch. Don’t ask.” Nobody had.
“When we give it to barons the barons use it to strengthen their iron grip on the people. So I say, fuck barons, and fuck people who won’t help themselves.”
That got a murmur of assent, although Long Tom looked pained. To Ryan the Tech-nomads sounded frustrated.
“What if they grab you and try to make you teach them?” Ryan asked.
Long Tom chuckled humorlessly. “That’d be a triple-poor idea, friend. We make real bad captives and hostages, and even worse slaves.”
“We got measures,” Randy said with a nasty grin
.
“What ones?” Jak asked.
“Pray you never find out.”
“Wait,” Krysty said. “There’s something here I don’t understand.”
“What’s that?” Long Tom asked. Like all the men except Great Scott, he was especially attentive to Krysty. Mostly it amused Ryan.
“Isn’t the cargo we’re guarding Tech-nomad tech for the baron of Haven?”
Everybody spoke denial at once. “It’s not the baron,” Long Tom managed to say over the others. “It’s his chief healer and whitecoat, Mercier.”
“But he works for the baron,” J.B. said. “What’s the difference?”
“She,” Katie said.
“Huh?” J.B. said.
“Mercier,” Long Tom said. “She’s a she.”
“Don’t you think a woman can be a whitecoat?” asked Katie, who seemed to still be in defensive mode.
J.B. shrugged. “Man, woman, doesn’t matter to me. At least, not that I’d ever let on, or Mildred’d yank a knot in my…tail.”
“Damn straight,” Mildred said, crossing her arms beneath her breasts.
“Question stands, though,” Ryan said. “Baron, baron’s healer, whitecoat, whatever.”
“She’s different,” Great Scott said. “She’s a great whitecoat, very dedicated. Just like her father.”
“We’ve got total respect for the late Lucien Mercier,” Sparks said. “Even if he did go to work for that shitheel Baron Dornan.”
“Maybe Dornan wasn’t such a total shitheel after all,” Long Tom said. “He hired Lucien.”
“Gimme a break,” Randy snorted. “His own kids had to chill him.”
“So he wasn’t Father of the Year,” Long Tom said. “He still had the welfare of his people at heart.”
“Except for the ones he worked to death, tortured, or just plain murdered,” Randy said. “He was a tyrant motherfucker.”
