by James Axler
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.
It made it easier to do their job of keeping lookout, anyway.
“I almost feel like helping them,” Mildred shouted. “Feel guilty about not, anyway.”
A mob of Tech-nomads worked in the water up to their waists, hauling on ropes; others pushed against the hull of the grounded ship from land. The New Hope had bent on a cable and was trying to tow her sister ship free, although the channel’s narrowness meant she had to pull at an angle. They worked with a fierce singleness of purpose, with none of the parrot chatter that often characterized the Tech-nomads when they were among themselves.
Not that they could’ve heard one another.
“Don’t,” J.B. yelled. “Didn’t they teach you to never volunteer back in your time?”
“But maybe if we helped we could speed things along.”
“We’re not going to escape the hurricane,” Krysty called. “This is it.”
“The Tech-nomads hired us to guard their fleet,” Ryan said. He stood watching the rescue operation with arms folded. He willed himself not to feel the wind’s hammering. Compared to controlling the atavistic, instinctive fear of the storm’s awful power, that was a breeze.
“They could ask us to help if they wanted. They told us to keep an eye out. So that’s what we do.”
“Good,” Jak said. Though the albino teen was willing to work like a slave on his own account, and for his friends, he had a reluctance to work on a stranger’s behalf.
“More than you know, my lad,” Doc shouted. “Unless you believe that’s an innocent oceanic wayfarer seeking shelter from the storm coming around that bend downstream?”
The others saw the high prow of a sturdy little vessel that looked like an old shrimp boat, just poking around a stand of black mangrove.
“Wouldn’t you know it,” J.B. said.
An ear-tormenting rattle pierced the storm’s howl. Ryan saw Kayley, a female Tech-nomad rescued from the sinking Finagle’s First Law, spin and fall into thigh-deep water. He looked up.
Across the river men and muzzle-flashes appeared among wind-lashed trees. They were shooting at the Tech-nomads trying to rescue Egret. From the big clouds of smoke produced by most of the weapons, visible for an instant before the wind whipped them away into curling threads that quickly vanished in the rain, Ryan guessed most of the pirates were firing black powder blasters.
“Good luck to them reloading if the smoke poles’re muzzle-loaders,” J.B. remarked unconcernedly. He yanked the plastic wrap off his Smith & Wesson M-4000 shotgun and began ejecting buckshot shells into his hand. Feeding those into a cargo pocket of his baggy pants, he produced a box of rifle slugs and loaded those in their place.
Mildred sat, fastidiously managing to get a piece of the waterproof material to hold still long enough for her to plant her behind on it. As if it could make any possible difference, given how skin-soaked they all were. She took out her ZKR target pistol and propped her elbows just inside her knees.
Ryan unwrapped his own sniper rifle. He wiped condensation off the outsides of both lenses of his scope with a handkerchief from his pocket. Raising the longblaster to his shoulder, he confirmed the insides of the lenses were clear. The scope remained waterproof after all the years and abuse it had been through.
He wondered how long that would last, as nothing lasted forever.
A nearer rattle of blasterfire told him the Tech-nomads had begun returning fire at the pirates who had infiltrated through the trees on the far bank. He swung his scope down along the river. He didn’t have the option a normal shooter did, of using his other eye to discover where to point the much more restricted vision field of the telescopic sight. But he had a lot of practice with pointing toward the last place he’d looked.
And the shrimp boat wasn’t a small target. He picked it up right away. It was stained white and sun-faded blue, the paint peeling badly from long exposure to sun and weather. The name Mary Sue was painted on the bow.
He lined up the post of the telescopic sight on a man hunkered behind a battered M-60 machine gun laid across the shrimper’s bow rail. These pirates had some serious armament. Then again he’d noticed both the Tech-noma
ds and the pirates tended to use only heavy full-automatic weapons, like the M-60 or the BARs Isis favored. Support weapons. For personal arms both sides stuck to semiauto, conventional repeaters, or even black powder and non-firearms. He knew why: ammo. It was expensive, hard to come by, heavy. Even though he was pretty sure the Tech-nomads reloaded, and maybe manufactured some of their own, full-auto fire was a pretty wasteful way to go.
It was a long shot at the machine gunner, especially in these conditions, at least five hundred yards. The only thing going for Ryan was that the wind trying too hard to knock him on his rear was blowing almost right into the teeth of the shot. It wasn’t going to deflect the hefty 180-grain copper-jacketed traveling about 2800 feet per second bullet much. He took a deep breath and started to let about half of it out.
Ryan’s field of view filled with yellow fire. He jerked his head back, completely surprised. The shrimp boat was awash with flame. The gunner in the bow, completely wrapped in flames, let the heavy black blaster fall overboard. An instant later he followed, flapping his arms like firebird wings. Crewmates were doing likewise. The lucky ones weren’t on fire. Although luck in this case might just mean a chance to drown in the raging river, rather than burn.
“It would seem the New Hope got her rocket rack repaired,” Doc said into Ryan’s ear. The one-eyed man hadn’t even heard the multimissile launch for the storm.
“Oh, no,” Mildred said in disgust after triggering a shot across the river. “Hell no. I can’t hit anything in this crosswind.”
She got up to fetch one of the extra longblasters the Tech-nomads had lent them. A bullet kicked up sand from where she had been sitting an eyeblink after the wind plucked away the black plastic groundsheet she’d been sitting on.
“Get to cover,” Ryan shouted. “Bastards are shooting at us.”
“But the wind—” Krysty said.
“Find a tree that looks like it’ll stay put,” Ryan shouted. A bullet cracked past his ear. “Move!”
They did, scrambling back among the gnarled cypress roots on the relatively high ground behind them. Ryan moved quickly to take his own advice. He kept his eye on his companions to make sure they all did likewise.
When everybody had put a bole between him or her and the pirate blasters, he took stock of the tactical situation again. Most of the Tech-nomads trying to free the trapped yacht kept at it, trusting in their comrades aboard Hope to deal with the pirates. Once again Ryan admired their grit, as he did that of the three remaining water-striders. The riders kept zipping in close to the bank to shoot at the pirates before scooting away again.
The wind had grown truly monstrous. Pirates were getting knocked over by it as well as Tech-nomad bullets, and more. Ryan saw arrows standing from the front of a body bobbing on its back in the water on the far side. Though New Hope was still rolling and surging, her motion was nowhere as violent or radical as it had been in open water, with not even the insufficient coverage of the dense woods to cut the wind. The Tech-nomads aboard seemed to be compensating for it just fine.
From their new positions, relatively secure against both blasterfire and the wind that sought to pluck them away like leaves, the companions added their fire. Mildred had a Mini-14, Krysty a lever-action .44 Magnum carbine. Doc used the same weapon with a longer barrel. J.B.’s rifled slugs gave his scattergun range and accuracy enough to have a chance of hitting across the water.
And a chance was all you could hope for. Ryan lined up his scope dead on the center of a hairy bare chest and fired. The guy was scarcely sixty yards away; normally Ryan would’ve used iron sights. But the pirate was still standing there, blasting away with some kind of revolver, when he brought the longblaster back down from its recoil rise.
Saving the breath it took to curse, Ryan swung his rifle into the wind, so that the aim point was a few fingers left of the flabby, dark-furred rib cage. This time he saw the man was dropping even before the Steyr kicked up far enough. He vanished from the scope.
Ryan was swinging around, waiting for another target to jump out at him, when Mildred shouted, “Folks, we got more trouble!”
A crack cut across the storm roar. Dark water fountained from midstream. Two Tech-nomads pulling the grounded ship with ropes went down.
Ryan looked downriver. A sleekly sinister black shape was just nosing past the shrimp boat, which was now basically a bonfire sitting inexplicably atop the churning river with no visible boat about it.
“The Black Joke, I presume?” Doc asked.
“I sure hope Long Tom got his rocket launcher reloaded,” Mildred said.
“Rad-blast it.” Ryan raised his rifle. Through the scope he saw men working frantically at the rear of the long tube of the recoilless weapon. Next to it stood a man dressed completely in black.
Ryan lined up a shot on the black-clad chest. The recoilless rifle was a major threat, but Ryan reckoned if he took down the pirate boss, the rest would stand down. As raindrops spattered on the objective lens, he pulled the trigger.
He knew even as the Steyr kicked up he’d missed. When he brought it down again, cranking another cartridge into the breech, he saw Black Mask hustling aft. A pirate was in the process of falling backward over the railing behind where he’d stood a moment before. Ryan hadn’t missed completely, but this shooting match gave out no second prizes.
Ryan’s next shot took down the man reloading the recoilless. By the time he brought his longblaster back down another was stepping up to take the dead man’s place. He had to pause, then, to reload.
“Come on,” Mildred as saying. “Doesn’t New Hope have any more rockets?”
“That black ship don’t seem to be having such an easy time getting past the wreck,” J.B. said, thumbing more solid-shot shells into the tubular mag of his scattergun.
“Indeed not!” Doc shouted.
It was true. The channel was narrow, and flames continued to billow from the wreck despite the rain. The Black Joke seemed to be trying to work past its stricken sibling without taking light herself.
The recoilless fired. The shell went off somewhere in the woods inland of Ryan’s party. Leaning into the tree for added stability, the one-eyed man managed to drop the new gunner. When the pirates seemed a little reluctant to make a conspicuous target of themselves, he looked around at the battle closer to hand.
A brisk firefight was in progress between the pirates and the Tech-nomads. The defenders had finally given up trying to free the Snowy Egret for the moment and sought cover—and weapons to shoot from it.
The New Hope still wasn’t launching any more of its incendiary rockets. Ryan dropped a couple of the pirates attacking overland. Then he heard the recoilless go off again.
This time the shell threw up a fountain thirty yards upstream of New Hope. An answering snarl came from close by. Isis had apparently found some more .30-06 ammo for her BAR. She lay atop Egret’s cabin, firing back at the pirate flagship.
She didn’t manage to suppress the enemy gun crew. But Ryan did, on his third shot.
Isis began to spray the pirates on the far bank with quick savage bursts. The other Tech-nomads added their shots to hers from crossbows and blasters. The pirates fell back.
“Listen,” Jak called. “Black ship guns engines double-hard.”
Ryan gave up looking for targets to do as the albino teen said. Downwind he could hear the higher-pitched knocking of Black Joke’s engines, distinct even through the bellowing wind.
“Running!” Jak shouted triumphantly.
It was true. The black ship backed away and quickly vanished behind the subsiding flames of the derelict. Ryan could actually see her mainmast above wind-bent trees as she fled downstream.
“That’s how they knew how to cut us off,” Ryan said. “Their lookouts saw our masts over the trees. They knew where the channel we were following had us headed and put men ashore to bushwhack us.”
“They’re cutting stick and running now,” J.B. said.
The shooting dwindled and d
ied. The pirates who had attacked through the trees now seemed interested only in retreating as rapidly as the wind and mucky footing would allow. Those who were in condition to. Ryan didn’t notice anyone wasting time trying to help the wounded get away.
“Why is the river dropping?” Mildred said.
Everybody looked. It was true. The level of the water was falling perceptibly. Ryan noticed it was taking on the blackish tinge of tannin from rotting vegetation a channel like this usually showed, rather than the dirty brownish-gray appearance it had before.
“The wind’s not dying,” Krysty said. “Why isn’t it still driving the seawater upriver against the flow?”
“Perhaps the tide recedes?” Doc suggested in a voice that didn’t display much confidence despite the fact he, like everybody, was bellowing against the hurricane roar. The wind lashed them like invisible whips now.
Ryan shook his head. “Don’t know,” he said. “But the damned Egret’s stuck harder aground than she was before.”
And then Isis, who had slithered over the downstream side of the cabin when the shooting ceased, fired a shattering burst in the air.
“Everybody, get aboard ship!” she screamed. “Suckout!”
Chapter Ten
“What the blazing nuke death’s a suckout?” Ryan demanded.
Isis looked toward them and waved the twenty-pound BAR one-handed as if it were a willow wand. “You! Grab your traps and get your asses aboard! Do it now!”
After an instant’s frozen hesitation, the Tech-nomads—who now stood in water a good two feet shallower than they had moments ago—boiled into action. Some splashed out toward the New Hope and scrambled aboard. Others piled back onto the Egret.
“What good getting onboard stuck ship?” Jak shouted. He was clinging to the tree he’d taken cover behind with one white hand. His long white hair was blowing almost straight out to the side. The wind was threatening to toss his skinny body through the air.
“You got me,” Ryan said. “But the lady sounds like she means it.”
