by James Axler
“But these old Nuke War ships were monsters,” J.B. said with an odd note of pride in his voice. “I’ve seen hulls that were three-feet thick.”
“How could it possibly float with a hull that thick?” Ricky asked.
“Now, according to Archimedes—” Doc said, then abruptly stopped when he saw the annoyed expressions of the other companions. “Trust me, they just did,” he finished lamely.
“A yard of solid metal, reinforced by deck plates and a frame of welded girders...” Krysty noted, her voice trailing off in thought. “Saw something like this once before, but it was sticking out of a mountain, and impossible to reach.”
“Amazing. I wasn’t aware the Navy had any of these still in service back in my time,” Mildred said, thoughtfully rubbing her chin. “Maybe it was a training vessel, or in a maritime museum.”
“No live ammunition then?” Ryan asked.
She frowned. “Probably not. Maybe a little to teach the swabbies how to operate the old-fashioned cannons just for the sake of tradition. Ships were switching entirely over to missiles in my day. They didn’t use guns anymore.”
“Why?” Ricky asked, unable to take his eyes off the towering metal giant.
“Well, missiles were lighter, went farther and hit harder,” Mildred explained, “and with better accuracy.”
“Fair enough,” Ricky said. “Let’s go!”
“Tracks lead straight to,” Jak said, pointing at the smooth field of grass.
“Are there any tread marks or oil spills?” Ryan asked, looking over the smooth grass. He was an expert hunter, but Jak’s skills at tracking were amazing.
“Tread marks? You think this wreck might be guarded by droids?”
“Clear, just boots,” Jak slowly, studying the ground with half-closed eyes.
“Good. Then lead the way,” Ryan commanded. “We go in the same place they did.”
“So if trap, we find?”
“Yeah.”
In the background, the thunder rumbled again, louder and closer.
“Not sure about the wisdom of going inside a giant metal ship during a lightning storm,” Doc said.
“These big bastards got hit by lighting all the time at sea,” J.B. retorted with a snort. “They’re safe enough once we’re inside.”
“Indeed, as always, the devil is in the details,” Doc said as thunder sounded once more.
“If we encounter a droid, shoot the eyes,” Krysty said, switching the assault rifle to single shot. “Then run like nuking hell.”
All across the ship, birds rustled in their nests, and sang sweet songs of warning. Several of them took flight, but most of the birds stayed, concerned, but not overly frightened at the arrival of the humans.
Reaching the vertical deck, Ryan experienced a second of vertigo, then his mind adjusted to the perspective of standing upright in front of something that should be underfoot.
“Dizzy,” Ricky said, shaking his head.
The vines hung thick along this section of the deck, and Doc reached out to finger one of them.
“Fake,” he announced softly, looking up the vine. It went straight into a dark hatchway, the door hanging open. “This is actually a knotted rope, the leaves are plastic.”
“A secret entrance,” J.B. said with a broad smile. “There surely is something here that the travelers wanted just for themselves.”
“And something too big to get all at once,” Krysty added. “Mebbe they’re not hauling something away, but repairing the nuke reactor.”
Quickly, both Ryan and J.B. checked their rad counters.
“All clear,” Ryan stated, slinging the Steyr over a shoulder. “Okay, I’m on point. J.B. is next and Krysty last. Doc and Ricky, stay here to guard our backs.”
“Here take this,” Mildred said, passing him a small flashlight.
Pumping the attached handle several times, Ryan pressed the switch and the old bulb gave off a weak beam, barely visibly in the daylight. “Better than a candle,” he commented, tucking the device into a shirt pocket.
The climb was easy, the knots large and well spaced. When he was near the hatchway, Ryan paused to listen for any movements, then proceeded inside as fast as possible. He rolled off the rope onto the sideways wall with the SIG-Sauer in one hand and the Steyr in the other.
Reflected light came through the doorway at their feet, but it faded quickly into the gloom. Beyond that was a stygian blackness. Checking the flashlight in his pocket, Ryan saw that it had gone out. Pumping the handle produced no results, and he cast it away. After so many years, the device had finally died. Finding a new bulb would be next to impossible.
Lighting a candle, just for a moment, Ryan thought that he heard a low moan of pain, then J.B. climbed into view.
“Nuking long climb,” he grunted, squeezing through the hatchway.
“Or mebbe you’ve had one too many burritos,” Ryan suggested in friendly ribbing.
“Screw you, Ryan. We hardly ever get to chow down that much!”
Then Mildred appeared, huffing and puffing. “Long climb,” she wheezed, squeezing through the hatchway.
J.B. offered her a hand inside, then they moved away as Jak easily climbed into the ship, closely followed by Krysty.
“Hey, what happened to my flashlight?” Mildred demanded.
“Dead.”
“Dead?”
“Dead. Candle?”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t like this,” Krysty said, glancing around the thick maze of shadows. “With all of these metal walls, we could easily get chilled by one of our own ricochets.”
“Then not miss,” Jak suggested, peeking into an open doorway. Inside, was a sideways bathroom.
“Thanks, I’ll try to remember that,” Krysty muttered, raising her candle to check the overhead wall. There were deep deposits of a black residue.
Prodding it with a fingertip, she took a sniff. “The travelers used pitch torches in here,” Krysty said.
“Found them,” Mildred whispered, waving a hand.
Partially hidden behind a stanchion was a plastic bucket filled with sticky pitch and two wooden broom handles. Pulling them out, the companions lit the torches with their butane lighters.
Spitting and popping, the torches gave off a lot of bright light, the smoke rising to the wall overhead and crawling away to disappear into a tiny room full of rusted machinery.
Following the smoke stains on the wall above them, the companions carefully proceeded into the huge vessel. Rats and insects had chewed on everything edible over the years, rendering the organic furnishings unrecognizable debris. Only the occasional belt buckle remained in the litter, reflecting the torchlight like rectangular eyes. There were no bodies, but even under the best of conditions those would have crumbled into dust after a hundred years or so.
It was difficult for Ryan to get his bearing inside the sideways vessel, his mind kept trying to realign everything. The deck was now a wall, the walls were floors, the doorways open holes into darkness. Ladders and fireman poles were impossible to use. The angle completely wrong, they now were crossbars blocking the way. But some of the stairs were still serviceable, if you walked careful and slow.
Miles seemed to go by as they penetrated deep into the battleship. Twice, they lost the trail and had to go back to try other corridors, and once the smoke led them directly to a set of stairs rigged with a high-explosives mine. The trap was crude, and easily deactivated, but now they went slower, and more carefully. Apparently the travelers hadn’t wanted anybody else to share in their find. Whatever it was.
Spotting a wall locker overhead marked with the standard symbol for Emergency, Krysty warily pried it open and stepped back as several plastic-wrapped bundles dropped out.
“Are those survival packs?
” Mildred asked in surprise.
“Seems so,” Krysty said, pulling out a knife. “Sometimes it pays to be literate.”
Ripping off the plastic wrapping, she unearthed several plastic mirrors for flashing at passing planes, sheathed knives, tubes of shark repellent, bottled water, fishing nets, suntan lotion, saline pills, ten MRE food packs, a flare gun and a full box of flares.
“Damn, most of these are dead,” J.B. said, inspecting the flares and tossing some away. “But these four are still live.” He tucked them and the pistol into his munitions bag.
“Those food packs still intact?” Ryan asked, glancing around the darkness for any reactions to the discovery. But the great ship was as quiet as an undiscovered tomb.
“Two of them have pinholes in the Mylar,” Mildred said, tossing those into the corner. “But the rest are undamaged.”
“Excellent. Self-heats?”
“No, just food packs.”
“Good enough.”
On the next level, loose cables dangled everywhere, along with piles of smashed electrical equipment, debris, swivel chairs still bolted to the vertical floor.
“Auxiliary command?” Ryan asked, holding his torch closer to a detailed wall map showing the coastline of somewhere. Everything was neatly labeled, but the unknown language didn’t even give a hint to the ship’s home port.
“Or fire control,” Mildred replied. “Even these old monsters used a lot of electronics for targeting. The main guns had a range of twenty miles.”
“But only see eight miles at sea,” Jak said, impressed. “Shoot over horizon?”
“With amazing accuracy.”
Returning to the main corridor, the companions were somewhere near the middle of the vessel when there came a loud boom from outside and the entire ship trembled slightly.
“I think that we just got hit by lightning.” Krysty gasped as the emergency lights over the exits briefly flickered into life...only to die away again.
“The primary wiring is still intact,” Ryan said in surprise. “Mebbe you’re right about them fixing the reactor, after all.”
“Power can mean droids,” J.B. told them as there came another boom and the lights flickered once more.
“If we encounter a sec hunter droid, we leave,” Ryan stated coldly. “This is a bad place for a fight. We owe the travelers a lot, but not everything.”
Thunder boomed again, and there came the distant sound of rain. Moments later a cool breeze blew through the corridor, carrying the clean smell of fresh rain.
“Whew, not acid,” Jak exhaled. “Worried about Doc and Ricky.”
“The old coot is a pain in my ass, but he has enough sense to stay out of the acid rain,” Mildred said, then paused to turn toward a side corridor, her nose twitching. “Does anybody else smell blood?”
“I do.” Leading the way, Ryan entered an office of some kind, a pile of furniture pushed into a corner: desk, file cabinets and comps, all smashed into a nearly unrecognizable jumble. A murky light came from a porthole in the wall, the unbreakable plastic window mostly obscured by overlapping layers of bird shit.
Lifting open a desk drawer, Jak scowled at the sight of a broken bottle, the labeled faded into obscurity, but he recognized the design as a famous Scottish brewery. Another drawer yielded only crumbling papers, rusty paper clips and an open box of pencils.
“I can use those!” Mildred said, using a rubber band to bind the pencils together before tucking them into her medical bag.
“Here!” Jak said, kneeling on the wall.
There were several revolvers scattered around a navigational chart, along with a fully loaded crossbow.
“No blood splatter,” Mildred said, looking around. “The travelers must have been taken alive.”
Ryan frowned. “Or ran away.”
“Think it’s another vine master?”
“I hope not,” Krysty added softly, her posture bent forward slightly as if she was about to burst into a run.
“Sense anything?” J.B. asked.
“Too much,” she replied, rubbing a temple. “With so many people dying so violently inside the ship...”
Taking a revolver from the wall, Ryan cracked open the cylinder and checked inside. “Not fired,” he said, closing the weapon with a snap of the wrist. “They were caught by surprise.”
“Is that a Chinese blaster?”
“Sure enough.”
“Coldhearts want same as travelers,” Jak stated, then frowned. “Why not chill here?”
“And who leaves working blasters behind?” J.B. asked. “That makes no sense at all unless—” A cough sounded in the darkness, and something flew across the office to hit the Armorer in the throat.
Staggering backward, J.B. crashed into the desk. His glasses came off as he collapsed against a wall, the Uzi tumbling away, his fingers feebly twitching.
Chapter Fourteen
Rushing to J.B., Mildred plucked a small feathery dart from his throat and cast it aside.
“Blowgun!” Jak snarled, firing a long burst of the M-16 into the opposite doorway.
The stuttering muzzle-flash illuminated the darkness in every direction, briefly revealing a naked woman covered with garish tattoos, and holding a long bamboo pipe. The perfectly imbalanced 5.56 mm tumblers stitched a line of red geysers across her body, and she went spinning away to slam into a wall, then dropped from sight into the shadows.
“John’s alive and awake,” Mildred said quickly, pouring raw shine over the tiny wound. “The drug, or whatever it is, only seems to induce a kind of temporary paralysis.”
Raised voices could be heard, and a drum began loudly beating.
Yanking out a gren, Mildred pulled the pin and started to throw it where the female vanished, then stopped. “Goddammit, some of the travelers might still be alive!” Reluctantly, Mildred put the pin back and stuffed the gren into a pocket.
“Make a backblast!” Ryan commanded, dropping the Steyr to grab a file cabinet and fling it toward the open doorway. It landed in a loud crash, and a drawer popped free to land near J.B.’s outstretched hand.
As Krysty dragged the man to safety, the rest of the companions threw everything they could on top of the desk until there was a huge pile of debris that completely blocked the doorway.
A few moments later, excited voices could be heard on the other side. Then a comp monitor was yanked away, and a man’s face peeked through. He was covered with tattoos, with his teeth filed to needle points.
Cannies!
Firing from the hip, Ryan shot the cannie between the eyes. As the dead man fell back, Mildred tossed her gren through the opening, and Jak stuffed a chair in the opening.
On the other side of the crude barricade, the companions could hear angry shouting as the metallic sphere loudly bounced along the metal walls. Then a powerful detonation rocked the area, hellish light ripping away the darkness, as the explosion shoved back the pile of furniture.
Even before the reverberations of the blast finished echoing along the maze of metal corridors, the companions rushed forward.
The steaming bodies of cannies were in tatters, but enough chunks of them remained for Ryan to see the men and women were in fact not naked, but were wearing skintight outfits of a pale material that made them appear nude.
“Camou?” Jak asked with a frown.
“Tight clothing like this won’t snag on anything while climbing through wreckage,” Mildred explained, checking the belt pouch of a headless torso. “It’s called a combat suit.”
Warily, Mildred extracted a small leather bag from the pouch, and dumped out the contents. “This vessel isn’t American, but Chinese. Lord alone knows how it got this close to the East Coast.”
“Still crew,” Jak confirmed.
“No, th
ese can’t be the descendants of the crew, or else they’d have raided the survival packs years ago,” Ryan stated. “These are outlanders who made a home in the battleship. Lots of people would come to recce this place.”
“Meals on wheels,” Mildred said under her breath, pawing through the assortment of wooden darts and slim bamboo vials. Each of them was stopped up with a piece of hard rubber clearly carved of a car tire, one of them still had tread.
“I beg your pardon?” Krysty asked, swinging the M-16 back and forth to try to cover both doorways.
“Food delivered to your home,” Mildred said, putting the bamboo vials into her medical bag. “Damn it, the cannies are only carrying more of the same toxin. There’s no sign of an antidote!”
“Why carry? Not want food wake early,” Jak observed in cold logic.
Something skittered in the darkness just outside the nimbus of the flashlight, and all of the companions cut loose in various directions in case it was a diversion. A piercing scream of pain announced a kill, and in reply two blowgun darts smacked into the walls behind them.
“Okay, Mildred will stay with J.B.,” Ryan ordered. “We’ll hunt for the travelers. If we’re not back in ten, leave.”
The ZKR already in her hand, Mildred frowned. “But—”
“That was not a request, Mildred,” the man snapped, turning to advance into the darkness.
Reaching an intersection, Ryan ducked under a set of stairs, then swept past a large pump set in the middle of the corridor for no known reason.
This section of corridor was surprisingly clear of debris. Immediately suspicious, Ryan spun just as a cannie dropped from a hole in the ceiling behind him. A blowgun was already in his mouth. But as the man sharply inhaled through his nose, Krysty shot him in the belly.
With a startled gasp, the cannie stumbled backward over the pump housing, then started choking from the dart lodged in his throat. As he fell, Ryan shot him in the face to end the matter. Then the companions raced on, zigzagging through the dark maze of sideways corridors, inverted deck and compressed hatchways.
Trying to follow the beat of the drums, Ryan quickly realized that it was moving the same as them.
