by James Axler
“If you were a Poteetville sailor who’d done that, you’d be treated as a prisoner of war. We’re not stonehearts. A lot of my people would admire you for your grit and skill, even if it was their comrades you chilled. You fought like a tiger, and there’s too much eyewitness testimony to doubt the fact.
“If you were Baron Harvey’s sworn man, stuck-up little prickamouse that he is, and you offered to turn your coat for money, I probably would send you to feed the channel catfish. But you’re a professional. You have no reason to love your former employers, much less stay loyal to them. The way they ran out on you.”
He tipped his head back to the plush back of the chair. “I have to tell you, I’m not exactly at my best right now,” he said. “I had kind of a long day. I need time to think on it. And that’s the only answer I can give you, even if it earns me a ticket to go meet the six-foot cats at the bottom of the Sippi.”
She laughed. “They go bigger than that, hereabouts. I’m not offering to hire you on because you’re a stupe or a simp. I admire your balls and your skill, but what I need is brains to go with.”
She picked up the decanter and swirled the dark fluid that filled it just past halfway around its square, faceted sides.
“What do you say we have a drink and just chew the fat? You look like a man with a story to tell. Or even two.”
Mutely Ryan held up his wrists.
“Oh,” Baron Tanya said. “Right. Ellin, if you’ll do the honors?”
Stone did not look thrilled to be setting free a captive who still had traces of the blood of so many of her comrades mostly dried on his face and clothes, but she also didn’t raise any kind of objection. With the air of a person who knew how things would turn out if she did, she clicked open a lock-back folding knife and deftly severed the ropes binding Ryan’s wrists. She didn’t even nick his skin.
He suspected that had more to do with her own sense of professional pride than concern for him.
The baron poured them both drinks by hand. Stone freed his ankles with the same icy precision, so he got up, teetered briefly as full circulation came rushing back into his feet like a tide of pins and needles, and went and collected his goblet.
“Cognac,” she said. “Made by some kind of sect of old-time hermits in the Zarks. Surly bastards, but everyone leaves them alone, because distilling this booze is their tight little secret.” She shook her head. “It’s triple smooth, and tastes just like angels’ piss. Prosit!”
So he told her stories that had her eyes bugging out and her gut busting in equal measure. Sometimes at the same time. Some of them were true. Some had even happened to him.
Baron Tanya undertook to drink him under the table.
He let her think she had.
When he let his head loll back, and a well-practiced fake snore escape his slack and stubbled jaws, he heard her chortle softly to herself in triumph.
“So our new pet superman has his limits,” she said, her speech showing little sign of the various forms of hard liquor—none on the remotest par with any so base a beverage as Towse Lightning—she’d been pouring for them. “Ace on the line, too. I was starting to feel it myself.”
Stone said nothing. She had sat by the whole time, simply watching. And listening. Ryan doubted much got by her. The baron likely didn’t employ her to be stupe, either. Nor a simp. And her thoughts and feelings were no more accessible to Ryan than if she’d been a weathered stone lion in front of some long-derelict city hall in some nuked-out megacity of old.
Putting her hands on her thighs, the baron hoisted her bulk aloft with a grunt.
“Get some sailors in here to drag the carcass out of here. Put him in the spare cabin a deck down and lock the hatch and door.”
“Baron?”
“He hasn’t said yea or nay yet, Lieutenant. And I’m nuked if I’m going to trust him until he does. He’s too sly and too bold, all at once. It’s a rare combination and a dangerous one.”
There was a pause, during which Ryan’s skin crawled as if he could feel her scrutiny. He put it down to a subconscious reaction to pretty near stone certainty she was doing exactly that.
“How I hope he does say yes, Elli,” she said softly. “You know how badly we need a man like him on our side.”
Chapter Twelve
The ride back to their campsite was one of the longest of Krysty’s life, subjectively speaking, as the sky in the east had not yet begun to lighten as Abner steered them deftly toward the hand-expanded clearing.
The journey had been spent in almost total silence, after Myron’s grief-maddened outburst, which allowed uncertainty to worm its way inside her mind. The peaceful conviction that nothing…irreversible…would happen to Ryan, because he wouldn’t let it, had long since disappeared.
After a quick glance at the acting captain, who was curled into an almost fetal-tight ball of misery, Abner maneuvered past the grounded Mississippi Queen, whose stern was slanted downstream. That allowed him to clear the vessel and pull as far as possible into the shallows close to shore, in order to pause briefly to allow the occupants to debark one or two rafts at a time, and still let them ashore within the cleared space.
Krysty was not offended that Abner hadn’t asked her for orders. She was relieved. He was the small-boat guru. She reckoned he’d know best, as he clearly did.
As he turned the launch to port, Jak suddenly said, “Wait!” from the second raft.
“Ma’am?” Abner asked softly. She held up a hand.
Myron raised his face from his palms. “What? What is it?”
She just shook her head, quickly, as if trying clear hair from her face. Jak jumped off the raft with a prodigious splash, and began wading in knee-deep water. Visions of gigantic crocodiles sliding eagerly and unseen toward a serendipitous midnight snack almost closed her throat. Then it registered how alarmed he had to be to raise a wave and a racket like that. He normally went into water with no noise and scarcely a ripple.
He had barely taken a step onto dry land when he froze. His head went left, then began to track slowly clockwise as he scanned the tall grass on the perimeter of the camp.
“Stickie sign,” he said.
Suzan gasped. She might not have been the only one.
“We have to get out of here!” Sean yelped from the first raft.
“Where to?” J.B. asked almost conversationally from the tail-end boat, where he rode with Mildred, Nataly and the jovial giant, Santee.
“Anywhere!” the red-haired mechanic said. “I hate stickies. I can’t stand those sucker-tip fingers they got. I can’t let them get me, I can’t!”
“Ma’am?” Abner said again. Since this was clearly a matter of security, he deferred to her, as she had deferred to him mere seconds before.
“Ease back off the trigger of the blaster there, Sean,” Arliss said, patting his back in the way you might gentle a frightened horse. “They’re not here now.”
His head jerked up and around as a thought hit him. “Are they?”
“Gone now,” Jak said firmly. “But—not far, mebbe.”
Krysty drew her Glock 18 and thumbed the selector switch down to full-auto.
“I’m going to check things out,” she said, climbing gingerly over the side of the small boat. “J.B., Mildred, cover us. Ricky, Doc—keep eyes skinned outward. We don’t want to assume the only threats come from the land. Nataly and Arliss, would you come with me?”
“I’ve chilled stickies,” Santee called from the dinghy, raising his hand.
“Come on, then. Hopefully though, you won’t have to.”
She walked up next to Jak, who was still standing where he’d stopped, legs slightly bent, taking in the scene as thoroughly as he could. Her skin crawled with every step she took that had water under it.
Attuned as she was to nature, Krysty was not the tracker Jak was. Nobody was. Not even in their tight-knit group. But she saw some of what had halted him, right off: weird, splayed impressions where the short grass was sparse, loo
king almost like handprints.
Stickies, all right. Not that Krysty had doubted Jak’s assessment. Even in the darkness she could make out a number of the tracks, as far around the site as her eyes could see.
Nataly and Arliss joined Krysty, the first mate with her Ruger Old Army blaster in hand, the rigger with his lever-action Marlin carbine. Then Santee came up, swinging the ax he’d taken from the cargo raft up to his shoulder as if it were a willow switch.
“What did they do to the campfire?” he said.
They had buried the campfire, or its ashes, thoroughly and deep before departing. There was no compelling reason to. It wasn’t as if potential hostile eyes could sweep the clearing without seeing a sure sign they’d been here, and frankly, it hadn’t been worth their energy to make the effort to try. But that was just a habit people got into if they traveled around a lot, as everyone in the whole party surely did. You buried your ashes every time, if you liked the idea of not burning to death in your own accidental wildfire, even if fire wasn’t a clear and present danger here in the middle of the swamp.
But the ashes weren’t buried anymore. Dead and long-cold though they were, they had been scooped up and scattered across a ten-foot radius, leaving a funnel-shaped depression where the fire had been.
Krysty had Santee and Nataly go right a few paces, and she and Arliss went left, staying near the water, to take up positions there to cover Jak as he prowled around the site.
“Good thing we buried the heavy cargo, huh?” Avery called from his raft.
“You said it, man,” Santee agreed.
There had been some controversy over that. Ryan had insisted that anything too heavy to travel easily on a small raft had to be left behind—Avery said that given the resources at hand, they were a lot better off making several small rafts than one big one. Arliss had objected to that. Some of that cargo, in particular the outsize Lahti antitank rifle in its casket-like box, was worth a fortune.
“I don’t see that a fortune does a body much good,” J.B. had observed in his usual laconic style, “if you get chilled trying to hang on to it.”
Nataly and, after a little prodding, Myron, had backed Ryan. Arliss hadn’t stuck on the point. He was neither greedy nor stupe. It was just his job to keep the balance sheet in mind, which was all the more necessary since his friends and bosses, the late Captain Trace and her husband, so often lost sight of it. He had acknowledged the truth of J.B.’s observation with a rueful grin.
Ricky, his young mind filled with fever visions of pirate treasure—granted, he came from a part of the world where pirate treasure was a real thing, as were pirates, for that matter—suggested burying it.
“Stickies don’t dig,” J.B. had said. So they loaded the rafts with their personal gear, or such of it as had survived—Krysty’s and her friends’ had all come through intact—along with necessities, and whatever cargo would fit. The rest they’d buried.
And there it remained. Or at least there was no sign that the ground had been disturbed since they tamped it down over the buried goods.
“But I thought J.B. said stickies didn’t dig?” Arliss said in a bantering tone.
“They usually don’t,” Krysty stated.
“In all probability,” Doc said from his raft, “they were expressing their rage at being denied a chance to play with fire. Frustration drives them to frenzy. They might have even expected to find coals still live.”
“Be a good trick,” Santee said, “staying on fire all buried like that.”
“Who knows what goes on in a stickie’s mind?” Abner asked.
Once Jak pronounced the area clear, the rest of the party came ashore. And no sooner had they done so than Krysty was stricken leaden-limbed by exhaustion.
Judging by the way the others’ shoulders began to sag, when the immediate sense of danger had passed, she was far from the only one.
But not everybody accepted that the danger had passed. “We can’t stay here,” Sean muttered. “The bastards came here once. They’ll come back, sure as glowing night shit.”
“What would you have us do?” Arliss asked. He was starting to sound exasperated with his friend.
The mechanic just shook his head. “I don’t know. I just want to get out of here.”
“We need rest,” Mildred said flatly. “When you get this tired, your judgment goes to pot. Tempers get thin. You spook easily. You don’t want to be making decisions in that kind of condition, and you especially don’t want to be around people waving blasters in that kind of state!”
“But how can we rest?” Sean demanded. His voice was shrill. It was almost as if he were compelled somehow to prove Mildred right. “If we sleep, the stickies will night creep us. And their sucker fingers will pull the skin right off our faces. From our faces!”
“Well, that is a thing that happens,” J.B. said. “But if some of us keep good watch, we can discourage that sort of thing.” He hefted his Uzi one-handed to show what he meant by discouragement.
“First watch,” Jak said.
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Nataly asked. “You always seem to have the watch. And while mebbe you don’t need as much sleep as the rest of us, you need some.”
“Once we got away from those New Vickville boats,” Ricky called back over his shoulder from where he stood at the water’s edge, keeping watch out over Wolf Creek, “he went right to sleep. Stayed that way the whole time.”
“I thought he was always alert,” Arliss said.
“As Nataly says, even Jak needs to sleep sometimes,” Krysty added. “But floating back on the raft he didn’t see much point in keeping watch. So he got some sleep.”
“But I can’t sleep here!”
“Easy, Sean,” Arliss cautioned him.
“We don’t have to.”
The words, softly spoken, came from an unlikely source. Myron Conoyer stood hard by the waterline, as if daring his wife’s killer to come take him to join her.
“What do you mean, Captain?” Nataly asked.
He waved at the grounded tug. “We can sleep aboard the Queen.”
“You sure that’s a good idea?” Mildred asked.
“Well, it is more defensible,” J.B. told her.
“Yeah, but how do we know it’s not crawling with stickies? Maybe they thought it was a nice place for a new nest.”
“To say nothing of their habit of fouling human habitations when they intrude upon them,” Doc added.
“Check out,” Jak said. His manner made it clear even to the Queen’s crew that he meant he would do it.
“I’ll go with you,” J.B. said. “Everybody else, stick tight.” After a moment’s consideration he unslung his Smith & Wesson M-4000 riot shotgun, and slung the submachine gun.
“Just the two of you?” Jake asked. “Isn’t that suicide, if there are stickies aboard?”
“Son,” J.B. said, “the first sign of stickies, and I will be back here a lot faster than we left. No heroes in this bunch.”
“No stupes,” Jak agreed.
“But what if you have to go in the water and there are crocs?” Arliss asked.
“We’ll use them for stepping stones,” J.B. said.
But, miraculously, they soon reported to the group that there were no stickies aboard the partially burned-out boat, nor sign any had been aboard her. Krysty didn’t believe in miracles, as such, but in her present frame of mind she was willing and ready to give heartfelt if silent thanks to Gaia for the gift.
They tethered the launch and the boats to the Queen’s stern in a cluster. Then leaving Jak and an uneasily wakeful Sean on watch, they found berths on deck or below.
Krysty laid out her bedroll by the stern rail. She couldn’t remember when she felt so grateful for the relative softness and comfort of its embrace, with her rolled-up jacket for a pillow. This is probably the first time we’ve got a chance to rest after our last slow dance with death, she thought.
She felt herself plummeting toward sleep as though she�
��d stepped off a cliff, her last thoughts of Ryan.
* * *
“THE GRAND FLEET, Mr. Cawdor,” Baron Tanya said, waving expansively to left and right. “The pride of New Vickville.”
The sky was bright blue, with a wash of thin green and mauve chem clouds here and there. The morning air was still actually cool. The westerly breeze was stiff. It ruffled Ryan’s hair as he stood by the rail on the flying bridge, atop and at the front of the flagship’s multistory superstructure, and made the blue-and-white New Vickville flags flap loudly.
It also stank of carrion. The smell was stomach-wrenching even over the smell of the fires keeping the fleet’s boilers warm for instant action. Something big, or a lot of something small, had to have died out there recently. Ryan had no idea what. The baron seemed not even to notice, which made him wonder if it was a regular occurrence here.
“Impressive,” he said, because it was.
At least all that smell of dying gives me no cause to worry about Krysty and the others, he thought. They were to the north of here, and downwind to boot. Not that he worried much, anyway. His companions could take care of themselves with or without him, and the Mississippi Queen’s crew was keen on survival, unless grief drove Myron Conoyer over the edge and he did something stupe. Ryan didn’t worry much. He’d learned early on it only ate up energy and brain-time that might have been better used thinking of a solution to whatever was causing the worry in the first place. Worrying never make things better.
“To our left,” the baron said, “you see the Clytemnestra, an armored frigate with eight cannon. To our right, the proud Medusa, her sister ship.”
Sister seemed a relative term. Clytemnestra had a markedly lower superstructure than Medusa. Both had been armored in whatever appropriate gauge iron and steel scrap happened to be available when they were being fitted, and appeared, more or less, in good shape. Still, they looked huge—and Ryan was looking down at both from his vantage point.
