by James Axler
“I’m Captain Geislinger,” he said, not altogether necessarily. For one thing, Ryan knew his cabin was across the corridor. “What is— Oh, great flame-puking death angels, Dobie!”
He looked at the chill, lying on its back staring up at the ceiling, with arms outflung.
“What have you done to him?” The captain gobbled like a tom turkey in his rage. Ryan would barely have understood the words, if hadn’t already had a general idea what they were going to be.
“Placed him under arrest for treason,” Ryan said. He kept both blasters trained on the captain, who to his credit didn’t flinch—although Ryan suspected that might either be sheer obliviousness, or the belief that a low-life coldheart like Ryan would never pull the trigger on such an important man as himself.
Ryan hoped he wouldn’t have to disabuse the captain of that notion. Thing could get triple sticky, triple fast.
“He resisted arrest,” Ryan said. “Saved the baron the cost of a court-martial, anyway.”
“Court-martial? Court-martial!” The stocky captain actually barked a mad-sounding laugh. “I’ll convene my own captain’s mast right here and now, convict you of murder, and have you dangling and strangling to greet the morning sun!”
“Hail, the Revenge!” a male voice bellowed though the slitted port. “This is Captain Garza of the Pearl. If I do not see Lieutenant Ryan Cawdor, unharmed and unimpeded, making his way back to my ship on his launch within two minutes, I am ordered to open fire on you. Count begins—now!”
“Or mebbe not,” Ryan said.
Chapter Twenty-One
The sound at his door brought Ryan instantly awake. He sat up with his SIG in his hand without awareness of having drawn it.
He thought about firing up the lantern hung from the bulkhead, but decided against it. If this was more plotters come to avenge their fallen lieutenant, he didn’t want to simplify their targeting solution by lighting up his own stupe ass for them.
But he frowned for more than the thought of danger. That he could deal with, especially if all the conspirators were cast in the same pot metal as Danville. Though as a matter of survival, he knew not to take such a thing for granted.
It was that he hadn’t quite made out what the sound was. He only knew that it didn’t belong and issued from the door.
It came again: a thumping sound, not loud but somehow insistent, followed by a whisper like something sliding down the wood on the other side.
Ryan got up and went to the near side of the door—the hinge side. Reaching out carefully, he took the hold of the latch, then turned it and hauled the door wide-open, fast.
When no blaster shot exploded into the cabin, he risked a look around the open door.
The tall, nicely built Lieutenant Ellin Stone fell into his arms.
The instant he caught her he knew this was not some romantic ploy. Never mind the way she’d been looking at him since the night he saved her from getting blasted by P’ville raiders.
From the blood trailing from one side of her mouth and coming in pink froth from her fine nostrils, and the feel of warm, sticky wetness on the palm supporting her beneath her back, he knew he wouldn’t be saving her this time.
“Must…talk,” she said. She coughed blood all over his face and bare shoulder. He was still sleeping in his skivvies, enjoying that luxury while he could.
He half carried her to his bunk and laid her down on it. “Let me call you a medico,” he said.
She shook her head. She saw that was a waste of time, too.
“They—will chill you,” she said as he lit the lantern. Her teeth were a ghastly red by its light.
“The plotters.”
She nodded slightly. Her breath was coming in progressively more rapid wheezes as her lung filled with blood.
She was drowning from the inside out, and there was not one nuking thing Ryan could do about it. He sat beside her. She gripped his hand in both of hers. Her grip was still strong. “Was—one. Told me Tanya…had my brother chilled. Found out…it was a lie. By then, I was with them…”
“So you were the one who told Danville that Tanya was slow in coming across with the promised rewards.”
She nodded again. It visibly pained her, but clearly less than speaking would.
He’d known, almost at once. Or suspected, but right to the edge of conviction. He hadn’t outed her to her boss, and not just because it was still suspicion, however strong. He had wanted to see how things would play out.
He hadn’t expect them to play this way.
“Tanya—treated me well. I learned my brother died…mysteriously on patrol. He wouldn’t join—”
Her brown eyes, which had been all but closed, snapped open. “They’re going to do that to you too, Ryan!”
She tried to say more, but a coughing fit hit her. She rolled onto her side, gagging on her own blood. For a moment Ryan thought he’d lost her.
“There was. A meeting. Aboard Pearl. Heard talking. Storeroom. Listened outside. They spotted. Me. Tried. To run. Back-shot me.”
“Are they still aboard?”
She shook her head, then winced. “Ran. Came here. Had. To warn. You. Don’t go. Out again. Chill. You. My. Luhhh—”
Her head dropped loosely to the side. The gurgling, rattling wheeze stopped.
Ryan shifted her onto her back and laid her hands across her chest.
He knew now what he had to do.
And part of it involved doing the very thing Ellin had died to tell him would get him chilled.
* * *
“GOT SOME MIGHTY strange things going on down here,” Ensign Paxton shouted, trying to make himself heard over the chug of the blasterboat’s steam engine. He was a man not too many years younger than Ryan, a little shorter, lean, with an oily manner and a head that put the one-eyed man in mind of a kidney bean. He stood directly behind Ryan, leaning with arms folded against a brass upright, just in front of the boiler tank.
This engine was the loudest Ryan had encountered. He wondered if there was something wrong with the mechanics, or if it was just an unusual design.
The sun, not long risen, was still warm slanting in from the right. Its beams glinted off the river’s slow roll like a thousand tiny mirrors afloat on the brown water. The day was cloudless except for a low shelf of slate-colored clouds to the east. Ryan stood at the front of the wheelhouse next to the helmswoman, a random rating whose name he didn’t remember. He had his right hand up against the brass pole that formed the starboard-front corner of the patrol boat’s open-sided cabin. It held the pocket chron he’d drawn from stores after having been given his latest assignment by the baron herself. It was an ancient one, but accurate, its steel case kept polished shiny by diligent New Vick quartermasters.
As Ryan had suspected she would, Tanya once again failed to come through with any kind of significant assignment for him. Not even one as obvious as putting him in charge of purging the highly placed plotters in the Grand Fleet. The conspirators who had murdered Tanya’s beloved aide had not only escaped clean, but her sec men couldn’t even ID them. Ryan reckoned he could track them down quickly, and that should have put him over the top in looking for some achievement stellar enough to swap for safe passage for himself and his friends.
But no. It was straight back on patrol for Ryan. Tanya’s rationale this time was that she wanted to get him away from the fleet and out of sight until things calmed down.
“Last week one of our recon boats sneaking home from scoping out the P’ville fleet got caught in that big old cloudburst we had,” Paxton hollered, “just about midway between our big ships and theirs. And floating out of some weeds on the east side they saw what they said looked like a raft with a bunch of old scrap iron piled on it. Crazy, huh?”
Ryan turned north, the way they were still headed. He didn’t trust his face not to show some reaction. He had no idea why, but he felt gut-sure he knew where the scrap had come from.
What the rad-blast are they up to down there on Wolf
Creek? he wondered.
“Raft was already foundering in the storm,” Paxton shouted. “Comin’ apart. Sank before it even got all the way out in the main channel. Left not a trace. Recon crew weren’t able to get an exact fix on where.”
Tanya shipping Ryan right back out on recon patrol made at least a degree of sense, until she stopped and realized that this wasn’t something that was going to just blow over. Even if all the other plutocrat plotters and bad-apple officers had hated Danville Junior, they would never forgive Ryan for “betraying” one of their own.
He flicked open the watch’s highly polished cover: 8:15. Not that he cared.
“Intel bastards took until a couple days ago to even notice. Then some bright boy figured out a hidden tributary might mean a way to get around on Baron Harvey. So they decided to send us down to check it out.”
The good news was the area on the map where they’d been ordered to start the search lay south of Wolf Creek. The less good news was that the patrol was supposed to stay out looking for several days.
That was Tanya’s way of keeping Ryan out of sight until her enemies’ vengeful hate blew over.
“Found some stickie bodies caught on anchor chains from Medusa and Harpy a couple days later,” the blond and ponytailed enlisted woman at the wheel said. “They’d been clubbed, cut, or shot.”
She shrugged dismissively. “Probably just swampers, all of it. They’re triple crazy on the rads. I hear they’re cannies who eat their own babies.”
“True fact,” Paxton yelled. “All them rads make ’em stone crazy. Them and the stickies deserve each other, if you ask me.”
“You fixing to order helm to make the turn soon, Captain?” Chief Petty Officer Jones, walking up from the stern, called sarcastically.
Of course that was the only way he ever talked to Ryan. But he put some extra emphasis on the “Captain,” which itself was an ironic term, since in Grand Fleet regs the Doria was too small to rate the title even as courtesy to its commander.
“Chart says yes,” Ryan said. He had never yet risen to the chief’s bait, nor would he. “So yes.”
That was a big difference on this assignment: in the past, Ryan had commanded a squad on patrol, but the boat they rode in on was commanded by an actual Grand Fleet warrant. Today, by personal order of the baron of New Vickville, Ryan was the full-on commander of the steam blasterboat Doria and her crew of four, as well as the actual six-person recon team Jones was attached to. Of them all, Ryan only knew one—the black chief petty officer, whose presence on this mission he had expected. The other five members of Ryan’s squad were sitting on the afterdeck, no doubt pissing and moaning because they had to sit in the sun while the two Doria crew members got to work in the shade. Of course, they didn’t take into account that the crewmen had to work up close to the boiler and the firebox that heated it.
Eleven people were on board the little boat. With odds of ten-to-one, Ryan was confident. Tough odds even for him—and tough even when some of those who were almost certainly in on the plot to chill him were probably not much use in a fight. Unlike Wolf Creek, the mouth of Dead Man’s Creek was plainly visible from several hundred yards south. “Commence your turn to starboard as you come to bear, helm,” Ryan directed. He wasn’t sure that was proper navy lingo, but he also reckoned it would get his point across.
They could have passive-aggressively made him look like a simp by following his command in a way that would run the blasterboat straight aground. But if Ellin Stone had been right, the plan was to chill him on this trip. Since she’d died to bring him that warning, he was inclined to take it seriously.
However, the Doria was still in line of sight of the Grand Fleet, and with no haze on the river, might be under observation through powerful field glasses or even telescopes. It was too risky to try an assassination until the blasterboat left the Sippi.
Sure enough, the rating waited a handful of seconds before commencing to turn the wheel. Marinelli—Ryan recalled her name now—seemed to know her job, anyway. The little craft heeled slightly as it turned up the side-stream.
This one wasn’t as wide as Wolf Creek. In fact the banks made solid walls of six-foot-high weeds that seemed claustrophobically close to the Doria, even though the deck was high enough that Ryan could see over their tips.
“Slow her down,” Ryan commanded the helm. “Better get a leadsman out sounding the channel, just in case.” The plan was to take the Doria upstream as far as she could safely go, then continue the reconnaissance using the rowboat towed behind the patrol craft’s propeller.
Marinelli cast a nervous side-flick glance at him. “Channel looks ace ahead, sir.”
“Do it,” Ryan said. “You want to ground her in the middle of a stickie-infested strontium swamp?”
Paxton guffawed. “Nuke, no! Vasquez, get your ass in the bow and start dropping the lead.”
Another of the Doria’s four-man crew left the boiler and scuttled forward from under the curved wood canopy as the craft slowed. He knelt beside the swivel blaster and began tossing out his knotted rope with the weight on the end.
The vessel that was Ryan’s first command didn’t even rate a proper cannon. The swivel blaster was just an outsize cap-lock shotgun with a two-inch bore. Ryan had personally overseen its loading that morning. It was a basically an outsize version of the “buck and ball” load, universally popular with those who fired smoothbore black powder weapons, including the shotguns kept for boarding actions by crews in both ironclad fleets: a one-pound lead ball with a dozen .33-caliber double-ought buckshot pellets. Behind that two pounds of lead he’d poured a full pound of New Vick’s best cannon-grade gunpowder.
It was a lot for the blaster to handle, but the fleet armorer he’d talked to assured him the piece could take the pressure. It was designed to do maximum damage to anything unarmored past the muzzle, out to a hundred yards and beyond. It could drop a dozen stickies charging on dry land—or swampers, whatever they were, and if they even existed—and also knock a hole in a Doria-size boat that could sink her.
“Uh-oh,” Marinelli said. “Crocs.”
“Yeah,” Paxton agreed. “A mess of the bastards. Ugly as P’ville gaudy sluts, ain’t they?”
Ryan saw a few of the characteristic log-with-eyes shapes lying in the water ahead. Looking left and right, he saw more come slithering out of the grass of the banks to slide into the creek, and swim curiously toward the intruding vessel with undulations of their broad, powerful tails.
“Good thing we’re in the boat, ain’t it?” Paxton yelled. Even with the engine throttled down enough to let Vasquez cast the lead, the engine was still loud enough to overwhelm normal conversation at greater than arm’s length.
“Can’t get cocky,” Ryan called in reply, without looking back over his shoulder. “I’ve seen the bastards come flying out of the water like they got rockets up their scaly asses. Best stay back from the rails, just in case.”
“Encountered these monsters before, have you?” Jones asked from behind Ryan’s left shoulder. He was close enough to pitch his voice conversationally and be heard. “Say, whereabouts were you and the employers you ran out on camped, when you built those rafts?”
“Like I told the baron, I don’t know. I’m not a navigator. All these creeks and streams and runlets of piss dribbling out of these stinking swamps look the nuking same to me. Anyway, it was my employers ran out on me, if I remember right.”
“Look there,” Jones said, thrusting his left hand past Ryan’s face to point through the open front of the cabin, above the waist-height front bulkhead. “Here comes a double-large one. Better take a look.
“A nice, long look.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
The words and tone of voice should have been enough to warn Ryan what was coming.
Jones had a tendency to run his mouth. Ryan guessed the man had been put on him as a spy because he had proved himself as an elite fighter. But while he was an ace soldier, he wasn’t much of a spy
. A more skilled spy would have avoided the near-insubordinate banter in which Jones constantly engaged Ryan. He would have tried to befriend his mark—although Ryan might have seen through that almost as quickly. Or better still, maintained an air of neutral competence and ready compliance with Ryan’s commands. In other words, not made a point of calling attention to himself.
But Jones clearly had an ego, and it had to have rubbed his ass raw that some random mercie fished out of the Sippi was getting so much fuss made over him, when a seasoned New Vick warrior like him labored in obscurity. So he ran his mouth.
It should have been enough.
But Ryan didn’t have to rely on the chancy interpretation of his tone of voice, nor his take on what might have been a man with a habit of talking too much. Because he was watching from the corner of his single eye in the mirror-polished cover of his pocket chron as Jones quietly undid his holster flap and began to ease his handblaster free.
He turned slightly clockwise and back-kicked Jones in the upper-left thigh as the man began to bring his revolver up to put a bullet in the back of Ryan’s head. Taken utterly by surprise, the chief was flung back against the brass pole to portside. He fell to the deck behind Marinelli.
Ryan was already in furious motion. Using the impetus imparted by his powerful kick meeting the meaty part of Jones’s leg, the one-eyed man threw himself forward over the front bulkhead, right out of the cabin. Tucking his head and shoulder, he hit the foredeck, rolled and came up in a crouch, still moving forward fast.
Vasquez was on his knees in the bow, reeling in the knotted rope with the lead weight with the scooped-out nose full of wax at the end, after taking another sounding of the Dead Man’s Creek bottom. He turned to look back at the onrushing one-eyed man in surprise.
Without a word, Ryan kicked him right over the prow into the water.
He grabbed the grip-shaped handle cast into the breech of the swivel blaster and, using the last of his forward momentum, swung it 180 degrees right around. His own grip on the handle prevented him from pitching overboard to join the unfortunate leadsman and the somewhat more fortunate crocodiles.
