Time Castaways

by James Axler

  “No problem,” she stated, holstering her blaster and swinging around the bulky weapon. She knew there had been a reason Ryan said to bring one along. Sniper duty.

  Expertly, Krysty tested the drawstring before working the pump to notch a half-arrow. She knew the range wasn’t very good, so she would have to let them get close before taking them out. Taking a position at the porthole, the woman remembered something about an ancient sec chief telling his troops not to shoot until they could see the white of the enemy’s eyes. It was good advice.

  “I’ll go see if there are any maps of the bay in the tub,” J.B. declared, tilting back his fedora. “It’s a bastard maze out there, and if we hit a sandbar, we’ll never live long enough to get free again.”

  “That right,” Jak stated, sliding off his jacket and hanging it from a convenient wooden stud that seemed to have been made for just that purpose. The teenager flexed his arms, the hard muscles rippling under his alabaster skin.

  “Will you be conducting a reconnaissance of the ville, my dear Ryan?” Doc asked, doing the same to his frock coat.

  “Hell, no,” Ryan said, looking upward as if he could see through the wooden planks to the main deck. “I’m going to see what’s hidden under those canvas sheets.”

  DAWN WAS JUST STARTING to lighten the sky when a man-size door opened in the seawall of Northpoint ville and out walked a sec man wrapped in a heavy bearskin coat. There was a bamboo fishing pole resting on a shoulder, and he was carrying a wicker basket full of freshly baked bread, delicious wisps of steam rising from the small brown loafs.

  Whistling an ancient tune, the sec man ambled toward the sleeping guard sitting on the barrel at the end of the dock.

  “Hey, wake up, shithead!” he called out in a friendly manner. “Better not let the baron catch you snoozing on post, or she’ll have your balls for breakfast.”

  But his voice faded away at the sight of the still man covered with dozens of the tiny blue crabs, their pinchers snipping at his clothing and pale skin. There was a large puddle of dried blood a few feet away on the boards, and a rope lashed around the throat of the sec man holding the corpse tightly to the wooden pylon.

  Dropping everything, the sec man reached for the whistle lashed to his wrist and there was a blur of motion from the nearby Warhammer. Throwing back his head, the man clawed at the arrow in his throat, the shaft neatly pinning his mouth closed. Hot blood filled his mouth, dribbling from his lips and clogging his throat. Staggering from the pain, he tried to head for the ville, but tripped over the fishing pole and tumbled off the dock into the bay.

  The cold revived him for a moment, and the sec man tried to reach the nearby ladder, when another arrow hit him in the back, the impact driving his face against a pylon. Vaguely, he heard a sharp crack of bone breaking, and then nothing more ever again.

  Quickly rising into view on the warship, Doc and Jak appeared from behind the gunwale and released the mooring lines. Only seconds later, the low rumbling noises from the craft’s engine room increased drastically, and the warship began to sluggishly move away from the dockyard.

  Stepping out of the wheelhouse, Ryan went directly to the forward deck and yanked off the canvas sheet to reveal a honeycomb of bamboo pipes joined together with stout rope, and mounted on a platform atop a swivel post.

  “Light it up, lover!” Ryan called, flicking a butane lighter into life and igniting a stubby fuse at the back of the weapon.

  Already at the second launcher on the aft deck, Krysty did the same thing, and then the two companions impatiently waited for what seemed to be an inordinate length of time for the sputtering fuses to finally reach the cluster of bamboo pipes.

  When the fuse vanished inside the honeycomb, there was a gush of smoke and a rocket flew away, streaking over the dockyard to slam into the wall of the ville and violently explode. The loud noise seemed to echo across the bay, disturbing a flock of birds in the distant trees on the far side. Then the first of Krysty’s rockets launched to punch through the largest fishing boat moored at the dock. Spraying sparks and smoke, the rocket punched through the wooden hull and lanced into the water, hissing as it left behind a bubbling contrail.

  Just then, a bearded face appeared on top of the ville wall, and Mildred triggered her ZKR blaster from the porthole. A split second later, the sec man vanished with a cry of pain.

  Grabbing the heavy yoke of the honeycomb, Ryan moved the launcher into a new position just as the second rocket took off. However, it spiraled past the wall and missed the guard tower by a few feet. Exerting all of his strength, Ryan held the launcher still, and the third rocket flew true. With a thunderclap, the guard house detonated into flame and splinters, falling bodies arching down into the sleepy ville.

  Gushing black smoke fumes from the smokestack, the Warhammer steadily chugged away from the shore and began slipping into a vaporous cloud of mist covering the middle of the bay. Knowing she had only a few moments of sight remaining, Krysty quickly swung her yoke around to aim rocket after rocket at anything that might be able to give pursuit. In short order, canoes, fishing boats and barges were blown to smithereens, the wreckage swiftly sinking to the bottom of the bay.

  Meanwhile, Ryan took out the second guard tower, then the third.

  Screaming and yelling were coming from inside the ville, and suddenly they heard the steady gong of an alarm bell, closely followed by the shrill wails of a hundred whistles.

  Inside the wheelhouse J.B. saw no reason to be covert anymore. Taking a hand off the wheel, he pulled on a dangling rope and a steam whistle loudly howled from atop the smokestack.

  Out of sinkable targets, Krysty added the power of her honeycomb to Ryan’s. The homemade rockets hammered the dock nonstop, blowing out pylons and crashing through the boardwalk. Then they ruthlessly aimed the weapons at the one door, catching a squad of armed sec men totally by surprise. The sec men were blasted into shrieking hamburger by the double salvo, the door itself blown off the hinges before the thickening fog masked the ville completely.

  “Got more?” Jak asked, patting the smoking honeycomb fondly as if it were a well-trained hunting dog.

  “No, this was it. They must keep most of the rockets inside the ville.” Ryan smiled. “You know, just in case somebody jacks the boat.”

  “Do you think they will give pursuit?” Doc asked, his long hair riffling in the cloudy breeze.

  “I would,” Liana replied gruffly, just as something huge flashed past the warship to slam into the surface of the lake, throwing off a geyser of water.

  “Arbalest!” Ryan shouted, leveling the Steyr. But it was impossible to see through the morning fog. That was why they had chosen this time to leave instead of at night. Only now, the fog that shielded them was doing the same for the ville sec men.

  Opening her mouth, Mildred started to tell everybody to be quiet, the sec men were probably using the voice to aim the colossal crossbow. But then she realized that with the hammering steam engine, silence was impossible.

  Several more of the giant arrows came out of the mist, slashing across the bay in different directions. Most of them only sliced into the water, but one hit a sandbar, violently exploding into a geyser of splitters and loose sand.

  They know we’re out here, but are as blind as we are, Ryan noted with some satisfaction. At least both sides were on equal footing.

  However, unable to fight back or to hide, the companions could do nothing at the moment but tighten the grip on their blasters and wait for annihilation. If one of the giant arrows hit, the Warhammer would be cored like a ripe apple.

  “Head for the western shore!” Krysty shouted, motioning in the opposite direction.

  Nodding from behind the glass window of the wheelhouse, J.B. changed direction and started heading toward a small island covered with pine trees. It wouldn’t offer much protection, but some was always better than none.

  As the warship steamed behind the copse of trees, swarms of half-arrows arched down from the cloudy sky
, sounding like rain as they vanished into the murky water.

  Incredibly, there was the sharp report of a blaster from behind, the lolling boom telling it was a black-powder weapon.

  “It seems that we have awoken the beast,” Krysty muttered, pulling out her own blaster.

  Leaving the protection of the woody island, the Warhammer moved steadily along, trying to get as far away from the ville defenders as possible without approaching any of the countless sunken trees or small sandbars.

  For several minutes the vessel steamed along, rapidly increasing speed until there was a jarring impact that threw everybody to the deck as the warship suddenly stopped. Loose items rolled across the trembling deck, and several went overboard to splash into the drink.

  “Nuking hell, we ran aground!” J.B. cursed from the wheelhouse. Never letting go of the wheel, he grabbed a speaking tube made of joined sections of bamboo and shouted into the mouthpiece. “Jak! Reverse the engine! Give me dead slow!”

  “Gotcha…” the teenager answered, the reply ghostly faint over the sound of the laboring machine.

  Looking over the gunwale, Ryan saw only choppy water below the stern. Fireblast! Getting out of this passage was going to be a lot harder than he had ever imagined. The sunken log and larger sandbars they could see and easily avoid, but if there were many more of these hidden sandbars, they would still be fumbling about in the bay, looking for a way out, when the baron arrived with a hundred men in birch-bark canoes. That would be real trouble.

  Slowly, the engine eased in tempo, and the trembling in the hull stopped. Mechanical clanks sounded from belowdecks, and the propellers spun for an inordinately long time before the Warhammer sluggishly pulled itself loose with a moist sucking sound. The water swirled darkly around the boat, then gradually cleared as it moved backward into deep water again.

  “Liana, are there any man-eaters in the bay?” Krysty demanded, scowling at the muddy water. “Can we swim out ahead to check for more obstacles?”

  “None,” she replied quickly, eager to help. “Only the sea…I mean the lake, has killer fish.”

  “That won’t help,” Ryan growled, gripping the gunwale and staring at the wide bay ahead of them. “The bastard sandbar we just hit was too fragging far underwater to see. Swimming ahead of the boat would only slow us more!”

  “Ah, but mayhap I can show us the way,” Doc announced, holstering his blaster. “Keep us still for a moment, John Barrymore, while I find some string!”

  “String?” J.B. demanded, looking over the rim of his glasses

  “String!” the time traveler replied haughtily, disappearing down the stairwell. A few moments later Doc returned with a slim length of hemp rope coiled in his hands.

  Going to the bow, he stretched the rope out to the length of his arm and tied off a knot. He kept doing that for the whole length of the rope, then he went back and added a larger knot between each of the arm’s-length knots.

  Looking for something to use as a plumb, Doc found nothing serviceable and reluctantly tied the Ruger to the end of the rope. At least it was waterproof and would not be damaged by a long immersion, unlike the precious LeMat.

  “Clever, very clever, ya old coot,” Mildred said, slapping the man on the back.

  “My parents had a fool for a son, but that was my brother,” Doc replied with a wry smile, tossing the rope overboard. The revolver splashed out of sight, and the man let the knotted rope run through his fingers until it stopped descending.

  “John Barrymore, we have ten feet to the port side!” he bellowed over his shoulder. “Is that sufficient?”

  “The what side?” J.B. replied from the wheelhouse, looking from behind the big wheel.

  “Port has four letters, just like the word left.”

  “Ah, gotcha. Yeah, ten is fine,” J.B. replied happily, snatching the speaking tube. “Jak! Move us forward at half speed! No, make that a third!”

  “Third speed!” the teenager replied, and a few seconds later the vessel began to creep forward again.

  Just then, in the far distance, there was a flurry of blasterfire, but it did not seem to be coming in their direction. At least, not yet.

  Casting out the line again, Doc reeled it in quickly and read the depth. “Mark!” he called out. “Half twain to the starboard!”

  “Dark night, speak English!” J.B. demanded from the wheelhouse.

  “Full twain means clear sailing,” Mildred answered from the forward deck. “Half twain means the water is getting shallow, quarter twain means danger, slow and back off!”

  “Well, why doesn’t he just say so!”

  “Tradition, my friend!” Doc replied, casting out the rope once more.

  With Doc leading the way, J.B. clumsily steered the bulky vessel through the sandy maze of the narrow channel. Progress was slow, and Ryan stayed a tense guard at the back of the boat, the Steyr clenched in both hands, straining to see into the wafting fog.

  Slow hours passed, and the noon sun began to bake away the cool morning mist when the Warhammer finally entered a wide area of the bay, the clear blue water dotted with a series of small islands that strongly resembled the fjords of Norway.

  “It should be clear sailing from here on,” Doc called out in marked satisfaction, working the Ruger free of the wet rope. The blaster was streaked with mud and covered with kelp, but otherwise undamaged.

  “About damn time,” J.B. replied gruffly, turning to the speaking tube. “Okay, Jak, give me full speed!”

  But the reply of the teenager was cut off when there came a dull boom from far behind the steamboat.

  “Are those cannons?” Mildred asked nervously.

  “Hope so,” Ryan replied gruffly, the wind blowing his black hair forward to hide his expression.

  Straining to hear over the hammering of the steam engine, the companions anxiously waited for the appearance of a cannonball from out of the fog, but nothing happened. There was only the sound of the steam engine and the lap of the waves against their wooden hull.

  Then the boom came again, followed by another, then more, slow and steady, the concussions coming in the pendulum beat of a human heart.

  “That’s a timing drum,” Ryan stated, tightening his grip on the longblaster. “Fireblast, I thought we sank everything they had!”

  “Guess we missed one,” Krysty said furiously, her hair coiling and flexing. “There must have been a dry dock or a boatyard that Liana didn’t know about.”

  Softly, the beat continued, regular and steady, slowly growing louder, a smooth counterpoint to the mechanical laboring of the steam engine.

  “I saw a vid once about Roman galleys,” Mildred said calmly, even though there was a tickle of fear in her stomach. “Mostly they used slaves, but during a war, sometimes sec men would crew the ships. Fifty, sixty, a hundred strong men rowing in perfect unison, the oars moving to the beat of a timing drum.”

  “How fast did they move?” Krysty asked, getting to the point.

  “Very fast, too damn fast,” Mildred replied honestly, her hands holding on to the gunwale. “With a properly trained crew, a galley could easily catch a windjammer near the shore and ram into it hard enough to crash through, completely through, coming out the other side.” The physician shook her head. “The Romans didn’t have to fire an arrow or draw a single sword. They just plowed the other ship down like roadkill and let the sea do the rest.”

  “How far did Liana say it was until we reach the open lake?” Krysty asked, pulling out her Glock to drop the magazine and check the load.

  “Fifty more miles, just past a peninsula,” Mildred answered, glancing ahead of the boat. Only smooth open water was in sight. “Think we’ll make it before they arrive?”

  Suddenly the beat of the timing drum changed, quickening slightly, the unseen enemy moving faster toward them.

  “We’ll find out soon enough,” Ryan said, raising the Steyr.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Nothing could
be seen moving through the thick fog covering the bay. There was only the dull beat of the timing drums, and the steady splash of oars slapping against the choppy water.

  “Faster! Row faster!” Baron Wainwright commanded, leaning forward in the longboat as if she could hasten their progress through sheer willpower. “The mainlanders must not escape!”

  Her velvet dress was blackened with soot and badly slashed, a plump breast almost fully exposed. But the leather bodice underneath had saved her life from a hail of flying debris. However, the baron had lost a lot of her beautiful hair in the fire that engulfed her ville when the guard towers collapsed, and the side of her face was horribly blistered. Her vaunted beauty was gone and her ville in ruins. Now, madness gleamed from her eyes, and the only thought pounding in her mind in tempo to the timing drum was the ever-repeating word: revenge…revenge…revenge…

  Putting their backs into the job, the dozen sec men in the lead longboat obediently tried to move the oars faster, and stay in tempo to the beating drum. The tethered slave at the drum didn’t care if the mainlanders were caught or not. But any slowing in the beat would result in a brutal whipping, so he tried his best to urge the sec men on to faster and faster speeds.

  “Don’t worry, cousin, they won’t get away,” Baron Griffin growled, working the bolt on his Marlin .444 longblaster. There were only four rounds for the titanic weapon, but he swore to make every fragging one of them draw blood.

  That is, if I can shoot straight, the baron amended privately. In spite of a brief nap and several cups of strong tea, Griffin was still exhausted from the long trip to Northpoint, and yet exhilarated to be so near the hated mainlanders. There were two predark weapons in his gunbelt—the Ruger .38 his father had given him on his deathbed, and his wife’s 12-gauge scattergun. When the one-eyed man fell to his feet to beg for his life, Baron Griffin would execute the coldheart with the sawed-off blaster. The sight of his head exploding would be a balm to his aching heart. It wouldn’t be enough. Griffin wanted to torture the outlander for years as punishment for his cowardly attack, but a fast chilling would have to suffice. However, the slut would go into the gaudy house to serve his sec men until they rode her to death. And I’ll be first to put rubies into that silk saddle, the baron savagely promised, feeling his manhood swell at the thought of the delicious agony he would inflict upon the stocky woman.