by James Axler
Grunting in reply, Baron Wainwright checked the load in her blasters. The coldhearts who attacked Northpoint and jacked her boat had made a critical mistake. They hadn’t checked the warehouse located across the bay from the ville. The winter longboats had been stored there, undergoing their yearly repairs, along with a few birch-bark canoes she used to trade with the outer islands. The Warhammer was gone, but a hundred of the sec men from Anchor and Northpoint had been jammed into the hodgepodge of longboats, a good dozen more riding along in the small canoes. They had mounted the Wendigo on a barge, and Wainwright knew the outlanders didn’t stand a chance against the war wag’s big rapidfire blasters.
She grinned as she thought about the war wag, and the bulky arbalest filling a nearby longboat. The boat just behind it was stacked high with arrows for the deadly weapon, and the mixed crew of the two villes was carrying every working blaster the two barons possessed. Plus, hundreds of boomerangs, spears, bolos and grens. Baskets upon baskets of black-powder grens. More than enough to blow a hole through the world, if necessary. Cobbled together in less than an hour, this was more than a mere caravan, or a flotilla, it was a fragging armada!
Personally, Wainwright wished LeFontaine was here, but the sec chief had not returned from escorting that Hilly to some cave on the southern shore, near the Green Mountain. But such was life.
Just then a low breeze moved among the longboats and suddenly the sec men could see one another much more clearly.
“Must be about noon,” Griffin said, awkwardly working the arming bolt of the Marlin. “The fog is almost gone.”
“Good,” Wainwright muttered. “That’ll make it easier to chill them.”
Suddenly, from ahead of them came the familiar noise of a badly tuned steam engine lumbering along. Without waiting to be told, the sec men in the center longboat started to work the windless of their arbalest, pulling back the ten-foot bow in preparation of loading a yard-long arrow.
“Just watch out for the one-eyed man,” Griffin warned, hefting the heavy longblaster. “He’s a crack shot with a blaster.”
“Me, too,” Wainwright whispered, drawing the S&W .44 Magnum blaster, and clicking back the hammer.
LEANING AGAINST the gunwale to steady himself, Ryan looked through the telescopic sights of the Steyr, but there was nothing to be seen across the bay but the damnable fog.
Softly muffled voices could be heard, along with the clatter of wood hitting wood, and a rhythmic splashing. Oars in the water. Lowering the longblaster, the one-eyed man strained to listen to the timing drum. Counting under his breath to get the beat, Ryan soon cursed at the realization that there were several drums. However, the bastard things were pounding in such perfect unison that it was impossible for him to even guess the exact number. There could be dozens, maybe even hundreds.
“Gaia, it sounds like the baron sent everything she had after us,” Krysty muttered uneasily, swaying to the motion of the boat.
“Of course, madam,” Doc rumbled, a blaster in each hand. “We have the speed, but they must intimately know this bay. It is the source of their livelihood. If our vessel becomes entangled with another sandbar, we shall most definitely become dead in the water.”
Shifting the med kit to keep it out of the way, Mildred tried not to shiver at the phrase. Dead in the water. She had never truly understood the nautical term before. In a sea battle, standing still meant you died. End of discussion. Mentally, the physician made a note to add this incident to her growing codex. If we survive today, she added privately.
Suddenly there was the stomping from the stairwell, and everybody spun with their blasters at the ready as Jak came into view brandishing a stone ax.
“Could use hand,” the sweat-drenched teenager stated simply, then turned and descended back into the engine room.
“I’ll go,” Krysty offered, holstering her blaster. “My snub-nose has the worst range.”
“Fair enough,” Ryan said, giving the redhead a meaningful glance. “I’ll give a shout if anybody gets past us.”
She patted her blaster. “If snakeskin boots appear on the stairs, the owner will never reach the bottom in one piece.”
“Good. And if you hear me call you Amanda or Abigail…”
“We blow the engine and sink this tub.” Reaching out, Krysty stroked his scarred cheek, speaking volumes, then she turned and headed off.
For a moment Ryan watched her go until she was out of sight, then concentrated on business. The best way to keep Krysty sucking air was to make sure that the baron and her sec men never got on this boat alive.
“Mildred, go see if J.B. can get any more speed out of this thing,” Ryan growled, shouldering the longblaster. “Then go load the arbalest.”
Looking at the ungainly weapon, the physician nodded thoughtfully to herself, then strode into the wheelhouse. A split second later Liana came out, holding a handful of leather quivers filled with arrows.
“I found these in the armory,” Liana announced, dropping the quivers onto the deck, a rapidfire crossbow hung across her slim back. “With the wind at our backs they’ll have much better range than anything coming this way.”
“Our thanks, dear lady, but now you should seek refuge in the hold,” Doc said in unaccustomed frankness. “Soon, we shall be in harm’s way.”
“Where you go, I follow,” Liana said simply, feeding a half-arrow in the hopper of the elaborate weapon, then several more.
At the words, Doc took her small hand and gently squeezed. Then as if never seeing it before, Doc saw the wedding ring on his left hand. Emily.
“We need to talk,” the time traveler said.
“Later,” Ryan interrupted, pulling out the panga and testing the edge of a thumb. “Liana, know what a firebrand is?”
“Sure.”
“Go make some.”
Immediately, Liana rushed off.
With Doc standing watching at the rear gunwale, Ryan went to the empty honeycomb and started hacking at the wooden pivot, alternating the angle of the strikes as if he was chopping down a tree. Soon, the support cracked and the spent rocket pod toppled and crashed onto the deck.
Leaving the gunwale, Doc started to drag the honeycomb aft, as Ryan hacked down the second launcher. Without any rockets, they were only good as shields. At least it gave them something better than the gunwale to stand behind. That was only waist high.
“This position will also make them easy to shove overboard,” Doc added, dusting off his hands. “In case we need to lighten the boat.”
“And a pipe bomb or two stuffed inside wouldn’t hurt, either,” Ryan agreed, dragging the launcher into position.
“Indeed not, sir!” Doc grinned. “It would be most appropriate for us to give the baron some small recompense for the use of her warship, and lead in the coin of the realm these days!”
“Bet your ass.”
In the distance, the drums continued, growing ever louder.
Lashing the honeycombs into place with some rope, the men tested the knots to make sure they were secure. A few minutes later, Liana returned with a wicker basket full of rope, and a ceramic demijohn.
“Cooking oil,” she announced, setting the items down behind the impromptive barricade. “I also told J.B. the old poem on how to find the passage to the open lake.”
“Poem?” Doc asked curiously, arching an eyebrow.
“‘Two tall pines will show you the way,’” she recited, in a clear strong voice. “‘One faces freedom, and the other looks away.’”
“How the frag does a tree look away?” Ryan demanded skeptically.
“Sir, trees have faces,” Liana said patiently, as if explaining something to a small child.
“Faces,” Ryan repeated.
She nodded vigorously.
After a moment Ryan shrugged in acceptance. Okay, the local trees had faces. Had to be muties. He just hoped that J.B. could figure out which way the fragging tree was looking when the time came. Ahead of the boat, the bay was starting to
narrow, as if becoming an inlet, the water studded with an archipelago of tiny islands, most of them too small for even a newborn stingwing to safely land on, much less support a full grown tree.
“I brought air support,” Mildred called, returning with the bulky munitions bag slung over a shoulder, the Uzi bumping into her backside with every step.
“Well done, madam!” Pulling out a knife, Doc began to cut the sounding line into several pieces of the exact same length.
As the companions started to lash the rope to pipe bombs, the drumming got noticeably louder, and a long narrow boat slipped out of the fog bank. At the front was a wooden shield more suitable for an ax fight, but Ryan knew it would probably also serve well against blasters.
“There they be,” a sec man shouted, pointing an accusing finger.
Instantly, Ryan dropped the pipe bomb, swung up the Steyr, aimed and fired.
The sec man flipped over backward from the arrival of a 7.62 mm hollowpoint round, his life spraying across the other sec men filling the boat. Several of them recoiled, dropping their oars, but most did not, and kept steadily rowing, their bloody faces full of murderous rage.
“And the whale beholds Captain Ahab,” Doc whispered, drawing his two blasters, and thumbing back the hammers.
“Galley, my ass, that’s a longboat,” Mildred muttered, carefully cutting the fuse to each pipe bomb until it was less than an inch long. “It’s much faster than a—Aw, crap!”
Exiting the mist came another longboat stuffed full of even more sec men armed with a wide variety of weapons. Then came a score of birch-bark canoes holding only a single occupant, closely followed by a dozen more longboats carrying at least a hundred sec men. One longboat was equipped with an arbalest and a stack of arrows, while another boasted the deadly bamboo honeycomb of a rocket launcher. And behind them all was a barge bearing Wendigo.
Instantly the four companions stopped what they were doing and unleashed a barrage of lead at the honeycomb, cutting down a sec woman trying to light the master fuse. With a strangled cry, she toppled overboard and disappeared below the choppy surface. A few moments later, the gasping woman resurfaced, only to have a longboat ram into her head. The skull cracked open with horrid results, and the corpse slipped below the keel of the vessel.
“Get that big bastard!” sec chief Donovan bellowed, fanning his blaster at the Warhammer. Incredibly, the lead hit the gunwale and honeycomb, sounding like somebody knocking on a door.
Kneeling behind the honeycomb, Ryan centered the crosshairs on the snarling face of the sec chief, adjusted for the wind and distance and gently squeezed the trigger. Spinning, Donovan fell, the longblaster flying from his bandaged hand to splash into the lake.
In reply, a swarm of boomerangs lashed out from the army of sec men, along with a flurry of half-arrows from their rapidfire crossbows.
The spinning boomerangs fell short, skipping along the surface of the lake to hit the hull of the Warhammer with a dull thud before splashing into the bay. But arching high, the half-arrows came down like a rain of death, impacting everywhere on the warship, one of them pinning Mildred’s med kit to the deck.
Lifting her crossbow, Liana sent off a single arrow, a piece of burning rope lashed to the shaft. For a long moment it hung in the air, almost seeming to stand still, then it arched down to hit the honeycomb.
Screaming in terror, a sec man yanked out the firebrand, when a shot rang out and he doubled over, his belly gushing red life. Yelling obscenities, another sec man grabbed the smoking firebrand and used it to ignite the master fuse of the rocket launcher.
Lighting the fuse on a pipe bomb attached to the end of a rope, Doc spun it to near invisibility, then let go. The explosive charge sailed away, going much too high and lofting over the jeering armada before violently detonating.
The hail of shrapnel peppered the assorted crafts, the pieces of casing and bent nails shredding the exposed people, and ripping apart the longboat carrying the honeycomb. Listing at first, the craft slowed, then tilted sideways, just as the rockets started to launch. Skipping across the bay, they blew up two other longboats before the honeycomb went under the surface. The other longboats raced to get away as there was fierce bubbling, and then the launcher detonated, a watery geyser rising high into the afternoon sky, raining pieces of bamboo and human organs across the turbulent bay.
Spotting a busty woman who seemed to be shouting orders to the sec men, Ryan guessed that had to be Baron Wainwright, and centered his crosshairs on her when he saw Baron Griffin rise into view cradling a monstrously huge longblaster. Fireblast, that was a bastard Marlin!
Aiming quickly, the two men fired at the same moment.
The booming .444 Magnum Express round of the predark blaster hit nothing, the slug humming into the distance, but the 7.62 mm round from the Steyr slammed the baron smack in the chest, and he dropped, splinters exploding from under his clothing.
“More fragging armor,” Ryan growled, trying again for the man’s head. But the motion of the steamboat and that of the longboats was making marksmanship mostly a matter of luck. He wasted two rounds hitting nothing, then put two more into the hull. The lead slapped the wood, but the craft did not even slow, much less sink.
As the angry baron struggled to work the Marlin, Ryan coolly emptied an entire clip as fast as he could, the slugs hammering the baron backward, and finally hitting the longblaster. With an audible ricochet, the weapon was jerked from his startled grip and dropped into the bay. Instantly, a sec man dived for the weapon, but even if successful, he was soon left behind by the speeding armada.
Screaming wordlessly, Baron Griffin emptied his blaster at the companions. Holding his breath, Ryan got the man again in the chest. Staggering from the blow, Griffin merely reloaded and started banging away again, before sec chief Donovan pulled him down behind the wooden armor.
More half-arrows and boomerangs were released as several canoes darted ahead of the longboats, the sec men using both hands to paddle, stone knives held in their teeth like outlander pirates.
Peeking out from behind the honeycomb, Mildred kneeled at the gunwale and switched the Uzi to full-auto before hosing the nimble little crafts with a lethal stream of 9 mm Parabellum rounds. The copper-jacketed slugs tore through the sec men before sinking the canoes. Paddling furiously, the rest of the sec men in canoes tried to get away, and Ryan took out one with the Steyr, while Mildred aced the rest. Doc and Liana concentrated on the longboats.
Raising a protective shield, Wainwright shouted something the companions could not hear, and there immediately came the totally unexpected report of a big-bore blaster from a couple of longboats.
The companions ducked fast, and the gunwale of the Warhammer was pelted with incoming lead. One of the ropes holding a honeycomb into place snapped, and a window in the wheelhouse loudly shattered.
“No damage!” J.B. shouted.
As the companions stood to return fire, another salvo came, and Doc staggered backward, dropping his weapons as a dark red stain began to spread across his frilly shirt.
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Sixteen
The ragged fusillade of blasterfire continued as a bleeding Doc slumped to the deck and the LeMat skittered across the slightly tilting boat, heading straight for the water. Diving forward, Liana caught the blaster just before it went over the edge.
Crouching behind the gunwale, Mildred shoved the Uzi over to Ryan. The one-eyed man checked the clip, then stood and burped the rapidfire at the sec men in short bursts.
“How bad is it?” Mildred demanded, checking the position of Doc’s wound. The upper arm was usually a good place to get shot, if that was possible—lots of flesh, and only a single major artery to worry about. But that was not what she was worried about.
“Just a flesh wound,” Doc said, straining against the pain. “Nothing serious.”
“Glad to hear it,” she remarked, setting down the med kit before pulling the man forward to check the back of the
arm. There was no corresponding hole. Damn, she thought, the slug was still in him.
Blasterfire sounded from the longboats again, closer this time, and lead smacked into the wood along the hull. Then more arrows pelted down from the sky, feathering the deck and wheelhouse.
Slinging the Uzi, Ryan lit the fuse on a pipe bomb, then released it in an easy pitch. It was still airborne when he ducked, and the explosion rattled the Warhammer. Screams came from the sec men, along with a great deal of splashing.
“This is going to hurt, and you know these folks like poison,” Mildred remarked, reaching into the kit to pull out a pair of needle-nose pliers recovered from a car shop, along with a bottle of shine. “So you know what’s coming.”
“D-do your worst, Hippocrates,” the scholar growled, pulling out his old leather wallet and placing it between his teeth. “I am prepared.”
Standing, Liana trigger the LeMat twice, the barrel jumping wildly with every shot. Stepping behind a honeycomb, she scowled at the weapon, then tucked it into her gunbelt. The recoil of the blaster was far beyond her ability to control.
Sloshing shine over the pliers, Mildred plunged them into the wound, causing a surge of fresh blood. Inhaling sharply at the contact, Doc went stiff, but said nothing, his free hand tightening into a fist until the knuckles audibly popped and cracked.
“Theo?” Liana said, the name a question.
“Tut-tut, dear girl, I am fine.” Doc coughed, wiping his mouth on the back of a trembling hand. “The good doctor’s administrations are sometimes medieval in nature, but always highly effective.”
“Shut up, ya old coot,” Mildred snorted, feeling the contact of steel on the soft lead. As carefully as possible, she extracted the miniball, doing the minimum of damage to the surrounding tissue, and briefly inspected it in the wan sunlight. In spite of the red smears of blood, there seemed to also be some other color on the lead. Damnation, she thought, no choice then.
