NUKE SPAWN

Everyone who lives in Deathlands must endure the hellscape of a world mutilated by nukes and madness. Survival is a grim pursuit, achieved only by the most ruthless means. Yet Ryan Cawdor and his companions remain determined to persevere by doing whatever it takes to survive.

DEATH INFESTATION

When a mat-trans malfunction strands Ryan Cawdor and his friends in a gutted redoubt in the West Indies, the crystal waters offer them a tantalizing glimpse of untouched splendor. But the oasis is abruptly shattered by violent and ruthless pirates, and Ryan has to barter with a young guide, a teenage boy on a blood quest against a sadistic local warlord, to navigate a land teeming with predators—mutie, human and animal. The race is on to find a second redoubt, buried deep in the inhospitable heart of Monster Island. As pirates, mutie sec men and monsters converge, the kill zone widens, blood flows...and the group rushes to escape paradise before it destroys them.

Because even paradise has claws in Deathlands.

J.B. raced up the gangplank

He traveled its length in heartbeats, covering left as he sprinted past the cabin, but nobody lay in wait for him. He let the Uzi drop to the end of its sling and waved Mildred to follow from cover.

As she started up the gangplank, J.B. kicked aside the dead pirate sprawled behind the Browning and took his place.

A few seconds passed before Ryan appeared, running flat out, his longblaster slantwise across his chest. As he headed west from the street, a mob of pursuers burst onto the waterfront behind him.

Roaring in triumph, they leveled their blasters at Ryan’s fleeing back.

Crimson Waters

James Axler

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan “press on” has solved, and always will solve, the problems of the human race.

—Calvin Coolidge,

30th President of

the United States

THE DEATHLANDS SAGA

This world is their legacy, a world born in the violent nuclear spasm of 2001 that was the bitter outcome of a struggle for global dominance.

There is no real escape from this shockscape where life always hangs in the balance, vulnerable to newly demonic nature, barbarism, lawlessness.

But they are the warrior survivalists, and they endure—in the way of the lion, the hawk and the tiger, true to nature’s heart despite its ruination.

Ryan Cawdor: The privileged son of an East Coast baron. Acquainted with betrayal from a tender age, he is a master of the hard realities.

Krysty Wroth: Harmony ville’s own Titian-haired beauty, a woman with the strength of tempered steel. Her premonitions and Gaia powers have been fostered by her Mother Sonja.

J. B. Dix, the Armorer: Weapons master and Ryan’s close ally, he, too, honed his skills traversing the Deathlands with the legendary Trader.

Doctor Theophilus Tanner: Torn from his family and a gentler life in 1896, Doc has been thrown into a future he couldn’t have imagined.

Dr. Mildred Wyeth: Her father was killed by the Ku Klux Klan, but her fate is not much lighter. Restored from predark cryogenic suspension, she brings twentieth-century healing skills to a nightmare.

Jak Lauren: A true child of the wastelands, reared on adversity, loss and danger, the albino teenager is a fierce fighter and loyal friend.

Dean Cawdor: Ryan’s young son by Sharona accepts the only world he knows, and yet he is the seedling bearing the promise of tomorrow.

In a world where all was lost, they are humanity’s last hope....

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter One

“Smoke!”

The cry penetrated the fog of ache and confusion that enveloped Ryan Cawdor’s brain and body.

“Need go! Now!”

Jak Lauren. He recognized the albino youth’s voice.

Also his urgency. Jak said little, even less than J. B. Dix, the group’s armorer. When he did speak, it was even more to the point.

Ryan made himself sit up. He wobbled. His head spun like a gyroscope. The mat-trans unit swirled with the usual jump mists, but the stench of ozone and burning insulation was cutting through the physical haze as well as that in his brain now. It made his eye water and his stomach feel even worse.

Jump sickness, he thought. The jump had been a rough one. Jumping outside normal space via mat-trans gateway was always a wrenchingly disorienting experience, but it seldom hit him as hard as this one had.

Someone tugged his arm. By sheer iron will he forced himself to move, despite the pain and nausea. He lurched unsteadily to his feet.

Another hand clutched the back of his coat. Before he could get his balance, he felt himself being towed forward. He had to speed-stagger to keep from falling on his face on the hard floor.

He tried to fight off his assistant. “Krysty!” he cried.

His voice came out a croak. Dense brown smoke watered his eye and scorched down his throat like lye.

“I’m fine, Ryan!” he heard her call. Her hoarseness didn’t encourage him to believe she was exactly telling the truth.

But the fact that she was awake and aware enough to respond reassured him. He put a hand down briefly to keep from collapsing despite what he was pretty sure was the wiry strength of Jak—a young man half his size—holding him up. Then he banged his left shoulder on the frame of the six-sided chamber’s door and was out.

At once the air cleared. He fell to his knees, coughing hard enough to bring up a lung. Jak let him go.

When the hacking fit passed he shook his head to clear it, then raised it to look around.

They were in the gateway’s antechamber. A few feet away his redheaded mate, Krysty Wroth, stood with one arm around the shoulders of Mildred Wyeth, helping her keep her feet.

Mildred was a black woman in her late thirties, with hair worn in beaded plaits. She was stocky, but after a few years of hiking across the Deathlands very little of that was fat. Despite Mildred’s weight, Krysty didn’t have much trouble holding her up. Mildred was also a freezie from predark.

Ryan became aware of Jak hovering at his side nervously. “Thanks,” he said to the youth, whose white hair had fallen forward to almost obscure his face. “I’m fit to fight. Help the others.”

“At last you rejoin us, my dear Ryan,” a deep voice said. “Welcome back to the land of the living.”

Dr. Theophilus Tanner stood by a darkened bank of camp consoles, looking dapper, and surprisingly hale for a man who normally looked as if he were on his last leg after a jump. A tall stork of a man with silver-white hair hanging down to the collar of his old-time frock coat, he carried a black swordstick with a silver lion’s head.

His head still feeling as if it might go spinning off his shoulders at any moment, Ryan looked back at the mat-trans. The walls of the chamber were made of armaglass tinted a dull, nasty-looking mustard color. Smoke of a similar but darker hue still snaked out into the antechamber of the redoubt that housed the mat-trans.

“Not good,” he muttered, rubbing the back of his neck.

“What do we have here?” Doc asked.

“Looks like a map,” J.B. said. He was a little banty rooster of a man, in a battered, dusty bomber jacket, steel-framed specs and a fedora. In addition to being the group’s armorer and general gadget master, he was also Ryan Cawdor’s oldest and best friend.

It was a map, Ryan saw. Or at least part of one, anyway, hung on a sheet of particle board that showed a mess of holes. Some were small and precisely round. Others were more irregular.

“Somebody blasted the map for some reason,” J.B. said. “Bullets ricocheted off the wall behind. They tumbled and deformed. That’s why the funny holes.”

“Maybe it wasn’t the map they were shooting at,” Mildred said. “Maybe there was somebody standing in front of it at the time.”

J.B. shrugged. “Triple-stupe idea, either way. The ricochets were as like to chill the shooters as whoever they were shooting at.”

“From the scrap of map,” Doc said, reaching up to almost touch the faded colors of the paper with the tip of a finger, “we would appear to be here, in the Leeward Islands—the northern segment of the Lesser Antilles, in the Caribbean.”

“How you reckon that, Doc?” Mildred asked.

“Behold the symbol here,” he said. “An ocher hexagon. Does that suggest anything to you?”

He smiled, his winter-pale blue eyes dancing, and nodded toward the gateway.

Ryan stepped close. “So mebbe this one in the mountains is another mat-trans gateway?” he asked.

“It would certainly appear so. If that is indeed the case, my dear Ryan, then it would seem to be located on the island of Puerto Rico.”

He frowned. “Curiously, the mat-trans in San Juan we jumped to once upon a time isn’t shown. Perhaps it postdates this facility and the map was never updated.”

Ryan shrugged, uninterested. Knowing, not knowing—wouldn’t feed him, either way.

“So where are we now?” Krysty asked. She smoothed back her hair from her flawless face.

Doc shook his head. “Alas, dear lady, that I cannot say. The geography of the region was never of more than passing interest to me.”

“Well, let’s get rolling, people,” Ryan said. “Finding some kind of supplies in this rad-blasted redoubt is of more than passing interest to me.”

* * *

“WHAT COULD DO?” Jak asked.

A quick search had showed the redoubt’s stores were well looted, so empty they might never have been stocked in the first place. But that wasn’t what had them all standing and staring openmouthed in awe and surprise.

The albino youth asked a good question, Ryan judged. The walls of a redoubt could shrug off blaster bullets like spit, and it would take a powerful blaster to seriously scratch them.

The corridor ahead of them was pinched shut, like an old length of hose with a swag-bellied sec man standing on it.

“Seismic activity, at a guess, dear boy,” Doc said.

“Talk plain, Doc!” Jak admonished.

“Earthquakes,” J.B. said.

“I thought most of the really massive quakes happened along the Pacific Rim,” Mildred said.

“The West Indies and Central America have been traditional hotbeds of such upheaval,” Doc said, used to Jak’s outbursts.

While he could sit stone still for hours on guard or on a hunt, Jak wasn’t known for patience where his fellow humans were concerned, particularly the time-trawled professor. Still, Ryan eyed the old man closely. He also had a habit of drifting in and out of reality.

Mildred grunted. “Oh. That’s right. I remember back in the early twentieth century there was a terrible eruption that killed tens of thousands of people. Mount Pelée, the volcano was called. Wiped out the city of Saint-Pierre the way Vesuvius did Pompeii.”

“On the island of Martinique, then,” Doc said. “That would lie south and perhaps somewhat east of here, if my reading of that map fragment was correct.”

J.B. rubbed the back of his neck. “We sure got bellies full of eruptions when we were in Mex Land,” he remarked.

“Gaia is restless here,” Krysty said, frowning. Her emerald-green eyes were pointed at the crushed corridor, but Ryan saw they were focused on nothing in particular.

He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. We need to find a way out of here.”

“Find food,” Jak said. “Hungry.”

“How can you even think of food?” Mildred demanded. “My stomach’s still doing slow rolls from that damned jump.”

J.B. squinted critically into the dark depths of his upended canteen. “I wouldn’t sweat the grub, Jak,” he said. “The water’s about gone. Dehydration’ll chill us before hunger gets a proper start gnawing our vitals.”

“So,” Ryan said. “Out.”

“I hope the doors aren’t blocked by the same forces that did this,” Mildred said. “Whatever they were.”

Jak shook his head. “Open. Air fresh.”

Mildred eyed him. “You sure about that, Jak?”

“Power’s still on,” J.B. added. “Or didn’t you notice we’re not stumbling around in darkness blacker than twelve feet up a stubbie’s bowels?”

Jak shook his head irritably. “Air fresh,” he repeated. “Not filtered. Not smell?”

J.B. drew in a deep breath. “Mebbe not,” he said, “compared to you.”

Ryan grunted. “So lead the way,” he said to Jak. “Get us out of here.”

* * *

J.B. SQUINTED THROUGH his minisextant at the sun, which was about halfway up a blue sky free of chem clouds. “You were right about the map,” J.B. said, lowering the device. “We’re in the Caribbean, all right.”

The companions stood on the highest point of the island, which was as bare as a baby’s backside and not a whole lot larger, if not nearly so smooth. In fact, the rock beneath their feet was black, hard and porous—lava. Though it didn’t rise more than forty or fifty feet above the dancing green water that surrounded it, its regular shape unpleasantly suggested that it was the cinder cone of an actual volcano.

The breeze up the west side of the island, off a beach where stretches of white sand alternated with rusty-brown, smelled of salt and decaying sea life.

“What now?” Krysty asked.

“We could try the mat-trans,” Mildred said. “It hasn’t exactly taken us a long time to find out there was nothing but rock and sand on this damn island. Might be able to get back inside the time limit of the LD button.”

The gateways had a feature that allowed a user to return to the originating point by pressing the “last destination” button within half an hour of a jump.

J.B. frowned at his wrist chron. “We’d be crowding it,” he said. “Anyway, I’m not rightly sure I want to trust a malfunking machine.”

“Do you like the idea of dying of thirst here, with water, water everywhere, and not a drop to damn well drink?” Mildred asked.

“Not starve, anyway,” Jak said. “Sea here—food always.”

* * *

MILDRED GLARED AROUND at the others. “Why not try the gateway? We can always jump to a random destination. It got us here, after all.”

J.B. shook his head. “Bad idea, Millie. There’s something wrong with it. I don’t think it’s safe.”

“Safe?” Doc whinnied the word like a laughing horse. Mildred noted the way his blue eyes rolled. He was losing his grip on reality, which was never rock solid to begin with. “Jumping through time and space by such unnatural means is never safe, J.B.! Never safe at all.”

Doc slumped suddenly, his face crumpling like an old newspaper. Mildred knew he was remembering his lost family and life, before he’d been time-trawled away from everything he knew or held dear by the scientists of Operation Chronos.

“We’re not trying the mat-trans,” Ryan said. He wasn’t a man who minced words; while he might consult his friends on decisions, once he spoke in that tone, as flat and hard as slate, it was final. “We’re getting off this nuke-withered rock. Alive.”

Krysty had walked down toward the beach to the northwest. It wasn’t a long trip.

“There are islands off this way,” she said. “Some of them have trees.”

“Might be game,” J.B. added.

“Trees mean fresh water,” Jak said.

“Not necessarily where we can get at it,” Ryan said. “But yeah.”

“This is an area, as our youthful friend so astutely points out, that abounds in edible sea life,” Doc said. He seemed to have snapped back to the present; he tended to do that when confronted with a problem he found interesting, Mildred had noticed. “That suggests humans live here, too.”

“That’s so,” Ryan said. “People go where there’s chow. So we start working our way from island to island. Only question is, how?”

“Nearest island’s a good mile, mile and a half off,” J.B. said. “Anybody feel like a swim?”

“You’ve got to be kidding me, John Barrymore,” Mildred said. The armorer was her lover. “I can’t swim that far. We don’t know what the current’s like, anyway.”

“Sharks,” Jak stated.

“Just joking, Millie,” J.B. said.

“Down here!”

Everybody looked to where Krysty was standing on the beach with her back to the sea. She was waving.

“I think I found a way!”

Chapter Two

“What way?” Jak said. “Only see water.”

Ryan stood at Krysty’s side on the white coral sand. The others had gathered nearby.

“You have to learn to look below the surface, Jak,” J.B. said.

Ryan was doing so, and frowning. The water close to shore was shallow and as clear as glass, but he wasn’t sure what it was he was seeing.

“It would appear to be a road,” Doc said, bending over like a feeding crane to peer into the water. “Made out of cyclopean blocks. Limestone, I would say.”

Mildred’s forehead creased into a frown. “That sounds like the Bimini Roads,” she said. “Except aren’t they off the Bahamas? And I don’t think the Bahamas are all that near to here, are they?”

Ryan polled the others with his eye. They looked as blank as he felt.

Doc blinked at Mildred like a newly hatched baby bird. “Dear lady,” he said, “I fear the rest of us have little idea what you are saying. Except that, yes, the Bahamas lie far to the northwest of here, beyond the island of Hispaniola. Quite near the east coast of Florida, in fact.”

“So, what would subsurface blocks like this be doing here?” Mildred demanded.

“Who knows?” Ryan said. “Why care?”

“The road, if that’s what it is, seems to lead right past that next island,” Krysty observed. She flashed that smile Ryan loved so well, as dazzling as late-morning sun breaking bright off the wavelets.

“If the road leads to the next island,” Ryan said, “it’s the closest thing to a way off this sorry bare-ass rock that we’ve got. I’m going.”

Doc straightened and shot the cuffs of the white shirt he wore beneath his frock coat. “And we shall follow,” he said. “As usual.”

* * *

“OW! SHIT.”

“What is it, Mildred?” Krysty asked.

They were wading through thigh-deep water, following the big oblong blocks of pale stone. Ryan led, holding his Steyr Scout Tactical longblaster at the ready. Behind him marched J.B., cradling his Uzi. Then Mildred, Krysty and Doc, who flourished his swordstick in the hot air with every sloshing step. Jak brought up the rear, scowling around at the water as if expecting something to dart through it and bite them.

As it appeared, something just had. “My leg,” Mildred said. “Something stung me just now. Right above my right boot.”

Jak pointed. “There!”

What he was pointing at moved fast, but Krysty had good reflexes. She looked in time to see something like a silver shadow, long and slim as the concealed blade of Doc’s sword, dart away through the water.

Looking back at Mildred, she saw a dark cloud puff into the water by her leg.

“’Cudas!” Jak shouted.

“Barracuda,” Doc said doubtfully. “I didn’t think they were known for attacking humans. Swimmers, perhaps. But certainly not walking ones. Or even waders.”

Balancing precariously on one leg against the slow ocean current, Mildred hoisted her right leg out of the water. “Somehow I don’t think this one got the memo, Doc,” she said.

Evidently not. Krysty saw a red slice, vivid against the coffee-with-cream skin of Mildred’s calf. Blood flowed freely to drip into the water.

“Ace on the line,” J.B. said. “That blood could draw sharks.”

“Screw sharks!” shouted Jak. “More ’cuda coming!”

Quickly Krysty looked around. Sure enough, the shallow Caribbean waters, so deceptively peaceful on the surface, swarmed with sinister shiny shapes just below. Some circled just out of range. Others...

Mildred jumped one-legged straight out of the water. “Fuck!” she screamed. Through the roiling water Krysty saw a lean shape lance past, just where the woman had been standing.

With a rattling roar J.B. cut loose a burst from his machine pistol. Water spouted in an arc twenty feet from where Mildred was splashing back down. She came down on both feet but teetered. Krysty grabbed her wrist and kept her from toppling.

The fall itself was no danger, obviously, but to be floundering around, depending on her own modest human swimming abilities, while contending with a shoal of killer fish could be deadly.

A corpse bobbed to the surface. Its belly was white and showed the tips of black tiger stripes. Jaws filled with razor-edged teeth gaped. A round eye stared blankly. An inky cloud surrounded it.

“Good shooting.” Ryan hefted his Scout but didn’t find any targets worth a precious 7.62 mm round.

“Strike, more like,” J.B. called. “I was mainly looking to scare the nuke-suckers off. Or at least back. Bullets don’t travel for shit in water, anyway.”

“These barracuda seem unnaturally large,” Doc said. He had his sword drawn and pointed toward the water. “I do not recall them growing significantly longer than six feet, yet yon specimen is a good nine or ten feet long, and some of his kindred seem longer still.”

“Mebbe muties,” Jak said with a snarl of distaste.

“Keep moving, everybody!” Ryan said. “They’ll chew us to bits if we just stand here gaping like a pack of stupes!”

They moved into a slow-motion run, raising hip-high waves. Krysty held her snub-nosed Smith & Wesson Model 640 in her hand, but their wakes made it difficult to spot the finny horrors close by.

Then again, if they were that close it was probably too late to do anything about them, anyway. Seeing a shape arrow at her from about thirty feet off to her right, Krysty snapped a shot at it. The .38-caliber slug kicked up a foot-tall jet of water. Whether the bullet hit the ’cuda, or even came near, she didn’t know. The fish sheered away.

And she felt an impact against her own left calf. She looked down to see another ten-foot fish whip away from her. By reflex she looked down. It had ripped the tough denim of her jeans, but she saw no blood and felt no sting of salt water on a fresh wound.

“Go!” Jak shouted from right behind her.

J.B.’s Uzi snarled again. Ryan’s Steyr went off with a hard crack that seemed to hit the water and skip like a stone; Krysty felt the shock wave on her cheek as she started into forward motion again.

“They don’t like the bullets hitting near them,” Mildred said in satisfaction, letting her big, ZKR-551 handblaster settle back online from a shot.

“Yeah,” J.B. said. He fired a single shot from his mini-Uzi. “But when I said we had plenty of cartridges, I didn’t mean enough to keep blasting them into the ocean all day to frighten fish.”

Jak snarled a curse. His handblaster roared. Lighting off right behind Krysty, its muzzle-blast made her ears ring, and the shock slapped the back of her head like an open palm. A .357 Magnum revolver had the nastiest blast of any handblaster she’d encountered, nearly as bad as Ryan’s 7.62 mm longblaster.

“Fucker bit!” Jak said, evidently meaning it bit him. He uttered a scream of triumph as another barracuda bobbed to the surface. It had the front part of its head and whole upper jaw blown away.

Though it made her stumble slightly as she continued to run through the warm water, Krysty glanced back. She saw the floating corpse bounce as one of its fellows hit it from below.

“They eat their dead,” she called.

Ryan had slung his longblaster now in favor of his 9 mm SIG-Sauer handblaster. Its cartridges were far more common than the big bottleneck rifle rounds, and if anything, the pistol’s handiness and quicker firing gave him a better chance of hitting one of the slim, elusive targets. “But I think we got a bigger problem than these little fuckers.”

“Why, Ryan?” Doc asked. Swirls of dark blood trailed from both his legs now. But his upheld swordstick ran red halfway down its blade, indicating he’d at least gotten some vengeance. “The blighters appear to be fleeing.”

“’Cuda got bigger problem, too!” Jak yelled. “Look!”

Thirty yards to their left, a big triangular fin cut the surface. As Krysty watched, at least half a dozen more appeared behind it, gray and unspeakably sinister.

“Sharks!” Jak shouted unnecessarily.

“Bull sharks, I do believe,” Doc said. “Known for their highly aggressive natures. And for their proclivity for extremely shallow water.”

Krysty spun and lunged. She caught Jak and yanked him up out of the water in a huge gout of spray. She winced at the way the nasty sharp bits of metal sewn to his jacket bit into the flesh of her arm, meant to discourage just this sort of bear hug.

A foot-tall fin slashed past beneath him, barely two feet from Krysty’s own legs.

Krysty managed to pump three quick shots after the departing bull shark.

“Looks bad, here,” J.B. said, racking back the charging handle on his Uzi after slamming in a fresh thirty-round mag.

“All this blood in the water is drawing them,” Doc said. “It will induce a feeding frenzy, no doubt.”

Ryan had holstered his SIG-Sauer to whip up the Steyr. He fired a blast. Water gushed into the air just in front of another fin carving toward him. The big shark turned away not five feet from Ryan’s legs, red foam marking its wake.

“Ryan, behind you!” Mildred shouted.

Ryan spun with remarkable alacrity despite the water’s drag. Holding on to his longblaster’s forestock, he whipped his long panga from its sheath, sidestepped and swung upward.

Horrified, Krysty saw a great dark shape like a fat gray torpedo blast out of the water to fly with its open jaws aimed right at Ryan’s face. Or where it had been an instant before. She saw his heavy knife blade score a long gash from the gill slits back along the water-streaming side of the killer fish. Trailing a pennon of bright blood, the shark dived back into the water in a huge shower of spray.

In an eyeblink Ryan had the panga sheathed again and his longblaster shouldered. Taking a flash aim through the flip-up ghost ring sights, he fired, but not at the shark that had so narrowly missed biting his head off. Nor at any of the others swimming horrifyingly close by to the eight-foot-wide path of submerged stone slabs. But at a fin moving at the back of the pack, almost a hundred feet away.

A pink-tinged jet greeted the shot, and the fin began to move away. Ryan cranked the bolt and fired again, at another of the more distant sharks.

“They’re turning away!” Mildred shouted.

“Got bigger food,” Jak said as Krysty let him back down into the warm embrace of the sea. Her bare left arm streamed blood from a dozen gashes into the water.

“You’re hurt, Krysty,” Mildred said.

“Not as bad as I will be if those big bastards come back,” Krysty said. “Let’s move while we’ve got a chance! We might actually make the island.”

They ran clumsily. The water pulled at Krysty. Strong as she was, it sucked the strength right out of her. She was bleeding, too—not fast, but enough that it would sap her energy in a short time.

Doc ran high-stepping, water flashing by his upraised knees. But the effort quickly took its toll. Mildred cruised past him, grabbed him by the coat and towed him behind her as if she were a tugboat.

Most of the sharks were distracted by the bigger feasts offered by the three of their kinfolk Ryan had chilled. Especially the one that was thrashing on the surface, sending prisms of water flying and causing a tremendous commotion. Which apparently was exactly what sharks liked, because the other fins in sight were making a beeline toward their flailing comrade.

Most of them. J.B.’s Uzi loosed off another burst as one came close from the far side. A beat later, Ryan’s longblaster boomed.

Then, before Krysty even realized the island was nearby, Ryan was standing in water to his shins, shouting at them to power on as he swung up the Steyr to put another shot into a charging shark. J.B. stopped to stand beside him and lay down covering fire with his machine pistol. The pistol slugs might or might not actually hurt the sharks underwater, but the tubby gray monsters sure didn’t like the impacts in the water nearby.

Then they were on a white beach. Krysty toppled and fell forward.

* * *

“HOW ARE YOU DOING?” Ryan asked, squatting beside Krysty where she sat in the shade of a palm tree near some brush.

She smiled wanly and gripped his offered hand with hers. Mildred knelt on her left, clucking in dismay as she did her best to tend the cuts Jak’s boobied jacket had left in her arm.

“Better now,” the redhead said. “Thanks to you, lover.”

“We’re not home free yet,” Ryan said, standing. “Just on a different island.”

“Jak and Doc think they might find fresh water,” J.B. said. “Plus the road keeps going to the next island, whatever that’s worth.”

Ryan rose and peered into the distance. About half a mile to the north stood yet another island. This one was large, at least a couple hundred yards by about a quarter mile. The next one looked larger still.

“Still got to get there,” he said. “And those ’cudas are still around. Sharks, too. Even if that last bunch got bellies full of each other, there are still lots of sharks in a whole bastard ocean.”

“Well, see now, Ryan,” J.B. said. “I aim to do something about that.”

He had one of their precious few blocks of C-4 moldable plas-ex and was breaking it into quarter-kilo chunks and stuffing those into detonators. The explosive had been scavvied from a recent find.

“Shock waves propagate better in water than in air, John Barrymore,” Doc said, walking back along the beach. “Would not those bombs you are so cleverly improvising pose as great a threat to us as to the sharks?”

“Find any drinking water?” Ryan asked.

Doc sat down in the shade of some kind of bush and mopped his forehead with a handkerchief. “No. Jak was circling the other way. Perhaps he’ll have more luck. He has a better nose for such things than I.”

“There,” Mildred said, cutting off the end of a roll of gauze she’d wound around Krysty’s upper arm and standing up. “That ought to keep you from bleeding to death.”

“Thank you, Mildred,” Krysty said.

Mildred grunted. “Glad to help. Makes me feel useful.”

She looked at Doc. “I’m no expert on underwater blasts. But I believe shock waves in water pose danger mostly to internal organs. And mainly through bodily orifices.”

“So if we keep our bungholes out of the water,” Ryan said, “we should be green.”

“Not exactly a medically precise description,” Mildred said, “but close enough for the Deathlands. Of course, good thing we don’t have lawyers anymore, so you can’t sue me for malpractice if I’m wrong.”

Doc smiled sadly. “No lawyers indeed,” he said. “Ah, it just goes to show. Even a war taking billions of innocent lives has a bright side, if one looks closely enough!”

Chapter Three

“Yonder she lies,” the old one-legged black boatman said grandly. “Nueva Tortuga. Or NuTuga, as the folk who live there like to call her.”

“If I am not mistaken,” Doc said, “this is the island of Nevis we see before us.”

“So ’tis,” the boatman said.

“Call me Oldie of the Sea,” he’d told them. “Or call me Ishmael. Just don’t call me late for supper.” Then he’d laughed and laughed, so hard it was infectious despite the fact the joke was older than Doc and twice as worn-out. He’d appeared out of a sun falling into a brownish-black bank of clouds on the western horizon, rowing his little skiff, towing a net full of writhing silver-sided fish.

Ryan frowned out across water that danced with midafternoon sun-dazzle at a hilly green island to the north and east of the little boat. A shiny white ville with neat orange-and-red-tile roofs tumbled down some of the hills to a harbor crowded with boats. None of them was as much as a hundred feet long, as far as he could tell.

It looked like the last place on earth settled by, inhabited by and run exclusively for the benefit of the coldest-hearted pirates in the West Indies.

He and his companions had found an inhabited island late the previous afternoon. Actually, they’d found the boatman’s camp, which consisted mainly of a firepit and a shanty made of warped, sun-silvered planks and a roof of ancient corrugated plastic, a mottled cream color with little hints of original orange remaining in the troughs. Ryan couldn’t see it surviving the next stiff breeze, to say nothing of the next hurricane.

A quick search of the island, which wasn’t much bigger than the one they’d jumped in on, showed no one else was currently on it. But the fact that there were ashes and burned wood chunks visible in the fireplace, instead of drifted sand, showed somebody had been there recently. After a brief conference they agreed to hide in the brush. Except for Ryan, who sat to see who showed up by boat.

“So...Oldie,” Mildred said reluctantly. “You sure you’re going to be okay here?”

“Sure,” he said. “Ever’body’s safe as houses in NuTuga. Houses’re safe, too. Syndicate don’t let anybody act out. Ever’body’s equal before the law.”

He was a wiry guy of medium height, just a finger or two taller than J.B. His skin had started black and gotten blacker from constant exposure to the Caribbean sun. It made for a startling contrast with his hair and beard, full despite his years although cut close to his skull, and white as the snow he’d likely never seen. His face was a mass of wrinkles, as much, Ryan reckoned, from habitual good humor as age or sun.

He’d haggled briefly and halfheartedly before agreeing to feed them, refill their canteens from his hidden water cistern, let them sleep rough on his island and ferry them to the nearest port in the morning for three 7.62 mm rounds from Ryan’s Steyr Scout longblaster. Ryan got the impression he only accepted payment because his new friends would naturally suspect him of plotting something if he hadn’t—and that what he was really after was some company, however brief.

His skiff, named the Ernie H, was well kept but seemed as ancient as Oldie was. Right now, the little vessel ran on a broad reach across a breeze from the northwest, using a single triangular sail on the mast. Oldie had a pair of oars locked up under the gunwales for calm seas.

He also had an Ishapore 2A longblaster clamped under a tarp by his seat in the stern. It was the reason he’d been willing to take the 7.62 mm rounds in exchange for passage, since the Indian-made rifle had been built to fire those rounds. Though the forestock was secured by windings of bright red copper wire, Ryan had seen how the steel of the barrel and receiver shone with a faint coating of oil. It was a piece both well used and well maintained.

“So truly,” Doc said, peering toward the near ville, “the city is ruled by a council of pirates?”

“Right as rain,” Oldie said. “They started using the place soon as the quakes settled down after the war. Much as they ever settled down, that is. Wasn’t much commerce to raid in those days, but a lot of richies tried to weather the nuke-storm at sea on their yachts. They made pretty ripe plucking.”

The wind died as they approached the mouth of the harbor. Oldie calmly stood and began furling the sail, easily shifting his weight to accommodate the boat’s rocking.

“Pirates did a lot of coastal raiding in those days, too,” he said. He was clearly doing something he did every day. It didn’t take much conscious attention on his part. “These days, too, of course. Anyway, what with one thing or another, this side of the island wound up with a double-cherry natural harbor—if you could call what made it ‘natural,’ speaking rightly.

“Since the quakes and storms and whatnot had pretty much leveled Charlestown, which was pretty much the only town that counted, here or on St. Kitts just off to the north, there—” he nodded his white-bearded chin at a humpy green line lying off on the horizon as he lowered the sail “—the place tended to attract folks. Took hold right quick as a place to trade. ’Course, being as the only folks with much to trade—or at least, the means to insist on getting paid for what they had to trade, if you catch my drift—were pirates, pirates it was as settled it. Some got so successful they decided they could do better by staying put, keeping things running smooth and taking their cut off the top, than by sea-roving. Less work, and a shitload safer.”

“So they sell rum, gaudy sluts and beans to the gangs that bring in loot,” J.B. said. “Good income, if you got the weapons to hang on to it.”

Oldie grinned. “Told you, they was pirates to start with. They may put on airs and strut around cocky, but they didn’t forget their roots. They call their sec men Monitors. People as run afoul of them live to regret it.”

He got out his oars and set them in locks to either side of the bench that ran across the bow, then sat and began to pull with strong, practiced strokes. Muscles bunched and corded on arms left bare by the sleeveless burlap-sack blouse he wore.

“No engine on this thing?” Mildred asked in apparent surprise.

“Won’t have one.” He turned his head and spat into the water. “Don’t hold by the things. Don’t need gas. Get all the fuel I need, growing from the ground or in our sister the sea. And don’t need replacement parts.”

He grinned and thumped the hand-carved wood stump that replaced his lower left leg. “Not since I whittled this one to replace the pin that mutie eel bit off for me. More-ay we call ’em—‘a’ for ass, ’cause those are some big-ass eels!”

Jak scowled suspiciously. “Thought said shark bit off,” he said.

“Did I?” Oldie laughed. “One of them things. See, son, man gets to a certain age, trivial little details just naturally start to slip out of his mind. Great white, mutie more-ay—whichever. It got my leg and I don’t have it any longer.”

Jak lapsed into sullen silence, as the crusty old bastard laughed at him. But Ryan had seen the end of the stump beneath Oldie’s left knee. Something with big jaws and big teeth had taken it off; he knew that much from the marks. If the ancient half-crazed mariner wanted to make a joke out of something like that, good for him. Ryan had to smile in acknowledgment of his balls.

“Sweet yacht, there,” J.B. said, pointing.

J.B. was no nautical man—far less than Ryan, anyway, who’d at least grown up with small boats as a baron’s son in the rich and powerful East Coast barony of Front Royal. But J.B. was a skilled mechanic and tinkerer, not just an armorer. He knew wags of all sort, land and sea alike. He had a feel for them, and an eye.

Ryan nodded. He admired the clean lines of the vessel, although she had a funny prow: straight up and down, not angling up from the sea. She had to run ninety feet over waterline, with a smooth white coat of paint, unlike many of the other vessels in the harbor, whether masted or motor craft. Most were dilapidated and didn’t look well maintained at all.

Ryan also appreciated the machine gun on the pintle mount rising from the foredeck. He judged it was .30 caliber, which made it a Browning 1919. An oldie but goody, even by the time the balloon went up on the Big Nuke. But if it was maintained properly, as he reckoned this one had to be, it would still be capable of dealing out serious hurt. It even sported a splinter shield welded together from thick steel plates. The gun could kill a small craft’s engine, or just shoot the crew out of a larger vessel, without doing much damage to cargo or hull.

“Not bad,” Oldie admitted, “even if she has an engine in her belly. That’s the Wailer. Don’t burn your eyes on her too long, boys and girls. Like about half the hulls tied up here right now, she belongs to the Sea Wasp Posse, out of Ocho Rios over to Jah-Mek-Ya. Biggest, meanest pirate bunch working the Antilles and northern Gulf since that giant-ass ’cane took down the Black Gang some time back. The Blacks were cocks of the walk before that.”

J.B. caught Ryan’s eye and gave him a quick, tight, closemouthed grin. It hadn’t been a hurricane that took down the most feared pirate crew in the West Indies. Although not one but two hurricanes had helped. The real cause of their demise had been the companions.

It wasn’t a fact Ryan felt the need to advertise. Especially not closing in on a place that was the main pirate trading, refitting and recreational port. Odds were, the Black Gang had been NuTuga’s best customers in their time. The Syndicate might not look kindly on people who took that big a bite out of their business.

Quays had been built out into the NuTuga harbor out of broken-up volcanic rock, mostly a dark, rusty red-brown. The tops had been boarded over with planks. Some of the craft, such as the Wailer, were tied up to them. Others rode at anchor in the harbor itself.

As they entered the harbor Krysty pointed off to the left. “What are those?” she asked.

Squinting, Ryan saw what appeared to be half a dozen steel cranes standing by the shore, which was brown volcanic sand shored up by bigger chunks of lava. Four of the arms were swung out over the harbor. Something that looked like a curiously shaped duffel bag hung from a chain from each into the water. A seagull perched on the rounded top of one, bending forward to peck at it.

“Oh, no,” Krysty said in a small voice.

Frowning, Ryan looked closer. Those were humans hung from the chains, waist-deep in water with steel bands under the armpits. Their sun-blackened bodies were nude. At least one seemed to have been a woman.

One twitched. The seagull spread slate-backed wings and flew away. It had been pecking at the victim’s eyes.

“Is that one still alive?” Krysty asked.

J.B. shrugged. “Not much wind stirring,” he said.

“Oh, God—” Mildred emitted a strangled cry. Turning away just in time, she vomited noisily into the harbor.

“Lady got a delicate disposition?” Oldie inquired solicitously.

“She possesses a certain sensibility,” Doc said, with irony Ryan could make out distinctly even though he wasn’t sure their guide did. “Which fits not altogether comfortably with the exigencies of our modern world.”

Oldie shrugged. “She’s probably not gonna find NuTuga much to her taste, then.”

“Punishment is harsh,” Ryan rasped.

“Told you,” Oldie said with a certain gloomy satisfaction. “Syndicate runs a tight ship, even if they don’t tread the decks themselves much anymore. These poor folk broke the law. So they got their legs slashed and hung into the harbor to think things over.”

“Legs slashed?” Krysty said. She wasn’t a delicate flower, by any stretch. She was Deathlands born and bred, like Ryan himself, like everybody but Doc and the vigorously puking Mildred. It took a lot to shock her.

But this had done the trick.

“Doesn’t that bring ’cudas and sharks?” she asked. The way her emerald-green eyes flashed the instant the words were out of her mouth showed she got it.

“Reckon that’s the point,” J.B. said. “Right?” He took off his glasses and began to polish the lenses with a stained handkerchief.

“Best keep your noses clean while visiting lovely Nueva Tortuga, folks,” Oldie said. He continued to row.

“What manner of crimes,” Doc asked, “would occasion such stern punishment?”

Oldie managed to shrug without missing a stroke. “Could be a lot of things. Theft. Vandalism. Cheating at cards. Welshing on a debt. Brawling.”

J.B. frowned and fitted the glasses back on his nose. “Reckon those things’re pretty much what pass for recreation among pirates,” he said.

“There’re limits, see,” Oldie said.

“What are they, precisely, my good man?” Doc asked.

Oldie laughed. “You sure find out once you cross ’em,” he said, nodding to the dangling, half-submerged bodies.

“So the one real rule is don’t piss off the Syndicate,” Ryan said. He grunted.

Krysty knelt on the sideboard next to Mildred. She helped the shorter woman turn back inboard and wiped her mouth with a rag.

“Are we sure we want to visit this place, Ryan?” she asked.

“We do got a habit of pissing off the powerful, Ryan,” J.B. said.

“It’s not like we’re here on a pleasure cruise,” Ryan said with a bit of a rasp. “We got to find passage back to the mainland. Or some kind of paying gig. Triple-fast. Otherwise we’ll be boiling the shirts off our back to make soup of the sweat—if we could find a way to pay for fresh water, that is.”

“Oh, there’s work aplenty to be found in NuTuga,” Oldie said, “if a body’s got the stomach for it.”

“We got the stomach for a lot,” J.B. said. But he was frowning at the dangling bodies as he did it.

The body that had had the seagull pecking its eyes jerked. Ryan guessed something big had hit its legs underwater. He still couldn’t tell if any kind of living muscular reaction contributed to the motion.

He didn’t really want to know. He was a hard man, but he had limits, too.

“So the ville’s actually run by pirates?” Mildred asked. Her skin was the color of the ash in Oldie’s firepit. “They must be monsters.”

“They turned into something worse,” the old man said. “Government.”

And he laughed and laughed.

Chapter Four

Oldie pulled the Ernie H up next to the end of an unoccupied wharf. “You folks make it ashore without I tie up?” he asked.

“Reckon so,” Ryan said. “Why?”

J.B. went over the side to stand knee-deep in water on the slope of the busted-rock mole to help the others across.

“Don’t wanna pay their fee. Not my kind of place, NuTuga. Not my kinda crowd.”

“That speaks well for you,” Mildred said.

“Don’t they try to stick you, anyway?” Ryan asked. He was surprised that the Syndicate, as Oldie described it, would let loose of the smallest chance at income. It was standard operating procedure for barons everywhere, whatever they called themselves.

Oldie laughed again. “The Monitors let me slide if I don’t technically land. They’re not too keen on splashing around in water where all the big fish and most of the little ones got a taste for human flesh.”

J.B. was just handing Mildred across to the slanted rock face of the pier. He cocked an eyebrow.

“Get your fool ass out of the water, J.B.,” Ryan said.

The armorer grinned, but he scampered up to the boardwalk with a vigorous splash just the same.

Ryan sat on the outboard gunwale to counterbalance the others as first Krysty, then Doc leaped to the rock. Contemptuously, Jak jumped into the water, then waded the couple of steps up out of the sea. At the last, he yelped and jumped clear.

“Something bumped leg!” he said, then glared as the others grinned at him.

Ryan tossed everybody’s pack and weapons over to them. After Krysty fielded his own, he took the leap. He wasn’t going to go wading with sharks and killer ’cuda.

“Word to the wise, Ryan,” Oldie called after him.

Ryan looked down at the man where he sat in the prow with his oars cocked up in their locks.

“Mind your steps here, folks,” the old man said. “Walk careful, especially around the Sea Wasps.”

“I thought you said theirs was an egalitarian society,” Doc said.

“Yeah. Whatever that is. The Syndicate is law.” He chuckled. “Just remember that people are basically dogs. They always got them a pack order. The more folks talk about everybody being equal, the more some’re more equal than others.”

“Talk sense!” Jak grumbled.

J.B. clapped him on the shoulder—gingerly, to avoid the sharp bits.

“He is, son. He is. Someday you’ll appreciate the fact. If you happen to live, that is.”

Ryan nodded to Oldie, and the old man pushed off with an oar. Ryan shouldered his pack and headed up the pier.

A party of men materialized at the inland end. There were six of them. Some were burly, some were wiry. All were hard. All were armed.

“Monitors?” J.B. asked as he swung along by Ryan’s side.

“Reckon so,” the one-eyed man replied.

The waiting six all had shaved heads and black T-shirts. Bloused over their boots, they wore baggy camo pants with many pockets and sundry patterns. Each had a hefty truncheon of polished black wood hanging from his belt. Counterbalancing the sticks were sawed-off scatterguns, either pump or double-barreled, with grips cut down to pistol size.

“Cute touch about these matching armbands,” J.B. murmured from half a pace behind Ryan’s left elbow.

Ryan knew Krysty was walking just behind his right elbow. He could smell the clean woman scent of her. She’d bathed in the sea off Oldie’s little beach the previous night. Both before and after lovemaking with Ryan.

“How you mean?” Ryan asked, making no effort either to be heard by the waiting sec men, or not to be.

J.B. jutted his chin at a jackstaff mounted above a solid-looking blockhouse made of brown lava chunks that stood back across an esplanade from the waterfront. A flag swung in a rising but still sluggish breeze. Ryan could tell it had some kind of black figure on a white field. So did the armbands, he saw.

“Yeah,” Mildred said from behind. “That’s cute. Photonegative skull and crossbones.”

Looking closer at the welcoming committee Ryan saw the armbands did indeed show a black skull over crossed bones.

“They look like event security at a rock show in the nineties,” Mildred said cryptically, then snorted. The notion seemed to amuse her.

“Welcome to Nueva Tortuga,” said the man in the middle. He stood a little ahead of his flankers. He was on the lean side, and an inch or so less than Ryan’s own six foot two. His skin was tanned dark, although his coal-smudge eyebrows and black beard made his tan look paper-pale.

“NuTuga, as we call it,” he went on. “We’re Monitors. We keep the peace. That’s all you need to know. Except you got to pay the entry fee.”

“Entry fee?” Ryan said, halting about ten feet short of them.

The leader provided several options in trade goods, ammo, gold or local jack. Ryan felt his cheeks tighten and his skin prickle as though he’d caught a touch of sunburn.

“No exceptions,” the squad leader said, pleasantly enough. “You don’t pay, you don’t stay.”

“What,” Mildred said truculently. “Or you’ll hang us off one of those derricks?”

Ryan felt his jaw tighten. Mildred’s predark outrage was building a healthy head of steam.

The leader only smiled wider. His teeth were white. Both men and clothes were clean, an unusual touch even in a relatively well-off ville on the mainland. The leader’s boots were cowboy pattern, obviously handmade of sharkskin. They may even have been built since skydark.

“Only if you make your way back here,” he said, “after we take you out a mile or two and toss your asses over the rail.”

Ryan looked back at his companions. He noted right off that Oldie was still hovering right off the end of the pier, keeping his skiff in place with light sculling of his oars. Even at this range the old sailor managed to catch Ryan’s eye. He cocked his head in question.

Ryan raised a hand to the boatman and nodded just once. The white-bearded old man shrugged expressively. Your funeral, Ryan could all but hear him say. He began to row back out among the ships rocking gently at anchor.

“All right,” Ryan said, emphasizing the words just enough to let his friends know his mind was made up. “We pay.” He handed over the requisite number of rounds.

“Must hurt like a nuke when you light those puppies off,” J.B. said conversationally.

“Not half as much as when you’re on the other end,” said the shortest member of the crew, an Asian whose flat, fringe-bearded chin sloped outward along with his neck, which in turn simply got wider and wider until it became shoulders. He had a surprisingly mild voice. Ryan reckoned the Syndicate’s strongarms didn’t need to bluster much.

“One more thing,” the leader said, tucking the ammo away in a pouch at his web gear belt. “We need to peace-bond your weapons.”

“Peace-bond?” Ryan asked.

“Yeah. We won’t try taking them away from you, but we don’t want you using them in our fair ville.”

“What’s the point of letting us keep them, then?” Mildred demanded.

“Would you rather we confiscate them? Look, it’s for your protection. You shoot or cut somebody, that will get you hung in the harbor with a few cuts down your legs to rile up the fish.”

“What if the other guy starts it?” J.B. asked.

The enforcers, not so subtly, had settled into braced positions, suggesting they were considering the chance the newcomers might try resisting. Ryan wanted to assure them that nothing could be further from their minds. But that wasn’t the sort of thing it did much good to say, he’d found.

It wouldn’t be true, of course. All of them, even the unusually squeamish Mildred and the spirit of mercy herself, Krysty, were imagining what it’d be like to shove those scatterguns up the Monitors’ uptight asses to the breech-locks and light them off. He knew that. Just as he knew his friends also calculated that the odds weren’t with them on that play.

“Just how do you mean ‘peace-bond,’ anyway?” Ryan asked.

“We wire the breeches open on your blasters,” the squad leader said. “Blades we wire in the sheath. You break the seal, you go in the harbor. That simple.”

“Not like,” Jak said.

“Me, neither,” Ryan said. “But it doesn’t look like we got much choice.”

He unslung his Steyr Scout, dropped the magazine from the well, cranked back the bolt and handed the piece over. The leader passed it to the Asian guy, who dug out a spool of wire and a pair of clippers and got to work.

In short order, most of the squad was busy wiring the companion’s weapons to spec. When each man finished a piece, he handed it back to the squad leader. The bearded man squeezed a dab of some shiny gold-colored sealant where the wire’s ends were twisted together. It seemed to harden almost instantly.

“Where’d you get that stuff?” Mildred asked interestedly. “I’d think it’d be set solid after all these years.”

The squad leader smiled and handed back her ZKR with the trigger wired in its guard. “That’s for us to know,” he said, “and you never to find out.”

When the considerable task was done, the leader stepped back. “That does it for the weapons you got showing,” he said. “Now, how about the holdouts?”

Krysty took a deep breath. Pulling her shoulders back, making her considerable breasts strain tighter against the front of the khaki man’s shirt she wore, she put hands on her well-rounded hips and did a slow roll.

“Care to search me and find out, big boy?”

Ryan’s eyebrows shot up. It was all he could do to keep from asking her if she’d flat lost her mind right here. But he remained silent. He knew Krysty didn’t do much without a reason. Usually a triple-good one.

The leader actually blanched behind his black beard and eyebrows and took a step back. “N-no,” he said. “That won’t be necessary.”

Turning to his squad he snarled, “All right, you taints! If you think the Syndics’re paying us to stand around with our thumbs up our asses, I want to be there when you explain it to them!”

They turned and stomped off along the esplanade that was paved in lightweight white tufa gravel that ran around the inside of the harbor. Ryan let out a long, long breath.

“Krysty, what the hell was that?” Mildred demanded.

“Dudes like that generally don’t see any point to havin’ power if they can’t abuse it good and regular,” J.B. said laconically.

Krysty smiled with an unusually mischievous edge. “Normally,” she said. “But didn’t their whole attitude tell you their bosses ride even tighter herd on them than barons usually do their sec men?”

Ryan grunted. “Makes sense, since you put it that way,” he said, scratching the back of his neck. The volume of sweat running down from his shaggy, curly black hair was more than mere afternoon heat in the Carib could account for. “They don’t want them pissing off the paying customers, after all. Especially when the customers might come back in force and shoot the shit of the ville.”

Ryan took for granted the Syndicate had some kind of pretty stout defenses against that. Even if he hadn’t seen signs of it yet. Obviously the pirates had a good thing here and knew it.

“Evidently the pirates’ own code tends to bind their behavior in Nueva Tortuga,” Doc said, clearly thinking along the same lines.

“And nothing makes sure they keep their minds right like, say, that pair of .50 calibers the Syndicate’s got set up to cross fire the harbor entrance,” J.B. said, finishing Ryan’s thought.

“But how could you be so sure they wouldn’t want to grab the merchandise, Krysty?” Mildred asked.

Ryan saw that she didn’t understand, as was so often the case since she’d awakened from her centuries-long cold sleep into a world she neither could’ve nor would’ve ever imagined. And when Mildred found something she didn’t understand, she gnawed on it like a dog with a bone.

“Discipline, Millie,” J.B. said. “Syndicate wants to make sure their bullyboys don’t take bribes. Of any kind.”

“Thus it ever is with tyrants,” Doc declared. “Corruption, in their eyes, consists in their not getting their share.”

Ryan squinted at the sun, which was rolling toward the ragged-topped cone of Nevis Peak, which dominated the small island.

“Let’s shake the dust off, people,” he said. “Standing here jawing isn’t filling our bellies or getting us any closer to anyplace we want to be.”

“A man might mention that the heat of the subtropical day can develop a powerful thirst, as well,” Doc said.

“Where do we go?” Mildred asked.

Doc laughed again. He flung out a long, skinny arm in the same direction the Monitor squad had gone. “Why, follow the sound of music and merriment, dear lady!” he declared. “Where those are, commerce is. Whether licit or otherwise.”

From that way, indeed, floated the tinkle of a not particularly well-tuned piano, a bubble of conversation, a high-pitched and slightly mad-sounding laugh.

“Not that it makes much difference to us which,” Mildred said glumly.

“As long as it pays,” Ryan said, “makes me no difference at all.”

Krysty frowned at him. “Ryan Cawdor, you know that isn’t true!”

“Truer than not, Krysty,” he growled. “Now come on. We’re bleeding daylight, and I got a feeling the longer we stay on this rock, the unhealthier it gets.”

Chapter Five

The Blowing Mermaid, the sign read. The crudely but colorfully painted image that accompanied the words made it clear the half fish, half voluptuous nude blonde woman in question was blowing bubbles or spouting breath like a sounding whale.

“Classy,” Mildred said.

“Needs must when the devil drives,” Doc murmured.

“That’s so encouraging,” she said.

“Anybody got any better ideas?” Ryan’s tone suggested he was addressing the group as a whole. Mildred couldn’t help noticing how his lone blue eye fixed on her for just a moment—and pierced like a blue laser.

“Thought not,” he said with a shrug, and pushed inside.

The smell of spilled beer, sweat and ganja smoke hit Mildred in the face like a sandbag as she stepped up to the door. Inside was dark, hot and humid. The conversation was boisterous enough that it actually overwhelmed the out-of-tune piano in the corner.

A grimy, fly-specked skylight let in yellow sun. It was enough to see by once Mildred’s retinas had adjusted from the seaside dazzle outside. There were about twenty patrons in the gaudy, enough to make it seem pretty well occupied without everybody banging elbows with their neighbors.

Mildred wondered how that worked out, especially when sailors—pirates, to boot—just in after days at sea got their first taste of whatever unimaginable rotgut the tall, corpse-faced bartender with the truly remarkable gray side-whiskers was doling out. Would fear of the Syndicate’s justice—and its Monitors—be enough to make everybody behave?

Mildred continued to scan the gaudy as Ryan led them to a bar that was fronted in what looked like respectable-gauge metal plate, painted some kind of drab color she couldn’t make out. It looked bulletproof to Mildred’s eye, which hadn’t exactly been uneducated before her long sleep and revival, since she’d been raised around firearms from girlhood on. For one reason or another it seemed the gaudy’s proprietors weren’t willing to trust their hides entirely to Syndicate civic discipline.

She realized that shouldn’t surprise her, either. While being a pirate—or any kind of coldheart bandit—could be a rational life-path in the strange and horrible world in which she found herself, it still wasn’t one that bespoke good choices. Or good impulse control. She suspected it wasn’t all that uncommon for patrons to haul out iron and start blasting in haste—then repent at leisure, either under the clubs or shotgun blasts of the Monitors, or while hungry, nasty fish dined on their nether regions in the harbor.

The volume of conversation dropped inevitably, and its tempo slowed to a sort of reggae-bass bubble as the clientele scoped the new arrivals. Even with an oldie in a frock coat, a long-haired albino kid and a tall, strikingly handsome chiller with an eye patch, they weren’t even the most disparate looking bunch in the place. The fact one of them—Mildred herself—was black didn’t even register. It seldom did. The wave of mutations that had followed in the wake of the war had produced whole new sets of folk for the masses to be prejudiced against.

“What’ll it be, gentlemen, ladies?” the bartender said. He was a big man, taller even than Ryan and wider, especially but not limited to the belly encompassed by his stained leather apron. “McDugus Fish, at your service.”

“What do you have?” Ryan asked.

“Rum and beer,” the bartender said. “Also jolt.”

The floor was planks, although it was covered in sawdust. The dust was yellow and smelled fresh. It actually overpowered the other smells. Mostly.

“Have you any tea, my good man?” Doc asked. Mildred narrowed her eyes at him. It seemed such an off-the-wall request for a pirate den as to be almost foolhardy. While it might mean that Doc had slipped his reality moorings again and was drifting off into the ozone, as he frequently did, he often showed a puckish sense of humor. Sometimes not at the best moments.

To her astonishment the bartender never batted a heavy-lidded gray eye. “What kind?” he asked. “Green? Earl Grey? Oolong?”

Doc raised a bushy, snow-white brow. “Such a broad assortment!”

The bartender shrugged. “We get a lotta different cargos traded through here,” he said. “So name your drink and pay for your dose. No tabs, no credit.”

“Naturally,” J.B. said.

While the thought of tea almost made Mildred salivate, she didn’t trust the water it was made with. Given the general standard of cleanliness the Syndicate forced on its ville, Mildred figured that indicated they’d take at least similar care with their water supply. But she hadn’t survived Deathlands by taking things of that nature for granted. She ordered neat rum.

Ryan and J.B. ordered beer. Doc asked for Earl Grey tea; Krysty went for green tea. Jak ordered rum, as well.

“Any jobs you know about?” Ryan asked, taking a sip from the lumpy blue-glazed pottery mug.

“Say, this ain’t half-bad!” J.B. exclaimed. “Better than half-good, mebbe.”

Not visibly overwhelmed at the endorsement of his house brew, the barkeep intoned, “Got plenty scuts. No jobs I know about. Might sign on to a crew. Always ships coming in short-handed. Then again, there’s usually no shortage of sailors between gigs, either.”

His big oblong face rumpled as he studied them. “There’s always slut work,” he said. “Either of the women could do. Or the kid, or you. Of course you’d have to get inspected by the Syndicate, get licensed up all proper.”

If the suggestion offended Ryan, he showed no sign.

“They license prostitution here in NuTuga?” Mildred couldn’t restrain herself from asking.

McDugus Fish reared back, rolling his eyes like an outraged horse. “Of course!” he said. “Every aspect of every trade is carefully regulated and licensed. We can’t just let people do what they want. That’d be anarchy!”

“Huh” was the best Mildred could think to say.

Mildred accepted her handleless cup of rum. Turning away from the bar, she saw Doc and Jak staring bemusedly into a dark corner. She followed their gazes. Her eyes had adjusted to the shine from the skylight and the gleam of hurricane lanterns hung over the bar, so it took them a moment to reset themselves to the gloom of the far corner of the gaudy.

Her eyebrows shot up.

“Guess the sign’s not false advertising,” J.B. said.

Evidently it wasn’t.

A woman sat there in a wheelchair. She was bare to the waist, and a blanket covered her lap. A fishlike tail stuck out from under the blanket, by the footrests of the ancient metal chair.

She was assiduously pleasuring a fat guy who had his grimy shirt pulled up and canvas trousers down around his knees.

Mildred’s first reaction was to blurt, “That can’t be real!”

“Well, the tail is fake,” McDugus Fish admitted. “Just for show. But my daughter JaNene’s a real good swimmer with fins on. She was born with her legs stuck together and can’t walk too good, see.”

“She’s your daughter?” From Krysty’s tone even she, Deathlands born and raised, found this whole thing a bit hard to take.

Fish scowled defensively. “She’s not a mutie or anything,” he said. “It’s just a birth defect, same as the albino kid, here. The Syndicate healers assured us of that!”

So JaNene was a legit mermaid. Of sorts. Of course that didn’t mean she was a close match for the voluptuous creature on the sign. The hair hanging down in front of her shoulders was indeterminate dirty-blond and matted like seaweed, the bare tits sagging over washboard ribs were half-empty skin bags, and her eyes and cheeks were sunk in the characteristic pits of the true jolt-walker.

“You let your daughter give blowjobs for money?” Krysty said. “In the open?”

“Hey!” the bartender said. “It’s all perfectly aboveboard. She’s licensed and inspected and everything. And seeing as she’s in the gloom, there, she isn’t a distraction.”

Krysty seemed inclined to push the point. Ryan took her by the arm and gently but firmly turned her toward a vacant table in another corner of the bar.

“Not our house, Krysty,” he said. “We’ll just sit down and wait to see what develops.”

* * *

WHAT DEVELOPED WASN’T MUCH. Not very fast anyway.

“No accounting for taste,” J.B. said with a bob of his head toward the corner, where JaNene Fish and her fake fish tail were busy at work. He was nursing his third beer, a dark, bitter ale. Ryan actually found it pretty good.

One of the scuts McDugus Fish referred to had swept sawdust over a spilled beer, then swept the mess up, dumped it in an old paint can and thrown fresh sawdust from a pail in its place. Evidently there was a mill somewhere on the island. And evidently either the Syndicate or the joint’s owner—who Ryan guessed was from one of the Syndicate families—or Fish himself were serious about keeping the place shipshape.

“Here, now,” he heard J.B. call. “You look like a man who could use a drink.”

A man had slipped in through the door with the air of a man who knew, from experience or observation, that lingering in a doorway too long just made you a good target. He didn’t look the coldheart part. He was middle height, with his chest kind of sunken over a significant paunch, dressed in a faded flowery shirt open over a grimy T-shirt, khaki shorts held up by a length of nylon line, and sandals cut from old tires. His hair hung like a curtain around the sides and back of a high domed head, with a few brown strands brushed across it. His face would’ve been homely even if it wasn’t a mass of random lumps, almost as if he’d fallen foul of a whole hive of yellow jackets.

His eyes darted left and right before dead-centering on J.B. “You talkin’ to me?” he asked.

“Sure, mister,” J.B. said. “Come on over. We’ll buy you whatever you’re drinking.”

The man ran a yellowish tongue over thin lips. “I—I ain’t registered, you know what I’m sayin’? I’m, uh, clean, and all. But I better not—”

“You got us wrong,” Ryan said. He had J.B. looking for likely prospects to pump for information with minimum cost, particularly in terms of suspicions raised, which was something they could afford little of in a place like this. “We’re new in the ville. We’re just looking for the angles.”

“Oh. Well. That’s different.”

He hooked a chair from a table nearby, where a pair of villainous-looking fat women with two good eyes and about five teeth between them sat murmuring sweet nothings to each other. They were so absorbed in gazing into each other’s eyes they never looked around when the chair legs went scraping away across the sawdust-covered planks.

“I’m Lumpy,” the man said, seating himself between Ryan and J.B. “From the lumps, you see? Just so you know, I ain’t a mutie or anything. They’re parasites.”

And he grinned around at everyone with a mouthful of uneven teeth in varying shades of brown, as if announcing he’d just won the trophy for having the biggest dick in NuTuga.

“Not that there’s anything wrong with being a mutie,” he added hastily. He was looking at Jak, who scowled.

Ryan carefully didn’t look at Krysty, who was a mutie.

“I mean, to some there is, to some there ain’t,” Lumpy said. “Syndics won’t have any taints here in the ’Tuga, of course. The crews love to jolly ’em up too much, you know what I mean? Bad for order. But over to Monster Island, now, muties and norms live side by side like there wasn’t a thing wrong with it.”

“Monster Island?” Mildred asked. “Where’s that?”

Lumpy frowned for a moment. He scratched idly at a particularly prominent lump on the right side of his jaw. It seemed to Ryan that something like a hair whipped back and forth from it before zipping back inside.

A trick of the light, he told himself. He hoped so.

“Why,” the disfigured man said, brightening, “took me a moment. You folks really aren’t from this part of the Carib, are you? Monster Island is Puerto Rico, is all.”

“That’s the only reason they call it that, my good man?” Doc asked. “From the admittedly rare case of normal humans and mutants living together in harmony?”

“Well, that,” Lumpy said, transferring his dirty-nailed attentions to the back of his neck. “Plus the fact the island’s teeming with man-eating monsters, of course.”

Chapter Six

Mildred sat back in her chair. “Oh, great,” she said.

Ryan ignored her. He wasn’t any happier than she was about the news that the place where they might find an easy ride back to the mainland via a mat-trans was overrun with ravenous monsters. But fretting over the fact wouldn’t make it any less of one.

“Say we wanted to get back to the mainland,” he said when Lumpy had ordered a rum.

The server was a black-haired, green-eyed girl wearing a leather apron over a short skirt and carrying a tray. Lumpy, anyway, didn’t neglect to eye her backside appreciatively as she walked back toward the bar.

“How’d we go about that?” Ryan finished.

Lumpy sat back in his chair. He looked half-spent just from watching the girl.

“Got the jack?” he asked, still looking at her when she stood giving the order to McDugus Fish. “You can do pretty near anything, if you got the jack.”

Doc laughed in wry delight. “Isn’t that not ever the way of the world?” he asked.

“Say we aren’t exactly flush,” J.B. said. “Could we work passage?”

“You done pirate work before?” Lumpy asked. “You all look to know your way around them blades and blasters you’re loaded down with. I mean, not to pry or nothin’.”

“We were hoping for more peaceful employment,” Krysty said.

“Don’t traders work the port?” Mildred asked. “I mean, the, uh, Mermaid even sells fresh fruit. The island doesn’t look big enough to grow it all here. Unless it’s all brought in as pirate swag?”

He laughed. “Oh, nuke me, no. There’s traders ply here, right enough. Once they buy their export licenses off the Syndicate, they’re as safe on the open sea as you and me, sittin’ right here. Only they don’t much like to take on crew here, if you catch my drift. Not everybody’s reliable.”

“Imagine that,” Mildred said.

“What about other paying gigs?” Ryan asked. “Local work.”

The girl brought Lumpy’s rum. He grinned at her when she set it down. She ignored him as if he were an insect. She took the .22 round Ryan handed her and walked away without a word.

“Whoo,” Lumpy said, “that is purely fine. Where was I? Oh. Jobs. Well, the crews bring in plenty slaves. You could sign on for Monitors, but I reckon you’d have the same objections to that you have to signing on for pirates.”

He shook his head. “Can’t think of much. I do some odd jobs now and then since I lost my nerve, fish some. I can fix a few things, and that’s not always something you want slaves doing, know what I mean. But that’s just me, and I barely scrape by. There’s five of you.”

“Six, actually,” Mildred said. “But who’s counting?”

Lumpy shot back his rum and shook all over like a wet dog. He set his empty on the table upside down with a clack. It seemed to Ryan the single shot had hit him pretty hard. Of course, he didn’t know whether it was his first of the day.

“Spring for another?” Lumpy asked, looking around with eyes even less clear than they had been when he sat down.

J.B. signaled the server for another, then he leaned his leather-clad elbows on the table.

“So how about this Monster Island,” he said. “How about getting passage there?”

Lumpy shrugged. “Same story as the mainland. Go for a pirate, or pay your way. Gas, brass or ass—nobody rides for free.”

“So what do you think, Ryan?” J.B. asked.

“I’m thinking,” he admitted.

“You considering turning pirate, Ryan?” Mildred asked.

“Would you like signing up as Monitors better?” J.B. asked.

She scowled.

“Everything lives off other things,” Jak said. “Want eat, gotta kill.”

“Unusual loquacity, Jak,” Doc said. “And unusual eloquence. Albeit in the service of a doctrine of moral expediency.”

Jak scowled furiously.

“Don’t worry,” J.B. told him. “I didn’t get it, either.”

“I did,” Ryan said. “Haven’t we done plenty of things to stay alive we weren’t thrilled about?”

“Ah, yes,” Doc said. “Steeping in shame to stay alive. I remember...the sows....”

“Stay with us, Doc,” J.B. said. “The sows’re long since gone for bacon.”

For a moment Doc gazed around, wild-eyed, as if seeing hell-knew-what bizarre landscape peopled with alien monstrosities, instead of a surprisingly clean but still seedy gaudy house and the faces of his friends. Then the mad light left his eyes. He seemed to deflate.

“Ah, yes,” he said again, with a sad smile. “Long gone.”

“Should we be discussing stuff like this...you know?” Mildred asked, waggling her eyebrows ridiculously and looking sidelong at their guest.

“Don’t mind him, Millie,” J.B. said. “He’s too sunk in rum to know what we’re talking about. Or care.”

Lumpy had, indeed, tossed off his second shot like water and now slumped in his chair like a half-empty sack of oatmeal. His own eyes stared without focus at the tabletop. He drooled over a hanging lower lip.

The doors burst open and four Monitors swaggered in. They were dressed and armed like the crew that had braced Ryan and his friends on the docks, and their heads were likewise shaved. Which was a little more curious this time out, since one of them was a woman, who wasn’t unattractive in a blade-faced kind of way. She seemed to glare around a lot more truculently than her three companions, as if suspecting she had more to prove than they did.

Heads didn’t turn when the Syndicate sec team blew in. Conversation didn’t falter, but it dropped an octave. And heads huddled down a little closer in collars, where applicable, or chins closer to collarbones where not. Ryan realized he wasn’t the only man in the gaudy who was suddenly keenly aware the four were the only ones in the house with easily accessible weapons.

He smiled, ever so slightly. Not that a measly twist of wire with a dab of goo sealing it would stop him doing the necessary thing.

But then, he wasn’t in any rush to throw his life away, either. He looked away from the four as they ceremoniously paid for their drinks at the bar, and back to his comrades.

“We all know finding an easy living isn’t easy,” he said. “Finding a hard one isn’t always easy, either. We’ll do what we need to to survive, bottom line.”

“We always do, Ryan,” J.B. said.

“We don’t have to make a decision tonight,” Ryan said. “But in the morning, we’ve got to move. So we need to know by then which way we’re moving.”

Krysty patted his hand. “Something’ll come up, lover,” she said. “It always does. One way or another.”

“Krysty’s right, as usual,” Mildred said. “But it’s the ‘or other’ part that worries me.”

J.B. grinned at her. “What, Millie? You looking to live forever?”

“Made a good start on it already, John,” she said. “Even if not quite on a par with Doc.”

Without waiting for permission, Lumpy waved at the good-looking server for yet another rum. Ryan took it in; his one eye seldom missed much. He didn’t object. He might have more questions to ask before they were done with Lumpy.

If the stupe doesn’t drink himself under before I think of them, he thought.

Lumpy glared at the Monitors. “Bastards,” he muttered. “All they do is keep a man down.”

The Monitors drank, neither lingering nor rushing, then they sauntered out of the gaudy without a word to anyone. As soon as the door slammed shut, the conversation picked up. The piano player, who’d been engaged in low tinkling, struck up a brisk tune.

“Fuckin’ Monitors!” Lumpy exclaimed. “Drink! Sweetcheeks, get them sweet cheeks over here! I need a drink.”

Behind the bar, McDugus Fish’s lugubrious face fisted in annoyance. In the corner Ryan saw a gleam of eyeball as his daughter looked to see what the fuss was. She never missed a stroke, though. A real trouper, that girl; Ryan had to give her that.

The expression on her face like a rain squall on the ocean, the black-haired, jade-eyed server approached. “I need another rum,” Lumpy declared, as if suspecting she was keeping one from him.

She nodded and turned away. “And I need some of that, too,” he said, and grabbed her left ass cheek.

She froze. All the color drained out of her face. She seemed unsure what was actually happening.

The bar went dead still. The piano player turned into a statue with her hands hovering over the keys. McDugus Fish’s face went red, then white.

The door opened. The belligerent female Monitor strode back inside, followed closely by a heavily muscled black Monitor an inch or so shorter than she was. She stopped dead. A smile winched its way across her sharp features.

“So,” she said, not loudly, but the gaudy had gone so still she might as well have shouted. “What do we got here?”

“Oh, shit!” Lumpy gulped. His face went puce. He let go the server’s rump and tried to jump to his feet, but booze had addled his coordination as much as his sense. His legs tangled with those of the chair and they both went down in a clatter and a tangle.

He disengaged and jumped quickly. Moving like a striking mongoose, the female Monitor flowed across the floor. She was right on top of him when he reared upright.

Lumpy faced the back door, which led to the latrines out back. That meant his back was to her—and the truncheon that slammed into his skull.

Ryan heard a moist, muffled crunch. Where Lumpy had looked like a half-filled burlap sack sitting in his alcoholic torpor a few moments before, now he hit the floor like an empty sack dropped from the ceiling. He lay on his face gurgling and making vague swimming motions in the sawdust with his arms and hands.

Ryan realized that he and his companions were the only ones staring at Lumpy, or what remained of him. The rest of the patrons and McDugus Fish were all looking studiously someplace else. Except for the server, who stood looking at the twitching Lumpy with vindictive glee.

The black male Monitor enthusiastically put the boot in. Mildred winced as ribs cracked audibly.

The fallen man didn’t react to repeated kicks, or a couple of experimental whacks cross the shoulders with the woman’s stick. The female Monitor straightened.

“Get this trash hauled out to the curb pronto, Fish,” she snapped at the barkeep. “We got strict regulations in this town.”

McDugus Fish turned and bawled something at the open door behind the bar. A couple of men in aprons and, to Ryan’s surprise, hairnets bustled out. They were both short and dark, one stocky, one wiry.

“They do have strict health regs in this ville,” Mildred said, sounding bemused.

“It’s like why a dog licks himself,” J.B. explained. “Because they can.”

She glared at him a moment, then wordlessly shook her head.

The two helpers from the back—cooks, Ryan thought—hurried up, grabbed Lumpy by the shoulders and dragged him out the door. His head hung limp, drawing a furrow in the sawdust along with his feet and hanging arms. He didn’t seem to be moving or making noises any longer. Ryan wouldn’t be surprised if the poor bastard had taken the last train west.

“How can we just sit here and watch?” Mildred hissed, as the Monitors walked to an unoccupied table on the far wall.

Ryan looked at her. It took him a moment to catch her drift.

“Nor our deal,” he reminded her. “And I reckon we got everything that poor simp had to give.”

The door opened, and two more Monitors, both males, swung in. They located their comrades, then moved purposefully to their table. They perched on the edges of their chairs, leaning forward to talk earnestly. The other two nodded.

Once again the door swung open. A fresh wave of ganja smoke rolled in on the humid gust from outdoors, and with it the noise of a half-dozen outlandishly dressed and dreadlocked roisterers.

A short, bearded black guy with dreads stuffed into a pillow-sized knit cap of red, gold, black and green stepped to one side and puffed out his banty-rooster chest.

“We be the Sea Wasp Posse,” he declared. “Silver-Eye Chris be our big man. We can outdrink, outfight, and outfuck any motherfucker in NuTuga. Fear us well enough, mebbe nobody gets hurt.”

If the other patrons had carefully ignored the fate of Lumpy, their gazes positively bounced off the six men who had come in. The Sea Wasps wore extravagantly flounced blouses and trousers, vests blazing with bright patches and ribbons, and weapons. Lots and lots of weapons.

Even JaNene’s latest customer pulled out. He stepped away from the phony mermaid, stuffing his rapidly shrinking pecker back inside his blue denim trousers and yanking them back up by the drawstrings. The blonde turned a blank expression toward the newcomers. She rubbed her mouth absently with the back of one hand, then hanging her head, she began to cry soundlessly.

“So this is the top dog pack,” J.B. said. Like the others, he didn’t look directly at the garish newcomers. It wasn’t fear. It was plain practicality. They were outnumbered here.

The Sea Wasps sauntered up to the bar as if they were the owners come to see how McDugus Fish was keeping the place up. For all Ryan knew, they were. They obviously had a hefty reputation hereabouts.

Krysty rose. Ryan looked at her. She nodded at the door to the back: call of nature. Realizing the same thing, Mildred stood to join her. Strength in numbers.

The two vanished toward the back. Krysty seemed completely at ease, but her flame-colored hair had tightened into a short, tight cap. Ryan hoped nobody would notice that her hair could and did move by itself. That would mark her as a mutie, and with this bunch, who knew what the consequences would be.

The Sea Wasps had their drinks and were leaning back against the bar insolently eyeing their fellow pirates as if deciding which one they planned to kill first. One man stood out in particular. He wasn’t the tallest, although he stood about an inch or two higher than Ryan. He wasn’t the burliest; that was a pale-skinned man-mountain with a beard hanging over his wide chest and kettle belly. Despite his size, he projected a big cat’s readiness to spring into lethal, lightning-fast action. He had golden dreads and lightly tanned clean-shaven features that might’ve been handsome on somebody else. His eyes were silver, like old-time coins with all the tarnish polished off.

That silver gaze swept the crowd insolently. It passed over Ryan’s table without pausing. Clearly he sized up the travelers as the lowest-threat bunch in the room.

Momentarily. Then his eyes snapped back. Two silver eyes locked up briefly with Ryan’s blue one.

Unlike everyone else in the room, Ryan wasn’t looking away from the Sea Wasp Posse.

The golden-dreaded man’s smile widened about a half inch. He nodded just a little more. Ryan returned the gesture.

Smart enough to be dangerous, Ryan thought, availing himself of the chance to take a sip of his now-flat beer without appearing to submit. That was another reality of the world: authentic hardcases knew how to spot each other on first glance. And generally they steered well clear, unless circumstances required them to tussle. You didn’t live to get case-hardened that way, as opposed to just rabid-weasel vicious, without having a well-developed sense of survival.

He allowed himself to relax fractionally. The Sea Wasps’ leader was willing to look for easier prey, if looking for prey was on his mind. The only question was how quick his pack would get the message.

They had obviously been into the weed, which Ryan knew sometimes took the edge off. But these guys lived edgy, and from their manner they’d been hitting the booze pretty hard, and maybe even jolt. Betting on their being made mellow by their smokes was another quick road to a shallow hole in the beach. Or just the harbor, without the necessity of being hung up, which Ryan was fairly sure was where Lumpy was destined, if he wasn’t bobbing facedown already with the ’cuda nuzzling his exposed face and fingers.

The back door opened. Krysty and Mildred came in. They made for their companions’ table without glancing at the Sea Wasps, who were smoking vast cone-shaped spliffs and joking among themselves. Also without obviously steering clear of them, except to Ryan’s keen blue eye.

Even so, one of the Sea Wasps suddenly blocked their path. He was a wiry mocha-skinned dude, with a single-braided black goatee and tattoos of women with big bare boobs and snake bodies twining up bare, muscle-cabled arms. He had two machetes slung crosswise over his back with the hilts sticking up over his shoulders, and two Smith & Wesson autoblasters in hip holsters decorated with bright beadwork. The weapons Ryan could see were peace-bonded, which didn’t much comfort him.

“So what have we got here?” the pirate asked. He had a Spanish accent. “You getting a higher-quality slut in this gaudy of yours, now, than that taint cocksucker daughter of yours, Fish-face?”

“She’s not a taint,” McDugus Fish said stubbornly. “It’s a birth defect.”

“You got smarter,” the pirate said. “Figured out I got a soft spot for the redheads, huh?”

And he reached out and grabbed Krysty’s left breast.

Chapter Seven

Time seemed to slow. Ryan shifted his left hand inside his long coat.

Calmly yet decisively Krysty reached up and removed the hand from her breast.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she demanded, strong but not shrill.

Her eyes turned like emerald lasers to the table of Monitors sitting across the room. They were all watching.

“I thought the Syndicate had laws against assault,” she said clearly.

As one, the four sec goons turned their heads away.

“Well,” J.B. murmured, “remember what Oldie said about some dogs being more equal than others? Reckon this gang’s the most equal of all.”

“Right,” Ryan said, rising from his chair. He didn’t hurry as he walked toward the tableau a few paces away.

The pirate saw him coming and showed him a gap-toothed grin. “What you want here, Patch? You triple-stupe? You think you can fuck with the Sea Wasps? You think wrong, man.”

And he grabbed Krysty’s breast again.

“If you don’t remove your hand,” Ryan said, “I’ll remove it for you.”

The guy just grinned wider. His hand squeezed the full breast again quickly, then began to move down toward the flat plane of her stomach.

Rattlesnake-fast, Ryan’s left hand whipped to the sheath on his hip, freeing eighteen inches of steel blade. Before the pirate could so much as blink it rose and slashed down.

The panga’s razor-honed edge chopped the Sea Wasp’s hand off just above the wrist. The hand seemed to pulse on Krysty’s breast one more time and then it fell to the floor. It lay on its back in the sawdust like an overturned beetle, fingers twitching like bug legs.

The pirate stared down at the blood jetting from his stump in slack-jawed amazement. Krysty sidestepped quickly out of the way of the pulsing blood, then she and Mildred grabbed their own weapons. As Ryan had quickly and covertly undone the peace-bonding on his weapons when the Wasps came in, they were obviously undoing theirs now.

But not all of the party’s armaments had been sealed in sheath or holster, of course.

The wounded man began to shriek like a horse in a burning barn. Grabbing his stump with his remaining hand, he danced in a circle, painting the patrons, the tables, the chairs, the walls, even the ceiling with arterial spray that gleamed dark in the fish-oil light.

With startling power, Doc kicked the table. It flew across the room into the faces of the other Sea Wasps. They were too startled by this completely unexpected turn of events to react with what would surely be their normal rapid savagery.

The Monitors, a beat slower, jumped to their feet, unlimbering their scatterguns.

A dully glittering disk spun across the room. The black Monitor who’d come back from the first party grunted audibly as one of Jak’s concealed throwing knives buried itself in his bare, muscle-ribbed gut. It was probably only a flesh wound. As strong as he was, Jak couldn’t throw one of his relatively light holdout knives hard enough to punch through the tough abdominal wall at that range. But the man stared down at himself and shrieked in terrified surprise as if it had gutted him like a fish.

His female companion was faster and firmer. She had a sawed-off pump shotgun with a pistol grip on its shortened forearm as well as in the back. She brought the stubby weapon rapidly online, ready to spray Ryan and friends with lethal buckshot.

Instead, a loud bang went off in Ryan’s right ear and a red dot appeared right above the woman’s collarbone, above the neckline of her black T-shirt. More shots blasted in quick succession, forcing Ryan to squint as side-blasts from a short barrel stung his cheek.

J.B. was half standing from his chair, his right arm locked out. His right fist clenched a little black Kel-Tec P-32 blaster. It was his latest pet holdout pistol, though it didn’t have much punch, being only a .32 ACP.

Which was why J.B. kept shooting, walking shots up the Monitor’s chin and cheek and putting a last one through the right side of her forehead. At twenty feet, J.B. was shooting near the absolute accuracy the tiny handblaster was capable of. But with a blaster in his hands, any blaster, J. B. Dix was both lucky and good.

Ryan stood, bloody panga in hand, while the Sea Wasp whose hand he’d amputated had gotten hold of himself. He tugged furiously at one of his machete hilts with his remaining hand, even though he was bleeding out fast enough through his stump that he’d go down inside another minute, unconscious or dead.

Until then, he was a threat. Krysty booted him in the balls, the impact lifting his soles a good five inches off the sawdust.

When he landed again he doubled over in agony that overrode even the pain from his arm, which shock was likely dulling already, anyway. Krysty held the short muzzle of her Smith & Wesson 640 revolver almost to the back of his head and blew what brains he had onto the sawdust in front of his boots.

At last Ryan got his SIG-Sauer out and started blasting toward the Sea Wasps as they sorted themselves out from under the table Doc had kicked into them. He didn’t think he hit any of them. The bar was suddenly full of patrons who decided all at once that getting out of the Blowing Mermaid was the best survival strategy, even if it meant racing through a horizontal hail of bullets and buck. He did see Silver-Eye Chris vanish over the bar with startling alacrity.

One of the other Monitors lit off both barrels of his sawed-off. The big pirate who’d been enjoying JaNene’s ministrations was just darting past him to the door and took both charges full in his hanging gut. Screaming shrilly he went down, trying to stuff purple-pink coils of intestine back into his ruptured belly.

J.B. fired again, but Ryan wasn’t sure at what. They’d stepped away from each other.

Doc streaked past, his coattails flapping like stork wings. In a flash, Ryan saw he had his sword in one hand and the ebony sheath in the other. The Monitor with Jak’s throwing knife stuck in his belly had apparently realized the thing hadn’t punctured anything vital. Ignoring it, he swung his own pump gun to bear.

With a fine fencing lunge, Doc ran him through the right shoulder. He cried out again, dropping the scattergun.

The blaster was slung around his neck on a waist sling. Rather than falling free, it dangled. Even though neither wound seemed fatal, the Monitor decided two new holes in his hide was enough for one day’s work. Letting the blaster hang, he turned and joined the crush of customers trying to fight their way through the open door.

Shouts from outside suggested others were trying to fight their way in. Ryan dashed toward an overturned table and took cover behind it, to see J.B. grinning at him from behind another.

Shots were coming from behind the bar. Ryan risked a look out to see a couple of heads seeming to stand like apples on the upper surface, with handblasters stuck out in front of them. As he looked a head jerked. A whole divot of long black dreads was knocked off the back.

The head vanished. The hand and the silver Beretta handblaster it held slithered back out of sight. Ryan glanced over to see Mildred, crouched behind a jumble of chairs and a table, bringing her .38 Czech target revolver back online.

Then he saw two forms struggling off to the side. Krysty was still in the open. The biggest of the Sea Wasps was grappling with her. He was a great black bear of a man with a grimace full of gold teeth, a black beard and a vast mass of dreadlocks swinging from his cannonball head. He held a big butcher knife point-downward in a ham-sized fist. Krysty held the knife off with one hand while the other held his hand away from her throat.

“Krysty, get down!” Mildred shouted. Ryan raised his SIG, looking for a clear shot, but the pair was battling too wildly for him to risk it.

Of course, it wouldn’t normally be possible for a woman to resist a near giant like that, hand to hand. Even a woman as tall and well muscled as Krysty.

As Ryan watched over the three-dot sights of his handblaster, a change seemed to come over her. He couldn’t have put his finger on what it was, exactly. She seemed larger, somehow. He knew then that she had called on the power of the Earth Mother, Gaia.

Krysty picked up the big bearded man and threw him across the bar. Bottles with faded labels shattered. He disappeared in a cascade of glass shards, brown liquid and the broken halves of the heavy hardwood shelf.

Usually Krysty had a bit more staying power, but she collapsed onto the floor. This time, channeling the power of Gaia drained her like a cut artery.

By reflex Ryan started up to help the woman. Then it hit him: if she’s down, she’s out of the line of fire.

Not safe. Nobody was safe in a blasterfight, especially at such close quarters. But no enemy was likely to waste a shot on her while her friends were still shooting. And while one or two of the Sea Wasps behind the bar had gone down with the huge man, at least three were still popping up to loose a round or two before ducking back behind the armor-plated bar. Including their unmistakable silver-eyed leader.

Taking quick aim, Ryan popped the two lanterns hung behind either end of the bar. One promptly went out. The other stayed lit long enough to ignite the gush of fish oil from the punctured metal reservoir.

Blue flames whoomped into life behind the length of the bar. The alk in the bottles the big man had broken was potent. To add fuel, literally, to the flames Ryan shot fast holes in the two lanterns suspended directly above the bar. They produced rains of fire as their spilling fuel took light.

Screams pealed from behind the bar. The giant rose howling. Flames from his burning dreads haloed his agony-racked face as he beat at his blazing back with blistering hands.

Two shots cracked from behind the bar. The big man quit screaming. He sagged back against the wall, then slid slowly out of sight, leaving a smear of flaming alcohol.

Somebody—Silver-Eye Chris, Ryan had little doubt—had chilled him, not to put him out of his misery, but because he was endangering his comrades with his flailing and flaming.

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