DESPERATE MEASURES

Since the nukecaust, the American dream has been reduced to a daily fight for survival. In the hellish landscape of Deathlands, few dare to dream of a better tomorrow. But Ryan Cawdor and his companions press on, driven by the need for a future less treacherous than the present.

CAUGHT IN THE CROSS FIRE

Pulling sec duty aboard a steamboat on the mighty Sippi is a welcome reprieve for Ryan and his friends…until armored warships reduce their vessel to a burning husk. Abruptly stranded in a nightmarish, poisonous swamp, fighting off crocodiles and muties, the companions and their crew of allies get to work building rafts. Their escape route, however, is swiftly intercepted, and they learn they’ve sailed into the middle of a fierce conflict between two villes fighting over the iron trade. The companions don’t seem to stand a chance against the fleets of ironclad gunboats. But in Deathlands, even the underdog can bite back…

“You and Mildred best head for cover.”

“Ryan, they’ll only hit us by accident with those oversize muskets,” Mildred replied.

“Mebbe, but it looks like some smaller craft are heading this way. Krysty, Mildred—git!”

“Come on.” Krysty grabbed Mildred’s wrist and dragged her toward the cabin.

She heard Ryan open fire, accompanied by staccato bursts from J.B.’s submachine gun. Given the range, the bobbing of the approaching war craft on the water and the complex movement of the Queen—pitching fore and aft as well as heeling to her right from the centrifugal force of the fastest left turn the vessel could manage—she doubted he’d be lucky to hit anything significant. Much less score another shot through a forward port to take the helmsman.

She and Mildred had almost reached the cabin when the return fire hit, roaring like an angry dragon. Stout planks suddenly erupted into fragments, almost in the redhead’s face.

And then the world vanished in a soundless white flash.

Iron Rage

James Axler

Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.

—Mark Twain,

Life on the Mississippi

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 pre-dark 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

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

Title Page

Quote

The Deathlands Saga

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

Copyright

Chapter One

“It looks pretty,” Ricky Morales said.

“Bad country,” Maggie Santiago replied. “Worse comin’.”

She was a small woman, with jaw-length brown hair that was held off her face by a headband. She had a slight build and was decidedly flat-chested. Ricky was sixteen and noticed that kind of thing.

He wiped sweat from his forehead. The approach of the Yazoo River to its confluence with the Sippi was unquestionably beautiful, with tall green grass to either side, crowned by the shattered ruins of what he was told was Vicksburg rising above it to the south, and the brown expanse of the great river itself ahead. The Yazoo rolled by the hull of the Mississippi Queen, brown and slightly greasy in the hot sun, which threw eye-stinging darts of morning light at the slow, slogging waves.

A great blue heron, with its beautiful gray-blue plumage shining in the sun and a crest of feathers sweeping back from its head, stalked majestically through the shallows of the northern bank. It was hard to believe the green reeds lining the flow, and the green heights to the left, harbored any kind of wickedness or ugliness.

“I don’t know,” Ricky said, holding up a toothed washer to the near-cloudless sky to squint through it, looking for lingering grit or crud. The slight machinist and mechanic was teaching him to disassemble the Queen’s bow winch. It was just the sort of thing the youth found fun. “It looks double-peaceful to me.”

Krysty Wroth, her flame-red hair tossed by the slow afternoon breeze—moving, in fact, rather more than the light wind could account for—joined the pair. She stood gazing out of the blunt round prow of the river tug with one boot up on the gunwales. Ricky tried hard not to stare at the tall, statuesque woman. As usual. She was one of his companions, and one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen. He had a crush on her, even though she was the lover of the group’s leader, the one-eyed Ryan Cawdor.

“It’s hard to imagine anything so beautiful could be so deadly,” Ricky told Maggie.

A sliding brown ridge appeared in the water near the wading heron. A pair of big, broad jaws burst through the surface in an explosion of spray. They snapped shut on the majestic bird. A savage shake, a roll, a wave, and the bird was gone beneath the water with nothing to show that it had ever been there, except for a heavy roll of greenish water slowly diminishing to become one with the flow, and a blue-gray feather swooping down to light delicately on the river and be carried away downstream.

Ricky jumped to his feet. “Whoa!”

“Hey,” Maggie snapped. “Mind the parts, kid! You kick them in the Yazoo, and I’ll kick you in right after.”

She referred to the components of the winch, which they had spread out on oiled canvas. Though she was only an assistant to the vessel’s chief engineer, Myron Conoyer—also known as husband to the captain of the Queen, Trace Conoyer, with whom he co-owned the boat—she took her task seriously. So did the rest of the crew who worked for the pair.

“What was that?”

Maggie glanced that way. Ricky hadn’t thought she’d noticed the commotion, but she had.

“Nile crocodile,” she said matter-of-factly. “These waters are lousy with them.”

She gave him a gap-toothed smile.

“One of the reasons this is a nasty stretch of river,” she said.

Ricky looked at Krysty. “Didn’t that bother you?” he asked. He was still freaked out about seeing the bird snatched below the lazy, deceptively innocuous water so precipitously, and he needed someone to validate him.

“What?” she said.

“The bird—the heron. A big old croc grabbing it just like that—that doesn’t bother you?”

Krysty shrugged. He tried to keep his eyes off the fascinating thing that did to the front of the plaid shirt she wore, and failed.

“It’s just the circle of life,” she said.

“What’s the problem, Ricky?” a voice asked from behind him. “We’re not getting paid to sightsee.”

He turned. There was no mistaking that voice.

“He was alarmed because a Nile croc took down a heron, right over there, Ryan,” Krysty said, as her man approached with the captain and her husband alongside.

Ryan came up and put his arm around her. He was a tall rangy man, narrow-waisted and broad-chested, with shaggy black hair and a single pale blue eye. His other eye was covered by a black patch, and a scar ran from brow to jawline.

“I just don’t want him kicking any parts of my winch overboard,” Maggie said.

“Don’t worry,” Krysty told her. “He loves his machines far too much for that.”

“Nile crocodiles,” Ryan grunted. “Great.”

“Don’t mind them,” said the short, potbellied, curly-bearded man in the glasses next to him. He wore grease-stained tan coveralls. “Everything else here is much worse.”

“You and your exaggerations, Myron,” Trace Conoyer said. She was taller than her spouse, with a hawk nose and piercing dark eyes to match, and dark blond hair worn short. “Though for a fact, I’d just as soon people keep their eyes skinned proper until we’re well out in the Sippi stream and heading south.”

“Start with the worst thing, then,” Ryan said. “After that, it’ll only be good news.”

“Don’t be too sure of that, my friend,” Myron said. As the Queen’s chief engineer, he was Ricky’s nominal boss while aboard the vessel. Although in Ricky’s mind his boss would always be the group Armorer, and his mentor, J. B. Dix.

And Ryan, of course.

Most of them had abilities that were useful to the vessel and her crew—even Doc, with his weird, eclectic old-days knowledge.

As a general rule, Ryan Cawdor did not hire his group out for sec work, unless survival was at stake, for one reason or another. When survival for himself and his small, loyal band of friends was concerned, anything and everything were always on the table.

The companions had been hired on the Queen as crew. There was always plenty of work to be done. Captain Conoyer was grateful for fourteen extra hands to do it, and willing to pay with room and board and a share in the proceeds of every transaction—the same deal she and every other member of the crew had. With differences in percentage, of course.

One of the conditions of the companions’ employment was that if—more likely, when—there was fighting to be done, they would be required to defend the ship. It just so happened that the new crew members were all ace at that particular skill.

But then again, that was pretty much an unspoken condition of every job, including just living day to day. They lived in the Deathlands, after all.

“Stickies,” the captain said. “Been colonies of them around the confluence of the Yazoo and the Sippi for fifty years, the old river folk say.”

“Do they ever attack boats?” Ricky asked, as he settled back down by the tarp on which the winch parts rested.

“Not if they keep well clear of the banks,” Trace said.

“What if there are snags on the river?” Krysty asked. “Or mebbe sandbars narrowing the channel.”

“Like I said—if they keep clear of the banks. Otherwise all bets are off.”

“Don’t forget the rads,” Myron said helpfully.

“Rads?” Krysty and Ricky said almost simultaneously.

“Oh, I was getting there,” Trace stated. “Not just rads, but heavy-metal pollution, big-time. You know how you always hear talk about strontium swamps? Well, they actually got stretches of that around here.”

Ricky eyed a flock of ducks starting noisily from some reeds on the right bank. “Does that mean those birds are muties too, if they can live around here?”

Trace shrugged. “Many of the creatures seem less affected by the rads than we are,” Myron said.

“Sounds like a double-bad place for shore leave,” J.B. said, approaching from astern.

“It’s not my idea of a vacation spot,” added Mildred Wyeth, who walked by his side. She was taller than he by a slight margin, which the battered fedora he wore tended to disguise.

“The rads won’t kill you,” Myron said. “Not right away. The swampers who live in these bogs will likely get you first.”

“Swampies?” Mildred asked.

“Swampers,” the engineer repeated, with added emphasis on the second syllable. “Not muties. People.”

“Of a sort,” his wife told them.

“Wouldn’t they have to be muties to survive if the rad count’s that high?” Ricky asked.

“They’re too mean for the rads to chill,” Santiago offered.

“How about them?” Ryan asked. “Do they go after vessels that are underway?”

“Not much when they stay clear of the banks,” the captain said. “Like the stickies. Like most things, come to that. That’s another reason we stay out in the middle of the channel when we can. The river’s lethal enough. We don’t need the grief that comes from land.”

“Which is her typically sour way of saying the river is our home, and we feel safest here,” Myron said. “Right, my love?”

That got a lopsided grin from the captain. “Anything you say, Myron.”

Ricky picked up a sprocket and held it up to the sun to be examined.

“I get it,” he said glumly. “Everything’s dangerous. Especially everything beautiful.”

Ryan winked at Krysty and grinned. “Pretty much.”

“The real danger is the darkness in the human soul,” said Nataly Dobrynin, the Queen’s first mate, emerging from the superstructure and walking up to join the others. She was on the tall side, taller than either Conoyer, and skinny. She wore her long, dark brown hair pulled back in a ponytail that emphasized the austere bone structure of her face, and her slightly angled gray eyes. She never smiled, and intimidated the hell out of Ricky.

Surely that can’t be right, Ricky thought. Stickies are double dangerous, for one thing. Rads and heavy-metal poisoning, for another.

He looked to Ryan for confirmation. He sure as nuke wasn’t contradicting the somewhat-scary mate.

But Ryan frowned thoughtfully.

“That’s true enough,” he said. “That’s what blew up the world, after all.”

“Some would blame the cold hearts of the whitecoats, lover, never mind the darkness of their souls,” Krysty said drily.

“That ‘some’ being you.”

She grinned; he shrugged.

“Well, ‘some’ aren’t wrong,” he said. “But they still had their reasons, which fieldstripped down to that.”

“I’d say it was the madness of shutting themselves off from the natural world in order to try to control it,” the redhead said.

“Sounds like the same thing, to me,” Nataly said. She turned to Trace. “Captain, we’re coming eight up on the confluence.”

Trace nodded. “Right. Everybody, get to your stations. Break time’s over. The big river’s mood doesn’t look bad today, but wrestling this bitch of a barge through the turbulence where the streams join could get triple ugly triple fast.”

“You best put your toys away and step lively too, Ricky,” Ryan said. “I think we need to have weapons in hand when we hit the Sippi. With the captain’s permission, of course.”

“Why’s that?” Myron asked. The bespectacled engineer sounded more curious than challenging.

“Junctions are good places for bad things to happen,” J.B. stated, settling his fedora more firmly on his head. “Like crossroads. Reckon rivers aren’t any different.”

“They used to say the Devil hung out at crossroads,” Mildred said. “Back in the, uh, day.”

Ricky turned his face down to hide his grin. The “day” she meant was back in the long-dead twentieth century, where Mildred had lived most of her life. She had undergone a routine abdominal surgical procedure and something had gone wrong. She’d been frozen in a cryogenic procedure and shipped to a cryocenter in Minnesota just as the balloon was going up on the Big Nuke.

Trace nodded. “You’re right, Ryan. Take your people to full alert. But stand ready to lend a hand if it turns out the river’s what we really need to be worried about.”

Ryan nodded.

“Get that winch back together double quick,” Myron said, all business now.

“But we haven’t finished cleaning it,” Maggie protested.

“Yes, you have,” Myron told her, his tone at once gentle and commanding. “You’ll just take it apart again and clean it after we’re headed up the Sippi for Feliville.”

“Aye-aye, sir,” she said glumly. Then she sat back on her heels, looked at Ricky and suddenly grinned.

When she did that she was positively cute, he thought.

“All right, champ,” she said. “Show me what you’ve got.”

* * *

THE DECK ROLLED beneath Ryan’s boots as the Mississippi Queen chugged into the joining of the Yazoo with the Sippi.

His Steyr Scout Tactical longblaster in hand, he stood at the bow, with Krysty at his side. The rest of the companions were spread out around the eighty-foot-long vessel’s perimeter, interspersed with armed members of the Queen’s regular crew. Doc Tanner, his LeMat combination handblaster and shotgun at the ready, held a position to Krysty’s right. J.B. was to Ryan’s left, holding his Uzi, and Mildred flanked him farther astern. Jak Lauren, their young scout, stood in the stern. He was ready to run down the thick hawser by which they towed a hundred-foot barge stacked high with lumber and bales of cloth and leap aboard to repel any would-be boarders with his knives and .357 Magnum Colt Python revolver.

Finally, Ricky Morales, having reassembled the power-winch to his stern task-mistress’s approval, lay on his belly on the flat roof of the main cabin, ready to snipe with the DeLisle replica carbine he had helped his uncle make by hand, in happier times on his home island of Puerto Rico. Although it couldn’t really be called “sniping,” since the weapon lacked a scope, the boy could consistently hit his mark with whisper-quiet shots out to a hundred yards.

In the event Ryan’s people had to reach out and touch somebody—as Mildred put it in her quaintly anachronistic freezie way—any farther than one hundred yards, Ryan’s Steyr, which did have a scope, could do the job.

Not that Captain Conoyer believed there’d be any trouble. But she hadn’t batted an eyelash when Ryan suggested turning out as many hands with blasters as possible to wait for it, just in case. Having hired him in part as a sec consultant, as she put it, she had the sense to listen to him on the subject.

Over a third as wide across the beam as she was long, the tug was surprisingly stable as she chugged confidently out into the crosscurrent from the Sippi. As ballast she carried tons of big metal scrap chunks, plus crates of weapons and ammo that were the actual prizes from this current voyage up the Yazoo. The cream of the crop was a Lahti Model L-39: a bolt-action antitank rifle firing 20 mm armor-piercing rounds, in cherry condition, consigned to a wealthy baron up the big river. Or so Ryan was told; sadly, Captain Trace had refused to open the crate despite the near-drooling entreaties of J.B. and his apprentice armorer, Ricky.

The Queen began its turn to starboard almost as soon as it cleared the banks to the north. Ryan glanced back over his right shoulder, along the vessel’s length toward the barge. He knew that getting it safely around the corner would be the trickiest part. But Trace had taken the helm herself, and just in their brief time aboard Ryan and his friends had learned she was expert in piloting the boat.

The one-eyed man was just as glad the Queen wasn’t a pusher-style Sippi tug, of the sort her crew told Ryan had dominated the river before the nukeday. Bigger and of all-steel construction, they used to push not just single barges, but sometimes two or more in series—each many times larger than the wooden one the Queen was dragging toward Feliville—with their square prows. He didn’t even want to try to imagine how pulling off a maneuver like this would have worked in such an arrangement.

He was unlikely to find out. Nukeday had triggered colossal earthquakes that had started shaking up the continental US even before the warheads stopped detonating. None was worse than the quake caused by the New Madrid Fault Line that ran by the Sippi from north of Memphis to St. Louis. The blasts, quakes and seismic water surges had smashed most of the vessels on the river into twisted junk, left them high and dry when the great river actually changed channels, and even tossed them inland, sometimes even into the hearts of major cities.

They had become mother lodes of fabulous scrap for generations of especially intrepid scavvies. Or for barons willing to enslave the people of the villes they ruled to the arduous and dangerous work of ship-breaking. These days most of the river traffic was wood-hulled, driven by steam engines or, as the Queen was, by scavvied Diesels. And when they hauled barges they were content to pull them.

As Ryan turned his face forward again, he scanned the seven-foot weeds that obscured the Yazoo’s north bank and the east bank of the Sippi. He wasn’t sure what he expected to see, but he expected to see something. His gut told him that trouble was coming.

But it gave him not the slightest clue as to what that trouble would actually be. Nor where it would come from.

He looked back out across the Sippi and saw a geyser of water shoot up into the air, fifty yards ahead and a little off the port bow of the turning tugboat. A heavy boom hit him with an impact as much felt as heard. It was a sound he was all too familiar with.

He spun to look south. Steaming up the river from the south came four boats, a quarter mile away and closing slowly. They were a ragged assortment, no two alike, and none as large as the Queen herself. They had a strange, ugly, bruised glint to them in the afternoon sun, and were gray mottled with red. Black plumes billowed from their smokestacks and were swept away east by a crossing breeze.

Yellow light flared from the bows of the nearest two, accompanied by giant puffs of dirty-white smoke.

“Red alert!” he turned and shouted toward the Queen’s cabin. “Cannon fire! We’re under attack!”

Chapter Two

Ryan heard a rushing roar pass overhead. Then a fresh column of water blasted up from the river right in front of the left side of the bow, drenching him.

A hand-cranked siren was winding from the tug’s cabin. Ducking reflexively behind the rail—as if that would offer protection from a cannon shot, either shell or solid ball—Ryan equally reflexively looked back to Krysty.

His lover was likewise crouched, her Glock 18C blaster looking especially futile clutched in her white hands. Her hair had retracted itself to a tight scarlet cap on her skull.

He felt the vibrations of the hull through his boot soles change. At the same time the growl of the Diesels grew louder and slightly higher in pitch. Trace had ordered full throttle. Her husband was doubtless belowdecks now, babying the powerful marine engines to keep them churning at maximum power. Ryan could feel the propellers straining to drive the vessel and the burden she towed faster. But there was no way to give hundreds of tons jackrabbit acceleration. Their accumulation of speed would go painfully slowly.

And the pursuing vessels already had a speed advantage, even though their steam engines were powering them against the Sippi’s sluggish but immensely powerful flow. If this was a race, they couldn’t win it.

And if this was an artillery duel—well, Ryan thought, the Queen was nuked, as the tug had no artillery. Accommodations were tight aboard the tubby vessel as it was—he and his companions slept on deck, when weather permitted, as fortunately it had most nights they’d been on the Queen. And every pound counted when your entire living was based on hauling cargo. The Conoyers could have mounted a black powder cannon, but they chose not to.

Even if they had, they would have been outgunned. The enemy cannoneers hadn’t yet hit the lumbering tug, but it was a matter of time.

Something cracked above Ryan’s head. He ducked even lower, instinctively. The crack was repeated, slightly less loud.

I know that song, he thought. Someone was firing a blaster at him—not a charcoal-burner nineteenth-century replica, but a smokeless-powder high-powered longblaster.

The longblaster shots, in their way, concerned him more than the cannonade. Most black powder cannon weren’t rifled, and therefore weren’t accurate, even though a metal ball weighing just a couple of pounds could do a shocking amount of damage to a body. While most blaster-shooters weren’t particularly accurate, either, there was always the chance that their pursuers would have a marksman in their ranks.

On the other hand, the Queen’s complement most definitely did. And his name was Ryan Cawdor.

He laid the Steyr’s foregrip on the rail and sighted through the low-power Leupold variable scope. He didn’t need much magnification to confirm what he already suspected: the weird, dully metallic stuff covering the oncoming boats looked that way because it was weird and metallic.

The vessels had been covered, at least up front, in plates and pieces of scrap metal.

“J.B.,” he called. He didn’t take his eye from the scope. “Get over here. I’ve got work for you.”

The attacking vessels were steaming in a V formation, with the lead boat on Ryan’s right. As he panned his scope across the vessels, he noticed activity on the bow of the one to his left. Men were swabbing out the barrel of their blaster with what looked like a wet mop and probably was, so that the fresh charge of black powder they were fixing to put in wouldn’t cook off the moment they inserted it.

Ryan sighted in on the nearest gunner and drew a deep breath. As the sight lined up he let half of it out, bit back the rest and squeezed the trigger.

The carbine bucked and roared. Automatically Ryan’s right hand left the rear grip to work the bolt, jacking out the spent case and slamming home a fresh cartridge from the 10-round magazine in his longblaster. The empty brass clinked off the deck boards and rolled out one of the scuppers, which was a shame, since the things were valuable for their metal, even if they were bent or otherwise unable to be reloaded. But spilled blood wouldn’t go back in the body, either. All that mattered to Ryan now was lining up the next shot.

As he expected, the four-person crew was hunkered down and frozen in place. A brighter smear on the improvised-armor plate above them and to the left showed where Ryan’s bullet had hit and knocked away a path of rust the size of his palm.

Also as expected. Like any master marksman, Ryan knew pretty well where a bullet would go when it left his longblaster—not an option except in aimed fire, of course. Though neither the Yazoo nor the Sippi were exactly racing today, the interference of their currents meeting did cause some chop, which in turn made the Queen wallow in a not-entirely-predictable way. But it wasn’t hard to compensate for the motion. And while she was still turning to starboard, into the bigger river’s flow, the enemy ships were coming pretty straight on, and not fast, either. That meant Ryan didn’t have to lead his target much to speak of.

The second shot wasn’t perfect, either. Because of the Queen’s motion he still pulled slightly off, though he reckoned the shot would take the swabber in the right shoulder. When the scope came back level, Ryan saw that his target was out of sight, and the short, skinny kid who’d been just to his right was spattered with red and visibly freaking out about it.

The other two shooters dived for cover behind the armored rail, which unlike the Queen’s wooden hull would reliably stop most bullets, possibly including his pointy-nosed, high-powered, 7.62 mm full-metal-jacket slug. It depended on the hardness of whichever chunk of scrap he happened to hit.

A quick examination showed all four boats carried but a single bow blaster each. It also showed a shocking bright flash of yellow fire from the one on the left-most craft, followed by a vast gout of smoke that instantly began to blow back over the hunchbacked, ironclad shape of the cabin in the breeze of its passage, as well as overboard in the crossing wind.

This time, the projectile’s moan punctuated with a shattering crash from somewhere astern.

“Is everybody fit to fight?” Ryan shouted. He still kept his eye to the glass. He was getting an idea.

“Everybody’s fine,” J.B. replied, crouching at his left side. “The shot blew a section of the starboard rail to glowing nuke shit, just aft of the cabin.”

“Reckon you can hit anybody with the Uzi at this range?”

A beat passed while J.B. considered that. Ryan continued scrutinizing the closing craft.

“Be easiest firing single shots, with the folding stock extended, like she was a big fat carbine. I could hit one of those boats, anyway, I’m pretty sure, but wouldn’t promise anything more precise. Nor even how much damage a round would do if it hit somebody at this range.”

J.B. paused again.

“But I reckon you mean full-auto?”

Ryan grinned behind the Scout’s receiver.

He actually sensed the Armorer’s shrug. Perhaps because he knew the little man so well. They had been best friends for years, ever since they’d served together in the war wags headed by the enigmatic—and legendary—character known only as the Trader.

“Reckon I could bounce a few off their…what? They got some jury-rigged armor, don’t they?”

“Yeah and yeah. I’m about to throw a real scare at them. I want you to make sure they get the message.”

Another loud noise—this one was definitely an explosion, though without the terrible sharp sound and shockwave of high explosive. Immediately the hand-cranked siren atop the bridge—the front part of the cabin—whined out three staccato yips, a pause, followed by three more, and then repeated. It was the Conoyers’ signal for fire aboard.

“Looks like Baron Teddy’s going to have to make his harem’s underthings out of something other than that fine muslin we were taking to him,” J.B. stated. “The shell burst in the barge and set some of the cloth bales on fire.”

That was neither man’s problem. Trying to prevent another shell from landing smack in the middle of the cabin—or blowing a hole at their waterline—was.

In his observation of the enemy vessels, Ryan had noticed that the helmsman of each was plainly visible through an ob port, above the bow cannon, although shadowed. He couldn’t tell if the port had glass. Since he knew the odds of its being bulletproof were slim, he discounted the chance it would turn a longblaster bullet.

It wasn’t an easy shot. Realistically, Ryan didn’t think he had to hit spot-on, but he lined up the shadowy head on the lead boat’s driver as carefully as he could, and fired.

“Head shot,” J.B. reported. He had whipped out a handy little 8-power Simmons monocular he’d bought off a scavvy a few weeks back and was scoping out Ryan’s target.

“Ace on the line,” the one-eyed man said. And indeed, when he could see his target again, there was an indistinct flurry of activity on the boat’s bridge, and no head visible behind the spoked wheel. “Light ’em up.”

As J.B. began to rip short, controlled bursts of 9 mm rounds at the other craft, Ryan saw that, without a hand at its helm, the lead vessel had already began to slew to his right. A second shot through the front ob port helped discourage anyone who might think of trying to regain control.

Ryan swung his scope in search of new targets. He heard cheering break out from behind him and realized the pursuing craft were losing way against the slow, heavy Sippi current.

“Looks like they had enough for now,” J.B. remarked, as he eased off the trigger. “Want me to continue firing them up?”

Ryan lifted his head from behind the scope.

The distance between the lumbering Queen, which had almost completed her turn to the north, and the other craft was visibly increasing now. Blasterfire from that direction had ceased.

“Don’t waste the bullets,” he said.

Chapter Three

“What the nuke did you do?” Trace Conoyer called.

Ryan looked around to see the captain striding toward him from the cabin on her long, jeans-clad legs.

Her tone of voice had demanded a response, but it wasn’t hostile or challenging.

“I left Nataly at the helm,” she said. “How did you make those New Vick frigates sheer off?”

“Frigates?” J.B. echoed.

“New Vick?” Ryan asked.

“They like to call them that. They’re just glorified blasterboats and muster two, three cannon. Four, five at max. But they are ironclad. They’re part of the fleet the barony of New Vickville has been building for a generation now.”

The barge began to obscure Ryan’s view of the so-called frigates. The cloud of brown-tinged white smoke told him that the fire there wasn’t serious.

“I sent Moriarty and a damage control party aft to put out the fire,” the captain said. “I sent the white-haired kid and Doc along. It was obvious they weren’t going to have anything to shoot at, and they seemed antsy for something to do. Got the kid perched up top of the cabin, keeping eyes skinned for trouble from landward. He’s still at it. He’s a strange one.”

“That he is,” Ryan agreed, although Jak was no longer a kid. Then again, he was slighter and smaller than Ricky Morales, who was a kid. It was a natural mistake.

“Were those boys shooting at your tow barge, for some reason?” J.B. asked.

Trace shook her head. “They weren’t aiming for anything in particular.”

“Must be triple-bad shots,” J.B. said. He had slung his Uzi and now took his glasses off to polish them with a handkerchief.

The captain shrugged. “Mebbe. But those cannon aren’t anywhere near accurate at that range. They’re smoothbores. Usually four-pounders, in boats like those. Six for the broadside cannon, mebbe.”

J.B. nodded. That was his lingo, even if charcoal-burning cannon without rifling were pretty far out on the fringe for him.

Krysty and Mildred approached them from around the starboard side of the cabin.

“No injuries, Captain,” the shorter woman reported. “That was some lousy shooting, thankfully.”

“Any orders for us, Captain?” Krysty asked.

“Stand ready if you’re needed.”

The statuesque redhead gave her lover a wink as he straightened from the rail. He kept his blaster in hand, just to be sure.

“So what’s the deal with this barony of New Vick?” J.B. asked. He settled his wire-rimmed spectacles back in place. Behind them Ryan could see a gleam in his eyes. “Why are they building up a fleet?”

“They’re in an arms race with Poteetville,” Trace replied.

“Captain.”

“What have you got for me, Edna?” the captain asked.

This time it was Edna Huang who was approaching from astern. A short, bespectacled Asian woman who inexplicably liked to wear her shiny black hair all wound into circular pigtails, she was the Mississippi Queen’s chief purser.

“Arliss reports the fire is controlled and he’ll soon have it out,” Edna said. “There’s no sign of structural damage to the barge that he can find.”

“Ace on the line,” the captain said.

The purser seemed less than happy at the very news she brought.

“What’s eating at you?” Trace asked.

“There’s not much damage to the textiles, ma’am. But there’s still some. We may need to write off as much as ten percent, adding in for smoke damage.”

“It’s the cost of doing business on the river,” the captain said.

“Baron Teddy’s not going to be triple pleased.”

“You leave him to me. He knows how the world works today.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Now run along and send up Avery.”

“Already here, Captain.”

Avery Telsco, the Queen’s chief shipwright, was a long, lanky black dude with short dreadlocks. He wore a monocle, of all the nuking things, screwed into his right eye. Although having seen him work repairing the ship and fighting off the ever-present danger of rot in her wooden meat and bones, Ryan gathered it wasn’t wholly an affectation. He did make use of it on detail work and inspecting for damage.

“Ace. Report.”

“The shot that hit us just busted a chunk of rail all to nuke. Mebbe ten feet. I can have it fixed in twenty minutes with a spare spar from stores. Or, if you’d care to send a boat ashore we could cut down a sapling—”

“Nuke, no!”

“It would be cheaper, Captain,” Edna said.

“Getting people killed by stickies would not be cheaper,” Trace replied. “And I doubt your crew mates would like to have all their hair fall out and have their skin get all gross with rad blueberries and stumble around like zombies for a few days from even a mild rad dosage. Now git!”

The purser turned and hurried back into the cabin as fast as her legs would propel her.

“Do the badlands extend a ways?” Ryan asked. The view astern was completely hidden by the barge now. Under Nataly’s firm hand, the Queen was churning steadily north up the big river. Ryan could see activity at the stern of the barge, including glimpses of Doc Tanner’s disorderly white hair, past the stacked lumber as the damage control crew pitched still-smoldering bales of Baron Teddy’s expensive, recently spun muslin overboard.

“A couple miles in all directions, pretty much,” Trace admitted.

“So if you got a minute, Captain,” Ryan said, “tell us about this arms race between Poteetville and, uh, New Vick.”

“New Vickville is just south of the hot spot that includes the ruins of old Vicksburg, on and around the bluff, down there to the south. The ville got pretty rich off scavvy from the ruins, not too long after skydark.”

“Seems like that would be pretty dangerous, what with all the fallout around here,” Mildred commented.

“The first baron believed in ruling with what you might call an iron hand,” Avery said in a dry drawl.

“Avery here’s our history bug,” Trace stated.

“Poteetville lies about five, six miles north of here,” the shipwright said. “It started out as a camp for people scavvying flotsam on the Sippi, of which there was a drek-load, right after skydark. Eventually both Poteetville and New Vick turned into pretty big river trading ports. And natural rivals, being so close together.”

“Yeah,” Ryan said. “I wouldn’t think they’d both be able to get rich.”

“Well, Poteetville naturally gets first dibs on traffic coming down from the north,” Trace said, “while New Vick is the stop-off spot for ships from the south. Plus there’s a fair amount of traffic coming off the Yazoo, like us.”

“Things started to heat up between them mebbe thirty, forty years ago,” Avery said. “Baron Poteet sent his daughter to marry Baron Vick, and she promptly died under mysterious circumstances. It seems she committed suicide, but that didn’t mollify Poteetville any. Both villes started building up their fleets. Each already had one or two improvised-armor vessels apiece, to repel river pirates.”

“And do a little pirating themselves,” the captain added.

“But both sides decided they needed full-on ironclad fleets. Or mebbe flotillas. So they started building them like crazy. And expanding and consolidating their holds on the countryside surrounding, making lesser villes either pay them tribute or just absorbing them. That kind of thing.”

“Building pocket empires,” J.B. said. He looked at Ryan. “There’s a lot of that going around this days.”

Ryan shrugged. “It was one of the things that kept Trader in business, back when we ran with him.”

“Yeah.”

“Now both sides got, what? A dozen or so apiece of what you might call ironclad warships. They’ve got three or four big vessels that they call ‘capital’ ships, some smaller ones they call frigates, and a shitload of unarmored little patrol boats. Some of them don’t amount to much more than a canoe with a trolling motor, truth to tell.”

“And those that we just had the run-in with were frigates,” Ryan stated.

“Like I said, they’re what pass for frigates,” Trace replied. “The capital ships run up to a hundred and fifty feet long, and can mount up to ten blasters on the Pearl. That’s Baron Vick’s flagship. Baroness, some people would say, though no one would say that to her face. We can be glad we didn’t brush up against them.”

“Any rifled blasters?” J.B. asked. Ryan didn’t think his friend needed to sound quite so rad-blasted hopeful.

But the captain shook her head. “All smoothbore, like the smaller ships carry. But that many weapons can put a lot of metal in the air in a hell of a hurry. It was lucky that we didn’t run into them.”

“I notice you people seem to use the words ship and boat pretty interchangeably,” Mildred said. “In my experience, nautical types tend to get pretty sticky about the distinctions between them. They can be real assholes about it. Pardon my French.”

“‘French’?” Avery asked, blinking in confusion made comical by one eye being magnified to double size by his monocle. “Wait, that was French? I don’t speak French, but I understood what you said—”

“She’s not from around here,” Ryan said by way of explanation.

“This isn’t the Cific,” Trace said drily. “You may have noticed. Not even the Gulf. Back before the Big Nuke there may have been craft working the river big enough to be worth making a fuss over which were ships and which were boats. Not these days.”

“I take it we’re not close to this New Vick,” Ryan said. “Any idea why they’d have their ironclads this far north?”

“Well, things have been coming to a head between them and Poteetville the last few years,” Avery said. Fifteen years ago they were having a bit of a thaw between them. Then the old Baron Vick, Silas Krakowitz, took a new wife after his first one died. And I mean the old baron—the one who started building up his ville and its ironclad armada in the first place. His wife was much younger, late twenties or thereabout. Then Baron Harvey J. Poteet’s Senior’s wife, Maude, insulted Krakowitz’s young wife, Tanya. That started things off. Then, after old Silas croaked, Tanya became the baron. She was still hot past nuke red over Maude’s slight. Not long after Harvey Junior became baron of Poteetville, he refused to recognize Tanya’s legitimacy as baron. So the shit has been seriously headed for the fan between them ever since.”

Ryan frowned.

“That suggests we might just find ourselves running into the Poteetville fleet,” he said.

“Ships!” Jak shouted from atop the Queen’s cabin. “Lots! Big ones!”

“We just did,” the captain replied laconically.

Another rushing roar like a young tornado passed overhead.

Chapter Four

Krysty felt her gut clench and her eyes widen as the roar ended in a colossal splash to the west of Mississippi Queen, so close that the tubby tug rocked perceptibly.

The redheaded beauty looked north. A line of ships, ominously dark in the shadows of chem clouds crossing the afternoon sun, seemed to stretch across the mile-wide river, side-on to each other. Thin lines of dark smoke rose from their stacks, diffusing rapidly as the breeze began tugging it toward the west bank. A puff of lighter smoke, also drifting to her left, stood out from the rest. That was from the cannon that had fired at them.

Yellow lights flashed from all along the line.

The first boom rolled over them like thunder. Ryan knelt and laid his longblaster across the railing. J.B. knelt by his side, his fedora jammed tightly on his head and his Uzi in his hands. Krysty knew he was by Ryan’s side for support only. His blaster didn’t have the range to do any damage to the hostile ironclads, which were at least a quarter of a mile distant.

Captain Conoyer was already sprinting for the cabin, shouting, “Hard to port, now! Redline the engines!”

She paused at the pilothouse doorway. “Everybody whose duties don’t keep them up top, get belowdecks now!” she bellowed. “Barge damage party, get back aboard and under cover!”

Most of the attackers’ volley dropped into the water at least a hundred yards shy of the Queen’s bow, sending up greenish-brown columns of water that burst into white froth before opening like flowers and falling back again. A couple shots splashed closer, but wide to the right and left.

“At least it’ll take them a while to reload,” Mildred said, wincing as the multiple thumps of cannon shots reach them. She had reflexively hunkered down behind the front rail. So had Krysty.

“Bigger boats are already turning broadside to bring their side blasters to bear,” Ryan reported, peering with his scope through falling spray.

“I’d say it’s just about ready to get serious,” J.B. said, sounding more interested than alarmed.

Krysty looked back. The people who had gone on board the barge to fight the fire in the fabric bales were scrambling back across the thick hawser that connected the hulls. She was relieved and pleased to see Doc trotting right across, as spry as a kid goat, holding his arms out to his sides with his black coattails flapping. Despite his aged appearance, he was chronologically but a few years younger than Ryan. The bizarre abuse and rigors the evil whitecoats of Operation Chronos had subjected him to after trawling him from the late 1800s had aged him prematurely, and damaged his fine, highly educated mind. But he could still muster the agility and energy of a man much younger than he appeared to be.

Ricky came last, straddling the thick woven hemp cable and inchworming along, but he did so at speed.

Avery had vanished. “You and Mildred best head for cover,” Ryan said.

“They’ll only hit us by accident,” Mildred replied, “shooting oversize muskets at us.”

“They’re going to have a dozen or two shots at us, next round,” J.B. said. “That’s a lot of chances to get lucky.”

“Looks like some smaller fry are heading this way,” Ryan reported. “Krysty, Mildred—git!”

“But what good will a wooden hull and decks do against iron cannonballs?” Mildred asked.

“Splinters!” Ryan exclaimed.

“Come on.” Krysty grabbed the other woman’s wrist and began to run for the cabin. Though Mildred was about as heavy as she was, Krysty was barely slowed, towing Mildred as if the woman were a river barge. She was strong, motivated and full of adrenaline.

Krysty heard Ryan open fire. Given the range, the bobbing of the approaching lesser war craft, and the complex movement of the Queen—pitching fore and aft as well as heeling over to her right from the centrifugal force of the fastest left turn the vessel could manage—she doubted he’d be lucky enough to hit anything significant.

The women had almost reached the cabin when the next salvo hit, roaring like an angry dragon. Krysty saw stout planks suddenly spreading into fragments almost in her face.

And then the world vanished in a soundless white flash.

* * *

RYAN’S HEART ALMOST imploded in his chest when he heard the shell crash through the roof of the bridge and detonate. Krysty!

He stood, pushed off from the rail and spun.

The forward port corner of the cabin—his right—had been smashed. Smoke streamed out. He heard screams, smelled burned flesh, and burning horsehair from padded chairs.

Krysty lay on her back on the deck, her head in Mildred’s lap. Her hair was curled close to her head, though not tightly, and was waving feebly. Her face was a ghastly mask of gore and char.

“Krysty!” he shouted.

Mildred waved him off.

“Her forehead’s just nicked,” she said. “The rest is just smoke.”

“She’s not hurt?”

“She’s concussed,” Mildred said. “But she’s tough. She’ll make it. There’s nothing more to do for her right now. Ow! What?”

The last was directed at J.B., who had taken off his fedora and was swatting her on top of the head with it.

“Your hair’s smoldering up top,” he said.

“Oh,” she said sheepishly. “Something made me dive for the deck. Since Krysty was hanging on to my wrist it was easy to take her down with me. But she still caught more of the blast than I did.”

“Help!” somebody yelled from inside the cabin. “Somebody help the captain!”

Ryan and Mildred looked at each other. “Look out after Krysty, John,” she said. Easing Krysty’s head to the planks, she extricated herself and stood.

As soon as he saw Krysty’s head laid gently down, Ryan moved ahead of Mildred to the door and looked inside.

A dense haze of greenish smoke filled the bridge, lit poorly by afternoon sunlight slanting in through the hole, and a few oily flickering yellow flames. The stink of burned gunpowder, hair and overcooked flesh was intense. Ryan had to clamp his jaw shut against acid vomit that shot up his throat.

Nataly Dobrynin stood at the wheel. Like Krysty’s, her face was a black-and-crimson mask. She was craning to her left to peer out the front port. The polycarbonate there had been blasted free by the explosion. The right side, though intact, was smoke-smudged, partially melted and tricky to see through.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Scalp cut and smoke damage. It’s not as bad as it looks.” Despite her words, she seemed to be as much holding herself upright as steering the Queen through its hard left turn.

She jerked her head toward the cabin wall to her right. “Help the captain.”

Ryan looked the way she indicated. Trace Conoyer was slumped against the bulkhead. Her right arm was missing from above the elbow. Avery knelt beside her, frantically trying to tie off the wound with a handkerchief. He didn’t seem to be making much headway against the blood spurting all over him, and rendering the floorboards slippery.

“Mildred,” Ryan rasped.

“Already on it,” the predark doctor said. She actually shouldered him out of the way as she entered the bridge and went to the captain.

When she had been studying to become a doctor, Mildred had discovered she enjoyed research more than tending to the sick and injured, so she chose the field of medical research and focused on cryogenics. Ultimately, her research had saved her life, as it allowed her colleagues to freeze her after the botched surgery. Her sleep lasted longer than a hundred years, and when she awakened, the world had drastically changed. And to survive—emotionally as well as physically—she had to change, as well. She had thrown herself wholeheartedly into the role of healer, bringing real medical skill and knowledge to a world that almost completely lacked them. And when she went into full-on healer mode, she would turn aside for nothing.

Not even Ryan Cawdor.

To the right of the entrance, at the bridge’s rear, was a hatch leading to the deck below. Just short of it lay a body. At one time it had been human, but now it was hard to tell. It seemed to have been blown open, with entrails scattered on the deck. A string of intestine was draped over a chart table lying on its side. The chill was still smoldering.

“I had just gone below,” Avery said over his shoulder. He was now helping the dazed captain hold her stump upright while Mildred tied it off properly. “Edna was headed down right behind me.”

“She had to have taken the brunt of the blast,” Nataly said. “She never had a chance. Poor woman.”

Another salvo landed around the vessel. From the sounds they made, Ryan gathered the Poteetville ironclads were firing a mix of solid shot and explosive shells. Probably whatever was closest to hand.

Ryan stepped up alongside Nataly and began pistoning the butt-plate of his Steyr into what remained of the windscreen. Even damaged as it was, the tough polymer resisted his jackhammer blows. But he managed to pop it out of its framework.

Nataly nodded her thanks as she straightened, showing a quick flash of teeth, bright white against her horror mask of a face.

“What about you?” he asked.

“I was right beside the captain,” she said through gritted teeth. “The blast didn’t do much to me. I thought I was chilled for sure.”

Seeing that both the tall, thin woman and Mildred both had their respective situations well in hand, Ryan went back outside. He found Krysty sitting up against the remains of the cabin’s front wall, while J.B. tried to daub the blood and soot from her face with a wet rag.

She was awake, and she smiled as her emerald green eyes met his.

“You were worried,” she said. “That’s sweet.”

“We’re not out of the woods yet,” he said. She was clearly still dazed.

He looked around. The Mississippi Queen had already swung its bow past due west and was continuing to turn back south. In the process it had moved most of the way to that shore. Most of the barge was visible to port behind the tug.

Suddenly the rest of the companions were gathered around. “How’s Krysty?” Ricky asked. “Nuestra Señora, please let her be okay!”

“I’ll be fine,” Krysty said, more in the tone of voice of a person agreeing with someone who had just said something she didn’t really understand than as an actual affirmation.

“What are you all doing here?” Ryan demanded of the boy, Jak and Doc.

The old man shot his cuffs with elaborate unconcern. “There seems to be a dearth of jobs for us to do at the moment.”

A shattering sound erupted from aft of the cabin. Pieces of the roof flew off in a big gout of smoke. Yellow flames began to flick just above the jagged edges of the bulkhead.

“Dark night!” J.B. exclaimed, as voices began shouting in alarm. “It must’ve set bedding on fire.”

“We’ve got a job now,” Ryan said grimly. “We’ll man the hoses and try to get the fire out. J.B., help me carry Krysty into the cabin.”

“Just leave me here, lover,” Krysty said. She still sounded out of it, but was clearly pulling her blast-scattered wits back together. “Be as safe here as anywhere.”

“No way,” Ryan said, gathering her in his arms for the briefest of hugs, then pulling her away from the bulkhead so he could hoist her by the shoulders while J.B. lifted her feet. “It’s at least some protection. Better than none.”

“You know what old line about lightning not striking twice in the same place?” Krysty asked, her head lolling. “It’s not true. Lots of times lightning hits the same place a dozen times in the blink of an eye.”

“I know that,” he said. “Stay with me.”

He managed not to say, You’re starting to sound like Doc. Although it probably wouldn’t have mattered because the old man had already led the two youngest members of the team back to where several of the crew were unrolling canvas hoses to fight the flames.

Inside, Mildred was letting Trace Conoyer lower her arm, gingerly, to see if the pressure bandage she had taped over the wound would hold. The dirty-rag tourniquet had already been removed and discarded.

Myron Conoyer and Arliss Moriarty hunched over the captain. Avery hovered in the background, uncertain as to how to help.

The captain had already recovered her senses.

“Go tend the engines, Myron,” she ordered in an almost normal voice. “We need to keep them on full power, and we can’t have them blow up on us.”

“But—”

“If you think Mildred would do as good a job taking care of the Diesels as you would, by all means swap places with her. But somebody needs to be down with those engines, and not just Maggie. She’s ace, but doesn’t have a third of your chops.”

Myron bobbed his balding head. “Aye-aye, uh, Captain.” He turned and hurried back below, shaking his head at the sad mess that was all that remained of Edna.

Ryan and J.B. had settled Krysty on the floor, as clear as they could of the still slightly smoking Edna, the captain, and—most important, in Ryan’s view—the helmswoman’s feet. He had folded his long black coat and propped her head up against it. Her hair lay limply across it, as if eager to give up the fight.

“Thank you, lover,” she said as he kissed her cheek and straightened. “I’ll be back on my feet before you know it.”

“Not before I tell you you’re ready,” Mildred said sternly, not even looking around from examining the captain’s dressing.

“Let’s go, J.B.” Ryan jerked his chin to the door. Though the Queen sported powered pumps, at times like this they used hand pumps to allow the engines to devote full power to driving the vessel and her burden. From the way the deck shuddered beneath his feet, he knew that Myron had followed his wife’s initial order to redline them and keep them there, regardless.

Ryan approved. His own team worked that way: if he told them to do something that pushed the envelope, or even seemed flat crazy—and their own judgment told them it might actually be worth a try—they did it. And they usually pulled it off.

“Ryan.” Trace’s voice rasped as if she’d been gargling lye. “Stay. If you will.”

That latter part was one of the shipboard niceties the captain liked to maintain, and Ryan knew it. He turned back. Aboard the Queen, she was his boss. And in this case what she was calling him back from was adding the strength of his back and arms to saving her ship.

“I need you…to advise me,” she said. “We’ve had more than one run-in with people who want this cargo, and I’ve seen that you know something about tactics.”

“You’re the authority on ship-handling,” he said. “I can’t pretend to know nuke about it.”

“We put our…heads together, then,” she said, managing a wan smile.

She was triple tough, there was no question. When her ship and crew were on the line, she would do her job and die doing it. For their part, the crew knew it, and responded accordingly.

Even Ryan and his people knew that. Good, honest bosses were hard to come by.

“I’m fresh out of ideas, now,” he admitted, as another volley came rushing in with a hurricane sound.

He felt a tremor beneath his feet, accompanied by a thunderous bang from astern. Immediately voices began screaming, “Fire! Fire on the barge!”

A moment later, Suzan Kenn appeared in the door, her gray-shot brown hair in more than the usual disarray.

“A shell hit the barge right where the lumber meets the cloth bales, Captain!” she exclaimed breathlessly. “She started burning like Billy Jesus right off the mark. The only hope we’ve got of dousing the blaze is turning on the power to the pumps.”

“We can’t do that,” Trace rapped. “Cut her loose.”

Suzan blinked. “Captain?”

“Are you sure, Trace?” Arliss asked.

He was the Mississippi Queen’s master rigger, which meant he kept the steering linkages in top shape, among other duties. A little guy, somewhere between J.B. and Jak in size, he had a short frizz of graying hair and a beard, prominent ears, and a missing right front incisor. He was the second-best financial mind on board, after the now-deceased Edna, and usually advised the Conoyers in negotiations, a job Edna had been too shy to do well. Like everybody aboard the Queen, he was ace at his job, and Ryan knew that part of his job was to keep his captain’s eye on the bottom line.

“The price—”

“Probably won’t buy us a new ship, Arliss, and definitely won’t buy a new us. We can’t die for the load.”

“But Baron Teddy—”

“Will have to—” she winced at a twinge of pain as Mildred adjusted the bandage “—deal with his disappointment. We can send him a nice note from upstream. He knew the risks when he ordered the goods. Cut her loose, Suzan.”

“Wait,” Ryan said.

Everybody looked at him. “You sound like a man with a plan,” Trace told him.

“I don’t know if I’d dignify it by calling it that,” he said. “Yet. Give me a minute to look outside.”

Suzan started to pull back away from the door as he headed for it. Then she ducked hastily inside at the thud and shudder of another impact.

Ryan’s nut-sack tightened in anticipation of the following explosion, which didn’t come. He poked his head outside.

The middle-aged deckhand had not been lying. Great clouds of white smoke were pouring out of the barge. He could see flames leaping to a height he judged to be higher than his head. He doubted their ability to put out the fire, even with power to drive water at good pressure through hoses stretched far astern. That wasn’t anything he knew much about, but his gut told him he was right. He trusted it.

The wind was still blowing out of the east and freshening slightly as the sun headed for the horizon behind the tall weeds of the western shore. There was already a respectable wall of smoke extending across the wide river in that direction.

The Queen was almost turned clean south. Ryan glanced upriver. As he feared, the half-dozen or so smaller craft giving chase were closer now, and at least three of them were big enough to be what he took for the so-called frigates, and armored.

They had one bit of luck: when he stepped briefly out to the rail to look astern, he could only see the easternmost of the bigger Poteetville ships now lying broadside to their fleeing prey. The rest were completely blanketed by a brown-gray haze of their own gun smoke. That was the thing about black powder weapons: unless you had a wind blowing up double brisk, you only had a few good shots before you were nigh-on blinded by a smoke screen of your own creation. The only bonus to that was that if your enemy was similarly armed, they had the same problem.

Good to know, but not particularly significant, Ryan thought. They were getting close to the point at which there was no sense wasting the powder and ball in hopes of scoring some lucky hits. In fact, he couldn’t see any muzzle-flashes from the stationary capital ships and frigates, even the one that was mostly clear because the breeze blew its gun smoke away. But the pursuing vessels all had bow cannon, even the patrol boats, and they were all banging lustily away as soon as their crews could reload them, which wasn’t fast, fortunately.

But now Ryan had his plan. He smiled and stepped back inside.

“It’s about time to straighten the rudder to run downstream, Captain,” Nataly said as he reentered the bridge. She had gotten her strength back and stood tall.

Trace had her eyes shut and her head back against the bulkhead, but she was awake and alert.

“You still have the helm,” she said, wearily but firmly.

“Keep us turning counterclockwise,” Ryan said. “Uh, to port.”

Nataly looked at him, shocked.

“Captain?” Arliss asked, sounding as if he thought the shock and the pain of her blasted-off arm had robbed her of her senses. “That’ll take us back toward their cannon.”

But Trace had raised her head upright and was gazing at Ryan with clear, brown eyes.

“Go on, Ryan,” she said. “I like where I think this is going.”

“Captain,” Arliss said, sounding pained that she was taking a landlubber’s advice, when it ran dead counter to every bit of his own riverman’s lore.

“Yeah,” he told the captain. “I got a plan. Bring the Queen as close as you can to the east bank and still safely sheer south. Then cut the barge free before you start your turn. I don’t know if that’s the right lingo, so I put it as plain as I know how.”

She managed a smile, albeit a thin one, and fleeting.

“Close enough for getting on with. Nataly—”

The helmswoman had subtly straightened her shoulders. “Aye-aye, Captain!” she said smartly. She had clearly grasped Ryan’s intention.

Arliss frowned, then he nodded and showed a gap-toothed grin.

“Good one,” he said. “If we’ve got to write off the barge, we can use her to lay us a smoke screen. And give those Poteetville bastards something to think about to get around it. You do know your shit, Cawdor.”

Ryan nodded once, briskly.

* * *

HE HELPED THEM beat down the fire. Fortunately only one of the rooms—which the Conoyers and their crew rather grandly called “staterooms”—was gutted. Sadly, Suzan had shared it Edna, and all their possessions were write-offs. That didn’t matter a bent shell case to Edna anymore.

It took Ryan, his friends apart from Krysty and Mildred, and the Mississippi Queen’s crew only minutes to reduce the flames to smoldering char. But they were intense minutes, and when they were done even Ryan had to find a cable coil to sit on while he caught his breath.

Krysty sat next to him, still seeming subdued. Though mostly concerned with keeping an eye on the captain, Mildred had not neglected to watch her concussed friend. She only let the redhead out of the cabin when the fire was out.

His friends found places to flake out on the deck or railing, as did the regular crew they’d been helping: Jake Lewis, tall and saturnine, Avery Telsco, Suzan Kenn, the cheerful bear of a South Plains Indian, Santee, a medium-sized dude named Abner MacReedy, who looked way too much like a rabbit, although he wasn’t particularly shy or skittish, and finally Arliss Moriarty, leaning back against an intact wall of the cabin smoking a corncob pipe. For some reason that gave Mildred the uncontrollable giggles every time she looked at him.

Jak, meanwhile, scrambled back onto the cabin roof. Unable to engage in his usual wide-ranging scouting, he settled for perching up there like a pelican, keeping watch at all hours of the day or night. He even slept up there. Aside from the fore and aft ends, both to portside, where shells had struck, the roof seemed pretty sound structurally. Ryan declined to worry about it. Jak of all people knew how to be careful where he put his feet, and not venture out on anything that wouldn’t support his slight weight. And anyway, it was his stupe neck.

“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc exclaimed.

He had been squatting on his long, skinny shanks, facing aft. All that was visible behind the tug was churning green water. Arliss and his red-haired crony, Sean O’Reilly, who was back helping Myron and Maggie nurse the engines as usual, had cut the barge loose at what Trace Conoyer judged the optimum moment.

By that time it was fiercely ablaze from one end to the other. Enough so that Ryan could feel the heat beating off it as he helped work the pumps. Had the wind not been blowing the sparks away from the Queen, they might well have set the tug alight too.

Now Doc drew himself up to his considerable height and flung out a long arm to point dramatically over the taffrail.

“The blackguards have found a way around the burning hulk, and are emerging from the smoke!”

J.B., who was sitting just aft of the cabin near a boat hung in davits with his back to the stern, barely tipped his head back and turned it to glance over his shoulder.

“Nothing shaken, Doc,” he said.

Ryan was surprised that J.B. could see over the stern, as short as he was. But the Armorer was the last person in their group to say more than he knew. “We knew it was going to happen sooner or later. They’re way out of range now, anyway.”

“Their frigates can’t keep up with us now,” Arliss said. No longer weighed down by the massive barge and her currently burning-to-nuke-shit cargo, the tubby little tug was making surprising time downriver. “They’re slow and handle like pigs, with all that armor. Unarmored patrol boats likely can’t catch us, even.”

That last bit of information was delivered with a note of unmistakable pride in his voice.

He shook his grizzled head.

“It’s lucky we got off as light as we did,” he said. “Except for poor Edna. We’re lucky, and that’s a fact.”

“Count no man lucky before his death,” Jake said.

Arliss put his hands on his hips and stuck his elbows out to the sides. “Well, aren’t you Captain Gloom ’n’ Doom? What, are you taking lessons from Nataly now?”

“It’s an old Viking saying. From my Viking grandmother, Freya.”

“She weren’t no Viking.”

“You didn’t want to tell her that.”

“Where are we going, anyway?” Ricky asked.

“Captain says she means to head back up the Yazoo,” Arliss said. “From there we’ll play it by ear.”

“So we’re basically in the clear?” The youth sounded relieved.

Krysty lifted her head and gave him a wan grin.

“Don’t ever say that, Ricky,” she said teasingly. “It’s only tempting fate.”

“Ships ahead!” Jak cried out from above. “War boats!”

Chapter Five

“It’s the New Vick fleet!” Arliss exclaimed. “And they got their big tubs with ’em!”

Krysty climbed to her feet in alarm. Without even looking, Ryan stood up beside her and reached an arm to steady her.

Ryan gazed south, along the length of the cabin. Out beyond the prow of the Mississippi Queen a V of five blasterboats was steaming toward them with little mustaches of water by their bows. He knew that meant they were driving hard, although the slow but strong Sippi current’s flowing against them slowed them.

Behind the blasterboats came the main New Vickville fleet, darkened by the long shadows that stretched from the low bluffs on the west bank of the big river. It was still well beyond blaster range, but the ironclad ships looked huge, like a distant range of mountains.

“Fireblast,” Ryan said, almost conversationally. Another person might have taken it for resignation. Another man saying it under the circumstances might have meant it that way.

But not Ryan. Krysty knew that his tone meant he had already accepted the situation—and begun to plot how to beat it and survive, as he had a thousand times before.

“Blasterboats have already cut us off from the Yazoo,” he said.

“And the big boats are squatting right in the river mouth,” said Jake, who among other duties was an assistant navigator, though pretty much every member of the Queen’s crew could do pretty much everyone else’s job.

Krysty and her friends were exceptions, of course, although they were willing hands. All had been aboard ships a number of times. They did what they could and nobody complained. When it came to fighting, it was the river-boaters who were second string.

And she already knew that it would come to fighting. Because if the patrol boats or heavy ironclads didn’t sink them with their blasters, they would wind up having to seek shelter somewhere in the deceptively green, rad- and mutie-haunted countryside around them.

Plus it always came down to fighting, sooner or later. These were the Deathlands.

Ryan was already half carrying her forward at a good clip. Several of the crew raced on ahead, maneuvering carefully past to avoid jostling the pair. They were on good terms, along with being nominally on the same side, but none of the Queen’s complement was eager to cross any of the newcomers. Least of all their tall, one-eyed wolf of a leader. Or his woman.

The rest of the companions followed Ryan and Krysty. They were never eager to race toward danger, at least when that wasn’t called for. Except Jak, who scampered forward along the cabin roof like a white two-legged squirrel.

On the bridge Trace Conoyer was standing determinedly on her own, next to the wheel, where Nataly was still piloting the boat. The captain’s right arm had been safety-pinned to the captain’s shirt to discourage her from waving it around. Mildred hovered next to her, watching her like an anxious mother. “They’ve opened fire,” Nataly said in her flat voice. She never seemed excited.

A waterspout blew up out of the river right in front of them. Droplets struck Krysty in the face, without much force.

“Steady as she goes,” the captain said. She shouted into a speaking tube down to the engine room to maintain full speed.

“But, Captain,” Nataly said. For the first time her voice betrayed emotion. She sounded worried now. “We’re heading right into their cannon!”

“Poteetville patrol boats aren’t that much farther behind us,” J.B. called from the open door. The door-slam sound of the shot that had produced the splash hit Krysty’s ears.

“Steady as she goes,” Conoyer repeated. She was leaning forward, gripping the lower sill of the now-vacant front port with her left hand so hard her knuckles whitened. “On my word, turn her hard aport, smartly as you can.”

The mate glanced nervously aside. Her steely veneer was showing serious cracks now.

“Aye-aye, Captain,” she said.

Ryan, J.B., Doc and Ricky had pushed onto the bridge with Krysty. Jak was doing whatever he was doing, as he usually did. Under the circumstances, he was as helpless as the rest of them. Arliss had come in with them. The rest of the Queen’s crew had dispersed elsewhere.

Flashes flickered from the bows of the oncoming craft. “Get down!” Ryan commanded.

He did as he ordered, although he stayed just high enough to peer out the front port. Krysty did likewise. She realized he had likely ordered his people down to reduce the targets they offered. She doubted the wooden front of the cabin would offer any resistance to a solid cannonball. It had not been built for that.

“You too, Nataly,” Trace ordered. After a dubious glance her way, the mate hunkered as low as she could and still see to steer.

The captain stayed erect. “Mildred, stay hunkered down too, but please help me stand. I need to see.”

Mildred reached out and grabbed her hips to steady her.

A shot whined overhead, then the ship was racked by a shuddering crash that seemed to come up through the deck by way of Krysty’s knee and boot sole. Another crash came from somewhere astern.

“Captain,” Maggie called, coming up the hatch from below, “the bow’s been holed below the waterline. We’re taking on a lot of—”

Something moaned by Krysty’s head, between her and Ryan. A hot breath blew across her face. She saw a lock of her lover’s curly black hair tweaked briefly out from his head as by invisible fingers.

From behind she heard a strange squelching noise, followed by another sound of rending wood. Something like hot rain fell on her shoulders and back. She heard a sizable amount of liquid hit the planks of the deck.

She and Ryan both turned. His lone blue eye was wide.

Maggie stood a step away from the hatch below. Or rather her slight torso did. Her head was missing entirely. A pulse of blood shot up from the terrible vacancy between her shoulders, then her headless trunk toppled down the ladder.

Ricky puked. The stink of vomit, added to the reek of fresh blood, excrement, burned flesh and lingering peppery gunpowder smell, made Krysty’s head spin.

“Arliss,” Trace snapped without turning, “get every hand available to work the bilge-pumps.”

His wrinkled, sunburned face was white beneath his beard, but he bobbed his head. “Aye, Captain.”

He vanished below, slipping slightly in Maggie’s blood.

“Captain,” Nataly said in a strained voice, “those blasterboats are getting mighty close—”

“On my mark, start your turn to port,” the captain said. Nataly stood back upright, her hands white on the wheel.

“Don’t see much of a break, up ahead,” J.B. murmured.

Krysty didn’t, either. The summer-green reeds and rushes on the left bank waved in the breeze in a line unbroken as far as the eye could see. She realized Ryan was gripping her arm, tightly enough to hurt, but she didn’t say anything. It reassured her more than it felt bad.

“Three,” Trace said. “Two…”

“Captain, I don’t see—” Nataly began.

“Now! Hard aport!”

“But it’s just land!”

“Now, nuke it, do it now!”

Ryan let go of Krysty’s arm. He started to grab for the wheel.

But Nataly, her normally narrow eyes now saucer-wide, began to crank the big spoked wheel counterclockwise for all she was worth. The Mississippi Queen began to heel to the right as her bow swung left.

They were curving toward what indeed looked to Krysty like solid land at a good rate of speed. She gripped the sill in front of her with her right hand and Ryan’s arm with her left. Bracing was the only thing she could think of to do.

The vessel shuddered to another hit.

The land rushed toward them. Krysty held her breath.

“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc crowed from behind them. “I see it!”

Then Krysty did, too. The weeds were thinner directly in front of them, stretching twenty or twenty-five yards to either side. The Queen’s bow slid smoothly among them, right into a channel Krysty would have bet her life a few seconds ago was not there.

“Ladies, gentlemen,” Trace said, “welcome to Wolf Creek.”

An explosion came from behind. It was as loud as rolling thunder, and made the stout little vessel rock violently back and forth. Instantly Krysty’s keen nostrils smelled fresh smoke, and not just of burned black powder.

“There’s another fire in the cabin,” Avery yelled from the hatch in the aft bulkhead.

“Get anybody who’s not pumping out the hull to fight the fire, Avery,” Trace ordered. Her voice was getting as thin as hope.

“That’s us,” Ryan said, straightening. Krysty went with him.

“Ryan,” Trace called. Krysty saw her sway despite Mildred’s strong hand supporting her. “Have that albino scout of yours keep his eyes skinned. Stand ready to repel boarders.”

“Right,” Ryan said.

“Nataly, take us up-channel at least a mile. Then look for the best place to ground her.”

The first mate had the steel back in her spine. “Aye-aye!”

“Mildred, help me…lie down. Then you’re relieved from tending me to join your friends. I need to pass out now.”

“Then let us help you out on deck to get you laid down,” Mildred said, working her hands professionally up the captain’s solid body as she stood up. “I’m not laying you down in this slop, no way.”

Trace’s short-haired head lolled on her neck. “What…ever.”

Her eyes rolled up in her head. Mildred was ready, but still had to bend her knees to hang on to the woman when her knees sagged.

“I’ll help you, Mildred,” Krysty said. She went to support the now-unconscious—or perhaps semiconscious—captain from the left.

It feels good to be able to do something, she thought. Even if we’re nowhere near safe yet.

* * *

“FIREBLAST!” RYAN EXCLAIMED as the sound of cannon fire echoed between the banks of Wolf Creek.

But when he paused in chopping away burning planks from the starboard side of the Mississippi Queen’s cabin to look astern to where the dull booms came from, he saw nothing but clear green water on Wolf Creek. They had rounded enough of a bend in the stream that the original screen of weeds that had shielded the creek’s mouth had passed out of sight. But he could clearly see two big banks of smoke like river-hugging fog, off above the flat land with its tall grass. The tops of the smoke clouds were already tinted gold by the rays of the sun sinking into the horizon.

“Poteetville and New Vick,” Arliss said grimly. The ship rigger was perched perilously atop the weakening roof of the Queen’s cabin forward of the fire, directing water from a canvas hose into its hungry red heart. “They found better things to play with than us. Meaning each other.”

“Think they’ll follow us this way?” Ricky asked. He was taking a break from manning the deck pumps, which worked on a teeter-totter sort of principle, like a railway flatcar. Although now that they were in a side channel, and out of the line of fire, Myron had throttled back the Diesels and diverted some power to pumping out the water gushing in through the breach. Instead Ricky and Jak were kicking the burning planks chopped free overboard.

There wasn’t enough power to spare for the above decks pumps too. Myron clearly reckoned that if the boat sank, it would take care of the fire, anyway. So his priority was keeping her afloat. His prime enemy as he saw it was water, and Ryan couldn’t disagree.

Avery laughed. He was pointing out to Ryan where to cut with the ax, plus helping out with one of his own.

“Not triple likely, kid. They probably forgot all about us. The only stuff we had worth stealing’s burned to the waterline. Least as far as they know.”

“The only reason either bunch really had for shooting at us,” Arliss pointed out, “was that they’re both plain mean. They’ve been rival king-ass fucks lording over this stretch of river for generations, each with only the other to give them any kind of check. And it went to their heads.”

“So are they meaner than the countryside hereabouts?” Ricky asked.

“Unless the stickies or the swampers got themselves some cannon,” J.B. replied, “I’d reckon yeah.”

“Too slagging right,” Jake said. He was handling the portside hose, where Krysty and Mildred worked the pump, while J.B. and Doc operated the starboard one that fed Arliss’s.

Ryan wasn’t pleased about Krysty working as hard as she was so soon after her concussion. But since the concussion wasn’t literally life-or-death, but putting out the fire might be, he knew better than to try to order her to sit this one out.

“But we gotta beach her soon,” Lewis said. “Then everything changes.”

It was the longest speech Ryan had heard the lanky man make. His tone carried a sense of doom. And if Ryan had any doubt the Queen was doomed—at least so long as she stayed in open water—Arliss chilled it at once.

“She’s riding lower in the water as every minute passes.”

“At least we mostly got the fire beat down,” Avery stated.

“What happens if we go down?” Ricky asked.

“Nile crocodiles,” Jake said with doleful satisfaction.

Ricky emitted a yelp of terror. Everybody laughed. He blushed.

Suzan came back aft. “Captain’s compliments, Ryan, and she asks that you present yourself on the bridge at your earliest convenience.”

Obviously under the inspiration of their captain, Ryan had noticed the crew was partial to the use of old-timey-sounding nautical talk on formal occasions. “She requests your advice picking a spot to ground the vessel.”

“Right,” he said. Just because he knew the game didn’t mean he had to play. Their employers didn’t seem to expect it of him or his people, anyway.

“We got the fire controlled,” Arliss said. “Jake, Avery and I can take it from here. You all can go.”

“You heard the lady,” he said, passing the hose down to Krysty and clambering from the roof of the mostly gutted cabin. “Let’s shift on out of here.”

Jak looked at him with eagerness written on his face. “Go up top, watch?”

He nodded. Jak scrambled up to the roof.

“Man doesn’t talk much,” he told the Queen crew members.

“Noticed,” Jake said.

* * *

“WAIT,” MILDRED MUTTERED. “How did I wind up carrying the lower end of this freaking coffin when the dude on the other end is like eight feet tall?”

Santee was not, in fact, eight feet tall, although he was six-six, minimum, or she was the Pope, Mildred thought, and he was indisputably on the end higher up the staircase. Or “ladder,” as the boat people insisted on calling it. That struck the much shorter Mildred as markedly unfair.

Of course what they were carrying could only serve as a coffin for a child or a very short adult. It was no more than five feet long and felt as if it were packed with lead ingots. Or maybe she felt burdened because it was sweltering hot there in the cargo hold, and she had to breathe through a wet handkerchief tied around her face to filter out the smoke. And then there was the stench of rotting blood from poor Edna and Maggie, although their bodies had been taken ashore.

“What’s in it, anyway?” she demanded as she struggled up the stairs with her unbalanced burden. “Shouldn’t we only be carrying, like, food and other vital supplies off the boat?”

The big man smiled down at her. “Treasure,” he said cheerfully. Nothing seemed to get to Santee.

She managed to make it up the rest of the way and onto the deck, where the two of them handed the long wooden box over the rail to a quartet of workers standing in shin-deep shallows. Then she propped her butt on the rail to catch her breath. Santee said nothing, only drank deeply from a canteen and handed it to her.

He didn’t seem offended when she wiped the mouth with her hands. Even on short acquaintance, the Mississippi Queen’s crew had learned that she had her eccentricities. Fortunately, they were inclined to take folk at their own value, and not sweat that kind of thing unless it slopped over into their own personal lives. They weren’t outlaws, these people who made their livings on the river—certainly not by the standards of the day—but they were pretty clearly outcasts, who had trouble fitting into the more settled societies ashore.

Which is probably why we and they get along like bosom buddies, she thought.

Her companions and the crew worked without particular urgency to unload the boat of whatever was deemed necessary, and prepare a camp on the riverbank, which was as flat as a board and barely higher than the water. The sun wasn’t going to set for some time yet, and it wasn’t as if they could hide their presence.

Ryan and the captain had chosen a decent spot to ground the boat. It was a mostly clear area of dry, firm soil. The radiation in the immediate vicinity wouldn’t chill them too quickly, according to Ryan’s coat-lapel rad counter. As for the amount of heavy metals—brutally toxic—they might be taking in, there was no way to tell, which didn’t make Mildred any too happy. But what mattered was immediate survival. In the absence of that none of the other stuff would matter anyway.

The one slightly alarming aspect was the presence of a dilapidated railroad bridge barely a quarter mile upstream. The rusty steel structure had fallen into the creek from roughly one-third of the way out from this bank almost to the far side. Likely there was still a rail line, long overgrown by weeds, leading to and from it. The problematic part was, this region was alleged to be crawling with stickies, and that derelict bridge would provide an ace nest for a major stickie colony.

Still, she thought, we take what we can get. As usual.

Ryan was hacking back the long grass and scrub surrounding their landing point with his panga. Jake was helping out with a scythe that they seemed to be carrying to trade at some point. He mowed the stuff down far faster than Ryan, and likely could have done as well by himself. But Ryan clearly felt the need to do something, especially after the enforced helplessness when they were trying to run from a bunch of boats shooting cannon at them.

At least Ryan and Mildred had prevailed on Krysty to take it easy, once they got ashore. She had insisted on carrying her own backpack off the vessel—fortunately all their gear had survived the fires and general smashing. Then she went off to the side and sat down on her jacket, spread out on the dirt. She was acting normally, aside from her not being in the thick of all this activity.

Mildred smirked. Sometimes she got her companions to stop acting as if they were superhuman, and to take some regard for their health. If you didn’t take care of yourself some, your performance degraded. There was no way around that. And especially given the way they all lived, that was a fast ride to a hole in the ground, with dirt hitting you in the eyes. Such was life in the Deathlands.

Sadly, the captain would not listen to Mildred’s urging that she rest after her terrible injury and blood loss, though in fairness she wasn’t listening to her own people, either. She was wading around in the water with Avery and Nataly, inspecting the pierced hull to see if it could be repaired. Or if it even had the structural integrity left to be worth repairing. After sharing a brief, impassioned hug with her, her husband had retreated below to the engine compartment with J.B. and Ricky, doing something to take care of the engines, which Mildred understood not at all and cared about less.

She decided to watch Trace closely. Strangely, aside from her losing her lower arm, and Edna and Maggie losing their lives, no one was seriously hurt. Pretty much everybody had gotten cut, scraped, bruised and burned. Even Nataly looked as if she’d just gotten a bad sunburn on the left side of her face, once the grime and gore got washed off. Mildred guessed it hurt like bloody hell, but the first mate was stoic about it.

Well, great.

She heaved herself to her feet. Suzan and Abner MacReedy were carrying a crate of scavvied canned goods out of the hull. They were prime trade goods, too, as whatever the few-spoken Santee termed “treasure” presumably was. But if their day-to-day survival depended on consuming them—well, they were cheap at the price, as long as they weren’t spoiled. She reckoned she needed to get back and pitch in.

We’re all exhausted, she thought. Surely I can take my eyes off Trace and Krysty for a few minutes…

From his perch atop the cabin, which was the most intact roof section of the largely burned-out cabin, Jak yelled out, “Crocs! Lots!”

Chapter Six

Ryan knew their scout Jak didn’t cry wolf. But what really ripped his attention away from hacking at the weeds surrounding the camp—and keeping his eye scanning in all directions inland, mindful of all the reasons he was trying to clear the tall grass and brush away—was that Jak’s falcon-scream warning was followed promptly by the cracking, booming blast of his .357 Magnum Colt Python handblaster.

Unlike the rest of them, who were extremely handy with a blaster—even Mildred had been an Olympic-level pistol shot in her day, and carried a competition-quality Czech-made ZKR 551 revolver to prove it—Jak was all about blades. At any given time he had a dozen or so knives hidden on his body, both for close-quarters fighting and throwing. He was ace with them all, and he loved getting the chance to use his skill.

Ryan’s head snapped around in time to see the grounded Mississippi Queen’s first mate and chief shipwright pick up their captain by the elbows and carry her onto the bank, sending big splashes of water into the twilit air. There were four or five others in the shallow water that he could see, including Doc and Ricky, helping unload the boat of whatever Arliss deemed necessary.

Another thunder crack ripped from Jak’s Python. Ryan saw a plume of water spurt up about ten yards downstream of the boat. The craft was beached at an angle of about forty-five degrees, with the keep of its prow driven into the soft soil of the beach, and its stern pointing west. Trace had ordered Nataly to bring her in that way to facilitate loading and unloading. The actual channel of Wolf Creek got steep fast, they told Ryan, who had no reason to doubt them.

They know their trade, and we know ours. There wasn’t a nuking thing any of us could have done to stop us from winding up here, stranded on some forsaken shore in the middle of a nuking strontium swamp, he knew.

The one-eyed man hated the feeling of helplessness their bombardment had pounded into him. Into all of them, he knew, crew and companion alike.

He was already running toward the shore, transferring his panga to his left hand and drawing his SIG Sauer P226 handblaster with his right. His boots wanted to sink into the firm but moist soil. It was just this side of being straight-up mud. Out in the stream, Ryan could see what looked like random snags disturbing the water’s oleaginous flow, except that they hadn’t been there before. They were strangely bumpy. Some of those bumps showed glabrous gleams. And they were moving.

“Fireblast!” he burst out. There had to be a dozen of the bastards. More. How did so many get so close without Jak noticing them? he wondered.

Then he saw what seemed like a mostly submerged log, but with eye-bumps on the near end, slide out of the lower weeds in the water by the far bank, sculling with faint side-to-side strokes of its tail.

The bastards were cunning, he thought. They snuck up on them.

“Mildred!” Ryan yelled. “Stay in the nuking boat!”

The physician froze with one leg over the rail. The last of the stragglers in the water had made the sanctuary of the bank. Clearly, Mildred didn’t realize the big Nile crocodiles could swim quite easily in water as shallow as that surrounding the hull.

Jak fired again. Ryan could see thrashing in the water this time, and he spotted a pink tinge in some of the splashes. A couple of the “snags” diverted toward it. Apparently these bastards weren’t above making a meal out of one of their buddies.

But the others headed for the bank like starved ville rats offered a feast by their tyrant baron. Blasters were coming out among the people onshore, although they hesitated to waste ammo on such dubious targets.

When she was about four feet from the water, Trace shook off her helpers. Then she turned back to the creek.

“We should be clear as long as we keep away from the water,” she said. “We just need to figure out how to drive these bastards off so we can work on getting the Queen under way again.”

“At least we’ve got plenty of ammo,” Arliss said. Though the Queen’s crew preferred black powder blasters—indeed, preferred fleeing to shooting, whenever the option offered—they kept a hefty store of all kinds and calibers of ammunition in the hold. It was something they could always trade, and be pretty sure of catching a profit, too, almost regardless what they traded for it.

“Right,” the captain said. Despite her horrible wound, she seemed strong and in command of herself. Ryan knew what it felt like to step up in emergencies, disregarding your own wounds. If he hadn’t shown that knack early on, he’d never have made it out of Front Royal alive, after his brother Harvey’s treachery cost him his eye and left him with a scar down his face.

“I saw,” Doc said, stepping toward her tentatively with his outsize LeMat wheel gun in his knobbly-knuckled hand. “I am not sure it is safe to stand so close to the water, Captain. These Nile crocodiles have a reputation as being quite aggressive.”

She waved him off with her stump. “Light some torches,” she commanded. “I bet they don’t like fi—”

In the midst of a big wave of water a huge, pebble-scaled form erupted from the creek. Tooth-daggered jaws opened what seemed a whole yard wide. Before anyone could react, they snapped shut on the captain around her waist.

“Hold fire!” Ryan shouted. He tucked the SIG back in its holster and charged.

The croc was a monster, at least twenty feet long. It was shaking Trace in its jaw like a dog with a rat as it backed toward the water.

Ryan reversed his panga. Gripping the hilt with both hands, he took a running dive toward the immense reptile.

The wide-bladed panga was not meant for stabbing, especially, but it did have a point. He aimed to bring that down on the spine behind the horror’s triangular skull.

But the croc was heaving too much. The panga sank into its neck a full six inches as Ryan landed half on the croc, half in the water.

The croc whistled in pain and fury, but it did not open its mouth and release its prey. Instead it started to roll away from Ryan, either in a premature death roll meant to drown its captive, or more likely as a simple animal reflex to get the injured site away from the thing that had caused it unexpected pain.

Trying to mute his own awareness of the scaled, toothy horrors that could be wriggling toward him with their bulging eyeballs fixed on his legs, Ryan maneuvered himself to straddle the beast. He wrenched the broad blade free with the same effort it would have taken him to deadlift an engine block.

The croc had made a tactical mistake. Its back was armored well enough to shed bullets that hit at any kind of angle, if the crocodiles and gators he’d tangled with before were any guide. But its pale belly was vulnerable. As soon as Ryan saw the flash of yellow hide, he plunged the panga down again.

It sank into the beast’s chest, between its scrabbling forelegs. He twisted the blade, hoping he’d hit the heart. Then again he didn’t know where the nuking thing was located.

The crocodile roared. Meaning at least it opened its jaws—meaning it let Trace go. Ryan was in no position to confirm that fact, though, because before he could yank the panga free, or even let go of the handle, the monstrous creature had sped up its roll—dragging Ryan right along with it as if he were a rag doll.

For a moment he felt the crushing sensation of incredible mass on top of him. The thing had to have weighed a ton or more, at that size. The air was blasted out of his lungs in an involuntary yell. Had the mud beneath not been so soft, taking him into its slippery embrace and cushioning the weight, the behemoth surely would have crushed him to death.

The beast kept rolling. When the unendurable weight came off Ryan, he managed to let go of the panga’s hilt and somehow get one boot and one knee planted into the muck.

He was also able to draw his handblaster. He pressed its muzzle almost into the croc’s throat, right at the base of the long, triangular head, and started cranking off rounds. He figured if anything would cause handblaster rounds to penetrate the croc’s notoriously hard skull—not a triple-big target as well—it was a lot of them, from below, at near-contact range. The fact that the copper-jacketed 147-grain 9 mm bullets had a lot of penetration for a handblaster didn’t hurt.

The croc began to thrash from side to side. The water around it was maroon with blood except when its visibly diminishing efforts churned it to froth. That was pink.

Ryan flung himself away from the monster. It was still strong. A death-throe crack of the tail could pulp his hips or snap his spine like a baby’s arm.

Trace was on her feet but bent over and staggering in knee-deep water. She had her good arm pressed to her gut where the jaws had closed, but she waved her stump, its compress now soaked red with blood from her struggles, at the shore and the stunned watchers.

“Thanks,” she croaked. “I’m all right, all right, I’m fit to fight—”

She was yanked right out from behind her words and under the water in a flash. There was surprisingly little disturbance on the surface where she vanished. It was as if she’d never been.

Even Ryan was shocked immobile by the suddenness of her disappearance. But being Ryan Cawdor, he didn’t stay that way longer than a heartbeat or two. Instead he hightailed it for solid land. He was not diving into a river full of nuking killer crocs to wrestle with one big and strong enough to make the captain, who was no small woman herself, simply disappear like that.

If he was going to commit suicide, he’d pick a better way.

As he reached land, though, he turned. Long-practiced habit kicked in. Even as he scanned the creek’s surface for some sign of the captain—or where the next attack might come from—he kicked the magazine free of the handblaster’s well, stuck it in a back pocket and slammed a fresh one home. He had no idea how many cartridges he’d fired, but he wanted all of them if he needed to shoot again.

For a moment the creek’s surface was peaceful and even seemed free of crocodiles, at least in the stretch Ryan was watching with laser focus, past the Queen’s stern.

Then Trace burst out of the water, head back, arm and stump thrown high, but not under her own power. She was well out from the bank, where soundings by means of a predark weighted line said the channel was more than eight feet deep.

She spun counterclockwise, hitting the murky water in a shower of spray that dwarfed the one that had accompanied her brief reappearance. Then two separate waves sloshed upward on opposite sides of where she’d gone down again. Tall tails thrashed the water into curtains of spray.

Ryan took his SIG in a two-handed grip and blasted off the whole magazine, plus the cartridge up the spout. He reckoned if he chilled the captain by accident now, with two of the monsters fighting over her, it would just be a mercy chill. The spurts kicked up by the bullets striking were barely noticeable against the effects of their titanic struggle.

The farther croc reared out of the water. In its jaws was clamped one of Trace’s legs. Red flew from the ragged end, past the yellow knob of her femur head. The commotion ceased.

Dead silence reigned. It was as if time stopped, though Ryan’s pulse continued to pound in his ears. The violated water subsided into the usual ripple of its undisturbed flow so swiftly and smoothly it almost seemed to be trying to erase the horror that happened upon and inside it just moments before. The suspended moment was broken to pieces by a wailing wordless cry from Myron. The chief engineer was tackled by Santee just shy of the monster-haunted water as he tried to run to his doomed mate’s aid.

Ryan realized he needed to follow the advice he been given when he was a boy learning to hunt: shoot enough blaster. He holstered the SIG, which he’d already reloaded, and ran for his Steyr. The longblaster was propped against his pack thirty paces inshore, muzzle-up to keep muck from getting in the barrel.

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