by James Axler
Twenty yards from the Egret a big, bulky, smoothed-off shape plunged back under water as fast as it had appeared, leaving a loud snort and a plume of vented air hanging above where it had been. Just before it vanished, Krysty caught a glimpse of a blunt muzzle and a glaring red-rimmed eye. Mildred was grimacing and holding her wrist with her left hand.
Quickly slinging her own massive weapon, Krysty grabbed the longblaster, eased the strap free of the wounded woman and lowered it to the deck.
“What happened?” she asked, disengaging Mildred’s wounded right hand. The doctor seemed disinclined to let go. Without even thinking about it, Krysty pulled the hand free.
“You’ve skinned your thumb pretty badly,” she said.
“Sprained it, too,” Mildred grumbled. “Now I know what the phrase ‘M-1 thumb’ means.”
Krysty shook her head. “The Tech-nomads warned you. The bolt slams right back on you.”
“Tell me about it. I’m not used to a rifle anyway. And it doesn’t feel natural to keep my thumb on the same side as the fingers, instead of grasping the rifle like I would a pistol grip.”
“We need to get this cleaned up and bound.”
“Screw that! Screw the damn rifle, too.” With her left hand she reached around and grabbed the blocky black revolver from the holster on her right hip. “This may not do much when I hit, but at least I can hit something with it!”
“And shoot one-handed,” Krysty said. She unslung her BAR and started looked around for targets.
Its steam engine pounding furiously, Finagle’s First Law, the squadron’s third major vessel, churned past the Egret at about the same spot the great creature Mildred had messed up her thumb shooting at had vanished. Although he was out of sight on the far side of the main cabin, Krysty heard Jammer screech in outrage at the black pall of smoke it trailed from its doubled stack. The Tech-nomads’ time-honored philosophy of avoiding confrontation only applied outside the family—as the companions had learned abundantly the past couple of days.
Above the engine’s rhythmic thud rose a sharp-edged snarl. A cloud of white steam puffed away from the steamboat’s prow. Krysty saw the skinny bare shoulders of a Tech-nomad named Stork turned toward her, pressed against the mesh back of a recumbent seat as his gangly pallid legs pedaled wildly. His pedaling turned the six barrels of a Steam Gatling powered by the Finagle’s boiler. It was hurling .450-caliber lead slugs at targets on the far side of the tubby craft.
“Oh, shit, Krysty!” Mildred called. “Look at the Hope!”
The redhead turned to look past the Egret’s own prow, so much narrower and more graceful than the Finagle’s. Beyond the bowsprit she could see at least half a dozen water mounds churning around the rotor-ship.
Whatever these angry aquatic monsters were, a whole pod of them appeared to be on the attack.
As the two women watched, a creature erupted from the water to the Hope’s starboard. Its elephantine bulk crashed down across the ship’s bow in an explosion of brown water.
Chapter Two
“Ryan!” Krysty screamed. She raced toward the Egret’s bow, holding her BAR at port arms. She heard Mildred’s boots thumping after her.
A knot of Egret crew had gathered at the bow. A few held blasters or crossbows. The others were mostly pointing and shouting contradictory advice.
Krysty shouldered them roughly aside. She wasn’t shy about using the Browning’s butt or even its muzzle, still warm from the burst she’d fired at the one creature, to clear a path. The Tech-nomads yelped but gave way, seeming if anything more shocked and hurt than resentful.
As she came up to the rail she saw a slim pale figure, white hair streaming, leap from the rail onto the broad gray back of the monster draped across the Hope’s bow. With feet splayed on the tough hide, Jak pointed his Colt Python at the back of the oil-barrel-size head and fired.
A second man charged forward to hack at the monster’s bristly snout with a long, broad-bladed knife.
“It’s Ryan!” Mildred exclaimed, coming up beside her. “He’s all right!”
But how long he’d stay that way remained an open question. Even as he slashed the beast with his panga, its companions began to ram the Hope with impacts Krysty could feel through the Egret’s hull. The rotor-ship no longer moved. The creature draped across the bow had stalled it. With the wind calm, its mass was apparently too great for the vessel’s auxiliary electric motor to move.
Krysty raised the Browning. “Careful where you shoot!” a man nearby said. “Those’re our friends up there.”
“That’s my man up there,” she snarled. “And I know how to shoot.”
She aimed at the nearest monster, a mound twenty feet long and almost ten broad, heading toward the port stern of the stalled Hope. She triggered a short blast. Spray flashed from the wide back. Another burst. With a steam-whistle wail the monster slid below the pool’s greasy surface.
Bleeding from deep gashes generated by Ryan’s panga, the first monster reared up from the Hope’s bow. The movement tossed Jak away like a watermelon seed. But the albino youth had sensed its muscles bunching and read the beast’s intent. As it snapped its vast bulk up he sprang, using its motion to hurl himself up into the rigging of the Hope’s foremast. He caught the mast one-handed, like a monkey on one guyline, then planted his feet on another.
Ryan had stuck his big knife back in its sheath and was retrieving his Steyr rifle from the deck where he’d laid it. As lethal as the big scoped bolt-action was at range, it was a liability in a close-in fight.
Krysty fired another burst at a monster closing in on the Hope’s midship from the left. As her ears rang from the Browning’s roar, she heard a snarl and a curtain of pink-tinged spray shot upward from the beast’s back. Stork had apparently hand-cranked his Gatling around to bear.
He also got a touch too enthusiastic. Krysty’s heart leaped into her throat as Ryan dived aft to avoid the burst of bullets that raked across the Hope’s prow. She heard Smoker, the Finagle’s black, burly and bearded captain, roaring angrily at the Gatling gunner as the squat steamboat passed between Egret and her stricken comrade.
A multichambered thunderclap from right behind Krysty made her duck her head instinctively. She spun to see Isis three feet behind her, a thin trail of blue smoke unspoiled from the muzzle brake of the BAR she’d just fired. Another fat tail like a giant beaver’s paddle was just vanishing into a roil of water.
“Don’t forget it’s this ship you’re mainly supposed to be protecting,” the long, lean woman said. She sounded neither reproachful nor excited, just matter-of-fact, as always. There was a reason her crew called her “Ice.”
Krysty nodded. For a few moments she concentrated wholly on shooting at any of the great gray shapes that presented itself, always keeping mindful of what lay behind them, as Ryan had taught her. No point in trying to help your friends if you chilled them yourself with your own blasterfire.
She burned through three of the 20-round magazines so fast they might have been strings of firecrackers. Though she also knew to shoot in short bursts the long black barrel quickly grew so hot the heat shimmer interfered with her sighting. Even on such gigantic targets.
“Give it a rest,” Isis suggested from right beside her. So focused had she become on her own shooting Krysty had been all but oblivious to the roar of the tall, lean woman’s own big Browning, and the muzzle-blasts that buffeted her like a stiff wind. “We don’t want to burn out the barrel. Or even have to take time to swap it out.”
Krysty nodded. She looked around. The Finagle was running back on a reciprocal course along their starboard side. Before view of any of the steam craft but its stacks and radio masts vanished behind the Egret’s cabin, Krysty saw Stork with his Gatling swiveling and blasting away as fast as his long, wiry legs could revolve the barrels.
Beyond the wake the steam boat left in the black water, topped with yellow foam, an object like an overturned whaleboat floated to the surface near the reeds of the far
bank of the little lake. Red streamed down its blubbery sides. It was clearly dead.
But the death of one of their own only redoubled the aquatic muties’ fury. The Egret was suddenly torqued counterclockwise by simultaneous impacts at bow and stern.
Krysty heard Isis’s teeth grind. “Dammit!” the captain groaned as if in sympathy to the noises of the tortured hull. “Even if we wound the monsters fatally, most won’t die quick enough to help.”
Despite the fact she could still feel the heat from her BAR barrel on her skin, Krysty had to shoulder the heavy longblaster and open up again. She fired toward the port quarter, where a monster was charging, attempting to ram again. Some of the Egret’s crew joined in with fancy compound bows and crossbows, feathering the animal’s back like an elongated seagoing porcupine. Krysty’s powerful .30-06 slugs literally ripped bloody chunks out of the broad back.
The creature submerged before it struck, and Krysty staggered as the deck lurched beneath her bootsoles. The beast had clearly slammed against the keel in passing below, trying to break Egret’s back or turn her turtle.
Instead a huge basso roar of agony vibrated up through the very timbers of the former yacht. The mutie had succeeded in driving some of the arrows stuck in its hide deeper by hitting the boat. It was clearly in great pain.
As she popped another empty magazine from the BAR’s well and stooped to grab a new one from the rapidly dwindling stock in the messenger bag Isis had dropped at her feet, Krysty grimaced.
“I hate the thought of wounding them without killing them.” She was untroubled by killing when it was needful. To eat, or to prevent whatever you were chilling from chilling you—man or beast. But she deplored wanton killing.
And she abhorred cruelty. She’d seen more than enough of it, known her share of it. That was one of the reasons she loved Ryan as she did: he was never cruel, never inflicted pain for its own sake.
“Me, too,” Mildred said.
She had gone green. Despite the blood dripping from the gauze she’d hastily tied around her wounded thumb, she had kept up the fight. She was clumsily jamming a fresh 8-round spring clip into the top of her M-1 receiver, impaired by her wound.
“The Deathlands just seem to find something awful to throw at you every single day.”
A shout from the bow made Krysty look. The water around the Hope seemed to boil. As she watched in horror a mutie with a good head start rammed its blunt head into the rotor-ship’s hull just aft of the bowsprit.
She heard the crunch as wooden planks gave way.
Then she tensed as Ryan went over the rail, right on top of the gray back.
But the man hadn’t been knocked overboard to his death. Or at least he wasn’t giving in to Death. In an instant he had jumped up to stand with boots planted wide on the monstrous back, holding the panga with its long, heavy blade downward, both hands wrapped around the grip.
An enormous single-fluked tail whipped up out of the water as he plunged the blade almost to his hands in the creature’s flesh. A cascade of water surged over Ryan, momentarily hiding him from sight. Krysty’s heart almost stopped beating.
But the waters receded and she saw him still there, ripping his panga free, leaving a trail of gore in the heavy humid air as he cocked the weapon over his head again. She realized the splash had been produced by a reflex reaction to the pain of having the knife bite deep, more than any attempt to wash him off. Though she could barely believe it hadn’t, so violent had the wash of stinking dark-stained water been.
Three times more Ryan plunged his panga into the horror’s back. The beast backed away from the hole it had stove in the Hope’s hull. Its big blunt head snapped up, venting a squealing roar of pain and fury.
It dived with breathtaking speed. But like Jak, Ryan felt the creature’s muscles bunch in preparation. Clutching the panga in his teeth, he threw himself toward the rail of the damaged boat, flinging out a hand.
His fingers reached just short of the rail. Then a bone-white hand gripped his wrist, his other hand clamping on Jak’s wrist. Ryan’s boots thumped into the white hull. A moment later he was clambering over the rail, helped by a dozen hands, which shortly were clapping him on the back.
“Whew,” Mildred said explosively.
Krysty let loose the breath she’d unconsciously been holding, as well. “That man just doesn’t do anything that isn’t heart-stopping, does he?”
But Ryan was brushing off the Tech-nomads’ congratulations. He gestured angrily. From her vantage point on the ship, trailing the other now by no more than forty yards, Krysty could see what he meant with painful clarity.
A dozen or more of the monsters still beset the squadron. No matter how dramatic, everything the defenders had done had amounted to a pinprick. Nothing more.
With a snarl of disgust Isis threw down her own BAR. Its barrel was glowing red now. It was almost certainly ruined, burned out. More to the point the heat would have warped the barrel, which could trap a bullet before it reached the muzzle. That meant there would be nowhere for the expanding gases of the next fired cartridge to go, except by blowing the receiver apart in the captain’s face.
If she was lucky, that would chill her.
“This isn’t working,” she said. “If there was some way to discourage the bastards…”
Mildred hauled up her longblaster and cranked out all eight shots at a mutie making right for them. The empty 8-round steel clip flipped free with a ching. Krysty saw red streamers in the water before the humped form vanished again.
“Oww,” Mildred moaned. “I feel like a mule’s kicked my shoulder. With sharpened shoes on. Do you have any explosives? They might not kill the things, but—”
A roar made all three women turn to look aft. The Finagle was crossing Egret’s stern. A geyser of water, dark with a white crown, erupted from the bayou close beside the steamboat’s starboard hull. Behind Stork the equally storklike figure of Doc Tanner wound up, raising his left leg and cocking his right arm way back, then hurling an object at an angle off the Finagle’s stubby bow. It splashed among at least a quartet of the huge forms. A moment later another waterspout blasted upward.
“What was that?” Isis exclaimed, shading her eyes with her hand.
“Bombs!” Mildred replied. “J.B.’s making up bundles of some kind of explosive and passing them off to Doc!”
“Son of a—” the captain said.
“We got dynamite, too,” Jammer said from right behind her. Krysty could barely hear for the ringing in her ears. “Waterproof fuse. Whole nine yards.”
The sailing master showed his brown gap-toothed grin. “Never know when you might need to shoot a channel to clear passage.”
Another dirty fountain erupted, then another. The waters around Hope churned white with the furious efforts of the giant aquatic muties.
But Krysty quickly saw the water was being churned by the creatures’ frenzy to escape. A dead monster floated to the surface, belly up, distended and already turning blue from internal organs ruptured by shock waves transmitted much better through water than mere air. The rest seemed to be protected by the thickness of their hides, along with muscle and blubber and whatever else lay beneath. Judging by the speed they made, they weren’t hurt badly.
“I hope they’re not permanently injured,” Krysty said. “Now that they no longer threaten us.”
“Yeah,” Isis said. “So long as they keep running They don’t like the shock waves much.”
Mildred sighed heavily. “So, what the hell were those things, anyway? They looked familiar, somehow.”
Isis turned toward her. “Manatee.”
“You’re telling me we’ve just been attacked by giant mutant sea cows?” Mildred exclaimed.
Jammer grinned at her. “Huge mutie sea cows.”
Chapter Three
Somewhere in the gathering dusk a bittern boomed. A flight of herons rose up from the dense woods northeast of the little island in the middle of a relatively broad bayou where the
Tech-nomad squadron had anchored for the night. The bugs swarmed around the companions in jittery clouds, biting lustily despite the smoky driftwood fire that was burning in a pit that had been scraped clear.
Mildred stood with her companions by a small driftwood fire near the widening of the bayou, watching the herons winging majestically into a sky blazing red and orange with sunset. She felt bone-weary. She had helped the Tech-nomads tend their injured, including poor Scooter. The mutie manatee had broken almost all of his bones and torn most of his tendons free of the bone.
Three Tech-nomads had died: one strider-boat pilot drowned, a crew woman on the New Hope had fallen and broken her neck when a mutie manatee rammed the ship, and Scooter had succumbed to his horrendous injuries.
Another dozen were hurt badly enough to require treatment. That meant about a quarter of the squadron’s people had wound up as casualties. Four of their eight pedal-powered scout boats had been smashed beyond repair. Of the three large craft only the New Hope had been seriously damaged. She now lay with a third of her length grounded on a little island down the sluggish stream. The starboard bow had been holed; some seams had been started on the portside. These had been patched up to what the chief shipwright, a short-haired, hard-faced woman named Vonda, claimed was as good as new. Mildred had thought she heard doubt in the woman’s voice, though.
The human toll affected her more than the material. But she was acutely aware the damage the Tech-nomad craft had incurred could come back later and bite somebody in the ass.
Even her friends or her.
Now she watched the big birds fly over, their white feathers turned to flames by the sunset, and sighed deeply.
“That’s one way these swamps are better than most of the Deathlands, anyway,” she said. “Sometimes it doesn’t look at all as if the nuke war and skydark even happened.”
“The waters have tended to obviate the scars left behind by the conflagration and its sequelae,” Dr. Theophilus Tanner said. He was a tall and skinny man with pale blue eyes and a long, hard-worn face framed with lank, gray hair.