by James Axler
“As for what can be done,” Frost said, still in a perfectly calm and even voice, “whether she...can be rescued depends largely on fate. This my wife and I know. As for your capabilities, we know them, for we have seen them in action. And as for your exerting all your formidable abilities to return Milya safely to us, I believe we have all the guarantees we need.”
“Are you going to walk away and leave J.B. here?” Ryan asked Mildred. Her eyes went wide. Her face went pale. “Or do you reckon I am?”
She turned away, tight-lipped.
“Come,” the baron called.
The door opened. A woman stood there. Or maybe a girl. On the tall side for a female, an inch or so taller than Ricky, an inch or two shorter than Krysty. She stood as straight and slim as a bayonet, and wore a drab uniform tunic and trousers closely cut to her frame. She wore a handblaster in a flap-covered holster in front of her left hip, with butt reversed for a right-hand cross-draw. Ricky thought it was a CZ-75 semiauto, which would have made it a 9 mm weapon.
He felt his own brows rise as he recognized her as the girl who’d ridden to their rescue, knee to knee with the baron himself, shooting and sabering slavers with cold ferocity.
She didn’t show much of a figure, but he liked her already.
“Ah, Alysa,” the baron said, brightening.
“Baron,” she replied, stepping into the room.
Ricky caught himself staring. He blushed and moved his eyes back to the lamp-lit contour lines of the map.
Then they strayed back to her as if magnetized.
When the baron’s men had rescued the party from the slaver ambush, the girl had slaughtered with a fierce and fearsome joy. Now her posture and face were stiff, as if she was not just uncomfortable but trying to keep some powerful emotion in check. Fear? He wasn’t sure.
“My friends, permit me to introduce Lieutenant Alysa Korn. Despite her age, or lack of it, she’s earned the rank among our baronial defenders.”
Frost didn’t seem to care for the universal Deathlands term “sec men.” Not that Ricky saw how that made much difference.
Frost finished introducing Ryan’s group with Ricky. He stammered some nonsense he hoped sounded polite. She barely flicked him a glance with her pale green eyes. She might as well have been a lizard on a rock. Or he might.
“Alysa will be your guide on your journey,” the baron stated.
Ricky looked at Ryan. The one-eyed man frowned.
“You know the area we’ll be searching in?”
“I have some familiarity with it,” she said.
Her already hard face hardened another degree. Oddly it made her look younger and more vulnerable to Ricky, somehow.
“At least,” she said, as if the words were being pulled from her mouth like teeth, “I know whom to ask for information.”
Ryan stared at her a moment more. She didn’t wither under the blue flame of his glare. Ricky sure would have.
He nodded. “More than we’d know,” he said.
He looked back at Baron Frost. “What else can you give us?”
Chapter Eight
Through half-open lids J.B. saw a dark, concerned face hovering over his. It was mostly covered by a surgical mask, but what he could see of it seemed nicely engineered. Good eyes, big and dark.
He wished it were Mildred, all the same.
The face frowned. “He’s still not all the way under,” she said. “We need more chloroform.”
“That’s all right, Miss—” he started to say. But he realized he didn’t have the breath to spare to make words.
And then he was swirling down, down into the dark depths.
Of remembering...
* * *
“SO, TRADER, YOU signed on a new guy?” a woman called out from the doorway of a spectacular vehicle. A pristine fedora was cocked to one side of her head, and she smoked a long black cheroot.
“That I did.”
“Welcome aboard War Wag One, sonny,” the woman said. She was a rangy-looking specimen, with baggy olive-drab pants covered in pockets bulging with gear and a rust-colored tank top hugging a none-too-generous chest.
“Go easy on him, Rance,” said the bearded man who followed a step or two behind J.B., prodding him along by sheer force of personality.
The woman blew blue-gray smoke out of her upturned nose.
“Skinny little guy,” she said. “Why’d you bother, Trader?”
“Because he has skills we need and shows promise.”
The woman nodded. “Shows promise.”
“I just said that.”
The woman left the vehicle and walked up to J.B., stopping several feet away. She looked him up and down with hands on narrow hips. Her boobs weren’t anything to write home about, J.B. thought. Neither was her face, long, a bit mannish and sporting a couple of pale scars beneath a shock of straw-colored hair held up by a grimy yellow bandanna. She had an M1911 handblaster holstered at her right hip.
Normally, J.B. would only have noticed the blaster—which, from what little he could see, was well-worn but well-kept. But she was a woman, after all. One who was actually pretty presentable, having all her teeth, eyes and limbs.
And as much as young J.B. may have preferred tinkering with gadgets—especially the chilling kind—to dealing with people, he was still male.
“So what good are you, kid?” the woman demanded.
“J.B., this is my chief wrench, Rance Weeden,” Trader said.
“Short for ‘Rancid,’” said a skinny man with a luxuriant mustache and long dark hair tied up into a horsetail at the crown of his head. He strode past them and headed for the vehicle.
Rance shot the man the bird. “It’s Ransom. As well you know, Abe, you skinny dog turd.”
“Known far and wide for her tact,” the Trader said, deadpan. “And her skill. So feel free to speak right up and answer her, J.B.”
“I know my way around blasters, some machines,” J.B. told her. “Locks, too.”
She grunted. “Well, it happens that I can use another mech.”
He frowned. “I’m better with blasters,” he said pointedly, looking at Trader.
“We’ve got a weapons master,” Trader said. “Ace DeGuello. And he doesn’t need a helper right now.”
“Helper? I know I’m better.”
“You might be,” the Trader said.
“You’ve seen my work!”
“You roll with me,” Trader said, “you do what I need you to do. Right now I need you to help Rance. You’ll work with Ace when there’s an opening.”
Rance walked closer to him.
“Listen, kid,” she said, not unkindly. “You work with me, odds are double-good you’ll get a chance to show your chops with blasters. We keep this snorting warthog rolling, after all. And, anyway—if you’re really mechanical, then a machine’s a machine.”
She stuck out her hand. It was grease-stained and visibly strong, but somehow feminine.
After a moment he grinned and took it. Her grip was as strong as it looked like it’d be.
“You’re on,” he said. “I’m J. B. Dix. And I’m gonna show you how good I am!”
“You better,” she said, and walked away.
Chapter Nine
“Lyagushki,” the ice-blonde woman said beneath her breath.
“What was that, Alysa?” Krysty asked.
The sea-scented wind whined and slunk around Krysty’s jeans-clad legs like a mutie dog begging for a handout. Their guide squatted on winter-dry grass next to a patch of bare soil brushed over rocks, inshore of a clump of scrub oak. Krysty and her companions stood around Alysa surveying the crossroads clearing. Though the forest wore its dense white coat of snow, both fresh and old, that starveling ocean wind had licked the open area clean down to dirt and stone.
To their surprise the Stormbreak sec woman had led them to a low point near the coast—the coastline here running mostly east to west.
“Frogs?” Ryan muttered. “Did she say frogs?” H
e stood with his longblaster at relaxed ready before his groin, scanning the dark gnarled granite boulders and the surrounding scrub and trees, here mostly firs, for signs of trouble. Doc and Mildred stood nearby, frowning—the stocky black woman clearly worrying about J.B. and impatient at any delay, no matter how warranted.
As usual, Jak prowled the snowy woods nearby, patrolling for enemies. It amused Krysty to think how well Jak’s coloration suited him for an environment in which he felt out of place. He still managed to slip through the underbrush without so much as the snap of a snow-coated twig.
As she had when the friends first saw her, bursting out of the white forest to their rescue the day before, Alysa wore a heavy coat with a wolf-fur collar. She’d worked her hair into a long braid that fell out behind her red-star cap across the saber-scabbard slung across her back. She had her Marlin lever-action longblaster in her hand.
Alysa continued to scowl at what looked to Krysty like plain granite, mostly bare but for the wind-blown dirt and rust-colored lichen. She didn’t respond to the implicit question for Ryan, who had understood the Russian word.
“The ambush for Milya was here,” the young woman said. Though she rose, she never took her eyes off the ground. “The slavers took them by surprise. Our men never had a chance.”
“Why the nuke did they come this way?” Ryan asked. “Baron Frost told us everybody stuck to the inland roads because of danger from the coast.”
She sighed. “West of here the way inland becomes uncertain for a few miles. A coldheart chieftain named Goat has set himself up as baron of a ville called Windy. It’s a tiny place, but his small gang of coldhearts makes the inner road even more dangerous than the coast.”
“The baron indicated the inland road had been preferred for years,” Doc said. “Perhaps generations. Why, exactly, inasmuch as he also told us the intense slaver activity was a recent development?”
“There are other problems,” Alysa said curtly. “Right now I’m trying to see if there’s anything we might have missed when we first rode to Milya’s rescue.”
“Jak can pick up a trail on a stretch of predark sidewalk after two days of rain,” Ricky called from where he stood, mostly supervising their horses as the animals browsed the dry grass. “Why not call him in to help look? Oh, sorry.”
Krysty smiled. The young Latino showed a number of contrasts. Prominent among them was how his natural reticence failed to prevent him from sometimes blurting whatever popped into his mind. Whether at an opportune moment or not.
Ryan shook off the apology with a toss of his shaggy-curled head. “Good suggestion. Korn.”
Alysa brought her head up sharply, a startled look in her pale green eyes.
“If you’re going to guide us, you need to talk to us. You need to tell us what we need to know.”
For a moment she glared at him with a naked fury that set Krysty on her heels. Then she dropped her head and her shoulders slumped. She nodded, once.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I haven’t done my duty.”
“So what have you learned here?”
Krysty feared Ryan’s peremptory tone would spark the girl’s rage again. Instead she all but snapped to attention.
“They laid in wait at the crossroads,” she said in clipped tones. “Clearly they knew to expect our party. They opened fire and cut down Milya’s escort before they had a chance to respond.” She shook her head, looking worried, frustrated—and also somehow sad. “Nothing we didn’t know before.”
“You say they knew your group was coming,” Mildred said. “Maybe they have a spy back in the ville?”
Alysa’s eyes went wide. “That’s impossible! We are loyal. To our baron—to one another. We are tightly knit.”
Mildred sighed. “Sounds like you people could use a bigger dose of good old-fashioned Russian paranoia.”
“I hate to come in second to anybody in paranoia,” Ryan said, “but it’s just as likely they had scouts out on the road. I’m guessing the girl and her escorts were well-dressed and looked prosperous?”
The Stormbreaker woman nodded. “She is the baron’s daughter.”
“Yeah. So they didn’t have to know who she was to know she was a real ace strike.”
“Would they make that much effort just to capture a single girl?” Mildred asked.
“She was a looker, right?”
“She is a beautiful young woman, yes. Although she takes some pains to hide the fact, in her rebelliousness.”
“So there’s a market for pretty high-born girls out there,” Ryan said. “The younger the better. She’d fetch a primo price from the right buyer.”
“One more thing, Ryan,” Krysty said. “If they actually knew she was the baron’s daughter, wouldn’t they make a ransom demand? Or anyway offer the baron the chance to outbid other offers to buy her back?”
Ryan glared off into the snowy forest.
Krysty could feel Gaia’s heart practically pulsing here, up through the stone beneath her feet. The Earth Mother seemed to be trying to tell her something.
“Too many variables,” Ryan growled. “Too much we can’t know. Though who knows? Mebbe they sent a demand or sale-offer and it crossed us by a different road. The key here is we can’t assume there’s a spy back at the ville.”
“And if your surmise is correct, Ryan,” Doc said, “we can assume hostile eyes are watching us.”
Ryan grunted a laugh. “And that’s different from the usual situation how? Still, ace on the line you reminded us to keep our eyes skinned triple-hard, Doc.”
He looked at Alysa, who had fallen into a sort of parade-rest position with her longblaster’s steel-shod butt grounded in the earth at her feet. She seemed most comfortable when a strong man gave her orders. Happy, almost.
“Yes, sir,” she said crisply.
It hurts to be this one, Krysty realized. She hoped that inner pain would not lead to rashness that would get them all chilled. Alysa seemed dedicated to her job and good at it. But the very ferocious, heedless courage she’d shown against the slavers the previous day might possibly get them all killed.
“All right,” Ryan called. “Let’s mount up and ride, people. The one thing we know for sure is the rad-blasted girl isn’t here.”
* * *
“YOU KNOW,” DOC said from the back of his white-stocking black gelding, “these Maine woods used to be largely if not exclusively deciduous, back in my— Back a long time ago.”
The horses’ hooves crunched on the hard snow-pack of a forest road. Ryan rode his notch-eared black-and-white pinto gelding knee to knee with Alysa Korn on her blood bay mare at the little column’s head. Krysty and Mildred rode right behind them. Krysty was aboard a strawberry roan mare, Mildred a grumpy dun mule with a roached mane.
Doc rode next, then Ricky with his short legs sticking out from the flanks of a chubby palomino pony, and beside him Jak was astride a small, scrubby, copper-colored mare.
The sun was sliding down a mostly clear sky toward the trees ahead, which looked like white cones in the fading light. The air was crisp and cold and still. The snow deep on the ground and heavy in the trees around seemed to make hearing double-acute, as if they were in some kind of room with acoustic walls. Ryan could hear Doc fine over the crunch of the horses’ hooves through the thin crust of ice overlying the previous night’s snowfall, the swish of their tails, their frequent blatting farts.
“Mebbe so,” Ryan said without looking back. “No way to tell.”
He had little use for knowledge for its own sake, but as a baron’s son, he’d been well-educated by the standards of the time. Extremely well, given that in most places “well-educated” meant “able to read.”
“But there is,” Alysa said.
Ryan raised a brow in surprise. Their guide didn’t speak much. As he’d pointed out that morning at the ambush site, she didn’t speak enough, sometimes. She’d spent their brief acquaintance mostly white-lipped, as if holding in anger just short of nuke red.
“Throughout skydark, our ancestors regularly emerged into the world to forage and hunt. After all, the conditions weren’t terribly different from what we experienced during our long winters. As we do now. Much vegetation died back, starved of sunlight. Foraging was hard, and became harder until the sky cleared.
“Once it did, various conifers had moved in to replace dead deciduous trees. Where before the war had stood great hardwood forests, they grew back mixed. As they are today.”
Doc nodded sagely. “Indeed,” he said. “Not an uncommon situation.”
“Usually the fruits of skydark were more bitter,” Krysty said.
The young woman shrugged. “What we endured, and what we inherited, is bitter enough.”
“How do you know so much about growing food in winter?” Mildred demanded. “I mean, yeah, your people were used to long, cold winters. From both sides, mostly. But most places I know, it gets cold, growing season crashes to a screeching halt.”
She actually turned a smile over her shoulder. A brief, tight-lipped one. But a smile.
“Before the war some people in Maine began experimenting with various forms of greenhouses for cold-weather growing,” she said. “Also, some of the Kostroma’s complement of Spetsnaz troops had returned to service after a spell at the Valaam Monastery near Leningrad.”
“Spetsnaz?” Mildred asked. “Soviet Special Forces?”
“Special Purpose Forces,” Alysa said, translating spetsialnogo naznacheniya literally. “Yes. The monastery was a popular shelter among those who served there, especially on active combat duty in Afghanistan and elsewhere.”
“And what were these Spetsnaz commandos supposed to do aboard a nuclear-missile submarine, exactly?” Mildred asked darkly.
“They were meant to be landed to perform acts of sabotage and assassination in the wake of the thermonuclear exchange,” the blonde woman said matter-of-factly.