Storm Breakers

by James Axler

  The captain was still alive. Ryan could tell it was him because he wore an actual captain’s uniform, with a blue uniform jacket and even a hat with scrambled eggs on the front. It was faded but looked as if it was clean and regularly mended.

  Or it had before the captain had taken a steel-jacketed Sov 7.62 mm round through the chest. Basically the same wound his slaver mates had dealt J.B., except nobody was in a hurry to tend to him. He sat with his back propped against the command console to the left of the wheel, glaring at Ryan.

  “The muties betrayed us,” the captain wheezed. He had a slight accent Ryan couldn’t identify, beyond that it was vaguely Mex-sounding. “After we traded with them so profitably for so long. We should have known. What else...can one expect from monsters? But at least they’ll chill you all to sacrifice to their god!”

  And he laughed. That had to have hurt like blazing nuke death. Ryan had to give him that.

  “Shut up and die.”

  The slaver captain laughed at Ryan, his teeth bloody.

  Neither Ryan nor anybody else had any idea how to pilot this huge rad-blasted boat. He wasn’t even sure how important any of the shot-out panels and screens were. So Ryan was trying to set up a better defense of the pilot house than its previous proprietors had managed, while hoping like a bastard to find a way out that didn’t involve dying.

  It’s not going to be bastard easy, he thought, standing beside the open hatch he’d sprung through. It stood aft of the bridge. The windshields wrapped around to either side of it gave a view astern. They were intact. Only the forward windows had gotten starred by hits, and the only panel completely gone was the one on the starboard—landward—side that Ryan had taken out with the Kalashnikov.

  The problem was, there wasn’t any cover. Except for some chairs bolted to the deck.

  We’re going to have to suck it up and make some ramparts out of chills, he thought.

  “At least the slavers and their erstwhile batrachian allies have something better to do than lay siege to us,” Doc said, glancing down at the expanse of deck between the fore and aft towers.

  “Just a matter of time before one or the other comes for us,” Ryan said.

  Ricky had hunkered down beside the captain and was speaking to him urgently. To Ryan’s surprise the man actually answered.

  “A menina bonita?” he said. “The wild girl from Monster Island? Sim. I saw her. She was...worth all the trouble she gave us. Given the price paid for her by the lecherous...baron of—”

  His words ended in a rattle. His head lolled to one side. He eyes stared blankly at the deck.

  Ricky grabbed him by the blood-soaked jacket and shook him. “Which baron? The baron of what? Tell me. Tell me!”

  “Kid,” Ryan said. “You shake a body in that condition, usually the only thing you get out of it is blood and other ooze you’ll like even less.”

  A figure burst onto the bridge. Even Ryan was taken by surprise.

  But the figure made it only halfway across in obvious blind-panic flight before Doc triggered his LeMat right into the man’s throat almost at contact range.

  The man fell spraying blood. Ryan set his jaw as hot droplets spattered across his face. He heard voices echoing up the stairwell—the ladder, he supposed. They started out surprised but turned quickly to anger.

  “Get ready,” Ryan said. After a moment’s hesitation he tossed the AK to Lyudmila. She fielded it with one hand despite its weight and grinned.

  “Careful where you point that thing before you light it off,” he said, drawing his SIG-Sauer.

  “Ryan,” said Jak, who stood next to him looking aft across the main deck, which was mostly a battlefield of slavers, hunched, shambling muties and the occasional freed captive darting from cover to cover trying to keep out of harm’s way.

  Jak pointed a white finger dead astern. “Look,” he said.

  * * *

  “AT LEAST NOBODY’S shooting at us.”

  Mildred shouted to make herself heard over the howl of the wind.

  “Ryan,” Krysty cried. She was jumping up and down at the rail of the top level of the after superstructure, waving frantically with both hands at the bridge up front.

  Since that looked to be a good two football fields away, Mildred wasn’t even sure how Krysty hoped to see or be seen. Then again, Mildred was having trouble keeping the hard-driving rain from impeding her vision. Maybe the redhead was having better luck.

  There was plenty of shooting going on below them. Even with all the other noise, which at this point was about like being inside the throat of an erupting volcano, Mildred could hear the shots snap, crackle and pop like the famous and now-fossilized breakfast cereal. But it was all going on beneath them.

  The slavers had found something much more interesting than the two marauding women. Or even the slaves they’d liberated.

  Or rather, that something had found them. The frogs had started coming up out of the bay and swarming aboard. There were dozens of the hopping bastards.

  They had seen flashes of obvious blasterfire in the distant pilothouse since climbing up here to avoid the battle between two sets of their deadly enemies. Mildred wished she could share Krysty’s wholehearted faith that that meant their companions had captured the freighter’s bridge.

  Mildred glanced down to her right. She swallowed and looked quickly away.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m not doing that again. It’s hard enough dealing with the sway up here without seeing it. Looks like the slaves have quit even trying to make a break for it across the loading ramp. I think the frogs’ve gotten spooked more than the slavers.”

  “That’s a shame,” Krysty said. “Mebbe we can get them to start putting lifeboats down at the stern— Wait! I see somebody waving back. It’s Ryan! I think.”

  Mildred blinked and wiped her eyes clear enough for a brief squint at the forward superstructure. “I see motion,” she grudged. “That’s pretty much it.”

  “It’s Ryan! I know it is.”

  “If you say so, Krysty.”

  “He’s— It looks as if he’s waving us away. No, no! We’ll come and join you.”

  “No, we’re not,” Mildred said. “All the slavers and frogs on Earth will eat us if we try.”

  She bit back the impulse to say he couldn’t hear her, since Krysty—who was very bright, however carried away by optimism—no doubt knew that as well as she. Truth was, if it was her, and J.B. was up there, she’d do the same thing.

  It doesn’t look as if I’m going to be seeing you again, John Barrymore, she thought. Hope you get better and have yourself a fine old life.

  “You’re right,” she said. She waved once, dispiritedly, toward the pilothouse. Then she turned away.

  “Let’s go around to the back and see what the deck looks like behind us,” she said. “One way or another, we’ll have to get a lifeboat away and go rescue the others. Might as well see how hard we’ll have to fight.”

  “Right,” Mildred said.

  She also wished she had Krysty’s faith they’d ever get that far. She was having a hard time seeing anything beyond that fight part.

  But she wasn’t about to go down without one, any more than Krysty Wroth was.

  They started to their left on the walkway that ran around the after superstructure. They’d scarcely turned the corner, after quick wary looks to make sure no enemies lurked around it, when out to sea a siren pulsed three times. Its acid whine ate right through the tumult of storm and firefight and the giant ship’s tortured frame.

  Mildred cringed. She saw Krysty’s face pale two shades.

  “Oh, dear,” Krysty said.

  “Well, damn!” Mildred stated. “What fresh hell is this?”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Ryan leaned into the stairwell and blasted off four quick shots. Below him somebody screamed. The sound of a return shot crackled up, but Ryan didn’t hear or feel the bullet go by.

  The slide locked back. He tossed the blaster down the well
for good measure. It was the Beretta he’d taken from the guy whose head he’d chopped in two with the Kalashnikov. There were no spare magazines, and nobody was going to take time out to reload that one.

  He ducked back, shaking his head. He drew his SIG-Sauer. So far nobody’d made it past the landing immediately below the bridge, except the one slaver who’d caught everybody by surprise.

  He could hear shots, screams and inhuman croaking echoing up from the lower decks. It was only a matter of time before they got bull-rushed. And whether by slavers or muties, Ryan knew for sure they could bring more bodies than he and his crew had bullets.

  He heard a tapping from behind him. “Knock that shit off,” he snarled without turning.

  After a moment, a child’s voice said, just audible above the wind howling in the broken windshield, “Sir, it wasn’t us, please.”

  He turned. A figure stood at the side of the pilothouse, outside, looking in.

  It was a familiar figure, complete with one hand doggedly clamping a fedora atop his head.

  “J.B.?” Then, “What the fireblast are you doing out there? Levitating?”

  With his free hand the Armorer pointed right aft. He mouthed something.

  “Door,” Ryan said. “What door? There’s a door?”

  The Armorer went the way he’d pointed. A moment later Ryan heard, “Don’t shoot,” and his long-lost best friend stepped onto the bridge.

  He and Ryan clapped each other on the shoulder. “What took you so long?” Ryan said.

  “Overslept,” J.B. said with a brief smile. “Won’t happen again.”

  “How did you get up here?”

  “Steel ladder right up the side of the tower. There’s a catwalk that runs right around this level. Must be to wash the windows or something.”

  “But the hatches on the lower levels are welded shut,” Ryan said. “You mean the top one isn’t?”

  Ryan felt triple-stupe. He hadn’t given the hatch from the bridge level so much as a glance to see if it showed the same inexpert weld marks the ones below did. Granted, he’d had other things on his mind, like blasting his way onto the bridge without getting blasted in return.

  Still, he’d made an assumption. That was an ace way to get dead.

  J.B. swayed, then toppled forward. Ryan caught him by the shoulder.

  “You fit to fight?” he asked, then silently cursed himself for asking such a stupe question.

  “Be fine,” J.B. said, in a tone of voice that clearly wasn’t. “After I sit down for a moment and catch my breath.”

  As Ryan eased him down to the rubber mat that covered the pilothouse deck, a voice said, “The slavers saw no need to prevent escape to the outside from this deck, Mr. Cawdor. Inasmuch as they were the only ones who used it.”

  He glanced up. “Lady Katerina?” And then, “What’s wrong—”

  “Mother!” A black-haired rocket streaked past Ryan to collide with the baroness.

  Ryan winced as the AK Milya had dropped clattered on the mat. Not even he could hold that carelessness against her. Much. Not when she was running into her mother’s open arms. But one thing bothered him.

  Lady Katerina had her face pressed against her daughter’s shoulder. Between that and her Astrakhan he couldn’t see much of her face. He put a hand on her arm and gently pushed.

  “Don’t want to stand right in the doorway,” he said. “Never know what might be coming through it anytime now.”

  He didn’t add, Or going into it—such as bullets. The expected rush hadn’t materialized yet, but the sounds of battle were getting louder. Lyudmila pushed away from her mother. Ryan saw the girl’s shoulder tense as she got her first good look at the baroness.

  She asked the question that had just bubbled back to the surface of Ryan’s mind. “Mother? What’s wrong with your face?”

  Katerina’s Frost’s face no longer looked fully human. Somehow it had become elongated, exaggerated at cheekbone and jaw. Her nose seemed to have sunk into her face. Her eyes were wide and round.

  Strangely, horribly, she still retained more than a touch of beauty. But it was a frightening beauty.

  “My fate,” Katerina said. “The shadow over Tavern Bay. Decreed for me by men a hundred years dead. I’m turning into a lyagushka, Milya.”

  Milya made a noise like a stepped-on mouse.

  “Don’t be afraid, my darling,” the baroness lisped through teeth whose sharp points protruded through her lips. “You will not share my fate. Only the direct offspring of a mating between human and lyagushka can ever change. Believe me. My family has been trying for generations to find another way to perpetuate our...breed.”

  Milya started to turn away from the mask of horror her mother’s features had become. Then she turned and hugged her fiercely.

  “Don’t give in, Mother!” she cried. “Fight it.”

  “I have been. And I have lost. But never fear. I will die your mother. The mother who loves you.”

  “Don’t talk that way!”

  A boom blasted out of the stairwell. J.B. leaned back out of the entrance cradling his shotgun as the reverberations still sounded. He had shifted to put his back to the bulkhead beside the opening.

  “We’re all going to die if we don’t figure out a way to get down safely double-quick,” he said. “The frogs’re driving the slavers upward. And if we try going down the ladder, the slavers can just lean out and blast us like birds sittin’ on a wire.”

  He shook his head. “Hurts like a bastard when I shoot,” he said.

  “Fighting down there,” observed Jak, who had shifted to look through the portside windows.

  Ryan went up alongside the albino. A glance down at the deck confirmed his words. Not that Ryan ever doubted them.

  “So,” he said, turning back. “Looks like we’ll have to make a break for it and take our chances regardless. Slim chance is still better than none, as Trader used to say.”

  “No,” Katerina said. Grimacing in pain as if her fingers had grown to her daughter’s arm, she tore herself loose from her. Still fully the regal baroness, despite the awful change overtaking her, she swept to the helm with a swirl of her coattails and began to work controls.

  The engines, whose near-subliminal hum Ryan had been aware of since setting foot aboard without really noticing, began to come to life. Despite the constant, seemingly random three-dimensional movements, the howling gale was putting the big ship through, and the frequent impacts of her black hull on the tire-buffers protecting the dock, Ryan felt a distinct shudder run through the vessel as her huge screws began to bite water.

  “You know how to pilot this thing?” he asked.

  He was keeping his focus soft. His eye caught motion in the corner of its peripheral vision. A pale oval blur popped up above the level of the floor. He snapped a handblaster shot across his body. Red sprayed. The face vanished.

  “She went to sea as a girl,” J.B. said helpfully.

  Katerina pealed a wild laugh. “I sailed in this ship! She was originally a Great Lakes freighter, did you know? The slave trade goes back generations in Tavern Bay. And now this new set of slavers is learning the cost of doing business with the lyagushki, as others have before.”

  The deck moved beneath Ryan’s boots as, almost imperceptibly, the ship began to move forward.

  “What are you doing?” Ryan asked.

  “Increasing your chances as much as I can. My daughter must not fall into lyagushki claws. They have no concern for ties of family—and those who are not them, or cannot change, they see only as breeding stock. Or food.”

  A little tremolo ran up through Ryan’s boots, followed quickly by another.

  “The cables have parted fore and aft,” Doc said from the starboard window. “But how does this help us escape with your daughter, Lady Katerina? We might escape the base, but we still face a ship full of slavers and muties, each eager to see the color of our insides.”

  “I will drive the ship onto the rocks by the cliff to the sou
th. It is a lee shore. If the impact doesn’t break her back and send her to the bottom, the waves and wind pounding her against the rocks will.”

  “And that helps us get away how?” Ryan asked.

  “It gives your enemies something new to worry about,” she said. “And will send a large number of them too. Though mostly slavers, I’m afraid. Lyagushki have gills, though they are hard to see when not in use.”

  “Here come!” Jak shouted. His Python filled the bridge with a bright flash and brain-smashing noise.

  Routed by the frogs’ treacherous attack, a mob of slavers rushed up the stairs and poured into the bridge. The withering volley of blasterfire from Ryan and his four companions didn’t slow them, except for those who fell and those who stumbled over them.

  In an eyeblink the bridge was full of frantic bodies, reeking of sweat. It wasn’t an assault. It was a pure stampede.

  Ryan found himself grappled by a man with a full yellow beard chopped off square at his collarbone. His mouth and eyes were wide open. He was missing a front tooth and his breath smelled like a gaudy-house crapper after a cheap brew special.

  The guy was bare-handed. He had Ryan by both wrists. His strength was that of a man driven by sheer adrenaline overload. Whether by accident or some residual design, he had his right hip turned against Ryan’s body, forestalling the otherwise obvious knee to the balls.

  Ryan head-butted him, flattening his nose against his fear-twisted face. Blood squirted hot onto his shirt. Ryan’s quick glimpse of the slaver’s face showed his nose had clearly been broken before, and those who had experienced it once or more were less susceptible to the shock and pain of it, which could totally freeze even a coldheart.

  But it still hurt. Enough to make the man’s wide blue eyes blink and the drowner’s grip on Ryan’s arms relax.

  The one-eyed man wrenched his right hand free, then chopped the man’s thick throat with the butt of his SIG-Sauer. The slaver reeled back, gagging and clutching his neck. Ryan shot him in the face, then fired two quick shots into the skinny black guy behind him.