by James Axler
There were at least a dozen slavers crowding into the pilothouse. Ryan drew his panga and started hacking.
A blaster roared. A child shrieked. A girl, by the voice—but too young for Milya, at least.
But that confirmed to Ryan he didn’t dare shoot any more. He didn’t want to shoot the other captives they’d freed, but if it came to a choice between them and his friends—or even Milya—that was just too bad for them. But he could just as easily blast Jak or J.B. in the scrum as he could a slaver.
And the slavers were beginning to collect themselves to fight more effectively. A punch caught Ryan on the blind left side of his face. His head rocked back. Another slaver slammed a longblaster butt into his belly while a third grabbed his blaster hand.
“Get down!” Milya screamed.
Ryan did. He just sat right down on the wet rubber mat. His weight pulled the weedy little slaver clutching his blaster arm with both fists down with him.
Brown eyes blinked from a ratlike face six inches from Ryan’s nose. Then a burst of full-auto blasterfire erupted.
The rat-faced slaver squeaked like the rodent he resembled and fell straight down. Blood was spraying from wounds in his back.
Milya Frost stood at the front of the bridge with her back to her mother. She had recovered the AK-47 and was firing the blaster from the hip. She did her trainers credit, pumping out bursts short enough so that she could hold down the weapon’s barrel with her skinny arms. She sprayed the mob of panicked slavers with steel-jacketed 7.62 mm death. They jerked and fell to the deck.
Then the bolt locked back. She began fumbling for a reload. There were still at least six slavers still standing, and they converged on her.
Ryan still had rounds in the magazine of his SIG-Sauer. He opened fire, as did Doc, Jak and J.B. All of them apparently had obeyed Milya’s order in time—except the Armorer, who was still sitting and hadn’t needed to.
The SIG-Sauer’s slide locked back. The bearded, shave-headed slaver boss Ryan had seen board the Serge Broom with Milya loomed above him. His mightily mustached face was a twisted mask of blood and rage. He held a fire ax over his head with both hands, ready to split Ryan’s breastbone like kindling.
Thunder crashed from Ryan’s left. Yellow flashes lit that side of the slaver’s face. He jerked as if dancing in place, and badly. Then he collapsed like an empty burlap sack.
Lady Katerina had turned from the helm. A pair of boxy black Glock blasters wisped blue smoke from her elegantly gloved fists.
“Gentlemen,” she croaked in a voice both guttural and hollow, “brace yourselves.”
Another slaver, this one carrying an M-16, burst out of the stairwell and took a frenzied step toward the bridge.
The vessel hit the rocks. The deck canted forward as momentum drove the stern upward. Ryan tumbled forward to slam against the control panel.
The earth-shattering crash of hull smashing against surf-pounded granite was joined by viscera-churning screeching and crackling as the shockwave rippled through the structure of the ship.
The stern hit the water with a hollow boom. Through the aft view ports, Ryan could see water rush upward in a white wave.
The ship began to swing its stern to starboard. The bow ground against the rocks. Looking up through the front windshield, Ryan saw the south cliffs rising out of sight like a black, implacable wall.
Her blasters still in hand, Katerina cradled Milya against her. The girl had dropped her longblaster and was sobbing wildly.
Ryan’s first act was to reload his handblaster. Then he yelled, “Everybody fit to fight?”
Jak and Doc answered yes. A bit later so did J.B., to Ryan’s vast relief.
“Where’s Ricky?” he asked, pulling himself to a sitting position.
“Here,” the youth called, climbing through the window Ryan had shot out. He had his longblaster slung and his Webley revolver in hand. “When Milya screamed to get down, there was a guy right under me. So I went out.”
“Good move,” Ryan said.
He heard a groan, followed by a long sigh. It ended in a gurgle. Ryan looked to see Doc, his hair wild, one wing of his shirt collar standing up, straightening and withdrawing his slim blade from the back of a pirate.
“Just making sure,” he said.
Jak, as agile as a catamount and resilient as rubber, was already up checking the fallen slavers with a hunting knife in hand. Ryan saw him plunge it into a thick, grimy neck. The way blood spurted showed it was a well-chosen shot.
Climbing to his feet, Ryan surveyed the scene. The slavers were down. His companions were all accounted for. None of them showed obvious signs of punctures. But otherwise they looked the way he felt.
Which was as if his whole body had been used to pound the nails to build a mansion fit for a baron.
Four of the captives huddled to port of the helm, hugging each other and sobbing. The youngest, a black-haired girl of about eight, lay on her face, unmoving. Her blood had joined the mix of blood and dirt and water that lay an inch deep on the floor. The sixth, a black-haired boy of about sixteen, had vanished.
“Why didn’t they shoot more?” Ricky asked.
“Blasters empty,” Jak said. He straddled a burly back. As if to emphasize his words, he cut the fallen slaver’s throat with an extra-vicious jerk of his arm.
“We’re not exactly loaded down with ammo, either,” Ryan stated.
“We brought some extra ammunition,” said J.B., who now sat stuffing red plastic-hulled shells into his M-4000. “Just 9 mm, .45 caliber and 12 gauge, though. Didn’t have any .44 Remington to hand. Sorry, Doc.”
Doc flourished his blade. “This never needs reloading.”
“I hear the frogs croaking in the stairs,” J.B. said. “Not sure what’s keeping them, truth to tell.”
Lady Katerina kissed her daughter’s reddened, tear-drenched face and pushed her away. “You must go. All of you. Now.”
“What about you?” Ryan asked.
“Look at me,” the baroness commanded. He did and his stomach turned. Her face was utterly unrecognizable now, distorted by the half-finished transformation from human to frog-mutie. “I have little time left. I wish to die as a woman.”
“Mother!”
A hand whose fingers were joined by webs and whose tips sprouted black talons thrust her toward Ryan. Stunned by the rapidity of the transformation, Ryan barely caught the girl before she rebounded off his chest.
“What do you mean to do, my lady?” Doc asked.
Katerina’s coat was already straining at the seams across the back as her torso swelled and hunched forward. She managed to force herself upright and tore open the front of it.
Beneath she wore a canvas vest. It had many pockets. In each one Ryan saw a small block of C-4 with a blasting cap inserted. Little loops of det cord joined them.
“Fireblast,” he said.
Her smile was ghastly. “I shall soon go to embrace my family. Leave now!”
Chapter Thirty-Three
As Baroness Katerina promised, the storm was bashing the slaver ship to death against the foot of the cliffs.
The doomed ship leaned far to port as a storm-driven wave drove its keel up the rocks with a shriek like fingernails on a blackboard magnified a million times.
Ryan heard a scream of terror as another of the freed captives, a pretty blonde teenager, lost her grip on the ladder right above his head. He turned to see her vanish into gray boiling water below.
Grinding, the ship righted itself. Halfway down the ladder Ryan looked down at the deck.
Seven or eight frogs were in sight. They seemed to be searching for hiding slavers. Their short, sharply bowed legs seemed to enable them to keep their balance against the bucking of the deck better than Ryan could have kept his.
They hadn’t been looking up, despite the blasterfire that roared from the pilothouse at irregular intervals as Lady Katerina shot muties—her kin—trying to get onto the bridge.
Ryan saw frog fa
ces turned upward as the girl fell screaming to her death. The enormous bulging eyes could show no emotion. But the muties began to croak and point their claws at the fugitives, strung down the side of the superstructure like meat beads on a steel necklace.
From above Ryan heard a voice cry, “My people! I see it now!”
Lady Katerina croaked a series of syllables that hurt Ryan’s throat to listen to. The only thing he could come close to deciphering any of it was what sounded like the letters E and A together, repeated several times.
“Fireblast!” Ryan yelled. “She’s gone over!”
“No, she hasn’t,” J.B. called from above.
From the top of the superstructure, Ryan saw a white flash. He hugged the tower tightly as the pilothouse exploded in a ring of yellow flame. Arcing debris trails smoked far out over the churning water.
Ears ringing from the explosion, Ryan clambered down as fast as he could. When his boot heels were about six feet from the deck, he let go.
He landed, crouching, with his left hand on the cold steel deck for support. He had the SIG-Sauer in his right hand. Ignoring the pain where the muzzle of his slung Steyr Scout had gouged him in the kidneys, he double-tapped a frog staring down at him from six feet away. Then he turned and blasted the one who was trying to turn right behind him.
Full-auto fire ripped out from ten feet above Ryan’s head. He recognized the snarl of J.B.’s Uzi.
Even while fighting for his life, Ryan winced in sympathy with J.B. at the pain his friend had to have endured, clinging to the frigid, rain-slick steel ladder with one arm while firing the heavy submachine gun with the other. To have done so with his recent chest wound and operation incisions just healed had to have hurt like a bitch.
In a moment, the frogs on the narrow space between superstructure and rail were down. Rain blanketed the view. For now, the muties had better things to do than investigate more random blasterfire, anyway.
In a matter of moments they were all safely on the deck. Ryan set Doc and J.B. facing aft with their blasters. Milya, sobbing constantly, took her place at their side with her AK reloaded with its last mag and ready. Ryan wondered how in the name of glowing nuke shit the slavers had ever caught her in the first place.
He watched forward as Jak and Ricky scouted toward the bow.
“What now, Ryan?” Doc asked. He sounded almost cheerful. Though he fought for his life as fiercely as any of them—and as well as most—he had a more philosophical attitude toward the leaving of it than his comrades did.
Ryan blew out a gusty breath, then had to throw out his blaster hand to brace himself against the cold metal of the superstructure as the most recent impact rocked the ship. The Serge Broom was dying, with neither dignity nor silence.
As much rust as she showed, Ryan was surprised the ship had stuck together as long as she had.
“We look for some of those lifeboats I so blithely promised Krysty we’d find waiting for us,” he said.
“I see none, I fear,” Doc said.
“Me, neither.”
Ricky and Jak rounded the superstructure, running hard. “No boats up front!” Ricky called.
“But frogs!” Jak shouted. “Coming this way!”
“I see forms shambling through the rain toward us from astern, too,” Doc added.
Ryan looked to sea. It was a constantly churning surge of death, as expected.
“I guess we go over the rail,” he said.
“And swim?” Ricky asked.
A noise like a giant’s backbone being broken vertebra by vertebra reverberated in their ears and in their bones.
“We’re going to wind up doing that anyway,” Ryan said. “Ship’s breaking up. Only choice now is go down with the bitch, dive in ourselves, or travel in a mutie’s belly.”
“Ryan! Look over the rail!”
“Krysty?” he said aloud.
Then Ricky leaned way too far out over the rail, waving a hand furiously above his head and shrieking Krysty’s name. Jak caught him by the back of his parka just in time to keep him going over as the ship rolled violently to port.
More judiciously—a bit, anyway—Ryan leaned over the rail.
There was a powerboat tossing in the waves hard beside the doomed freighter. A vaguely familiar-looking man was keeping it in position. And two very familiar female figures rode beside him in the cockpit, waving vigorously. Each held a loudspeaker.
“Hustle your butts down here!” Mildred yelled. “There’s room for everybody!”
Ryan squeezed his eye shut. “If only we had a nukin’ rope.”
“Right here,” J.B. called.
He was sitting on the deck with Doc holding him by the collar of his jacket.
He winced as obvious pain sliced through him, then with a grin of triumph he held up a blue-striped white nylon coil.
“Got two of them,” he said. “Lady K had them packed.”
Doc’s handblaster boomed. A frog-mutie had approached within thirty feet from astern. It fell kicking to the deck.
“Stand them off!” Ryan shouted. “We’re going home.”
* * *
CAINE SENT THE launch speeding northeast, throwing up a white bow-wave, slaloming expertly to avoid getting slammed by the storm waves.
With a crack like a huge shinbone snapping, the Serge Broom at last broke in two on the rocks. The bow section started to settle where it was, only to be smashed repeatedly against the cliffs until the weight of the superstructure toppled it outward and it turned turtle. The longer stern section rolled to seaward; its broken-off end rapidly filling with seawater, it quickly sank, sliding down into the cove away from the sheer walls.
Huddled in the stern with Ryan, Krysty put her head against Ryan’s shoulder and sighed.
“I wish more of the slaves had been able to get clear,” she said.
He hugged her. “You two did what you could,” he said. “Otherwise—well, that’s life in the Deathlands.”
She nodded. J.B. and Milya Frost rode in the chairs bolted into the cockpit. The rest were crowded into the space aft, including the two young women, both seventeen or eighteen, who were the only other liberated captives to make it to the craft. Those two clung together and said nothing.
J.B., holding his hat jammed on his head, had his neck craned around to watch as the ship went down.
“I guess that’s a run of women blowing themselves up to save their loved ones,” he said.
“What’s that, J.B.?” Ryan asked. He knew about Lady Katerina, obviously, but his old friend had distinctly said women. The howl of the storm, the slap and crash of the waves, and the muted thunder of the engines weren’t enough to make Ryan mistake that.
Sadly J.B. shook his head. “It’s the past now,” he said. “Let it lie and drive on.”
A tumult of dirty white water was bubbling up from where the freighter’s two sundered parts had vanished. Turned in her own chair, Milya uttered a lost-soul wail.
Mildred clambered over the partition into the cockpit to put a comforting arm around her.
“Might I suggest,” Caine called, “that I put you ashore as close by as reasonable safety allows? So that you can recover your gear, which I presume you stashed?”
“What do you mean?” Ryan called. He was still not used to the servant’s Brit accent. But the guy knew how to drive a speedboat under conditions that were nearly impossible to navigate. Ryan had to give him that.
“I can deliver Milya myself, if you will permit me. I shall take the other young ladies with me, as well, if you allow. We can give them proper homes, I daresay.”
“He means,” Krysty said, with just a final sniffle, “that if we go back to Stormbreak, the baron may not be happy about gaining a daughter but losing an adored wife.”
“He seems a good man,” Doc said, then added, “for a baron.”
“Yeah,” J.B. said. “And remember what they say about barons and gratitude.”
“Good call, Caine,” Ryan stated. “I think we’ll j
ust take you up on that deal, thanks very much.”
“But Ryan!” Mildred exclaimed. “What about the rest of our payment? We busted our asses back there, and we can use the money!”
“And what good does jack do when the dirt’s hitting you in the eyes, Mildred?”
“My friends,” Caine said, “you need forgo nothing.”
He turned and actually cracked a smile.
“If you will open the strongbox bolted behind the cockpit, you will see that Lady Katerina packed away the promised sum, as well as a bonus.”
“She didn’t miss much, Ryan,” J.B. said. “I can testify to that.”
“I reckon not,” Ryan agreed.
“A remarkable woman,” Caine said, his face once more turned forward. “Cursed by the evil deeds of men long dead. A great and powerful shame. We shall miss her terribly, not just her husband and daughter.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “Oh, and—J.B.?”
The Armorer cranked his head around. “Yeah?”
“Welcome back.”
J.B. smiled.
“It’s good to be home.”
* * * * *
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ISBN: 9781460315880
Copyright © 2013 by Worldwide Library
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