by James Axler
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 t
he 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 fou
r-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.