by James Axler
As he pulled up his pants and did up the fly, the answer came to him: however low an opinion Baron Tanya had of Baron Harvey, or how justified it may be, he had to have people under him who were anything but stupe. They were smart enough to infiltrate observers in small boats, probably by skulking in the shadows near the shore, close enough to observe the New Vick patrols without being observed in turn. The steam-powered blasterboats probably followed set patterns and a set schedule. Given long enough, the Poteetville spies had charted them out.
He heard the sounds they made: small, furtive sounds, but detectable simply because they were not the sounds of the ship’s routines, even in their endless minor variations: more whispers, more scrapes, a clink of improperly secured gear.
Despite himself, Ryan wondered why the sentries on board the Pearl didn’t hear those sounds as plain as blaster shots. He slipped on his holster belt and secured his weapons, then drew the SIG Sauer and, folding down the small writing desk from one bulkhead, dropped the mag from the well and laid it on the table. Next he worked the slide deliberately, ejecting the chambered round into his palm. He dropped it into a pocket; there was no way to ensure it wouldn’t roll off the table from the boat’s slow and not entirely predictable pitching.
He pulled the slide all the way back, and locked it open with the slide-catch lever. His experienced fingers found the takedown lever, on the blaster’s left side above the trigger, then turned it down. It was a simple matter of pulling back on the slide to disengage the catch, then easing the slide forward off the frame.
He turned the slide upside down in his palm and carefully removed the recoil-guide rod, to avoid shooting its spring across the dark cabin and losing the nuking thing. He laid the slide on the table, then pulled the spring off the rod and set it down propped at an angle inside the trigger guard, to keep it from rolling off the table.
The hatch had a lock of simple, ancient design—the sort that had a keyhole. J.B. would have opened the door with barely more delay than if it wasn’t locked to begin with. Lacking his friend’s prodigious level of skill, or his communion with mechanism, it took Ryan what felt like a fumbling, clattering eternity to pick the simple lock with the guide rod.
At last he was done. The latch turned and the hatch was unlocked.
Closing it again for the moment—and trying the latch again to make sure it wouldn’t lock itself—he went back to the table and reassembled the SIG the way he’d stripped it: by feel. Urgency sang in his veins, and gave him a prickly sensation between the shoulder blades.
He reloaded the blaster and eased the slide back and forth to chamber a round. Babying it that way was a good way to get it to jam, but right now he reckoned stealth was worth the risk.
Ryan had been able to perform the actions without haste because he knew that it would take time for a raiding party to work its way out of their boat—boats, almost certainly—and up and into the big ironclad warship. They had to be careful lest they do something obvious enough to raise the alarm. In which case they’d be blasted off the hull by the Pearl’s crew.
But he didn’t have forever, and he sensed somehow that what time he had was rapidly running out.
He padded barefoot to the hatch and opened it cautiously. He knew from listening the first night when they locked him in, imagining him to be passed-out drunk, that his captors didn’t post sentries by the hatch. But it wouldn’t do to just walk blithely out into the corridor and straight into the arms of a passel of sec men.
Nor, he realized, would it have done to walk blithely out into the corridor and straight into the arms of a Poteetville raiding party with blacked-out faces and weapons in their hands.
* * *
KEYED-UP AS the raiders doubtlessly were, they weren’t expecting to encounter anybody else sneaking around the Pearl’s superstructure. They were on guard for somebody obliviously emerging from a cabin, and were no doubt prepared to neutralize anyone who did so before they gave the alarm. Probably permanently.
Nonetheless Ryan pulled his face back and eased the door closed. Only when he was sure they’d moved past did he open it again. He poked enough of his face out to get a quick glance at them—and had to pull back fast to avoid being spotted. The invaders, five of them that he could see, were wary enough to check behind them periodically.
Ryan risked another quick look to make sure no other groups were following the first one. The first he’d spotted, he reminded himself. Then a final check showed them moving stealthily up the ladder to the cabin’s second and top story.
Where the bridge lay, and aft, the way they were going, the baron’s chambers.
He went after them as fast as he could without making noise. The fact he’d forgone pulling on his boots helped.
Had he been a loyal sailor of New Vickville, he’d have raised the alarm straightaway. But as always his interests were his own—and his friends’. He could alert the Pearl and the fleet at any time. For now, he wouldn’t.
After all, if this nighttime raid managed to win the war for Poteetville, that might just open up an escape route for him and his companions.
The baron’s stateroom, actually two rooms plus a tiny bath, was on the starboard side—the east, away from the heat of the afternoon sun. As he suspected, he found the raiders arranging themselves for surprise entry: one against the bulkhead on each side flanking the door, the other three in a semicircle with blasters ready. Two of them carried remade double-barreled, sawed-off shotguns. The others held revolvers. Just as they were cocking themselves back to pounce, the door opened. Lieutenant Stone strode purposefully out—and almost into the barrels of blasters. In the spill of lantern light from within, appearing a lot brighter than it was to his dark-accustomed eye, Ryan saw her eyes grow huge.
He also saw the intruders tense to blast her down.
Crouched in the stairwell, he already had his SIG leveled in a two-handed Weaver stance, his right arm almost at lockout, his left elbow down and crooked, that hand applying steadying pressure on the one wrapped around the grip. He had already aimed at the head of the raider closest to him, a guy in a black knit watch cap carrying a replica Remington Army wheelgun, seemingly propped like an apple on the front sight post. Ryan squeezed off a round.
The blaster barked and blazed. The head jerked before the raider fell to the deck. There was naturally a chance the loud noise from behind would cause the hyped-up raiders to blast the winsome lieutenant from pure reflex. In which case, that sucked for her, but didn’t bother Ryan. Instead the shot caused an instant moment of confusion.
Ryan was already doing his best to increase that confusion—and better his own odds—by pumping a shot into the small of the back nearest the hatch. The man yelled and discharged his Peacemaker into the ceiling.
The raider crouched on the far side of the door yanked both triggers of his scattergun. Stone had leaped back. Ryan ducked as the doubled charge smashed full into one of the shotgunner’s teammates.
The man Ryan had back-shot spun to the left as if some of the shot had hit his left arm. He dropped his weapon and went down howling in pain.
Two shots roaring from inside the open hatchway dropped one of them. Stone kept presence of mind in a fight, apparently. Mebbe this wasn’t her first rodeo. The last raider snapped a shot toward Ryan, which thunked into the hardwood over his head. He double-tapped the man through the sternum and down he went.
“Clear out here!” he shouted, so Stone wouldn’t try to blast him when she emerged, as she did an instant later. Ryan was already kicking a blaster away from the moaning, writhing man he’d shot from behind. From a glance he’d taken at least one .33 caliber double-ought ball to the elbow, which meant he’d likely lose the arm. If he lived.
Ellin Stone stepped out—behind the squared-off muzzle of an extended Colt Model 1911. Her face was white, her dark eyes still saucer huge, but her somewhat square jaw was firmly set.
A bank of greenish-white smoke hung from waist height up in the corridor. Any more blac
k powder shots and everybody would have been blind. It stank of burned powder, caps and voided bowels.
Other doors were opening. A couple of sec men appeared from the direction of the bridge. Seeing Ryan standing up by the ladder through the stinking smoke, they raised their handblasters at him.
“Stand down!” Stone snapped. “The intruders are all down. Secure them.”
She looked at Ryan. “Thank you.”
He was about to say something self-effacing. Instead he snapped, “Fireblast!”
Chapter Fourteen
“What?” the confused-looking lieutenant said.
“Something I should have thought of first. Come with me!”
Hand-cranked sirens began to grind and wail all over the big ironclad. “Up!” he said.
“But the baron—”
Ryan heard the unmistakable sound of a shotgun action being pumped. He decided to waste the second it took to peek in through the open door.
Clad in a luxuriant green nightgown over something white and lacy, Baron Tanya sat in her big chair. She held a 12-gauge Mossberg 590 marine shotgun with matte-silver metal and synthetic furniture with her two strong, square hands, and the air of a person who knew exactly how to use it. Clearly there was no screwing around with black powder smoke poles for the baron, just like with her assistant.
“I’ve got this,” she said, with what Ryan took for relish. “You go!”
He left, running for the stairs. Stone followed. There was no dither in the woman, he had to give her that.
As soon as he burst out into the open air of the unarmored top deck, his growing suspicions were confirmed. A low fog overlaid the great, black river. It wasn’t thick. He could plainly see the looming, shadowed bulks of the Clytemnestra and the Medusa to either side. He could even see a handful of patrol boats, off upstream. But beyond a hundred and fifty, two hundred yards, the Sippi and what was on it might have been on the other side of a big wall.
“Fire all the cannon you can upstream,” he told Stone. “Whole fleet. High as they can.”
“But—”
“Now!”
He didn’t even see resentment flash in her eyes—and by the light of the lantern hung at the aft end of the top deck, he would have. Instead she sprinted to a speaking tube by the aft rail and began barking orders.
In a surprisingly brief amount of time, a flash from the Pearl’s bow lit up the river clear to where the sight line got swallowed in the mist, throwing a pair of steam blasterboats into garish relief before winking out. Baron Tanya ran a taut ship; Ryan had seen that much during the tour of the iron-sheathed giant Stone had given him that afternoon. From the noise and the concussion that shivered up through the deck and his bare soles, Ryan could tell it was a much bigger cannon than the patrol craft carried.
A flicker of yellow light came from the flying bridge of the Medusa. Turning his head the other way, he saw a similar signal from Clytemnestra. Then her bow cannon belched vast yellow fire. The report of the Medusa’s bow cannon hit the other side of him a heartbeat later.
As he suspected, Stone spoke with the baron’s own voice when need be.
He felt a change in the vibrations from beneath. He guessed that meant the steam engines that drove the Pearl’s colossal bulk were firing up, but it was not the kind of mass you got moving in any kind of a hurry. The ironclad war craft were built for power, not for speed.
Cannon were booming from the rest of the New Vick fleet. He couldn’t see where the shots hit. The splashes were lost in the fog. But just as he began to wonder if he’d crowned his coup at saving the baron—and her chief aide—from the raiding party with a giant economy-size fuckup, wasting his new employers a ton or so of powder and ball, he saw a diffuse yellow flare blossom inside the fog. More followed.
A waterspout rocked a blasterboat back and sent a wave of river water crashing over its deck. A lucky shot: lucky for the patrol craft that it was a near miss, lucky for the Poteetville gunners to have come that close, shooting stone-blind as they were for the very fog that hid their approach.
“The Invincible Armada!” Stone shouted at Ryan over the din of cannon. Some of the patrol boats were getting into the act now, banging away with their own bow cannon. “How did you know?”
It amused Ryan how much different perspective made. When he’d been staring up the business ends of the cannon, they’d seemed as huge as the mouth of a predark railroad tunnel. But from up here, on top of what was almost certainly the biggest, baddest warship on the entire Sippi River, they seemed pathetic little popguns.
“Heard noises,” he said, “where noises didn’t belong. So I decided to investigate.”
“And you released yourself on your own recognizance.”
He just grinned. It wasn’t a question. The facts spoke as loud as an eight-pounder cannon.
“So you could have left at any time?”
“I told you and I told the baron. I get paid, I do the job.” Which was even true—so far as it went.
She shook her head. While she had been able to get the party started on her own hook, she was clearly leaving the conduct of the naval battle in other hands. Ryan didn’t know whose. Probably Captain Delgado, on the Pearl’s bridge.
Stone turned back to the speaking tube. She listened a moment with a hand covering the ear not pressed to the polished brass funnel. Ryan was amazed she could hear much for the racket of cannon banging off. It took time to get one swabbed out and reloaded after a shot, but as he knew firsthand, it wasn’t hard, since the cannon were smoothbores. And with as many cannon as the three big boomers, the frigates and the swarm of blasterboats boasted, there were shots cracking off pretty much all the time.
The Pearl was beginning to lumber ahead. Ryan was no naval tactician, but it was plain to him that the New Vick ironclads wanted to bring the full force of their broadsides against the attacking fleet.
“But how did you know Poteetville’s whole fleet was coming behind the cutting-out parties?”
“That’s what I should’ve checked right off,” he said. He didn’t miss that she’d said parties, not party. He guessed she’d got reports of other groups of raiders. “The bastard weather. That’s why they happened to come tonight instead of some other. The fog.”
“Right.”
She turned back to the speaking horn and listened for what seemed like a whole minute.
Ryan stood and watched the fireworks. The two main fleets were plainly out of range of each other. He’d wanted the big cannon to start blasting in hopes of keeping things that way. Once the element of surprise was lost, Baron Harvey Junior would decide to withdraw and try his luck again some other time. It had to be clear to the enemy commanders by now that their ballsy little commando decapitation strike had gone bust, too.
So I might as well enjoy the show, Ryan thought.
Stone nodded briskly and straightened. “The bridge is secured—that raiding party’s down and the main decks are secured, but there’s still fighting outside the engine room and the powder magazine.”
Ryan rammed home a full magazine into the well of his handblaster. He grinned at her. “What’re we standing here for, then? Time’s blood!”
* * *
“YOU SAVED THE Grand Fleet, Mr. Cawdor,” the baron said over a steaming cup of coffee in her stateroom. “Meaning you saved New Vickville, and you also saved me, which I appreciate. Thank you.”
“And you saved me,” Stone added. She was looking at Ryan with an unusually doe-like look in her big, dark eyes.
He had long since learned that all those stories of his childhood about the damsel in distress falling for the big strong hero who rescued her were a steaming load of glowing nuke shit. In the case of his own crew, honors were about even where it came to Mildred and Krysty saving one or more of the males as opposed to being saved by them. They’d certainly hauled his chestnuts out of the fire on many more occasions than one. And if he tended to hold the greater number of successful rescues, that applied to the whole
group, not just the two women.
But—sometimes it happened. Even from a woman clearly as capable of handling herself in a fight as Ellin Stone. She’d gotten more blood on her than Ryan had in the brief but vicious mopping-up actions, having picked up a cutlass on her way down with him. Both of them sat on tarps to save the baron’s fine upholstery, the way Ryan had his first night.
He sipped his black coffee. It was real coffee, too. The baron didn’t believe in stinting herself. Not that that wasn’t obvious from looking at her surroundings. And her. Then again, squatting astride the lower portion of the biggest trade route remaining across the Deathlands had its privileges. It made sense she’d have access to the real thing, not the awful chicory coffee-sub drek they liked to pretend was coffee in most of Deathlands.
“Yes,” Baron Tanya said with a nod. “Thank you for saving my aide, as well. I find her services invaluable. And Elli has known enough tragedy in her life, poor girl.”
Ryan saw a flicker cross Stone’s face. He could not interpret it.
Outside it was still dark, or maybe false dawn was beginning to gray out the skies to the east. He couldn’t see anything through the slit-like open port. No more cannon blasts came from outside. As he’d anticipated, Baron Harvey had opted to cut his losses and try his luck another time. Though shots had continued to bang back and forth for half an hour while Ryan and Ellin jumped raiders from behind and butchered them handily, the battle had ended as soon as the enemy ironclads could steam back out of range upriver.
“So,” Baron Tanya said, draining her cup with a slurp, “you picked the lock on your cabin. Care to tell me how you managed that, Mr. Cawdor?”
“No.”
She set the cup in the saucer with a slight clatter, and put both down on the round teak table beside her.
“Ace,” she said. “That just goes to prove you’re resourceful as well as bold. And decisive.
“We got off double lightly, thanks to you. No more than a score of casualties. And only two of those weren’t from fighting off the boarding parties. When the Armada swung closest to us as they were trying to turn tail, a shell came down on top of Hera’s cabin and chilled her second lieutenant and a steward. Though I suppose casualties are never light to the poor bastards who have lost their limbs. Or their lives.”