by neetha Napew
"Not here for anything except Donovan," Ryan said.
"Why do you want him?"
"Information."
"About what?"
"Want to talk to him about the Chosen," Ryan called out.
"What about them?"
"Had some trouble with them. Still do. Figure mebbe Donovan can help."
A debate seemed to ensue aboard Calypso, the black-haired man taking on other survivors aboard the boat.
"You people figure on jawing about your situation much longer?" Ryan shouted out harshly.
"Find ourselves in a bad way," Donovan shouted back. "We aren't too keen on making it any worse."
"You're aboard a boat that isn't going to make it to shore," Ryan said, "and those river pirates may return at any minute to finish the job they started just out of sport. Mebbe you can abandon ship and swim to shore, but you're still going to be vulnerable when you do it. Your situation gets any worse, you'll have to get chilled to do it. Where I'm sitting, that may not be that far way."
"All right." Donovan lowered the rifle and stepped to the railing, making a big target of himself if it went that way. "We're about out of choices."
"You're Donovan?"
"I am." Despite his situation, the man seemed to take pride in acknowledging his identity.
Ryan gave him a half smile, recognizing the fact that the man faced them without fear and that he'd be a dangerous enemy. "Get your people off that boat and we'll take you aboard."
"Boat's salvageable," Donovan said.
"Not by me," Ryan replied.
"Save me, save my boat. Like you pointed out, I've got the option of swimming to shore."
"There's some deadly mutie fish in this river," Elmore called out loud enough for Ryan to hear. "He goes in, there's a chance he won't be coming back out."
"You got any bilge pumps aboard that boat?" Ryan asked.
"Two. Both of them gasoline powered. Neither one of them working right now. Pirates saw to that when they scuttled the boat after taking our cargo. They'd have opened bigger holes in her if we'd let them. But after we saw they meant to chill us anyway, we fought back. If we'd tried to fight back any earlier, we couldn't have done it."
"Why?"
"Mister," Donovan said, "there were a lot of bastard pirates here. And they aren't going to take too kindly to you people chilling the ones you did, or destroying their transport. Salvaging one of those predark watercraft is hard, even up here where water activities seemed to be pretty big."
Ryan glanced farther downriver, "If there were so many pirates, mebbe it'd make better sense if you got off that goddamn boat and came aboard."
"No way," Donovan said. "This boat's my life. Spent more time aboard her these past ten years than anywhere else in my life. Leaving her is not an option."
Ryan tried staring him down across the expanse of dirty water as a corpse floated between them. He didn't think it was one of the bodies of the river pirates they'd killed, so it was mute testimony to the fate the Heimdall Foundation people had ahead of them if they stayed with Calypso.
Donovan showed no signs of giving in.
"Fireblast," Ryan swore. Then he turned to Morse. "Get us alongside so we can tie on."
Morse clearly wasn't happy about the prospect. "That boat will drag us under with it. She's near twice as big as mine."
Ryan glared at him. "I didn't say you had a choice. Get it done. Now."
ONCE RYAN'S COMMITMENT to help the stricken ship became definite, the crew aboard Calypso galvanized into action. Ropes from both boats were used to tie the bigger ship behind the smaller one. Jak and Dean helped the Morse boys bring up the hand-crank bilge pump from belowdecks and transferred it to the Heimdall Foundation craft.
Within twenty minutes, they were ready to attempt to move the boat. The borrowed bilge pump didn't equal the amount of water flooding Calypso belowdecks, but at least it managed to slow the water it was taking on.
Morse looked at the lines lashing them to the other boat with disgust and vehement hatred. "Junie's going to handle like a fucking fat-assed mud turtle trying to haul that bastard boat."
"Get it done," Ryan ordered.
"I am, I am." Morse surveyed the ropes himself, then called out new orders to Calypso's crew to trim their sails the way he wanted. "But you better hope those pirates don't come rushing back with reinforcements. Even without that boat tied to us, we couldn't outrun them."
Ryan knew that, and he hoped it as strongly as he dared.
Chapter Thirty
"Bring up the sails!" Morse bawled.
His sons, working with sailors from the Heimdall Foundation boat, pulled on the lines and sent sailcloth spinning up Junie's masts. They filled at once, sucking in the breeze with greedy need.
Ryan stood in the prow, clear of Calypso so he had a view downriver. Donovan stood beside him, a couple inches shorter and moving with a seaman's gait as Junie's deck bowed and shivered in protest of the load she was taking on.
Donovan had pulled on a sleeveless light blue shirt decorated with scarlet-and-green parrots, but Ryan suspected it was more for the shirt's ability to hold his pipe and tobacco than for any creature comfort. The Heimdall Foundation man looked as if he could weather any elements. Scars crisscrossed his body, mute testimony to the rigorous trials he'd been subjected to.
Slowly, inexorably, Junie stole Calypso from a watery grave. They traveled with the river but headed for the eastern bank. Donovan had pointed out the various tributaries feeding into the river, and Ryan had confirmed them with his binocs. Even with the river level up, Donovan also gave Morse directions to steer clear of certain areas of the river because of underwater wreckage.
"When the river lowers after the rainy season," he said to Ryan, "you get a better chance of seeing most of them. But there's others, if you haven't explored this river, that you won't know about until you've ripped the underside of your boat out. Ask me how I know. This isn't the first time I've had to put Calypso back together."
"WE'VE GOT A CAMPSITE farther up this tributary," Donovan said.
Ryan kept his eye on the men in Calypso's crow's nest. So far, neither of them had spotted the returning pirates. He knew it was possible that the pirates had decided to cut their losses, but he didn't trust that. With full dark coming less than an hour away, the pirates may have decided to hole up for the night on familiar terrain. Come first light, Ryan figured they'd be hunted again.
"What's the campsite for?" Ryan asked.
Donovan shook his head. "Just a base camp. You don't even need to take us there. Just put us ashore farther up this stream, and we'll see our own way clear."
"It isn't going to happen like that," Ryan said. Then he told Donovan about Krysty and their encounter with the Chosen.
"HOW ARE YOU FEELING?" Donovan squatted beside Krysty and gently peeled her eyelid back.
"Like I'm just short of catching the last train headed for the coast," Krysty croaked. It was a struggle for her to sit up on her own against the side of the boat.
"You still hearing the woman's voice?"
"Louder all the time. Can't hardly keep her away these past few days."
Donovan released her eyelid, and it slowly closed. "Well, you keep holding her back. Keep eating your soup and work on saving your strength. We'll see you clear of this."
"You can get her out of my head?" Krysty asked.
"Not me," Donovan replied. "But I know someone who can."
"I can't wait," Krysty said. "There's not room enough for both of us in here."
"HAVE YOU SEEN THIS BEFORE?" Ryan asked when they were back in the prow, away from Krysty.
Donovan nodded. "Twice. Both of them were women who'd come up on Chosen with death rattling in the backs of the throats. One of them was a gaudy slut over in Taylorville south and east of here. Rough trade ville, purely sport and gaudies, folks living out hard days there and spending their nights taking whatever they can from other folks, staying there just because they think they can kee
p ahead of folks taking from them. Gaudy slut had slit the throat of one of the Chosen, then she got her mind grafted for her trouble."
"Grafted?"
Donovan nodded and sucked on his pipe, streaming fragrant smoke. "The Chosen's term, what they call what they do. A lot of their skills with their minds they'd only started exploring right before skydark."
"In the Totality Concept," Ryan said.
Donovan's head snapped around. "What do you know about the Totality Concept?"
Ryan shook his head. "I'm not here to say what I know. Want to know what you know."
"But if you can add to our store of knowledge about the Totality Concept…"
"That's not what I'm here to do," Ryan said.
"How much do you know about the Heimdall Foundation?" Donovan asked. "I talked with Elmore. He said you knew some of it."
Ryan had let Elmore join the other crew aboard Calypso.
"No."
"Mebbe I could be as tight-lipped about what I know about the Chosen."
"That's not a game you want to play with me," Ryan told the man harshly. "I saved your ass back there. Now I'm saving your boat. Way I see it, the scales here are way out of balance."
"But you do know something."
"Something," Ryan admitted. "But not what you're looking for. All the stuff I've gotten to know, the Heimdall Foundation's the first place I've heard of that's got an idea that skydark was brought about by aliens from another world."
"ETs," Donovan said automatically.
"ETs what?" Ryan asked.
Donovan removed his pipe from his mouth. "Sorry. ETs are extraterrestrials. Aliens. We know a little about the Totality Concept. Supposed to have been a division, called Department Thirteen we think, that had made some kind of contact with an alien race."
"And you believe that?"
"Enough that I've given my life over to finding out whether it's true."
"Waste of time."
"What makes you say that?"
"Had some kind of ETs here," Ryan said, "you'd have known about them before now."
"Not so sure about that."
"You ever seen an alien?" Ryan asked.
"Of course not. If we had, there wouldn't be such a desperate need to know."
"Then how can you believe in them?"
"I want to believe."
"Friend I used to know had a saying. Want in one hand and shit in the other. See which one gets fullest first."
"Whether you're ready to deal with it or not, Ryan," Donovan said harshly, "it happened. The world was on the brink of an alien invasion, and it was them who started the nukecaust that blew up the world."
"Don't give a damn about that," Ryan said. "I'm here now, and I got my own problems. I want to know what we're going to do about Krysty."
"There's someone I can send for. I've got a lot of friends in out-of-the-way places."
"What's this friend going to do?"
"We'll have to see. First we get my boat to shore and set up camp for the night. Then you and I have got some more dickering to do."
"About what?"
"About what you're going to do for helping me get your lady friend's ass out of the sling it's in."
"Saved your life," Ryan said. "Saved your boat. You owe me big time."
Donovan gave him a hard stare. "That's one of the Chosen dancing around in your lady friend's head. You can't save her, and she can't save herself. She's knocking on death's door right now. Don't know how she hasn't gone under before now. But she hasn't. Mebbe she still has a chance. But to give her that chance, I'm going to have to call in a marker that's owed me, mebbe give one back that's going to be pure hell to pay. And I'm the one going to have to pay it back."
Ryan glared at the man, not trusting himself to speak. But he knew Donovan was right; he didn't know the price the man was going to have to pay. And Ryan was willing to pay whatever price was asked. It was a seller's market.
"If you could have done something," Donovan reminded him in a gentle voice, "you'd have done it before now. All you got left is the best you can do."
Ryan said nothing because he had nothing to say.
THEY PUT IN TO THE RIVERBANK just before dark descended on the mountainous terrain the stream cut through. They'd made good time because the wind had been with them, but going against the flow of the stream pulling the foundering ship behind them had slowed them considerably.
Ryan wasn't at all comfortable with the distance they'd managed to put between them and the pirates, but he ordered everyone off Junie, including Morse and his sons, and established a watch rotation among the companions.
The Heimdall Foundation people spread out along the bank, making do with the sodden camp gear packed aboard Calypso. Donovan organized his people, setting up a work team to continue pumping the boat out during the night. Ryan wasn't happy about the lanterns the work team operated by. Even within the belowdecks of the boat, the soft yellow light diffused over the dark landscape and was reflected in the stream. But he knew they had no choice if they were going to save the boat. Left untended, the boat would have sunk to the bottom of the stream where they anchored for the night.
Donovan also put out hunting teams, and Jak and Dean volunteered to go with them, anxious to get away from Junie's confines.
At first, Ryan was reluctant to let them go. Allowing them away from the group put them at risk as being taken captive or killed by the Heimdall Foundation people.
Donovan saw his indecision. "Let them go. I give you my word that you don't have anything to worry about from me."
"I don't know that your word is worth anything yet."
"Those boys look able to take care of themselves out there. And you're going to have to trust me to some degree at some point if you're going to save your lady friend."
"Man's right," J.B. said at Ryan's elbow. The Armorer had come up so quietly Ryan had never heard him. "Jak and Dean aren't going to get in so deep with this bunch that we can't get them out. Donovan here appears purely motivated about saving his boat."
Ryan knew that was true, and he knew J.B. was hinting about the explosives he'd made on the journey.
"Better to find out now, while we're not in it up to our necks, how much you can trust him," J.B. pointed out Jak and Dean had disappeared from camp as soon as they'd been told.
"YOU NEVER SAID what your cargo was," Ryan said. He stood belowdecks in Calypso, watching as Donovan shone a bull's-eye lantern around the interior of the sailboat.
Donovan stood in waist-high water, the rhythmic crank of the hand-powered bilge pump echoing all around him. "Piece of a space station that come down a few months ago."
"Shostakovich's Anvil?" Ryan asked.
Turning, Donovan was careful to keep the main intensity of the lantern from Ryan's face, but he draped part of the glow over him. "You know about it?"
"Saw it come down," Ryan answered.
"Where were you?"
"In the Smoke Creek Desert."
Excitement flared in Donovan's face. "The space station broke up somewhere over that area."
Ryan nodded. "You ever recover any pieces of the space station?"
"No. We sent teams in there, but no one ever found an impact area. The piece of Shostakovich's Anvil that I was carrying came over from what used to be Washington State. The people tracking the space station's breakup charted it, then traded with a bunch of scavengers who'd located it. I was making the final haul with it back to the Heimdall Foundation when the river pirates jumped me."
"A big piece of the space station went down in the Smoke Creek Desert," Ryan said.
"We knew it had, but we didn't find an impact area. Figured muties carried it off, mebbe. Some of them seem to have an affinity for predark tech. Can't use and don't seem to understand it, but they worship it all the same. Recovered some nice pieces from them over the years. Or we thought it might have been scavengers."
Ryan scanned the damage he could see to the boat's hull. It looked like ax
es had been used on the planks, creating crosshatches of white-scarred wood. "Where it fell," he said, "it would take a mighty determined man to get it out."
"Where?"
Ryan looked at the man and shook his head. "If we get Krysty back to herself, I'll tell you. You're not the only feller playing with a hole card here."
Chapter Thirty-One
"A couple days' work should see us clear of most of the damage."
Ryan sat on the other side of a campfire from Donovan. The Heimdall Foundation man lounged back against a tree that had been felled to provide firewood.
"We can even do most of it while we're being towed," he went on. "Troy tells me he's managed to save one of the gasoline-powered bilge pumps, and it'll be working come morning. With the hand-cranker you've let us borrow, we should be able to make a real move on getting Calypso dry. Got men cutting new timbers now that'll serve us till we can put up in dry dock back at the Foundation."
"How big is this place?" Doc asked. He held a thin branch with a piece of turkey meat on the end, browning in the campfire. All of them had eaten big meals, mixing the self-heats from the stores of both boats, as well as the meat the hunting party had brought back.
"The Foundation?"
"Yes."
"It's a big place," Donovan replied. "Other than that, I'm not going to say too much. We've survived this long by keeping our secrets secret."
"Of course, my dear fellow," Doc said unctuously, "but having some interests in the scientific research area myself, I find myself intensely curious."
"Mebbe someday you'll get up to the Foundation and have a look yourself."
"Mayhap I will. Ryan has told me you're aware of some of the ramifications of the Totality Concept."
"Sure. What areas were you most interested in?" Donovan asked.
"Why the experiments regarding—"
"No," Ryan interrupted, not wanting to give Donovan any more information than he already had.
Doc ceased speaking, glancing at Ryan in owl-eyed curiosity. "Have I spoken out of turn?"
"Man's leading you on, Doc, wanting to find out how much you know," Ryan commented. He stroked Krysty's hair. She'd insisted on coming to sit by the campfire with him but hadn't been able to remain awake. He missed talking to her, missed the way she was able to help him keep his thoughts all untangled. It felt as though he had knots in his head now.