by James Axler
Blasterfire crackled and popped from the tops, but it was far too slow and sporadic. Two of the eight-armed muties burst as high-powered longblasters exploded their soft heads, but Ryan knew the shooters in the tops of the three masts were trying to cover port and starboard as well as bow and stern. Goulash shoved in shoulder to shoulder with Ryan, brandishing a beautiful, filigreed hunting sword and a double-barreled scattergun sawn down into a handblaster. He leaned out over the rail and pulled one trigger and then another. Two octopods smeared off the hull in riddled ruins. The Hungarian waved the swiftly creeping creatures upward. “Ha! Come then!”
“Goulash, get the hell back from the rail! Reload!”
An octopod launched out of the water like a rocket. It shot up level with the rail, and Goulash screamed and thrust his sword. His attack was instantly entangled as two arms wrapped around his wrist and elbow. His sword clattered to the deck as an arm cinched around his neck and squeezed. Ryan lunged, but the creature simply fell away before his attack and let its weight pull Goulash over the rail. The Hungarian fell gasping and struggling into the dark sea below wrapped in the octopod’s embrace.
Ryan knew in an instant that the good ship Glory was not being boarded and taken. Her crew was being harvested. The silent night creep ended. Octopods shot up out of the water like an artillery barrage and hit the rails in full assault. There were scores of them, not counting the ones that had attacked through the blaster hatches below. Gypsyfair screamed and brandished her knife as an octopod pulled itself over the rail and rose. Ryan had seen squids and octopuses before. Out of the water their boneless bodies had no buoyancy or leverage and were reduced to creeping and pulling themselves along by muscular contraction. This octopod suddenly stood up straight, using its eight arms like legs. It shot out an arm and snatched the blind mutant’s knife out of her hands.
Ryan wound up and threw.
A marlinspike was a poor throwing weapon at best, but the half pound of iron revolved twice and slammed into the octopod’s head-body and rippled its gray flesh. Light strobed across its body in bizarre flashes, and it turned on its attacker.
Ryan had seen battle with man and mutie in every corner of the Deathlands as well as in some of the farthest flung corners of the nukecausted world. He didn’t flinch as the octopod ran toward him across the deck, seven feet tall on its eight arms with horrible shuffling speed. Ryan held his knife low and charged. He collided with the mutant octopus and hurled his left shoulder into the creature. It rocked back beneath the force of meeting its adversary’s frame, but its suckers gripped the deck and arms instantly snaked around Ryan’s limbs. Toothed suckers bit through his pants and directly into his bare flesh.
Ryan slashed, but it was like stabbing a stickie. His blade barely cut the thick, rubbery flesh, and in an instant a suckered arm constricted around his biceps while three others wound around him. The creature was using four arms to stand on and four to control Ryan. The contractile power of the octopod’s arms was sickening. Ryan stared into its golden, alien, rectangular eyes and knew he going to board the last train west. The webbing between the mutie’s forward arms flopped up and its head tilted back. It opened the underside of its body like a flower and a dark parrot beak twice the size of a human fist prolapsed out and opened. The arm around his biceps twisted and turned his blade away. The other three arms pulled him in.
Doc appeared out of nowhere.
He stalked across Glory’s deck like an avenging scarecrow with his sword unsheathed. The creature holding Ryan paused and one of its eyes bulged and watched Doc lunge and lance an oncoming octopod between its alien optical organs. Doc’s opponent shuddered, released black ink like a chilled man releasing his bowels and instantly went limp.
“Between the eyes!” Doc’s voice rose to operatic heights. “Shipmates, slash not! A swift thrust or a sharp blow, but between the eyes or not at all! That is where you shall find their brain!”
Ryan managed to twist in the cold, horrid, sucking grip. He felt the horrible beak scrape against his stomach, but its curved slick surface slid snapping across the plates of his stomach muscle. His blade was out of position to stab, so he desperately slammed the knife’s handle down between the octopod’s eyes. It was a weak blow, nearly all forearm, but the octopod’s protruding eyes squeezed shut and retracted into its head. The grip of every arm encumbering Ryan weakened, and the creature sagged. Ryan felt the mainmast against his back, and he put a foot against it and reared up. He put all of his weight behind it as he snapped his head forward and butted the octopus between the eyes.
Every suction cup released at once and the octopod slimed off of Ryan to flop shuddering to the deck. Ryan scooped up Goulash’s fallen sword. It was short, heavy, curved and not particularly well balanced. The thick blade had been designed for sliding around bones and penetrating deep to finish off downed big game. It would do for octopod between-the-eyes butchery.
Atlast screamed and screamed. He lay on the deck holding an octopod aloft with both arms and legs. The octopod had all eight arms suctioned against the deck and it inexorably contracted down, beak snapping to crush his skull. Its golden eyes snapped up just in time to see Ryan round on it.
The one-eyed man turned his wrist as he lunged the blade between the octopod’s eyes up to the hilt. Atlast screamed as the creature belched a bucket of ink on him, went limp between his limbs and collapsed on top of him. Ryan ripped his sword free. Three octopods charged him, scuttling on the tips of their suckered arms. He heard the pop of Mildred’s target revolver, and one of the aquatic mutants dropped, dripping ichor between its optical organs. A silver pinwheel of steel revolved over Ryan’s shoulder and Jak’s ship’s knife sank into cephalopod ganglia and dropped it. The remaining octopod took a look at Ryan as he charged and turned toward the rail.
It met Captain Oracle.
Oracle rammed his orange-furred prosthesis between its eyes up to the wrist. He twisted and yanked the paw free with hooked brains, guts and multiple hearts trailing between the silver claws. Manrape knelt above another, driving his fist between its eyes like a piston. Doc skewered one, and octopods convulsed and fell from stem to the stern as the crew counterattacked with a vengeance and scores of armed crewmen boiled out of the hatches like angry ants. The skin of the remaining octopods rippled and flashed like strobes.
Ryan’s teeth flashed in the dark as he heard J.B.’s Uzi blasting tight bursts belowdecks. The octopods with crewmen prey released them, and they all began hurling themselves over the rails. Ryan heard splashes as others belowdecks ejected from the blasterports. Ryan lowered his sword. The octo-muties had come to feed, and the food had fought back with far too much vigor for their taste. Wounded crewmen lay in lakes of blood and ink, twisting and screaming from tentacle tearings and beak bites.
Doc shook blood and ink from his blade. “Captain! All known species of octopus are poisonous! Like spiders, many are not dangerous to man, but this species is unlike any I have ever seen.”
“Wounded to the med!” Mildred shouted like she was in surgery. “Tell Bonesaw to administer any antivenin we have!”
Crewmen gathered up their blood-and ink-stained companions. The dead octopods and their ink were already starting to smell like a rottie attack. “Miss Loral,” Oracle grated. “I want a death and damage report ASAP! Commander, I want any sail set that can catch a wind!”
“Aye, Captain!” Miles wiped ink from a Japanese wakizashi short sword. “What course?”
“Due east, Commander! I want good, deep Lantic beneath us, without a spec of land, rock or reef on the horizon within the hour.”
“Aye, Captain!”
“Mr. Manrape, have the waisters get this filth off my deck.”
“You heard the captain, Hardstone!” Manrape shouted. “Get this squid filth overboard! I don’t want to see a spec of blood or a drop of ink on this deck come the light of dawn!”
Crewmen ran to the jobs and stations.
“Ryan!” Gypsyfair screamed and cl
icked and pointed at the deck. “There! There! There!”
Ryan stared at a pile of cordage in the glow of the ship’s lantern. The cordage had not been there before and was just a few feet away from where he had dropped his first octopod opponent with a head butt. “Watch the decks for anything out of place!” Ryan shouted. “The rad-blasted things can camo!” Ryan rounded on the pile of cordage with his sword before him. The pile of cordage rippled and changed color. The octopod tried to rise but seemed strong enough to only get three arms beneath it. It reeled like a drunk before Ryan in retreat. The one-eyed man raised his sword for the killing thrust. The octopod’s siphon suddenly contracted and Ryan recoiled as a liter of stinking black ink hit him under high pressure. “Fireblast...”
Crewmen charged in from all directions, brandishing blades, and cut off the creature from Ryan and the rail. Its camouflage flashed off, and the octopod returned to its normal slick-gray color. The golden eyes bulged outward in two directions as the seamen advanced. The octopod flopped headfirst into the water barrel and crossed its eight arms above it in defense. Half a dozen of the crew closed in for the kill.
“Gypsyfair!” Oracle called. “Sweep the decks, stem to stern! Boarding pike and blaster men to her!” Gypsyfair began echolocating the deck surrounded by a phalanx of blasters and sharpened steel.
“Lover!” Ryan turned as Krysty flung herself into his arms. She kissed him for long moments and then leaned back. She surveyed his sucker-torn, ink-stained face and torso. “You look like you just got thumped by stickies, and you smell like they pushed you down a pest-hole privy.”
Ryan’s teeth flashed through the ink covering his face. “I love the way you sweet talk me after we’ve been separated.”
Fresh shouting broke out. “Kill the thing!” “You kill it!” “I’m not getting within reach of it!”
Ryan hefted his sword. Krysty took his six with her blaster as they approached the armed crowd surrounding the water barrel. The octopod’s head was at the bottom, and its arms roiled like a snake mating ball at the surface. No one wanted to get close to it.
“Get Gallondrunk!” Sweet Marie shouted. “He’ll pin that squid in the barrel stem to stern with that walrus lance of his! Then we chop it up proper!”
This suggestion was met with great enthusiasm.
“Belay that!” Oracle ordered. The crew parted before him. “Mr. Manrape, I want a section of grating lashed to the top of that barrel. Put a guard on it. And get Boiler and Skillet out of the med and into the galley. They’ve been nursing their wounds long enough.”
Manrape looked quizzical for the first time in Ryan’s experience. “Aye, Captain.”
“That beast is a hundred kilos if it’s an ounce, and our stores are spoiling. We need meat if we are going to make it across the ’Quator.”
The crew seemed pleased with the idea, and men and women began whispering about calamari and the delights of Brazil.
Oracle turned back for the quarterdeck. “And Mr. Forgiven could use some fresh ink. Speaking of which, Purser, rate Mr. Ryan ordinary seaman.”
Chapter Six
J.B. worked. The good ship Glory was short on blasters. The majority of the weapons in the armory were typical, home-rolled, break-open, single-shot longblasters and pistols. The Glory had standardized on .45 caliber, and they had molds and enough lead to make thousands of bullets, and they could fire black powder or smokeless with equal facility. They punched primers out of predark coins that could be found anywhere.
Cases were the main problem. They had no machinery on board to extrude scavenged brass or aluminum. Smithy had to do it by hand. They were saving and reloading old cases, and by the buckets of split cases at J.B.’s feet some had been reused far too many times than was safe. The sharpshooters in the tops had assiduously cared for predark hunting longblasters of .308 and 30-06 caliber. Reloading them was even more problematic. A number of the crew had personally acquired arms taken as booty or acquired otherwise, which were stored in the blaster room, but most of those had but a handful of shells left to them after the last battle.
What they also had was several crates of blasters in various states of disrepair that were beyond Gunny’s knowledge or ability to fix. They kept those to sell for their parts in ports of call. J.B. liked Gunny, and Gunny liked him. They were men of similar minds. Unfortunately, what Gunny most understood was black powder and muzzle-loading cannons. Between him and Smithy, they could produce the simple springs, hinges and screws to keep the primitive blasters serviceable. The gas systems, trigger groups and bolt assemblies of predark semi-automatic blasters and assault weapons were beyond their skill.
They were not beyond J.B.’s.
The Armorer had disassembled every last waste weapon, made a list of things he felt Smithy could handle, requisitioned his tool kit and gone to work. If J.B. hadn’t liked Gunny already as a brother armorer, the fact that Gunny didn’t pull rank but instead watched with awe, asked intelligent questions and eagerly helped in whatever capacity he could won J.B.’s admiration. J.B. finally rose from the worktable and nearly hit his head on the low deck beam above. He sat back down and checked his chron. They had been at it for eleven hours straight. He and Gunny had cannibalized ten broken and corroded AKs and produced two that might function through another battle or two, though they only had enough ammo for slightly less than a mag each. Six M-16s had produced one working longblaster. Strangely enough they had nearly a case of 5.56 mm ammo but only one serviceable magazine. Several scatterguns and a few handblasters were now also in temporary working order.
Gunny shook his head in delight at the bonanza of working blasters. “Oh, that shines, J.B.!”
The Armorer stretched. He sighed as he felt familiar strong hands start to knead his shoulders. Mildred spoke low from behind him. “Hey.”
He looked up and smiled at her. “Hey.”
“How’s it going?”
“Did some good work today.”
Mildred smiled indulgently at the gleaming weapons. “I can see that.”
“How’s it in the med?” J.B. asked. He’d heard the screaming all through the night.
Mildred’s face went tight. “Doc was right. The octopods were poisonous. Whatever Bonesaw’s using for antivenin might work on snakes, but no one bit last night lived. We lost fifteen. The sucker wounds were ugly and prolific. Ryan’s covered with them, but none are deep and none are going septic.”
“How you and Bonesaw getting along?”
“Well, first off, the ship’s healer is named Bonesaw. That tells you something right there.”
“Bad?”
Mildred made a grudging noise. “He can plug a bullet hole. His sewing isn’t bad, and he’s actually pretty good at setting bones. Those octopus arms snapped a few. He’s got some interesting herbals going on, but...”
J.B. knew Mildred well. “But that’s not what’s bothering you.”
“Bonesaw knows I’m more than just a healer.”
Gunny smirked. “Everyone does.”
J.B. knew everyone knew too. One of the problems the companions had was that just about any group they met who learned of Mildred’s talents were reluctant to let her go, some violently so. “You got a little bossy about the wounded up top.”
“Yeah, well there’s this Hippocratic Oath thing of mine, J.B. Just isn’t made for this brave new world of yours.”
“How’s Jak, Ricky?”
Mildred made a face. “Jak’s fine.”
J.B. let out a long breath. “Ricky?”
Mildred’s face twisted into an expression the Armorer was genuinely afraid of. “Bad enough the ship’s healer’s name is Bonesaw! But the bosun’s name is Manrape. J.B., the kid’s ass is on the line and you better do something!”
J.B. looked Gunny in the eye. He hated asking for favors, but he asked now. “Ricky’s an armorer, not as good as me but better than you, and he’s an accomplished machinist. This ship needs him.”
“And he’s becoming an able top m
an,” Gunny replied. “He can do all three wearing a dress.”
J.B. stopped just short of reaching for the closest loaded blaster. “I can steal ten blasters while you’re cleaning your monocle. I’ll cut Manrape to shreds.”
“And you can’t imagine what will be done to you, but you can imagine Mildred weeping while she watches.”
“You’d let that happen?”
“You’ve seen Manrape. Have you known anyone so fast? Anyone so strong? He is a demigod among us and a demon in battle.”
J.B. had met several demigods and demons, self-professed and otherwise. Manrape was admittedly something of a juggernaut
“This ship is in trouble, matey. When the final battle comes, we’ll need him more than you and all your lot put together.” Gunny looked away. “Sacrifices have to be made, mebbe.”
Mildred pleaded. “J.B.!”
“The officers, do they keep their weapons separate?”
Gunny nodded. “Aye, they do.”
“Tell the captain I want to strip, clean, polish and tune every one of them, and tell him I need to requisition Ricky for it while you and I go over the cannons.”
“Aye.” Gunny chewed at his mustache. “I can do that. It will just prolong things, but it will give Ricky a few days’ respite. Can’t imagine the cap’n saying no.”
“Thanks.”
Mildred looked close to tears. “Thanks, J.B.”
“I should’ve thought of it earlier.”
“A few days’ respite, then what?”