Deathlands 118: Blood Red Tide

by James Axler

  “Miss Loral, straight in for the Pig’s tail.” Ryan rolled the dice. “Get us within one hundred meters, then hard to starboard. I want every crewman not needed to sail the ship or fire the cannons stationed to the starboard rail with a blaster.”

  Loral’s eyes widened. Ryan was gambling everything on a single broadside. She flashed the wolf grin. “Aye!”

  Ryan filled his lungs. “J.B., chasers when we’re in range! The blaster deck is yours! Chasers when we’re in range! When we turn to starboard, be ready to fire as she bears!”

  * * *

  J.B. LEANED PERILOUSLY out of the number-one starboard chaser blaster port as the blaster crew reloaded. Spray atomized upward and misted his glasses as the Glory cut through the South Atlantic like a knife with the wind behind her. DontGo seized his belt. J.B. accepted the support and took in his opponent. The War Pig was an ocean-going horror, a behemoth with modifications that included two blaster decks to the Glory’s one, but the monster was lumbering like a horse half mired in mud. Smoke puffed from the monster’s stern. J.B. saw the gray streak of the cannon ball that rustled past the Glory six meters to his left.

  The crew missed Gunny, but the artilleryman and weaponsmith had trained his people well and they admired J.B.’s competence and style. The Pig had four stern chasers to the Glory’s two. The Pig was now reduced to one. The battle plan was simple. If the Glory exchanged broadsides with the Pig, she was most likely doomed. Ryan was attempting to give J.B. a shot at raking fire.

  With the weather gauge, Ryan would attempt to turn the Glory’s full broadside at the Pig’s stern. The stern was less heavily built than the prow or the sides, and there was a chance the cannonballs would rip through the Pig from stern to stem. The Glory had doused all fires. Dorian was stoking his boiler, which was dangerous in the extreme for a wooden ship. J.B. would attempt to put all eight of his shots up the Pig’s ass. The stern was a much smaller target, and that was why Ryan was bringing the Glory in dangerously close.

  Dorian knew exactly what was happening. His crewmen surged to fill the stern rail and the smashed-out windows of Dorian’s cabin. Blasterfire erupted from the stern of the Pig and from the sharpshooters in the tops. DontGo yanked J.B. back inside as bullets hit the Glory like hail. “Fucking unfriendly,” Skillet opined.

  Ryan roared from the top deck. “Two hundred meters, J.B.!”

  “Blaster captains!” J.B. called. “Light fuse!” The blaster captains squatted over the fuse baskets and struck sulfur matches well away from the powder and set the coiled fuses to smolder. The Glory had nearly a full complement, but far too many of the crew were still lubbers. They were going to fire from starboard, so J.B. had run the Mapuche, Kelpers and gauchos to port. Veterans would fire the first volley.

  “One hundred fifty!”

  “Starboard crews!” J.B. bellowed. “Run out the blasters!”

  J.B. watched as his crews yanked on the ropes and tackles and the cannons rumbled forward. These were not the narrow, long-range chasers meant to take away spars or rigging. These cannons were squat beasts of short range and large caliber and looked like black iron, hostile beer kegs. They were smashers.

  “Miss Loral!” Ryan ordered. Hard to starboard! Blaster men, fire!”

  Miss Loral turned the ship. They had a nearly perfect strong wind behind them and the Glory pivoted in the water like a dancer. On deck every crewman not required to steer the ship or fire the cannons stood and began unloading their blasters into the Pig’s stern in suppressive fire. Shell casings fell past the blaster ports and tinkled off the cannon muzzles like brass rain.

  “J.B.!” Ryan called. “Fire as she bears!”

  J.B. crouched at the starboard number one cannon as the stern of the Pig swung into view. A lucky shot sparked off the cannon, and Yerbua screamed and fell back. Cannon number one coincided with the Pig. “Fire!” DontGo clapped fuse, and the cannon bucked backward like a mule as it belched smoke and fire. “All crews! Fire as they bear!”

  Cannon two boomed and shot back on its rails. Cannons three, four and five fired in rapid succession followed by six, seven and eight in a slow series of detonations. “Reload!”

  The crews swabbed out the cannon and rammed in powder and shot. Smoke obscured everything, but the wind was quickly shredding it. J.B. barely heard Ryan’s order thanks to his ringing ears.

  “Drop sail!”

  J.B. felt the ship slow beneath his feet. Ryan had liked what he saw. He was willing to risk stopping the ship to let J.B. finish it. J.B. peered over cannon number one as the smoke cleared away. The War Pig was in horrible shape. The captain’s cabin resembled a shattered, smoking, empty cabinet. Two of her stern chasers lay smashed from their carriages on their sides. The other two had fallen into the sea. The eight twenty-two pound iron balls had gone bouncing and caroming forward through the ship. Smoke poured out a number of her blaster ports. Best of all, her black smokestack leaned at a terrible angle to port. J.B.’s blaster crews worked their aiming screws and handspikes to utilize what little traverse the cannons had to aim. “Fire at will!” J.B. shouted.

  The cannons fired out of order as the crews took the time to aim from their relative positions. J.B. watched as one cannon ball and then another plunged into the War Pig’s guts. Metal screamed and tore and the smokestack suddenly dropped six feet belowdecks. Glowing embers and ash from the boilers erupted like a volcano and fell back to the decks. A cannon jumped from her starboard side in a wave of fire like it was abandoning ship as a powder keg exploded. Glory’s three and four fired nearly simultaneously and smoke obscured J.B.’s vision, but he saw the orange pulses of explosions through it. The blaster crews raced to reload, lay their cannons and fire.

  Manrape bellowed down the main hatch. “Cease fire!”

  “Cease fire!” J.B.’s blaster crews finished reloading and running out but held fire. J.B. leaned out the number one cannon porthole, and what he saw would give even a hardened veteran of the Deathlands pause. The War Pig was dying. Black powder explosions kept detonating amid decks, blowing out through portholes and up through hatches. Fire burned up top and was reaching into the rigging. Pure white steam geysered out of a hole in the Pig’s side like a giant teakettle from her ruptured boiler and made her whistle and scream like a stuck pig. Fire-charred and steam-broiled men threw themselves overboard, seeking the embrace of the cold Lantic waters. Others were blasted out onto the sea involuntarily, bodily or in bits by the explosions. More and more were jumping overboard as all hands began to abandon ship. It was an ugly choice. The waters churned with fins, strange humped shapes and tentacles as those below overcame their normal fear of large ships, explosions and each other and rose to the smell of blood to feed at the surface.

  “All crews! Run the cannons back in!”

  Hardstone cleared his throat. “Begging Gunny’s pardon.”

  “Hardstone?”

  “I’d keep the cannons run out.”

  “Why?”

  “In case something really big rises up, like.”

  J.B. considered the gray waters now with lit fires above, stained with blood on the surface, and the black depths beneath.

  “Starboard crews belay that! Stay on station! Port crews run out the cannons! Sharp eyes on the water all around!”

  Ricky called out from the tops. “Boat in the water!”

  * * *

  RYAN SNAPPED HIS longeyes shut. The dinghy wasn’t making a run for it. The two men aboard sculled hard and fast and took a long way around the War Pig as she burned to the waterline and the predators fed. They headed straight for the Glory. Ryan took in the two sailors. They were big. One was a hunchbacked black man and the other blonde and bearded. Ryan assumed he was still in command of the Glory until he was told differently. “Hold fire!”

  The two sailors rowed up and stopped smartly before the Jacob’s ladder. Ryan stared down at them coldly. The black man had strange yellow eyes like a wolf’s. Far more disturbing was the pair of yellow eyes staring out
of the pink lobe on the side of his skull. Ryan recognized the tattooing on the blond man’s exposed neck and wrists. He was Viking Cult from the Great Lakes. “You’re a long way from home, Son of Odin.”

  “I wanted to go someplace warm.” The man grinned into the fiercely cold Westerlies lashing his hair. “Now look at me.”

  Ryan liked the man but did not show it on his face. “What do you want?”

  “To take ship.”

  “You came to claim our captain.”

  The black man reached down and yanked up a tarp. Dorian Sabbath lay in the bottom of the boat bloody and bruised but still living. “Claim ours.”

  Ryan considered the prize before him. “You’d betray your captain?”

  The Viking spit. “I was press-ganged.”

  The black man nodded. “So were we.”

  “I hear Oracle isn’t the pressing or the whipping kind,” the Viking continued. “I hear he’s also short of sailors.”

  “You can hand, sail and reef?”

  “I’m Smyke, formerly ranked bos’n on the War Pig.”

  “Nubskull.” The black man nodded. “We’re sailors, able.”

  It dawned on Ryan that Nubskull was not referring to Smyke when he said “we.” “Permission to come aboard. Mr. Forgiven, enter Smyke and Nubskull as able seamen until signed or proved otherwise. Smyke to be promoted to bos’n when he is proved to it and signed. Mr. Manrape, clap Dorian in irons. No harm or abuse to come to him until the captain says otherwise. Inform the captain and have the dinghy brought aboard.

  Ryan turned from the chorus of ayes to Koa. “You, sir, plot us a course for the Cape.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The Cape of Storms

  The cape tried to tear Glory limb from limb. With the wind, the rain and the ocean spray, the world abovedeck was a whirling maelstrom of freezing water. The only thing more violent was the ocean below her keel. They had given up trying the channels off Tierra del Fuego the moment they had raised them. They had no pilot and would have been smashed on the rocks almost instantly. Commander Miles had ordered them to head for open ocean. Some crew members prayed for rocks. The waves they rode atop and the wells between they fell into were the most horrifying things Ryan had ever encountered. There was almost no difference between day and night, and he was glad to not see most of what was around them. Commander Miles could not keep his footing, injured as he was. Miss Loral had taken command on deck, and Ryan had gone up into the rigging. He almost liked it better. The sea had washed six crewmen overboard already. The rigging was a tightrope act in a nukecaust-worthy storm, but his job was simple. He knew the stirrup rope beneath his feet and the spar he laid his body across. He could do it with his eye closed. The weight of wet sail was a very old and familiar adversary, and the men next to him on the terrible perch knew their jobs as well or better than him.

  Except for Koa.

  Ryan thought a man would have coughed up his esophagus after seventy-two hours of screaming, but Koa still screamed and screamed and hauled sail.

  The watch bell chimed dimly beneath the roar of the wind and waves. Nubskull shot up the shrouds to take Ryan’s place. They had just enough men to run two good shifts up in the rigging. For men who had never seen a mountain and rarely a tree, the Mapuche were utterly fearless up in the rigging. What they lacked was experience, and the Cape was no place to acquire it. Three had fallen to their doom. Mildred’s med was full of broken bones, strains and spectacular contusions. The only blessing at all was that the wind was so horrendous the Glory wasn’t carrying much sail, but what she had up had to be constantly shifted tack upon tack. Ryan clapped Nubskull on the shoulder and gratefully gave up his spot on the stirrup. He descended to the pitching, wave-flooded deck and went into the close murk below mostly by feel.

  All fires had been doused, including the galley’s. The only illumination was the Glory’s small selection of battery-operated or crank generator lights. Most of those had been prioritized for the med. Ryan shrugged out of his dripping sealskins and oiled canvas and changed into Falkland woolens and a permanently bloodstained gaucho cape.

  Filthy bodies in close proximity provided most of the warmth. Ryan sensed genuine heat and moved toward it. Ryan’s messmates sat on sea chests drinking with one hand and holding hammocks as the deck pitched with the other. It was useless to try to rig tables with the ship pitching this hard. Technically Ryan had acted as an officer, indeed, a commander, but he had not been invited to dine with Miles and Loral. Ryan’s uniform lay in his sea chest and his duties were all able seaman in the rigging until further notice. He didn’t mind. Onetongue wore the blue fleece Ryan had given him.

  “Hi, Ryan!” The tongue-shorn mutie shoved a wooden stoop into his messmate’s hands. “Have th’um hot buttered rum!”

  Ryan took the stoop and felt the heat through the wood. “Thought fires were doused.”

  Onetongue grinned happily. “Chem heater’th, Ryan! Chem heater’th! Cap’n’th orders! Hot grog for the top’th men!”

  Oracle had traded for Brazilian rum and sugar, and Falkland’s butter formed a delicious layer of fat on top. Like the lights, Oracle was using his cache of tech, in this case chemical heating units to get something hot into his crew. He wasn’t holding anything back. They either would get around the horn to warm south Lantic waters, or they would go down to the Old Place, their flesh and bones to be feasted on by those below. Ryan drank deep and celebrated another watch finished and alive.

  Hardstone limped forward, carrying the steaming mess kid. “Burgoo, boys! Get it while it’s hot!”

  Ryan drained his stoop and scooped it into the steaming oatmeal. A plastic, binary chemical heating pouch floated in the gruel. Like the rum, Skillet had loaded it with butter and sugar. He took up his issue wooden spoon and tucked in. Oracle wasn’t stilting on rations, either. Every man could eat his fill. Ryan ate three stoops’ worth and rubbed his pleasingly full belly.

  Doc strode rapidly into fo’c’sle. He was clearly upset. Over the moaning of the wind, the slamming of the waves and the groans of the Glory’s timbers, Dorian Sabbath let forth another scream. Dorian was chained in the captain’s cabin, and at Oracle’s direction Manrape was working him for every last scrap of information on his family’s ships, crew and disposition.

  Wipe scooped oatmeal into his maw and stared at Doc hungrily. “What’s Manrape doing to him, Doc? Is it hot?”

  Doc paled.

  Ryan threw a short elbow into Wipe’s jaw and knocked him off his sea chest. Technically Ryan had been an officer, but a seaman striking another without being struck first could be punishable by death. Wipe howled and rubbed his chin. “You saw! You saw!”

  Hardstone ate oatmeal. “You fell and hit your face, Wipe.”

  “You all saw!”

  Hardstone, Koa and Atlast all stared down at Wipe and spoke as one. “You fell.”

  Onetongue tilted back his head and shoved out a tongue that could mate with a sea cucumber and belched. “A, B, THEE, D, E, F’TH, G...”

  The tension broke. Wipe clapped his hands. Doc shook his head admiringly. “A most potent eructation, good Onetongue! And you know your ABCs!”

  “You taught me, Doc!” Onetongue dished up Doc a stoop of burgoo. “You taught u’th all!”

  Ryan smiled over his gruel. “Onetongue?”

  “Ye’th, Ryan?”

  “Ask Doc to teach you to read while you’re at it, and have him teach you some math. You’re a lot smarter than you let on, and we could use another bos’n. Maybe another officer.”

  “Aw jee’th, Ryan!”

  Onetongue’s messmates made affirmative noises. Doc nodded. “All aboard respect your work ethic, your fighting ability and your knowledge of the ship. Only your shyness stops your advancement, dear shipmate. Should you wish it of me, you have but to ask.”

  “Aw, jee’th, Doc!”

  “When you signed the book you made your mark. By next watch you shall be able to write your name.”

>   * * *

  RYAN CAME DOWN from the rigging. According to every calculation, they had rounded the horn. But there’d been no celebration. It had cost them ten more crewmen from lubbers to topsmen, and just as Oracle had forgone landing in Brazil, he had ordered the ship to forgo the western shore of South America and head deep into the Cific. You couldn’t tell the difference by the darkness, winds or waves. The only difference was Glory now headed northwest, so she no longer took the gale-force winds and tidal waves on the chin. It gave her far more wind to work with. Unfortunately, it meant the ship now rolled from side to side in spectacular fashion rather than seesawed, and new fits of seasickness struck even the oldest salts.

  The weather was warming. That was a blessing. Mildred had been forced to amputate nearly two-dozen fingers, toes and earlobes from frostbite. Ryan took a deep breath. He suddenly felt weak and dizzy. He put a hand on a beam to steady himself. Scurvy had hit the ship. Mildred had rated six crewmen invalids and assigned them to their hammocks until further notice. Ryan pinched his front teeth between his thumb and forefinger and tried to wiggle them. His gums had been bleeding for three days now, but his teeth still sat tightly in his skull.

  Onetongue waved a frantic hand. “Cap’n want’th to thee you in hi’th cabin, Ryan!”

  Ryan squared himself and tore off his foul-weather gear. He wondered if he had any clothes left that weren’t filthy and crusted with salt.

  Onetongue read his mind and grinned. “For th’upper!” Ryan paused. He did have one set of clean clothes. He went to his sea chest and donned his uniform.

  “Look’th good!”

  Ryan wasn’t egotistical, but he knew he wore it well. “Thanks, Tongue.”

  “Oh, almo’tht forgot!” Onetongue handed Ryan a folded note. The last flurry of note passing on the Glory had lead to some very strange and dangerous directions. Ryan held the note up to a weakly glowing LED light. Ryan smirked in the gloom. Being universally recognized as the ship’s most useless crew member, Krysty had spent a great deal of the voyage around the Horn vomiting as she pedaled one of the two bicycle generators in the orlop to keep the lights on. The note read RYAN but not in Oracle’s block script. Ryan flipped it open.