Iron Rage

Krysty heard Ryan open fire. Given the range, the bobbing of the approaching lesser war craft, and the complex movement of the Queen—pitching fore and aft as well as heeling over to her right from the centrifugal force of the fastest left turn the vessel could manage—she doubted he’d be lucky enough to hit anything significant.

The women had almost reached the cabin when the next salvo hit, roaring like an angry dragon. Krysty saw stout planks suddenly spreading into fragments almost in her face.

And then the world vanished in a soundless white flash.

* * *

RYAN’S HEART ALMOST imploded in his chest when he heard the shell crash through the roof of the bridge and detonate. Krysty!

He stood, pushed off from the rail and spun.

The forward port corner of the cabin—his right—had been smashed. Smoke streamed out. He heard screams, smelled burned flesh, and burning horsehair from padded chairs.

Krysty lay on her back on the deck, her head in Mildred’s lap. Her hair was curled close to her head, though not tightly, and was waving feebly. Her face was a ghastly mask of gore and char.

“Krysty!” he shouted.

Mildred waved him off.

“Her forehead’s just nicked,” she said. “The rest is just smoke.”

“She’s not hurt?”

“She’s concussed,” Mildred said. “But she’s tough. She’ll make it. There’s nothing more to do for her right now. Ow! What?”

The last was directed at J.B., who had taken off his fedora and was swatting her on top of the head with it.

“Your hair’s smoldering up top,” he said.

“Oh,” she said sheepishly. “Something made me dive for the deck. Since Krysty was hanging on to my wrist it was easy to take her down with me. But she still caught more of the blast than I did.”

“Help!” somebody yelled from inside the cabin. “Somebody help the captain!”

Ryan and Mildred looked at each other. “Look out after Krysty, John,” she said. Easing Krysty’s head to the planks, she extricated herself and stood.

As soon as he saw Krysty’s head laid gently down, Ryan moved ahead of Mildred to the door and looked inside.

A dense haze of greenish smoke filled the bridge, lit poorly by afternoon sunlight slanting in through the hole, and a few oily flickering yellow flames. The stink of burned gunpowder, hair and overcooked flesh was intense. Ryan had to clamp his jaw shut against acid vomit that shot up his throat.

Nataly Dobrynin stood at the wheel. Like Krysty’s, her face was a black-and-crimson mask. She was craning to her left to peer out the front port. The polycarbonate there had been blasted free by the explosion. The right side, though intact, was smoke-smudged, partially melted and tricky to see through.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Scalp cut and smoke damage. It’s not as bad as it looks.” Despite her words, she seemed to be as much holding herself upright as steering the Queen through its hard left turn.

She jerked her head toward the cabin wall to her right. “Help the captain.”

Ryan looked the way she indicated. Trace Conoyer was slumped against the bulkhead. Her right arm was missing from above the elbow. Avery knelt beside her, frantically trying to tie off the wound with a handkerchief. He didn’t seem to be making much headway against the blood spurting all over him, and rendering the floorboards slippery.

“Mildred,” Ryan rasped.

“Already on it,” the predark doctor said. She actually shouldered him out of the way as she entered the bridge and went to the captain.

When she had been studying to become a doctor, Mildred had discovered she enjoyed research more than tending to the sick and injured, so she chose the field of medical research and focused on cryogenics. Ultimately, her research had saved her life, as it allowed her colleagues to freeze her after the botched surgery. Her sleep lasted longer than a hundred years, and when she awakened, the world had drastically changed. And to survive—emotionally as well as physically—she had to change, as well. She had thrown herself wholeheartedly into the role of healer, bringing real medical skill and knowledge to a world that almost completely lacked them. And when she went into full-on healer mode, she would turn aside for nothing.

Not even Ryan Cawdor.

To the right of the entrance, at the bridge’s rear, was a hatch leading to the deck below. Just short of it lay a body. At one time it had been human, but now it was hard to tell. It seemed to have been blown open, with entrails scattered on the deck. A string of intestine was draped over a chart table lying on its side. The chill was still smoldering.

“I had just gone below,” Avery said over his shoulder. He was now helping the dazed captain hold her stump upright while Mildred tied it off properly. “Edna was headed down right behind me.”

“She had to have taken the brunt of the blast,” Nataly said. “She never had a chance. Poor woman.”

Another salvo landed around the vessel. From the sounds they made, Ryan gathered the Poteetville ironclads were firing a mix of solid shot and explosive shells. Probably whatever was closest to hand.

Ryan stepped up alongside Nataly and began pistoning the butt-plate of his Steyr into what remained of the windscreen. Even damaged as it was, the tough polymer resisted his jackhammer blows. But he managed to pop it out of its framework.

Nataly nodded her thanks as she straightened, showing a quick flash of teeth, bright white against her horror mask of a face.

“What about you?” he asked.

“I was right beside the captain,” she said through gritted teeth. “The blast didn’t do much to me. I thought I was chilled for sure.”

Seeing that both the tall, thin woman and Mildred both had their respective situations well in hand, Ryan went back outside. He found Krysty sitting up against the remains of the cabin’s front wall, while J.B. tried to daub the blood and soot from her face with a wet rag.

She was awake, and she smiled as her emerald green eyes met his.

“You were worried,” she said. “That’s sweet.”

“We’re not out of the woods yet,” he said. She was clearly still dazed.

He looked around. The Mississippi Queen had already swung its bow past due west and was continuing to turn back south. In the process it had moved most of the way to that shore. Most of the barge was visible to port behind the tug.

Suddenly the rest of the companions were gathered around. “How’s Krysty?” Ricky asked. “Nuestra Señora, please let her be okay!”

“I’ll be fine,” Krysty said, more in the tone of voice of a person agreeing with someone who had just said something she didn’t really understand than as an actual affirmation.

“What are you all doing here?” Ryan demanded of the boy, Jak and Doc.

The old man shot his cuffs with elaborate unconcern. “There seems to be a dearth of jobs for us to do at the moment.”

A shattering sound erupted from aft of the cabin. Pieces of the roof flew off in a big gout of smoke. Yellow flames began to flick just above the jagged edges of the bulkhead.

“Dark night!” J.B. exclaimed, as voices began shouting in alarm. “It must’ve set bedding on fire.”

“We’ve got a job now,” Ryan said grimly. “We’ll man the hoses and try to get the fire out. J.B., help me carry Krysty into the cabin.”

“Just leave me here, lover,” Krysty said. She still sounded out of it, but was clearly pulling her blast-scattered wits back together. “Be as safe here as anywhere.”

“No way,” Ryan said, gathering her in his arms for the briefest of hugs, then pulling her away from the bulkhead so he could hoist her by the shoulders while J.B. lifted her feet. “It’s at least some protection. Better than none.”

“You know what old line about lightning not striking twice in the same place?” Krysty asked, her head lolling. “It’s not true. Lots of times lightning hits the same place a dozen times in the blink of an eye.”

“I know that,” he said. “Stay with me.”

He managed not to say, You’re starting to sound like Doc. Although it probably wouldn’t have mattered because the old man had already led the two youngest members of the team back to where several of the crew were unrolling canvas hoses to fight the flames.

Inside, Mildred was letting Trace Conoyer lower her arm, gingerly, to see if the pressure bandage she had taped over the wound would hold. The dirty-rag tourniquet had already been removed and discarded.

Myron Conoyer and Arliss Moriarty hunched over the captain. Avery hovered in the background, uncertain as to how to help.

The captain had already recovered her senses.

“Go tend the engines, Myron,” she ordered in an almost normal voice. “We need to keep them on full power, and we can’t have them blow up on us.”

“But—”

“If you think Mildred would do as good a job taking care of the Diesels as you would, by all means swap places with her. But somebody needs to be down with those engines, and not just Maggie. She’s ace, but doesn’t have a third of your chops.”

Myron bobbed his balding head. “Aye-aye, uh, Captain.” He turned and hurried back below, shaking his head at the sad mess that was all that remained of Edna.

Ryan and J.B. had settled Krysty on the floor, as clear as they could of the still slightly smoking Edna, the captain, and—most important, in Ryan’s view—the helmswoman’s feet. He had folded his long black coat and propped her head up against it. Her hair lay limply across it, as if eager to give up the fight.

“Thank you, lover,” she said as he kissed her cheek and straightened. “I’ll be back on my feet before you know it.”

“Not before I tell you you’re ready,” Mildred said sternly, not even looking around from examining the captain’s dressing.

“Let’s go, J.B.” Ryan jerked his chin to the door. Though the Queen sported powered pumps, at times like this they used hand pumps to allow the engines to devote full power to driving the vessel and her burden. From the way the deck shuddered beneath his feet, he knew that Myron had followed his wife’s initial order to redline them and keep them there, regardless.

Ryan approved. His own team worked that way: if he told them to do something that pushed the envelope, or even seemed flat crazy—and their own judgment told them it might actually be worth a try—they did it. And they usually pulled it off.

“Ryan.” Trace’s voice rasped as if she’d been gargling lye. “Stay. If you will.”

That latter part was one of the shipboard niceties the captain liked to maintain, and Ryan knew it. He turned back. Aboard the Queen, she was his boss. And in this case what she was calling him back from was adding the strength of his back and arms to saving her ship.

“I need you…to advise me,” she said. “We’ve had more than one run-in with people who want this cargo, and I’ve seen that you know something about tactics.”

“You’re the authority on ship-handling,” he said. “I can’t pretend to know nuke about it.”

“We put our…heads together, then,” she said, managing a wan smile.

She was triple tough, there was no question. When her ship and crew were on the line, she would do her job and die doing it. For their part, the crew knew it, and responded accordingly.

Even Ryan and his people knew that. Good, honest bosses were hard to come by.

“I’m fresh out of ideas, now,” he admitted, as another volley came rushing in with a hurricane sound.

He felt a tremor beneath his feet, accompanied by a thunderous bang from astern. Immediately voices began screaming, “Fire! Fire on the barge!”

A moment later, Suzan Kenn appeared in the door, her gray-shot brown hair in more than the usual disarray.

“A shell hit the barge right where the lumber meets the cloth bales, Captain!” she exclaimed breathlessly. “She started burning like Billy Jesus right off the mark. The only hope we’ve got of dousing the blaze is turning on the power to the pumps.”

“We can’t do that,” Trace rapped. “Cut her loose.”

Suzan blinked. “Captain?”

“Are you sure, Trace?” Arliss asked.

He was the Mississippi Queen’s master rigger, which meant he kept the steering linkages in top shape, among other duties. A little guy, somewhere between J.B. and Jak in size, he had a short frizz of graying hair and a beard, prominent ears, and a missing right front incisor. He was the second-best financial mind on board, after the now-deceased Edna, and usually advised the Conoyers in negotiations, a job Edna had been too shy to do well. Like everybody aboard the Queen, he was ace at his job, and Ryan knew that part of his job was to keep his captain’s eye on the bottom line.

“The price—”

“Probably won’t buy us a new ship, Arliss, and definitely won’t buy a new us. We can’t die for the load.”

“But Baron Teddy—”

“Will have to—” she winced at a twinge of pain as Mildred adjusted the bandage “—deal with his disappointment. We can send him a nice note from upstream. He knew the risks when he ordered the goods. Cut her loose, Suzan.”

“Wait,” Ryan said.

Everybody looked at him. “You sound like a man with a plan,” Trace told him.

“I don’t know if I’d dignify it by calling it that,” he said. “Yet. Give me a minute to look outside.”

Suzan started to pull back away from the door as he headed for it. Then she ducked hastily inside at the thud and shudder of another impact.

Ryan’s nut-sack tightened in anticipation of the following explosion, which didn’t come. He poked his head outside.

The middle-aged deckhand had not been lying. Great clouds of white smoke were pouring out of the barge. He could see flames leaping to a height he judged to be higher than his head. He doubted their ability to put out the fire, even with power to drive water at good pressure through hoses stretched far astern. That wasn’t anything he knew much about, but his gut told him he was right. He trusted it.

The wind was still blowing out of the east and freshening slightly as the sun headed for the horizon behind the tall weeds of the western shore. There was already a respectable wall of smoke extending across the wide river in that direction.

The Queen was almost turned clean south. Ryan glanced upriver. As he feared, the half-dozen or so smaller craft giving chase were closer now, and at least three of them were big enough to be what he took for the so-called frigates, and armored.

They had one bit of luck: when he stepped briefly out to the rail to look astern, he could only see the easternmost of the bigger Poteetville ships now lying broadside to their fleeing prey. The rest were completely blanketed by a brown-gray haze of their own gun smoke. That was the thing about black powder weapons: unless you had a wind blowing up double brisk, you only had a few good shots before you were nigh-on blinded by a smoke screen of your own creation. The only bonus to that was that if your enemy was similarly armed, they had the same problem.

Good to know, but not particularly significant, Ryan thought. They were getting close to the point at which there was no sense wasting the powder and ball in hopes of scoring some lucky hits. In fact, he couldn’t see any muzzle-flashes from the stationary capital ships and frigates, even the one that was mostly clear because the breeze blew its gun smoke away. But the pursuing vessels all had bow cannon, even the patrol boats, and they were all banging lustily away as soon as their crews could reload them, which wasn’t fast, fortunately.

But now Ryan had his plan. He smiled and stepped back inside.

“It’s about time to straighten the rudder to run downstream, Captain,” Nataly said as he reentered the bridge. She had gotten her strength back and stood tall.

Trace had her eyes shut and her head back against the bulkhead, but she was awake and alert.

“You still have the helm,” she said, wearily but firmly.

“Keep us turning counterclockwise,” Ryan said. “Uh, to port.”

Nataly looked at him, shocked.

“Captain?” Arliss asked, sounding as if he thought the shock and the pain of her blasted-off arm had robbed her of her senses. “That’ll take us back toward their cannon.”

But Trace had raised her head upright and was gazing at Ryan with clear, brown eyes.

“Go on, Ryan,” she said. “I like where I think this is going.”

“Captain,” Arliss said, sounding pained that she was taking a landlubber’s advice, when it ran dead counter to every bit of his own riverman’s lore.

“Yeah,” he told the captain. “I got a plan. Bring the Queen as close as you can to the east bank and still safely sheer south. Then cut the barge free before you start your turn. I don’t know if that’s the right lingo, so I put it as plain as I know how.”

She managed a smile, albeit a thin one, and fleeting.

“Close enough for getting on with. Nataly—”

The helmswoman had subtly straightened her shoulders. “Aye-aye, Captain!” she said smartly. She had clearly grasped Ryan’s intention.

Arliss frowned, then he nodded and showed a gap-toothed grin.

“Good one,” he said. “If we’ve got to write off the barge, we can use her to lay us a smoke screen. And give those Poteetville bastards something to think about to get around it. You do know your shit, Cawdor.”

Ryan nodded once, briskly.

* * *

HE HELPED THEM beat down the fire. Fortunately only one of the rooms—which the Conoyers and their crew rather grandly called “staterooms”—was gutted. Sadly, Suzan had shared it Edna, and all their possessions were write-offs. That didn’t matter a bent shell case to Edna anymore.

It took Ryan, his friends apart from Krysty and Mildred, and the Mississippi Queen’s crew only minutes to reduce the flames to smoldering char. But they were intense minutes, and when they were done even Ryan had to find a cable coil to sit on while he caught his breath.

Krysty sat next to him, still seeming subdued. Though mostly concerned with keeping an eye on the captain, Mildred had not neglected to watch her concussed friend. She only let the redhead out of the cabin when the fire was out.

His friends found places to flake out on the deck or railing, as did the regular crew they’d been helping: Jake Lewis, tall and saturnine, Avery Telsco, Suzan Kenn, the cheerful bear of a South Plains Indian, Santee, a medium-sized dude named Abner MacReedy, who looked way too much like a rabbit, although he wasn’t particularly shy or skittish, and finally Arliss Moriarty, leaning back against an intact wall of the cabin smoking a corncob pipe. For some reason that gave Mildred the uncontrollable giggles every time she looked at him.

Jak, meanwhile, scrambled back onto the cabin roof. Unable to engage in his usual wide-ranging scouting, he settled for perching up there like a pelican, keeping watch at all hours of the day or night. He even slept up there. Aside from the fore and aft ends, both to portside, where shells had struck, the roof seemed pretty sound structurally. Ryan declined to worry about it. Jak of all people knew how to be careful where he put his feet, and not venture out on anything that wouldn’t support his slight weight. And anyway, it was his stupe neck.

“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc exclaimed.

He had been squatting on his long, skinny shanks, facing aft. All that was visible behind the tug was churning green water. Arliss and his red-haired crony, Sean O’Reilly, who was back helping Myron and Maggie nurse the engines as usual, had cut the barge loose at what Trace Conoyer judged the optimum moment.

By that time it was fiercely ablaze from one end to the other. Enough so that Ryan could feel the heat beating off it as he helped work the pumps. Had the wind not been blowing the sparks away from the Queen, they might well have set the tug alight too.

Now Doc drew himself up to his considerable height and flung out a long arm to point dramatically over the taffrail.

“The blackguards have found a way around the burning hulk, and are emerging from the smoke!”

J.B., who was sitting just aft of the cabin near a boat hung in davits with his back to the stern, barely tipped his head back and turned it to glance over his shoulder.

“Nothing shaken, Doc,” he said.

Ryan was surprised that J.B. could see over the stern, as short as he was. But the Armorer was the last person in their group to say more than he knew. “We knew it was going to happen sooner or later. They’re way out of range now, anyway.”

“Their frigates can’t keep up with us now,” Arliss said. No longer weighed down by the massive barge and her currently burning-to-nuke-shit cargo, the tubby little tug was making surprising time downriver. “They’re slow and handle like pigs, with all that armor. Unarmored patrol boats likely can’t catch us, even.”

That last bit of information was delivered with a note of unmistakable pride in his voice.

He shook his grizzled head.

“It’s lucky we got off as light as we did,” he said. “Except for poor Edna. We’re lucky, and that’s a fact.”

“Count no man lucky before his death,” Jake said.

Arliss put his hands on his hips and stuck his elbows out to the sides. “Well, aren’t you Captain Gloom ’n’ Doom? What, are you taking lessons from Nataly now?”

“It’s an old Viking saying. From my Viking grandmother, Freya.”

“She weren’t no Viking.”

“You didn’t want to tell her that.”

“Where are we going, anyway?” Ricky asked.

“Captain says she means to head back up the Yazoo,” Arliss said. “From there we’ll play it by ear.”

“So we’re basically in the clear?” The youth sounded relieved.

Krysty lifted her head and gave him a wan grin.

“Don’t ever say that, Ricky,” she said teasingly. “It’s only tempting fate.”

“Ships ahead!” Jak cried out from above. “War boats!”

Chapter Five

“It’s the New Vick fleet!” Arliss exclaimed. “And they got their big tubs with ’em!”

Krysty climbed to her feet in alarm. Without even looking, Ryan stood up beside her and reached an arm to steady her.

Ryan gazed south, along the length of the cabin. Out beyond the prow of the Mississippi Queen a V of five blasterboats was steaming toward them with little mustaches of water by their bows. He knew that meant they were driving hard, although the slow but strong Sippi current’s flowing against them slowed them.

Behind the blasterboats came the main New Vickville fleet, darkened by the long shadows that stretched from the low bluffs on the west bank of the big river. It was still well beyond blaster range, but the ironclad ships looked huge, like a distant range of mountains.

“Fireblast,” Ryan said, almost conversationally. Another person might have taken it for resignation. Another man saying it under the circumstances might have meant it that way.

But not Ryan. Krysty knew that his tone meant he had already accepted the situation—and begun to plot how to beat it and survive, as he had a thousand times before.

“Blasterboats have already cut us off from the Yazoo,” he said.

“And the big boats are squatting right in the river mouth,” said Jake, who among other duties was an assistant navigator, though pretty much every member of the Queen’s crew could do pretty much everyone else’s job.

Krysty and her friends were exceptions, of course, although they were willing hands. All had been aboard ships a number of times. They did what they could and nobody complained. When it came to fighting, it was the river-boaters who were second string.

And she already knew that it would come to fighting. Because if the patrol boats or heavy ironclads didn’t sink them with their blasters, they would wind up having to seek shelter somewhere in the deceptively green, rad- and mutie-haunted countryside around them.

Plus it always came down to fighting, sooner or later. These were the Deathlands.