Haven's Blight

The group of Tech-nomads at the bow went silently tense. “What do you mean by that?” Randy barked.

“Why, nothing deprecatory, friend,” Doc said, blinking like a big confused bird. “I merely…wondered. Oh, dear.”

Doc’s experiences being yanked back and forth through time had had effects other than prematurely aging him. They had fuddled his mind. It didn’t keep him from being brilliant, nor functioning at a very high level. For periods ranging from minutes to months at a time. And sometimes he was easily confused.

“I’ve been wondering the same thing, too,” Mildred said. “I mean, no offense or anything. But why don’t you share more of your knowledge with people? You could make a big difference.”

“You think we haven’t tried?” Katie asked with unlooked-for ferocity. Normally the wrench was among the most approachable of Tech-nomads, would’ve been considered affable by the standards of normal people. To the extent anybody in the Deathlands could be considered normal.

The others tossed a look around like it was something hot.

“Uh-oh,” J.B. said to Ryan under his breath. “We stepped on some toes, here.”

Ryan shrugged. However spiky the Tech-nomads could be, no one had ever called them quick on the trigger. While he was never going to take for granted they could never get pissed off enough to chuck him and his friends over the rail and tell them to walk from here, a Tech-nomad was more likely to get spit on your shirt screaming into your face than take a shot at you.

Long Tom wrinkled up his bearded face. “Don’t think we haven’t tried,” he said. “The problem is, people aren’t willing to listen.”

“Tom,” Great Scott began. “Are you sure—?”

“No,” Tom said. “It’s been a long time since I was sure of anything. But if we’re going to trust these people to have our backs in a fight I think we can open up a little with them.”

“Good thing we had them in that fight with the mutie sea cows,” Sparks said. “Without Ryan and the kid they’d’ve sunk us for sure yesterday.”

Jak looked fierce at being called a “kid,” but he didn’t say anything.

“Problem is,” Sparks said, “most people don’t want to know. Or the barons won’t let them learn. And we never teach to barons.”

“You don’t believe in law and order?” J.B. asked.

Sparks shrugged. “Mostly we don’t believe in rule.”

“When we give common people what I like to call tech-knowledge-y,” Styg said, “the barons steal it, suppress it, or both.”

Styg was a stocky Tech-nomad with curly brown hair, who carried a number of pens and mechanical pencils in an ancient, cracked, yellowed protector in the pocket of the long-sleeved blue, white and black plaid flannel shirt he wore despite the humid heat. He’d been introduced to the companions as, “Styg, short for Stygimoloch. Don’t ask.” Nobody had.

“When we give it to barons the barons use it to strengthen their iron grip on the people. So I say, fuck barons, and fuck people who won’t help themselves.”

That got a murmur of assent, although Long Tom looked pained. To Ryan the Tech-nomads sounded frustrated.

“What if they grab you and try to make you teach them?” Ryan asked.

Long Tom chuckled humorlessly. “That’d be a triple-poor idea, friend. We make real bad captives and hostages, and even worse slaves.”

“We got measures,” Randy said with a nasty grin.

“What ones?” Jak asked.

“Pray you never find out.”

“Wait,” Krysty said. “There’s something here I don’t understand.”

“What’s that?” Long Tom asked. Like all the men except Great Scott, he was especially attentive to Krysty. Mostly it amused Ryan.

“Isn’t the cargo we’re guarding Tech-nomad tech for the baron of Haven?”

Everybody spoke denial at once. “It’s not the baron,” Long Tom managed to say over the others. “It’s his chief healer and whitecoat, Mercier.”

“But he works for the baron,” J.B. said. “What’s the difference?”

“She,” Katie said.

“Huh?” J.B. said.

“Mercier,” Long Tom said. “She’s a she.”

“Don’t you think a woman can be a whitecoat?” asked Katie, who seemed to still be in defensive mode.

J.B. shrugged. “Man, woman, doesn’t matter to me. At least, not that I’d ever let on, or Mildred’d yank a knot in my…tail.”

“Damn straight,” Mildred said, crossing her arms beneath her breasts.

“Question stands, though,” Ryan said. “Baron, baron’s healer, whitecoat, whatever.”

“She’s different,” Great Scott said. “She’s a great whitecoat, very dedicated. Just like her father.”

“We’ve got total respect for the late Lucien Mercier,” Sparks said. “Even if he did go to work for that shitheel Baron Dornan.”

“Maybe Dornan wasn’t such a total shitheel after all,” Long Tom said. “He hired Lucien.”

“Gimme a break,” Randy snorted. “His own kids had to chill him.”

“So he wasn’t Father of the Year,” Long Tom said. “He still had the welfare of his people at heart.”

“Except for the ones he worked to death, tortured, or just plain murdered,” Randy said. “He was a tyrant motherfucker.”

“Now, Randy, you know a lot of that’s down to his sec boss Dupree,” Long Tom said.

“He hired the man. He kept him on. You met Baron Dornan. He didn’t like a mosquito to fart in his ville without his by-your-leave. Dupree did nothing Dornan didn’t sign off on.”

“Baron Tobias is different,” Katie said firmly. “He’s not like his father at all. Except he supports Amélie in her work the way his father did hers.”

Ryan perked his ears up. The Finagle wrench had changed her tone again. She sounded distinctly fond of Baron Tobias of Haven.

“And his sister,” Great Scott said with a certain bitchy relish. “She rules as his co-baron. She’s a big supporter to Amélie, too.”

“Because she keeps her alive!” Katie said.

“Elizabeth Blackwood has some kind of wasting disease from childhood,” Long Tom explained. “Amélie has managed to slow its progress. Now she’s working on a cure.”

Krysty caught Ryan’s eye. He could tell she was wondering the same thing he was: was that the cargo they were guarding? The cure for the life-threatening illness?

In one way it didn’t matter: the gig was the gig. They’d given their bond to do the job. They’d do it as best they could. But Ryan’s mind couldn’t help calculating in the background: could they turn this to some kind of lasting advantage in Haven?

ISIS HAD TURNED UP. Ryan had noticed that except during emergencies or special maneuvers, the captains and even crews of the three vessels tended to circulate among the ships at whim. He guessed there wasn’t much reason not to.

Now the tall, silver-haired woman said, “I still think it’s a mistake dealing with a baron at all. Even if it’s through a trusted servitor.”

Long Tom shot her a pained look. “Isis, we’ve been through all this—”

“There’s still time to come to our senses.”

“But, Ice,” Katie said, “it’s Baron Tobias.”

She cocked a thin-plucked brow at the other woman. “And that matters how?”

“Well, he’s hardly a typical baron. He really tries to help his people.”

“So did the old baron, Dornan—in his way,” Randy said. “He got the same concern for the people a rancher has for his cows. It profits him to keep the livestock healthy as possible. Nothing more.”

“Oh-hh,” Katie said in exasperation. “You people.”

“If we judge people by actions and not what we imagine their motivations are,” Long Tom said, with an air that made Ryan sure he was invoking some long-held principle of Tech-nomad life, “then Tobias is a pretty right guy. He hasn’t shown any of his father’s hard-ass tendencies so far.”

“He certainly has a fondness for leading the troops into battle,” Great Scott said. “Not one to lead from behind.”

“You people aren’t exactly backward when it come to a fight,” Mildred said.

Ryan frowned at her. He didn’t want to get into any debates with these people. Anyway, they seemed to do ace at arguing without any help from outsiders.

But instead of snapping at Mildred the shaven-headed man just shrugged. “Well, true enough. When we have to.”

“Beside the point, anyway,” Isis said. “Power corrupts. If Tobias isn’t objectively bad now, he’ll go bad. And he’ll have more of our tech to help him.”

“Fine grasp of cliché, Isis,” Great Scott said, sneering. “But does power really corrupt, or do only the corrupt seek power?”

“Tobias Blackwood had power pretty much thrust on him,” Long Tom said. “He was born to it.”

“Aside from the killing his dad part,” Randy said.

They started an increasingly savage wrangle. More crew were drifting over to join in, not all of them from New Hope’s contingent. Apparently word a juicy argument was on had spread among the squadron.

Ryan quickly caught the eye of each of his companions in turn and jerked his head, slightly but emphatically, aft. Moving softly so as not to attract attention, he headed amidships himself. When he turned his back to the rail near where one of the water-strider pedal-craft was strapped to the hull and leaned back, he saw the others drifting after.

“’Bout time,” Jak said. “Bored.”

“I think it’s their favorite sport, arguing,” Mildred said, shaking her head.

“Indeed,” Doc agreed.

“Speaking of which, Mildred,” Krysty said with a smile, “do we really want to wade into the middle of it ourselves? These people have spent years roaming the Deathlands in each other’s company. The whole wide world, as far as we know. They’ve got a whole complicated spider’s web of relationships spun together. Do we want to get tangled in that, especially with emotions involved?”

Ryan raised a brow at that statement. He’d been about to raise that very issue with Mildred himself.

Mildred sighed. “Yeah. Sorry. I realized what I was doing the moment I opened my mouth. I guess I’m as bored and stir crazy as Jak, here.”

Krysty caught Ryan’s eye behind the other woman’s back and winked. He grinned.

“Trader used to say when minds and hands were idle the Devil’d find a use for ’em,” J.B. said. “Like most everything Trader said, that proves out true. Except when he was trying to pull a fast one, of course.”

“What do?” Jak demanded. “Stuck on boat.”

“Well,” Ryan said slowly, “as to that, we can always clean and oil our weapons again. The spray and salt air can eat a barrel from inside like belly worms. And we never know when trouble’s going to hit. Only that it’s going to, sure as the sun rises in the east.”

A patter of bare feet on the deck brought everybody’s head around. Katie was running toward them, her hazel eyes wide.

“Why, Katie, dear child,” Doc said. “Whatever has put you in such a state?”

Ryan caught the eye of a wolf-grinning J.B. and shook his head. Slick old bastard, he thought.

“Long Tom wants you up front,” she said breathlessly. “There’s a fleet lying just over the horizon, off the entry to the estuary where Haven is. Tom thinks they’re Black Gang pirates!”

Ryan nodded briskly. “Saddle up, everybody. Break time’s over. And the last easy day was yesterday.”

Chapter Five

“For what we are about to receive,” Doc murmured, “dear Lord, make us thankful.”

Ryan smiled a tight smile. Engines thumping like a giant’s heart, the tubby steamship tossed on a rising storm swell. The sky was gray and rapidly being overtaken with black from the west, just as the little fleet was rapidly being overtaken from the east by at least a dozen pirate craft their own size or larger.

They were splitting the difference and running for the coast. A little inlet gave onto the bayou network. There they hoped to lose the pirates and shelter from the storm. Or at least make it harder for the pirate ships to come at them all at once.

J.B. and Jak were riding on the rotor-ship in the middle of the convoy. In the urgent calm following news of the Black Gang Ryan had dispatched Mildred and Krysty to the Snowy Egret. They couldn’t object; they were leading the way, after all. The fact that they were running for safety didn’t matter. If safety existed on this planet in this century, their best efforts hadn’t turned it up so far.

Of course the fact was the Finagle’s First Law was closest to the pursuing foe, and the most likely to be able to intercept enemies going after her two sisters. The risk was overwhelmingly greater here. But the two women never said a word to show they realized they were being protected.

While the six companions had talked among themselves amidships of the New Hope, the Tech-nomads had a lookout mounted atop the mast of the rotating sail sixty or seventy feet over their heads. Along with all their fancy detector gear, radar and lasers and who knew what, the thing the Tech-nomads relied on most to keep their convoy safe was a keen pair of basic-issue human eyeballs and a good pair of binoculars.

And the lookout had seen something that made him lose his mind in buckets: the Black Gang pirate fleet, standing right over the horizon, dead between them and their goal. But that was where their ways diverged from the old days, at least as they were portrayed in the storybooks it had been Ryan’s privilege, as a baron’s son, to read growing up in Front Royal. Instead of cupping hands over his bearded mouth and hollering “Sail ho!,” he quietly but frantically conveyed the word to squadron boss Long Tom via the Tech-nomad commo system. Which Ryan knew entailed headsets that basically passed for fanciful and not very large items of jewelry.

“We seem to find ourselves caught between Scylla and Charybdis,” Doc said. He stood in the bow with his foot up on a bollard, gazing toward the nearest enemy craft. With his unassisted eye Ryan could see the railings were crowded with scrubby-looking pirates.

“Care to translate that into English for me, Doc?” he asked, as he shouldered his Steyr. He had to adjust his scope to its greatest magnification. The lead ship was a yacht not unlike the Snowy Egret. The pirates were running right into the teeth of a rising wind blown before the storm out of the southwest. The masts were bare. Like the Egret, it was using some kind of engine.

“Scylla and Charybdis were a many-headed monster and a giant whirlpool that mythology claimed guarded the Strait of Messina,” the professor explained. “The great heroes Odysseus and Jason were both forced to pass between them in their respective epics. The phrase, ‘between a rock and a hard place’ conveys much the same import.”

“Or ‘between hammer and firing pin,’” Ryan grunted, his good eye pressed to the eyepiece of his scope.

“Indeed. Are you seeing anything of interest, my dear Ryan?”

“No good news,” Ryan said, reluctantly lowering the rifle. “They’re still over a thousand yards off. If we were both standing still, on a surface that stood still, I’d probably take the shot.”

He stood scowling toward the approaching fleet. The waves were nasty, at least by the standards of a man who spent most of his life with his boot soles planted firmly on dry land: ten to twelve feet high and breaking higher, with the wind ripping pennons of foams from their tips. Despite that the pirates were pulling boats alongside the bigger vessels that had them under tow and loading crewmen bristling with arms off all varieties into them.

“Whoever’s in charge of that boat’s keeping inside the cabin,” Ryan said, “although when the taints get a little closer I’ll put a couple through their windscreen on general principles.”

“Do you think the commodore of yon pirate fleet rides the leading vessel?”

“Not a chance. Black Mask is supposed to be a smart operator, and he’s brushed up against the Tech-nomads before. He knows they got some nasty tricks up their sleeves.”

“But don’t men of the class you so colorfully describe as ‘coldhearts’ usually consent to obey only a commander who leads from the front?”

“Depends,” Ryan said. Something was happening on the bow of that nearest ship. He didn’t like it and started to raise the rifle again. “If he’s got some bully-boys to whip the troops on, he doesn’t have to expose his own precious carcass, any more than any other baron. Plus I reckon he makes plentiful use of Sergeant Jolt and Sergeant Shine to keep the boys leaning forward. Shit!”

“What do you see that so displeases you, my dear Ryan?”

His answer was loud and brief. The SSG roared and bucked its steel-plated butt against Ryan’s shoulder. The heavy copper-jacketed 7.62 mm slug it launched at a thousand yards a second streaked invisibly toward its target.

And as Ryan feared, the motion of the boat beneath him, or the one his target rode, threw off his shot—the windage wasn’t much consideration with the gale blowing from almost right behind him. A pirate standing next to the crew of three or four who were busy setting up a heavy machine gun on some kind of mounting in the bow jerked as a dark spray appeared from his black-clad right upper arm. He grabbed himself and fell.

The machine gun belched yellow flame as big as a land wag. It was bright as the sun in the gloom of the rising storm. A line of water spurts higher than Ryan’s head shot up astern of Finagle, cutting dead cross its wake.

“Shit,” Ryan said again as he cranked the bolt. The multiple thunder of the burst buffeted his eardrums. “Big-ass machine gun.”

He aimed hastily, fired again. But even for a primo marksman with finely tuned tools a thousand-yard shot was near impossible. Especially under conditions like these. Ryan missed his target, the huge bearded man in the black bandanna who stood behind the .50-caliber Browning hanging on to its spade grips. Grimly the one-eyed man worked the bolt yet again and drew breath for another desperate long shot.

“Ryan,” Doc said with quiet intensity.

A savage command not to disturb him at a moment like this flashed through Ryan’s brain. But something at a deeper level than his conscious mind made him break his fierce blue eye away from the eyepiece of his telescopic sight and look left.

Lines of fire lanced away from the Snowy Egret on a rising course as bright against the lead-hued sky. Their trails formed a fiery rainbow of afterimage on Ryan’s pupils as they arced down to strike the lead pirate ship and the sea around it.

Orange fire billowed from the pirate yacht. It rolled forward across the bow, enveloping the heavy machine gun and its crew. Blazing men danced on deck or threw themselves over the water. Hell glows of muted orange from within the waves showed even the ocean provided little shelter from the hideous flesh-consuming flames.

“Nape rockets?” Ryan said in wonder.

“Indeed, it is as you said, my dear Ryan,” Doc said. “The Tech-nomads tend to pack a mighty sting.”

A burst of machine-gun fire from another pirate craft raked Finagle’s stern. A woman’s scream was cut off, and a man began to moan in a voice that sounded as if it was being crushed out of him by giant boulders.

A sudden curtain of dirty brown smoke appeared in front of Ryan’s and Doc’s eyes, cutting off all view of the pirate fleet.

“RYAN!” KRYSTY clutched at Egret’s rail as brown smoke enveloped Finagle’s First Law. The little squadron was staggered so that the middle ship, the New Hope, was out of line upwind of Egret. Before the smoke she’d had a clear view of the trail ship.

Isis laughed. She stood on the rail beside the two women. BARs awaited them in closed boxes, waterproofed against the ceaseless spray that soaked their clothes and made their hair hang like seaweed, dripping clammily down their backs.

Mildred glared at her. “They’re your friends on that burning ship, too,” she declared.

“The Finagle isn’t burning,” Isis said. “That’s a smoke screen.”

She gave no signal or command that Krysty could identify. But suddenly from the water churning not ten feet from the Egret’s hull, a wall of smoke erupted. It was the same dirty brown as that which hid the Finagle from their sight.

Both Mildred and Krysty jumped back from the rail. “Whoa!” Mildred said. “Don’t startle a body like that!”

“Smoke screen?” Krysty asked.

“Uh-huh,” the captain said. “With the wind blowing it right up the pirates’ unwashed snouts.”

Krysty felt the slim and graceful yacht heel to starboard as she tacked a few points into the wind’s teeth.

“Changing our vectors a little,” Isis said, as a burst of machine-gun fire sent up a line of waterspouts fifty yards ahead of them and slightly to the right. “Spoil their tracking solutions.”

“What if they have radar?” Mildred asked worriedly. “Marine radar was pretty common once upon a time. I’m sure if they wanted they could cobble a working unit or two together.”

Isis smiled. “They may think they have a working radar,” she said. “Imagine their surprise.”

“What do you mean?” Krysty asked.

“The smoke contains a biodegradable, nontoxic aerosol that masks conventional radar wavelengths like old-time chaff,” Isis said. “It also blocks infrared pretty effectively.”

Mildred gestured helplessly at the metal crates containing their own longblasters. “So now we can’t shoot at them, either,” she said sourly.

“There are more of them than there are of us,” Krysty said, as ahead of them the New Hope let loose its own smoke screen and was instantly lost to view. “Even though our friends have some pretty potent weapons, if neither side can see to shoot the other I judge we got the better end of the deal.”

“Long as my friends and I aren’t getting shot at,” Mildred said, “I’m okay. Hey!”

The last was accompanied by a defensive duck as a burst of automatic fire cracked overhead.

“They’re shooting blind,” Krysty said. She wasn’t sure which woman she was trying to reassure, Mildred, or herself. Isis as usual seemed to cool.

The long, lean, exotic captain had opened the lockers and was pulling something out. Before Krysty could tell what it was a whooshing roar drew her attention forward. Even through the dense concealing fog she could see the glows of rocket engines arcing away from the New Hope’s launch racks toward the enemy fleet.

“I guess we are, too,” Mildred said. A heartbeat later an orange glow flared like the sun behind the vivid clouds of an incoming acid-rain storm.

“Not at all,” Isis said, smiling. She held a pair of bulky dark goggles toward the women. “Try these.”

From Finagle’s First Law, the distinctive moan of Stork’s bow-mounted Gatling began to rise above the storm howl. Krysty hesitated momentarily, then pulled the goggles over her eyes and the strap to the back of her head.

Immediately the pirate fleet appeared. It seemed all shades of gray, the hulls brightest, almost silver, as were the blasters in pirate hands. The pirates themselves were duller gray, the ocean a strange liquid construct of endlessly shifting panes in tones of slate and gunmetal, like stained glass robbed of color and rendered somehow fluid. Everything was overlaid with a rainbow shimmer, almost like the sheen of oil on water, except jittery instead of fluid.

“What is this?” Mildred demanded at her side. “I’ve looked through Starlight scopes and IR goggles. I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

“Millimeter wave radar,” Isis said. “Much, much shorter wave than conventional radar. It gets translated into visual imagery by the ship’s computers, then broadcast to these headsets.”

The magical eye of the goggles wouldn’t see through the waves, apparently. Because just then a shift in the shimmery planescape revealed something Krysty hadn’t noticed before. A swarm of small motor craft was forging toward the Tech-nomad squadron, packed dangerously full with pirates wearing black clothes or armbands.

Just how dangerously overloaded they were was proved a few heartbeats later when Krysty saw the bow of a whaleboat plunge into a wave—and keep going until the water swallowed it and the crew whole. Another wave surge, its top torn ragged by the fierce insistent wind, hid where it had vanished from sight. When it subsided, she saw a few heads bobbing and arms flailing futilely above the churning water. She never saw the boat itself again.