Haven's Blight

A roar of gunfire assaulted Krysty’s eardrums. Through the ringing it left in her ears she heard Isis say, “Hard to hit the buggers in this sea. But at least it’s just as hard for them, plus they’re shooting blind.”

Krysty pulled down her goggles and looked at the approaching swarm of boats. Flashes told her some of the pirates were shooting into the dense brown bank, now rolling toward them like a fog. She heard a few stray shots crack overhead.

She aimed and fired at the nearest boat. As far as she could tell, she missed it cleanly. She heard Mildred fire a burst, then curse. Evidently she’d whiffed as well.

The Egret pitched so vigorously in the waves Krysty was finding it hard to keep her feet. Her stomach, normally as strong as cast iron, was starting to weaken from the complicated motion induced by the storm. But she willed herself to keep her feet, ripping burst after burst at the pirates. Her shoulder started to ache from the relentless pounding of the Browning’s recoil.

“Where do they get all these suckers?” Mildred asked as she bent to grab a fresh magazine.

“From the poor souls downtrodden in the baronies,” Isis said. “From the hopeless trying to scratch a living among the islands, or up the fever-swamp bayous. From the crews of craft they’ve captured.”

She fired a burst. “From other pirate bands they’ve absorbed. They get the same choice as other captives—join or die.”

“They must be doing mighty well,” Mildred said. “Ha, except for you!” Apparently she’d seen a target go overboard. The range was close enough now Krysty was able to bring punishing bursts on targets, spatter boat crews with bullets. Even if the pitching of the sea was so savage that she could only hit one or two at a time before Egret’s motion threw her aim totally off.

It also meant the range was short enough for the pirates’ blind-fired blasters to have effect, as well. Krysty heard a grunt from the rail aft, where other goggled Tech-nomads were shooting with a bizarre assortment of weapons, from M-16s to crossbows. She didn’t look that way as she clawed an empty magazine from the well of her longblaster. Its receiver and barrel cast heat like a midwinter stove.

“To have that many predators hunting together,” Mildred said, “they must eat well.”

Isis was momentarily distracted. She lowered her BAR and moved her lips soundlessly. Krysty guessed that somehow she was still speaking to her crew.

“Dammit,” the captain said, shaking her head. “Another one lost.”

She snapped back into focus, looking at Mildred with her startling blue eyes. “Yes, they eat well,” she said. “And the fattest feast for a hundred miles of this coast is Haven. But so far that shell’s too tough for them to crack.”

“And that’s part of the reason they’re attacking so furiously now, despite the storm and the damage we’re doing,” Krysty said. “Just the value of the Tech-nomads’ own equipment, like these goggles. Let alone whatever cargo we’re carrying.”

“And that’s a big reason we seldom deal with outsiders,” Isis said. “Even the ones who aren’t out-and-out pirates can usually resist anything but temptation.”

A commotion from astern made itself heard even over the noise of blasterfire and the approaching hurricane. “Krysty, look!” Mildred called. “Some of the boats have broken through Finagle’s smoke screen.”

Krysty’s heart lurched with an adrenal shock of fear for Ryan. Not that he was in any greater danger now than a thousand times before, she told herself. And yet despite herself her mind framed the words, Mother Gaia, please, keep him safe.

And Isis cried out, “Here come the bastards!”

Chapter Six

Using his iron sights and the goggles Smoker had provided him and J.B., Ryan snapshot the man steering a twenty-foot boat as it started to slide down the face of a wave toward them. As a vagary of the storm sea pushed the unguided boat past the Finagle’s First Law, Ryan saw Doc leaning out to fire his bulky LeMat into the craft.

Whether by the blast of the big gun or the lurch of the ship, Doc was pitched over the brass rail. Gripping the longblaster in his left hand, Ryan lunged. He managed to tangle his right fist in the long flapping tail of Doc’s frockcoat.

As skeletal-thin as the old man was, he weighed enough to slam Ryan face-first into the rail. The one-eyed man tasted blood. Shaking off the momentary wooziness, Ryan slung his rifle hastily, then got hold of the other man’s coat with his other hand.

The LeMat roared again. By chance he saw the head of a pirate who stood in the stern of the little boat, grinning and aiming some kind of handblaster improvised from a piece of pipe, snap back as the .44 caliber round hit him over the right eye. A piece of his skull came off, taking with it the filthy pink bandanna wrapped around the pirate’s head. He toppled back among his fellows, who were all more interested in scrambling toward the tiller to try to regain control of the wildly tossing little craft than fighting.

The Finagle heeled well over toward the starboard side. Ryan looked down to see Doc’s head and shoulders fully submerged in foam-shot green water. One big bony-knuckled hand held the huge blaster that would normally be down by his thigh—and was now up, out of the water.

Ryan hauled hard. Doc’s head broke free of the waves, streaming and sputtering. As Ryan straightened his legs in a sort of dead lift, a line slithered over the rail toward the fallen man. Doc’s free hand caught the blue-and-white nylon rope and he was able to help haul himself to safety.

“Pretty hard core, aiming and shooting while you were upside down like that,” Ryan said as Doc scrambled inboard with alacrity surprising for one who generally looked as if he weren’t just at Death’s door, but walking on through it. “Triple hard.”

“It was the danger I could do something about, Ryan,” Doc said. He coughed violently, spewing up a torrent.

“Thank you,” he said, recovering quickly. “As well as to my other benefactor.”

“Yeah.” Ryan turned to see the ship’s owner and commander himself, the burly grizzle-bearded black man called Smoker, standing there with his oil-stained coveralls soaked through. He had a big long-barreled Smith & Wesson double-action blaster holstered on one hip and a cutlass with an eighteen-inch blade and a vicious knuckle-duster handguard thrust through his belt at the other. “Thanks, Captain.”

“Least I could do.” From the bow came the weird grinding roar of Stork’s pedals turned, steam-powered Gatling. “Need all the fighters I can get today. Pretty impressive presence of mind, there, Doc, holding that handblaster free of the water even when your head was under.”

Doc smiled. “Though the LeMat isn’t what it once was, the workings must be kept dry.”

“What was the blast?” Ryan asked. He scanned the moving hills of water but saw no immediate danger this side of the smoke screen, which was beginning to fray and come apart under the wind’s increasingly savage onslaught.

“RPG,” Smoker said around the stub of cigar clamped unlit between his teeth. Like all Tech-nomads except a few apparent eccentrics, he had teeth in perfect condition, almost blinding in their whiteness.

“Hit the stern. The nuke-suckers were trying either to take out the prop or the steering. Didn’t make either. Didn’t hurt anybody, beyond a few scorch marks and scrapes. Won’t be so lucky long.”

A hefty thump forward, accompanied by another quick violent vibration of the planks beneath his boots, made Ryan turn.

“There’s our luck running out,” Smoker said as grappling hooks thumped on the deck. He drew his weapons. “All hands stand by to repel boarders.”

As a pair of hooks slithered backward to catch on the rail, Ryan followed his example. He ran forward, drawing his SIG-Sauer with his left hand and his panga with his right.

Men swarmed up both ropes. Ryan was still raising his handblaster when the captain’s blaster cracked off behind him. A dark-skinned head with a black do-rag wrapped around it, which had just appeared above the nearer rope, snapped back. The pirate fell away, carrying at least a couple of his mates with him, to judge by the shouts. Ryan heard a body splash into the water.

As another pirate swarmed over the rail, Ryan took him out. Struck through the left shoulder the man reeled back, but got hold of the rail with a black-nailed left hand. A shot through the body sealed his fate.

As the second pirate fell, the one-eyed man hacked through the rope closer to him with a single stroke of his panga. That elicited more yells as bodies thumped back into the whaleboat and others splashed into the raging sea, hopefully never to be seen again.

Ryan heard shots and screams behind him. Putting his back against the cabin, he risked a quick glance that way.

Pirates were swarming up over the stern of the steamer. Two raced toward Doc, one armed with what looked like a short spear, the other with a fire ax.

Doc had emptied the fat cylinder of his LeMat, but he had a nasty surprise in store. There was a single stub of shotgun barrel mounted beneath the revolver’s cylinder. Doc took the ax-man’s face off with a charge of double-00 buckshot.

A four-foot adjustable boiler wrench smashed the skull of the guy with the short spear. A following pirate shot the crewman who’d swung the massive wrench off the housing with some kind of one-shot homemade blaster. The lower half of the face of the guy with the pipe-gun blew out over the rail in a shower of red liquid as another Tech-nomad inside the cabin shot him out a port with a crossbow, the heavy quarrel going sideways through his mouth and tearing his teeth out. As the pirate gurgled and choked on his own blood, Smoker, roaring, grappled him and threw him bodily into the sea. Cackling with manic glee, Doc put away his giant handblaster and pulled his swordstick from his belt. Pulling the slim blade from within, he began to duel a pirate armed with a machete, using the ebony cane sheath as a parrying weapon.

A flicker of motion in Ryan’s peripheral vision snapped his head back around. A hand grabbed his wrist as he tried to raise his SIG-Sauer. A blast of foul breath hit him in the face as he turned toward his bearded, sunburned attacker. The pirate held a two-foot length of pipe with a heavy join on the business end cocked back over his left shoulder, intending to bust open Ryan’s head.

To discourage the move, Ryan jammed the panga into the man’s swag gut almost to the grip and twisted. The man bellowed in pain, then sagged, letting go of Ryan’s gun wrist.

The one-eyed man promptly raised his left hand and shot a second charging pirate over the shoulder of the man he’d stabbed. Then he put his boot against the breastbone of his first attacker and kicked the man off his blade. Howling in agony, the pirate fell backward, trailing a loop of gut like a strand of greasy purple-gray sausage.

This is going to be a long day, Ryan thought, as the sound of clashing weapons and angry voices broke out from the cabin roof above his head.

WITH A LOUD CHUNK the ax that had been swung at Jak’s face sank into the bulkhead of the New Hope’s main cabin. As the nicked blade, crusted with old brown blood, descended toward his face, the albino youth had bobbed the upper half of his body aside. He felt a slight tug as a lock of his long white hair was severed by the cut.

He finished the act of holstering his now empty Colt Python. With the enemy on top of him there was no time to reload the big blaster.

That suited Jak fine.

With a quick wrist-flipping flourish Jak drew and opened his current favorite knives, a pair of balisongs with matching ironwood hilts. With his left hand he slashed the ax man across his eyes as his attacker, at least twice the boy’s size, wrenched and grunted in frenzied desperation to yank his weapon free.

The man squealed like a scorched pig as the tip of Jak’s butterfly knife raked across both eyeballs. A hot jet of blood and aqueous fluid hit Jak in the face as he sliced the blinded pirates face and throat to blood-gouting ribbons.

Shrieking in fury a second pirate lunged for Jak, raising a four-foot-length of pipe with six-inch spikes welded to the head to smash the albino teen. Instead his sallow face contorted more as a shotgun discharged into his temple from no more than a foot away. Jak saw yellow muzzle-flash lick the side of the long, scarred countenance, which twisted into the most surprised look the teen had ever seen.

Then it seemed to collapse back and in on itself like a rubber mask stretched over a deflating balloon as the shot column took away most of the skull and facial bones that gave it structure from behind, right out the right side of the head.

“Rad-blast it, Jak!” J.B. shouted, stepping up and jacking the action of his Smith & Wesson M-4000. “Quit screwing around.”

Jak grinned. “Okay, let’s fight!”

A WHALER CHURNED past the rounded prow of Finagle’s First Law. The muzzle-flashes of the score of pirates crammed board were bright despite the fact the air was full of rain and spray.

Ryan’s rifle slammed his shoulder and cracked. A pirate fell over the rail. The one-eyed man slung his Steyr and drew his handblaster. Holding it in both hands he popped rounds furiously at the craft as it curved around toward the stern.

His 9 mm bullets either had more effect than he saw, injuring or unnerving the man at the tiller, or the pirate steering the thirty-foot boat got careless. Or maybe the unpredictable thrashing of the sea betrayed it. The vessel swung far enough wide of the Finagle that Stork could depress his multibarreled steam-powered blaster to bear on them.

The Gatling set up its terrible grinding moan. The heavy slugs sent up a geyser of water in front of the launch, and the boat powered right into the lead spray.

It was as if a giant invisible butcher began chopping at the pirates with a giant cleaver. Heads blew apart like ripe watermelons dropped on boulders from a great height. Arms and legs flew free, cartwheeling through the water-heavy air like pinwheels spraying blood sparks. Splinters snapped up from the thin hull. Greenish-brown water surged in around the pirates’ legs, some of which stood without the benefits of torsos above the waists. It instantly turned a tainted maroon.

The boat turned sideways; its bow swamped.

The roar of the Gatling stopped. For a moment, as the only sound seemed to be the descending whine as the six barrels gradually slowed their spin, Ryan thought Stork had stopped firing for lack of targets.

Then he saw what looked like a thin red hose hooked from the gangly man’s throat to the deck, which rose and fell rhythmically.

Chapter Seven

Stork’s beaky, wildly hair-fringed face took on a look of almost clinical curiosity. He brought walking-stick fingers to the bullet hole. He pressed the fingertips against it.

Blood squirted out to the sides, down his T-shirt and up into his beard, to the decreasing rhythm of his heart. He toppled from the mesh sling seat.

Wildly Ryan looked around. The smoke screens had turned into a few random brown wisps twisting in the wind. Ahead of the convoy’s lead ship, the Snowy Egret, he could see a break in the waving green wall of the mangrove swamp that made up the shoreline. It was sanctuary of a sort, offered by a bayou mouth: tantalizingly close, yet perhaps an infinity away—because the bigger pirate ships were fast approaching, and the survivors of their swarm of smaller boats, sensing opportunity now that the terrible Gatling had quit ripping at them, were closing in like a pod of killer whales on the Egret and the New Hope. Meanwhile the Hope was no longer sending out a volley of its terrible rockets. Ryan didn’t know whether they were out, or the launcher was out of service, or whether the rocket crew was dead or injured. It didn’t matter.

The sound of rotating barrels got sharper, higher. Ryan spun.

Grinning, coattails flapping behind him like storm-crow’s wings, Doc sat in the recumbent seat of the steam gun. His feet pumped the pedals furiously spinning up the barrels once more. His hands worked the crank to swing the bizarre weapon to bear on fresh targets.

“Have no fear, Ryan!” he sang out over the howl and smash of wind and battle. “I am on it!”

TEETH SHATTERED as Krysty whipped the heavy butt of her BAR across the face of a pirate with long greasy locks and a pale scar running down his face over a dead eye like a cruel parody of her own lover. A long black mustache contradicted the impression until it vanished in the general eruption of blood from his smashed nose and upper jaw.

“Krysty! Behind you!” Mildred yelled.

Half by reflex, half instinct she kicked hard, straight back. Before her leg fully extended, her boot heel contacted hard flesh. She heard a cough of exhalation and the person she kicked fell away.

She spun, bringing the muzzle of the Browning around level with her narrow waist. A wiry little pirate, shirtless to reveal a sunken chest spiderwebbed with crude tattoos, had reeled back against a man twice his size with a gold ring hanging from a much-mashed nose. He had a fat bean-shaped face, steel-wool hair and sideburns poking out to the sides as if he had hedgehogs glued to his cheeks. The big man grabbed his comrade in one hand and pointed a sawed-off double-barrel shotgun at Krysty over his shoulder with the other.

She triggered a quick burst. The smaller man jerked as dark holes appeared like flies caught in the webs of his chest tats. The other man’s tiny bloodshot blue eyes stood suddenly out of their sockets as the jacketed .30-06 slugs, barely slowed by blasting through the lights and heart of his smaller pal, ripped through his belly.

Judging by the way his bandy legs folded one had to have smashed through his spine and cut the cord.

Explosions were blasting off all around. Waves crashed over the rail. The ship rocked through a complex three-dimensional pattern that was ever-changing and totally disorienting.

Smoke obscured Krysty’s vision aft, from where the most recent two attackers had come. She wasn’t sure what was burning. The sharp stink of wood combusting blended with the sweetish barbecue smell of roasting human flesh singed the roof of her mouth and tormented a stomach already disordered by the unpredictable motion of the ship. The smells had to be strong to be detectable at all through the rain and spray, so dense and fierce she couldn’t tell them apart.

On all sides people shouted and screamed. A ferocious tumult rose from the stern, beyond the wall of smoke. Fighting raged there.

She turned the other way to see Mildred caught from behind in a bear hug by a big Latino-looking pirate with his back to a ladder coaming. A smaller man cocked back his arm to drive a long narrow rod with the tip ground to a point into the woman’s belly.

Krysty pointed the BAR at what she hoped was a safe angle clear of Mildred and held back the trigger. The blaster barked and bucked twice, and the heavy receiver locked open. One bullet hit the pirate with the spike on the hip and passed through him, smashing his narrow pelvis. He fell screaming, the needle-like weapon falling from his hands and washed out instantly through the scuppers by a backwash tendrilled with his own blood.

Mildred smashed her head back into the face of the man who held her. He grunted in unexpected pain. Blood squirted from his smashed nose.

The unexpected turn of events made him loosen the grip of his big bare arms. Mildred kicked back just beneath his right knee with her bootheel, then scraped it down his shin. He moaned and she broke free.

As the pirate pawed at her, she brought her knee up hard into his groin. His eyes bugged out and he doubled over.

As his big shaggy head descended, she jammed the muzzle of her ZKR 551 target pistol into his open mouth. Teeth broke. Blood streamed freely where the big sharp-edged front site tore the roof of his mouth. So furious was the sturdily built black woman, the force of it straightened him back up.

Fear of what was coming overcame even the agony and airlessness of smashed balls. His eyes flew wide. Pleading.

“Fuck you,” Mildred shouted, and pulled the trigger. There was a short, sharp bark. His eyes bulged out farther, impossibly far, until one popped from its orbit and fell to bounce off a filthy cheek, staring crazily around. He sank to the deck. A clot of hair and brains remained on the housing. A slug trail of blood ran down beneath it.

Caught in the midst of kneeling to discover there were no more magazines in the satchel Isis had provided, Krysty saw an ax handle fast descending toward Mildred’s skull. She dropped the empty longblaster with a clunk and grabbed for her own snub-nosed .38 revolver. But her warning only gave her friend enough time to begin to dodge, so that she took a glancing blow to the side of her head rather than taking the whole sickening force full on the cranium.

She slumped against the housing next to the man whose brains she’d blown all over it. Her new attacker cocked his leg to put the boot in. Crouching, off balance on the dizzily tilting deck, Krysty knew she would never get her blaster in action in time to keep him from stomping Mildred’s skull in.

“Here, catch!” a voice cried from above. Krysty looked up to see Isis standing atop the front of the cabin. She lobbed a head-size dark object right at the pirate’s face, turned upward like Krysty’s to see who had called out.

Reflex betrayed him. He dropped the ax handle to whip up both hands to protect himself. The pirate fielded a package of what looked like gray clay blocks taped together.

Krysty launched herself between the pirate and his intended victim, with sufficient power and the proper angle to bodycheck him clean over the side.

A moment after his wildly kicking cowboy boots vanished from sight, the boat shuddered. A column of water shot skyward twenty feet, shot through with red and body parts. Krysty just recognized a single pointy-toed boot before the sea swallowed the whole mess.

Mildred picked herself up. She looked up at Isis. “Kinda took a chance there, didn’t you?”

“Life is taking a chance,” the captain said. “Anyway, I had faith in your resourcefulness. There were reasons we hired you.”

Krysty found time to wonder fleetingly what those reasons were. The mouth of the stream the fleet had been making for beckoned welcomingly not fifty yards from the lead ship’s graceful prow. It wasn’t much: it looked like a mere hole, scarcely wider than the narrow sailing yacht herself, hacked in a wall of green that would’ve looked brick-solid if it weren’t waving like grass in the gale.

The rain wasn’t currently heavy, but the drops hit like ice bullets. Raising a big pale wave of water before its bow, a big launch roared in from starboard, trying to cut the yacht off from entering the bayou’s sanctuary. Blasterfire flashed. Bullets cracked by Krysty’s head. She heard a despairing cry as one found a target. From the direction she knew at least it was neither her friend Mildred nor the exotic and coolly competent ship’s captain. Knowing it would be ineffectual, she held out her Smith & Wesson with one hand wrapped over her blaster hand to brace and emptied its 5-shot cylinder.

Then it was as if an invisible circular saw ripped diagonally across the rear third of the intercepting pirate launch. Blood fountained as jeering men were ripped apart. Both sides of the hull shattered.

A wave carried the stricken launch up onto its frothy peak. The engine’s weight promptly snapped off the stern. By the time the wave plunged into the trough, all that remained above the water surface was bobbing debris. Including half a dozen heads, with faces that gazed up at Krysty with despair and desperate imploring.

“I never thought I’d be happy to see people doomed to drown like rats,” Mildred said. “I hate even being happy seeing rats drown. I hate what this world has done to me.”