Iron Rage

His lover was likewise crouched, her Glock 18C blaster looking especially futile clutched in her white hands. Her hair had retracted itself to a tight scarlet cap on her skull.

He felt the vibrations of the hull through his boot soles change. At the same time the growl of the Diesels grew louder and slightly higher in pitch. Trace had ordered full throttle. Her husband was doubtless belowdecks now, babying the powerful marine engines to keep them churning at maximum power. Ryan could feel the propellers straining to drive the vessel and the burden she towed faster. But there was no way to give hundreds of tons jackrabbit acceleration. Their accumulation of speed would go painfully slowly.

And the pursuing vessels already had a speed advantage, even though their steam engines were powering them against the Sippi’s sluggish but immensely powerful flow. If this was a race, they couldn’t win it.

And if this was an artillery duel—well, Ryan thought, the Queen was nuked, as the tug had no artillery. Accommodations were tight aboard the tubby vessel as it was—he and his companions slept on deck, when weather permitted, as fortunately it had most nights they’d been on the Queen. And every pound counted when your entire living was based on hauling cargo. The Conoyers could have mounted a black powder cannon, but they chose not to.

Even if they had, they would have been outgunned. The enemy cannoneers hadn’t yet hit the lumbering tug, but it was a matter of time.

Something cracked above Ryan’s head. He ducked even lower, instinctively. The crack was repeated, slightly less loud.

I know that song, he thought. Someone was firing a blaster at him—not a charcoal-burner nineteenth-century replica, but a smokeless-powder high-powered longblaster.

The longblaster shots, in their way, concerned him more than the cannonade. Most black powder cannon weren’t rifled, and therefore weren’t accurate, even though a metal ball weighing just a couple of pounds could do a shocking amount of damage to a body. While most blaster-shooters weren’t particularly accurate, either, there was always the chance that their pursuers would have a marksman in their ranks.

On the other hand, the Queen’s complement most definitely did. And his name was Ryan Cawdor.

He laid the Steyr’s foregrip on the rail and sighted through the low-power Leupold variable scope. He didn’t need much magnification to confirm what he already suspected: the weird, dully metallic stuff covering the oncoming boats looked that way because it was weird and metallic.

The vessels had been covered, at least up front, in plates and pieces of scrap metal.

“J.B.,” he called. He didn’t take his eye from the scope. “Get over here. I’ve got work for you.”

The attacking vessels were steaming in a V formation, with the lead boat on Ryan’s right. As he panned his scope across the vessels, he noticed activity on the bow of the one to his left. Men were swabbing out the barrel of their blaster with what looked like a wet mop and probably was, so that the fresh charge of black powder they were fixing to put in wouldn’t cook off the moment they inserted it.

Ryan sighted in on the nearest gunner and drew a deep breath. As the sight lined up he let half of it out, bit back the rest and squeezed the trigger.

The carbine bucked and roared. Automatically Ryan’s right hand left the rear grip to work the bolt, jacking out the spent case and slamming home a fresh cartridge from the 10-round magazine in his longblaster. The empty brass clinked off the deck boards and rolled out one of the scuppers, which was a shame, since the things were valuable for their metal, even if they were bent or otherwise unable to be reloaded. But spilled blood wouldn’t go back in the body, either. All that mattered to Ryan now was lining up the next shot.

As he expected, the four-person crew was hunkered down and frozen in place. A brighter smear on the improvised-armor plate above them and to the left showed where Ryan’s bullet had hit and knocked away a path of rust the size of his palm.

Also as expected. Like any master marksman, Ryan knew pretty well where a bullet would go when it left his longblaster—not an option except in aimed fire, of course. Though neither the Yazoo nor the Sippi were exactly racing today, the interference of their currents meeting did cause some chop, which in turn made the Queen wallow in a not-entirely-predictable way. But it wasn’t hard to compensate for the motion. And while she was still turning to starboard, into the bigger river’s flow, the enemy ships were coming pretty straight on, and not fast, either. That meant Ryan didn’t have to lead his target much to speak of.

The second shot wasn’t perfect, either. Because of the Queen’s motion he still pulled slightly off, though he reckoned the shot would take the swabber in the right shoulder. When the scope came back level, Ryan saw that his target was out of sight, and the short, skinny kid who’d been just to his right was spattered with red and visibly freaking out about it.

The other two shooters dived for cover behind the armored rail, which unlike the Queen’s wooden hull would reliably stop most bullets, possibly including his pointy-nosed, high-powered, 7.62 mm full-metal-jacket slug. It depended on the hardness of whichever chunk of scrap he happened to hit.

A quick examination showed all four boats carried but a single bow blaster each. It also showed a shocking bright flash of yellow fire from the one on the left-most craft, followed by a vast gout of smoke that instantly began to blow back over the hunchbacked, ironclad shape of the cabin in the breeze of its passage, as well as overboard in the crossing wind.

This time, the projectile’s moan punctuated with a shattering crash from somewhere astern.

“Is everybody fit to fight?” Ryan shouted. He still kept his eye to the glass. He was getting an idea.

“Everybody’s fine,” J.B. replied, crouching at his left side. “The shot blew a section of the starboard rail to glowing nuke shit, just aft of the cabin.”

“Reckon you can hit anybody with the Uzi at this range?”

A beat passed while J.B. considered that. Ryan continued scrutinizing the closing craft.

“Be easiest firing single shots, with the folding stock extended, like she was a big fat carbine. I could hit one of those boats, anyway, I’m pretty sure, but wouldn’t promise anything more precise. Nor even how much damage a round would do if it hit somebody at this range.”

J.B. paused again.

“But I reckon you mean full-auto?”

Ryan grinned behind the Scout’s receiver.

He actually sensed the Armorer’s shrug. Perhaps because he knew the little man so well. They had been best friends for years, ever since they’d served together in the war wags headed by the enigmatic—and legendary—character known only as the Trader.

“Reckon I could bounce a few off their…what? They got some jury-rigged armor, don’t they?”

“Yeah and yeah. I’m about to throw a real scare at them. I want you to make sure they get the message.”

Another loud noise—this one was definitely an explosion, though without the terrible sharp sound and shockwave of high explosive. Immediately the hand-cranked siren atop the bridge—the front part of the cabin—whined out three staccato yips, a pause, followed by three more, and then repeated. It was the Conoyers’ signal for fire aboard.

“Looks like Baron Teddy’s going to have to make his harem’s underthings out of something other than that fine muslin we were taking to him,” J.B. stated. “The shell burst in the barge and set some of the cloth bales on fire.”

That was neither man’s problem. Trying to prevent another shell from landing smack in the middle of the cabin—or blowing a hole at their waterline—was.

In his observation of the enemy vessels, Ryan had noticed that the helmsman of each was plainly visible through an ob port, above the bow cannon, although shadowed. He couldn’t tell if the port had glass. Since he knew the odds of its being bulletproof were slim, he discounted the chance it would turn a longblaster bullet.

It wasn’t an easy shot. Realistically, Ryan didn’t think he had to hit spot-on, but he lined up the shadowy head on the lead boat’s driver as carefully as he could, and fired.

“Head shot,” J.B. reported. He had whipped out a handy little 8-power Simmons monocular he’d bought off a scavvy a few weeks back and was scoping out Ryan’s target.

“Ace on the line,” the one-eyed man said. And indeed, when he could see his target again, there was an indistinct flurry of activity on the boat’s bridge, and no head visible behind the spoked wheel. “Light ’em up.”

As J.B. began to rip short, controlled bursts of 9 mm rounds at the other craft, Ryan saw that, without a hand at its helm, the lead vessel had already began to slew to his right. A second shot through the front ob port helped discourage anyone who might think of trying to regain control.

Ryan swung his scope in search of new targets. He heard cheering break out from behind him and realized the pursuing craft were losing way against the slow, heavy Sippi current.

“Looks like they had enough for now,” J.B. remarked, as he eased off the trigger. “Want me to continue firing them up?”

Ryan lifted his head from behind the scope.

The distance between the lumbering Queen, which had almost completed her turn to the north, and the other craft was visibly increasing now. Blasterfire from that direction had ceased.

“Don’t waste the bullets,” he said.

Chapter Three

“What the nuke did you do?” Trace Conoyer called.

Ryan looked around to see the captain striding toward him from the cabin on her long, jeans-clad legs.

Her tone of voice had demanded a response, but it wasn’t hostile or challenging.

“I left Nataly at the helm,” she said. “How did you make those New Vick frigates sheer off?”

“Frigates?” J.B. echoed.

“New Vick?” Ryan asked.

“They like to call them that. They’re just glorified blasterboats and muster two, three cannon. Four, five at max. But they are ironclad. They’re part of the fleet the barony of New Vickville has been building for a generation now.”

The barge began to obscure Ryan’s view of the so-called frigates. The cloud of brown-tinged white smoke told him that the fire there wasn’t serious.

“I sent Moriarty and a damage control party aft to put out the fire,” the captain said. “I sent the white-haired kid and Doc along. It was obvious they weren’t going to have anything to shoot at, and they seemed antsy for something to do. Got the kid perched up top of the cabin, keeping eyes skinned for trouble from landward. He’s still at it. He’s a strange one.”

“That he is,” Ryan agreed, although Jak was no longer a kid. Then again, he was slighter and smaller than Ricky Morales, who was a kid. It was a natural mistake.

“Were those boys shooting at your tow barge, for some reason?” J.B. asked.

Trace shook her head. “They weren’t aiming for anything in particular.”

“Must be triple-bad shots,” J.B. said. He had slung his Uzi and now took his glasses off to polish them with a handkerchief.

The captain shrugged. “Mebbe. But those cannon aren’t anywhere near accurate at that range. They’re smoothbores. Usually four-pounders, in boats like those. Six for the broadside cannon, mebbe.”

J.B. nodded. That was his lingo, even if charcoal-burning cannon without rifling were pretty far out on the fringe for him.

Krysty and Mildred approached them from around the starboard side of the cabin.

“No injuries, Captain,” the shorter woman reported. “That was some lousy shooting, thankfully.”

“Any orders for us, Captain?” Krysty asked.

“Stand ready if you’re needed.”

The statuesque redhead gave her lover a wink as he straightened from the rail. He kept his blaster in hand, just to be sure.

“So what’s the deal with this barony of New Vick?” J.B. asked. He settled his wire-rimmed spectacles back in place. Behind them Ryan could see a gleam in his eyes. “Why are they building up a fleet?”

“They’re in an arms race with Poteetville,” Trace replied.

“Captain.”

“What have you got for me, Edna?” the captain asked.

This time it was Edna Huang who was approaching from astern. A short, bespectacled Asian woman who inexplicably liked to wear her shiny black hair all wound into circular pigtails, she was the Mississippi Queen’s chief purser.

“Arliss reports the fire is controlled and he’ll soon have it out,” Edna said. “There’s no sign of structural damage to the barge that he can find.”

“Ace on the line,” the captain said.

The purser seemed less than happy at the very news she brought.

“What’s eating at you?” Trace asked.

“There’s not much damage to the textiles, ma’am. But there’s still some. We may need to write off as much as ten percent, adding in for smoke damage.”

“It’s the cost of doing business on the river,” the captain said.

“Baron Teddy’s not going to be triple pleased.”

“You leave him to me. He knows how the world works today.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Now run along and send up Avery.”

“Already here, Captain.”

Avery Telsco, the Queen’s chief shipwright, was a long, lanky black dude with short dreadlocks. He wore a monocle, of all the nuking things, screwed into his right eye. Although having seen him work repairing the ship and fighting off the ever-present danger of rot in her wooden meat and bones, Ryan gathered it wasn’t wholly an affectation. He did make use of it on detail work and inspecting for damage.

“Ace. Report.”

“The shot that hit us just busted a chunk of rail all to nuke. Mebbe ten feet. I can have it fixed in twenty minutes with a spare spar from stores. Or, if you’d care to send a boat ashore we could cut down a sapling—”

“Nuke, no!”

“It would be cheaper, Captain,” Edna said.

“Getting people killed by stickies would not be cheaper,” Trace replied. “And I doubt your crew mates would like to have all their hair fall out and have their skin get all gross with rad blueberries and stumble around like zombies for a few days from even a mild rad dosage. Now git!”

The purser turned and hurried back into the cabin as fast as her legs would propel her.

“Do the badlands extend a ways?” Ryan asked. The view astern was completely hidden by the barge now. Under Nataly’s firm hand, the Queen was churning steadily north up the big river. Ryan could see activity at the stern of the barge, including glimpses of Doc Tanner’s disorderly white hair, past the stacked lumber as the damage control crew pitched still-smoldering bales of Baron Teddy’s expensive, recently spun muslin overboard.

“A couple miles in all directions, pretty much,” Trace admitted.

“So if you got a minute, Captain,” Ryan said, “tell us about this arms race between Poteetville and, uh, New Vick.”

“New Vickville is just south of the hot spot that includes the ruins of old Vicksburg, on and around the bluff, down there to the south. The ville got pretty rich off scavvy from the ruins, not too long after skydark.”

“Seems like that would be pretty dangerous, what with all the fallout around here,” Mildred commented.

“The first baron believed in ruling with what you might call an iron hand,” Avery said in a dry drawl.

“Avery here’s our history bug,” Trace stated.

“Poteetville lies about five, six miles north of here,” the shipwright said. “It started out as a camp for people scavvying flotsam on the Sippi, of which there was a drek-load, right after skydark. Eventually both Poteetville and New Vick turned into pretty big river trading ports. And natural rivals, being so close together.”

“Yeah,” Ryan said. “I wouldn’t think they’d both be able to get rich.”

“Well, Poteetville naturally gets first dibs on traffic coming down from the north,” Trace said, “while New Vick is the stop-off spot for ships from the south. Plus there’s a fair amount of traffic coming off the Yazoo, like us.”

“Things started to heat up between them mebbe thirty, forty years ago,” Avery said. “Baron Poteet sent his daughter to marry Baron Vick, and she promptly died under mysterious circumstances. It seems she committed suicide, but that didn’t mollify Poteetville any. Both villes started building up their fleets. Each already had one or two improvised-armor vessels apiece, to repel river pirates.”

“And do a little pirating themselves,” the captain added.

“But both sides decided they needed full-on ironclad fleets. Or mebbe flotillas. So they started building them like crazy. And expanding and consolidating their holds on the countryside surrounding, making lesser villes either pay them tribute or just absorbing them. That kind of thing.”

“Building pocket empires,” J.B. said. He looked at Ryan. “There’s a lot of that going around this days.”

Ryan shrugged. “It was one of the things that kept Trader in business, back when we ran with him.”

“Yeah.”

“Now both sides got, what? A dozen or so apiece of what you might call ironclad warships. They’ve got three or four big vessels that they call ‘capital’ ships, some smaller ones they call frigates, and a shitload of unarmored little patrol boats. Some of them don’t amount to much more than a canoe with a trolling motor, truth to tell.”

“And those that we just had the run-in with were frigates,” Ryan stated.

“Like I said, they’re what pass for frigates,” Trace replied. “The capital ships run up to a hundred and fifty feet long, and can mount up to ten blasters on the Pearl. That’s Baron Vick’s flagship. Baroness, some people would say, though no one would say that to her face. We can be glad we didn’t brush up against them.”

“Any rifled blasters?” J.B. asked. Ryan didn’t think his friend needed to sound quite so rad-blasted hopeful.

But the captain shook her head. “All smoothbore, like the smaller ships carry. But that many weapons can put a lot of metal in the air in a hell of a hurry. It was lucky that we didn’t run into them.”

“I notice you people seem to use the words ship and boat pretty interchangeably,” Mildred said. “In my experience, nautical types tend to get pretty sticky about the distinctions between them. They can be real assholes about it. Pardon my French.”

“‘French’?” Avery asked, blinking in confusion made comical by one eye being magnified to double size by his monocle. “Wait, that was French? I don’t speak French, but I understood what you said—”

“She’s not from around here,” Ryan said by way of explanation.

“This isn’t the Cific,” Trace said drily. “You may have noticed. Not even the Gulf. Back before the Big Nuke there may have been craft working the river big enough to be worth making a fuss over which were ships and which were boats. Not these days.”

“I take it we’re not close to this New Vick,” Ryan said. “Any idea why they’d have their ironclads this far north?”

“Well, things have been coming to a head between them and Poteetville the last few years,” Avery said. Fifteen years ago they were having a bit of a thaw between them. Then the old Baron Vick, Silas Krakowitz, took a new wife after his first one died. And I mean the old baron—the one who started building up his ville and its ironclad armada in the first place. His wife was much younger, late twenties or thereabout. Then Baron Harvey J. Poteet’s Senior’s wife, Maude, insulted Krakowitz’s young wife, Tanya. That started things off. Then, after old Silas croaked, Tanya became the baron. She was still hot past nuke red over Maude’s slight. Not long after Harvey Junior became baron of Poteetville, he refused to recognize Tanya’s legitimacy as baron. So the shit has been seriously headed for the fan between them ever since.”

Ryan frowned.

“That suggests we might just find ourselves running into the Poteetville fleet,” he said.

“Ships!” Jak shouted from atop the Queen’s cabin. “Lots! Big ones!”

“We just did,” the captain replied laconically.

Another rushing roar like a young tornado passed overhead.

Chapter Four

Krysty felt her gut clench and her eyes widen as the roar ended in a colossal splash to the west of Mississippi Queen, so close that the tubby tug rocked perceptibly.

The redheaded beauty looked north. A line of ships, ominously dark in the shadows of chem clouds crossing the afternoon sun, seemed to stretch across the mile-wide river, side-on to each other. Thin lines of dark smoke rose from their stacks, diffusing rapidly as the breeze began tugging it toward the west bank. A puff of lighter smoke, also drifting to her left, stood out from the rest. That was from the cannon that had fired at them.

Yellow lights flashed from all along the line.

The first boom rolled over them like thunder. Ryan knelt and laid his longblaster across the railing. J.B. knelt by his side, his fedora jammed tightly on his head and his Uzi in his hands. Krysty knew he was by Ryan’s side for support only. His blaster didn’t have the range to do any damage to the hostile ironclads, which were at least a quarter of a mile distant.

Captain Conoyer was already sprinting for the cabin, shouting, “Hard to port, now! Redline the engines!”

She paused at the pilothouse doorway. “Everybody whose duties don’t keep them up top, get belowdecks now!” she bellowed. “Barge damage party, get back aboard and under cover!”

Most of the attackers’ volley dropped into the water at least a hundred yards shy of the Queen’s bow, sending up greenish-brown columns of water that burst into white froth before opening like flowers and falling back again. A couple shots splashed closer, but wide to the right and left.

“At least it’ll take them a while to reload,” Mildred said, wincing as the multiple thumps of cannon shots reach them. She had reflexively hunkered down behind the front rail. So had Krysty.

“Bigger boats are already turning broadside to bring their side blasters to bear,” Ryan reported, peering with his scope through falling spray.

“I’d say it’s just about ready to get serious,” J.B. said, sounding more interested than alarmed.

Krysty looked back. The people who had gone on board the barge to fight the fire in the fabric bales were scrambling back across the thick hawser that connected the hulls. She was relieved and pleased to see Doc trotting right across, as spry as a kid goat, holding his arms out to his sides with his black coattails flapping. Despite his aged appearance, he was chronologically but a few years younger than Ryan. The bizarre abuse and rigors the evil whitecoats of Operation Chronos had subjected him to after trawling him from the late 1800s had aged him prematurely, and damaged his fine, highly educated mind. But he could still muster the agility and energy of a man much younger than he appeared to be.

Ricky came last, straddling the thick woven hemp cable and inchworming along, but he did so at speed.

Avery had vanished. “You and Mildred best head for cover,” Ryan said.

“They’ll only hit us by accident,” Mildred replied, “shooting oversize muskets at us.”

“They’re going to have a dozen or two shots at us, next round,” J.B. said. “That’s a lot of chances to get lucky.”

“Looks like some smaller fry are heading this way,” Ryan reported. “Krysty, Mildred—git!”

“But what good will a wooden hull and decks do against iron cannonballs?” Mildred asked.

“Splinters!” Ryan exclaimed.

“Come on.” Krysty grabbed the other woman’s wrist and began to run for the cabin. Though Mildred was about as heavy as she was, Krysty was barely slowed, towing Mildred as if the woman were a river barge. She was strong, motivated and full of adrenaline.