Haven's Blight (7 page)

Chapter Nine

Tech-nomads swarmed around the grounded yacht like ants. Ryan and the companions stood in a group on a patch of ground high enough not to be boggy, although the way the rain was coming down the ground was getting soft anyway despite the roots of the tough grass that grew there holding it together.

Their packs lay nearby, covered in tarps held down by the packs’ own weight. Their weapons were wrapped in plastic that seemed to be of Tech-nomad manufacture. The companions themselves made no attempt to shelter from the rain. They weren’t going to be anything but soaked for the foreseeable future. As for the wind, they’d seen too many trees blown over in the half hour since a sudden shift in the wind had run
Snowy Egret
up onto the shallowly submerged bank to want to get too close to any of those. So they stood in an open area and let the hurricane’s rising fury beat on them.

It made it easier to do their job of keeping lookout, anyway.

“I almost feel like helping them,” Mildred shouted. “Feel guilty about not, anyway.”

A mob of Tech-nomads worked in the water up to their waists, hauling on ropes; others pushed against the hull of the grounded ship from land. The
New Hope
had bent on a cable and was trying to tow her sister ship free, although the channel’s narrowness meant she had to pull at an angle. They worked with a fierce singleness of purpose, with none of the parrot chatter that often characterized the Tech-nomads when they were among themselves.

Not that they could’ve heard one another.

“Don’t,” J.B. yelled. “Didn’t they teach you to never volunteer back in your time?”

“But maybe if we helped we could speed things along.”

“We’re not going to escape the hurricane,” Krysty called. “This is it.”

“The Tech-nomads hired us to guard their fleet,” Ryan said. He stood watching the rescue operation with arms folded. He willed himself not to feel the wind’s hammering. Compared to controlling the atavistic, instinctive fear of the storm’s awful power, that was a breeze.

“They could ask us to help if they wanted. They told us to keep an eye out. So that’s what we do.”

“Good,” Jak said. Though the albino teen was willing to work like a slave on his own account, and for his friends, he had a reluctance to work on a stranger’s behalf.

“More than you know, my lad,” Doc shouted. “Unless you believe that’s an innocent oceanic wayfarer seeking shelter from the storm coming around that bend downstream?”

The others saw the high prow of a sturdy little vessel that looked like an old shrimp boat, just poking around a stand of black mangrove.

“Wouldn’t you know it,” J.B. said.

An ear-tormenting rattle pierced the storm’s howl. Ryan saw Kayley, a female Tech-nomad rescued from the sinking
Finagle’s First Law,
spin and fall into thigh-deep water. He looked up.

Across the river men and muzzle-flashes appeared among wind-lashed trees. They were shooting at the Tech-nomads trying to rescue
Egret.
From the big clouds of smoke produced by most of the weapons, visible for an instant before the wind whipped them away into curling threads that quickly vanished in the rain, Ryan guessed most of the pirates were firing black powder blasters.

“Good luck to them reloading if the smoke poles’re muzzle-loaders,” J.B. remarked unconcernedly. He yanked the plastic wrap off his Smith & Wesson M-4000 shotgun and began ejecting buckshot shells into his hand. Feeding those into a cargo pocket of his baggy pants, he produced a box of rifle slugs and loaded those in their place.

Mildred sat, fastidiously managing to get a piece of the waterproof material to hold still long enough for her to plant her behind on it. As if it could make any possible difference, given how skin-soaked they all were. She took out her ZKR target pistol and propped her elbows just inside her knees.

Ryan unwrapped his own sniper rifle. He wiped condensation off the outsides of both lenses of his scope with a handkerchief from his pocket. Raising the longblaster to his shoulder, he confirmed the insides of the lenses were clear. The scope remained waterproof after all the years and abuse it had been through.

He wondered how long that would last, as nothing lasted forever.

A nearer rattle of blasterfire told him the Tech-nomads had begun returning fire at the pirates who had infiltrated through the trees on the far bank. He swung his scope down along the river. He didn’t have the option a normal shooter did, of using his other eye to discover where to point the much more restricted vision field of the telescopic sight. But he had a lot of practice with pointing toward the last place he’d looked.

And the shrimp boat wasn’t a small target. He picked it up right away. It was stained white and sun-faded blue, the paint peeling badly from long exposure to sun and weather. The name
Mary Sue
was painted on the bow.

He lined up the post of the telescopic sight on a man hunkered behind a battered M-60 machine gun laid across the shrimper’s bow rail. These pirates had some serious armament. Then again he’d noticed both the Tech-nomads and the pirates tended to use only heavy full-automatic weapons, like the M-60 or the BARs Isis favored. Support weapons. For personal arms both sides stuck to semiauto, conventional repeaters, or even black powder and non-firearms. He knew why: ammo. It was expensive, hard to come by, heavy. Even though he was pretty sure the Tech-nomads reloaded, and maybe manufactured some of their own, full-auto fire was a pretty wasteful way to go.

It was a long shot at the machine gunner, especially in these conditions, at least five hundred yards. The only thing going for Ryan was that the wind trying too hard to knock him on his rear was blowing almost right into the teeth of the shot. It wasn’t going to deflect the hefty 180-grain copper-jacketed traveling about 2800 feet per second bullet much. He took a deep breath and started to let about half of it out.

Ryan’s field of view filled with yellow fire. He jerked his head back, completely surprised. The shrimp boat was awash with flame. The gunner in the bow, completely wrapped in flames, let the heavy black blaster fall overboard. An instant later he followed, flapping his arms like firebird wings. Crewmates were doing likewise. The lucky ones weren’t on fire. Although luck in this case might just mean a chance to drown in the raging river, rather than burn.

“It would seem the
New Hope
got her rocket rack repaired,” Doc said into Ryan’s ear. The one-eyed man hadn’t even heard the multimissile launch for the storm.

“Oh, no,” Mildred said in disgust after triggering a shot across the river. “Hell no. I can’t hit anything in this crosswind.”

She got up to fetch one of the extra longblasters the Tech-nomads had lent them. A bullet kicked up sand from where she had been sitting an eyeblink after the wind plucked away the black plastic groundsheet she’d been sitting on.

“Get to cover,” Ryan shouted. “Bastards are shooting at us.”

“But the wind—” Krysty said.

“Find a tree that looks like it’ll stay put,” Ryan shouted. A bullet cracked past his ear.
“Move!”

They did, scrambling back among the gnarled cypress roots on the relatively high ground behind them. Ryan moved quickly to take his own advice. He kept his eye on his companions to make sure they all did likewise.

When everybody had put a bole between him or her and the pirate blasters, he took stock of the tactical situation again. Most of the Tech-nomads trying to free the trapped yacht kept at it, trusting in their comrades aboard
Hope
to deal with the pirates. Once again Ryan admired their grit, as he did that of the three remaining water-striders. The riders kept zipping in close to the bank to shoot at the pirates before scooting away again.

The wind had grown truly monstrous. Pirates were getting knocked over by it as well as Tech-nomad bullets, and more. Ryan saw arrows standing from the front of a body bobbing on its back in the water on the far side. Though
New Hope
was still rolling and surging, her motion was nowhere as violent or radical as it had been in open water, with not even the insufficient coverage of the dense woods to cut the wind. The Tech-nomads aboard seemed to be compensating for it just fine.

From their new positions, relatively secure against both blasterfire and the wind that sought to pluck them away like leaves, the companions added their fire. Mildred had a Mini-14, Krysty a lever-action .44 Magnum carbine. Doc used the same weapon with a longer barrel. J.B.’s rifled slugs gave his scattergun range and accuracy enough to have a chance of hitting across the water.

And a chance was all you could hope for. Ryan lined up his scope dead on the center of a hairy bare chest and fired. The guy was scarcely sixty yards away; normally Ryan would’ve used iron sights. But the pirate was still standing there, blasting away with some kind of revolver, when he brought the longblaster back down from its recoil rise.

Saving the breath it took to curse, Ryan swung his rifle into the wind, so that the aim point was a few fingers left of the flabby, dark-furred rib cage. This time he saw the man was dropping even before the Steyr kicked up far enough. He vanished from the scope.

Ryan was swinging around, waiting for another target to jump out at him, when Mildred shouted, “Folks, we got more trouble!”

A crack cut across the storm roar. Dark water fountained from midstream. Two Tech-nomads pulling the grounded ship with ropes went down.

Ryan looked downriver. A sleekly sinister black shape was just nosing past the shrimp boat, which was now basically a bonfire sitting inexplicably atop the churning river with no visible boat about it.

“The
Black Joke,
I presume?” Doc asked.

“I sure hope Long Tom got his rocket launcher reloaded,” Mildred said.

“Rad-blast it.” Ryan raised his rifle. Through the scope he saw men working frantically at the rear of the long tube of the recoilless weapon. Next to it stood a man dressed completely in black.

Ryan lined up a shot on the black-clad chest. The recoilless rifle was a major threat, but Ryan reckoned if he took down the pirate boss, the rest would stand down. As raindrops spattered on the objective lens, he pulled the trigger.

He knew even as the Steyr kicked up he’d missed. When he brought it down again, cranking another cartridge into the breech, he saw Black Mask hustling aft. A pirate was in the process of falling backward over the railing behind where he’d stood a moment before. Ryan hadn’t missed completely, but this shooting match gave out no second prizes.

Ryan’s next shot took down the man reloading the recoilless. By the time he brought his longblaster back down another was stepping up to take the dead man’s place. He had to pause, then, to reload.

“Come
on,
” Mildred as saying. “Doesn’t
New Hope
have any more rockets?”

“That black ship don’t seem to be having such an easy time getting past the wreck,” J.B. said, thumbing more solid-shot shells into the tubular mag of his scattergun.

“Indeed not!” Doc shouted.

It was true. The channel was narrow, and flames continued to billow from the wreck despite the rain. The
Black Joke
seemed to be trying to work past its stricken sibling without taking light herself.

The recoilless fired. The shell went off somewhere in the woods inland of Ryan’s party. Leaning into the tree for added stability, the one-eyed man managed to drop the new gunner. When the pirates seemed a little reluctant to make a conspicuous target of themselves, he looked around at the battle closer to hand.

A brisk firefight was in progress between the pirates and the Tech-nomads. The defenders had finally given up trying to free the
Snowy Egret
for the moment and sought cover—and weapons to shoot from it.

The
New Hope
still wasn’t launching any more of its incendiary rockets. Ryan dropped a couple of the pirates attacking overland. Then he heard the recoilless go off again.

This time the shell threw up a fountain thirty yards upstream of
New Hope.
An answering snarl came from close by. Isis had apparently found some more .30-06 ammo for her BAR. She lay atop
Egret
’s cabin, firing back at the pirate flagship.

She didn’t manage to suppress the enemy gun crew. But Ryan did, on his third shot.

Isis began to spray the pirates on the far bank with quick savage bursts. The other Tech-nomads added their shots to hers from crossbows and blasters. The pirates fell back.

“Listen,” Jak called. “Black ship guns engines double-hard.”

Ryan gave up looking for targets to do as the albino teen said. Downwind he could hear the higher-pitched knocking of
Black Joke
’s engines, distinct even through the bellowing wind.

“Running!” Jak shouted triumphantly.

It was true. The black ship backed away and quickly vanished behind the subsiding flames of the derelict. Ryan could actually see her mainmast above wind-bent trees as she fled downstream.

“That’s how they knew how to cut us off,” Ryan said. “Their lookouts saw our masts over the trees. They knew where the channel we were following had us headed and put men ashore to bushwhack us.”