Iron Rage (14 page)

“I
did
hijack it, Baron. It was the getting-away part where I ran into difficulty.”

She stared at him. After an increasingly uncomfortable interval he began to wonder if he'd overplayed his
hand. Then again, it wasn't as if he had much to lose, under the circumstances.

Then she started laughing.

He didn't join in. He didn't feel that faking his way along with her would help his cause. Baron Tanya was shaping up as a person who liked a man hard enough to maintain a cool attitude in his position—not defiant, necessarily, but the opposite of servile. And wherever his best shot at getting back to his friends and getting them out of this mess lay, aiming for Dogbert's job as butler was triple sure not it.

“I like you, Cawdor,” she said. “You're my kind of asshole.”

She uncrossed her legs and sat forward, putting her hands on her meaty, green-clad thighs.

“Come work for me.”

“Why?” he asked warily.

“You're a mercie. I pay well for value.”

“I mean, why would you offer me a job, instead of a bullet in the head? Or a quick trip to the bottom of the Sippi. I chilled a bunch of your people and messed up your boats.”

Her dark green eyes met his steadily. “Their job is to die for New Vickville,” she said. “If necessary. But their main job was to control the situation, not to get overrun by a one-man army. I don't feel good about the dead and wounded, but I don't blame you. You faced a threat, and you responded, which was better than two boatloads of my sailors did.”

He sat back and looked at her. The persona he was choosing to present would be skeptical of the baron's
apparent readiness to forgive, and would be shrewd enough to look over an offer to see if it sounded too good to be true—and if it did, to know that it
was
.

“You're dubious,” she said.

“I'd be triple stupe not to be, wouldn't I, Baron?”

He glanced briefly at Stone. She stood by watching with a stern expression that he guessed amounted to neutral. Maybe she put it on and took it off with her snappy blue-green uniform. Maybe she didn't. But she wasn't giving away her own assessment of him or the situation for glowing nuke shit.

Fair enough. There was one boss in this room, and it wasn't her, as he had calculated all along. She might have influence over her baron, but Tanya Krakowitz was clearly headstrong, and inclined to make up her own mind.

The baron stood again.

“Here's how I see it,” she said. “I think you laid your ass on the line for your former bosses. You could've started hollering surrender, or just dived in the river and swum for the shore.”

Not with those bastard crocs in there, he thought. Although he didn't for a fact know if they inhabited this stretch of the big river, or merely stayed up Wolf Creek, for whatever obscure reason. He was too battered and wily to say anything that might expose his companions' hiding place. “So you went on the attack—” she was clearly warming to her narrative “—because, as you say, you thought it was the best way to do your job. Then your employers cut stick and ran off on you.
And you single-handedly set out to whip two blasterboats full of crew and came close to doing it.

“If you were a Poteetville sailor who'd done that, you'd be treated as a prisoner of war. We're not stonehearts. A lot of my people would admire you for your grit and skill, even if it was their comrades you chilled. You fought like a tiger, and there's too much eyewitness testimony to doubt the fact.

“If you were Baron Harvey's sworn man, stuck-up little prickamouse that he is, and you offered to turn your coat for money, I probably would send you to feed the channel catfish. But you're a professional. You have no reason to love your former employers, much less stay loyal to them. The way they ran out on you.”

He tipped his head back to the plush back of the chair. “I have to tell you, I'm not exactly at my best right now,” he said. “I had kind of a long day. I need time to think on it. And that's the only answer I can give you, even if it earns me a ticket to go meet the six-foot cats at the bottom of the Sippi.”

She laughed. “They go bigger than that, hereabouts. I'm not offering to hire you on because you're a stupe or a simp. I admire your balls and your skill, but what I need is brains to go with.”

She picked up the decanter and swirled the dark fluid that filled it just past halfway around its square, faceted sides.

“What do you say we have a drink and just chew the fat? You look like a man with a story to tell. Or even two.”

Mutely Ryan held up his wrists.

“Oh,” Baron Tanya said. “Right. Ellin, if you'll do the honors?”

Stone did not look thrilled to be setting free a captive who still had traces of the blood of so many of her comrades mostly dried on his face and clothes, but she also didn't raise any kind of objection. With the air of a person who knew how things would turn out if she did, she clicked open a lock-back folding knife and deftly severed the ropes binding Ryan's wrists. She didn't even nick his skin.

He suspected that had more to do with her own sense of professional pride than concern for him.

The baron poured them both drinks by hand. Stone freed his ankles with the same icy precision, so he got up, teetered briefly as full circulation came rushing back into his feet like a tide of pins and needles, and went and collected his goblet.

“Cognac,” she said. “Made by some kind of sect of old-time hermits in the Zarks. Surly bastards, but everyone leaves them alone, because distilling this booze is their tight little secret.” She shook her head. “It's triple smooth, and tastes just like angels' piss. Prosit!”

So he told her stories that had her eyes bugging out and her gut busting in equal measure. Sometimes at the same time. Some of them were true. Some had even happened to him.

Baron Tanya undertook to drink him under the table.

He let her think she had.

When he let his head loll back, and a well-practiced fake snore escape his slack and stubbled jaws, he heard her chortle softly to herself in triumph.

“So our new pet superman has his limits,” she said, her speech showing little sign of the various forms of hard liquor—none on the remotest par with any so base a beverage as Towse Lightning—she'd been pouring for them. “Ace on the line, too. I was starting to feel it myself.”

Stone said nothing. She had sat by the whole time, simply watching. And listening. Ryan doubted much got by her. The baron likely didn't employ her to be stupe, either. Nor a simp. And her thoughts and feelings were no more accessible to Ryan than if she'd been a weathered stone lion in front of some long-derelict city hall in some nuked-out megacity of old.

Putting her hands on her thighs, the baron hoisted her bulk aloft with a grunt.

“Get some sailors in here to drag the carcass out of here. Put him in the spare cabin a deck down and lock the hatch and door.”

“Baron?”

“He hasn't said yea or nay yet, Lieutenant. And I'm nuked if I'm going to trust him until he does. He's too sly and too bold, all at once. It's a rare combination and a dangerous one.”

There was a pause, during which Ryan's skin crawled as if he could feel her scrutiny. He put it down to a subconscious reaction to pretty near stone certainty she was doing exactly that.

“How I hope he does say yes, Elli,” she said softly. “You know how badly we need a man like him on our side.”

The ride back to their campsite was one of the longest of Krysty's life, subjectively speaking, as the sky in the east had not yet begun to lighten as Abner steered them deftly toward the hand-expanded clearing.

The journey had been spent in almost total silence, after Myron's grief-maddened outburst, which allowed uncertainty to worm its way inside her mind. The peaceful conviction that nothing…irreversible…would happen to Ryan, because he wouldn't
let
it, had long since disappeared.

After a quick glance at the acting captain, who was curled into an almost fetal-tight ball of misery, Abner maneuvered past the grounded
Mississippi Queen
, whose stern was slanted downstream. That allowed him to clear the vessel and pull as far as possible into the shallows close to shore, in order to pause briefly to allow the occupants to debark one or two rafts at a time, and still let them ashore within the cleared space.

Krysty was not offended that Abner hadn't asked her for orders. She was relieved.
He
was the small-boat guru. She reckoned he'd know best, as he clearly did.

As he turned the launch to port, Jak suddenly said, “Wait!” from the second raft.

“Ma'am?” Abner asked softly. She held up a hand.

Myron raised his face from his palms. “What? What is it?”

She just shook her head, quickly, as if trying clear hair from her face. Jak jumped off the raft with a prodigious splash, and began wading in knee-deep water. Visions of gigantic crocodiles sliding eagerly and unseen toward a serendipitous midnight snack almost closed her throat. Then it registered how alarmed
he
had to be to raise a wave and a racket like that. He normally went into water with no noise and scarcely a ripple.

He had barely taken a step onto dry land when he froze. His head went left, then began to track slowly clockwise as he scanned the tall grass on the perimeter of the camp.

“Stickie sign,” he said.

Suzan gasped. She might not have been the only one.

“We have to get out of here!” Sean yelped from the first raft.

“Where to?” J.B. asked almost conversationally from the tail-end boat, where he rode with Mildred, Nataly and the jovial giant, Santee.

“Anywhere!” the red-haired mechanic said. “I hate stickies. I can't stand those sucker-tip fingers they got. I can't let them get me, I can't!”

“Ma'am?” Abner said again. Since this was clearly a matter of security, he deferred to her, as she had deferred to him mere seconds before.

“Ease back off the trigger of the blaster there, Sean,” Arliss said, patting his back in the way you might gentle a frightened horse. “They're not here now.”

His head jerked up and around as a thought hit him. “Are they?”

“Gone now,” Jak said firmly. “But—not far, mebbe.”

Krysty drew her Glock 18 and thumbed the selector switch down to full-auto.

“I'm going to check things out,” she said, climbing gingerly over the side of the small boat. “J.B., Mildred, cover us. Ricky, Doc—keep eyes skinned outward. We don't want to assume the only threats come from the land. Nataly and Arliss, would you come with me?”

“I've chilled stickies,” Santee called from the dinghy, raising his hand.

“Come on, then. Hopefully though, you won't have to.”

She walked up next to Jak, who was still standing where he'd stopped, legs slightly bent, taking in the scene as thoroughly as he could. Her skin crawled with every step she took that had
water
under it.

Attuned as she was to nature, Krysty was not the tracker Jak was. Nobody was. Not even in their tight-knit group. But she saw some of what had halted him, right off: weird, splayed impressions where the short grass was sparse, looking almost like handprints.

Stickies, all right. Not that Krysty had doubted Jak's assessment. Even in the darkness she could make out a number of the tracks, as far around the site as her eyes could see.

Nataly and Arliss joined Krysty, the first mate with her Ruger Old Army blaster in hand, the rigger with his lever-action Marlin carbine. Then Santee came up,
swinging the ax he'd taken from the cargo raft up to his shoulder as if it were a willow switch.

“What did they do to the campfire?” he said.

They had buried the campfire, or its ashes, thoroughly and deep before departing. There was no compelling reason to. It wasn't as if potential hostile eyes could sweep the clearing without seeing a sure sign they'd been here, and frankly, it hadn't been worth their energy to make the effort to try. But that was just a habit people got into if they traveled around a lot, as everyone in the whole party surely did. You buried your ashes every time, if you liked the idea of not burning to death in your own accidental wildfire, even if fire wasn't a clear and present danger here in the middle of the swamp.

But the ashes weren't buried anymore. Dead and long-cold though they were, they had been scooped up and scattered across a ten-foot radius, leaving a funnel-shaped depression where the fire had been.

Krysty had Santee and Nataly go right a few paces, and she and Arliss went left, staying near the water, to take up positions there to cover Jak as he prowled around the site.

“Good thing we buried the heavy cargo, huh?” Avery called from his raft.

“You said it, man,” Santee agreed.

There had been some controversy over that. Ryan had insisted that anything too heavy to travel easily on a small raft had to be left behind—Avery said that given the resources at hand, they were a lot better off making several small rafts than one big one. Arliss had
objected to that. Some of that cargo, in particular the outsize Lahti antitank rifle in its casket-like box, was worth a fortune.

“I don't see that a fortune does a body much good,” J.B. had observed in his usual laconic style, “if you get chilled trying to hang on to it.”

Nataly and, after a little prodding, Myron, had backed Ryan. Arliss hadn't stuck on the point. He was neither greedy nor stupe. It was just his job to keep the balance sheet in mind, which was all the more necessary since his friends and bosses, the late Captain Trace and her husband, so often lost sight of it. He had acknowledged the truth of J.B.'s observation with a rueful grin.

Ricky, his young mind filled with fever visions of pirate treasure—granted, he came from a part of the world where pirate treasure was a real thing, as were pirates, for that matter—suggested burying it.