Iron Rage (25 page)

He half carried her to his bunk and laid her down on it. “Let me call you a medico,” he said.

She shook her head. She saw that was a waste of time, too.

“They—will chill you,” she said as he lit the lantern. Her teeth were a ghastly red by its light.

“The plotters.”

She nodded slightly. Her breath was coming in progressively more rapid wheezes as her lung filled with blood.

She was drowning from the inside out, and there was not one nuking thing Ryan could do about it. He sat beside her. She gripped his hand in both of hers. Her grip was still strong. “Was—one. Told me Tanya…had my brother chilled. Found out…it was a lie. By then, I was with them…”

“So you were the one who told Danville that Tanya was slow in coming across with the promised rewards.”

She nodded again. It visibly pained her, but clearly less than speaking would.

He'd known, almost at once. Or
suspected
, but right to the edge of conviction. He hadn't outed her to her boss, and not just because it was still suspicion, however strong. He had wanted to see how things would play out.

He hadn't expect them to play this way.

“Tanya—treated me well. I learned my brother died…mysteriously on patrol. He wouldn't join—”

Her brown eyes, which had been all but closed, snapped open. “They're going to do that to you too, Ryan!”

She tried to say more, but a coughing fit hit her. She rolled onto her side, gagging on her own blood. For a moment Ryan thought he'd lost her.

“There was. A meeting. Aboard
Pearl
. Heard talking. Storeroom. Listened outside. They spotted. Me. Tried. To run. Back-shot me.”

“Are they still aboard?”

She shook her head, then winced. “Ran. Came here. Had. To warn. You. Don't go. Out again. Chill. You. My. Luhhh—”

Her head dropped loosely to the side. The gurgling, rattling wheeze stopped.

Ryan shifted her onto her back and laid her hands across her chest.

He knew now what he had to do.

And part of it involved doing the very thing Ellin had died to tell him would get him chilled.

* * *

“G
OT SOME MIGHTY
strange things going on down here,” Ensign Paxton shouted, trying to make himself heard over the chug of the blasterboat's steam engine. He was a man not too many years younger than Ryan, a little shorter, lean, with an oily manner and a head that put the one-eyed man in mind of a kidney bean. He stood directly behind Ryan, leaning with arms folded against a brass upright, just in front of the boiler tank.

This engine was the loudest Ryan had encountered. He wondered if there was something wrong with the mechanics, or if it was just an unusual design.

The sun, not long risen, was still warm slanting in from the right. Its beams glinted off the river's slow roll like a thousand tiny mirrors afloat on the brown water. The day was cloudless except for a low shelf of slate-colored clouds to the east. Ryan stood at the front of the wheelhouse next to the helmswoman, a random rating whose name he didn't remember. He had his right hand up against the brass pole that formed the starboard-front corner of the patrol boat's open-sided cabin. It held the pocket chron he'd drawn from stores after having been given his latest assignment by the baron herself. It was an ancient one, but accurate, its steel case kept polished shiny by diligent New Vick quartermasters.

As Ryan had suspected she would, Tanya once again failed to come through with any kind of significant assignment for him. Not even one as obvious as putting him in charge of purging the highly placed plotters in the Grand Fleet. The conspirators who had murdered Tanya's beloved aide had not only escaped clean, but her sec men couldn't even ID them. Ryan reckoned he
could track them down quickly, and that should have put him over the top in looking for some achievement stellar enough to swap for safe passage for himself and his friends.

But no. It was straight back on patrol for Ryan. Tanya's rationale this time was that she wanted to get him away from the fleet and out of sight until things calmed down.

“Last week one of our recon boats sneaking home from scoping out the P'ville fleet got caught in that big old cloudburst we had,” Paxton hollered, “just about midway between our big ships and theirs. And floating out of some weeds on the east side they saw what they said looked like a raft with a bunch of old scrap iron piled on it. Crazy, huh?”

Ryan turned north, the way they were still headed. He didn't trust his face not to show some reaction. He had no idea why, but he felt gut-sure he knew where the scrap had come from.

What the rad-blast are they up to down there on Wolf Creek? he wondered.

“Raft was already foundering in the storm,” Paxton shouted. “Comin' apart. Sank before it even got all the way out in the main channel. Left not a trace. Recon crew weren't able to get an exact fix on where.”

Tanya shipping Ryan right back out on recon patrol made at least a degree of sense, until she stopped and realized that this wasn't something that was going to just blow over. Even if all the other plutocrat plotters and bad-apple officers had hated Danville Junior, they would never forgive Ryan for “betraying” one of their own.

He flicked open the watch's highly polished cover: 8:15. Not that he cared.

“Intel bastards took until a couple days ago to even notice. Then some bright boy figured out a hidden tributary might mean a way to get around on Baron Harvey. So they decided to send us down to check it out.”

The good news was the area on the map where they'd been ordered to start the search lay south of Wolf Creek. The less good news was that the patrol was supposed to stay out looking for several days.

That was Tanya's way of keeping Ryan out of sight until her enemies' vengeful hate blew over.

“Found some stickie bodies caught on anchor chains from
Medusa
and
Harpy
a couple days later,” the blond and ponytailed enlisted woman at the wheel said. “They'd been clubbed, cut, or shot.”

She shrugged dismissively. “Probably just swampers, all of it. They're triple crazy on the rads. I hear they're cannies who eat their own babies.”

“True fact,” Paxton yelled. “All them rads make 'em stone crazy. Them and the stickies deserve each other, if you ask me.”

“You fixing to order helm to make the turn soon,
Captain
?” Chief Petty Officer Jones, walking up from the stern, called sarcastically.

Of course that was the only way he ever talked to Ryan. But he put some extra emphasis on the “Captain,” which itself was an ironic term, since in Grand Fleet regs the
Doria
was too small to rate the title even as courtesy to its commander.

“Chart says yes,” Ryan said. He had never yet risen to the chief's bait, nor would he. “So yes.”

That was a big difference on this assignment: in the past, Ryan had commanded a squad on patrol, but the boat they rode in on was commanded by an actual Grand Fleet warrant. Today, by personal order of the baron of New Vickville, Ryan was the full-on commander of the steam blasterboat
Doria
and her crew of four, as well as the actual six-person recon team Jones was attached to. Of them all, Ryan only knew one—the black chief petty officer, whose presence on this mission he had expected. The other five members of Ryan's squad were sitting on the afterdeck, no doubt pissing and moaning because they had to sit in the sun while the two
Doria
crew members got to work in the shade. Of course, they didn't take into account that the crewmen had to work up close to the boiler and the firebox that heated it.

Eleven people were on board the little boat. With odds of ten-to-one, Ryan was confident. Tough odds even for him—and tough even when some of those who were almost certainly in on the plot to chill him were probably not much use in a fight. Unlike Wolf Creek, the mouth of Dead Man's Creek was plainly visible from several hundred yards south. “Commence your turn to starboard as you come to bear, helm,” Ryan directed. He wasn't sure that was proper navy lingo, but he also reckoned it would get his point across.

They could have passive-aggressively made him look like a simp by following his command in a way that would run the blasterboat straight aground. But if Ellin
Stone had been right, the plan was to chill him on this trip. Since she'd died to bring him that warning, he was inclined to take it seriously.

However, the
Doria
was still in line of sight of the Grand Fleet, and with no haze on the river, might be under observation through powerful field glasses or even telescopes. It was too risky to try an assassination until the blasterboat left the Sippi.

Sure enough, the rating waited a handful of seconds before commencing to turn the wheel. Marinelli—Ryan recalled her name now—seemed to know her job, anyway. The little craft heeled slightly as it turned up the side-stream.

This one wasn't as wide as Wolf Creek. In fact the banks made solid walls of six-foot-high weeds that seemed claustrophobically close to the
Doria
, even though the deck was high enough that Ryan could see over their tips.

“Slow her down,” Ryan commanded the helm. “Better get a leadsman out sounding the channel, just in case.” The plan was to take the
Doria
upstream as far as she could safely go, then continue the reconnaissance using the rowboat towed behind the patrol craft's propeller.

Marinelli cast a nervous side-flick glance at him. “Channel looks ace ahead, sir.”

“Do it,” Ryan said. “You want to ground her in the middle of a stickie-infested strontium swamp?”

Paxton guffawed. “Nuke, no! Vasquez, get your ass in the bow and start dropping the lead.”

Another of the
Doria
's four-man crew left the boiler
and scuttled forward from under the curved wood canopy as the craft slowed. He knelt beside the swivel blaster and began tossing out his knotted rope with the weight on the end.

The vessel that was Ryan's first command didn't even rate a proper cannon. The swivel blaster was just an outsize cap-lock shotgun with a two-inch bore. Ryan had personally overseen its loading that morning. It was a basically an outsize version of the “buck and ball” load, universally popular with those who fired smoothbore black powder weapons, including the shotguns kept for boarding actions by crews in both ironclad fleets: a one-pound lead ball with a dozen .33-caliber double-ought buckshot pellets. Behind that two pounds of lead he'd poured a full pound of New Vick's best cannon-grade gunpowder.

It was a lot for the blaster to handle, but the fleet armorer he'd talked to assured him the piece could take the pressure. It was designed to do maximum damage to anything unarmored past the muzzle, out to a hundred yards and beyond. It could drop a dozen stickies charging on dry land—or swampers, whatever they were, and if they even existed—and also knock a hole in a
Doria
-size boat that could sink her.

“Uh-oh,” Marinelli said. “Crocs.”

“Yeah,” Paxton agreed. “A mess of the bastards. Ugly as P'ville gaudy sluts, ain't they?”

Ryan saw a few of the characteristic log-with-eyes shapes lying in the water ahead. Looking left and right, he saw more come slithering out of the grass of the banks to slide into the creek, and swim curiously toward
the intruding vessel with undulations of their broad, powerful tails.

“Good thing we're in the boat, ain't it?” Paxton yelled. Even with the engine throttled down enough to let Vasquez cast the lead, the engine was still loud enough to overwhelm normal conversation at greater than arm's length.

“Can't get cocky,” Ryan called in reply, without looking back over his shoulder. “I've seen the bastards come flying out of the water like they got rockets up their scaly asses. Best stay back from the rails, just in case.”

“Encountered these monsters before, have you?” Jones asked from behind Ryan's left shoulder. He was close enough to pitch his voice conversationally and be heard. “Say, whereabouts were you and the employers you ran out on camped, when you built those rafts?”

“Like I told the baron, I don't know. I'm not a navigator. All these creeks and streams and runlets of piss dribbling out of these stinking swamps look the nuking same to me. Anyway, it was my employers ran out on
me
, if I remember right.”

“Look there,” Jones said, thrusting his left hand past Ryan's face to point through the open front of the cabin, above the waist-height front bulkhead. “Here comes a double-large one. Better take a look.

“A nice, long look.”

The words and tone of voice should have been enough to warn Ryan what was coming.

Jones had a tendency to run his mouth. Ryan guessed the man had been put on him as a spy because he had proved himself as an elite fighter. But while he was an ace soldier, he wasn't much of a spy. A more skilled spy would have avoided the near-insubordinate banter in which Jones constantly engaged Ryan. He would have tried to befriend his mark—although Ryan might have seen through that almost as quickly. Or better still, maintained an air of neutral competence and ready compliance with Ryan's commands. In other words, not made a point of calling attention to himself.

But Jones clearly had an ego, and it had to have rubbed his ass raw that some random mercie fished out of the Sippi was getting so much fuss made over him, when a seasoned New Vick warrior like him labored in obscurity. So he ran his mouth.

It should have been enough.

But Ryan didn't have to rely on the chancy interpretation of his tone of voice, nor his take on what
might
have been a man with a habit of talking too much. Because he was watching from the corner of his single
eye in the mirror-polished cover of his pocket chron as Jones quietly undid his holster flap and began to ease his handblaster free.