Storm Breakers (6 page)

Chapter Nine

“Lyagushki,”
the ice-blonde woman said beneath her breath.

“What was that, Alysa?” Krysty asked.

The sea-scented wind whined and slunk around Krysty’s jeans-clad legs like a mutie dog begging for a handout. Their guide squatted on winter-dry grass next to a patch of bare soil brushed over rocks, inshore of a clump of scrub oak. Krysty and her companions stood around Alysa surveying the crossroads clearing. Though the forest wore its dense white coat of snow, both fresh and old, that starveling ocean wind had licked the open area clean down to dirt and stone.

To their surprise the Stormbreak sec woman had led them to a low point near the coast—the coastline here running mostly east to west.

“Frogs?” Ryan muttered. “Did she say frogs?” He stood with his longblaster at relaxed ready before his groin, scanning the dark gnarled granite boulders and the surrounding scrub and trees, here mostly firs, for signs of trouble. Doc and Mildred stood nearby, frowning—the stocky black woman clearly worrying about J.B. and impatient at any delay, no matter how warranted.

As usual, Jak prowled the snowy woods nearby, patrolling for enemies. It amused Krysty to think how well Jak’s coloration suited him for an environment in which he felt out of place. He still managed to slip through the underbrush without so much as the snap of a snow-coated twig.

As she had when the friends first saw her, bursting out of the white forest to their rescue the day before, Alysa wore a heavy coat with a wolf-fur collar. She’d worked her hair into a long braid that fell out behind her red-star cap across the saber-scabbard slung across her back. She had her Marlin lever-action longblaster in her hand.

Alysa continued to scowl at what looked to Krysty like plain granite, mostly bare but for the wind-blown dirt and rust-colored lichen. She didn’t respond to the implicit question for Ryan, who had understood the Russian word.

“The ambush for Milya was here,” the young woman said. Though she rose, she never took her eyes off the ground. “The slavers took them by surprise. Our men never had a chance.”

“Why the nuke did they come this way?” Ryan asked. “Baron Frost told us everybody stuck to the inland roads because of danger from the coast.”

She sighed. “West of here the way inland becomes uncertain for a few miles. A coldheart chieftain named Goat has set himself up as baron of a ville called Windy. It’s a tiny place, but his small gang of coldhearts makes the inner road even more dangerous than the coast.”

“The baron indicated the inland road had been preferred for years,” Doc said. “Perhaps generations. Why, exactly, inasmuch as he also told us the intense slaver activity was a recent development?”

“There are other problems,” Alysa said curtly. “Right now I’m trying to see if there’s anything we might have missed when we first rode to Milya’s rescue.”

“Jak can pick up a trail on a stretch of predark sidewalk after two days of rain,” Ricky called from where he stood, mostly supervising their horses as the animals browsed the dry grass. “Why not call him in to help look? Oh, sorry.”

Krysty smiled. The young Latino showed a number of contrasts. Prominent among them was how his natural reticence failed to prevent him from sometimes blurting whatever popped into his mind. Whether at an opportune moment or not.

Ryan shook off the apology with a toss of his shaggy-curled head. “Good suggestion. Korn.”

Alysa brought her head up sharply, a startled look in her pale green eyes.

“If you’re going to guide us, you need to talk to us. You need to tell us what we need to know.”

For a moment she glared at him with a naked fury that set Krysty on her heels. Then she dropped her head and her shoulders slumped. She nodded, once.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I haven’t done my duty.”

“So what have you learned here?”

Krysty feared Ryan’s peremptory tone would spark the girl’s rage again. Instead she all but snapped to attention.

“They laid in wait at the crossroads,” she said in clipped tones. “Clearly they knew to expect our party. They opened fire and cut down Milya’s escort before they had a chance to respond.” She shook her head, looking worried, frustrated—and also somehow sad. “Nothing we didn’t know before.”

“You say they knew your group was coming,” Mildred said. “Maybe they have a spy back in the ville?”

Alysa’s eyes went wide. “That’s impossible! We are loyal. To our baron—to one another. We are tightly knit.”

Mildred sighed. “Sounds like you people could use a bigger dose of good old-fashioned Russian paranoia.”

“I hate to come in second to anybody in paranoia,” Ryan said, “but it’s just as likely they had scouts out on the road. I’m guessing the girl and her escorts were well-dressed and looked prosperous?”

The Stormbreaker woman nodded. “She is the baron’s daughter.”

“Yeah. So they didn’t have to know who she was to know she was a real ace strike.”

“Would they make that much effort just to capture a single girl?” Mildred asked.

“She was a looker, right?”

“She is a beautiful young woman, yes. Although she takes some pains to hide the fact, in her rebelliousness.”

“So there’s a market for pretty high-born girls out there,” Ryan said. “The younger the better. She’d fetch a primo price from the right buyer.”

“One more thing, Ryan,” Krysty said. “If they actually knew she was the baron’s daughter, wouldn’t they make a ransom demand? Or anyway offer the baron the chance to outbid other offers to buy her back?”

Ryan glared off into the snowy forest.

Krysty could feel Gaia’s heart practically pulsing here, up through the stone beneath her feet. The Earth Mother seemed to be trying to tell her something.

“Too many variables,” Ryan growled. “Too much we can’t know. Though who knows? Mebbe they sent a demand or sale-offer and it crossed us by a different road. The key here is we can’t assume there’s a spy back at the ville.”

“And if your surmise is correct, Ryan,” Doc said, “we can assume hostile eyes are watching us.”

Ryan grunted a laugh. “And that’s different from the usual situation how? Still, ace on the line you reminded us to keep our eyes skinned triple-hard, Doc.”

He looked at Alysa, who had fallen into a sort of parade-rest position with her longblaster’s steel-shod butt grounded in the earth at her feet. She seemed most comfortable when a strong man gave her orders. Happy, almost.

“Yes, sir,” she said crisply.

It hurts to be this one, Krysty realized. She hoped that inner pain would not lead to rashness that would get them all chilled. Alysa seemed dedicated to her job and good at it. But the very ferocious, heedless courage she’d shown against the slavers the previous day might possibly get them all killed.

“All right,” Ryan called. “Let’s mount up and ride, people. The one thing we know for sure is the rad-blasted girl isn’t
here
.”

* * *

“Y
OU
KNOW
,” D
OC
said from the back of his white-stocking black gelding, “these Maine woods used to be largely if not exclusively deciduous, back in my— Back a long time ago.”

The horses’ hooves crunched on the hard snow-pack of a forest road. Ryan rode his notch-eared black-and-white pinto gelding knee to knee with Alysa Korn on her blood bay mare at the little column’s head. Krysty and Mildred rode right behind them. Krysty was aboard a strawberry roan mare, Mildred a grumpy dun mule with a roached mane.

Doc rode next, then Ricky with his short legs sticking out from the flanks of a chubby palomino pony, and beside him Jak was astride a small, scrubby, copper-colored mare.

The sun was sliding down a mostly clear sky toward the trees ahead, which looked like white cones in the fading light. The air was crisp and cold and still. The snow deep on the ground and heavy in the trees around seemed to make hearing double-acute, as if they were in some kind of room with acoustic walls. Ryan could hear Doc fine over the crunch of the horses’ hooves through the thin crust of ice overlying the previous night’s snowfall, the swish of their tails, their frequent blatting farts.

“Mebbe so,” Ryan said without looking back. “No way to tell.”

He had little use for knowledge for its own sake, but as a baron’s son, he’d been well-educated by the standards of the time. Extremely well, given that in most places “well-educated” meant “able to read.”

“But there is,” Alysa said.

Ryan raised a brow in surprise. Their guide didn’t speak much. As he’d pointed out that morning at the ambush site, she didn’t speak
enough,
sometimes. She’d spent their brief acquaintance mostly white-lipped, as if holding in anger just short of nuke red.

“We had among us people very wise in the ways of nature, and green growing things,” she said. Her stilted manner of speech—almost suggesting she spoke English as a second language, although her accent was as American as Ryan’s—made him think she felt uncomfortable talking. Except in clipped, informative phrases.

“Throughout skydark, our ancestors regularly emerged into the world to forage and hunt. After all, the conditions weren’t terribly different from what we experienced during our long winters. As we do now. Much vegetation died back, starved of sunlight. Foraging was hard, and became harder until the sky cleared.

“Once it did, various conifers had moved in to replace dead deciduous trees. Where before the war had stood great hardwood forests, they grew back mixed. As they are today.”

Doc nodded sagely. “Indeed,” he said. “Not an uncommon situation.”

“Usually the fruits of skydark were more bitter,” Krysty said.

The young woman shrugged. “What we endured, and what we inherited, is bitter enough.”

“How do you know so much about growing food in winter?” Mildred demanded. “I mean, yeah, your people were used to long, cold winters. From both sides, mostly. But most places I know, it gets cold, growing season crashes to a screeching halt.”

She actually turned a smile over her shoulder. A brief, tight-lipped one. But a smile.

“Before the war some people in Maine began experimenting with various forms of greenhouses for cold-weather growing,” she said. “Also, some of the
Kostroma’
s complement of Spetsnaz troops had returned to service after a spell at the Valaam Monastery near Leningrad.”

“Spetsnaz?” Mildred asked. “Soviet Special Forces?”

“Special Purpose Forces,” Alysa said, translating
spetsialnogo naznacheniya
literally. “Yes. The monastery was a popular shelter among those who served there, especially on active combat duty in Afghanistan and elsewhere.”

“And what were these Spetsnaz commandos supposed to do aboard a nuclear-missile submarine, exactly?” Mildred asked darkly.

“They were meant to be landed to perform acts of sabotage and assassination in the wake of the thermonuclear exchange,” the blonde woman said matter-of-factly.

“Those sons-of-bitches!” Mildred said. “They were coming here to commit acts of full-on terrorism against my people and my country?”

“Back away from the trigger, Mildred,” Ryan said. “Those bullets left the blaster more than a century ago. Everybody concerned’s dead. Except, well, you.”

Alysa glanced at him with a V of puzzled frown creasing the pale skin between even paler brows. Ryan ignored her. He was a bit angry at himself for mentioning Mildred’s past as a freezie.

“Obviously,” Alysa said, “they decided to change their objectives when the submarine was forced aground. Their original mission seemed to them as futile as their allegiance.”

“I thought Spetsnaz types were all supposed to be super-fanatical Party members,” Mildred said.

Alysa actually uttered a sort of faint coyote-yip of a laugh. “The stories say that some were,” she said. “Some were very good at fooling the
zampolit,
the military commissars. We tell stories of how they did so.”

“What sort of methods did your ancestors employ to grow food in the depths of the savage northern winter?” Doc asked. Ryan didn’t know whether he was impelled to switch the subject back by his keen scientific curiosity, or to deflect Mildred from worrying that particular loose tooth any more.

He and their guide began a detailed discussion involving greenhouses and soil preparations. Ryan didn’t care about that worth a bent shell-case, so he looked back to take stock of his companions.

Krysty immediately caught his eye and flashed him a big smile. As always, it hit him right in the chest. But he just let his pressed-together lips stretch out a little wider to the sides and—reluctantly—let his eye slide past her beautiful face.

Mildred had her head down. He couldn’t see her expression, but he guessed it was either grim or worried. She hadn’t shown too many other expressions since J.B. went down. Ryan couldn’t much blame her.

Doc looked chipper: head up, blue eyes bright, pink spots glowing in the cold on his sagging cheeks.

Ricky was doing his blatant best to look eagerly attentive. Ryan suspected he was actually working on the skill of sleeping with his eyes open. Next to him Jak’s face was as hard as ice and his ruby eyes glared.

They came to a creek or small river. They had long since headed back inland but were no more than a mile or two from the coast. Though ice lined the water beside both banks, a clear channel ran lead-colored between them.

Alysa had slowed her mare to a deliberate walk. Ahead on the road, which wasn’t much more than a wide flat stretch in the snow here, a timber bridge crossed the forty feet or so of water. The banks were fairly steep, perhaps six feet high, and broken up here and there by piles of granite boulders that were dark and evil-looking through their coverings of snow.

The Stormbreaker sec woman looked keenly everywhere: at the bridge, the rocks, the scrub and trees on the far side, even the heights of the trees around them. The shadows had grown deep and were beginning to darken. She had her Marlin longblaster in her gloved right hand.

“What?” Ryan demanded. “I thought we’d passed the coldheart ville. And we’re away from the coast. What’s got you fretting here?”