Time Castaways (19 page)

“Already doing just that,” J.B. replied, disappearing back inside the bedraggled wheelhouse.

“What are you…Where are we going?” Liana asked, emptying a bucket onto a smoldering firebrand. As the deluge hit, it hissed out of existence.

“Back to where we found you,” Ryan replied, checking his pockets for any more loose rounds. But he found nothing. Three full magazines, fifteen rounds, and then he was down to the nine in the SIG-Sauer and his knife.

“For more supplies?” she asked, setting down the bucket.

While riding together, Doc had told her about the mountain of goods stored in the belly of the predark warship, enough brass to sink a barge, thousands of self-heats, clean clothing and a host of other things, each more amazing and miraculous than the next.

“Wish we could, but no,” Ryan answered, grimly shouldering the longblaster. “But we weren’t planning on fighting today, and it damn near used every brass we have. If there is even one functioning sec hunter droid
onboard that huge carrier, we couldn’t stop it. Nobody is setting foot on the bastard ship.”

“Then why go back?” Liana asked, brushing the damp hair off her sweaty face. The woman saw the others make the simple gesture all the time, as if it meant nothing, but after a lifetime of hiding in the shadows, exposing her face to others felt wild and improper. Almost defiant.

“If the sec droids are still working, then maybe so are the repair robots,” Mildred answered, easing her heavy bag to the deck and taking a seat on a coiled pile of wet rope. “And under no circumstances can we allow a functioning mat-trans unit to fall into the hands of the local barons.”

Thoughtfully, Liana scowled. Yes, Theo had also mentioned those machines. “So, we’re going back to smash them.” She said it as a question.

“Better,” Ryan said, proceeding to explain the plan.

As the day wore on, the steamboat chugged steadily due south, and the snowy tors of Royal Island sank below the horizon to disappear from sight. Immediately, J.B. altered their course to the west and started the long journey back.

Chapter Seventeen

Reaching the mouth of the bay, Baron Griffin raised a hand, commanding the armada to a stop. The drummers relayed the order, and the remaining sec men backpad-dled furiously to ease the longboats to a gentle halt. Ahead of them was the vast sea.

“All right, is anybody bleeding?” Baron Wainwright demanded, looking over the assemblage of sec men and women. “Is there any blood on the outside of the hulls? Any on your oars or blasters?”

Fully aware of the danger that surrounded them on every side, the combined army studiously checked their possessions, and a ragged chorus answered in the negative.

“Well, check again!” Griffin snapped, rocking to the motion of the gentle waves. “Everybody inspect the person to your right! We’re out of the bay, and a single drop can put us into a world of hurt!”

Knowing the baron was referring to a kraken, the sec men and women looked again, much more intently this time. While they were occupied, the two barons turned away from the others to hold a private conversation.

“Have you done a count?” Griffin asked softly, uncorking a canteen to take a small drink. Unlike those
of the sec men, this container held a mixture of coffee sub, sugared milk and shine.

“No,” Wainwright whispered, accepting the canteen to take a drink without wiping off the top first. That would have been a deadly insult between the cousins. “How many did we lose?” The brew slid down easy and put strength in her blood, clearing away the fatigue of her rudely interrupted sleep from the night before. She had barely escaped from the burning ville with the clothes on her back. All of her precious plastic jewelry was gone, including her irreplaceable necklace of mutie teeth from her childhood. Just another crime that the outlanders had to pay for with their screams.

“How many? Two longboats, fifty sec men and twenty canoes,” Griffin answered, taking back the container and sealing it tight.

Absolutely stunned, Wainwright could just barely stop herself from turning to check the count. Shitfire, that was over half the armada! “Are you sure, cousin?”

“Unfortunately, yes,” Griffin replied, slinging the canteen over his right shoulder so that the strap would not touch the bandaged wound on his left shoulder. “I was so damn sure they would be an easy chill. How the frag could anybody guess they had a working rapidfire!”

“Several, plus grens,” Wainwright muttered, hitching up her gunbelt. There came a tinkling sound from her hip.

Suspicious, the woman drew the knife to find the wooden handle ended in a small broken shard, the rest of the glass blade only tiny pieces rattling in the snake
skin sheath. Yanking it free, she tossed the whole thing away to splash into the sea.

“By the lost gods, I hate a fair fight!” Griffin said petulantly, resting a hand on his late wife’s sawed-off scattergun as if somehow drawing strength from the blaster. “And now they’ve escaped. Gone south across the sea.” He pointed. “Look there! You can still see faint traces of their smoke on the horizon.”

“Nonsense. It’s a trick,” Wainwright retorted. “Nobody could be feeb enough to leave our island paradise for the endless rad craters and acid rain of the mainland. That would be fragging suicide!”

“Maybe,” Griffin countered. “I agree, due south is death, but between the Broken Thing, volcanoes, whirlpools and krakens, so is every other direction. There’s no nuking way off the world.”

“Okay, if there’s nowhere to run, then they’re still on the world,” Wainwright declared, looking along the rugged coastline in both directions. “So the question-becomes, which way did they go, east or west?”

Pulling out a well-maintained old Ruger, the baron spun the cylinder, finding solace in the sound of the oiled steel. “We could split the fleet,” he said without much conviction. “But that’s just as stupe as heading south.”

“Agreed,” Wainwright muttered, running stiff fingers through her tangled frenzy of hair. She still smelled of smoke, and longed to take a quick bath in the cold lake. But there was no time for such things now. Every second left the armada farther and farther behind the vile outlanders.

“Black dust, what I wouldn’t give for a single falcon,” Griffin said, rubbing a forearm where his beloved pet normally rested.

“Have faith, cousin, I might know where they are going,” Wainwright said unexpectedly, thoughtfully touching the many blisters on her face. “A few days ago, I sent my sec chief to Green Mountain to check on a story of a Hilly about some outlanders supposedly armed with blasters. It must have been them.”

“Green Mountain,” the baron repeated. Wild muties supposedly lived in the ivy-covered hills, and nobody who ventured there ever returned. Still it was better than exhausting the sec men by rowing around aimlessly.

“All right, you gleebs, the rest break is over,” Griffin shouted, facing the expectant crew. “Drummers, give me double time! We row west for Green Mountain!” Then he added, “And there’s a bag of steel waiting for the person who brings me the head of the one-eyed outlander!”

“Five bags if he’s still alive!” Wainwright continued, upping the ante to not lose control of her troops. “Plus, you get to keep any of the others as your personal slaves!”

Now the faces of the sec men brightened at the incredible offer, their weary expressions changing into greedy leers of raw avarice. Slaves, steel and revenge! Who could ask for better?

As the drummers started a beat, the eager sec men and women spit into their sore hands, and began rowing with renewed vigor, each making plans on how to capture the cowardly outlanders alive, and unharmed.

IT WAS LATE in the evening by the time the companions returned to the beached aircraft carrier. The huge green mountain of ivy was ridiculously easy to locate, standing out from the bare granite hills like an emerald sitting in a pile of fresh dung.

For the moment, everybody was on deck, the firebox of the engine packed full with dry wood, and the boiler filled with clean water from the lake. The balcony they had jumped off was now fully exposed from their blaster fight with the droids, the rusty metal jutting out like the hand of a beggar. Ryan mentally counted the steps they had climbed up, doing some rough calculations to try to figure out where the engine room should be located.

Strange enough, the plan had come to the one-eyed man when the Warhammer had gotten caught on the sandbar. The nose of the boat was mired in the muck, yet the back end was still deep in the water. It occurred to him that the Harrington was in the exact same position, albeit on a much larger scale. If he could just breach the hull of the aircraft carrier, then the lake would flood the engine room, drowning the sec droids, and destroying the ancient machinery of the power plants, removing any chance of a possible repair. Without electricity, the mat-trans unit was just an oddly shaped room.

Trying to imagine the metal hidden under the thick growth of plants, Ryan realized that the trick would be to correctly guess the location of the massive engines, without actually going inside the vessel.

“Gotta be near rear,” Jak stated confidently, looking
away from the shore and toward the lake. “When we there, deck had tilt, so end must be deep.”

“True, but we want to breach the hull,” J.B. countered, removing his fedora to smooth down his hair, and then replace the hat. “Not just blow a hole in a bile pump, or into a room full of war comps.”

“Those would be protected by watertight bulkheads,” Krysty added, standing with her arms crossed.

Holding on to the gunwale tightly, Liana said nothing, intimidated by the sheer, staggering size of the predark warship. She had serious trouble wrapping her thoughts around the fact that Green Mountain was actually a machine. She had seen war wags, and steamships before, some of them as large as a log cabin, but this was mind-boggling. And it was made of metal. More metal than there was in the private treasure of every baron on the whole damn world!

“All right, head for the stern!” Ryan shouted, pulling out his panga. “That’s our best chance.”

“Aye, aye, skipper!” Doc called out from the wheelhouse, working the throttle and wheel.

Gently moving against the tide, the huffing boat eased around the imposing bulk of the carrier until reaching the far end. Reaching out with the panga, Ryan slashed at the vines and saw only darkness beyond. “Take her in,” he shouted, sheathing the blade. “Dead slow!”

Throttling down the steam engine, Doc eased the boat through the hanging curtain of vines to slip into the thick gloom.

Lighting torches, the companions studied the rusty
hull curving above their heads, the metal sloping downward to form a sort of grotto. The water below them was choked with kelp, but dimly seen was a large plane of metal. It was mostly eaten through with corrosion, but still identifiable as a propeller blade.

Using that as his starting point, Ryan backtracked along the hull until reaching a relatively flat section. From his days with the Trader, building and repairing war wags, the man knew that any angle in armor would be the strongest point. His best bet would be a nice straight section like this. Having explored the wrecks of warships before, he knew the hull would be thicker than the reach of his arm, but the implo gren had a range of fifteen feet. More than enough. Hopefully.

Choosing a strong hanging vine, Ryan lashed the gren in place, so that it was dangling just above the choppy surface of the cold lake. Wrapping a fuse around the arming lever, Ryan made sure it was good and tight, then checked again before pulling out the ring and activating the device. When the fuse burned through, the lever would drop off and the gren would detonate.

“Get ready to leave,” Ryan ordered, leaning far over the gunwale and extending the torch. With a sputter, the fuse ignited and sizzled away into the morass of damp vines, moving a lot faster than he had thought it could.

“Haul ass!” Ryan bellowed, tossing the torch.

Hearing the urgent tone in the man’s voice, Doc gave no reply and simply shoved the throttle all the way forward. Sluggishly, the engine revved in power, and
the steamboat began to chug faster as it moved away from the imposing bulk of the Harrington.

Charging through the hanging vines, the boat emerged into the pale moonlight. Heading straight into the waves, Doc held as steady a course as possible, their speed steadily building.

“I just hope this works,” J.B. muttered as the boat crested a swell, to slam back down hard. “That was my only implo gren.”

“It’ll work,” Ryan declared, cracking his knuckles. “And if not, we can always—”

Just then, light flashed from inside the hanging cascade of flowering vines, followed by a bizarre sucking noise that almost sounded like a recording of an explosion played in reverse. Instantly, a powerful wind grabbed the Warhammer, trying to haul the boat and companions backward, even as the entire lake seemed to rush toward the carrier.

Squinting through the wild spray, the companions saw that a large section of the vines was gone. The bare metal hull of the carrier was in plain sight, along with a fifteen-foot-wide hole in the hull, most of the wide gap situated under the surface. Swirling and gurgling, the lake rushed in through the breach. Success!

“Done and done.” Mildred smiled in grim satisfaction, her beaded plaits whipping around. “I just hope the damn ship doesn’t have any—”

A blinding flash of blue came from within the Harrington and what strongly resembled a lightning bolt began to crackle over the entire length of the warship. Thousands of flowery vines immediately withered and
dropped away to reveal the great ship for the world to see.

“—electrical capacitors,” the woman finished lamely as megavolts of raw power snapped and crackled over the warship, then expanded across the onrushing lake, leaping from wave to wave in a burning spiderweb.

At the terrible sight, the companions braced for death, but the static discharge faded into dancing sparks just before reaching their boat. Easing his stance, Ryan allowed himself a sigh of relief, when from deep within the Harrington there came a loud bang and a hard quiver shook the entire vessel, pieces of the hull breaking off to tumble into the shallows with countless small splashes.

Spinning, J.B. charged down the stairs into the engine room.

“Fireblast, we have cookoff!” Ryan cursed, dashing to the stern of the boat. Drawing his panga, the one-eyed man slashed at the ropes holding the two honeycombs into place. “Lighten the damn boat! Throw away everything we don’t need!”

“Gaia, protect us all,” Krysty said in a hoarse whisper as she sprinted for the heavy arbalest.

The withered vines remaining on the Harrington now burst into flames like a million fuses, the burning network of electrical sparks and fire racing across the carrier to expose a score of crumbled jet fighters on the buckled flight deck. Immediately, the smashed planes exploded into fireballs, then the defensive blasters along the sides of the carrier began to detonate, ripping away from the hull and still shooting as they tumbled
through the turbulent night. A forward section of the hull erupted, throwing up a huge geyser of earth, stones and trees. As if in reply, a stuttering salvo of rockets from within the carrier streaked into the starry sky, spiraling randomly.

“Just wanted to flood the bastard ship, not remove it from the face of the Deathlands!” Ryan shouted. “If I’d know this was gonna happen—” Another explosion ripped apart the night, the blast sounding even louder than the others, and the boat was tossed about on the shaking lake, foaming waves crashing over the gunwale to soak the people. “I’d have used a longer fragging fuse,” he finished in a bellow.