Haven's Blight

As a pair of hooks slithered backward to catch on the rail, Ryan followed his example. He ran forward, drawing his SIG-Sauer with his left hand and his panga with his right.

Men swarmed up both ropes. Ryan was still raising his handblaster when the captain’s blaster cracked off behind him. A dark-skinned head with a black do-rag wrapped around it, which had just appeared above the nearer rope, snapped back. The pirate fell away, carrying at least a couple of his mates with him, to judge by the shouts. Ryan heard a body splash into the water.

As another pirate swarmed over the rail, Ryan took him out. Struck through the left shoulder the man reeled back, but got hold of the rail with a black-nailed left hand. A shot through the body sealed his fate.

As the second pirate fell, the one-eyed man hacked through the rope closer to him with a single stroke of his panga. That elicited more yells as bodies thumped back into the whaleboat and others splashed into the raging sea, hopefully never to be seen again.

Ryan heard shots and screams behind him. Putting his back against the cabin, he risked a quick glance that way.

Pirates were swarming up over the stern of the steamer. Two raced toward Doc, one armed with what looked like a short spear, the other with a fire ax.

Doc had emptied the fat cylinder of his LeMat, but he had a nasty surprise in store. There was a single stub of shotgun barrel mounted beneath the revolver’s cylinder. Doc took the ax-man’s face off with a charge of double-00 buckshot.

A four-foot adjustable boiler wrench smashed the skull of the guy with the short spear. A following pirate shot the crewman who’d swung the massive wrench off the housing with some kind of one-shot homemade blaster. The lower half of the face of the guy with the pipe-gun blew out over the rail in a shower of red liquid as another Tech-nomad inside the cabin shot him out a port with a crossbow, the heavy quarrel going sideways through his mouth and tearing his teeth out. As the pirate gurgled and choked on his own blood, Smoker, roaring, grappled him and threw him bodily into the sea. Cackling with manic glee, Doc put away his giant handblaster and pulled his swordstick from his belt. Pulling the slim blade from within, he began to duel a pirate armed with a machete, using the ebony cane sheath as a parrying weapon.

A flicker of motion in Ryan’s peripheral vision snapped his head back around. A hand grabbed his wrist as he tried to raise his SIG-Sauer. A blast of foul breath hit him in the face as he turned toward his bearded, sunburned attacker. The pirate held a two-foot length of pipe with a heavy join on the business end cocked back over his left shoulder, intending to bust open Ryan’s head.

To discourage the move, Ryan jammed the panga into the man’s swag gut almost to the grip and twisted. The man bellowed in pain, then sagged, letting go of Ryan’s gun wrist.

The one-eyed man promptly raised his left hand and shot a second charging pirate over the shoulder of the man he’d stabbed. Then he put his boot against the breastbone of his first attacker and kicked the man off his blade. Howling in agony, the pirate fell backward, trailing a loop of gut like a strand of greasy purple-gray sausage.

This is going to be a long day, Ryan thought, as the sound of clashing weapons and angry voices broke out from the cabin roof above his head.

WITH A LOUD CHUNK the ax that had been swung at Jak’s face sank into the bulkhead of the New Hope’s main cabin. As the nicked blade, crusted with old brown blood, descended toward his face, the albino youth had bobbed the upper half of his body aside. He felt a slight tug as a lock of his long white hair was severed by the cut.

He finished the act of holstering his now empty Colt Python. With the enemy on top of him there was no time to reload the big blaster.

That suited Jak fine.

With a quick wrist-flipping flourish Jak drew and opened his current favorite knives, a pair of balisongs with matching ironwood hilts. With his left hand he slashed the ax man across his eyes as his attacker, at least twice the boy’s size, wrenched and grunted in frenzied desperation to yank his weapon free.

The man squealed like a scorched pig as the tip of Jak’s butterfly knife raked across both eyeballs. A hot jet of blood and aqueous fluid hit Jak in the face as he sliced the blinded pirates face and throat to blood-gouting ribbons.

Shrieking in fury a second pirate lunged for Jak, raising a four-foot-length of pipe with six-inch spikes welded to the head to smash the albino teen. Instead his sallow face contorted more as a shotgun discharged into his temple from no more than a foot away. Jak saw yellow muzzle-flash lick the side of the long, scarred countenance, which twisted into the most surprised look the teen had ever seen.

Then it seemed to collapse back and in on itself like a rubber mask stretched over a deflating balloon as the shot column took away most of the skull and facial bones that gave it structure from behind, right out the right side of the head.

“Rad-blast it, Jak!” J.B. shouted, stepping up and jacking the action of his Smith & Wesson M-4000. “Quit screwing around.”

Jak grinned. “Okay, let’s fight!”

A WHALER CHURNED past the rounded prow of Finagle’s First Law. The muzzle-flashes of the score of pirates crammed board were bright despite the fact the air was full of rain and spray.

Ryan’s rifle slammed his shoulder and cracked. A pirate fell over the rail. The one-eyed man slung his Steyr and drew his handblaster. Holding it in both hands he popped rounds furiously at the craft as it curved around toward the stern.

His 9 mm bullets either had more effect than he saw, injuring or unnerving the man at the tiller, or the pirate steering the thirty-foot boat got careless. Or maybe the unpredictable thrashing of the sea betrayed it. The vessel swung far enough wide of the Finagle that Stork could depress his multibarreled steam-powered blaster to bear on them.

The Gatling set up its terrible grinding moan. The heavy slugs sent up a geyser of water in front of the launch, and the boat powered right into the lead spray.

It was as if a giant invisible butcher began chopping at the pirates with a giant cleaver. Heads blew apart like ripe watermelons dropped on boulders from a great height. Arms and legs flew free, cartwheeling through the water-heavy air like pinwheels spraying blood sparks. Splinters snapped up from the thin hull. Greenish-brown water surged in around the pirates’ legs, some of which stood without the benefits of torsos above the waists. It instantly turned a tainted maroon.

The boat turned sideways; its bow swamped.

The roar of the Gatling stopped. For a moment, as the only sound seemed to be the descending whine as the six barrels gradually slowed their spin, Ryan thought Stork had stopped firing for lack of targets.

Then he saw what looked like a thin red hose hooked from the gangly man’s throat to the deck, which rose and fell rhythmically.

Chapter Seven

Stork’s beaky, wildly hair-fringed face took on a look of almost clinical curiosity. He brought walking-stick fingers to the bullet hole. He pressed the fingertips against it.

Blood squirted out to the sides, down his T-shirt and up into his beard, to the decreasing rhythm of his heart. He toppled from the mesh sling seat.

Wildly Ryan looked around. The smoke screens had turned into a few random brown wisps twisting in the wind. Ahead of the convoy’s lead ship, the Snowy Egret, he could see a break in the waving green wall of the mangrove swamp that made up the shoreline. It was sanctuary of a sort, offered by a bayou mouth: tantalizingly close, yet perhaps an infinity away—because the bigger pirate ships were fast approaching, and the survivors of their swarm of smaller boats, sensing opportunity now that the terrible Gatling had quit ripping at them, were closing in like a pod of killer whales on the Egret and the New Hope. Meanwhile the Hope was no longer sending out a volley of its terrible rockets. Ryan didn’t know whether they were out, or the launcher was out of service, or whether the rocket crew was dead or injured. It didn’t matter.

The sound of rotating barrels got sharper, higher. Ryan spun.

Grinning, coattails flapping behind him like storm-crow’s wings, Doc sat in the recumbent seat of the steam gun. His feet pumped the pedals furiously spinning up the barrels once more. His hands worked the crank to swing the bizarre weapon to bear on fresh targets.

“Have no fear, Ryan!” he sang out over the howl and smash of wind and battle. “I am on it!”

TEETH SHATTERED as Krysty whipped the heavy butt of her BAR across the face of a pirate with long greasy locks and a pale scar running down his face over a dead eye like a cruel parody of her own lover. A long black mustache contradicted the impression until it vanished in the general eruption of blood from his smashed nose and upper jaw.

“Krysty! Behind you!” Mildred yelled.

Half by reflex, half instinct she kicked hard, straight back. Before her leg fully extended, her boot heel contacted hard flesh. She heard a cough of exhalation and the person she kicked fell away.

She spun, bringing the muzzle of the Browning around level with her narrow waist. A wiry little pirate, shirtless to reveal a sunken chest spiderwebbed with crude tattoos, had reeled back against a man twice his size with a gold ring hanging from a much-mashed nose. He had a fat bean-shaped face, steel-wool hair and sideburns poking out to the sides as if he had hedgehogs glued to his cheeks. The big man grabbed his comrade in one hand and pointed a sawed-off double-barrel shotgun at Krysty over his shoulder with the other.

She triggered a quick burst. The smaller man jerked as dark holes appeared like flies caught in the webs of his chest tats. The other man’s tiny bloodshot blue eyes stood suddenly out of their sockets as the jacketed .30-06 slugs, barely slowed by blasting through the lights and heart of his smaller pal, ripped through his belly.

Judging by the way his bandy legs folded one had to have smashed through his spine and cut the cord.

Explosions were blasting off all around. Waves crashed over the rail. The ship rocked through a complex three-dimensional pattern that was ever-changing and totally disorienting.

Smoke obscured Krysty’s vision aft, from where the most recent two attackers had come. She wasn’t sure what was burning. The sharp stink of wood combusting blended with the sweetish barbecue smell of roasting human flesh singed the roof of her mouth and tormented a stomach already disordered by the unpredictable motion of the ship. The smells had to be strong to be detectable at all through the rain and spray, so dense and fierce she couldn’t tell them apart.

On all sides people shouted and screamed. A ferocious tumult rose from the stern, beyond the wall of smoke. Fighting raged there.

She turned the other way to see Mildred caught from behind in a bear hug by a big Latino-looking pirate with his back to a ladder coaming. A smaller man cocked back his arm to drive a long narrow rod with the tip ground to a point into the woman’s belly.

Krysty pointed the BAR at what she hoped was a safe angle clear of Mildred and held back the trigger. The blaster barked and bucked twice, and the heavy receiver locked open. One bullet hit the pirate with the spike on the hip and passed through him, smashing his narrow pelvis. He fell screaming, the needle-like weapon falling from his hands and washed out instantly through the scuppers by a backwash tendrilled with his own blood.

Mildred smashed her head back into the face of the man who held her. He grunted in unexpected pain. Blood squirted from his smashed nose.

The unexpected turn of events made him loosen the grip of his big bare arms. Mildred kicked back just beneath his right knee with her bootheel, then scraped it down his shin. He moaned and she broke free.

As the pirate pawed at her, she brought her knee up hard into his groin. His eyes bugged out and he doubled over.