Haven's Blight

Krysty just turned to shield her blaster from the bulk of the water. The slog of swamp water against the back of her head and shoulders was neither cool nor refreshing. It would take forever to dry in air that seemed scarcely less wet than the bayou itself, and would stink while it was doing it. But that, too, was part of Nature.

“Doubt it,” she said.

BOTH RYAN’S GROUP and the Tech-nomad squadron under the guidance of a long drink of water called Long Tom had happened to fetch up in a little trading post called Port Landrieu at the same time. The companions were looking for work. The Tech-nomads had it: delivering a load of meds and medical equipment to a healer in the ville of Haven to the east, far enough up an estuary to have at least a little protection from the savage storms that rolled in from the Lantic.

For two days the three-boat convoy hugged the coast, slipping inland when the ever-shifting interconnections of the confusing skein of bayous and ponds made it possible to move laterally that way. Ryan and his friends were dubious about the densely grown swamp country. Jak had grown up in it and knew it well enough to know just how unwelcoming it was—although he had also, as a mere boy, proved to be among its most dangerous predators. Their employers, though, assured them that as bad as the bayous were, the open Gulf was worse.

The friends had enough experience of the Gulf and its special terrors not to doubt that.

But the trip had proved uneventful, even though the Tech-nomads were vocally uneasy about the depredations of a particularly potent and nasty band of pirates calling themselves the Black Gang. Sight of a number of unfamiliar sails just on the horizon to the southeast had sent the convoy ducking up a stream late the evening before.

The companions had breathed a collective sigh of relief when the three ships, accompanied by a cloud of half a dozen surprisingly fast little pedal-powered scout boats, had embarked onto what looked like a small, placid, green-scummed lake. Some of the bayous they’d negotiated that very morning were narrow enough for a coldheart to step right aboard from the bank. Or even for some poisonous snake, a water moc or a copperhead, to drop from a dangling tree limb right onto the deck. Or onto an unsuspecting crew person’s head.

Then the big angry whatever had smashed Scooter and his water-striding scout boat to splinters.

WITH SURPRISING ALACRITY Mildred whipped up her heavy Garand and fired. She was a stocky woman, and after years tramping the Deathlands with her newfound friends not much of it was fat. The rifle roared, and Mildred yelped and dropped it. Only the fact she had the sling wrapped around her arm kept it from dropping into the tea-colored water.

Twenty yards from the Egret a big, bulky, smoothed-off shape plunged back under water as fast as it had appeared, leaving a loud snort and a plume of vented air hanging above where it had been. Just before it vanished, Krysty caught a glimpse of a blunt muzzle and a glaring red-rimmed eye. Mildred was grimacing and holding her wrist with her left hand.

Quickly slinging her own massive weapon, Krysty grabbed the longblaster, eased the strap free of the wounded woman and lowered it to the deck.

“What happened?” she asked, disengaging Mildred’s wounded right hand. The doctor seemed disinclined to let go. Without even thinking about it, Krysty pulled the hand free.

“You’ve skinned your thumb pretty badly,” she said.

“Sprained it, too,” Mildred grumbled. “Now I know what the phrase ‘M-1 thumb’ means.”

Krysty shook her head. “The Tech-nomads warned you. The bolt slams right back on you.”

“Tell me about it. I’m not used to a rifle anyway. And it doesn’t feel natural to keep my thumb on the same side as the fingers, instead of grasping the rifle like I would a pistol grip.”

“We need to get this cleaned up and bound.”

“Screw that! Screw the damn rifle, too.” With her left hand she reached around and grabbed the blocky black revolver from the holster on her right hip. “This may not do much when I hit, but at least I can hit something with it!”

“And shoot one-handed,” Krysty said. She unslung her BAR and started looked around for targets.

Its steam engine pounding furiously, Finagle’s First Law, the squadron’s third major vessel, churned past the Egret at about the same spot the great creature Mildred had messed up her thumb shooting at had vanished. Although he was out of sight on the far side of the main cabin, Krysty heard Jammer screech in outrage at the black pall of smoke it trailed from its doubled stack. The Tech-nomads’ time-honored philosophy of avoiding confrontation only applied outside the family—as the companions had learned abundantly the past couple of days.

Above the engine’s rhythmic thud rose a sharp-edged snarl. A cloud of white steam puffed away from the steamboat’s prow. Krysty saw the skinny bare shoulders of a Tech-nomad named Stork turned toward her, pressed against the mesh back of a recumbent seat as his gangly pallid legs pedaled wildly. His pedaling turned the six barrels of a Steam Gatling powered by the Finagle’s boiler. It was hurling .450-caliber lead slugs at targets on the far side of the tubby craft.

“Oh, shit, Krysty!” Mildred called. “Look at the Hope!”

The redhead turned to look past the Egret’s own prow, so much narrower and more graceful than the Finagle’s. Beyond the bowsprit she could see at least half a dozen water mounds churning around the rotor-ship.

Whatever these angry aquatic monsters were, a whole pod of them appeared to be on the attack.

As the two women watched, a creature erupted from the water to the Hope’s starboard. Its elephantine bulk crashed down across the ship’s bow in an explosion of brown water.

Chapter Two

“Ryan!” Krysty screamed. She raced toward the Egret’s bow, holding her BAR at port arms. She heard Mildred’s boots thumping after her.

A knot of Egret crew had gathered at the bow. A few held blasters or crossbows. The others were mostly pointing and shouting contradictory advice.

Krysty shouldered them roughly aside. She wasn’t shy about using the Browning’s butt or even its muzzle, still warm from the burst she’d fired at the one creature, to clear a path. The Tech-nomads yelped but gave way, seeming if anything more shocked and hurt than resentful.

As she came up to the rail she saw a slim pale figure, white hair streaming, leap from the rail onto the broad gray back of the monster draped across the Hope’s bow. With feet splayed on the tough hide, Jak pointed his Colt Python at the back of the oil-barrel-size head and fired.

A second man charged forward to hack at the monster’s bristly snout with a long, broad-bladed knife.

“It’s Ryan!” Mildred exclaimed, coming up beside her. “He’s all right!”

But how long he’d stay that way remained an open question. Even as he slashed the beast with his panga, its companions began to ram the Hope with impacts Krysty could feel through the Egret’s hull. The rotor-ship no longer moved. The creature draped across the bow had stalled it. With the wind calm, its mass was apparently too great for the vessel’s auxiliary electric motor to move.

Krysty raised the Browning. “Careful where you shoot!” a man nearby said. “Those’re our friends up there.”

“That’s my man up there,” she snarled. “And I know how to shoot.”

She aimed at the nearest monster, a mound twenty feet long and almost ten broad, heading toward the port stern of the stalled Hope. She triggered a short blast. Spray flashed from the wide back. Another burst. With a steam-whistle wail the monster slid below the pool’s greasy surface.

Bleeding from deep gashes generated by Ryan’s panga, the first monster reared up from the Hope’s bow. The movement tossed Jak away like a watermelon seed. But the albino youth had sensed its muscles bunching and read the beast’s intent. As it snapped its vast bulk up he sprang, using its motion to hurl himself up into the rigging of the Hope’s foremast. He caught the mast one-handed, like a monkey on one guyline, then planted his feet on another.

Ryan had stuck his big knife back in its sheath and was retrieving his Steyr rifle from the deck where he’d laid it. As lethal as the big scoped bolt-action was at range, it was a liability in a close-in fight.

Krysty fired another burst at a monster closing in on the Hope’s midship from the left. As her ears rang from the Browning’s roar, she heard a snarl and a curtain of pink-tinged spray shot upward from the beast’s back. Stork had apparently hand-cranked his Gatling around to bear.

He also got a touch too enthusiastic. Krysty’s heart leaped into her throat as Ryan dived aft to avoid the burst of bullets that raked across the Hope’s prow. She heard Smoker, the Finagle’s black, burly and bearded captain, roaring angrily at the Gatling gunner as the squat steamboat passed between Egret and her stricken comrade.

A multichambered thunderclap from right behind Krysty made her duck her head instinctively. She spun to see Isis three feet behind her, a thin trail of blue smoke unspoiled from the muzzle brake of the BAR she’d just fired. Another fat tail like a giant beaver’s paddle was just vanishing into a roil of water.

“Don’t forget it’s this ship you’re mainly supposed to be protecting,” the long, lean woman said. She sounded neither reproachful nor excited, just matter-of-fact, as always. There was a reason her crew called her “Ice.”

Krysty nodded. For a few moments she concentrated wholly on shooting at any of the great gray shapes that presented itself, always keeping mindful of what lay behind them, as Ryan had taught her. No point in trying to help your friends if you chilled them yourself with your own blasterfire.

She burned through three of the 20-round magazines so fast they might have been strings of firecrackers. Though she also knew to shoot in short bursts the long black barrel quickly grew so hot the heat shimmer interfered with her sighting. Even on such gigantic targets.

“Give it a rest,” Isis suggested from right beside her. So focused had she become on her own shooting Krysty had been all but oblivious to the roar of the tall, lean woman’s own big Browning, and the muzzle-blasts that buffeted her like a stiff wind. “We don’t want to burn out the barrel. Or even have to take time to swap it out.”

Krysty nodded. She looked around. The Finagle was running back on a reciprocal course along their starboard side. Before view of any of the steam craft but its stacks and radio masts vanished behind the Egret’s cabin, Krysty saw Stork with his Gatling swiveling and blasting away as fast as his long, wiry legs could revolve the barrels.

Beyond the wake the steam boat left in the black water, topped with yellow foam, an object like an overturned whaleboat floated to the surface near the reeds of the far bank of the little lake. Red streamed down its blubbery sides. It was clearly dead.

But the death of one of their own only redoubled the aquatic muties’ fury. The Egret was suddenly torqued counterclockwise by simultaneous impacts at bow and stern.

Krysty heard Isis’s teeth grind. “Dammit!” the captain groaned as if in sympathy to the noises of the tortured hull. “Even if we wound the monsters fatally, most won’t die quick enough to help.”

Despite the fact she could still feel the heat from her BAR barrel on her skin, Krysty had to shoulder the heavy longblaster and open up again. She fired toward the port quarter, where a monster was charging, attempting to ram again. Some of the Egret’s crew joined in with fancy compound bows and crossbows, feathering the animal’s back like an elongated seagoing porcupine. Krysty’s powerful .30-06 slugs literally ripped bloody chunks out of the broad back.