Iron Rage

Most of them had abilities that were useful to the vessel and her crew—even Doc, with his weird, eclectic old-days knowledge.

As a general rule, Ryan Cawdor did not hire his group out for sec work, unless survival was at stake, for one reason or another. When survival for himself and his small, loyal band of friends was concerned, anything and everything were always on the table.

The companions had been hired on the Queen as crew. There was always plenty of work to be done. Captain Conoyer was grateful for fourteen extra hands to do it, and willing to pay with room and board and a share in the proceeds of every transaction—the same deal she and every other member of the crew had. With differences in percentage, of course.

One of the conditions of the companions’ employment was that if—more likely, when—there was fighting to be done, they would be required to defend the ship. It just so happened that the new crew members were all ace at that particular skill.

But then again, that was pretty much an unspoken condition of every job, including just living day to day. They lived in the Deathlands, after all.

“Stickies,” the captain said. “Been colonies of them around the confluence of the Yazoo and the Sippi for fifty years, the old river folk say.”

“Do they ever attack boats?” Ricky asked, as he settled back down by the tarp on which the winch parts rested.

“Not if they keep well clear of the banks,” Trace said.

“What if there are snags on the river?” Krysty asked. “Or mebbe sandbars narrowing the channel.”

“Like I said—if they keep clear of the banks. Otherwise all bets are off.”

“Don’t forget the rads,” Myron said helpfully.

“Rads?” Krysty and Ricky said almost simultaneously.

“Oh, I was getting there,” Trace stated. “Not just rads, but heavy-metal pollution, big-time. You know how you always hear talk about strontium swamps? Well, they actually got stretches of that around here.”

Ricky eyed a flock of ducks starting noisily from some reeds on the right bank. “Does that mean those birds are muties too, if they can live around here?”

Trace shrugged. “Many of the creatures seem less affected by the rads than we are,” Myron said.

“Sounds like a double-bad place for shore leave,” J.B. said, approaching from astern.

“It’s not my idea of a vacation spot,” added Mildred Wyeth, who walked by his side. She was taller than he by a slight margin, which the battered fedora he wore tended to disguise.

“The rads won’t kill you,” Myron said. “Not right away. The swampers who live in these bogs will likely get you first.”

“Swampies?” Mildred asked.

“Swampers,” the engineer repeated, with added emphasis on the second syllable. “Not muties. People.”

“Of a sort,” his wife told them.

“Wouldn’t they have to be muties to survive if the rad count’s that high?” Ricky asked.

“They’re too mean for the rads to chill,” Santiago offered.

“How about them?” Ryan asked. “Do they go after vessels that are underway?”

“Not much when they stay clear of the banks,” the captain said. “Like the stickies. Like most things, come to that. That’s another reason we stay out in the middle of the channel when we can. The river’s lethal enough. We don’t need the grief that comes from land.”

“Which is her typically sour way of saying the river is our home, and we feel safest here,” Myron said. “Right, my love?”

That got a lopsided grin from the captain. “Anything you say, Myron.”

Ricky picked up a sprocket and held it up to the sun to be examined.

“I get it,” he said glumly. “Everything’s dangerous. Especially everything beautiful.”

Ryan winked at Krysty and grinned. “Pretty much.”

“The real danger is the darkness in the human soul,” said Nataly Dobrynin, the Queen’s first mate, emerging from the superstructure and walking up to join the others. She was on the tall side, taller than either Conoyer, and skinny. She wore her long, dark brown hair pulled back in a ponytail that emphasized the austere bone structure of her face, and her slightly angled gray eyes. She never smiled, and intimidated the hell out of Ricky.

Surely that can’t be right, Ricky thought. Stickies are double dangerous, for one thing. Rads and heavy-metal poisoning, for another.

He looked to Ryan for confirmation. He sure as nuke wasn’t contradicting the somewhat-scary mate.

But Ryan frowned thoughtfully.

“That’s true enough,” he said. “That’s what blew up the world, after all.”

“Some would blame the cold hearts of the whitecoats, lover, never mind the darkness of their souls,” Krysty said drily.

“That ‘some’ being you.”

She grinned; he shrugged.

“Well, ‘some’ aren’t wrong,” he said. “But they still had their reasons, which fieldstripped down to that.”

“I’d say it was the madness of shutting themselves off from the natural world in order to try to control it,” the redhead said.

“Sounds like the same thing, to me,” Nataly said. She turned to Trace. “Captain, we’re coming eight up on the confluence.”

Trace nodded. “Right. Everybody, get to your stations. Break time’s over. The big river’s mood doesn’t look bad today, but wrestling this bitch of a barge through the turbulence where the streams join could get triple ugly triple fast.”

“You best put your toys away and step lively too, Ricky,” Ryan said. “I think we need to have weapons in hand when we hit the Sippi. With the captain’s permission, of course.”

“Why’s that?” Myron asked. The bespectacled engineer sounded more curious than challenging.

“Junctions are good places for bad things to happen,” J.B. stated, settling his fedora more firmly on his head. “Like crossroads. Reckon rivers aren’t any different.”

“They used to say the Devil hung out at crossroads,” Mildred said. “Back in the, uh, day.”

Ricky turned his face down to hide his grin. The “day” she meant was back in the long-dead twentieth century, where Mildred had lived most of her life. She had undergone a routine abdominal surgical procedure and something had gone wrong. She’d been frozen in a cryogenic procedure and shipped to a cryocenter in Minnesota just as the balloon was going up on the Big Nuke.

Trace nodded. “You’re right, Ryan. Take your people to full alert. But stand ready to lend a hand if it turns out the river’s what we really need to be worried about.”

Ryan nodded.

“Get that winch back together double quick,” Myron said, all business now.