Whether by the blast of the big gun or the lurch of the ship, Doc was pitched over the brass rail. Gripping the longblaster in his left hand, Ryan lunged. He managed to tangle his right fist in the long flapping tail of Doc’s frockcoat.
As skeletal-thin as the old man was, he weighed enough to slam Ryan face-first into the rail. The one-eyed man tasted blood. Shaking off the momentary wooziness, Ryan slung his rifle hastily, then got hold of the other man’s coat with his other hand.
The LeMat roared again. By chance he saw the head of a pirate who stood in the stern of the little boat, grinning and aiming some kind of handblaster improvised from a piece of pipe, snap back as the .44 caliber round hit him over the right eye. A piece of his skull came off, taking with it the filthy pink bandanna wrapped around the pirate’s head. He toppled back among his fellows, who were all more interested in scrambling toward the tiller to try to regain control of the wildly tossing little craft than fighting.
The Finagle heeled well over toward the starboard side. Ryan looked down to see Doc’s head and shoulders fully submerged in foam-shot green water. One big bony-knuckled hand held the huge blaster that would normally be down by his thigh—and was now up, out of the water.
Ryan hauled hard. Doc’s head broke free of the waves, streaming and sputtering. As Ryan straightened his legs in a sort of dead lift, a line slithered over the rail toward the fallen man. Doc’s free hand caught the blue-and-white nylon rope and he was able to help haul himself to safety.
“Pretty hard core, aiming and shooting while you were upside down like that,” Ryan said as Doc scrambled inboard with alacrity surprising for one who generally looked as if he weren’t just at Death’s door, but walking on through it. “Triple hard.”
“It was the danger I could do something about, Ryan,” Doc said. He coughed violently, spewing up a torrent.
“Thank you,” he said, recovering quickly. “As well as to my other benefactor.”
“Yeah.” Ryan turned to see the ship’s owner and commander himself, the burly grizzle-bearded black man called Smoker, standing there with his oil-stained coveralls soaked through. He had a big long-barreled Smith & Wesson double-action blaster holstered on one hip and a cutlass with an eighteen-inch blade and a vicious knuckle-duster handguard thrust through his belt at the other. “Thanks, Captain.”
“Least I could do.” From the bow came the weird grinding roar of Stork’s pedals turned, steam-powered Gatling. “Need all the fighters I can get today. Pretty impressive presence of mind, there, Doc, holding that handblaster free of the water even when your head was under.”
Doc smiled. “Though the LeMat isn’t what it once was, the workings must be kept dry.”
“What was the blast?” Ryan asked. He scanned the moving hills of water but saw no immediate danger this side of the smoke screen, which was beginning to fray and come apart under the wind’s increasingly savage onslaught.
“RPG,” Smoker said around the stub of cigar clamped unlit between his teeth. Like all Tech-nomads except a few apparent eccentrics, he had teeth in perfect condition, almost blinding in their whiteness.
“Hit the stern. The nuke-suckers were trying either to take out the prop or the steering. Didn’t make either. Didn’t hurt anybody, beyond a few scorch marks and scrapes. Won’t be so lucky long.”
A hefty thump forward, accompanied by another quick violent vibration of the planks beneath his boots, made Ryan turn.
“There’s our luck running out,” Smoker said as grappling hooks thumped on the deck. He drew his weapons. “All hands stand by to repel boarders.”
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.