Caught in the midst of kneeling to discover there were no more magazines in the satchel Isis had provided, Krysty saw an ax handle fast descending toward Mildred’s skull. She dropped the empty longblaster with a clunk and grabbed for her own snub-nosed .38 revolver. But her warning only gave her friend enough time to begin to dodge, so that she took a glancing blow to the side of her head rather than taking the whole sickening force full on the cranium.
She slumped against the housing next to the man whose brains she’d blown all over it. Her new attacker cocked his leg to put the boot in. Crouching, off balance on the dizzily tilting deck, Krysty knew she would never get her blaster in action in time to keep him from stomping Mildred’s skull in.
“Here, catch!” a voice cried from above. Krysty looked up to see Isis standing atop the front of the cabin. She lobbed a head-size dark object right at the pirate’s face, turned upward like Krysty’s to see who had called out.
Reflex betrayed him. He dropped the ax handle to whip up both hands to protect himself. The pirate fielded a package of what looked like gray clay blocks taped together.
Krysty launched herself between the pirate and his intended victim, with sufficient power and the proper angle to bodycheck him clean over the side.
A moment after his wildly kicking cowboy boots vanished from sight, the boat shuddered. A column of water shot skyward twenty feet, shot through with red and body parts. Krysty just recognized a single pointy-toed boot before the sea swallowed the whole mess.
Mildred picked herself up. She looked up at Isis. “Kinda took a chance there, didn’t you?”
“Life is taking a chance,” the captain said. “Anyway, I had faith in your resourcefulness. There were reasons we hired you.”
Krysty found time to wonder fleetingly what those reasons were. The mouth of the stream the fleet had been making for beckoned welcomingly not fifty yards from the lead ship’s graceful prow. It wasn’t much: it looked like a mere hole, scarcely wider than the narrow sailing yacht herself, hacked in a wall of green that would’ve looked brick-solid if it weren’t waving like grass in the gale.
The rain wasn’t currently heavy, but the drops hit like ice bullets. Raising a big pale wave of water before its bow, a big launch roared in from starboard, trying to cut the yacht off from entering the bayou’s sanctuary. Blasterfire flashed. Bullets cracked by Krysty’s head. She heard a despairing cry as one found a target. From the direction she knew at least it was neither her friend Mildred nor the exotic and coolly competent ship’s captain. Knowing it would be ineffectual, she held out her Smith & Wesson with one hand wrapped over her blaster hand to brace and emptied its 5-shot cylinder.
Then it was as if an invisible circular saw ripped diagonally across the rear third of the intercepting pirate launch. Blood fountained as jeering men were ripped apart. Both sides of the hull shattered.
A wave carried the stricken launch up onto its frothy peak. The engine’s weight promptly snapped off the stern. By the time the wave plunged into the trough, all that remained above the water surface was bobbing debris. Including half a dozen heads, with faces that gazed up at Krysty with despair and desperate imploring.
“I never thought I’d be happy to see people doomed to drown like rats,” Mildred said. “I hate even being happy seeing rats drown. I hate what this world has done to me.”
“Well, you can be grateful to Stork in Finagle for clearing the way for us,” Krysty said, meaning it to help. She often was unsure how to deal with her friend’s occasional episodes of remorse, despair and homesickness.
Isis stood atop the cabin, shooting a gigantic pristine Desert Eagle handblaster at the pirate boats that still sought to overtake them. Looking toward the enemy flotilla, Krysty saw a long black yacht, its masts bare like Egret’s, bearing down on them. Where Egret was spotless white, this vessel was painted black on every visible surface, hull, superstructure, even mast. A black-clad figure stood in the bow as if its feet were bolted to the deck, apparently unaffected by the violence of the waves. Its features were obscured by blackness as featureless at several hundred yards as the hull.
“Damn!” Isis exclaimed from overhead. “That ship’s the Black Joke, and there stands Black Mask his evil self. If only I had a decent fucking blaster!”
Krysty knew the rare handblaster was well-made, as such things went. She also knew what the Tech-nomad captain meant. No matter how good a handblaster it was, to reach out and have any chance at all of touching the pirate overlord, she needed range.
Mildred looked up from rummaging through the debris strewed about the deck for loaded BAR magazines. Krysty noted that not even pounding rain and the waves that broke over the railing with increasing frequency could wash all the spilled blood away.
“Speaking of blasters,” the physician said, “what’s that next to Black Mask?”
Krysty realized he stood beside a long tube laid horizontally on some kind of mount. It flared to a wider diameter at the after end. A wide steel sheet stood angled back behind it.
“Some kind of cannon—” Krysty began.
“Recoilless rifle,” Isis said.
Yellow flame and white smoke erupted out the rear of the tube to splash against the steel plate and boil out to all sides.
A blinding flash lit the thrashing cypress trees. A shock wave planed off the wavetops for fifty yards around.
Krysty’s breath solidified in her throat. Finagle’s First Law had blown up.
Chapter Eight
Someone was shaking Ryan by his shoulder. He wagged his head to clear the cotton that filled it. His hair slapped his cheeks and forehead like wads of seaweed freshly hauled from the sea. His knees were pressing down hard on something hard, and his face felt sunburned.
Also his head rang like an anvil, which was currently in use to forge red-hot iron.
“Ryan!” a voice called from the distance. He shook himself again. His sensory impressions, his very thoughts, whirled around him like shoals of little fish. Little flickering fish, their sides flashing silver in the yellow sunlight—
“Dear boy, please! The ship’s sinking. We have got to act upon the instant, or most assuredly perish!”
Whatever else could be said about Ryan, he was a survivor. He gave his head a final shake, short and sharp, and shook all those little vagrant fishes back into place.
He looked up to see Doc’s long face, streaming water, with raindrops exploding in little bursts all over it. His usually lank hair was plastered right down both sides of his head, making his skull look narrower than usual.
“Get up,” the old man urged. His words still seemed to cross some vast distance, although his bloodless lips moved barely the length of his long outstretched fingers from Ryan’s nose. “We must be taking our leave, and quickly.”
“Right.” Ryan gripped the other man’s forearm, and was glad of the unlooked-for strength with which Doc pulled him to his feet. He reeled, first from dizziness, then a second time because the deck was doing its level best to pitch him into waves that leaped up on all sides as if eager to receive him. Then he shook off his friend’s helping hand.
“What happened?” he asked, his voice a bone-dry croak without the water that covered every external inch of him.
“Boiler explosion,” Doc shouted. “A cannon shot from the Black Joke struck home. The steam Gatling has lost all power.”
It came back to Ryan, then: the flash and smoke as the recoilless rifle fired. The brilliant blue-white spot streaking like a renegade star toward Finagle’s fat stern. The flash and eardrum-torturing crack of a shaped-charge warhead going off. The answering yellow flash, followed by a sudden explosion of steam so hot