“You head inside if you want to.”
The Armorer lifted his face to the rain. Ryan wondered how he could see a blessed thing. Even if the rain didn’t totally obscure his glasses, the round lenses were fogged white as Jak’s hair.
“Reckon I’ll stay with you a spell,” the little man said.
This bayou wove a tangled skein of waterways, ever-changing—and never changing faster nor more decisively than when a brutal storm blew in off the Gulf. Ryan had hoped the surviving craft could power directly upriver, put some quick distance between them and the Gulf. Hurricane winds were bad, but water was the big killer.
But they weren’t having that kind of luck. The channel here all but paralleled the coast; from time to time Ryan could see gray waves whipped frighteningly high by the storm through the trees. Sooner or later the water would rise and surge right over the trees at them. And what happened next he didn’t care to speculate about.
“Anyway,” J.B. said, “could be worse.”
“How do you reckon that?”
“We could be out there in one a them little bicycle boats.”
One of them had just appeared off the port bow, surging ahead of the New Hope along the landward bank. Normally the Hope’s wind-augmented electric motors would drive her faster than the water-strider boaters could pedal. But they were moving against the current here. Like their namesakes, the little outrigger-equipped craft skimmed the water. The current bothered them lots less than the bigger ships, shallow draft though they were.
The four surviving water-strider riders had all volunteered to go out despite the wind and the waves it drove up the bayou. They were hunting for some kind of side channel or passage that would allow New Hope and Snowy Egret to sail inland to a place offering better shelter.
“Got that right,” Ryan said. “These Tech-nomads are triple weird, but they’ve got balls, got to give them that.”
J.B. stiffened by his side. “Wait,” he said. “We’re comin’ up on the Egret’s backside mighty quick.”
Ryan looked. The Armorer was right. They were closing quickly on the yacht’s taffrail.
“Shit,” he yelled. “They’re aground!”
Chapter Nine
Tech-nomads swarmed around the grounded yacht like ants. Ryan and the companions stood in a group on a patch of ground high enough not to be boggy, although the way the rain was coming down the ground was getting soft anyway despite the roots of the tough grass that grew there holding it together.
Their packs lay nearby, covered in tarps held down by the packs’ own weight. Their weapons were wrapped in plastic that seemed to be of Tech-nomad manufacture. The companions themselves made no attempt to shelter from the rain. They weren’t going to be anything but soaked for the foreseeable future. As for the wind, they’d seen too many trees blown over in the half hour since a sudden shift in the wind had run Snowy Egret up onto the shallowly submerged bank to want to get too close to any of those. So they stood in an open area and let the hurricane’s rising fury beat on them.
It made it easier to do their job of keeping lookout, anyway.
“I almost feel like helping them,” Mildred shouted. “Feel guilty about not, anyway.”
A mob of Tech-nomads worked in the water up to their waists, hauling on ropes; others pushed against the hull of the grounded ship from land. The New Hope had bent on a cable and was trying to tow her sister ship free, although the channel’s narrowness meant she had to pull at an angle. They worked with a fierce singleness of purpose, with none of the parrot chatter that often characterized the Tech-nomads when they were among themselves.
Not that they could’ve heard one another.
“Don’t,” J.B. yelled. “Didn’t they teach you to never volunteer back in your time?”
“But maybe if we helped we could speed things along.”
“We’re not going to escape the hurricane,” Krysty called. “This is it.”
“The Tech-nomads hired us to guard their fleet,” Ryan said. He stood watching the rescue operation with arms folded. He willed himself not to feel the wind’s hammering. Compared to controlling the atavistic, instinctive fear of the storm’s awful power, that was a breeze.
“They could ask us to help if they wanted. They told us to keep an eye out. So that’s what we do.”
“Good,” Jak said. Though the albino teen was willing to work like a slave on his own account, and for his friends, he had a reluctance to work on a stranger’s behalf.
“More than you know, my lad,” Doc shouted. “Unless you believe that’s an innocent oceanic wayfarer seeking shelter from the storm coming around that bend downstream?”
The others saw the high prow of a sturdy little vessel that looked like an old shrimp boat, just poking around a stand of black mangrove.
“Wouldn’t you know it,” J.B. said.
An ear-tormenting rattle pierced the storm’s howl. Ryan saw Kayley, a female Tech-nomad rescued from the sinking Finagle’s First Law, spin and fall into thigh-deep water. He looked up.
Across the river men and muzzle-flashes appeared among wind-lashed trees. They were shooting at the Tech-nomads trying to rescue Egret. From the big clouds of smoke produced by most of the weapons, visible for an instant before the wind whipped them away into curling threads that quickly vanished in the rain, Ryan guessed most of the pirates were firing black powder blasters.
“Good luck to them reloading if the smoke poles’re muzzle-loaders,” J.B. remarked unconcernedly. He yanked the plastic wrap off his Smith & Wesson M-4000 shotgun and began ejecting buckshot shells into his hand. Feeding those into a cargo pocket of his baggy pants, he produced a box of rifle slugs and loaded those in their place.
Mildred sat, fastidiously managing to get a piece of the waterproof material to hold still long enough for her to plant her behind on it. As if it could make any possible difference, given how skin-soaked they all were. She took out her ZKR target pistol and propped her elbows just inside her knees.
Ryan unwrapped his own sniper rifle. He wiped condensation off the outsides of both lenses of his scope with a handkerchief from his pocket. Raising the longblaster to his shoulder, he confirmed the insides of the lenses were clear. The scope remained waterproof after all the years and abuse it had been through.
He wondered how long that would last, as nothing lasted forever.
A nearer rattle of blasterfire told him the Tech-nomads had begun returning fire at the pirates who had infiltrated through the trees on the far bank. He swung his scope down along the river. He didn’t have the option a normal shooter did, of using his other eye to discover where to point the much more restricted vision field of the telescopic sight. But he had a lot of practice with pointing toward the last place he’d looked.
And the shrimp boat wasn’t a small target. He picked it up right away. It was stained white and sun-faded blue, the paint peeling badly from long exposure to sun and weather. The name Mary Sue was painted on the bow.
He lined up the post of the telescopic sight on a man hunkered behind a battered M-60 machine gun laid across the shrimper’s bow rail. These pirates had some serious armament. Then again he’d noticed both the Tech-nomads and the pirates tended to use only heavy full-automatic weapons, like the M-60 or the BARs Isis favored. Support weapons. For personal arms both sides stuck to semiauto, conventional repeaters, or even black powder and non-firearms. He knew why: ammo. It was expensive, hard to come by, heavy. Even though he was pretty