Krysty let loose the breath she’d unconsciously been holding, as well. “That man just doesn’t do anything that isn’t heart-stopping, does he?”
But Ryan was brushing off the Tech-nomads’ congratulations. He gestured angrily. From her vantage point on the ship, trailing the other now by no more than forty yards, Krysty could see what he meant with painful clarity.
A dozen or more of the monsters still beset the squadron. No matter how dramatic, everything the defenders had done had amounted to a pinprick. Nothing more.
With a snarl of disgust Isis threw down her own BAR. Its barrel was glowing red now. It was almost certainly ruined, burned out. More to the point the heat would have warped the barrel, which could trap a bullet before it reached the muzzle. That meant there would be nowhere for the expanding gases of the next fired cartridge to go, except by blowing the receiver apart in the captain’s face.
If she was lucky, that would chill her.
“This isn’t working,” she said. “If there was some way to discourage the bastards…”
Mildred hauled up her longblaster and cranked out all eight shots at a mutie making right for them. The empty 8-round steel clip flipped free with a ching. Krysty saw red streamers in the water before the humped form vanished again.
“Oww,” Mildred moaned. “I feel like a mule’s kicked my shoulder. With sharpened shoes on. Do you have any explosives? They might not kill the things, but—”
A roar made all three women turn to look aft. The Finagle was crossing Egret’s stern. A geyser of water, dark with a white crown, erupted from the bayou close beside the steamboat’s starboard hull. Behind Stork the equally storklike figure of Doc Tanner wound up, raising his left leg and cocking his right arm way back, then hurling an object at an angle off the Finagle’s stubby bow. It splashed among at least a quartet of the huge forms. A moment later another waterspout blasted upward.
“What was that?” Isis exclaimed, shading her eyes with her hand.
“Bombs!” Mildred replied. “J.B.’s making up bundles of some kind of explosive and passing them off to Doc!”
“Son of a—” the captain said.
“We got dynamite, too,” Jammer said from right behind her. Krysty could barely hear for the ringing in her ears. “Waterproof fuse. Whole nine yards.”
The sailing master showed his brown gap-toothed grin. “Never know when you might need to shoot a channel to clear passage.”
Another dirty fountain erupted, then another. The waters around Hope churned white with the furious efforts of the giant aquatic muties.
But Krysty quickly saw the water was being churned by the creatures’ frenzy to escape. A dead monster floated to the surface, belly up, distended and already turning blue from internal organs ruptured by shock waves transmitted much better through water than mere air. The rest seemed to be protected by the thickness of their hides, along with muscle and blubber and whatever else lay beneath. Judging by the speed they made, they weren’t hurt badly.
“I hope they’re not permanently injured,” Krysty said. “Now that they no longer threaten us.”
“Yeah,” Isis said. “So long as they keep running They don’t like the shock waves much.”
Mildred sighed heavily. “So, what the hell were those things, anyway? They looked familiar, somehow.”
Isis turned toward her. “Manatee.”
“You’re telling me we’ve just been attacked by giant mutant sea cows?” Mildred exclaimed.
Jammer grinned at her. “Huge mutie sea cows.”
Chapter Three
Somewhere in the gathering dusk a bittern boomed. A flight of herons rose up from the dense woods northeast of the little island in the middle of a relatively broad bayou where the Tech-nomad squadron had anchored for the night. The bugs swarmed around the companions in jittery clouds, biting lustily despite the smoky driftwood fire that was burning in a pit that had been scraped clear.
Mildred stood with her companions by a small driftwood fire near the widening of the bayou, watching the herons winging majestically into a sky blazing red and orange with sunset. She felt bone-weary. She had helped the Tech-nomads tend their injured, including poor Scooter. The mutie manatee had broken almost all of his bones and torn most of his tendons free of the bone.
Three Tech-nomads had died: one strider-boat pilot drowned, a crew woman on the New Hope had fallen and broken her neck when a mutie manatee rammed the ship, and Scooter had succumbed to his horrendous injuries.
Another dozen were hurt badly enough to require treatment. That meant about a quarter of the squadron’s people had wound up as casualties. Four of their eight pedal-powered scout boats had been smashed beyond repair. Of the three large craft only the New Hope had been seriously damaged. She now lay with a third of her length grounded on a little island down the sluggish stream. The starboard bow had been holed; some seams had been started on the portside. These had been patched up to what the chief shipwright, a short-haired, hard-faced woman named Vonda, claimed was as good as new. Mildred had thought she heard doubt in the woman’s voice, though.
The human toll affected her more than the material. But she was acutely aware the damage the Tech-nomad craft had incurred could come back later and bite somebody in the ass.
Even her friends or her.
Now she watched the big birds fly over, their white feathers turned to flames by the sunset, and sighed deeply.
“That’s one way these swamps are better than most of the Deathlands, anyway,” she said. “Sometimes it doesn’t look at all as if the nuke war and skydark even happened.”
“The waters have tended to obviate the scars left behind by the conflagration and its sequelae,” Dr. Theophilus Tanner said. He was a tall and skinny man with pale blue eyes and a long, hard-worn face framed with lank, gray hair.
Although he looked decades older than any of his companions, he was really about Mildred’s age, mid- to late thirties—if you stacked the years he’d actually lived through together. Like the physician, he was chronically displaced. He had been time-trawled from his own epoch, the late nineteenth century, by late twentieth-century whitecoats working for an ultrasecret project. Doc proved to be difficult. Tired of his antics, his captors sent him hurtling through time into the Deathlands. His time-trawling experiences had aged him so much that he looked to be in his sixties.
He and Mildred were by far the most extensively educated members of the party, in a formal sense—by Deathlands standards, almost ludicrously overeducated. His well-bred manners and pedantic manner sometimes irritated Mildred, as did his holding forth on a vast array of subjects. She considered his knowledge hopelessly out of date. Yet a lot of what he knew of history and natural sciences hadn’t been superseded by time, and he had learned a great deal unknown to his own period during his torment by the whitecoats of Operation Chronos.
Mildred flipped him an annoyed glance and turned her attention to the fire. “Sometimes I think some of the wild things have done better after skydark,” she said.
J.B. chuckled. “Like the killer sea cows,” he said. “Getting turned mutie and all giant and everything seems to have turned the tables for them.”
“GOT VID,” JAK SAID. “Tech-nomads.”
In his economical way the albino teen sounded as if he’d said all that needed saying.
Mebbe he did, Ryan reflected. True to their name the Tech-nomads lived and all but worshipped technology: a combination of tech preserved from the world right before the skydark, low-technology gleaned from millennia before even that, and the results of research and development they’d continued in their own secretive and eccentric