“Tom,” said Great Scott, an overtly gay guy in a loose canvas shirt and shorts, who shaved his head and wore a tiny little soul patch. His voice had a warning tone.
He was another technical wizard of some sort Ryan didn’t even understand. Then again, that pretty much defined any random Tech-nomad. Even when they had some kind of readily defined and comprehensible specialty—like Sparks, the commo guy, or Jenn, who kept the Hope’s unconventional power train turning smoothly and was keeping to her cabin today, unfortunately incapacitated by grief at having watched her lover die the previous day—they usually had a raft of other skills. Almost always including ones Mildred and even Doc Tanner strained to grasp, and which went right by Ryan.
The captain scowled. “Blind Norad, Scott. They’re two hundred miles away. It’s not like these people know where they’re heading, or could pass along any information to anybody. And besides, they’re on our side. Remember?”
Long Tom smiled. He had what amounted to extraordinary diplomatic skills for a Tech-nomad. Ryan reckoned it had a lot to do with why he was boss of this traveling freakshow.
Great Scott just glowered. Ryan reckoned he could read that pretty clearly, too. There were Tech-nomads, and there were outsiders. Never the twain should meet.
And he could understand that, at least. It was the same way he felt about the little group of survivors he’d gathered around him, who’d become his family in a deeper and truer way than any blood kin ever had.
Voices pulled his attention aft. Doc was walking toward them talking animatedly with the squadron’s chief engineer, a pretty woman named Katie who wore incredibly baggy khaki coveralls with only a green sports bra beneath them. She had her brown hair covered by a red bandanna. Her normal gig was boss wrench on Smoker’s Finagle’s First Law. But her skipper had virtually built the ship’s steam-powered engines with his own hands, Ryan had been told. He could keep them turning smoothly while his mechanic spent much of her time doctoring up the eccentric and cranky rotor-sail-driven system onboard New Hope.
Doc and Katie were just passing the foremost of the three rotor-sails: tall white cylinders pierced with spiral whirls of holes that apparently could catch wind from any angle to turn the rotors. These in turn could either act somehow like sails, or drive propellers. They also turned generators to store power in batteries for when the winds died down. It was a mystery to Ryan, and it was fine with him if it stayed that way.
The sails tended to creak shrilly and annoyingly when a stiff wind turned them rapidly, as it did now. Everybody had to raise their voices to make themselves heard.
“What I’m endeavoring to understand, dear lady,” said Doc, who was in his shirtsleeves, the height of informality for him, “is, why do you not share the gifts of your wondrous technology with the world at large? It sorely needs them.”
The group of Tech-nomads at the bow went silently tense. “What do you mean by that?” Randy barked.
“Why, nothing deprecatory, friend,” Doc said, blinking like a big confused bird. “I merely…wondered. Oh, dear.”
Doc’s experiences being yanked back and forth through time had had effects other than prematurely aging him. They had fuddled his mind. It didn’t keep him from being brilliant, nor functioning at a very high level. For periods ranging from minutes to months at a time. And sometimes he was easily confused.
“I’ve been wondering the same thing, too,” Mildred said. “I mean, no offense or anything. But why don’t you share more of your knowledge with people? You could make a big difference.”
“You think we haven’t tried?” Katie asked with unlooked-for ferocity. Normally the wrench was among the most approachable of Tech-nomads, would’ve been considered affable by the standards of normal people. To the extent anybody in the Deathlands could be considered normal.
The others tossed a look around like it was something hot.
“Uh-oh,” J.B. said to Ryan under his breath. “We stepped on some toes, here.”
Ryan shrugged. However spiky the Tech-nomads could be, no one had ever called them quick on the trigger. While he was never going to take for granted they could never get pissed off enough to chuck him and his friends over the rail and tell them to walk from here, a Tech-nomad was more likely to get spit on your shirt screaming into your face than take a shot at you.
Long Tom wrinkled up his bearded face. “Don’t think we haven’t tried,” he said. “The problem is, people aren’t willing to listen.”
“Tom,” Great Scott began. “Are you sure—?”
“No,” Tom said. “It’s been a long time since I was sure of anything. But if we’re going to trust these people to have our backs in a fight I think we can open up a little with them.”
“Good thing we had them in that fight with the mutie sea cows,” Sparks said. “Without Ryan and the kid they’d’ve sunk us for sure yesterday.”
Jak looked fierce at being called a “kid,” but he didn’t say anything.
“Problem is,” Sparks said, “most people don’t want to know. Or the barons won’t let them learn. And we never teach to barons.”
“You don’t believe in law and order?” J.B. asked.
Sparks shrugged. “Mostly we don’t believe in rule.”
“When we give common people what I like to call tech-knowledge-y,” Styg said, “the barons steal it, suppress it, or both.”
Styg was a stocky Tech-nomad with curly brown hair, who carried a number of pens and mechanical pencils in an ancient, cracked, yellowed protector in the pocket of the long-sleeved blue, white and black plaid flannel shirt he wore despite the humid heat. He’d been introduced to the companions as, “Styg, short for Stygimoloch. Don’t ask.” Nobody had.
“When we give it to barons the barons use it to strengthen their iron grip on the people. So I say, fuck barons, and fuck people who won’t help themselves.”
That got a murmur of assent, although Long Tom looked pained. To Ryan the Tech-nomads sounded frustrated.
“What if they grab you and try to make you teach them?” Ryan asked.
Long Tom chuckled humorlessly. “That’d be a triple-poor idea, friend. We make real bad captives and hostages, and even worse slaves.”
“We got measures,” Randy said with a nasty grin.
“What ones?” Jak asked.
“Pray you never find out.”
“Wait,” Krysty said. “There’s something here I don’t understand.”
“What’s that?” Long Tom asked. Like all the men except Great Scott, he was especially attentive to Krysty. Mostly it amused Ryan.
“Isn’t the cargo we’re guarding Tech-nomad tech for the baron of Haven?”
Everybody spoke denial at once. “It’s not the baron,” Long Tom managed to say over the others. “It’s his chief healer and whitecoat, Mercier.”
“But he works for the baron,” J.B. said. “What’s the difference?”
“She,” Katie said.
“Huh?” J.B. said.
“Mercier,” Long Tom said. “She’s a she.”
“Don’t you think a woman can be a whitecoat?” asked Katie, who seemed to still be in defensive mode.
J.B. shrugged. “Man, woman, doesn’t matter to me. At least, not that I’d ever let on, or Mildred’d yank a knot in my…tail.”
“Damn straight,” Mildred said, crossing her arms beneath her breasts.