Chapter Thirteen
Ryan frowned. He didn’t care for games, even when his best friend played them.
“No, I don’t, J.B.,” he said. “But I suppose I couldn’t stop you telling me without chilling you on the spot.”
Unfazed, J.B. laughed. “You got that right. This longblaster is called a DeLisle carbine.”
The name tickled the back of Ryan’s brain, which only made him more peevish. “Meaning what? Will you stop walking all around the muzzle and get to the damn trigger?”
J.B. tossed the piece to him. Ryan caught it handily. The weapon was shorter than his Scout, but surprisingly heavy.
“Why’s the barrel so thick?” he asked, examining it.
“That’s an integral suppressor,” J.B. said. “True silencer, actually. That puppy shoots regular .45 ACP handblaster balls, just the same as that Para-Ordnance P45-14 the kid has—another surprisingly sweet piece to pack if he isn’t a coldheart, I have to say. Because the bullet comes out less than the speed of sound, there’s no crack from it. And because the bolt-action locks up tight—it’s built on an old Brit Lee-Enfield .303—not much more than a whisper of sounds gets out, at all.”
“I remember reading something about these,” Mildred said. “Didn’t the British use them for commando missions in World War II?”
“This blaster’s a hundred-fifty years old?”
J.B. shook his head. “Nope. Pretty new, by the state of the metal and the furniture.”
“Surely nobody on the island is manufacturing longblasters,” Krysty said.
“Not manufacturing,” J.B. said. “Smith job. Modifying. Like I said, somebody took an old-days Enfield action, or mebbe an Ishapore like that Oldie of the Sea guy had. Cartridges were the same width as a .45, so mostly what it amounted to was putting on a new barrel, with some holes drilled in it to let the gas bleed into the silencer. And jimmying the receiver to take magazines in the right caliber—probably just handblaster mags. Mebbe both standard for 1911s and the double stacks like the Para-Ordnance shoots. Am I right?”
The captive nodded sullenly.
Ryan handed the weapon back to the armorer, then he turned the full blue fire of his glare on the prisoner.
“All right,” he said. “Who were you spying for, if it wasn’t the coldhearts who torched the ville?”
The black fury that flamed in the youth’s dark brown eyes sure looked real to Ryan. He felt the return glare like a punch. The kid had balls, but he also had the sense not to flare off too much, considering the situation he was in.
“I’m not spying for anybody! I just wanted food.”
“Don’t play games with me, boy,” Ryan said. “You’re mighty young to end the night staring up at the stars. But not so young I won’t put you that way if I don’t hear your story now, and hear it straight!”
Mildred and Doc were going through the pack. “For a fact,” Doc said, “our young guest is not carrying any food beyond some dried fish. And that is mostly crumbs, it would appear.”
Krysty knelt facing the captive. She wasn’t so close he could reach her with a sudden lunge. Not that he was liable to do much with his hands tied behind his back. But Krysty hadn’t stayed alive by taking any more unnecessary chances than the rest of them had.
“So you aren’t with the people who attacked Nuestra Señora,” she said.
He shook his head wildly, and Ryan was startled to see tears drawing bright lines of reflected firelight down his dark olive cheeks. “No! Those putos killed my family, my friends! They took my sister!”
Krysty looked at Ryan in surprise. “Who attacked the ville, then?” he asked.
“It was El Guapo,” the boy said. “And his fucking mutie monster henchman Tiburón. I hate them! I want to see them die twisting in their own guts!”
“Whoa! Slow down, boy,” Ryan said. “Those two didn’t do all that by themselves. It took an army.”
“The Handsome One has an army,” the boy said. “Two hundred coldhearts, mebbe more. He intends to conquer the whole island. That’s why he destroyed Nuestra Señora. We wouldn’t bow down to the bastard!”
“You intend to take on an entire army by yourself?” Doc asked. He shook his head and tut-tutted. “Brave, to be sure. But scarcely practical.”
“I don’t care,” the captive said. He was wagging his head from side to side in frustration. “How can I make you understand?”
“Tell us what happened,” Krysty suggested gently.
“How do I start? There is so much.”
J.B. hunkered down, across the fire from the prisoner. “You could always start at the beginning,” he said. “That works.”
“What’s your name, kid?” Ryan asked. “You can take it from there. We got all night.”
“My name is Ricardo Morales Goza,” the boy began. “My parents call—called me Ricky. I was sixteen years old last month.”
“Go-sa,” J.B. repeated. “Kinda funny name.”
“That’s Spanish,” Ryan said. “Your family name’s Morales, right?”
Ricky nodded.
“Just like they do in Mex Land, see. All right, get on with the telling, kid.”
* * *
H
IS
FATHER
WAS
J
OSÉ
M
ORALES
,
he told them, his mother María Elena. His father was a leading merchant and trader in the ville of Nuestra Señora, while his mother ran their store in town with the help of his older sister Yamile.
Ricky grew up active and happy, with an active mind. He was always prying into things. Sometimes it got him into trouble with adults, sometimes with other kids of the ville. His sister, who was very beautiful but also could be tough at need, had helped pull his butt out of countless scrapes and never told their parents about them. They would have disapproved, for they were raising the boy to live right, by their lights.
But even Yamile, much as she adored Ricky—and he adored her—couldn’t be around all the time. He was undersized as a child, had only gotten a growth spurt a year or two before. He learned to take care of himself. He became a scrapper.
He became even more adept at evading people who were pissed at him—especially the older kids who liked to bully him. Then, he began to lure them into surprises—a plank positioned to whip up and smack an unsuspecting pursuer in the face, a bucket of slops that tipped off a fence when an enemy ducked through the inviting hole that Ricky had slipped through a heartbeat before.
Seemed people were often pissed at him. As a kid on the small side, he learned attitude early on. When he started to grow out of his clothes at an increasingly rapid rate, he didn’t outgrow the attitude. He still had a smart mouth on him. And perhaps not the best judgment about when and with whom to run it.
The ville folk could fight and fight hard at need. Ricky remembered a couple of times when strange ships came from the sea, filled with strange, angry men. There had been shooting then, and screaming and ships burning. Each time, the surviving pirates went away as fast as they could. And each time life quickly returned to a pleasant, peaceful routine.
Eventually Ricky’s propensity for trouble caught up with him. José and María Elena despaired. They were trying to raise a good boy. They had taught him to read and reckon, and to know right from wrong. Why did he treat them that way?
His uncle, María Elena’s brother Benito, intervened. An oddly built man, with a round balding head, a squat body, bowed legs and long arms, Benito was the town mechanic and smith. María Elena loved her brother, and her husband liked him and had a fair regard for him as an honest dealer. But they, like many people in the town, seemed to find Tío Benito less than completely respectable. Some of it was that he liked to drink a bit more rum or palm wine than was sometimes good for him. But largely because he was so obsessed about doing things with his hands, always making or repairing machines of all kinds. Though he held with reading, and reckoning, too, he didn’t hold much with people who thought and talked all the time instead of doing.
And the things he did seemed to smack of the preoccupation with science and technology that characterized the old days, the predark days: the very things that burned the world, and brought on the Long Winter and the terrible years that followed.
But Benito was necessary and valued. And although he could be cranky he was generally well liked.
Benito volunteered to teach the errant Ricky. He’d noticed the boy’s handiness. He reckoned he could find ways to put all that energy to use that didn’t involve him getting into trouble and bringing shame upon his oh-so-respectable family.
Ricky’s parents hesitated. That wasn’t the life they intended for their only son.
They argued late into the night. It seemed to Ricky, lying in a side room on a pallet next to his softly snoring older sister and not even trying not to overhear, that they swapped sides with a certain regularity.
But he had a knack for the sort of thing his Tío Benito did. They couldn’t deny that. He had no inclination to follow his mother and father as shopkeepers, though he did enjoy the yearly trade expeditions his father had taken him on every year since he was ten. But he was more interested in talking to new people and hearing their stories, in listening to the hired sec men tell tales of their rougher, readier lives, than he was in actually doing any kind of business.
It wasn’t as if they didn’t have a child ready and willing to take over the shop when it came time. Yamile seemed to thrive on the very things that stultified her brother. She loved the buying and selling and calculating. She was sharp, and learned fast and eagerly. She could trade tough when she needed to. Her sweet smile and blossoming beauty tended to lull even those who knew the family into underestimating her, either her keenness or her toughness. Which never worked out well for them.
She never cheated anyone. Their parents raised them better than that. But driving a hard bargain was a virtue, not a sin. And they taught her to give value for value, always. Anything else was the code of the coldheart, and to be shunned.
So it was decided. Ricky would still study and do certain chores at home and in the shop. But he would become his uncle’s apprentice.
He took to it like a monkey to climbing. He loved machines, too, the way they worked, the marvelous way, almost a miracle, that disparate parts came together to function, to do things. Not just mechanical pieces, either. His uncle had a windmill, which sometimes ran noisily and annoyed the neighbors. But it fed a generator and recharged various batteries he’d collected. He taught Ricky about electricity and circuits. Not just to understand old-days electrical equipment, and repair it with existing parts when they were available—and improvise some substitute when they weren’t—but to build circuits of his own. Ricky loved that, too. He soaked up knowledge and manual skills like a sponge.
And best of all—and to the despair of his parents, who after a while gave up complaining and simply chose to ignore—were the weapons. Benito taught him to hone blades, and to forge and temper them, as well. Better still, he taught him how blasters worked. And how they didn’t, and what to do when they didn’t. How to cut and file steel, and case-harden it, to make replacement hammers and ejectors. To wind and temper springs. To bore and cut to spec, to cut threads and tap holes for bolts. To measure, precisely and carefully.
This last didn’t come naturally to Ricky, but Benito, though he never raised a hand any more than Ricky’s parents had, had a tongue that cut deeper faster than any well-honed tool in the shop. Ricky learned that to enjoy the pleasure of making things—things that worked as they were supposed to; otherwise, what was the point?—he had to also learn and perform the tedious parts, without shirking or slacking.
Eventually Ricky came to understand why he needed to study boring things, too. He burned with desire to make things, to make broken things work. And the only way to learn how was to go through steps he didn’t find so enjoyable. His adored yet thoroughly boring parents had been right all along.
Not that he would ever master the skills of bookkeeping.
His uncle also saw that he learned to use what he made: especially weapons. Of his many aptitudes, mechanical and electrical, the boy’s greatest knack was for weaponsmithing. Tío Benito had some skill, especially with a skinning knife. He was a fair hand with blasters, too. He taught the boy what he could.
All the men and women of the ville who dealt with weapons dealt with Benito. No matter how José and María Elena felt, to keep the ville law-abiding and peaceful, the pirates had to be kept at bay. He encouraged his friends and customers to teach the boy how to handle arms—and hand-to-hand combat.
On the side, Ricky found his newfound skills useful for concocting new and marvelous traps. Not that he had much occasion to use them. He was getting bigger. And, while his fighting skills were definitely a work in progress, the local bullies had long since lost any joy in tormenting him.
Besides, the new traps he was inventing were of an exceedingly deadly nature.
He never got any chance to use any of the more lethal skills Benito’s cronies and customers had imparted, but he still went out regularly on expeditions with his father and loved them more than ever. Especially when he got to talk technique with local smiths and tinkers.
His father grudgingly allowed him to handle and assess weapons he was intending to purchase. Ricky often helped him pick up broken or badly cared for weapons for little more than the cost of a fresh coconut or a mango. With Benito’s skill, or increasingly even his own, these could be transformed into perfectly usable—hence salable—firearms.
But José Morales never allowed his boy to carry arms in the field. Not even a knife, beyond a Swiss Army pocketknife that had come through the shop by way of a seaborne trader. And there was seldom much actual excitement on their trips. Most of the people in this part of the island led settled lives.
The occasional fight the expeditions faced was almost always against animals of some sort, ranging from tigers to the bizarre and awful creatures that had resulted in the nickname “Monster Island.” Although Ricky’s mother had sadly explained that that was as much because people like his friend Ivan and his family lived in peace alongside more usual-looking folk than because of the abundance and variety of lethal mutant animals that haunted the forests, and occasionally raided farms or even the ville’s fringes.