Storm Breakers (23 page)

“I can believe that,” he said.

“Can you walk?”

“I got to,” he said without hesitation. “So I can.”

“Lady Katerina,” a calm, masculine voice said. “All is in readiness.”

“Excellent, Caine,” the woman said. “Thank you.”

J.B. glanced toward where the voice came from. A tall, thin, distinguished-looking man with silver hair stood there. He was also dressed for outside, in a bulky parka with the fur-lined hood thrown back.

“Mr. Dix,” the baroness said, “I have had your gear and weapons taken to the motor launch. Now you must dress. And as quickly as you can. We have no more time.”

He nodded. This time the effort stabbed him in the chest like an ice pick. Where the bullet hit me, he thought.

“Then give me my hat, please,” he said. “I...earned it.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

The rain screamed down through roaring wind. The gangplank bucked and twisted beneath Krysty’s booted feet. The freighter’s hull boomed and moaned as waves threw it against the immense tires, maybe twice as tall as Ryan, that had been roped to the dock to act as bumpers. Seen from this close, in the faint radiance of the storm lanterns at the landward end of the gangplank, the hull showed patches of obvious rust where the paint had flaked away.

Overhead the clouds boiled like lead.

The rain felt frigid. It wasn’t hard to keep her head down, as if in numb compliance, fixed on the nylon rope that allegedly bound her wrists together before her. The rain felt like little spears when it hit her eyes. It plastered her hair to her head—and also, she knew, muted its distinctive radiant color, which could come in handy if any of the slavers they had brushed up against had survived to make it back to base carrying tales of the triple-hard band of wanderers they’d had the bad luck to encounter....

“What’s that?” called a harsh voice from the freighter’s storm-tossed deck ahead and above.

“Got some specials to deliver,” Ryan called out. His voice sounded slightly muffled by the hood of the coat he’d found and put on over his own greatcoat. Also he put a hoarse rasp to his voice to make it harder to recognize, should anyone here have heard it. It was a long shot. But since they could defend against it, why not?

All had gone as Ryan planned. Easier, as far as Krysty was concerned. By the time they reached the compound gates the rain had started, cold and hard from the outset. The guards had barely glanced at Ryan and Ricky from the shelter of their shack before hauling open the barrier and waving them through.

They’d found their way to the storage structures Ryan had observed from above, which were dark and deserted. They parked the truck and sneaked into a back one to prepare for their next move.

“What about the black one?” a second guard’s voice asked. “She don’t look special to me.”

“How would I know?” Ryan snarled. “I just do what I’m told. Mebbe you better do likewise.”

He put a genuine snap in the words. “Hey, man, no problem,” the second guard said hastily. “No problem. We’re all just out here doing our jobs in this freezing-ass shit.”

Aft, which seemed to Krysty to be a mile away, another, larger ramp led to the deck. For a while, slaves had been herded up that and into the hold. But when the gale really began to rock and roll, that ramp had been shut down. Whether the slavers were unwilling to risk having their merchandise flung wholesale into the water and crushed by the hull slamming the tire-buffered stone seawall, or if they just didn’t want to expose themselves to the danger or the discomfort, Krysty didn’t know.

Ryan walked behind her, prodding her occasionally with the muzzle of his longblaster. He had goosed her once, just as they started up the ramp. She hadn’t reacted to it, but silently promised to pay him back for that one.

Doc shoved Mildred along at the point of his handblaster. Behind came Jak. All three of the men were well muffled and hooded in garments Jak and Ryan turned up in a quick search of the cargo area.

The flexible gangplank got steeper as it approached the deck. Krysty was glad of the ropes that ran along either side at about the level of her short ribs. She wished she could grab on to them. But her tied hands, as fake as the bonds were, were necessary to the deception.

When Ryan told the companions that the only visible sign that distinguished slavers from slaves was the weapons, he hadn’t just been making idle conversation. Not that he often did. It was on little more than the strength of that fact that they’d made it this far.

But a few feet from the deck of the
Serge Broom
everything started to unravel. “Hey, now,” the first guard who’d spoken said. “Something don’t smell quite right. I think we better call the officer of the watch to check this out.”

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Ryan said. He held up his left hand with forefinger raised.

Krysty knew that, because lifting her face long enough to see past her rain-weighted lashes, she saw the guard to her left jerk back his head slightly. His eyes rolled up as if to look at the third one that had neatly appeared between them and his knit watch-cap. Then he folded to the deck.

Krysty and Mildred both went to one knee. The other guard opened his eyes and mouth wide as if to shout a warning. Then his face went even whiter and he shut his mouth abruptly as Ryan, Doc and Jak aimed their imposing blasters at him above the women’s backs.

He raised his hand away from the funny-looking submachine gun hanging horizontally in front of his hips on a long sling.

Jak eeled between Krysty and Mildred to slip around behind the guard. He put away his big, gaudy, loud .357 Magnum Colt Python and instead held the belled blade of a hunting knife against the guard’s throat.

The rest hustled up onto deck. Once there, Ryan turned and waved back toward the dock. Ricky appeared around a stack of the monster tires a few feet from the gangplank and hustled up it, carrying his carbine in one hands and clutching the safety in the other.

Ryan knelt beside the guard Ricky had silently chilled with a shot from the DeLisle. He checked for signs of life as Krysty and Mildred shucked their loosely wound bindings, nodding in satisfaction. Then, picking up the man’s Ruger Mini-14 longblaster from the deck, Ryan jerked his chin at the living guard.

“Truss him and take him. We’ve got questions.”

“Will he give us answers?” asked Mildred, who was gagging him from behind with a rag they’d snagged from the cargo hootch for that very purpose.

Krysty didn’t think Ryan’s answering smile was very nice.

“Yes, he will,” he said. “Won’t you?”

Rolling his eyes from one to the other, the guard nodded so hard it looked as if his head would pop off.

* * *

A
NOTHER
BUCKETFUL
OF
salt spray hit J.B. in the face. It felt like a handful of pebbles. Keeping one hand clamping the fedora on his head and the other locked on to the cockpit rail, he shook his head like a dog to clear his glasses. At least for the handful of heartbeats before they busted the crest of another wave and he got blasted in the face again.

The lunging, rolling, yawing motion of the twenty-odd-foot motor launch made him feel as if he were getting stabbed in the chest with each and every random motion. He reckoned they couldn’t be moving at anything resembling a safe or sane speed. Not that he had a snowball’s chance in hell of judging it with anything like accuracy.

I hate water wags, he thought. The ground at least stays put when you drive on it. Mostly.

Standing at his side, Katerina Frost piloted the craft with a look of grim determination and evident skill. As they set out, J.B. had asked how she knew how to drive one of these things. She said that as a girl she had accompanied her uncle on trading voyages and learned to handle powerboats then.

He did notice how she steered parallel to the waves as much as possible, and when it wasn’t, tried to climb their faces at an angle before they broke, which at least managed to keep them on top and the water on the bottom. Mostly.

The tall gray-haired man she called Caine stood behind them in the little cockpit. He spoke with what J.B. recognized as a Brit accent. The mat-trans system had jumped him and his friends to England once or twice.

Though it wasn’t common, ships did make the perilous crossing of the Lantic, and thus so did men. And women. Whether to trade or because one of the other continents had become to hot for them was always an open question. J.B. reckoned Caine had to have spent years serving on a ship, let alone ridden one over. The man stood with his gloved hands folded behind his back and legs braced, and needed no more than that to avoid going over.

Unlike J.B.

It came to J.B. that it was no coincidence his anesthesia fantasies had wound up in the very ville they were bashing through waves toward right this moment, Tavern Bay. He’d known they were within about fifty miles of the place the first time the sky cleared enough for him to shoot their location with his mini-sextant.

But the path Ryan chose for them didn’t take them anywhere near there. So J.B. had never thought to mention his earlier visit with Trader, at least a year before Ryan joined the convoy. Nor was J.B. in the habit of reminiscing out loud. Any more than he was in the habit of saying
anything
without due cause.

But his subconscious was well aware how near they were to the end point of his tumultuous first trip with Trader. And now he was heading back to that mutie- and memory-haunted ville.

“Why now?” he asked.

“I beg your pardon?” she asked without looking away from the churning violence of the sea. She had the gift of making her voice penetrate without shouting.

“I said, why wake me now?” yelled J. B., who didn’t.

“We have received intelligence—terrible intelligence, which only I in all the barony truly understood. Indeed, I fear that’s what triggered the change, though no one really knows why that happens, any more than they can foresee the hour appointed. So I dosed dear Vanya with sleeping meds and browbeat Rao until she roused you.

“So what is this danger my friends have gotten themselves into this time?”

“They are threatened by
lyagushki,
” she said. “The so-called muties of Tavern Bay—the frogs, as you know them.”

“How’d you know about that?”

“You spoke in your drugged sleep.”

He grimaced, then chuckled. He had almost blurted out the question,
What
else
did I say?

It was as if he was still channeling his young, impulsive self in ways. From before he learned to clamp down his emotions tight as a workpiece. Now Mildred was always after him to let his feelings out more, after all he’d gone through to get them under control.

He shook his head. There was just no pleasing some people. Although, he remembered with a pang, he pleased her triple-well in other ways. And she him.

He shook that off. He ached to see her. His other friends, as well. Now he was on his way to do just that.

So, no point bothering fuddling up my brain with irrelevant details now, he thought. It’s already messed up enough from the anesthetic.

“The
lyagushki
plan a sacrifice to their dread undersea god. I believe it is nothing but superstition. And yet I feel myself starting to feel the horrible impulse to worship him. Among other things.

“Apparently the drive is genetic. Engineered. We were made that way, you see. What...befalls us is no accident, no chance mutation.”

“So who did all this? Whitecoats before the Big Nuke?”

“Yes. They were devils. People today are right to fear them. Though some are fools and fear learned healers like Rao.”

Only then did J. B. say, “Wait. ‘
We’?
”

“We. I come from Tavern Bay. And—I am one of them. The accursed.

“You see, we all start as humans. Then at some point in our lives—it differs for each one—we change. Our bodies begin to transform. Sometimes it takes weeks or months; sometimes it happens overnight. Our minds also change. Likewise our emotions, which become...dreadful. I can feel them now, like demon voices gibbering in the night. I can keep them at bay.”

She raised her head toward the horizon. Or where J.B. reckoned the horizon likely had to be, given that any farther than a strong man could toss a gren it was impossible tell the sea from the sky. It began to rain again, harder than it had before.

“But keep them at bay I shall,” she said. “For as long as I must.”

J.B. glanced over his shoulder at the silent servant.

“Caine knows,” Katerina said. “He is my sole confidant. He is as loyal to me as he is to his baron, and his loyalty to my dear husband is absolute.

“But still—he kept my terrible secret for me all these years. Because though our marriage was arranged, dear Vanya came to love me with all his heart. And I him, which is why I now must part with him forever.”

Despite the rain and spray J.B. saw unmistakable tears welling in her eyes, to be whipped away by the rising gale.

“So you feel, like, this compulsion?” he asked.

“Yes. Even now. To join my kind. And...to serve. I believe we were made to instinctively serve our makers, who were mere men, if of perverted genius. But they are long turned to dust and ash. And that doglike loyalty has become...transferred to our god.”

And deep in her throat she made a strange rumbling noise. To J.B., above the crash of wind and waves, it sounded as if she were growling the letters, “E.A.,” several times.

His natural curiosity made him want to ask what they stood for. And the judgment, the cost of obtaining that which he had just relived—in however fouled-up a form—made him decide to keep his trap shut.

“So what do we do?” he asked instead.

“Warn your friends,” she said. “Or save them. And my daughter. So they can get her back to Stormbreak safely.”

“What about you?”

She looked at him. For all the curious gauntness of her face, the hollowness in her cheeks, he saw the beauty that had to still captivate the baron.

“I will never become one of them,” she said.

He nodded. “Roger that,” he said.

J.B. looked ahead, as if it would do any good. At least his specs kept the rain from blasting his eyeballs, although they ran with so much water he couldn’t have seen much even had there been anything to see.

“How much farther?” he asked.

“Not far,” she said. “We’re passing Tavern Bay now, in fact.”

She nodded to her right, evidently at something she could see that he couldn’t, that helped her keep her bearings.

“We should come in sight of the slaver anchorage in fifteen minutes,” she said. “I hope we come in time.”

“Yeah,” he said.

* * *

T
HEY
FOUND
AN
unused stateroom on the deck below the main one, beneath the superstructure there by the bow where the bridge was. Locked inside, out of sight of any passing slaver, Ryan took the captive’s gag off, having first impressed on him that the cost of trying to holler for help would be swift and painful.