Authors: James Axler
He needed no further encouragement than the half-dozen faces staring at him in grim expectancy. Well, them and the blasters that went with them.
“That special girl is up on the deck below the bridge,” he said. “She’s the prime package for this whole run. I hear she’s daughter to some hayseed baron up north along the coast a ways.”
“Do tell,” Mildred said.
With deliberate speed Ryan fired questions at him, terse and to the point. Their captive showed a tendency to babble, until Jak jabbed him in the cheek with the tip of his hunting knife, hard enough to start him bleeding. That got his mind right and his sentences short.
“Ace,” Ryan said. “We got what he knows. And what we need to.”
“How do you know he’s not lying?” Mildred asked. She was clutching the Mini-14 longblaster Ryan had taken from the guard Ricky had chilled and glaring at the one he hadn’t. The carbine had a banana magazine holding thirty 5.56 mm rounds in the well. She had several reloads stuffed in her belt.
“Because he knows if he lies, some of us might make it back here to settle up accounts with him. Which you know you wouldn’t like, right?”
He grabbed a pinch of the man’s cheek and twisted hard. The man nodded energetically.
“Gag him again, tie his feet, then stash him in the closet,” Ryan said.
“Why not chill the bastard?” Ricky asked. “The way you did that driver and his son?”
“Because, unlike in their case, I see a way to stash him,” Ryan said. “And because I don’t have time to go chilling people solely on account of their moral failings.”
He turned away. “Anyway, a few more questions may occur to me. Don’t worry. You’ll get to chill a load of coldhearts before the night is out, I don’t even doubt. Speaking of which—Krysty, take this.”
Ryan tossed her the blaster Jak had taken from the captive. The redhead fielded it with her usual catlike reflexes. And promptly almost dropped it, despite the manlike strength of her arms and hands.
“Gaia, lover, it’s heavy!” she exclaimed. Her big emerald eyes stared down at it as if it was a dead fish, not a black tube covered in peeling black enamel, with a pistol grip and a skinny box magazine stuck on the bottom, and a thinner barrel up front. “What
is
it?”
“M3A1 grease gun,” said Ricky, his dark eyes shining. “Submachine gun, blowback operated, fires from an open bolt. Uses the same .45 ACP ammo my blasters do. America mass-produced them during World War II because—”
“Enough,” Ryan said.
“Anyway, it’s easy to use,” Ricky said. “You’ll love it. It’s sweet. I’ll show you how.”
Frowning dubiously, Krysty nodded. Ricky bustled up to show her its workings.
“They call it the ‘grease gun’ because it looks like one,” he couldn’t resist adding. “You know, like what mechanics use—”
“Ricky.”
“Yes, sir. So anyway, this lever here drops the magazine out of the well...”
“So, what’s our plan?” Mildred asked.
“Sneak up into the superstructure. Chill the guards. Steal the girl. Not what you’d call complex.”
“I mean for getting out of here.”
“You got me.”
He had to grin at the look of sheer amazement she gave him, with her eyebrows crawling halfway up her broad forehead toward her beaded cornrows.
“What do you mean?” she demanded.
“I mean I don’t know,” he said. “Yet.”
“You have
got
to be shitting me. You still don’t have a plan for getting out?”
“We lack sufficient information to formulate any kind of rational plan,” Doc offered helpfully.
“Yes. So. I’m working on that. All right?”
He heard Krysty haul back the heavy bolt of the grease gun to cock it. Ryan
did
know what the weapon was. He only wished, with a hastily suppressed twinge in his chest, that J.B. was here to see it.
“Ace,” Krysty said. “You’re right, Ricky. It is easy.”
“So you’re good to go now, right?”
“I’m good to take Mildred and start freeing the slaves aboard,” she said. “Right.”
Ryan felt himself getting angry. “Step back away from the trigger of that blaster, Krysty. Has that soft heart of yours started softening your brain, too?”
Her eyes flashed green fire, but she answered evenly as well as briskly.
“Part of it’s compassion, yes. I want to help these poor people—as much as I can without endangering our mission. Or my friends.”
Ryan was getting the sinking feeling he’d really stepped in it with that one. Well, I gotta survive to take the consequences, he reassured himself.
“And I strongly suspect,” Krysty went on, “that when the slavers realize we’re here, as they are sure going to and at the worst possible time, you want them to have something to think about other than running us down. Right, lover?”
He held his hands up in surrender. “Okay, okay. You win.”
“Of course.”
“Who are you taking?”
“Mildred.”
“Which of the others, Jak or Ricky?”
“Just Mildred,” Krysty said.
He gave her a look.
She tossed her hair. It hadn’t really dried out after that soaking it had gotten—it was too humid inside the ship for that to happen anytime soon—but had gotten some life back.
“We women can handle our job just fine,” she said a bit tartly. “Right, Mildred?”
“Um—right? Right.”
“Four of you males aren’t too many for stealth,” Krysty said. “And not too many for what you’ll be facing.”
Ryan sighed. “Yeah.” Then he smiled.
Krysty and Mildred both looked at him suspiciously.
“What?” Mildred demanded. “I hate it when you get that look.”
Ryan laughed. “I just figured out our plan for getting off this death trap. These slavers must have boats. A launch or two, mebbe. Certainly lifeboats.”
“Slavers?” Mildred said. “You think they care that much about—”
“About their own personal asses? Nuking straight. So we grab the girl while you two spring as many slaves as you can as a diversion. Then we hop in a boat, lower it to the water and power out of here.”
Both women stared at him.
“That plan sucks,” Mildred said. “There’s a storm
coming, Ryan.”
“Fireblast, Mildred! Do you have a better plan? Would you rather swim?”
Krysty came up to kiss Ryan briefly on the cheek. “We’ll go,” she said. “And trust my resourceful wolf to come up with a decent escape plan.”
She winked at him.
“Right. We best get going now. Time’s blood, and right now,” Ryan said, “it’s spurting out like an artery’s cut.”
Chapter Thirty
Holding a longblaster down by his side by the grip, Ryan strode down the passageway as if he belonged in it. Jak trotted at his side. He had his black watch cap pulled low and his chin pressed down in the turned-up collar of his purloined overcoat to hide as much of his albino skin as possible.
The deck rocked beneath Ryan’s feet to no knowable rhythm. The ship’s mass dampened the effects of the waves but couldn’t cancel the ocean’s power. The vessel’s hull and structure boomed and creaked as the chaotic stresses came and went.
The pair of slavers on guard outside what they hoped was Lyudmila Frost’s stateroom/cell were way more suspicious than the pair atop the gangplank. One had greasy dark hair, a beard and a gut hanging out the front of a black leather jacket. The other was lean, mean, graying and buzz-cut, with round glasses that reminded Ryan of J.B. as the two swung to confront them with their blasters. Beard Man had a double-barrel shotgun, Buzz Cut a battered folding-stock AK-47.
“No passage here, asswipes,” Buzz Cut snarled. “Only those with business go farther. And you ain’t got no business, so fuck right off.”
“Hey, now,” Ryan said easily. “No worries. Been a change of plans.”
“That little dude!” Beard Man exclaimed. “He’s snow white! He’s a mutie!”
Ryan swung up the blaster. It wasn’t his usual Steyr, but Ricky’s homebuilt DeLisle replica. It chuffed once. Ryan felt even less recoil than he would have from his lower-caliber handblaster, with all that mass to soak up the .45 round’s energy.
So quiet was the shot, he heard the 230-grain copper-jacketed ball smash through Beard Man’s breastbone. He dropped the blaster with a clatter and staggered back, clutching his chest.
Jak made a blur-fast motion with his right hand. Buzz Cut dropped his AK-47 to grab with both hands at the steel hilt of one of Jak’s throwing knives, sticking out of his left eye socket. It had punched right through the lens of his glasses.
“Good job, Jak,” Ryan said. “Take them inside to finish them. Less blood.”
Jak grinned and nodded.
Ricky and Doc trotted down the corridor behind them. Ricky toted Ryan’s Scout carbine.
“Need me to pick the lock?” the youth asked.
Jak moved close to Buzz Cut. The man had fallen back against the door, and he was too preoccupied by pain even to notice. Jak grabbed his chin and slammed the back of his head against the steel door, then snatched the ring of keys off his belt and brandished them.
“Think we got it,” Ryan said, exchanging weapons with Ricky. “This blaster really is pretty sweet, you know.”
“Thanks!” Ricky said.
“Too easy,” Jak said as he worked the stateroom lock. “Not like.”
“Not too easy,” Ryan replied, with a lightness he didn’t feel. “We haven’t got to the hard part yet.”
Scowling, Jak opened the door. Ryan drew his panga and went in.
The stumpy older woman whom they had watched board with the baron’s daughter was kneeling at the foot of the bed, sobbing into her hands. A weight descended on Ryan’s back. Skinny but strong legs wrapped around his waist. Someone began screaming in his ear and clawing for his eyes.
Then the shrieking creature was gone. Ryan spun to see a girl with black hair and fury-red face, windmilling gangly arms and legs as Doc, who was stronger than he looked, held her up off the deck from behind.
“Fireblast, girl!” he said. “What the nuke is wrong with you? We’re here to rescue you.”
“It’s true,” Doc said reassuringly. “Your parents sent us. Baron Ivan and Lady Katerina Frost.”
The furious girl subsided. “And I was supposed to know that how? Put me down.”
Ryan nodded. Doc complied.
He had carried her into the stateroom. Immediately Ricky and Jak dragged the two guards inside by their collars. Both were still breathing. Briefly.
The girl stood and watched as Jak slit each man’s throat with a butcher’s expert hand.
“Bastards.” She spit on Buzz Cut and then went up and kicked the feebly moving slaver in the side. “He was one of the ones who...hurt Darya. You should have let me take care of him!”
Ryan was starting to see why her mother and father had decided to ship her off somewhere. Still, he had to admire her fighting spirit.
He looked around. The chamber was spartan: bed, lamp, table, writing desk, a chair. A closet built out from the bulkhead.
The
Serge Broom
uttered an especially loud groan, followed by three loud knocks, like a giant whaling on pipes with a claw hammer.
“¡Nuestra Señora!”
Ricky yipped. “Do ships always make such sounds in a storm?”
“Yes,” Ryan said.
“So it’s not breaking up?”
“Probably not.”
Milya was staring from one to another. She was wearing a T-shirt, jeans and sneakers. They were clean, or at least seemed to have been worn no more than a day or two.
Her blue eyes fastened on Ryan. “Who are you?” she demanded.
“Your rescue party, Lyudmila,” Ryan said. “We need to move now.”
Though Ryan’s skin was crawling right up his back in his anxiousness to be done with this gig—or at least onto the still-sketchy part, which was getting off the damned tub with Lyudmila plus all their parts—they had hidden out and given Krysty and Mildred a ten-minute head start to start freeing slaves. Then they’d had to be careful working their way up the stairs to the deck right below the pilot house.
At least they hadn’t needed to chill anybody on the way, with the attendant risks of noise or somebody stumbling onto chills.
“Anything here you need?” Ryan asked Milya.
She shook her head. “Just give me a blaster.”
Ryan hesitated, then he remembered Alysa mentioning the girl had gotten combat training. Plus the story the freed slaves had told of her vigorous if futile, and painful, defiance.
“Take the AK,” he said. “You know how to put the rad-blasted safety on, right?”
She stood up with the weapon and with a glare at Ryan worked the big selector lever with her thumb. It moved with the trademark Kalashnikov clack.
“Like the slavers ever do,” she said.
“Right.” He turned to the servant, who had turned away from the now-dead bodies and the considerable red pools they had bled out and was sobbing louder than before.
“Get up,” he said. “We’re not going to carry you.”
“Sandra, please,” Milya said. “Come with us.” She had put a parka from the closet on and was slinging the longblaster’s strap around her skinny neck.
But Sandra just shook her head, moaned and waved her hand for them to go.
“Right,” Ryan said. They weren’t getting paid to take her anywhere. As far as they knew, she wasn’t even from Stormbreak.
From somewhere a siren began to wail. A moment later a Klaxon joined in, deafeningly loud, from the flying bridge right overhead.
“Told,” Jak said. “Too easy.”
Ryan shook his head. “We knew it was coming.”
“No doubt the slaves the ladies have set free were spotted escaping,” Doc said.
“Alarm start on land,” Jak said. “Not boat.”
“Whatever,” Ryan stated. “Right now we need to get down the stairs and start looking for a ride home.
* * *
“S
HIT
,” M
ILDRED
SAID
A
s blaring mechanical noise filled the stairway where she and Krysty crouched.
The redheaded woman winced. The noise ricocheting up and down the steel passage hurt her ears.
At least they had managed to free fifty or so slaves before the alarm went off. They had asked the slaves to free as many of their fellow victims as they could before trying to flee the ship. She hoped some had listened.
How they’d fare if they got off the gangplank and into the slavers’ base she had no idea. They seemed eager to try, at least. And if she and Mildred were turning them loose to get slaughtered like sheep—well, at least they’d have a chance at freedom.
Mildred craned her neck to peer briefly through the little window in the door. On the other side the hold had been divided into huge pens by metal partitions bolted to floor and ceiling. Whatever you were supposed to call them on a boat. Or a ship.
“I see three of the bastards,” Mildred said, ducking back, holding her Mini-14 muzzle-up. “Thirty yards or so out, coming this way. Got blasters in hand but look mostly puzzled.”
Krysty frowned as she considered their options. They weren’t good.
“Fuck it,” she said.
At her nod Mildred opened the door. Krysty stepped through and began blasting away.
* * *
J
AK
AND
R
ICKY
raced up the companionway
from the main deck as fast as their legs could carry them. Their thudding footfalls echoed in the stairwell. Obviously they weren’t worried about being heard. Ryan doubted anyone could be heard over the racket made by the storm tossing the ship around with increasing force violence, and the grinding yammer of the Klaxon.
Ryan led the small group that had been following a landing or two back while the younger men scouted the way. Behind him came Milya. Ryan didn’t feel comfortable having a fourteen-year-old who had an attitude
before
the slavers pissed her off hotter than nuke red right behind him with a full-auto blaster. Then again, she did have the safety on. Last he checked. Doc brought up the rear, with both blaster and sword in hand.
“Slavers?” Ryan called. He saw no reason to keep his voice down. He couldn’t, if he wanted to be heard.
“No,” Ricky screamed. “Frogs! They’re swarming onboard and fighting with the slavers!”