Authors: James Axler
Chapter Thirty-One
Even over the growl of the twin engines and the rising bellow of the storm, J. B. Dix heard sirens and Klaxons as Katerina Frost drove the motor launch toward the black bulk of the slaver ship.
Lights began to blaze up in the slaver base ashore, big, bright electrics, obviously generator-powered.
By their blue-white glare J.B. could see shapes climbing the enormous cables that made the ship fast to the dock. They were horrifyingly inhuman—and even more horrifyingly familiar.
“Lyagushki,”
Katerina said, glancing up from the wheel. “It has begun.”
J.B. climbed into the cargo compartment aft of the cockpit, where Caine opened a chest bolted to the deck. From it he took a vest with pockets laden with shotgun shells and long narrow magazines. With unspeaking courtesy he helped J.B. shrug into the vest, then handed him his Smith & Wesson M-4000 shotgun and his Uzi. He checked both to make sure they were loaded with a round chambered, and slung them.
Still silent, Caine produced a double shoulder rig. A pair of blocky Glocks rode in the attached holsters. Both straps carried multiple mags.
“Lady Katerina,” he said in his clipped Brit accent.
She nodded. She was fighting the boat through the waves now, which had gotten less choppy and violent but bigger since they passed the headland cliffs. But she kept them on course, as steady as the tiny vessel could be, as she took first one hand off and then the other to allow her servant to strap the harness on.
He stepped back. “You know what to do,” she said.
“Yes, my lady.”
“Get the grapnel gun ready.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She flashed a quick glance over her shoulder at J.B. He was shocked at how much her face seemed to have changed. Her blue eyes were bulging now, her face longer and the cheeks even more hollow. She still retained a wild beauty, if not entirely human.
“Ready to climb?” she asked. Her teeth looked shockingly sharper than human teeth should.
“No,” he answered honestly. “But you know I will.”
“Yes.” She flashed him an alarming smile and turned back to the controls. The black stern of the ship already loomed like a cliff, but a cliff that rocked and slid to the irresistible fury of the storm waves.
“You are a good man, John Barrymore Dix,” she said. “Whatever happens, I am happy we could save such a man as you.”
He didn’t have much to say to that. So nothing was what he said.
* * *
“T
HEY
’
LL
BE
WAITING
for you fuckwads on the bridge,” snarled the slaver with the right forearm swinging unnaturally in a blood-soaked sleeve. A .357 Magnum bullet from Jak’s Colt Python had broken both radius and ulna. “They’ll blast you the second you show your bastard faces.”
Ryan crouched on the metal steps just below the open hatch to the pilothouse. He held the slaver in front of him with his left hand and the AK he’d forcibly borrowed from Milya in his right. Behind him waited his companions and six or seven of the high-ticket slaves they’d freed. They were all young and good-looking, and some so young even Ryan was shocked. Many of the freed slaves had opted to try their luck on their own, either hiding in their former cells or trying to get off the vessel. Likely they were all chills now.
“That’s why you go first,” he said, and bodily threw the slaver up the last steps and through the open entrance by the collar.
The slaver was dead right. At least three blasters opened up on him the second he appeared, one of them snarling on full-auto. He did a brief spastic dance and fell forward, dead.
The only people on this rad-blasted ship Ryan gave half a fuck about were his friends and the baron’s daughter. And they weren’t on the bridge. Ryan simply poked the Kalashnikov up above the bottom of the hatch with both hands and cut loose blindly on full rock and roll.
He blasted through the thirty-round banana mag in four ragged bursts. The only reason he let off the trigger at all was to keep from blasting about twenty rounds up through the roof. The Kalashnikov was built to be fired by some shit-scared peasant conscript who was lucky if he could speak Russian, much less read it. He wasn’t about to get its barrel burned by letting the whole mag go at once.
Ryan dumped the partially spent magazine and slammed in a full one. Then he launched himself up and over the lip.
He sprayed an even wilder burst as he flew into the room. He still managed to get a shoulder down and roll.
He came up with his back against the console at the front of the bridge, with the wheel on his right.
Several bodies were lying around. A bearded dude was standing up to Ryan’s right, wildly cranking off shots from a Beretta. The one-eyed man gave him a quick burst that sawed his face in two and sent the windscreen panel behind him cascading down five stories to the main deck.
As wind whipped sleet into the bridge, Doc led the others out. He fired his LeMat twice, and stabbed one unwisely persistent wounded slaver in the face with the sword. That ended that fight.
The bridge was kind of crowded. Some of the freed captives stood with their backs pressed against the periphery, doing their best to stay out of the storm’s direct blast, staring at the chills and obviously trying with all their might not to flip right out. Not Milya, of course; she had got a knife from somewhere and was making sure the seven fallen slavers were dead with a glee that even Ryan found a bit excessive. He decided to hold off a spell before letting her have the AK back. Even though the heavy blaster was kind of a pain to tote with the Scout strapped to his back, his SIG-Sauer and panga.
The captain was still alive. Ryan could tell it was him because he wore an actual captain’s uniform, with a blue uniform jacket and even a hat with scrambled eggs on the front. It was faded but looked as if it was clean and regularly mended.
Or it had before the captain had taken a steel-jacketed Sov 7.62 mm round through the chest. Basically the same wound his slaver mates had dealt J.B., except nobody was in a hurry to tend to him. He sat with his back propped against the command console to the left of the wheel, glaring at Ryan.
“The muties betrayed us,” the captain wheezed. He had a slight accent Ryan couldn’t identify, beyond that it was vaguely Mex-sounding. “After we traded with them so profitably for so long. We should have known. What else...can one expect from monsters? But at least they’ll chill you all to sacrifice to their god!”
And he laughed. That had to have hurt like blazing nuke death. Ryan had to give him that.
“Shut up and die.”
The slaver captain laughed at Ryan, his teeth bloody.
Neither Ryan nor anybody else had any idea how to pilot this huge rad-blasted boat. He wasn’t even sure how important any of the shot-out panels and screens were. So Ryan was trying to set up a better defense of the pilot house than its previous proprietors had managed, while hoping like a bastard to find a way out that didn’t involve dying.
It’s not going to be bastard easy, he thought, standing beside the open hatch he’d sprung through. It stood aft of the bridge. The windshields wrapped around to either side of it gave a view astern. They were intact. Only the forward windows had gotten starred by hits, and the only panel completely gone was the one on the starboard—landward—side that Ryan had taken out with the Kalashnikov.
The problem was, there wasn’t any cover. Except for some chairs bolted to the deck.
We’re going to have to suck it up and make some ramparts out of chills, he thought.
“At least the slavers and their erstwhile batrachian allies have something better to do than lay siege to us,” Doc said, glancing down at the expanse of deck between the fore and aft towers.
“Just a matter of time before one or the other comes for us,” Ryan said.
Ricky had hunkered down beside the captain and was speaking to him urgently. To Ryan’s surprise the man actually answered.
“A menina bonita?”
he said. “The wild girl from Monster Island?
Sim
. I saw her. She was...worth all the trouble she gave us. Given the price paid for her by the lecherous...baron of—”
His words ended in a rattle. His head lolled to one side. He eyes stared blankly at the deck.
Ricky grabbed him by the blood-soaked jacket and shook him. “Which baron? The baron of what? Tell me. Tell me!”
“Kid,” Ryan said. “You shake a body in that condition, usually the only thing you get out of it is blood and other ooze you’ll like even less.”
A figure burst onto the bridge. Even Ryan was taken by surprise.
But the figure made it only halfway across in obvious blind-panic flight before Doc triggered his LeMat right into the man’s throat almost at contact range.
The man fell spraying blood. Ryan set his jaw as hot droplets spattered across his face. He heard voices echoing up the stairwell—the ladder, he supposed. They started out surprised but turned quickly to anger.
“Get ready,” Ryan said. After a moment’s hesitation he tossed the AK to Lyudmila. She fielded it with one hand despite its weight and grinned.
“Careful where you point that thing before you light it off,” he said, drawing his SIG-Sauer.
“Ryan,” said Jak, who stood next to him looking aft across the main deck, which was mostly a battlefield of slavers, hunched, shambling muties and the occasional freed captive darting from cover to cover trying to keep out of harm’s way.
Jak pointed a white finger dead astern. “Look,” he said.
* * *
“A
T
LEAST
NOBODY
’
S
shooting at us.”
Mildred shouted to make herself heard over the howl of the wind.
“Ryan,” Krysty cried. She was jumping up and down at the rail of the top level of the after superstructure, waving frantically with both hands at the bridge up front.
Since that looked to be a good two football fields away, Mildred wasn’t even sure how Krysty hoped to see or be seen. Then again, Mildred was having trouble keeping the hard-driving rain from impeding her vision. Maybe the redhead was having better luck.
There was plenty of shooting going on below them. Even with all the other noise, which at this point was about like being inside the throat of an erupting volcano, Mildred could hear the shots snap, crackle and pop like the famous and now-fossilized breakfast cereal. But it was all going on beneath them.
The slavers had found something much more interesting than the two marauding women. Or even the slaves they’d liberated.
Or rather, that something had found them. The frogs had started coming up out of the bay and swarming aboard. There were dozens of the hopping bastards.
They had seen flashes of obvious blasterfire in the distant pilothouse since climbing up here to avoid the battle between two sets of their deadly enemies. Mildred wished she could share Krysty’s wholehearted faith that that meant their companions had captured the freighter’s bridge.
Mildred glanced down to her right. She swallowed and looked quickly away.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m not doing that again. It’s hard enough dealing with the sway up here without
seeing
it. Looks like the slaves have quit even trying to make a break for it across the loading ramp. I think the frogs’ve gotten spooked more than the slavers.”
“That’s a shame,” Krysty said. “Mebbe we can get them to start putting lifeboats down at the stern— Wait! I see somebody waving back. It’s Ryan! I think.”
Mildred blinked and wiped her eyes clear enough for a brief squint at the forward superstructure. “I see motion,” she grudged. “That’s pretty much it.”
“It’s Ryan! I know it is.”
“If you say so, Krysty.”
“He’s— It looks as if he’s waving us away. No, no! We’ll come and join you.”
“No, we’re not,” Mildred said. “All the slavers and frogs on Earth will eat us if we try.”
She bit back the impulse to say he couldn’t hear her, since Krysty—who was very bright, however carried away by optimism—no doubt knew that as well as she. Truth was, if it was her, and J.B. was up there, she’d do the same thing.
It doesn’t look as if I’m going to be seeing you again, John Barrymore, she thought. Hope you get better and have yourself a fine old life.
“You’re right,” she said. She waved once, dispiritedly, toward the pilothouse. Then she turned away.
“Let’s go around to the back and see what the deck looks like behind us,” she said. “One way or another, we’ll have to get a lifeboat away and go rescue the others. Might as well see how hard we’ll have to fight.”
“Right,” Mildred said.
She also wished she had Krysty’s faith they’d ever get that far. She was having a hard time seeing anything beyond that
fight
part.
But she wasn’t about to go down without one, any more than Krysty Wroth was.
They started to their left on the walkway that ran around the after superstructure. They’d scarcely turned the corner, after quick wary looks to make sure no enemies lurked around it, when out to sea a siren pulsed three times. Its acid whine ate right through the tumult of storm and firefight and the giant ship’s tortured frame.
Mildred cringed. She saw Krysty’s face pale two shades.
“Oh, dear,” Krysty said.
“Well, damn!” Mildred stated. “What fresh hell is this?”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Ryan leaned into the stairwell and blasted off four quick shots. Below him somebody screamed. The sound of a return shot crackled up, but Ryan didn’t hear or feel the bullet go by.
The slide locked back. He tossed the blaster down the well for good measure. It was the Beretta he’d taken from the guy whose head he’d chopped in two with the Kalashnikov. There were no spare magazines, and nobody was going to take time out to reload that one.
He ducked back, shaking his head. He drew his SIG-Sauer. So far nobody’d made it past the landing immediately below the bridge, except the one slaver who’d caught everybody by surprise.
He could hear shots, screams and inhuman croaking echoing up from the lower decks. It was only a matter of time before they got bull-rushed. And whether by slavers or muties, Ryan knew for sure they could bring more bodies than he and his crew had bullets.
He heard a tapping from behind him. “Knock that shit off,” he snarled without turning.
After a moment, a child’s voice said, just audible above the wind howling in the broken windshield, “Sir, it wasn’t us, please.”
He turned. A figure stood at the side of the pilothouse, outside, looking in.
It was a familiar figure, complete with one hand doggedly clamping a fedora atop his head.
“J.B.?” Then, “What the fireblast are you doing out there? Levitating?”
With his free hand the Armorer pointed right aft. He mouthed something.
“Door,” Ryan said. “What door? There’s a door?”
The Armorer went the way he’d pointed. A moment later Ryan heard, “Don’t shoot,” and his long-lost best friend stepped onto the bridge.
He and Ryan clapped each other on the shoulder. “What took you so long?” Ryan said.
“Overslept,” J.B. said with a brief smile. “Won’t happen again.”
“How did you get up here?”
“Steel ladder right up the side of the tower. There’s a catwalk that runs right around this level. Must be to wash the windows or something.”
“But the hatches on the lower levels are welded shut,” Ryan said. “You mean the top one isn’t?”
Ryan felt triple-stupe. He hadn’t given the hatch from the bridge level so much as a glance to see if it showed the same inexpert weld marks the ones below did. Granted, he’d had other things on his mind, like blasting his way onto the bridge without getting blasted in return.
Still, he’d made an assumption. That was an ace way to get dead.
J.B. swayed, then toppled forward. Ryan caught him by the shoulder.
“You fit to fight?” he asked, then silently cursed himself for asking such a stupe question.
“Be fine,” J.B. said, in a tone of voice that clearly wasn’t. “After I sit down for a moment and catch my breath.”
As Ryan eased him down to the rubber mat that covered the pilothouse deck, a voice said, “The slavers saw no need to prevent escape to the outside from this deck, Mr. Cawdor. Inasmuch as they were the only ones who used it.”
He glanced up. “Lady Katerina?” And then, “What’s wrong—”
“Mother!” A black-haired rocket streaked past Ryan to collide with the baroness.
Ryan winced as the AK Milya had dropped clattered on the mat. Not even he could hold that carelessness against her. Much. Not when she was running into her mother’s open arms. But one thing bothered him.
Lady Katerina had her face pressed against her daughter’s shoulder. Between that and her Astrakhan he couldn’t see much of her face. He put a hand on her arm and gently pushed.
“Don’t want to stand right in the doorway,” he said. “Never know what might be coming through it anytime now.”
He didn’t add, Or going into it—such as bullets. The expected rush hadn’t materialized yet, but the sounds of battle were getting louder. Lyudmila pushed away from her mother. Ryan saw the girl’s shoulder tense as she got her first good look at the baroness.
She asked the question that had just bubbled back to the surface of Ryan’s mind. “Mother? What’s wrong with your face?”
Katerina’s Frost’s face no longer looked fully human. Somehow it had become elongated, exaggerated at cheekbone and jaw. Her nose seemed to have sunk into her face. Her eyes were wide and round.
Strangely, horribly, she still retained more than a touch of beauty. But it was a frightening beauty.
“My fate,” Katerina said. “The shadow over Tavern Bay. Decreed for me by men a hundred years dead. I’m turning into a
lyagushka,
Milya.”
Milya made a noise like a stepped-on mouse.
“Don’t be afraid, my darling,” the baroness lisped through teeth whose sharp points protruded through her lips. “You will not share my fate. Only the direct offspring of a mating between human and
lyagushka
can ever change. Believe me. My family has been trying for generations to find another way to perpetuate our...breed.”
Milya started to turn away from the mask of horror her mother’s features had become. Then she turned and hugged her fiercely.
“Don’t give in, Mother!” she cried. “Fight it.”
“I have been. And I have lost. But never fear. I will die your mother. The mother who loves you.”
“Don’t talk that way!”
A boom blasted out of the stairwell. J.B. leaned back out of the entrance cradling his shotgun as the reverberations still sounded. He had shifted to put his back to the bulkhead beside the opening.
“We’re all going to die if we don’t figure out a way to get down safely double-quick,” he said. “The frogs’re driving the slavers upward. And if we try going down the ladder, the slavers can just lean out and blast us like birds sittin’ on a wire.”
He shook his head. “Hurts like a bastard when I shoot,” he said.
“Fighting down there,” observed Jak, who had shifted to look through the portside windows.
Ryan went up alongside the albino. A glance down at the deck confirmed his words. Not that Ryan ever doubted them.
“So,” he said, turning back. “Looks like we’ll have to make a break for it and take our chances regardless. Slim chance is still better than none, as Trader used to say.”
“No,” Katerina said. Grimacing in pain as if her fingers had grown to her daughter’s arm, she tore herself loose from her. Still fully the regal baroness, despite the awful change overtaking her, she swept to the helm with a swirl of her coattails and began to work controls.
The engines, whose near-subliminal hum Ryan had been aware of since setting foot aboard without really noticing, began to come to life. Despite the constant, seemingly random three-dimensional movements, the howling gale was putting the big ship through, and the frequent impacts of her black hull on the tire-buffers protecting the dock, Ryan felt a distinct shudder run through the vessel as her huge screws began to bite water.
“You know how to pilot this thing?” he asked.
He was keeping his focus soft. His eye caught motion in the corner of its peripheral vision. A pale oval blur popped up above the level of the floor. He snapped a handblaster shot across his body. Red sprayed. The face vanished.
“She went to sea as a girl,” J.B. said helpfully.
Katerina pealed a wild laugh. “I sailed in this ship! She was originally a Great Lakes freighter, did you know? The slave trade goes back generations in Tavern Bay. And now this new set of slavers is learning the cost of doing business with the
lyagushki,
as others have before.”
The deck moved beneath Ryan’s boots as, almost imperceptibly, the ship began to move forward.
“What are you doing?” Ryan asked.
“Increasing your chances as much as I can. My daughter must not fall into
lyagushki
claws. They have no concern for ties of family—and those who are not them, or cannot change, they see only as breeding stock. Or food.”
A little tremolo ran up through Ryan’s boots, followed quickly by another.
“The cables have parted fore and aft,” Doc said from the starboard window. “But how does this help us escape with your daughter, Lady Katerina? We might escape the base, but we still face a ship full of slavers and muties, each eager to see the color of our insides.”
“I will drive the ship onto the rocks by the cliff to the south. It is a lee shore. If the impact doesn’t break her back and send her to the bottom, the waves and wind pounding her against the rocks will.”
“And that helps us get away how?” Ryan asked.
“It gives your enemies something new to worry about,” she said. “And will send a large number of them too. Though mostly slavers, I’m afraid.
Lyagushki
have gills, though they are hard to see when not in use.”
“Here come!” Jak shouted. His Python filled the bridge with a bright flash and brain-smashing noise.
Routed by the frogs’ treacherous attack, a mob of slavers rushed up the stairs and poured into the bridge. The withering volley of blasterfire from Ryan and his four companions didn’t slow them, except for those who fell and those who stumbled over them.
In an eyeblink the bridge was full of frantic bodies, reeking of sweat. It wasn’t an assault. It was a pure stampede.
Ryan found himself grappled by a man with a full yellow beard chopped off square at his collarbone. His mouth and eyes were wide open. He was missing a front tooth and his breath smelled like a gaudy-house crapper after a cheap brew special.
The guy was bare-handed. He had Ryan by both wrists. His strength was that of a man driven by sheer adrenaline overload. Whether by accident or some residual design, he had his right hip turned against Ryan’s body, forestalling the otherwise obvious knee to the balls.
Ryan head-butted him, flattening his nose against his fear-twisted face. Blood squirted hot onto his shirt. Ryan’s quick glimpse of the slaver’s face showed his nose had clearly been broken before, and those who had experienced it once or more were less susceptible to the shock and pain of it, which could totally freeze even a coldheart.
But it still hurt. Enough to make the man’s wide blue eyes blink and the drowner’s grip on Ryan’s arms relax.
The one-eyed man wrenched his right hand free, then chopped the man’s thick throat with the butt of his SIG-Sauer. The slaver reeled back, gagging and clutching his neck. Ryan shot him in the face, then fired two quick shots into the skinny black guy behind him.
There were at least a dozen slavers crowding into the pilothouse. Ryan drew his panga and started hacking.
A blaster roared. A child shrieked. A girl, by the voice—but too young for Milya, at least.
But that confirmed to Ryan he didn’t dare shoot any more. He didn’t want to shoot the other captives they’d freed, but if it came to a choice between them and his friends—or even Milya—that was just too bad for them. But he could just as easily blast Jak or J.B. in the scrum as he could a slaver.
And the slavers were beginning to collect themselves to fight more effectively. A punch caught Ryan on the blind left side of his face. His head rocked back. Another slaver slammed a longblaster butt into his belly while a third grabbed his blaster hand.
“Get down!” Milya screamed.
Ryan did. He just sat right down on the wet rubber mat. His weight pulled the weedy little slaver clutching his blaster arm with both fists down with him.
Brown eyes blinked from a ratlike face six inches from Ryan’s nose. Then a burst of full-auto blasterfire erupted.
The rat-faced slaver squeaked like the rodent he resembled and fell straight down. Blood was spraying from wounds in his back.
Milya Frost stood at the front of the bridge with her back to her mother. She had recovered the AK-47 and was firing the blaster from the hip. She did her trainers credit, pumping out bursts short enough so that she could hold down the weapon’s barrel with her skinny arms. She sprayed the mob of panicked slavers with steel-jacketed 7.62 mm death. They jerked and fell to the deck.
Then the bolt locked back. She began fumbling for a reload. There were still at least six slavers still standing, and they converged on her.
Ryan still had rounds in the magazine of his SIG-Sauer. He opened fire, as did Doc, Jak and J.B. All of them apparently had obeyed Milya’s order in time—except the Armorer, who was still sitting and hadn’t needed to.
The SIG-Sauer’s slide locked back. The bearded, shave-headed slaver boss Ryan had seen board the
Serge Broom
with Milya loomed above him. His mightily mustached face was a twisted mask of blood and rage. He held a fire ax over his head with both hands, ready to split Ryan’s breastbone like kindling.
Thunder crashed from Ryan’s left. Yellow flashes lit that side of the slaver’s face. He jerked as if dancing in place, and badly. Then he collapsed like an empty burlap sack.
Lady Katerina had turned from the helm. A pair of boxy black Glock blasters wisped blue smoke from her elegantly gloved fists.
“Gentlemen,” she croaked in a voice both guttural and hollow, “brace yourselves.”
Another slaver, this one carrying an M-16, burst out of the stairwell and took a frenzied step toward the bridge.
The vessel hit the rocks. The deck canted forward as momentum drove the stern upward. Ryan tumbled forward to slam against the control panel.
The earth-shattering crash of hull smashing against surf-pounded granite was joined by viscera-churning screeching and crackling as the shockwave rippled through the structure of the ship.
The stern hit the water with a hollow boom. Through the aft view ports, Ryan could see water rush upward in a white wave.
The ship began to swing its stern to starboard. The bow ground against the rocks. Looking up through the front windshield, Ryan saw the south cliffs rising out of sight like a black, implacable wall.
Her blasters still in hand, Katerina cradled Milya against her. The girl had dropped her longblaster and was sobbing wildly.
Ryan’s first act was to reload his handblaster. Then he yelled, “Everybody fit to fight?”
Jak and Doc answered yes. A bit later so did J.B., to Ryan’s vast relief.
“Where’s Ricky?” he asked, pulling himself to a sitting position.
“Here,” the youth called, climbing through the window Ryan had shot out. He had his longblaster slung and his Webley revolver in hand. “When Milya screamed to get down, there was a guy right under me. So I went out.”