Iron Rage (16 page)

“And?”

She sighed gustily, puffing out blue smoke like a restive dragon.

“I need a man of your talents on my team.”

“You need a new sec man?” He carefully did not say “boss.”

“I need a new
everything
. My enemies give me no peace, and they are not considerate enough to take turns. As soon as I turn to face the latest attack, the other is thrusting at me with their spears. Do you begin to see my situation, Mr. Cawdor?”

“Yeah. You want a problem solver.”

Her face lit up. She was still handsome, that was sure, even if in an overstuffed, painted-up way.

“Exactly! And I am prepared to offer—whatever you want, within reason. And I have broad standards of reasonableness that include gold, property, women, even power. I can't offer you a title, not one that would mean anything. That's Poteetville's style, not ours. And our plutocrats would never accept you as an equal. Unless of course I was able to catch one of them at treason and squash him like the roach he is.”

She brightened visibly at that.

“I believe I've about burned up my considering time,” Ryan told her.

“You have.”

“What if I don't want that kind of responsibility? Do you have any openings for a grunt?”

She laughed. “You're far too dangerous to be a common sailor, a soldier, or sec man. Strange as it sounds to say it, I can trust you completely, or not at all.

“Please understand my position with regards to you, Mr. Cawdor. I find myself in the position of the lady riding the tiger. I dare not dismount.”

She suddenly grinned. “Don't look at me like that with that dangerous blue eye. You are a magnificent hunk of masculine lethality, and not at all my type. I prefer my men younger, tenderer and blond. Your duties to me would be strictly professional.”

The grin faded. “But from where I stand, I can either bind you to me with whatever appeals to you—or bind you to ballast stones headed for the bottom of the Sippi. Do you honestly see a third way?”

“Not offhand.”

“So there you have it. The carrot and the stick, as it were.”

“Put that way,” he said, “I'll take the carrot.”

He reckoned he had played hard to get long enough. She had reminded him of just how baronial she could be, with all that ballast-in-a-bag talk, and getting to know the legendary channel cats. And how ruthless she'd had to be to hold on to her position, once her husband died and the sharks began to circle.

She turned and stuck out her hand. “I knew you were a smart man. The lieutenant will return your weapons.”

He shook. Her grip was strong. He expected no less.

Smart enough to try to see all the angles, he was thinking. While going over the rail into a stolen rowboat some night was still the likeliest option for getting out of there and back to his friends—or just getting sent on some mission ashore and slipping away, leaving any comrades who thought to bar his way behind with extra smiles—he was beginning to glimpse a new, if distant possibility: that he might distinguish himself enough that, as a reward, he could negotiate safe passage out for him and his friends. And even the
Queen
's old crew, since there'd be no point in cutting one loose but not the other.

That was a tall order, given how little time he had before his friends found their own way out—or the rads got them. Or the stickies. But Ryan could distinguish himself a triple load, triple fast.

“Does this mean I get a room that doesn't lock from the outside?”

“Not yet.”

“But you said you'd either trust me all the way, or no way.”

“There's trust,” she said, “and then there's trust. You still have to earn the full consignment. Lieutenant Stone, please show our new, ah—special consultant—around.”

“Yes, Baron.”

She seemed neither pleased nor displeased. That high-cheekboned, broad-jawed face might as well have been the beautiful sculpture it resembled.

But what was the light he glimpsed behind those dark brown eyes?

“But what can we
do
?”

The words—almost a wail of despair—penetrated the fog inside Doc Tanner's tormented mind, but only barely.

He was walking through Hyde Park arm in arm with his beloved Emily, while their children, Rachel and Jolyon, trailed behind, his daughter excitedly pointing out features of the great glass-and-iron Crystal Palace, that wonder of the world and jewel in Great Britain's imperial diadem
.

“If you both quiet down and behave,” their mother told them, “we shall take you to see the dinosaurs!”

“Dinosaurs!” Rachel shouted
.

Emily sighed. “At least the spectacle—and the prospect of dinosaurs—is distracting them from all the bearded, smelly anarchists squawking from their soapboxes for the workers of the world to unite. Isn't that a boon, dear?”

“Pardon? Why, yes, my darling. Of course.” He himself was barely paying attention to his surroundings or even his adored family. He was engrossed in an article in The Times of London, concerning a private prosecution for libel the day's most famous Irish poet had
brought against the Marquess of Queensberry, for leaving at his club a calling card on which he had scrawled “For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite.”

He stirred himself from his daydream, back to the here and now. It would be less unpalatable than continuing where his thoughts had taken him. Yes, as horrible as his current reality was…

“We have to do something!”

Doc recognized the near-panicked voice of Sean O'Reilly. He fears stickies to the verge of outright phobia, Doc remembered. Not that there's anything inherently irrational in that.

“We all realize that, Sean,” Nataly replied calmly.

Doc focused his gaze on her tall, slim, upright figure. She was the functional acting captain much of the time, when that poor wretch Myron was sunk in the twin miseries of losing his ship and his wife on the same dire day.

“And it leaves the question of
what
,” Arliss said.

“Get out!” Sean yelled.

“We know,” Mildred said patiently. “If the stickies don't kill us, the radiation and heavy-metal poisoning will.”

“And that's if the swampers don't get us!” Ricky added.

“I keep telling you,” Myron muttered. “We have to repair and refloat the
Queen
. She'll take us out of here!”

“Myron,” Arliss said gently, “we tried that. That's what put us here.”

“Sneaking out on rafts didn't play out so ace, either,” Jake stated. Whereas Nataly often struck Doc as fatalistic,
the cadaverous navigator seemed to revel in wallowing in gloom.

“It's all Ryan's fault,” Sean said. “It was his idea. It was triple crazy, all along! We're lucky it didn't get us all chilled.”

Doc looked to Krysty, but the statuesque redhead merely sat on her backpack on the short grass with the others, a battered boonie hat sheltering her pale, perfect features from the hot midmorning sun. She showed no sign of the brutal day and night preceding, nor the too-short sleep that had followed. She seemed crisp and alert.

Doc had entered back into the present world fully enough that he did not fail to notice it was
Ryan's
backpack. Like his prized longblaster, he had left it behind when he made his mad, brave and inspired leap to single-handedly attack the New Vickville blasterboat.

She also seemed just as unaffected by the criticism of her lover, now presumably captive—Doc could not bring himself to believe that Ryan Cawdor was dead, not that he really thought he was. Her expression remained calm. Serene, almost. Like a childless Madonna from a Renaissance painting.

“Ryan's the only reason any of us are here!” Mildred snapped. “Several times over!”

“The whole idea was triple stupe!” Sean screamed.

“She's right,” Nataly said quietly. “Anyway, pointing fingers is one thing we know won't get us clear of this mess.”

Sean dropped to the ground in a heap of misery as complete as the one constituted by Myron Conoyer,
who was sitting with his back to the hull of his beloved wreck, as though deriving strength from it.

“I keep telling you,” Myron told the bare patch of ground between his listless, outspread legs. “The
Queen
is our only hope of getting out alive.”

“You know, I think he's right.”

The words, delivered softly, seemed to hit the group sitting or standing around on the beach like a charge of electricity. Everybody looked to the eastern end of the cleared shoreline. J.B. stood there, his fedora tipped back on his head, gazing, or so it seemed, toward the rusty remnants of a derelict railroad bridge, a quarter mile or so upstream.

Doc found it hard to repress a shudder. If he had ever laid eyes on a more certain nesting place for a colony of stickies, he could not summon it to mind.

“Who's right, John?” Mildred asked. “Don't keep us in suspense.”

The Armorer turned. “Why, Captain Conoyer, of course.”

Myron jerked at that. The memory it evoked of the former Captain Conoyer—his wife, Trace—clearly hit him like a spear. But then it seemingly registered that J.B. meant him, not his beloved partner who had been torn limb from limb before his eyes.

It was Myron who asked, “What do you mean?” incredulously.

J.B. took off his wire-rimmed spectacles and began to polish them with a handkerchief.

“We need a way out,” he said, “and fast. And the
Mississippi Queen
will give us just that.”

“Against a whole ironclad battle fleet?” Arliss scoffed. “Have you lost your mind, J.B.? I thought you were the most sensible of the bunch. But if one thing in this world is triple sure, it's that if we get near those ships—either set, take your pick—they'll finish the job they started a few days back. How do you propose to get around that? Make the poor
Queen
fly?”

“Oh, no.” J.B. replaced his glasses and smiled. “The opposite. Have any of you ever heard tell of the ship called the CSS
Arkansas
?”

* * *

R
YAN OPENED HIS EYE
.

The nighttime blackness inside his modest cabin was broken only by a few wisps of starlight shining in through the porthole above him. It was little more than a horizontal slit with a shutter on the inside, currently raised to allow a little muggy air in.

A cat might have gotten through it, but not Ryan Cawdor, nor any human he knew, including Jak.

He frowned. He had come all the way awake and alert at once. There was nothing unusual about that. What was unusual was that he had awakened with a sense of alarm thrilling through his body.

What troubled him was, he didn't know why.

He lay perfectly still on his left side, facing the hatch to the passageway outside. He could feel the slight but complex movements of the ship at anchor as the current shifted its enormous mass. He could hear the water slogging against the hull; the chugging of a distant patrol boat's engine, steadily receding; the faint strains if a harmonica.

And then he heard
whispering
, and knew what had awakened him.

A moment later he heard a faint scrape, little more than a whisper itself, as of wood on steel.

“Fireblasted amateurs,” he muttered to himself.

He whipped the cotton sheet off his body and sat up. He was naked. It was a luxury to be able to strip down completely for sleep. Most nights he was lucky if he felt confident enough to take his boots off when he bedded down.

He dressed in the dark, purposefully but without haste. He knew what had to be happening. It was why he and J.B. schooled their friends to a strict discipline of speaking only in undertones when trying to be covert. Whispers carried, and part of the reason they did was that they were unnatural—out of place. That was why he awakened.

He only wondered how the raiders had evaded the New Vick guard boats when he and his friends could not.

As he pulled up his pants and did up the fly, the answer came to him: however low an opinion Baron Tanya had of Baron Harvey, or how justified it may be, he had to have people under him who were anything but stupe. They were smart enough to infiltrate observers in small boats, probably by skulking in the shadows near the shore, close enough to observe the New Vick patrols without being observed in turn. The steam-powered blasterboats probably followed set patterns and a set schedule. Given long enough, the Poteetville spies had charted them out.

He heard the sounds they made: small, furtive sounds, but detectable simply because they were not the sounds of the ship's routines, even in their endless minor variations: more whispers, more scrapes, a clink of improperly secured gear.

Despite himself, Ryan wondered why the sentries on board the
Pearl
didn't hear those sounds as plain as blaster shots. He slipped on his holster belt and secured his weapons, then drew the SIG Sauer and, folding down the small writing desk from one bulkhead, dropped the mag from the well and laid it on the table. Next he worked the slide deliberately, ejecting the chambered round into his palm. He dropped it into a pocket; there was no way to ensure it wouldn't roll off the table from the boat's slow and not entirely predictable pitching.

He pulled the slide all the way back, and locked it open with the slide-catch lever. His experienced fingers found the takedown lever, on the blaster's left side above the trigger, then turned it down. It was a simple matter of pulling back on the slide to disengage the catch, then easing the slide forward off the frame.

He turned the slide upside down in his palm and carefully removed the recoil-guide rod, to avoid shooting its spring across the dark cabin and losing the nuking thing. He laid the slide on the table, then pulled the spring off the rod and set it down propped at an angle inside the trigger guard, to keep it from rolling off the table.