Time Castaways (11 page)

Incredibly, Lady Griffin perked up at that. “Saddle Brook? Why, I was born there!”

Keeping his face neutral, Ryan internally cursed the bad luck, then saw the baron fight to hide a smile. Clever bitch, it was just a trick to try to expose a liar. Whatever else they might be, these people were not fools.

“Sorry, my lady, but I don’t seem to recall ever seeing you there,” Ryan said in mock apology. “Could have sworn that I knew everybody from the Saddle.” He shrugged. “Guess I was wrong.”

Nodding in satisfaction as if the stranger had just passed some kind of a test, Baron Griffin dismissed the matter with a gesture. “You two can talk about old times later,” he said, leaning forward. “Now, what was this about metal, eh? Found a tin can, did you? Or perhaps a nail?”

“We can always use more of those,” Donovan sniffed in marked disinterest.

“Show the baron, woman!” Ryan barked, jerking a thumb at the baron. “That be why we here!”

Meekly, Mildred stepped forward, offering a small wad of folded cloth.

Scowling uncertainly, the baron hesitantly took the bundle and unwrapped the oil cloth to gasp out loud. Lying in the palm of his hand was a blaster. Not the rusted remains of one, but an intact blaster, the steel as smooth as polished bone.

Lifting the blaster, the baron felt a visceral thrill surge through his gut at the weight of the steel in his hand. His own weapons were nowhere near as heavy. This blaster was a monster! Easily twice the caliber of the one he inherited from his father, and he from his father before, possession of the weapon going all the way back to skydark.

“Careful, my lord, it be loaded,” Ryan warned.

The baron raised an eyebrow at that, and warily cracked the cylinder to extract a live brass, the metal shiny bright, the lead cut into the deadly cross pattern of a dum-dum. It was incredible. Live brass! He checked and found two more in the weapon, plus two empties. Five brass, three of them live!

“This is truly quite a find,” Lady Griffin said, seemingly unable to catch her breath. “You did well, outlander, to bring it directly to us. Failure to do so is a slow death on the learning tree. Or worse, the slave pits.”

In dark harmony, there came the distant crack of a bullwhip, followed by the anguished scream of a slave.

“That is as it should be, my lady,” Mildred answered
quickly, spreading her arms. “Only barons and their sec men should touch metal.” She smiled, and hoped it didn’t look like a grimace. The fragging boomerang was digging into her hip again, and bothering a sore rib she had acquired when the companions abruptly departed from the warship in the bay.

If the baroness noticed anything wrong, she made no comment. But she looked steadily at the physician in a most unnerving manner.

Sensing that something might be wrong, Mildred decided to not speak again unless spoken to directly.

“Well, Finnigan, this is the prize of a lifetime,” Baron Griffin stated in heartfelt honesty, removing the cartridges to spin the cylinder, then load it again. “So tell me, what do you want as a reward? A year of easy living in the gaudy house? Two horses? Ten crossbows? A hundred slaves?”

Pretending to scratch under his eyepatch, Ryan struggled to not show his disgust at the callous hierarchy of life. “Just a boat, my lord, one large enough for fishing, and six nets,” Ryan said, putting a touch of eagerness into the words. “Plus, all the food it can carry. My boat sank in a storm last week and now…” He shrugged.

“The ville is starving without the boat.” The baron nodded in understanding, passing the blaster to his sec chief. “Yes, I see, of course.”

Accepting the weapon, Donovan tucked it away for later cleaning and a thorough examination. Nobody was going to fire the new weapon until it had been completely disassembled and checked for traps. The fat
slut Wainwright was triple clever, and not above sending one of her sec men to pose as an outlander with a trick blaster as a gift to ace her cousin. The baron of Northpoint never attacked straight-on, but always hit from the side, like a damn lake snake. The joke among his troops was, if you hear nothing in the fog, it had to be Wainwright on the move.

“A boat and two nets, you said?” Baron Griffin asked, deliberately getting the numbers wrong.

Instantly, Ryan felt his long years of training under the tutelage of the Trader flare into action as the negotiations began in earnest. “Beg pardon, my lord, it was six nets and a ton of food,” he said incorrectly.

“Oh, yes. Six nets and ten barrels of dried fish.”

“Twenty barrels and five more of grain.”

“Ridiculous! Ten and five.”

“Six, ten and ten.”

“Done!” The baron grinned in pleasure. “We have a deal, outlander.” He paused and then added, “You could have asked for more.”

Knowing that was true, Ryan shrugged. “I only asked for what was needed, my lord. Not going to ask for a horse if I can’t ride.”

“Wise words,” the baron acknowledged, then spit into his palm and offered his hand. “My sec men will escort you to the dockyard, and you can choose a boat from my fleet. Anything under twenty feet is yours. Slaves will deliver the food and nets before nightfall.”

“Thank you, my lord!” Ryan said, accepting the hand and shaking to seal the deal.

“Please also allow me to give you a small gift,” Lady
Griffin purred, sliding a worn plastic bracelet off her wrist.

“Thank you, my lady,” Mildred replied with a forced grin, trying to appease the woman. In her time, the garish trinket was the kind of thing you could buy from a vending machine for a quarter.

However, as the physician reached out to accept the bracelet, Lady Griffin roughly grabbed her hand and pulled Mildred closer, staring intently at her face, and then nodding in grim satisfaction.

“Yes, I thought so!” Lady Griffin shouted in triumph. “Look there, metal! The outlander bitch has steel in her mouth!”

Jerking free from the grip, Mildred stared at the woman as if she were insane, then the truth of the matter hit her like an express train. Her fillings! She had completely forgotten about the fillings in her back molars.

“Steel in her teeth?” the baron asked with a frown, then his face hardened. “Mainlanders! Only mainlanders do that twisted perversion!”

Snapping his head around at the wild accusation, sec chief Donovan started to frown, then saw the grim expression on the face of the outlander. So it was true, these were mainlanders! “Close the gate!” the man bellowed, drawing his blaster. “Protect the baron!”

But as fast as the sec chief was, Ryan matched his speed, whipping out the SIG-Sauer in a blur of motion, and the two men fired simultaneously at each other in point-blank range.

Chapter Eight

The fog was heavy along the shore, and with their crossbows leading the way, the Northpoint sec men warily pushed aside the curtain of thorny bushes to enter the dark cave.

The last to enter was the Hilly, the mountain man brandishing a weapon in each hand, his every sense alert for the presence of the one-eyed giant who led the pack of outlanders. He had seen the nuking bastard in action, and had no wish to ever face the big man in battle. A knife in the back would do just fine.

As the sec men moved deeper into the cave, their torches revealed nobody hidden inside the rocky passageway, only the remains of an abandoned campsite, a few broken arrows, some food scraps and a wad of strange paper that smelled like food but was as shiny as metal.

“What the frag is it?” a sec man asked in obvious confusion.

“Dunno,” sec chief LeFontaine muttered, fondling a piece. The material was as soft as leather, and made a sound like dry autumn leaves being crumpled when he closed his fist. Yet when the man opened his hand, the stuff sprang back into the original shape. Bizarre.

“We better bring that back to the baron,” a beefy sec woman stated. “Just in case it’s…ya know…”

“Yeah, guess so,” LeFontaine agreed. It gave him a thrill to think there might be a wad of metal in his pocket.

“Well, whatever that drek is, there’s no big honking pile of blasters waiting for us, that’s for damn sure,” a sec woman declared irritably, playing the light of her torch around the cave. “I always did think that inbred throwback was shitting in our ears.”

“No, I swear the outlanders were here!” the Hilly cried.

Frowning, a sec man chuffed him to the ground. “Shut the frag up,” he growled menacingly. “Or ya get more!”

“No need for that yet,” LeFontaine growled, then paused to retrieve something shiny from the cold ashes of the campfire.

At first, he couldn’t quite identify what it was, never having seen anything like it before. Then his mind coalesced around the object and he gasped in astonishment. It was a spoon! A bent spoon made of solid metal, left behind with the trash as if it was of no importance whatsoever, completely worthless.

“Release the Hilly,” LeFontaine ordered, marveling over the incredible utensil. “He was telling it straight, boys. The outlanders were here, and packing more steel than even the lord high bastard Griffin his own damn self!”

The hand that had hit the Hilly now reached out to offer him assistance to get back on his feet. Ignoring it,
the mountain man stood and dusted off his ragged furs. There were a million things he wanted to say, but now was not the time or the place.

“So what are we waiting for?” the Hilly demanded. “Let’s go track down the mutie lovers, and get those blasters!”

The sec men cheered, and LeFontaine led the way outside to the waiting horses.

Climbing onto his mount, LeFontaine shook the reins and started forward at a slow walk. “All right, I want a full recce of the beach!” he said gruffly. “They probably swept the dirt to disguise which direction they went in, but nobody can do it forever. Spread out! Find their damn tracks, and it’s a week of beef, bed and beer for the man who does!”

The sec men burst into eager smiles at the generous offer, but then their expressions melted into frowns as a mountain of mottled hide rose from the nearby lake, the colossal figure of the kraken blotting out the foggy sun.

Snarling virulent curses, the sec men swung up their crossbows to cut loose with a flurry of arrows. They hit the mutie hard, the wooden shafts going into the fletching. Ignoring the attack, the monstrous thing howled as dozens of ropy tentacles snaked out of the waves to grab a horse by the legs. Screaming in terror, the animal was hauled into the lake and disappeared beneath the choppy surface.

“Retreat!” LeFontaine bellowed, kicking his horse in the flanks and charging for the nearby forest. The sec chief had a full five rounds of live brass in his wheel
gun, but against a kraken he might as well be throwing pinecones.

Galloping off the beach, the Northpoint sec men raced for their lives. If they could just get deep enough into the trees, the sheer size of the mutie would prevent it from following. They knew it was a desperate gamble, but there was no other choice. Only a feeb fought a hopeless battle.

Oddly, the Hilly did nothing, standing motionless near the mouth of the cave, a hand covering his mouth.

Astonished, LeFontaine and the sec men had no idea what the feeb was doing, and didn’t nuking care. If the Hilly wanted to see a kraken from the inside, that was his choice. But they were going to live!

Bent over their animals, trying to urge them to greater speed, the sec chief and his troops were near the tree line, when suddenly they were engulfed in writhing tentacles.

Indiscriminately, random men and horses were grabbed and bodily dragged back to the lake. Briefly, they shrieked in raw terror, then were hauled below the waves and out of sight.

Reaching the forest, the rest of the sec men sighed in relief, and slowed their advance to keep from getting knocked from their horses by the endless array of low-hanging branches.

“Think we’re safe now?” a sec woman panted, not daring to look backward.

Before anybody could reply, a mottled tentacle lifted her out of the saddle and into the sky. The other sec men heard her scream, but not for very long.

Realizing escape was impossible, LeFontaine reined
his horse to a halt under a large oak tree and slipped out of the saddle. Stepping away from the animal, he covered his mouth with a hand and tried not to breathe too loudly. With his heart pounding in his chest, the sec chief burned to tell the others what to do, but knew that would only mean his own demise. They had to figure it out on their own, or buy the farm.

“What the frag are you doing, sir?” a sec man demanded, and then was gone. A few seconds later a bloody boot descended from the sky, the foot still laced tightly inside.

As comprehension dawned, the few remaining sec men brought their horses to a standstill and clambered off, to creep away from the animals as quietly as possible. Set free, the horses bolted deeper into the forest and, one by one, their death screams could be heard from the sky above, heading back toward the lake.

Only a few seconds later, the sec men were alone in the dim forest, a chilly breeze murmuring through the pine needles and stirring the carpet of oak leaves around their boots.

Nobody dared to move, or speak, for an inordinate length of time. Then a new sound began to permeate the woods. Looking curiously around, the sec men blanched as they saw the deadly tentacles of the kraken wiggling along the mossy ground, the questing tip probing every tree, rock and bush in an orderly search for the hidden food.

AS THE TWO MEN FIRED, the soft chug of the SIG-Sauer was lost in the thunderous discharge of the Colt revolver,
and they both jerked backward, Ryan grazed across the throat, Donovan spraying blood from a shoulder wound.

“Blasters! The outlanders have more blasters!” Baron Griffin shouted, fumbling for his twin weapons.

Knowing the jig was up, Mildred ruthlessly shot the man smack in the chest. Dropping one of the weapons, the baron staggered backward, splinters showing from the ragged hole in his shirt.

The crafty son of a bitch was wearing wooden body armor, she realized. Now aiming at the baron’s face, Mildred quickly switched targets as Lady Griffin unlimbered her sawed-off shotgun and thumbed back the hammer. Neatly, the physician blew the weapon out of her hands with a well-placed shot from the ZKR. Mildred knew it was foolish, but she still hesitated to ace another woman without provocation, a terrible moral holdover from the twentieth century.

Torn from her grip, the shotgun discharged into the back of a throne and slammed the startled baron off the dais. Screaming in pain, Lady Griffin dropped to her knees, clutching a broken hand to her ripped bodice.

Shooting the sec chief in the chest with a similar lack of results, Ryan triggered his blaster at the falcon, and the bird exploded over Donovan, covering the man with blood and feathers. Blinded, the sec chief clawed at the gore on his face while waving his Colt around and shooting randomly. Feeling the breeze of a passing round on his cheek, Ryan put hot lead into the big man. Crimson erupted from the sec chief’s knee, and from the sleeve of the muscular arm frantically rubbing at his face.

Falling to the floor of the dais, a badly wounded
Donovan shot back once more and knocked over the brazier, pieces of flaming charcoal spraying out like a meteor shower as a swirling cloud of black soot filled the chilly air.

By now the ville was in total chaos, screaming civies running around madly, horses whinnying in terror, elks bawing, dogs barking. But the cry of “outlanders” and “blasters” steadily grew louder as it spread across the ville.

Putting a fast five rounds into the roiling smoke covering the fallen sec chief, Ryan heard an answering grunt of pain, then hastily reloaded and turned his attention to the onrushing squad of sec men. He took out the people loading crossbows, then something came at him from his blind side, and Ryan ducked as a boomerang spun by, missing him by inches.

In the distance, Baron Griffin was limping into a squad of sec men and shouting orders. Brandishing weapons, the troops charged toward the dais, firing arrows and twirling deadly bolos overhead. Gunning them down, Ryan felt a brief urge to be furious at the physician for nuking the scam. But that brass wouldn’t load. They had made a mistake, and now had to pay the price. That was life. And death, he added solemnly.

Stepping out of the thick smoke masking the dais, Mildred appeared with the Czech ZKR at the ready, her other hand holding the collar of the panting Lady Griffin. In ragged stages, the barrage of arrows and the spears coming their way slowed and then stopped completely, the ville sec men unwilling to harm the baron’s
wife, augmented by their clear terror of the working blasters.

“Let us leave, and she lives!” Mildred bellowed, then fired into the tumultuous crowd edging the ville green. With most of his face removed, a sec man fell back, the bolo spinning in his hands going high into the trees.

Doing the same thing in the other direction, Ryan started to ask a question when he saw Lady Griffin pull a hidden knife from within her bodice and press the sharp stone tip against her own throat.

“You’re never gonna take me to that bitch Wainwright alive!” she growled defiantly, her fist tightening in preparation.

Seeing the raw determination in her face, Ryan knew there was no use trying to convince the woman they had nothing to do with the other baron. In a world of paranoids, nobody believed the truth. “Okay, then we surrender,” the one-eyed man said, dropping his blaster.

Gasping at the action, Lady Griffin eased her muscles, and Mildred swung her blaster hard and fast, the barrel cracking across the temple of the other woman with surgical precision. Giving a little shudder, Lady Griffin released the knife and slumped unconscious to the cold grass.

Around the green, the sec men paused, not sure if their ruler was aced or not, then rushed forward in a wave, pulling out knives and axes. As Ryan and Mildred mowed them down, there unexpectedly came a long trumpet from the guard tower high above the ville, and the gate in the wall began to slowly rumble closed.
Then the sec man blowing the horn seemed to jump out of the tower to plummet to a grisly death. A moment later, there came the crack of the Steyr longblaster rolling down from the nearby foothills. However, the gate continued moving until it boomed shut.

“Fireblast, only one way out of here now,” Ryan muttered, snapping off shots. Swinging an arbalest around, the sec men fell, clutching red bellies.

“Yeah, I know,” Mildred growled, dumping out spent rounds to hastily reload. She closed the revolver with a snap of her wrist. “Lead the way, my friend.”

While Mildred laid down suppressive fire, Ryan pulled his only gren from a pocket, yanked loose the arming pin, flipped off the safety lever and threw the deadly explosive charge at the Wendigo.

The military sphere hit the grass and rolled directly underneath the war wag just as a swarm of sec men piled into the machine. With a sputtering roar, the diesel engine came to life…and the gren detonated. The strident blast blew the Wendigo apart, flaming chunks of men and machine flying outward in every direction.

Even as everybody ran away from the explosion, Ryan and Mildred raced toward the wreckage, using the expanding cloud of dark smoke as makeshift cover. Now that they were away from the baron’s wife, there would be nothing to stop the sec men from attacking with everything they had. Unless, of course, the companions were long gone.

As Ryan and Mildred pelted cross the field, the Steyr spoke again from the foothills, abruptly ending the life of a sec man struggling to aim a black-powder long
blaster. Stopping a few yards away from the burning wreckage, Ryan snapped off rounds from the SIG-Sauer, as Mildred prepared her gren and lofted it high to sail over the fence surrounding the bubbling still.

As it landed inside the barricade, the guards raced away in terror, but it was already too late. The military charge cut loose and the huge still erupted, hundreds of gallons of shine igniting into a staggering fireball. Shrapnel tore the fence to pieces, and the limp bodies of the sec men went airborne, the deafening concussion of the double explosion echoing among the rows of cabins and tents throughout the entire ville sounding louder than doomsday.