Iron Rage (24 page)

“You have a few lying around spare.”

This time Danville's smile had fangs. “Some are likely to become available in the not-so-distant future, let us say.”

Ryan rubbed his chin. “Very generous,” he said. “And mighty appealing. But again, why would you make an offer like this to a scabby mercie who got fished out of the river?”

“Because unlike the usurping bitch, Mr. Cawdor, we recognize the true value of a man like you. We won't pass you off with promises of reward. We'll deliver the real thing!”

Now, how would you know a thing like that, Junior? Ryan wondered. He filed the question away in his mind.

Revenge
had a rep among all the crews for having the shiniest brass and the most atrocious gunnery skills in the Grand Fleet. Her captain, Edmund Geislinger, was a weakling who was easily influenced and manipulated by his underlings. Not a plotter, but a weakling. If this well-turned-out young traitor depended on his crew for
his sec, Ryan should have no trouble turning down the offer—and making his way out alive.

But if not-yet-Baron Danville had his own sec men along, things might get dicey. Ryan was good, but he had too many holes in his hide to pretend to himself he was bulletproof.

I got to get back to Krysty and the others, he thought. That's my only job here. Help get them out. Even the rest of the crew, if they don't slow us down too much. I can't risk throwing my life away here. I have to think of them.

He stood up, grinned and stuck out his hand.

“Looks like you hired yourself a blaster, Baron Danville.”

“Ah, if only.” The young man's smile was the most generous Ryan had seen on his face. Apparently Ryan's rare attempt at flattery had worked. Not that this case had been much of a challenge.

The lieutenant rose and extended his hand.

“Welcome to the right side of history, Mr. Cawdor,” he said. “It gratifies me that my estimate of you has proved correct. You have made a wise choice.”

Ryan gritted his teeth behind something he figured would pass for a smile, nodded and focused hard on not crushing that hand to pulp.

Triple hard.

* * *

“A
ND YOU TOLD
them you were in?” Baron Tanya Krakowitz of New Vickville asked. It was just the two of them by lamplight in her stateroom.

“I did.”

“And then you came right back here to me as fast as those long, lean legs would carry you to rat out your new employers?”

Ryan just spread his hand and tipped his head, in such a way as to point out, I'm here.

She tipped
her
head to one side, almost matching his gesture, and studied him frowningly from behind a rope of gray smoke from her cigarette.

“If you'd go back on your word to them, can I trust you?”

“I came here,” he said. “Like you said. You got to make your own mind up what that means to you.”

“Are you here looking for me to outbid them?”

“I would've said that straight, if that was my plan. Your move.”

She laughed. “Good man! I'd have thought you'd turned stupe on me if you hadn't lied to them. Not that I ever would have seen you again.”

“That was how I sized up the situation, Baron,” he said, although he still would not have bet against his chances of making it out still breathing.

But he had also seen yet another chance to maybe buy safe passage clear for his friends before they all died convulsing in their own runny shit. Or wound up looking at the lining of a stickie's bellies.

“Now that the hydra has exposed a head,” the baron said thoughtfully, “I intend to stamp on it hard with my heel. To encourage the others, you know.”

“Remember what else there was about the hydra that made it special.”

She laughed. “So erudite for a mercie! And yes. I recall
quite clearly that along with having an overabundance of heads, they grew back when you cut one off. That's why I would prefer it if you return this treasonous little shit to me alive. If that proves impossible, well—message sent.”

“If
I
return him?”

“Who better to arrest him? By coming here like this you've cemented your place as one of the few people in this fleet I know I can trust.”

Her brow wrinkled in thought. “Let's see…you'll need a squad to back you up. At the least. Sec men or naval infantry? I leave it up to you.”

“Just a boat with a pilot to get me back there and bring back a prisoner.”

Her thoughtful look got squashed together in the middle in a look of puzzlement—and fresh skepticism.

“Mebbe you
are
crazy. You're talking about going in and arresting him on your lonesome? Even if you can deal with his daddy's hired bullyboys— Never mind. I'm sure you can. But Eddie, wimp that he is, will still get flash-heated past nuke red if you lay the hard arm on his current pet executive officer.”

“Then if I need troops along, a squad's too little,” he said. “What I do need is for you to be prepared to back my play.”

“How far?”

“All the way.”

A smile slowly grew across her broad face. She leaned forward. “Come closer and tell your auntie Tanya what's on your devious mind.”

He did.

* * *

R
YAN RODE ACROSS
the nighttime water in a vessel known as a packet boat. Its function was to deliver messages—or messengers, as it was doing now. Ryan carried an arrest warrant in a pouch on his holster belt next to his panga sheath.

The
Revenge
was lit up, at least as brightly as dozens of turpentine lamps could make her. It did make her bulk seem even more looming and gigantic, even though she was far smaller than the
Pearl
. An unusual number of lights were lit because the frigate had reversed orders to take its place screening the flagship, replacing the
Hera
, which had been slotted there. Such shakeups were not uncommon, to keep captains of the lesser ironclads from getting complacent. The new placement also accounted for the trip to the vessel being so short.

Likely Captain Geislinger was cussing up a storm on his bridge right now. He took such unexpected changes in routine personally. A man who was serious about his complacency, by all accounts.

They dropped a wooden ramp with side railings as the packet approached the frigate's starboard quarter. Such comings and goings were routine, at any time of the day or night.

“Junior Lieutenant Cawdor,” Ryan said to the single sailor standing stiffly at the top of the ramp. “Carrying a personal message to First Officer Danville from Baron Tanya.” He waved a piece of lumpy paper that had been folded and stamped with the baron's seal in red wax.

The sentry ran a contemptuous eye over Ryan. The sailor had a shiny chin strap fixing his pillbox hat to his head, and a full-size Springfield 1873 replica with
a fixed bayonet slung over his back. If the blade had ever nicked an edge scraping human bone, or had its shiny finish sullied by blood, there was no evidence Ryan could see.

The kid nodded wordlessly. Courier from the baron or not, Ryan was clearly not important enough to be worth actual
words
.

The one-eyed man walked on his way, purposefully, but without hurry.

* * *

R
YAN TURNED THE
latch and pushed open the door on the upper deck of the
Revenge
's cabin.

Senior Lieutenant Dober Danville sat at a fold-down desk, writing. He had little pince-nez specs perched on the end of his long nose. He looked up.

His expression of rising rage turned to blank befuddlement. “Cawdor. What are you doing here?”

Ryan held up the paper with his left hand. “Senior Lieutenant Danville, I'm placing you under arrest by the baron's personal orders. Stand up and turn around.”

He had a pair of predark handcuffs jingling from his belt. They were easy to pick, if you could get hold of a little piece of metal and bend it a little. He did not make Danville for a man who knew that.

Danville leaped to his feet. “What's the meaning of this? Why, you traitor!”

His handsome and insipid face had turned purple. Now it flashed to a pale white.

With a commendable turn of speed, the senior lieutenant undid the flap of his holster and began to haul out his sidearm.

Before the handblaster cleared leather, Ryan had drawn his SIG, dropped into a crouch and fired two quick rounds.

Danville jerked as the 9 mm slugs punched through his sternum to pierce the left atrium and aorta of his heart, respectively, like little blood-pumping balloons. His right arm dropped, returning the handblaster to its carrier.

Ryan fired a third shot on top of the classic double tap, right through the middle of his forehead. Danville's eyes rolled up, his lower jaw dropped, and his tongue flopped from his mouth. Then he folded to the deck like an empty suit of clothes.

Ryan shoved the door closed behind him with his boot heel. He holstered the SIG and drew a stubby handblaster from behind his back. He cracked it open from the top. In his pouch he carried two flares for the device. He slid the red one into the single chamber and locked up the piece. Then he stepped to the port.

Less than two hundred yards away the
Pearl
rose like a shadow iceberg. Ryan aimed the blaster high over the flagship's top deck.

The flare that blossomed against the night sky burned red.

Not a minute later the door, which he had pushed closed with his heel after chilling Danville, was kicked open by a heavy boot. A
Revenge
sec man appeared in the doorway, pointing a longblaster into the room.

He looked confused. There was no one in front of him. Unlike Baron Tanya's sec men, with their longblaster repeaters, he had to make do with a single-shot
Springfield 1873 carbine. It did have a bayonet fixed, though. “Over here,” Ryan said, from the wall to his right of the door, where the late lieutenant's fold-down bunk was folded up behind walnut paneling. “Twitch that blaster even a hair this way and you're a dead man.”

Ryan was holding both his SIG and Danville's weapon at arm's length in front of him. He mostly did it to intimidate: if you actually tried to shoot two handblasters at once, you could wind up missing with both. It did make for a mighty fast reload, though. You just switched hands when your first blaster ran dry.

A man bustled into the cabin. His short, wide shape was wrapped in a purple dressing gown over pale blue pajamas. Ryan thought they might be real silk. He had a shock of white hair and a face that likely wasn't always that red.

“I'm Captain Geislinger,” he said, not altogether necessarily. For one thing, Ryan knew his cabin was across the corridor. “What is— Oh, great flame-puking death angels, Dobie!”

He looked at the chill, lying on its back staring up at the ceiling, with arms outflung.

“What have you done to him?” The captain gobbled like a tom turkey in his rage. Ryan would barely have understood the words, if hadn't already had a general idea what they were going to be.

“Placed him under arrest for treason,” Ryan said. He kept both blasters trained on the captain, who to his credit didn't flinch—although Ryan suspected that might either be sheer obliviousness, or the belief that a
low-life coldheart like Ryan would never pull the trigger on such an important man as himself.

Ryan hoped he wouldn't have to disabuse the captain of that notion. Thing could get triple sticky, triple fast.

“He resisted arrest,” Ryan said. “Saved the baron the cost of a court-martial, anyway.”

“Court-martial? Court-martial!” The stocky captain actually barked a mad-sounding laugh. “I'll convene my own captain's mast right here and now, convict you of murder, and have you dangling and strangling to greet the morning sun!”

“Hail, the
Revenge
!” a male voice bellowed though the slitted port. “This is Captain Garza of the
Pearl
. If I do not see Lieutenant Ryan Cawdor, unharmed and unimpeded, making his way back to my ship on his launch within two minutes, I am ordered to open fire on you. Count begins—now!”

“Or mebbe not,” Ryan said.

The sound at his door brought Ryan instantly awake. He sat up with his SIG in his hand without awareness of having drawn it.

He thought about firing up the lantern hung from the bulkhead, but decided against it. If this was more plotters come to avenge their fallen lieutenant, he didn't want to simplify their targeting solution by lighting up his own stupe ass for them.

But he frowned for more than the thought of danger. That he could deal with, especially if all the conspirators were cast in the same pot metal as Danville. Though as a matter of survival, he knew not to take such a thing for granted.

It was that he hadn't quite made out what the sound was. He only knew that it didn't belong and issued from the door.

It came again: a thumping sound, not loud but somehow insistent, followed by a whisper like something sliding down the wood on the other side.

Ryan got up and went to the near side of the door—the hinge side. Reaching out carefully, he took the hold of the latch, then turned it and hauled the door wide-open, fast.

When no blaster shot exploded into the cabin, he risked a look around the open door.

The tall, nicely built Lieutenant Ellin Stone fell into his arms.

The instant he caught her he knew this was not some romantic ploy. Never mind the way she'd been looking at him since the night he saved her from getting blasted by P'ville raiders.

From the blood trailing from one side of her mouth and coming in pink froth from her fine nostrils, and the feel of warm, sticky wetness on the palm supporting her beneath her back, he knew he wouldn't be saving her this time.

“Must…talk,” she said. She coughed blood all over his face and bare shoulder. He was still sleeping in his skivvies, enjoying that luxury while he could.