Time Castaways (17 page)

Quickly rising into view on the warship, Doc and Jak appeared from behind the gunwale and released the mooring lines. Only seconds later, the low rumbling noises from the craft’s engine room increased drastically, and the warship began to sluggishly move away from the dockyard.

Stepping out of the wheelhouse, Ryan went directly to the forward deck and yanked off the canvas sheet to reveal a honeycomb of bamboo pipes joined together with stout rope, and mounted on a platform atop a swivel post.

“Light it up, lover!” Ryan called, flicking a butane lighter into life and igniting a stubby fuse at the back of the weapon.

Already at the second launcher on the aft deck, Krysty did the same thing, and then the two companions impatiently waited for what seemed to be an inordinate length of time for the sputtering fuses to finally reach the cluster of bamboo pipes.

When the fuse vanished inside the honeycomb, there was a gush of smoke and a rocket flew away, streaking over the dockyard to slam into the wall of the ville and violently explode. The loud noise seemed to echo across
the bay, disturbing a flock of birds in the distant trees on the far side. Then the first of Krysty’s rockets launched to punch through the largest fishing boat moored at the dock. Spraying sparks and smoke, the rocket punched through the wooden hull and lanced into the water, hissing as it left behind a bubbling contrail.

Just then, a bearded face appeared on top of the ville wall, and Mildred triggered her ZKR blaster from the porthole. A split second later, the sec man vanished with a cry of pain.

Grabbing the heavy yoke of the honeycomb, Ryan moved the launcher into a new position just as the second rocket took off. However, it spiraled past the wall and missed the guard tower by a few feet. Exerting all of his strength, Ryan held the launcher still, and the third rocket flew true. With a thunderclap, the guard house detonated into flame and splinters, falling bodies arching down into the sleepy ville.

Gushing black smoke fumes from the smokestack, the Warhammer steadily chugged away from the shore and began slipping into a vaporous cloud of mist covering the middle of the bay. Knowing she had only a few moments of sight remaining, Krysty quickly swung her yoke around to aim rocket after rocket at anything that might be able to give pursuit. In short order, canoes, fishing boats and barges were blown to smithereens, the wreckage swiftly sinking to the bottom of the bay.

Meanwhile, Ryan took out the second guard tower, then the third.

Screaming and yelling were coming from inside the
ville, and suddenly they heard the steady gong of an alarm bell, closely followed by the shrill wails of a hundred whistles.

Inside the wheelhouse J.B. saw no reason to be covert anymore. Taking a hand off the wheel, he pulled on a dangling rope and a steam whistle loudly howled from atop the smokestack.

Out of sinkable targets, Krysty added the power of her honeycomb to Ryan’s. The homemade rockets hammered the dock nonstop, blowing out pylons and crashing through the boardwalk. Then they ruthlessly aimed the weapons at the one door, catching a squad of armed sec men totally by surprise. The sec men were blasted into shrieking hamburger by the double salvo, the door itself blown off the hinges before the thickening fog masked the ville completely.

“Got more?” Jak asked, patting the smoking honeycomb fondly as if it were a well-trained hunting dog.

“No, this was it. They must keep most of the rockets inside the ville.” Ryan smiled. “You know, just in case somebody jacks the boat.”

“Do you think they will give pursuit?” Doc asked, his long hair riffling in the cloudy breeze.

“I would,” Liana replied gruffly, just as something huge flashed past the warship to slam into the surface of the lake, throwing off a geyser of water.

“Arbalest!” Ryan shouted, leveling the Steyr. But it was impossible to see through the morning fog. That was why they had chosen this time to leave instead of at night. Only now, the fog that shielded them was doing the same for the ville sec men.

Opening her mouth, Mildred started to tell everybody to be quiet, the sec men were probably using the voice to aim the colossal crossbow. But then she realized that with the hammering steam engine, silence was impossible.

Several more of the giant arrows came out of the mist, slashing across the bay in different directions. Most of them only sliced into the water, but one hit a sandbar, violently exploding into a geyser of splitters and loose sand.

They know we’re out here, but are as blind as we are, Ryan noted with some satisfaction. At least both sides were on equal footing.

However, unable to fight back or to hide, the companions could do nothing at the moment but tighten the grip on their blasters and wait for annihilation. If one of the giant arrows hit, the Warhammer would be cored like a ripe apple.

“Head for the western shore!” Krysty shouted, motioning in the opposite direction.

Nodding from behind the glass window of the wheelhouse, J.B. changed direction and started heading toward a small island covered with pine trees. It wouldn’t offer much protection, but some was always better than none.

As the warship steamed behind the copse of trees, swarms of half-arrows arched down from the cloudy sky, sounding like rain as they vanished into the murky water.

Incredibly, there was the sharp report of a blaster from behind, the lolling boom telling it was a black-powder weapon.

“It seems that we have awoken the beast,” Krysty muttered, pulling out her own blaster.

Leaving the protection of the woody island, the Warhammer moved steadily along, trying to get as far away from the ville defenders as possible without approaching any of the countless sunken trees or small sandbars.

For several minutes the vessel steamed along, rapidly increasing speed until there was a jarring impact that threw everybody to the deck as the warship suddenly stopped. Loose items rolled across the trembling deck, and several went overboard to splash into the drink.

“Nuking hell, we ran aground!” J.B. cursed from the wheelhouse. Never letting go of the wheel, he grabbed a speaking tube made of joined sections of bamboo and shouted into the mouthpiece. “Jak! Reverse the engine! Give me dead slow!”

“Gotcha…” the teenager answered, the reply ghostly faint over the sound of the laboring machine.

Looking over the gunwale, Ryan saw only choppy water below the stern. Fireblast! Getting out of this passage was going to be a lot harder than he had ever imagined. The sunken log and larger sandbars they could see and easily avoid, but if there were many more of these hidden sandbars, they would still be fumbling about in the bay, looking for a way out, when the baron arrived with a hundred men in birch-bark canoes. That would be real trouble.

Slowly, the engine eased in tempo, and the trembling in the hull stopped. Mechanical clanks sounded from
belowdecks, and the propellers spun for an inordinately long time before the Warhammer sluggishly pulled itself loose with a moist sucking sound. The water swirled darkly around the boat, then gradually cleared as it moved backward into deep water again.

“Liana, are there any man-eaters in the bay?” Krysty demanded, scowling at the muddy water. “Can we swim out ahead to check for more obstacles?”

“None,” she replied quickly, eager to help. “Only the sea…I mean the lake, has killer fish.”

“That won’t help,” Ryan growled, gripping the gunwale and staring at the wide bay ahead of them. “The bastard sandbar we just hit was too fragging far underwater to see. Swimming ahead of the boat would only slow us more!”

“Ah, but mayhap I can show us the way,” Doc announced, holstering his blaster. “Keep us still for a moment, John Barrymore, while I find some string!”

“String?” J.B. demanded, looking over the rim of his glasses

“String!” the time traveler replied haughtily, disappearing down the stairwell. A few moments later Doc returned with a slim length of hemp rope coiled in his hands.

Going to the bow, he stretched the rope out to the length of his arm and tied off a knot. He kept doing that for the whole length of the rope, then he went back and added a larger knot between each of the arm’s-length knots.

Looking for something to use as a plumb, Doc found nothing serviceable and reluctantly tied the Ruger to the end of the rope. At least it was waterproof and would
not be damaged by a long immersion, unlike the precious LeMat.

“Clever, very clever, ya old coot,” Mildred said, slapping the man on the back.

“My parents had a fool for a son, but that was my brother,” Doc replied with a wry smile, tossing the rope overboard. The revolver splashed out of sight, and the man let the knotted rope run through his fingers until it stopped descending.

“John Barrymore, we have ten feet to the port side!” he bellowed over his shoulder. “Is that sufficient?”

“The what side?” J.B. replied from the wheelhouse, looking from behind the big wheel.

“Port has four letters, just like the word left.”

“Ah, gotcha. Yeah, ten is fine,” J.B. replied happily, snatching the speaking tube. “Jak! Move us forward at half speed! No, make that a third!”

“Third speed!” the teenager replied, and a few seconds later the vessel began to creep forward again.

Just then, in the far distance, there was a flurry of blasterfire, but it did not seem to be coming in their direction. At least, not yet.

Casting out the line again, Doc reeled it in quickly and read the depth. “Mark!” he called out. “Half twain to the starboard!”

“Dark night, speak English!” J.B. demanded from the wheelhouse.

“Full twain means clear sailing,” Mildred answered from the forward deck. “Half twain means the water is getting shallow, quarter twain means danger, slow and back off!”

“Well, why doesn’t he just say so!”

“Tradition, my friend!” Doc replied, casting out the rope once more.

With Doc leading the way, J.B. clumsily steered the bulky vessel through the sandy maze of the narrow channel. Progress was slow, and Ryan stayed a tense guard at the back of the boat, the Steyr clenched in both hands, straining to see into the wafting fog.

Slow hours passed, and the noon sun began to bake away the cool morning mist when the Warhammer finally entered a wide area of the bay, the clear blue water dotted with a series of small islands that strongly resembled the fjords of Norway.

“It should be clear sailing from here on,” Doc called out in marked satisfaction, working the Ruger free of the wet rope. The blaster was streaked with mud and covered with kelp, but otherwise undamaged.

“About damn time,” J.B. replied gruffly, turning to the speaking tube. “Okay, Jak, give me full speed!”

But the reply of the teenager was cut off when there came a dull boom from far behind the steamboat.

“Are those cannons?” Mildred asked nervously.

“Hope so,” Ryan replied gruffly, the wind blowing his black hair forward to hide his expression.

Straining to hear over the hammering of the steam engine, the companions anxiously waited for the appearance of a cannonball from out of the fog, but nothing happened. There was only the sound of the steam engine and the lap of the waves against their wooden hull.

Then the boom came again, followed by another,
then more, slow and steady, the concussions coming in the pendulum beat of a human heart.

“That’s a timing drum,” Ryan stated, tightening his grip on the longblaster. “Fireblast, I thought we sank everything they had!”

“Guess we missed one,” Krysty said furiously, her hair coiling and flexing. “There must have been a dry dock or a boatyard that Liana didn’t know about.”

Softly, the beat continued, regular and steady, slowly growing louder, a smooth counterpoint to the mechanical laboring of the steam engine.

“I saw a vid once about Roman galleys,” Mildred said calmly, even though there was a tickle of fear in her stomach. “Mostly they used slaves, but during a war, sometimes sec men would crew the ships. Fifty, sixty, a hundred strong men rowing in perfect unison, the oars moving to the beat of a timing drum.”

“How fast did they move?” Krysty asked, getting to the point.

“Very fast, too damn fast,” Mildred replied honestly, her hands holding on to the gunwale. “With a properly trained crew, a galley could easily catch a windjammer near the shore and ram into it hard enough to crash through, completely through, coming out the other side.” The physician shook her head. “The Romans didn’t have to fire an arrow or draw a single sword. They just plowed the other ship down like roadkill and let the sea do the rest.”

“How far did Liana say it was until we reach the open lake?” Krysty asked, pulling out her Glock to drop the magazine and check the load.

“Fifty more miles, just past a peninsula,” Mildred answered, glancing ahead of the boat. Only smooth open water was in sight. “Think we’ll make it before they arrive?”

Suddenly the beat of the timing drum changed, quickening slightly, the unseen enemy moving faster toward them.

“We’ll find out soon enough,” Ryan said, raising the Steyr.

Chapter Fifteen

Nothing could be seen moving through the thick fog covering the bay. There was only the dull beat of the timing drums, and the steady splash of oars slapping against the choppy water.

“Faster! Row faster!” Baron Wainwright commanded, leaning forward in the longboat as if she could hasten their progress through sheer willpower. “The mainlanders must not escape!”

Her velvet dress was blackened with soot and badly slashed, a plump breast almost fully exposed. But the leather bodice underneath had saved her life from a hail of flying debris. However, the baron had lost a lot of her beautiful hair in the fire that engulfed her ville when the guard towers collapsed, and the side of her face was horribly blistered. Her vaunted beauty was gone and her ville in ruins. Now, madness gleamed from her eyes, and the only thought pounding in her mind in tempo to the timing drum was the ever-repeating word: revenge…revenge…revenge…

Putting their backs into the job, the dozen sec men in the lead longboat obediently tried to move the oars faster, and stay in tempo to the beating drum. The tethered slave at the drum didn’t care if the mainlanders
were caught or not. But any slowing in the beat would result in a brutal whipping, so he tried his best to urge the sec men on to faster and faster speeds.

“Don’t worry, cousin, they won’t get away,” Baron Griffin growled, working the bolt on his Marlin .444 longblaster. There were only four rounds for the titanic weapon, but he swore to make every fragging one of them draw blood.

That is, if I can shoot straight, the baron amended privately. In spite of a brief nap and several cups of strong tea, Griffin was still exhausted from the long trip to Northpoint, and yet exhilarated to be so near the hated mainlanders. There were two predark weapons in his gunbelt—the Ruger .38 his father had given him on his deathbed, and his wife’s 12-gauge scattergun. When the one-eyed man fell to his feet to beg for his life, Baron Griffin would execute the coldheart with the sawed-off blaster. The sight of his head exploding would be a balm to his aching heart. It wouldn’t be enough. Griffin wanted to torture the outlander for years as punishment for his cowardly attack, but a fast chilling would have to suffice. However, the slut would go into the gaudy house to serve his sec men until they rode her to death. And I’ll be first to put rubies into that silk saddle, the baron savagely promised, feeling his manhood swell at the thought of the delicious agony he would inflict upon the stocky woman.

Grunting in reply, Baron Wainwright checked the load in her blasters. The coldhearts who attacked Northpoint and jacked her boat had made a critical mistake. They hadn’t checked the warehouse located across the
bay from the ville. The winter longboats had been stored there, undergoing their yearly repairs, along with a few birch-bark canoes she used to trade with the outer islands. The Warhammer was gone, but a hundred of the sec men from Anchor and Northpoint had been jammed into the hodgepodge of longboats, a good dozen more riding along in the small canoes. They had mounted the Wendigo on a barge, and Wainwright knew the outlanders didn’t stand a chance against the war wag’s big rapidfire blasters.

She grinned as she thought about the war wag, and the bulky arbalest filling a nearby longboat. The boat just behind it was stacked high with arrows for the deadly weapon, and the mixed crew of the two villes was carrying every working blaster the two barons possessed. Plus, hundreds of boomerangs, spears, bolos and grens. Baskets upon baskets of black-powder grens. More than enough to blow a hole through the world, if necessary. Cobbled together in less than an hour, this was more than a mere caravan, or a flotilla, it was a fragging armada!

Personally, Wainwright wished LeFontaine was here, but the sec chief had not returned from escorting that Hilly to some cave on the southern shore, near the Green Mountain. But such was life.

Just then a low breeze moved among the longboats and suddenly the sec men could see one another much more clearly.

“Must be about noon,” Griffin said, awkwardly working the arming bolt of the Marlin. “The fog is almost gone.”

“Good,” Wainwright muttered. “That’ll make it easier to chill them.”

Suddenly, from ahead of them came the familiar noise of a badly tuned steam engine lumbering along. Without waiting to be told, the sec men in the center longboat started to work the windless of their arbalest, pulling back the ten-foot bow in preparation of loading a yard-long arrow.

“Just watch out for the one-eyed man,” Griffin warned, hefting the heavy longblaster. “He’s a crack shot with a blaster.”

“Me, too,” Wainwright whispered, drawing the S&W .44 Magnum blaster, and clicking back the hammer.

LEANING AGAINST the gunwale to steady himself, Ryan looked through the telescopic sights of the Steyr, but there was nothing to be seen across the bay but the damnable fog.

Softly muffled voices could be heard, along with the clatter of wood hitting wood, and a rhythmic splashing. Oars in the water. Lowering the longblaster, the one-eyed man strained to listen to the timing drum. Counting under his breath to get the beat, Ryan soon cursed at the realization that there were several drums. However, the bastard things were pounding in such perfect unison that it was impossible for him to even guess the exact number. There could be dozens, maybe even hundreds.

“Gaia, it sounds like the baron sent everything she had after us,” Krysty muttered uneasily, swaying to the motion of the boat.

“Of course, madam,” Doc rumbled, a blaster in each hand. “We have the speed, but they must intimately know this bay. It is the source of their livelihood. If our vessel becomes entangled with another sandbar, we shall most definitely become dead in the water.”

Shifting the med kit to keep it out of the way, Mildred tried not to shiver at the phrase. Dead in the water. She had never truly understood the nautical term before. In a sea battle, standing still meant you died. End of discussion. Mentally, the physician made a note to add this incident to her growing codex. If we survive today, she added privately.

Suddenly there was the stomping from the stairwell, and everybody spun with their blasters at the ready as Jak came into view brandishing a stone ax.

“Could use hand,” the sweat-drenched teenager stated simply, then turned and descended back into the engine room.

“I’ll go,” Krysty offered, holstering her blaster. “My snub-nose has the worst range.”

“Fair enough,” Ryan said, giving the redhead a meaningful glance. “I’ll give a shout if anybody gets past us.”

She patted her blaster. “If snakeskin boots appear on the stairs, the owner will never reach the bottom in one piece.”

“Good. And if you hear me call you Amanda or Abigail…”

“We blow the engine and sink this tub.” Reaching out, Krysty stroked his scarred cheek, speaking volumes, then she turned and headed off.

For a moment Ryan watched her go until she was out of sight, then concentrated on business. The best way to keep Krysty sucking air was to make sure that the baron and her sec men never got on this boat alive.

“Mildred, go see if J.B. can get any more speed out of this thing,” Ryan growled, shouldering the longblaster. “Then go load the arbalest.”

Looking at the ungainly weapon, the physician nodded thoughtfully to herself, then strode into the wheelhouse. A split second later Liana came out, holding a handful of leather quivers filled with arrows.

“I found these in the armory,” Liana announced, dropping the quivers onto the deck, a rapidfire crossbow hung across her slim back. “With the wind at our backs they’ll have much better range than anything coming this way.”

“Our thanks, dear lady, but now you should seek refuge in the hold,” Doc said in unaccustomed frankness. “Soon, we shall be in harm’s way.”

“Where you go, I follow,” Liana said simply, feeding a half-arrow in the hopper of the elaborate weapon, then several more.

At the words, Doc took her small hand and gently squeezed. Then as if never seeing it before, Doc saw the wedding ring on his left hand. Emily.

“We need to talk,” the time traveler said.

“Later,” Ryan interrupted, pulling out the panga and testing the edge of a thumb. “Liana, know what a firebrand is?”

“Sure.”

“Go make some.”

Immediately, Liana rushed off.

With Doc standing watching at the rear gunwale, Ryan went to the empty honeycomb and started hacking at the wooden pivot, alternating the angle of the strikes as if he was chopping down a tree. Soon, the support cracked and the spent rocket pod toppled and crashed onto the deck.

Leaving the gunwale, Doc started to drag the honeycomb aft, as Ryan hacked down the second launcher. Without any rockets, they were only good as shields. At least it gave them something better than the gunwale to stand behind. That was only waist high.

“This position will also make them easy to shove overboard,” Doc added, dusting off his hands. “In case we need to lighten the boat.”

“And a pipe bomb or two stuffed inside wouldn’t hurt, either,” Ryan agreed, dragging the launcher into position.

“Indeed not, sir!” Doc grinned. “It would be most appropriate for us to give the baron some small recompense for the use of her warship, and lead in the coin of the realm these days!”

“Bet your ass.”

In the distance, the drums continued, growing ever louder.

Lashing the honeycombs into place with some rope, the men tested the knots to make sure they were secure. A few minutes later, Liana returned with a wicker basket full of rope, and a ceramic demijohn.

“Cooking oil,” she announced, setting the items down behind the impromptive barricade. “I also told
J.B. the old poem on how to find the passage to the open lake.”

“Poem?” Doc asked curiously, arching an eyebrow.

“‘Two tall pines will show you the way,’” she recited, in a clear strong voice. “‘One faces freedom, and the other looks away.’”

“How the frag does a tree look away?” Ryan demanded skeptically.

“Sir, trees have faces,” Liana said patiently, as if explaining something to a small child.

“Faces,” Ryan repeated.

She nodded vigorously.

After a moment Ryan shrugged in acceptance. Okay, the local trees had faces. Had to be muties. He just hoped that J.B. could figure out which way the fragging tree was looking when the time came. Ahead of the boat, the bay was starting to narrow, as if becoming an inlet, the water studded with an archipelago of tiny islands, most of them too small for even a newborn stingwing to safely land on, much less support a full grown tree.

“I brought air support,” Mildred called, returning with the bulky munitions bag slung over a shoulder, the Uzi bumping into her backside with every step.

“Well done, madam!” Pulling out a knife, Doc began to cut the sounding line into several pieces of the exact same length.

As the companions started to lash the rope to pipe bombs, the drumming got noticeably louder, and a long narrow boat slipped out of the fog bank. At the front was a wooden shield more suitable for an ax fight, but
Ryan knew it would probably also serve well against blasters.

“There they be,” a sec man shouted, pointing an accusing finger.

Instantly, Ryan dropped the pipe bomb, swung up the Steyr, aimed and fired.

The sec man flipped over backward from the arrival of a 7.62 mm hollowpoint round, his life spraying across the other sec men filling the boat. Several of them recoiled, dropping their oars, but most did not, and kept steadily rowing, their bloody faces full of murderous rage.

“And the whale beholds Captain Ahab,” Doc whispered, drawing his two blasters, and thumbing back the hammers.

“Galley, my ass, that’s a longboat,” Mildred muttered, carefully cutting the fuse to each pipe bomb until it was less than an inch long. “It’s much faster than a—Aw, crap!”

Exiting the mist came another longboat stuffed full of even more sec men armed with a wide variety of weapons. Then came a score of birch-bark canoes holding only a single occupant, closely followed by a dozen more longboats carrying at least a hundred sec men. One longboat was equipped with an arbalest and a stack of arrows, while another boasted the deadly bamboo honeycomb of a rocket launcher. And behind them all was a barge bearing Wendigo.

Instantly the four companions stopped what they were doing and unleashed a barrage of lead at the honeycomb, cutting down a sec woman trying to light the
master fuse. With a strangled cry, she toppled overboard and disappeared below the choppy surface. A few moments later, the gasping woman resurfaced, only to have a longboat ram into her head. The skull cracked open with horrid results, and the corpse slipped below the keel of the vessel.

“Get that big bastard!” sec chief Donovan bellowed, fanning his blaster at the Warhammer. Incredibly, the lead hit the gunwale and honeycomb, sounding like somebody knocking on a door.

Kneeling behind the honeycomb, Ryan centered the crosshairs on the snarling face of the sec chief, adjusted for the wind and distance and gently squeezed the trigger. Spinning, Donovan fell, the longblaster flying from his bandaged hand to splash into the lake.

In reply, a swarm of boomerangs lashed out from the army of sec men, along with a flurry of half-arrows from their rapidfire crossbows.