LITMIR.BIZ

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rifle fired. The brilliant blue-white spot streaking like a renegade star toward Finagle’s fat stern. The flash and eardrum-torturing crack of a shaped-charge warhead going off. The answering yellow flash, followed by a sudden explosion of steam so hot it was initially invisible, and made the falling rain and spray sizzle as it expanded.

       Then a scalding hot pressure wave had picked him up and slammed him down. Pain had shot through his head, accompanied by purple-white lightning. And then the world had gone out of focus.

       “Didn’t lose consciousness,” he muttered. He tasted salt and copper. He’d cracked his head open on something, probably a metal bollard. “So mebbe my brain isn’t going to swell up until the inside of my skull implodes it.”

       “Ryan…” Doc said.

       Ryan became aware the deck was tilting sharply. He looked aft. A huge white cloud covered the whole rear half of the steamship, apparently proof against the efforts of wind and water to disperse it.

       A figure walked out of the cloud. At first Ryan thought its clothes were hanging off it in rags, then he realized similar rags were dangling from its chin.

       Even Ryan’s cast-iron stomach clenched in nausea and horror. The rags weren’t the man’s clothes at all. They were his skin, flash-boiled off him by live steam.

       The man’s eyes met his. For a moment he thought the man was imploring him. Then he realized the other couldn’t possibly see him. The eyes were white, parched like eggs, sightless from the blast.

       Ryan realized he still had a reassuringly familiar hardness gripped in his right hand. He did the only thing he could do: raised the SIG-Sauer P-226 smoothly in both hands, acquired his target, then squeezed his finger into a compressed surprise break. The handblaster cracked and jumped.

       A dark hole appeared in the cooked red mess of that forehead. The scalded Tech-nomad folded to the deck. He had received the only relief possible.

       The burly figure of Smoker, the ship’s captain, next appeared from the artificial fogbank that still hid the after half of Finagle’s First Law. The big black man didn’t look as if he’d gotten burned. But he was hurt, and badly, if Ryan was any judge—which he was. The right side of the big man’s coveralls were a darker shade than usual from midchest down. He clutched his right side and limped on his right leg.

       But whatever had wounded him hadn’t damaged his voice any. “Abandon ship!” he bellowed like an enraged bull elephant. “All hands—we’re going down!”

       A sudden line of bullets stitched fore-to-aft along the side of the cabin. Its path intersected the captain. He jerked, then sagged. Finally he collapsed to the deck of his sinking ship, where an outward roll of the hull sent him limply into the scuppers.

       “Shit,” Ryan said.

       “We had better seek out boats,” Doc said.

       “Do you see any?” Ryan demanded. The two men had to hang on to lines against the ship’s heaving. “The lifeboats I remember were carried back by the stern. We may have to swim for it.”

       “In this sea? That would be madness!”

       “Mebbe,” Ryan said. They were shouting at each other to make themselves heard over the howl of the storm and the drumming of the rain. “Mebbe triple-stupe. But the way I calculate, if we swim, we may drown. We stay on this tub, we will drown.”

       Another blast rocked ship. A yellow fireball rolled upward from the midst of the steam cloud that enveloped the stern. Black smoke poured after. Yellow licks of flame began to dart out the sides of the steam cloud.

       “Or burn,” Ryan added.

       Doc clutched his arm. “Perhaps there is another choice.”

       It was on Ryan’s tongue to say he didn’t see it. Instead he looked where Doc pointed.

       The New Hope, rotors spinning furiously in the wind, backed toward the sinking Finagle’s First Law. A small pirate boat tried for some unknown reason to dart between the ships and was crunched as the steamer rode it down. Ryan couldn’t see the impact of Finagle’s up-angled bow, but heard the screams of men being crushed.

       Jak stood on the slippery brass railing of the rotor-sailer’s stern, his hair hanging down his face and shoulders like spilled milk. He held on to a guyline, riding the wildly pitching and rolling and yawing craft like some Western cowboy taming a bronco. He laughed into the face of the storm. J.B. stood beside him on the deck, preparing to throw over a rope in a very business-like manner.

       “You know,” Ryan said as Jak threw back his head and uttered a panther-scream of exaltation, “that boy’s just having himself way too much fun.”

      THE WIND DIMINISHED when they entered the river mouth, which wasn’t to say it cut off. Nor did the rain slacken. Rather it grew even fiercer, and lightning veined the sky in bluish white in an almost continuous pulsation. The thunder was one loud roar, competing with all the other noise.

       One noise it wasn’t competing with was blasterfire, Ryan was pleased to note as he stood in the stern with his Steyr ready. The small pirate craft had pulled back and were being laboriously recovered by the larger vessels of the fleet. The ones that survived. It didn’t seem to him there were that many.

       “Hard to imagine they’ll keep coming,” Ryan said, “after taking losses like that.”

       Cold as the hearts of coldhearts were, they were, after all, mainly predators. And predators tended to seek easy prey. Or they didn’t survive to pass on their genes to baby predators.

       “I don’t know,” Long Tom said worriedly. He stood in the stern with them, more concerned with pursuit than with the dangers of navigating a narrow, relatively shallow passage in a hurricane. Clearly he trusted Micro, his sailing master. “Once Black Mask catches the scent of a rich prize, he doesn’t like to let it go. He’s not a man who deals well with disappointment.”

       On their last sight of the Black Joke, it had been tossed on massive waves five hundred or so yards astern. Perhaps half a dozen other large craft still clustered around it. That was less than half the fleet that first hove into view over the horizon.

       Ryan was pretty sure the Hope’s rocket racks had only accounted for two or three of the enemy ships. If the Tech-nomad squadron boasted any other weapons able to sink a ship of that size, he hadn’t seen them used in the fight. More likely the other captains had chosen to cut and run, from the battle or from the storm.

       “He doesn’t much care about losses,” Randy said. “Easy come, easy go. And the more casualties he takes, the fewer pieces the pie has to be cut into.”

       J.B. had his hat off and was wringing water out of it. “Not the kind of employer I’d like to work for,” he said, clapping the fedora back on his head. Ryan couldn’t see it was an ounce less soaked than before he’d wrung it out.

       “How does he get anybody to sign on with him, got an attitude like that?”

       Randy shrugged. “As we told you, there’s no shortage of men without much other choice live along this coast. Not to mention the ones he signs on at blasterpoint. Anyway, he’s free with the jolt and red-eye. And with the women, they say, when they make landfall. Lotta men reckon a fast death with the Black Gang beats a slow death ashore.”

       “Cast in those terms,” Doc said, “the attraction of his employ becomes, at least, more readily comprehensible.”

       Randy nodded. Despite their circumstances, Ryan felt brief amusement. The black Tech-nomad himself was pretty plainspoken. But by and large the Tech-nomads were about the only people left on Earth who didn’t think Doc talked funny.

       “Looks as if the Black Joke is making for the inlet,” a voice called from midships as the Hope fully entered the river. “Pursuing.”

       Long Tom winced. “Great. Just what we need. Even with the real storm about to land on us like as asteroid from fucking space.”

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