LITMIR.BIZ

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and Mildred approached them from around the starboard side of the cabin.

      “No injuries, Captain,” the shorter woman reported. “That was some lousy shooting, thankfully.”

      “Any orders for us, Captain?” Krysty asked.

      “Stand ready if you’re needed.”

      The statuesque redhead gave her lover a wink as he straightened from the rail. He kept his blaster in hand, just to be sure.

      “So what’s the deal with this barony of New Vick?” J.B. asked. He settled his wire-rimmed spectacles back in place. Behind them Ryan could see a gleam in his eyes. “Why are they building up a fleet?”

      “They’re in an arms race with Poteetville,” Trace replied.

      “Captain.”

      “What have you got for me, Edna?” the captain asked.

      This time it was Edna Huang who was approaching from astern. A short, bespectacled Asian woman who inexplicably liked to wear her shiny black hair all wound into circular pigtails, she was the Mississippi Queen’s chief purser.

      “Arliss reports the fire is controlled and he’ll soon have it out,” Edna said. “There’s no sign of structural damage to the barge that he can find.”

      “Ace on the line,” the captain said.

      The purser seemed less than happy at the very news she brought.

      “What’s eating at you?” Trace asked.

      “There’s not much damage to the textiles, ma’am. But there’s still some. We may need to write off as much as ten percent, adding in for smoke damage.”

      “It’s the cost of doing business on the river,” the captain said.

      “Baron Teddy’s not going to be triple pleased.”

      “You leave him to me. He knows how the world works today.”

      “Yes, ma’am.”

      “Now run along and send up Avery.”

      “Already here, Captain.”

      Avery Telsco, the Queen’s chief shipwright, was a long, lanky black dude with short dreadlocks. He wore a monocle, of all the nuking things, screwed into his right eye. Although having seen him work repairing the ship and fighting off the ever-present danger of rot in her wooden meat and bones, Ryan gathered it wasn’t wholly an affectation. He did make use of it on detail work and inspecting for damage.

      “Ace. Report.”

      “The shot that hit us just busted a chunk of rail all to nuke. Mebbe ten feet. I can have it fixed in twenty minutes with a spare spar from stores. Or, if you’d care to send a boat ashore we could cut down a sapling—”

      “Nuke, no!”

      “It would be cheaper, Captain,” Edna said.

      “Getting people killed by stickies would not be cheaper,” Trace replied. “And I doubt your crew mates would like to have all their hair fall out and have their skin get all gross with rad blueberries and stumble around like zombies for a few days from even a mild rad dosage. Now git!”

      The purser turned and hurried back into the cabin as fast as her legs would propel her.

      “Do the badlands extend a ways?” Ryan asked. The view astern was completely hidden by the barge now. Under Nataly’s firm hand, the Queen was churning steadily north up the big river. Ryan could see activity at the stern of the barge, including glimpses of Doc Tanner’s disorderly white hair, past the stacked lumber as the damage control crew pitched still-smoldering bales of Baron Teddy’s expensive, recently spun muslin overboard.

      “A couple miles in all directions, pretty much,” Trace admitted.

      “So if you got a minute, Captain,” Ryan said, “tell us about this arms race between Poteetville and, uh, New Vick.”

      “New Vickville is just south of the hot spot that includes the ruins of old Vicksburg, on and around the bluff, down there to the south. The ville got pretty rich off scavvy from the ruins, not too long after skydark.”

      “Seems like that would be pretty dangerous, what with all the fallout around here,” Mildred commented.

      “The first baron believed in ruling with what you might call an iron hand,” Avery said in a dry drawl.

      “Avery here’s our history bug,” Trace stated.

      “Poteetville lies about five, six miles north of here,” the shipwright said. “It started out as a camp for people scavvying flotsam on the Sippi, of which there was a drek-load, right after skydark. Eventually both Poteetville and New Vick turned into pretty big river trading ports. And natural rivals, being so close together.”

      “Yeah,” Ryan said. “I wouldn’t think they’d both be able to get rich.”

      “Well, Poteetville naturally gets first dibs on traffic coming down from the north,” Trace said, “while New Vick is the stop-off spot for ships from the south. Plus there’s a fair amount of traffic coming off the Yazoo, like us.”

      “Things started to heat up between them mebbe thirty, forty years ago,” Avery said. “Baron Poteet sent his daughter to marry Baron Vick, and she promptly died under mysterious circumstances. It seems she committed suicide, but that didn’t mollify Poteetville any. Both villes started building up their fleets. Each already had one or two improvised-armor vessels apiece, to repel river pirates.”

      “And do a little pirating themselves,” the captain added.

      “But both sides decided they needed full-on ironclad fleets. Or mebbe flotillas. So they started building them like crazy. And expanding and consolidating their holds on the countryside surrounding, making lesser villes either pay them tribute or just absorbing them. That kind of thing.”

      “Building pocket empires,” J.B. said. He looked at Ryan. “There’s a lot of that going around this days.”

      Ryan shrugged. “It was one of the things that kept Trader in business, back when we ran with him.”

      “Yeah.”

      “Now both sides got, what? A dozen or so apiece of what you might call ironclad warships. They’ve got three or four big vessels that they call ‘capital’ ships, some smaller ones they call frigates, and a shitload of unarmored little patrol boats. Some of them don’t amount to much more than a canoe with a trolling motor, truth to tell.”

      “And those that we just had the run-in with were frigates,” Ryan stated.

      “Like I said, they’re what pass for frigates,” Trace replied. “The capital ships run up to a hundred and fifty feet long, and can mount up to ten blasters on the Pearl. That’s Baron Vick’s flagship. Baroness, some people would say, though no one would say that to her face. We can be glad we didn’t brush up against them.”

      “Any rifled blasters?” J.B. asked. Ryan didn’t think his friend needed to sound quite so rad-blasted hopeful.

      But the captain shook her head. “All smoothbore, like the smaller ships carry. But that many weapons can put a lot of metal in the air in a hell of a hurry. It was lucky that we didn’t run into them.”

      “I notice you people seem to use the words ship and boat pretty interchangeably,” Mildred said. “In my experience, nautical types tend to get pretty sticky about the distinctions between them. They can be real assholes about it. Pardon my French.”

      “‘French’?” Avery asked, blinking in confusion made comical by one eye being magnified to double size by his monocle. “Wait, that was French? I don’t speak French, but I understood what you said—”

      “She’s not from around here,”

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