LITMIR.BIZ

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own judgment told them it might actually be worth a try—they did it. And they usually pulled it off.

      “Ryan.” Trace’s voice rasped as if she’d been gargling lye. “Stay. If you will.”

      That latter part was one of the shipboard niceties the captain liked to maintain, and Ryan knew it. He turned back. Aboard the Queen, she was his boss. And in this case what she was calling him back from was adding the strength of his back and arms to saving her ship.

      “I need you…to advise me,” she said. “We’ve had more than one run-in with people who want this cargo, and I’ve seen that you know something about tactics.”

      “You’re the authority on ship-handling,” he said. “I can’t pretend to know nuke about it.”

      “We put our…heads together, then,” she said, managing a wan smile.

      She was triple tough, there was no question. When her ship and crew were on the line, she would do her job and die doing it. For their part, the crew knew it, and responded accordingly.

      Even Ryan and his people knew that. Good, honest bosses were hard to come by.

      “I’m fresh out of ideas, now,” he admitted, as another volley came rushing in with a hurricane sound.

      He felt a tremor beneath his feet, accompanied by a thunderous bang from astern. Immediately voices began screaming, “Fire! Fire on the barge!”

      A moment later, Suzan Kenn appeared in the door, her gray-shot brown hair in more than the usual disarray.

      “A shell hit the barge right where the lumber meets the cloth bales, Captain!” she exclaimed breathlessly. “She started burning like Billy Jesus right off the mark. The only hope we’ve got of dousing the blaze is turning on the power to the pumps.”

      “We can’t do that,” Trace rapped. “Cut her loose.”

      Suzan blinked. “Captain?”

      “Are you sure, Trace?” Arliss asked.

      He was the Mississippi Queen’s master rigger, which meant he kept the steering linkages in top shape, among other duties. A little guy, somewhere between J.B. and Jak in size, he had a short frizz of graying hair and a beard, prominent ears, and a missing right front incisor. He was the second-best financial mind on board, after the now-deceased Edna, and usually advised the Conoyers in negotiations, a job Edna had been too shy to do well. Like everybody aboard the Queen, he was ace at his job, and Ryan knew that part of his job was to keep his captain’s eye on the bottom line.

      “The price—”

      “Probably won’t buy us a new ship, Arliss, and definitely won’t buy a new us. We can’t die for the load.”

      “But Baron Teddy—”

      “Will have to—” she winced at a twinge of pain as Mildred adjusted the bandage “—deal with his disappointment. We can send him a nice note from upstream. He knew the risks when he ordered the goods. Cut her loose, Suzan.”

      “Wait,” Ryan said.

      Everybody looked at him. “You sound like a man with a plan,” Trace told him.

      “I don’t know if I’d dignify it by calling it that,” he said. “Yet. Give me a minute to look outside.”

      Suzan started to pull back away from the door as he headed for it. Then she ducked hastily inside at the thud and shudder of another impact.

      Ryan’s nut-sack tightened in anticipation of the following explosion, which didn’t come. He poked his head outside.

      The middle-aged deckhand had not been lying. Great clouds of white smoke were pouring out of the barge. He could see flames leaping to a height he judged to be higher than his head. He doubted their ability to put out the fire, even with power to drive water at good pressure through hoses stretched far astern. That wasn’t anything he knew much about, but his gut told him he was right. He trusted it.

      The wind was still blowing out of the east and freshening slightly as the sun headed for the horizon behind the tall weeds of the western shore. There was already a respectable wall of smoke extending across the wide river in that direction.

      The Queen was almost turned clean south. Ryan glanced upriver. As he feared, the half-dozen or so smaller craft giving chase were closer now, and at least three of them were big enough to be what he took for the so-called frigates, and armored.

      They had one bit of luck: when he stepped briefly out to the rail to look astern, he could only see the easternmost of the bigger Poteetville ships now lying broadside to their fleeing prey. The rest were completely blanketed by a brown-gray haze of their own gun smoke. That was the thing about black powder weapons: unless you had a wind blowing up double brisk, you only had a few good shots before you were nigh-on blinded by a smoke screen of your own creation. The only bonus to that was that if your enemy was similarly armed, they had the same problem.

      Good to know, but not particularly significant, Ryan thought. They were getting close to the point at which there was no sense wasting the powder and ball in hopes of scoring some lucky hits. In fact, he couldn’t see any muzzle-flashes from the stationary capital ships and frigates, even the one that was mostly clear because the breeze blew its gun smoke away. But the pursuing vessels all had bow cannon, even the patrol boats, and they were all banging lustily away as soon as their crews could reload them, which wasn’t fast, fortunately.

      But now Ryan had his plan. He smiled and stepped back inside.

      “It’s about time to straighten the rudder to run downstream, Captain,” Nataly said as he reentered the bridge. She had gotten her strength back and stood tall.

      Trace had her eyes shut and her head back against the bulkhead, but she was awake and alert.

      “You still have the helm,” she said, wearily but firmly.

      “Keep us turning counterclockwise,” Ryan said. “Uh, to port.”

      Nataly looked at him, shocked.

      “Captain?” Arliss asked, sounding as if he thought the shock and the pain of her blasted-off arm had robbed her of her senses. “That’ll take us back toward their cannon.”

      But Trace had raised her head upright and was gazing at Ryan with clear, brown eyes.

      “Go on, Ryan,” she said. “I like where I think this is going.”

      “Captain,” Arliss said, sounding pained that she was taking a landlubber’s advice, when it ran dead counter to every bit of his own riverman’s lore.

      “Yeah,” he told the captain. “I got a plan. Bring the Queen as close as you can to the east bank and still safely sheer south. Then cut the barge free before you start your turn. I don’t know if that’s the right lingo, so I put it as plain as I know how.”

      She managed a smile, albeit a thin one, and fleeting.

      “Close enough for getting on with. Nataly—”

      The helmswoman had subtly straightened her shoulders. “Aye-aye, Captain!” she said smartly. She had clearly grasped Ryan’s intention.

      Arliss frowned, then he nodded and showed a gap-toothed grin.

      “Good one,” he said. “If we’ve got to write off the barge, we can use her to lay us a smoke screen. And give those Poteetville bastards something to think about to get around it. You do know your shit, Cawdor.”

      Ryan nodded once, briskly.

      * * *

      HE HELPED THEM beat down the fire. Fortunately only one of the rooms—which the Conoyers and their crew rather grandly called “staterooms”—was gutted. Sadly, Suzan had shared it Edna, and all their possessions were write-offs. That didn’t matter a bent shell case to Edna anymore.

      It took Ryan, his friends

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