are good places for bad things to happen,â J.B. stated, settling his fedora more firmly on his head. âLike crossroads. Reckon rivers arenât any different.â
âThey used to say the Devil hung out at crossroads,â Mildred said. âBack in the, uh, day.â
Ricky turned his face down to hide his grin. The âdayâ she meant was back in the long-dead twentieth century, where Mildred had lived most of her life. She had undergone a routine abdominal surgical procedure and something had gone wrong. Sheâd been frozen in a cryogenic procedure and shipped to a cryocenter in Minnesota just as the balloon was going up on the Big Nuke.
Trace nodded. âYouâre right, Ryan. Take your people to full alert. But stand ready to lend a hand if it turns out the riverâs what we really need to be worried about.â
Ryan nodded.
âGet that winch back together double quick,â Myron said, all business now.
âBut we havenât finished cleaning it,â Maggie protested.
âYes, you have,â Myron told her, his tone at once gentle and commanding. âYouâll just take it apart again and clean it after weâre headed up the Sippi for Feliville.â
âAye-aye, sir,â she said glumly. Then she sat back on her heels, looked at Ricky and suddenly grinned.
When she did that she was positively cute, he thought.
âAll right, champ,â she said. âShow me what youâve got.â
* * *
THE DECK ROLLED beneath Ryanâs boots as the Mississippi Queen chugged into the joining of the Yazoo with the Sippi.
His Steyr Scout Tactical longblaster in hand, he stood at the bow, with Krysty at his side. The rest of the companions were spread out around the eighty-foot-long vesselâs perimeter, interspersed with armed members of the Queenâs regular crew. Doc Tanner, his LeMat combination handblaster and shotgun at the ready, held a position to Krystyâs right. J.B. was to Ryanâs left, holding his Uzi, and Mildred flanked him farther astern. Jak Lauren, their young scout, stood in the stern. He was ready to run down the thick hawser by which they towed a hundred-foot barge stacked high with lumber and bales of cloth and leap aboard to repel any would-be boarders with his knives and .357 Magnum Colt Python revolver.
Finally, Ricky Morales, having reassembled the power-winch to his stern task-mistressâs approval, lay on his belly on the flat roof of the main cabin, ready to snipe with the DeLisle replica carbine he had helped his uncle make by hand, in happier times on his home island of Puerto Rico. Although it couldnât really be called âsniping,â since the weapon lacked a scope, the boy could consistently hit his mark with whisper-quiet shots out to a hundred yards.
In the event Ryanâs people had to reach out and touch somebodyâas Mildred put it in her quaintly anachronistic freezie wayâany farther than one hundred yards, Ryanâs Steyr, which did have a scope, could do the job.
Not that Captain Conoyer believed thereâd be any trouble. But she hadnât batted an eyelash when Ryan suggested turning out as many hands with blasters as possible to wait for it, just in case. Having hired him in part as a sec consultant, as she put it, she had the sense to listen to him on the subject.
Over a third as wide across the beam as she was long, the tug was surprisingly stable as she chugged confidently out into the crosscurrent from the Sippi. As ballast she carried tons of big metal scrap chunks, plus crates of weapons and ammo that were the actual prizes from this current voyage up the Yazoo. The cream of the crop was a Lahti Model L-39: a bolt-action antitank rifle firing 20 mm armor-piercing rounds, in cherry condition, consigned to a wealthy baron up the big river. Or so Ryan was told; sadly, Captain Trace had refused to open the crate despite the near-drooling entreaties of J.B. and his apprentice armorer, Ricky.
The Queen began its turn to starboard almost as soon as it cleared the banks to the north. Ryan glanced back over his right shoulder, along the vesselâs length toward the barge. He knew that getting it safely around the corner would be the trickiest part. But Trace had taken the helm herself, and just in their brief time aboard Ryan and his friends had learned she was expert in piloting the boat.
The one-eyed man was just as glad the Queen wasnât a pusher-style Sippi tug, of the sort her crew told Ryan had dominated the river before the nukeday. Bigger and of all-steel construction, they used to push not just single barges, but sometimes two or more in seriesâeach many times larger than the wooden one the Queen was dragging toward Felivilleâwith their square prows. He didnât even want to try to imagine how pulling off a maneuver like this would have worked in such an arrangement.
He was unlikely to find out. Nukeday had triggered colossal earthquakes that had started shaking up the continental US even before the warheads stopped detonating. None was worse than the quake caused by the New Madrid Fault Line that ran by the Sippi from north of Memphis to St. Louis. The blasts, quakes and seismic water surges had smashed most of the vessels on the river into twisted junk, left them high and dry when the great river actually changed channels, and even tossed them inland, sometimes even into the hearts of major cities.
They had become mother lodes of fabulous scrap for generations of especially intrepid scavvies. Or for barons willing to enslave the people of the villes they ruled to the arduous and dangerous work of ship-breaking. These days most of the river traffic was wood-hulled, driven by steam engines or, as the Queen was, by scavvied Diesels. And when they hauled barges they were content to pull them.
As Ryan turned his face forward again, he scanned the seven-foot weeds that obscured the Yazooâs north bank and the east bank of the Sippi. He wasnât sure what he expected to see, but he expected to see something. His gut told him that trouble was coming.
But it gave him not the slightest clue as to what that trouble would actually be. Nor where it would come from.
He looked back out across the Sippi and saw a geyser of water shoot up into the air, fifty yards ahead and a little off the port bow of the turning tugboat. A heavy boom hit him with an impact as much felt as heard. It was a sound he was all too familiar with.
He spun to look south. Steaming up the river from the south came four boats, a quarter mile away and closing slowly. They were a ragged assortment, no two alike, and none as large as the Queen herself. They had a strange, ugly, bruised glint to them in the afternoon sun, and were gray mottled with red. Black plumes billowed from their smokestacks and were swept away east by a crossing breeze.
Yellow light flared from the bows of the nearest two, accompanied by giant puffs of dirty-white smoke.
âRed alert!â he turned and shouted toward the Queenâs cabin. âCannon fire! Weâre under attack!â
Ryan heard a rushing roar pass overhead. Then a fresh column of water blasted up from the river right in front of the left side of the bow, drenching him.
A hand-cranked siren was winding from the tugâs cabin. Ducking reflexively behind the railâas if
