hard on something hard, and his face felt sunburned.
Also his head rang like an anvil, which was currently in use to forge red-hot iron.
“Ryan!” a voice called from the distance. He shook himself again. His sensory impressions, his very thoughts, whirled around him like shoals of little fish. Little flickering fish, their sides flashing silver in the yellow sunlight—
“Dear boy, please! The ship’s sinking. We have got to act upon the instant, or most assuredly perish!”
Whatever else could be said about Ryan, he was a survivor. He gave his head a final shake, short and sharp, and shook all those little vagrant fishes back into place.
He looked up to see Doc’s long face, streaming water, with raindrops exploding in little bursts all over it. His usually lank hair was plastered right down both sides of his head, making his skull look narrower than usual.
“Get up,” the old man urged. His words still seemed to cross some vast distance, although his bloodless lips moved barely the length of his long outstretched fingers from Ryan’s nose. “We must be taking our leave, and quickly.”
“Right.” Ryan gripped the other man’s forearm, and was glad of the unlooked-for strength with which Doc pulled him to his feet. He reeled, first from dizziness, then a second time because the deck was doing its level best to pitch him into waves that leaped up on all sides as if eager to receive him. Then he shook off his friend’s helping hand.
“What happened?” he asked, his voice a bone-dry croak without the water that covered every external inch of him.
“Boiler explosion,” Doc shouted. “A cannon shot from the Black Joke struck home. The steam Gatling has lost all power.”
It came back to Ryan, then: the flash and smoke as the recoilless 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.”
