With a loud, meaty thump the Egret heeled hard to starboard, throwing Krysty and Mildred against the port rail. Krysty set her butt on the low rounded housing of a gangway that led below and swung her legs across. Her companion putted around abaft the housing, clutching her beefy rifle and muttering.
The corrugated rubber soles of the red-haired beauty’s boots thumped the deck. The far rail was still angled up against the sky. Peering over, she saw a vast gray shape rolling in the thick, murky water alongside the Egret’s sleek hull.
“Crap!” Mildred exclaimed, joining Krysty and peering over. The gray mound disappeared, then came back with another shuddering impact, trying to capsize the seventy-foot yacht and making a good go of it. “Whatever those things are, you shoot them and they find out, there’s gonna be trouble!”
“One way to find out,” Krysty said grimly. She shouldered her heavy weapon, hung it over the rail with the muzzle not three feet from the heaving gray back, and fired.
She took no pleasure in harming any of Gaia’s creatures, but Krysty was no more a vegetarian than she was a pacifist. She respected, indeed in effect worshipped, the natural cycle of life. It had amused her once, when Mildred told her an activist of her own childhood years had recorded a song called, “I Don’t Eat Animals and They Don’t Eat Me.”
“They did, though, when her time came,” Krysty had observed.
Mildred had just stared at her, then broke up laughing.
The Browning roared. Its steel-shod butt jackhammered Krysty’s shoulder even though she was snugging it in firmly, the way the shooter of a longblaster should. A yellow-and-blue flame jetted from the black barrel and almost licked the gray wet hide. An arc of shiny brass casings spurted away to one side, twinkling in the sun, looking incongruously like droplets from a seaman pissing over the rail.
Holes appeared in what had to be immensely thick hide, and black blood spurted. Chunks of blubber and hide were blasted away.
Though its head was under water, the creature uttered a roar of pain and outrage. It bubbled up around the great shape as it vanished hurriedly and with amazing smoothness into the black water. Its vehemence rocked the boat.
“Did you kill it?” Mildred asked, peering doubtfully at the roil of water. Then she ducked back as a big fleshy fluke sent a parting shot of water geysering up at the women. Mildred jumped back with a yell.
Krysty just turned to shield her blaster from the bulk of the water. The slog of swamp water against the back of her head and shoulders was neither cool nor refreshing. It would take forever to dry in air that seemed scarcely less wet than the bayou itself, and would stink while it was doing it. But that, too, was part of Nature.
“Doubt it,” she said.
BOTH RYAN’S GROUP and the Tech-nomad squadron under the guidance of a long drink of water called Long Tom had happened to fetch up in a little trading post called Port Landrieu at the same time. The companions were looking for work. The Tech-nomads had it: delivering a load of meds and medical equipment to a healer in the ville of Haven to the east, far enough up an estuary to have at least a little protection from the savage storms that rolled in from the Lantic.
For two days the three-boat convoy hugged the coast, slipping inland when the ever-shifting interconnections of the confusing skein of bayous and ponds made it possible to move laterally that way. Ryan and his friends were dubious about the densely grown swamp country. Jak had grown up in it and knew it well enough to know just how unwelcoming it was—although he had also, as a mere boy, proved to be among its most dangerous predators. Their employers, though, assured them that as bad as the bayous were, the open Gulf was worse.
The friends had enough experience of the Gulf and its special terrors not to doubt that.
But the trip had proved uneventful, even though the Tech-nomads were vocally uneasy about the depredations of a particularly potent and nasty band of pirates calling themselves the Black Gang. Sight of a number of unfamiliar sails just on the horizon to the southeast had sent the convoy ducking up a stream late the evening before.
The companions had breathed a collective sigh of relief when the three ships, accompanied by a cloud of half a dozen surprisingly fast little pedal-powered scout boats, had embarked onto what looked like a small, placid, green-scummed lake. Some of the bayous they’d negotiated that very morning were narrow enough for a coldheart to step right aboard from the bank. Or even for some poisonous snake, a water moc or a copperhead, to drop from a dangling tree limb right onto the deck. Or onto an unsuspecting crew person’s head.
Then the big angry whatever had smashed Scooter and his water-striding scout boat to splinters.
WITH SURPRISING ALACRITY Mildred whipped up her heavy Garand and fired. She was a stocky woman, and after years tramping the Deathlands with her newfound friends not much of it was fat. The rifle roared, and Mildred yelped and dropped it. Only the fact she had the sling wrapped around her arm kept it from dropping into the tea-colored water.
Twenty yards from the Egret a big, bulky, smoothed-off shape plunged back under water as fast as it had appeared, leaving a loud snort and a plume of vented air hanging above where it had been. Just before it vanished, Krysty caught a glimpse of a blunt muzzle and a glaring red-rimmed eye. Mildred was grimacing and holding her wrist with her left hand.
Quickly slinging her own massive weapon, Krysty grabbed the longblaster, eased the strap free of the wounded woman and lowered it to the deck.
“What happened?” she asked, disengaging Mildred’s wounded right hand. The doctor seemed disinclined to let go. Without even thinking about it, Krysty pulled the hand free.
“You’ve skinned your thumb pretty badly,” she said.
“Sprained it, too,” Mildred grumbled. “Now I know what the phrase ‘M-1 thumb’ means.”
Krysty shook her head. “The Tech-nomads warned you. The bolt slams right back on you.”
“Tell me about it. I’m not used to a rifle anyway. And it doesn’t feel natural to keep my thumb on the same side as the fingers, instead of grasping the rifle like I would a pistol grip.”
“We need to get this cleaned up and bound.”
“Screw that! Screw the damn rifle, too.” With her left hand she reached around and grabbed the blocky black revolver from the holster on her right hip. “This may not do much when I hit, but at least I can hit something with it!”
“And shoot one-handed,” Krysty said. She unslung her BAR and started looked around for targets.
Its steam engine pounding furiously, Finagle’s First Law, the squadron’s third major vessel, churned past the Egret at about the same spot the great creature Mildred had messed up her thumb shooting at had vanished. Although he was out of sight on the far side of the main cabin, Krysty heard Jammer screech in outrage at the black pall of smoke it trailed from its doubled stack. The Tech-nomads’ time-honored philosophy of avoiding confrontation only applied outside the family—as the companions had learned abundantly the past couple of days.
Above the engine’s rhythmic thud rose a sharp-edged snarl. A cloud of white steam puffed away from the steamboat’s prow. Krysty saw the skinny bare shoulders of a Tech-nomad named Stork turned toward her, pressed against the mesh back of a recumbent seat as his gangly pallid legs pedaled
