to his horrendous injuries.
Another dozen were hurt badly enough to require treatment. That meant about a quarter of the squadron’s people had wound up as casualties. Four of their eight pedal-powered scout boats had been smashed beyond repair. Of the three large craft only the New Hope had been seriously damaged. She now lay with a third of her length grounded on a little island down the sluggish stream. The starboard bow had been holed; some seams had been started on the portside. These had been patched up to what the chief shipwright, a short-haired, hard-faced woman named Vonda, claimed was as good as new. Mildred had thought she heard doubt in the woman’s voice, though.
The human toll affected her more than the material. But she was acutely aware the damage the Tech-nomad craft had incurred could come back later and bite somebody in the ass.
Even her friends or her.
Now she watched the big birds fly over, their white feathers turned to flames by the sunset, and sighed deeply.
“That’s one way these swamps are better than most of the Deathlands, anyway,” she said. “Sometimes it doesn’t look at all as if the nuke war and skydark even happened.”
“The waters have tended to obviate the scars left behind by the conflagration and its sequelae,” Dr. Theophilus Tanner said. He was a tall and skinny man with pale blue eyes and a long, hard-worn face framed with lank, gray hair.
Although he looked decades older than any of his companions, he was really about Mildred’s age, mid- to late thirties—if you stacked the years he’d actually lived through together. Like the physician, he was chronically displaced. He had been time-trawled from his own epoch, the late nineteenth century, by late twentieth-century whitecoats working for an ultrasecret project. Doc proved to be difficult. Tired of his antics, his captors sent him hurtling through time into the Deathlands. His time-trawling experiences had aged him so much that he looked to be in his sixties.
He and Mildred were by far the most extensively educated members of the party, in a formal sense—by Deathlands standards, almost ludicrously overeducated. His well-bred manners and pedantic manner sometimes irritated Mildred, as did his holding forth on a vast array of subjects. She considered his knowledge hopelessly out of date. Yet a lot of what he knew of history and natural sciences hadn’t been superseded by time, and he had learned a great deal unknown to his own period during his torment by the whitecoats of Operation Chronos.
Mildred flipped him an annoyed glance and turned her attention to the fire. “Sometimes I think some of the wild things have done better after skydark,” she said.
J.B. chuckled. “Like the killer sea cows,” he said. “Getting turned mutie and all giant and everything seems to have turned the tables for them.”
“GOT VID,” JAK SAID. “Tech-nomads.”
In his economical way the albino teen sounded as if he’d said all that needed saying.
Mebbe he did, Ryan reflected. True to their name the Tech-nomads lived and all but worshipped technology: a combination of tech preserved from the world right before the skydark, low-technology gleaned from millennia before even that, and the results of research and development they’d continued in their own secretive and eccentric way. They mostly tended to avoid contact with outsiders—as in, the rest of the world.
Which made this current gig the more a mystery. Ryan and his friends had brushed up against the Tech-nomads a few times before. The dealings had been peaceable: Tech-nomads avoided conflict. But as the crew had seen this day, they fought fiercely and with some skill when pressed.
“Wonder what they’re up to over there,” J.B. said. He jerked his chin toward the woods. Leaving only a couple sentries on each big vessel the Tech-nomads had trooped deep into a stand of live oak on the stream’s south bank. Glancing that way, Ryan could just make out the odd orange gleam of firelight through the trees and undergrowth.
“They said they were ‘sharing the water’ of their dead brothers and sister,” Mildred said. “Whatever that means.”
“Not want find out,” Jak muttered. He hunkered down by the fire, where the flamelight danced in his ruby eyes. He wore his customary camou jacket with jagged bits of metal and glass sewn into the fabric to discourage people, or other things, from grappling with him.
“They neglected to invite us,” Ryan said. “Just as glad, myself.”
“Look on the bright side, Ryan,” J.B. said. Ryan cocked an eyebrow at him. His old friend wasn’t known for looking on the bright side of anything. He was an ace armorer and tinker, though, and Ryan Cawdor’s best friend in this whole treacherous world. “At least they aren’t blaming us for the damage they took.”
“In fairness, they could scarcely do so, John Barrymore,” Doc said. “They knew when they engaged our services we lacked heavy weaponry.”
Darkness had settled in. The only thing left of day was a sour yellow glow in the western sky, shading quickly to blue and indigo overhead. The crickets began their nightly commentary. The tree frogs trilled rebuttal.
J.B. showed the old man a rare grin. “But you more than made up for that in the end, didn’t you?” He shook his head in admiration. “Thinking of using explosives to drive off the muties was pure genius.”
“You did your customary splendid job fabricating the bombs.”
“Not much doing, there. Mostly chopping up blocks of C-4, sticking in initiators, adding some short pieces of safety fuse, then lighting them and giving them to you to toss.”
“Don’t downplay your contribution, John,” Mildred said reprovingly. “I’ve tried patching back together the hands of farmers who got careless trying to stick blasting caps in dynamite to blow up stumps.”
J.B. shrugged. “Part of my job.”
“We all did well today,” Krysty said. She looked at Ryan, her green eyes gleaming. “I’m proud of you, the way you jumped on that mutie’s back, though I wish you wouldn’t do that sort of thing.”
“Do I do it if I don’t have to?” he asked.
He saw her ivory-skinned brow furrow, then realized he’d spoken a bit gruffly.
“Sorry,” he said. “Guess I’m still on edge. I only did what looked to me needed doing.”
Her smile dazzled him.
“Anyway,” he said, “Jak did it first.”
He slapped palms on the grimy thighs of his jeans and rose.
“I hope the Tech-nomads get their funeral ritual done with soon,” he said. “I could use some food.”
RYAN’S EYE snapped open. He was surrounded by darkness as tangible as a blanket with humidity and heat. He knew where he was at once—lying in his bedroll by the embers of their campfire, with Krysty’s comforting presence peacefully by his side.
Something had tapped lightly on his right upper arm. It was uppermost as he lay with his head cradled on his rucksack. He happened to be facing west; the stars were invisible for a third of the way up the sky above the blackness of the forests.
“Know awake,” Jak said softly. “Heard
