On all sides people shouted and screamed. A ferocious tumult rose from the stern, beyond the wall of smoke. Fighting raged there.
She turned the other way to see Mildred caught from behind in a bear hug by a big Latino-looking pirate with his back to a ladder coaming. A smaller man cocked back his arm to drive a long narrow rod with the tip ground to a point into the woman’s belly.
Krysty pointed the BAR at what she hoped was a safe angle clear of Mildred and held back the trigger. The blaster barked and bucked twice, and the heavy receiver locked open. One bullet hit the pirate with the spike on the hip and passed through him, smashing his narrow pelvis. He fell screaming, the needle-like weapon falling from his hands and washed out instantly through the scuppers by a backwash tendrilled with his own blood.
Mildred smashed her head back into the face of the man who held her. He grunted in unexpected pain. Blood squirted from his smashed nose.
The unexpected turn of events made him loosen the grip of his big bare arms. Mildred kicked back just beneath his right knee with her bootheel, then scraped it down his shin. He moaned and she broke free.
As the pirate pawed at her, she brought her knee up hard into his groin. His eyes bugged out and he doubled over.
As his big shaggy head descended, she jammed the muzzle of her ZKR 551 target pistol into his open mouth. Teeth broke. Blood streamed freely where the big sharp-edged front site tore the roof of his mouth. So furious was the sturdily built black woman, the force of it straightened him back up.
Fear of what was coming overcame even the agony and airlessness of smashed balls. His eyes flew wide. Pleading.
“Fuck you,” Mildred shouted, and pulled the trigger. There was a short, sharp bark. His eyes bulged out farther, impossibly far, until one popped from its orbit and fell to bounce off a filthy cheek, staring crazily around. He sank to the deck. A clot of hair and brains remained on the housing. A slug trail of blood ran down beneath it.
Caught in the midst of kneeling to discover there were no more magazines in the satchel Isis had provided, Krysty saw an ax handle fast descending toward Mildred’s skull. She dropped the empty longblaster with a clunk and grabbed for her own snub-nosed .38 revolver. But her warning only gave her friend enough time to begin to dodge, so that she took a glancing blow to the side of her head rather than taking the whole sickening force full on the cranium.
She slumped against the housing next to the man whose brains she’d blown all over it. Her new attacker cocked his leg to put the boot in. Crouching, off balance on the dizzily tilting deck, Krysty knew she would never get her blaster in action in time to keep him from stomping Mildred’s skull in.
“Here, catch!” a voice cried from above. Krysty looked up to see Isis standing atop the front of the cabin. She lobbed a head-size dark object right at the pirate’s face, turned upward like Krysty’s to see who had called out.
Reflex betrayed him. He dropped the ax handle to whip up both hands to protect himself. The pirate fielded a package of what looked like gray clay blocks taped together.
Krysty launched herself between the pirate and his intended victim, with sufficient power and the proper angle to bodycheck him clean over the side.
A moment after his wildly kicking cowboy boots vanished from sight, the boat shuddered. A column of water shot skyward twenty feet, shot through with red and body parts. Krysty just recognized a single pointy-toed boot before the sea swallowed the whole mess.
Mildred picked herself up. She looked up at Isis. “Kinda took a chance there, didn’t you?”
“Life is taking a chance,” the captain said. “Anyway, I had faith in your resourcefulness. There were reasons we hired you.”
Krysty found time to wonder fleetingly what those reasons were. The mouth of the stream the fleet had been making for beckoned welcomingly not fifty yards from the lead ship’s graceful prow. It wasn’t much: it looked like a mere hole, scarcely wider than the narrow sailing yacht herself, hacked in a wall of green that would’ve looked brick-solid if it weren’t waving like grass in the gale.
The rain wasn’t currently heavy, but the drops hit like ice bullets. Raising a big pale wave of water before its bow, a big launch roared in from starboard, trying to cut the yacht off from entering the bayou’s sanctuary. Blasterfire flashed. Bullets cracked by Krysty’s head. She heard a despairing cry as one found a target. From the direction she knew at least it was neither her friend Mildred nor the exotic and coolly competent ship’s captain. Knowing it would be ineffectual, she held out her Smith & Wesson with one hand wrapped over her blaster hand to brace and emptied its 5-shot cylinder.
Then it was as if an invisible circular saw ripped diagonally across the rear third of the intercepting pirate launch. Blood fountained as jeering men were ripped apart. Both sides of the hull shattered.
A wave carried the stricken launch up onto its frothy peak. The engine’s weight promptly snapped off the stern. By the time the wave plunged into the trough, all that remained above the water surface was bobbing debris. Including half a dozen heads, with faces that gazed up at Krysty with despair and desperate imploring.
“I never thought I’d be happy to see people doomed to drown like rats,” Mildred said. “I hate even being happy seeing rats drown. I hate what this world has done to me.”
“Well, you can be grateful to Stork in Finagle for clearing the way for us,” Krysty said, meaning it to help. She often was unsure how to deal with her friend’s occasional episodes of remorse, despair and homesickness.
Isis stood atop the cabin, shooting a gigantic pristine Desert Eagle handblaster at the pirate boats that still sought to overtake them. Looking toward the enemy flotilla, Krysty saw a long black yacht, its masts bare like Egret’s, bearing down on them. Where Egret was spotless white, this vessel was painted black on every visible surface, hull, superstructure, even mast. A black-clad figure stood in the bow as if its feet were bolted to the deck, apparently unaffected by the violence of the waves. Its features were obscured by blackness as featureless at several hundred yards as the hull.
“Damn!” Isis exclaimed from overhead. “That ship’s the Black Joke, and there stands Black Mask his evil self. If only I had a decent fucking blaster!”
Krysty knew the rare handblaster was well-made, as such things went. She also knew what the Tech-nomad captain meant. No matter how good a handblaster it was, to reach out and have any chance at all of touching the pirate overlord, she needed range.
Mildred looked up from rummaging through the debris strewed about the deck for loaded BAR magazines. Krysty noted that not even pounding rain and the waves that broke over the railing with increasing frequency could wash all the spilled blood away.
“Speaking of blasters,” the physician said, “what’s that next to Black Mask?”
Krysty realized he stood beside a long tube laid horizontally on some kind of mount. It flared to a wider diameter at the after end. A wide steel sheet stood angled back behind it.
“Some kind of cannon—” Krysty began.
“Recoilless rifle,” Isis said.
Yellow flame and white smoke erupted out the rear of the tube to splash against the steel plate and boil out to all sides.
A blinding flash lit the thrashing
