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 breathing change.”
Ryan sat up, scratching his scalp on the right rear of his head.
“Can’t get a pinch of powder past you, Jak,” he said. He realized the albino youth had awakened him by tossing pebbles at him from a safe distance. A wise idea for one so young. When awakened too suddenly people had a reflex to lash out.
Beside him Krysty grumbled and sat up. “What?” she demanded.
“We have to move on,” Mildred said grumpily. Her voice wasn’t fuzzed with sleep. The night’s rotation had her paired with Jak on sentry-duty.
“Why?” Krysty muttered. She could come awake with feline suddenness when danger loomed. But this night she was letting go of sleep’s shelter only reluctantly.
“Tech-nomads say there’s a big hurricane coming. We need to get out to the open water and beat feet east if we want to miss it. And we do.”
“Now, how do the Techs know a thing like that, Millie?” the Armorer asked, sitting up and reaching around for his glasses. “Sky’s scarcely cloudy.”
“Not a clue.”
“They’re the bosses,” Ryan said, standing. “If they say saddle up and go, we saddle up and go.”
Chapter Four
As the hot sun poured from the blue Gulf sky, the Tech-nomads and the companions raced east before the storm. The clouds began to pile up the sky behind them, black and ominous.
The companions had gathered on the lead ship, the New Hope, in the bow, sitting on the hot wood deck or leaning against the rail, talking with Long Tom, who was the squadron commander, though neither he nor any other Tech-nomad would use the term, and some of his crew. Ryan squatted in front of the cabin, admiring the curve of Krysty’s buttocks as she stood in the prow gazing forward. The movement of her long red hair wasn’t altogether in tune with the stiff wind blowing from their starboard quarter.
“So how did you know the hurricane was coming?” Mildred asked.
“Well, duh,” said Highwire, an overly wound Asian techie with prominent ears and horn-rimmed glasses. He was shorter than J.B. and wispier. “We talked to them others of our group by phone.”
J.B.’s own face tightened up a bit. It wasn’t a respectful way to talk to his friend, much less his woman. Ryan shot his friend a deceptively lazy look. These people were their paymasters, not to mention the fact they outnumbered the companions enough they could just pitch them over the rail for the sharks if they got pissed off, despite the companions’ weapons and proficiency at using them. And it wasn’t exactly a surprise when Tech-nomads showed bad manners, even by rough and ready Deathlands standards.
“So, do you use surviving communications satellites?” Mildred asked.
“Nope,” Sparks said. A wiry black kid—almost all the Tech-nomads were on the lean side—he wore shorts and a loose jersey, and his hair in dreads. “Use meteor-skip transmission. Bounce the signal off the ionized trails they leave. Reliable and easy. Don’t have to wait on satellite coverage. Which is pretty scant these days.”
“Meteors,” Krysty said. “But they’re not all that common except when the showers happen a few times a year, are they?”
“Always meteors falling,” said Randy, the fleet’s electronics ace. He was another black man, but big and powerfully built, with a shaved head and a surprisingly high-pitched voice. He always seemed pissed off about something and spoke in aggressive, staccato bursts. Dark lenses covered his eyes as if they were part of his face. That creeped Ryan out slightly, although he suspected that was the intent. “Whether you see them or not.”
“Who’d you get the word from?” J.B. asked.
“The Tech-nomad flotilla,” Long Tom said.
Ryan scratched at an earlobe. “What’s that mean, exactly?”
The captain shrugged. He lived up to his name. He was a long lean drink of water with muscles like cables strung along bone, a long narrow head with ginger beard and receding hair both shaved to a sort of plush.
“Lot of things,” he said. “It can refer to the seaborne Tech-nomad contingent, or even all Tech-nomads worldwide. In this case it refers to a group of seacraft passing across the mouth of the Gulf.”
“Tom,” said Great Scott, an overtly gay guy in a loose canvas shirt and shorts, who shaved his head and wore a tiny little soul patch. His voice had a warning tone.
He was another technical wizard of some sort Ryan didn’t even understand. Then again, that pretty much defined any random Tech-nomad. Even when they had some kind of readily defined and comprehensible specialty—like Sparks, the commo guy, or Jenn, who kept the Hope’s unconventional power train turning smoothly and was keeping to her cabin today, unfortunately incapacitated by grief at having watched her lover die the previous day—they usually had a raft of other skills. Almost always including ones Mildred and even Doc Tanner strained to grasp, and which went right by Ryan.
The captain scowled. “Blind Norad, Scott. They’re two hundred miles away. It’s not like these people know where they’re heading, or could pass along any information to anybody. And besides, they’re on our side. Remember?”
Long Tom smiled. He had what amounted to extraordinary diplomatic skills for a Tech-nomad. Ryan reckoned it had a lot to do with why he was boss of this traveling freakshow.
Great Scott just glowered. Ryan reckoned he could read that pretty clearly, too. There were Tech-nomads, and there were outsiders. Never the twain should meet.
And he could understand that, at least. It was the same way he felt about the little group of survivors he’d gathered around him, who’d become his family in a deeper and truer way than any blood kin ever had.
Voices pulled his attention aft. Doc was walking toward them talking animatedly with the squadron’s chief engineer, a pretty woman named Katie who wore incredibly baggy khaki coveralls with only a green sports bra beneath them. She had her brown hair covered by a red bandanna. Her normal gig was boss wrench on Smoker’s Finagle’s First Law. But her skipper had virtually built the ship’s steam-powered engines with his own hands, Ryan had been told. He could keep them turning smoothly while his mechanic spent much of her time doctoring up the eccentric and cranky rotor-sail-driven system onboard New Hope.
Doc and Katie were just passing the foremost of the three rotor-sails: tall white cylinders pierced with spiral whirls of holes that apparently could catch wind from any angle to turn the rotors. These in turn could either act somehow like sails, or drive propellers. They also turned generators to store power in batteries for when the winds died down. It was a mystery to Ryan, and it was fine with him if it stayed that way.
The sails tended to creak shrilly and annoyingly when a stiff wind turned them rapidly, as it did now. Everybody had to raise their voices to make themselves heard.
“What I’m endeavoring to understand, dear lady,” said Doc, who was in his
