James Axler - Haven's Blight

“Least I could do.” From the bow came the weird grinding roar of Stork’s pedals turned, steam-powered Gatling. “Need all the fighters I can get today. Pretty impressive presence of mind, there, Doc, holding that handblaster free of the water even when your head was under.”

Doc smiled. “Though the LeMat isn’t what it once was, the workings must be kept dry.”

“What was the blast?” Ryan asked. He scanned the moving hills of water but saw no immediate danger this side of the smoke screen, which was beginning to fray and come apart under the wind’s increasingly savage onslaught.

“RPG,” Smoker said around the stub of cigar clamped unlit between his teeth. Like all Tech-nomads except a few apparent eccentrics, he had teeth in perfect condition, almost blinding in their whiteness.

“Hit the stern. The nuke-suckers were trying either to take out the prop or the steering. Didn’t make either. Didn’t hurt anybody, beyond a few scorch marks and scrapes. Won’t be so lucky long.”

A hefty thump forward, accompanied by another quick violent vibration of the planks beneath his boots, made Ryan turn.

“There’s our luck running out,” Smoker said as grappling hooks thumped on the deck. He drew his weapons. “All hands stand by to repel boarders.”

As a pair of hooks slithered backward to catch on the rail, Ryan followed his example. He ran forward, drawing his SIG-Sauer with his left hand and his panga with his right.

Men swarmed up both ropes. Ryan was still raising his handblaster when the captain’s blaster cracked off behind him. A dark-skinned head with a black do-rag wrapped around it, which had just appeared above the nearer rope, snapped back. The pirate fell away, carrying at least a couple of his mates with him, to judge by the shouts. Ryan heard a body splash into the water.

As another pirate swarmed over the rail, Ryan took him out. Struck through the left shoulder the man reeled back, but got hold of the rail with a black-nailed left hand. A shot through the body sealed his fate.

As the second pirate fell, the one-eyed man hacked through the rope closer to him with a single stroke of his panga. That elicited more yells as bodies thumped back into the whaleboat and others splashed into the raging sea, hopefully never to be seen again.

Ryan heard shots and screams behind him. Putting his back against the cabin, he risked a quick glance that way.

Pirates were swarming up over the stern of the steamer. Two raced toward Doc, one armed with what looked like a short spear, the other with a fire ax.

Doc had emptied the fat cylinder of his LeMat, but he had a nasty surprise in store. There was a single stub of shotgun barrel mounted beneath the revolver’s cylinder. Doc took the ax-man’s face off with a charge of double-00 buckshot.

A four-foot adjustable boiler wrench smashed the skull of the guy with the short spear. A following pirate shot the crewman who’d swung the massive wrench off the housing with some kind of one-shot homemade blaster. The lower half of the face of the guy with the pipe-gun blew out over the rail in a shower of red liquid as another Tech-nomad inside the cabin shot him out a port with a crossbow, the heavy quarrel going sideways through his mouth and tearing his teeth out. As the pirate gurgled and choked on his own blood, Smoker, roaring, grappled him and threw him bodily into the sea. Cackling with manic glee, Doc put away his giant handblaster and pulled his swordstick from his belt. Pulling the slim blade from within, he began to duel a pirate armed with a machete, using the ebony cane sheath as a parrying weapon.

A flicker of motion in Ryan’s peripheral vision snapped his head back around. A hand grabbed his wrist as he tried to raise his SIG-Sauer. A blast of foul breath hit him in the face as he turned toward his bearded, sunburned attacker. The pirate held a two-foot length of pipe with a heavy join on the business end cocked back over his left shoulder, intending to bust open Ryan’s head.

To discourage the move, Ryan jammed the panga into the man’s swag gut almost to the grip and twisted. The man bellowed in pain, then sagged, letting go of Ryan’s gun wrist.

The one-eyed man promptly raised his left hand and shot a second charging pirate over the shoulder of the man he’d stabbed. Then he put his boot against the breastbone of his first attacker and kicked the man off his blade. Howling in agony, the pirate fell backward, trailing a loop of gut like a strand of greasy purple-gray sausage.

This is going to be a long day, Ryan thought, as the sound of clashing weapons and angry voices broke out from the cabin roof above his head.

WITH A LOUD CHUNK the ax that had been swung at Jak’s face sank into the bulkhead of the New Hope’s main cabin. As the nicked blade, crusted with old brown blood, descended toward his face, the albino youth had bobbed the upper half of his body aside. He felt a slight tug as a lock of his long white hair was severed by the cut.

He finished the act of holstering his now empty Colt Python. With the enemy on top of him there was no time to reload the big blaster.

That suited Jak fine.

With a quick wrist-flipping flourish Jak drew and opened his current favorite knives, a pair of balisongs with matching ironwood hilts. With his left hand he slashed the ax man across his eyes as his attacker, at least twice the boy’s size, wrenched and grunted in frenzied desperation to yank his weapon free.

The man squealed like a scorched pig as the tip of Jak’s butterfly knife raked across both eyeballs. A hot jet of blood and aqueous fluid hit Jak in the face as he sliced the blinded pirates face and throat to blood-gouting ribbons.

Shrieking in fury a second pirate lunged for Jak, raising a four-foot-length of pipe with six-inch spikes welded to the head to smash the albino teen. Instead his sallow face contorted more as a shotgun discharged into his temple from no more than a foot away. Jak saw yellow muzzle-flash lick the side of the long, scarred countenance, which twisted into the most surprised look the teen had ever seen.

Then it seemed to collapse back and in on itself like a rubber mask stretched over a deflating balloon as the shot column took away most of the skull and facial bones that gave it structure from behind, right out the right side of the head.

“Rad-blast it, Jak!” J.B. shouted, stepping up and jacking the action of his Smith & Wesson M-4000. “Quit screwing around.”

Jak grinned. “Okay, let’s fight!”

A WHALER CHURNED past the rounded prow of Finagle’s First Law. The muzzle-flashes of the score of pirates crammed board were bright despite the fact the air was full of rain and spray.

Ryan’s rifle slammed his shoulder and cracked. A pirate fell over the rail. The one-eyed man slung his Steyr and drew his handblaster. Holding it in both hands he popped rounds furiously at the craft as it curved around toward the stern.

His 9 mm bullets either had more effect than he saw, injuring or unnerving the man at the tiller, or the pirate steering the thirty-foot boat got careless. Or maybe the unpredictable thrashing of the sea betrayed it. The vessel swung far enough wide of the Finagle that Stork could depress his multibarreled steam-powered blaster to bear on them.

The Gatling set up its terrible grinding moan. The heavy slugs sent up a geyser of water in front of the launch, and the boat powered right into the lead spray.

It was as if a giant invisible butcher began chopping at the pirates with a giant cleaver. Heads blew apart like ripe watermelons dropped on boulders from a great height. Arms and legs flew free, cartwheeling through the water-heavy air like pinwheels spraying blood sparks. Splinters snapped up from the thin hull. Greenish-brown water surged in around the pirates’ legs, some of which stood without the benefits of torsos above the waists. It instantly turned a tainted maroon.