James Axler - Iron Rage

The Queen began its turn to starboard almost as soon as it cleared the banks to the north. Ryan glanced back over his right shoulder, along the vessel’s length toward the barge. He knew that getting it safely around the corner would be the trickiest part. But Trace had taken the helm herself, and just in their brief time aboard Ryan and his friends had learned she was expert in piloting the boat.

The one-eyed man was just as glad the Queen wasn’t a pusher-style Sippi tug, of the sort her crew told Ryan had dominated the river before the nukeday. Bigger and of all-steel construction, they used to push not just single barges, but sometimes two or more in series—each many times larger than the wooden one the Queen was dragging toward Feliville—with their square prows. He didn’t even want to try to imagine how pulling off a maneuver like this would have worked in such an arrangement.

He was unlikely to find out. Nukeday had triggered colossal earthquakes that had started shaking up the continental US even before the warheads stopped detonating. None was worse than the quake caused by the New Madrid Fault Line that ran by the Sippi from north of Memphis to St. Louis. The blasts, quakes and seismic water surges had smashed most of the vessels on the river into twisted junk, left them high and dry when the great river actually changed channels, and even tossed them inland, sometimes even into the hearts of major cities.

They had become mother lodes of fabulous scrap for generations of especially intrepid scavvies. Or for barons willing to enslave the people of the villes they ruled to the arduous and dangerous work of ship-breaking. These days most of the river traffic was wood-hulled, driven by steam engines or, as the Queen was, by scavvied Diesels. And when they hauled barges they were content to pull them.

As Ryan turned his face forward again, he scanned the seven-foot weeds that obscured the Yazoo’s north bank and the east bank of the Sippi. He wasn’t sure what he expected to see, but he expected to see something . His gut told him that trouble was coming.

But it gave him not the slightest clue as to what that trouble would actually be. Nor where it would come from.

He looked back out across the Sippi and saw a geyser of water shoot up into the air, fifty yards ahead and a little off the port bow of the turning tugboat. A heavy boom hit him with an impact as much felt as heard. It was a sound he was all too familiar with.

He spun to look south. Steaming up the river from the south came four boats, a quarter mile away and closing slowly. They were a ragged assortment, no two alike, and none as large as the Queen herself. They had a strange, ugly, bruised glint to them in the afternoon sun, and were gray mottled with red. Black plumes billowed from their smokestacks and were swept away east by a crossing breeze.

Yellow light flared from the bows of the nearest two, accompanied by giant puffs of dirty-white smoke.

“Red alert!” he turned and shouted toward the Queen ’s cabin. “Cannon fire! We’re under attack!”

Ryan heard a rushing roar pass overhead. Then a fresh column of water blasted up from the river right in front of the left side of the bow, drenching him.

A hand-cranked siren was winding from the tug’s cabin. Ducking reflexively behind the rail—as if that would offer protection from a cannon shot, either shell or solid ball—Ryan equally reflexively looked back to Krysty.

His lover was likewise crouched, her Glock 18C blaster looking especially futile clutched in her white hands. Her hair had retracted itself to a tight scarlet cap on her skull.

He felt the vibrations of the hull through his boot soles change. At the same time the growl of the Diesels grew louder and slightly higher in pitch. Trace had ordered full throttle. Her husband was doubtless belowdecks now, babying the powerful marine engines to keep them churning at maximum power. Ryan could feel the propellers straining to drive the vessel and the burden she towed faster. But there was no way to give hundreds of tons jackrabbit acceleration. Their accumulation of speed would go painfully slowly.

And the pursuing vessels already had a speed advantage, even though their steam engines were powering them against the Sippi’s sluggish but immensely powerful flow. If this was a race, they couldn’t win it.

And if this was an artillery duel—well, Ryan thought, the Queen was nuked, as the tug had no artillery. Accommodations were tight aboard the tubby vessel as it was—he and his companions slept on deck, when weather permitted, as fortunately it had most nights they’d been on the Queen . And every pound counted when your entire living was based on hauling cargo. The Conoyers could have mounted a black powder cannon, but they chose not to.

Even if they had, they would have been outgunned. The enemy cannoneers hadn’t yet hit the lumbering tug, but it was a matter of time.

Something cracked above Ryan’s head. He ducked even lower, instinctively. The crack was repeated, slightly less loud.

I know that song, he thought. Someone was firing a blaster at him—not a charcoal-burner nineteenth-century replica, but a smokeless-powder high-powered longblaster.

The longblaster shots, in their way, concerned him more than the cannonade. Most black powder cannon weren’t rifled, and therefore weren’t accurate, even though a metal ball weighing just a couple of pounds could do a shocking amount of damage to a body. While most blaster-shooters weren’t particularly accurate, either, there was always the chance that their pursuers would have a marksman in their ranks.

On the other hand, the Queen ’s complement most definitely did. And his name was Ryan Cawdor.

He laid the Steyr’s foregrip on the rail and sighted through the low-power Leupold variable scope. He didn’t need much magnification to confirm what he already suspected: the weird, dully metallic stuff covering the oncoming boats looked that way because it was weird and metallic.

The vessels had been covered, at least up front, in plates and pieces of scrap metal.

“J.B.,” he called. He didn’t take his eye from the scope. “Get over here. I’ve got work for you.”

The attacking vessels were steaming in a V formation, with the lead boat on Ryan’s right. As he panned his scope across the vessels, he noticed activity on the bow of the one to his left. Men were swabbing out the barrel of their blaster with what looked like a wet mop and probably was, so that the fresh charge of black powder they were fixing to put in wouldn’t cook off the moment they inserted it.

Ryan sighted in on the nearest gunner and drew a deep breath. As the sight lined up he let half of it out, bit back the rest and squeezed the trigger.

The carbine bucked and roared. Automatically Ryan’s right hand left the rear grip to work the bolt, jacking out the spent case and slamming home a fresh cartridge from the 10-round magazine in his longblaster. The empty brass clinked off the deck boards and rolled out one of the scuppers, which was a shame, since the things were valuable for their metal, even if they were bent or otherwise unable to be reloaded. But spilled blood wouldn’t go back in the body, either. All that mattered to Ryan now was lining up the next shot.

As he expected, the four-person crew was hunkered down and frozen in place. A brighter smear on the improvised-armor plate above them and to the left showed where Ryan’s bullet had hit and knocked away a path of rust the size of his palm.

Also as expected. Like any master marksman, Ryan knew pretty well where a bullet would go when it left his longblaster—not an option except in aimed fire, of course. Though neither the Yazoo nor the Sippi were exactly racing today, the interference of their currents meeting did cause some chop, which in turn made the Queen wallow in a not-entirely-predictable way. But it wasn’t hard to compensate for the motion. And while she was still turning to starboard, into the bigger river’s flow, the enemy ships were coming pretty straight on, and not fast, either. That meant Ryan didn’t have to lead his target much to speak of.