Iron Rage. James Axler

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СКАЧАТЬ used to say the Devil hung out at crossroads,” Mildred said. “Back in the, uh, day.”

      Ricky turned his face down to hide his grin. The “day” she meant was back in the long-dead twentieth century, where Mildred had lived most of her life. She had undergone a routine abdominal surgical procedure and something had gone wrong. She’d been frozen in a cryogenic procedure and shipped to a cryocenter in Minnesota just as the balloon was going up on the Big Nuke.

      Trace nodded. “You’re right, Ryan. Take your people to full alert. But stand ready to lend a hand if it turns out the river’s what we really need to be worried about.”

      Ryan nodded.

      “Get that winch back together double quick,” Myron said, all business now.

      “But we haven’t finished cleaning it,” Maggie protested.

      “Yes, you have,” Myron told her, his tone at once gentle and commanding. “You’ll just take it apart again and clean it after we’re headed up the Sippi for Feliville.”

      “Aye-aye, sir,” she said glumly. Then she sat back on her heels, looked at Ricky and suddenly grinned.

      When she did that she was positively cute, he thought.

      “All right, champ,” she said. “Show me what you’ve got.”

      * * *

      THE DECK ROLLED beneath Ryan’s boots as the Mississippi Queen chugged into the joining of the Yazoo with the Sippi.

      His Steyr Scout Tactical longblaster in hand, he stood at the bow, with Krysty at his side. The rest of the companions were spread out around the eighty-foot-long vessel’s perimeter, interspersed with armed members of the Queen’s regular crew. Doc Tanner, his LeMat combination handblaster and shotgun at the ready, held a position to Krysty’s right. J.B. was to Ryan’s left, holding his Uzi, and Mildred flanked him farther astern. Jak Lauren, their young scout, stood in the stern. He was ready to run down the thick hawser by which they towed a hundred-foot barge stacked high with lumber and bales of cloth and leap aboard to repel any would-be boarders with his knives and .357 Magnum Colt Python revolver.

      Finally, Ricky Morales, having reassembled the power-winch to his stern task-mistress’s approval, lay on his belly on the flat roof of the main cabin, ready to snipe with the DeLisle replica carbine he had helped his uncle make by hand, in happier times on his home island of Puerto Rico. Although it couldn’t really be called “sniping,” since the weapon lacked a scope, the boy could consistently hit his mark with whisper-quiet shots out to a hundred yards.

      In the event Ryan’s people had to reach out and touch somebody—as Mildred put it in her quaintly anachronistic freezie way—any farther than one hundred yards, Ryan’s Steyr, which did have a scope, could do the job.

      Not that Captain Conoyer believed there’d be any trouble. But she hadn’t batted an eyelash when Ryan suggested turning out as many hands with blasters as possible to wait for it, just in case. Having hired him in part as a sec consultant, as she put it, she had the sense to listen to him on the subject.

      Over a third as wide across the beam as she was long, the tug was surprisingly stable as she chugged confidently out into the crosscurrent from the Sippi. As ballast she carried tons of big metal scrap chunks, plus crates of weapons and ammo that were the actual prizes from this current voyage up the Yazoo. The cream of the crop was a Lahti Model L-39: a bolt-action antitank rifle firing 20 mm armor-piercing rounds, in cherry condition, consigned to a wealthy baron up the big river. Or so Ryan was told; sadly, Captain Trace had refused to open the crate despite the near-drooling entreaties of J.B. and his apprentice armorer, Ricky.

      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!”

       Chapter Two

      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 СКАЧАТЬ