Free Haven's Blight by James Axler

each other to make themselves heard over the howl of the storm and the drumming of the rain. “Mebbe triple-stupe. But the way I calculate, if we swim, we may drown. We stay on this tub, we will drown.”
    Another blast rocked ship. A yellow fireball rolled upward from the midst of the steam cloud that enveloped the stern. Black smoke poured after. Yellow licks of flame began to dart out the sides of the steam cloud.
    “Or burn,” Ryan added.
    Doc clutched his arm. “Perhaps there is another choice.”
    It was on Ryan’s tongue to say he didn’t see it. Instead he looked where Doc pointed.
    The New Hope, rotors spinning furiously in the wind, backed toward the sinking Finagle’s First Law. A small pirate boat tried for some unknown reason to dart between the ships and was crunched as the steamer rode it down. Ryan couldn’t see the impact of Finagle ’s up-angled bow, but heard the screams of men being crushed.
    Jak stood on the slippery brass railing of the rotor-sailer’s stern, his hair hanging down his face and shoulders like spilled milk. He held on to a guyline, riding the wildly pitching and rolling and yawing craft like some Western cowboy taming a bronco. He laughed into the face of the storm. J.B. stood beside him on the deck, preparing to throw over a rope in a very business-like manner.
    “You know,” Ryan said as Jak threw back his head and uttered a panther-scream of exaltation, “that boy’s just having himself way too much fun.”
    T HE WIND DIMINISHED when they entered the river mouth, which wasn’t to say it cut off. Nor did the rain slacken. Rather it grew even fiercer, and lightning veined the sky in bluish white in an almost continuous pulsation. The thunder was one loud roar, competing with all the other noise.
    One noise it wasn’t competing with was blasterfire, Ryan was pleased to note as he stood in the stern with his Steyr ready. The small pirate craft had pulled back and were being laboriously recovered by the larger vessels of the fleet. The ones that survived. It didn’t seem to him there were that many.
    “Hard to imagine they’ll keep coming,” Ryan said, “after taking losses like that.”
    Cold as the hearts of coldhearts were, they were, after all, mainly predators. And predators tended to seek easy prey. Or they didn’t survive to pass on their genes to baby predators.
    “I don’t know,” Long Tom said worriedly. He stood in the stern with them, more concerned with pursuit than with the dangers of navigating a narrow, relatively shallow passage in a hurricane. Clearly he trusted Micro, his sailing master. “Once Black Mask catches the scent of a rich prize, he doesn’t like to let it go. He’s not a man who deals well with disappointment.”
    On their last sight of the Black Joke, it had been tossed on massive waves five hundred or so yards astern. Perhaps half a dozen other large craft still clustered around it. That was less than half the fleet that first hove into view over the horizon.
    Ryan was pretty sure the Hope ’s rocket racks had only accounted for two or three of the enemy ships. If the Tech-nomad squadron boasted any other weapons able to sink a ship of that size, he hadn’t seen them used in the fight. More likely the other captains had chosen to cut and run, from the battle or from the storm.
    “He doesn’t much care about losses,” Randy said. “Easy come, easy go. And the more casualties he takes, the fewer pieces the pie has to be cut into.”
    J.B. had his hat off and was wringing water out of it. “Not the kind of employer I’d like to work for,” he said, clapping the fedora back on his head. Ryan couldn’t see it was an ounce less soaked than before he’d wrung it out.
    “How does he get anybody to sign on with him, got an attitude like that?”
    Randy shrugged. “As we told you, there’s no shortage of men without much other choice live along this coast. Not to mention the ones he signs on at blasterpoint. Anyway, he’s free