Free Haven's Blight by James Axler Page B

together.
    Their packs lay nearby, covered in tarps held down by the packs’ own weight. Their weapons were wrapped in plastic that seemed to be of Tech-nomad manufacture. The companions themselves made no attempt to shelter from the rain. They weren’t going to be anything but soaked for the foreseeable future. As for the wind, they’d seen too many trees blown over in the half hour since a sudden shift in the wind had run Snowy Egret up onto the shallowly submerged bank to want to get too close to any of those. So they stood in an open area and let the hurricane’s rising fury beat on them.
    It made it easier to do their job of keeping lookout, anyway.
    “I almost feel like helping them,” Mildred shouted. “Feel guilty about not, anyway.”
    A mob of Tech-nomads worked in the water up to their waists, hauling on ropes; others pushed against the hull of the grounded ship from land. The New Hope had bent on a cable and was trying to tow her sister ship free, although the channel’s narrowness meant she had to pull at an angle. They worked with a fierce singleness of purpose, with none of the parrot chatter that often characterized the Tech-nomads when they were among themselves.
    Not that they could’ve heard one another.
    “Don’t,” J.B. yelled. “Didn’t they teach you to never volunteer back in your time?”
    “But maybe if we helped we could speed things along.”
    “We’re not going to escape the hurricane,” Krysty called. “This is it.”
    “The Tech-nomads hired us to guard their fleet,” Ryan said. He stood watching the rescue operation with arms folded. He willed himself not to feel the wind’s hammering. Compared to controlling the atavistic, instinctive fear of the storm’s awful power, that was a breeze.
    “They could ask us to help if they wanted. They told us to keep an eye out. So that’s what we do.”
    “Good,” Jak said. Though the albino teen was willing to work like a slave on his own account, and for his friends, he had a reluctance to work on a stranger’s behalf.
    “More than you know, my lad,” Doc shouted. “Unless you believe that’s an innocent oceanic wayfarer seeking shelter from the storm coming around that bend downstream?”
    The others saw the high prow of a sturdy little vessel that looked like an old shrimp boat, just poking around a stand of black mangrove.
    “Wouldn’t you know it,” J.B. said.
    An ear-tormenting rattle pierced the storm’s howl. Ryan saw Kayley, a female Tech-nomad rescued from the sinking Finagle’s First Law, spin and fall into thigh-deep water. He looked up.
    Across the river men and muzzle-flashes appeared among wind-lashed trees. They were shooting at the Tech-nomads trying to rescue Egret. From the big clouds of smoke produced by most of the weapons, visible for an instant before the wind whipped them away into curling threads that quickly vanished in the rain, Ryan guessed most of the pirates were firing black powder blasters.
    “Good luck to them reloading if the smoke poles’re muzzle-loaders,” J.B. remarked unconcernedly. He yanked the plastic wrap off his Smith & Wesson M-4000 shotgun and began ejecting buckshot shells into his hand. Feeding those into a cargo pocket of his baggy pants, he produced a box of rifle slugs and loaded those in their place.
    Mildred sat, fastidiously managing to get a piece of the waterproof material to hold still long enough for her to plant her behind on it. As if it could make any possible difference, given how skin-soaked they all were. She took out her ZKR target pistol and propped her elbows just inside her knees.
    Ryan unwrapped his own sniper rifle. He wiped condensation off the outsides of both lenses of his scope with a handkerchief from his pocket. Raising the longblaster to his shoulder, he confirmed the insides of the lenses were clear. The scope remained waterproof after all the years and abuse it had been through.
    He wondered how long that would last, as nothing lasted