creeping and pulling themselves along by muscular contraction. This octopod suddenly stood up straight, using its eight arms like legs. It shot out an arm and snatched the blind mutant’s knife out of her hands.
Ryan wound up and threw.
A marlinspike was a poor throwing weapon at best, but the half pound of iron revolved twice and slammed into the octopod’s head-body and rippled its gray flesh. Light strobed across its body in bizarre flashes, and it turned on its attacker.
Ryan had seen battle with man and mutie in every corner of the Deathlands as well as in some of the farthest flung corners of the nukecausted world. He didn’t flinch as the octopod ran toward him across the deck, seven feet tall on its eight arms with horrible shuffling speed. Ryan held his knife low and charged. He collided with the mutant octopus and hurled his left shoulder into the creature. It rocked back beneath the force of meeting its adversary’s frame, but its suckers gripped the deck and arms instantly snaked around Ryan’s limbs. Toothed suckers bit through his pants and directly into his bare flesh.
Ryan slashed, but it was like stabbing a stickie. His blade barely cut the thick, rubbery flesh, and in an instant a suckered arm constricted around his biceps while three others wound around him. The creature was using four arms to stand on and four to control Ryan. The contractile power of the octopod’s arms was sickening. Ryan stared into its golden, alien, rectangular eyes and knew he going to board the last train west. The webbing between the mutie’s forward arms flopped up and its head tilted back. It opened the underside of its body like a flower and a dark parrot beak twice the size of a human fist prolapsed out and opened. The arm around his biceps twisted and turned his blade away. The other three arms pulled him in.
Doc appeared out of nowhere.
He stalked across Glory’s deck like an avenging scarecrow with his sword unsheathed. The creature holding Ryan paused and one of its eyes bulged and watched Doc lunge and lance an oncoming octopod between its alien optical organs. Doc’s opponent shuddered, released black ink like a chilled man releasing his bowels and instantly went limp.
“Between the eyes!” Doc’s voice rose to operatic heights. “Shipmates, slash not! A swift thrust or a sharp blow, but between the eyes or not at all! That is where you shall find their brain!”
Ryan managed to twist in the cold, horrid, sucking grip. He felt the horrible beak scrape against his stomach, but its curved slick surface slid snapping across the plates of his stomach muscle. His blade was out of position to stab, so he desperately slammed the knife’s handle down between the octopod’s eyes. It was a weak blow, nearly all forearm, but the octopod’s protruding eyes squeezed shut and retracted into its head. The grip of every arm encumbering Ryan weakened, and the creature sagged. Ryan felt the mainmast against his back, and he put a foot against it and reared up. He put all of his weight behind it as he snapped his head forward and butted the octopus between the eyes.
Every suction cup released at once and the octopod slimed off of Ryan to flop shuddering to the deck. Ryan scooped up Goulash’s fallen sword. It was short, heavy, curved and not particularly well balanced. The thick blade had been designed for sliding around bones and penetrating deep to finish off downed big game. It would do for octopod between-the-eyes butchery.
Atlast screamed and screamed. He lay on the deck holding an octopod aloft with both arms and legs. The octopod had all eight arms suctioned against the deck and it inexorably contracted down, beak snapping to crush his skull. Its golden eyes snapped up just in time to see Ryan round on it.
The one-eyed man turned his wrist as he lunged the blade between the octopod’s eyes up to the hilt. Atlast screamed as the creature belched a bucket of ink on him, went limp between his limbs and collapsed on top of him. Ryan ripped his sword free. Three octopods charged him, scuttling on the tips of their suckered arms. He heard the pop of Mildred’s target revolver, and one of the aquatic mutants dropped, dripping ichor between its optical organs. A silver pinwheel of steel revolved over Ryan’s shoulder and Jak’s ship’s knife sank into cephalopod ganglia and dropped it. The remaining octopod took a look at Ryan as he charged and turned toward the rail.
It met Captain Oracle.
Oracle rammed his orange-furred prosthesis between its eyes up to the wrist. He twisted and yanked the paw free with hooked brains, guts and multiple hearts trailing between the silver claws. Manrape knelt above another, driving his fist between its eyes like a piston. Doc skewered one, and octopods convulsed and fell from stem to the stern as the crew counterattacked with a vengeance and scores of armed crewmen boiled out of the hatches like angry ants. The skin of the remaining octopods rippled and flashed like strobes.
Ryan’s teeth flashed in the dark as he heard J.B.’s Uzi blasting tight bursts belowdecks. The octopods with crewmen prey released them, and they all began hurling themselves over the rails. Ryan heard splashes as others belowdecks ejected from the blasterports. Ryan lowered his sword. The octo-muties had come to feed, and the food had fought back with far too much vigor for their taste. Wounded crewmen lay in lakes of blood and ink, twisting and screaming from tentacle tearings and beak bites.
Doc shook blood and ink from his blade. “Captain! All known species of octopus are poisonous! Like spiders, many are not dangerous to man, but this species is unlike any I have ever seen.”
“Wounded to the med!” Mildred shouted like she was in surgery. “Tell Bonesaw to administer any antivenin we have!”
Crewmen gathered up their blood-and ink-stained companions. The dead octopods and their ink were already starting to smell like a rottie attack. “Miss Loral,” Oracle grated. “I want a death and damage report ASAP! Commander, I want any sail set that can catch a wind!”
“Aye, Captain!” Miles wiped ink from a Japanese wakizashi short sword. “What course?”
“Due east, Commander! I want good, deep Lantic beneath us, without a spec of land, rock or reef on the horizon within the hour.”
“Aye, Captain!”
“Mr. Manrape, have the waisters get this filth off my deck.”
“You heard the captain, Hardstone!” Manrape shouted. “Get this squid filth overboard! I don’t want to see a spec of blood or a drop of ink on this deck come the light of dawn!”
Crewmen ran to the jobs and stations.
“Ryan!” Gypsyfair screamed and clicked and pointed at the deck. “There! There! There!”
Ryan stared at a pile of cordage in the glow of the ship’s lantern. The cordage had not been there before and was just a few feet away from where he had dropped his first octopod opponent with a head butt. “Watch the decks for anything out of place!” Ryan shouted. “The rad-blasted things can camo!” Ryan rounded on the pile of cordage with his sword before him. The pile of cordage rippled and changed color. The octopod tried to rise but seemed strong enough to only get three arms beneath it. It reeled like a drunk before Ryan in retreat. The one-eyed man raised his sword for the killing thrust. The octopod’s siphon suddenly contracted and Ryan recoiled as a liter of stinking black ink hit him under high pressure. “Fireblast...”
Crewmen charged in from all directions, brandishing blades, and cut off the creature from Ryan and the rail. Its camouflage flashed off, and the octopod returned to its normal slick-gray color. The golden eyes bulged outward in two directions as the seamen advanced. The octopod flopped headfirst into the water barrel and crossed its eight arms above it in defense. Half a dozen of the crew closed in for the kill.
“Gypsyfair!” Oracle called. “Sweep the decks, stem to stern! Boarding pike and blaster men to her!” Gypsyfair began echolocating the deck surrounded by a phalanx of blasters and sharpened steel.
“Lover!” Ryan turned as Krysty flung herself into his arms. She kissed him for long moments and then leaned back. She surveyed his sucker-torn, ink-stained face and torso. “You look like you just got thumped by stickies, and you smell like they pushed you down a pest-hole privy.”
Ryan’s teeth flashed through the ink covering his face. “I love the way you sweet talk me