they ever attack boats?” Ricky asked, as he settled back down by the tarp on which the winch parts rested.
“Not if they keep well clear of the banks,” Trace said.
“What if there are snags on the river?” Krysty asked. “Or mebbe sandbars narrowing the channel.”
“Like I said—if they keep clear of the banks. Otherwise all bets are off.”
“Don’t forget the rads,” Myron said helpfully.
“Rads?” Krysty and Ricky said almost simultaneously.
“Oh, I was getting there,” Trace stated. “Not just rads, but heavy-metal pollution, big-time. You know how you always hear talk about strontium swamps? Well, they actually got stretches of that around here.”
Ricky eyed a flock of ducks starting noisily from some reeds on the right bank. “Does that mean those birds are muties too, if they can live around here?”
Trace shrugged. “Many of the creatures seem less affected by the rads than we are,” Myron said.
“Sounds like a double-bad place for shore leave,” J.B. said, approaching from astern.
“It’s not my idea of a vacation spot,” added Mildred Wyeth, who walked by his side. She was taller than he by a slight margin, which the battered fedora he wore tended to disguise.
“The rads won’t kill you,” Myron said. “Not right away. The swampers who live in these bogs will likely get you first.”
“Swampies?” Mildred asked.
“Swampers,” the engineer repeated, with added emphasis on the second syllable. “Not muties. People.”
“Of a sort,” his wife told them.
“Wouldn’t they have to be muties to survive if the rad count’s that high?” Ricky asked.
“They’re too mean for the rads to chill,” Santiago offered.
“How about them?” Ryan asked. “Do they go after vessels that are underway?”
“Not much when they stay clear of the banks,” the captain said. “Like the stickies. Like most things, come to that. That’s another reason we stay out in the middle of the channel when we can. The river’s lethal enough. We don’t need the grief that comes from land.”
“Which is her typically sour way of saying the river is our home, and we feel safest here,” Myron said. “Right, my love?”
That got a lopsided grin from the captain. “Anything you say, Myron.”
Ricky picked up a sprocket and held it up to the sun to be examined.
“I get it,” he said glumly. “Everything’s dangerous. Especially everything beautiful.”
Ryan winked at Krysty and grinned. “Pretty much.”
“The real danger is the darkness in the human soul,” said Nataly Dobrynin, the Queen’s first mate, emerging from the superstructure and walking up to join the others. She was on the tall side, taller than either Conoyer, and skinny. She wore her long, dark brown hair pulled back in a ponytail that emphasized the austere bone structure of her face, and her slightly angled gray eyes. She never smiled, and intimidated the hell out of Ricky.
Surely that can’t be right, Ricky thought. Stickies are double dangerous, for one thing. Rads and heavy-metal poisoning, for another.
He looked to Ryan for confirmation. He sure as nuke wasn’t contradicting the somewhat-scary mate.
But Ryan frowned thoughtfully.
“That’s true enough,” he said. “That’s what blew up the world, after all.”
“Some would blame the cold hearts of the whitecoats, lover, never mind the darkness of their souls,” Krysty said drily.
“That ‘some’ being you.”
She grinned; he shrugged.
“Well, ‘some’ aren’t wrong,” he said. “But they still had their reasons, which fieldstripped down to that.”
“I’d say it was the madness of shutting themselves off from the natural world in order to try to control it,” the redhead said.
“Sounds like the same thing, to me,” Nataly said. She turned to Trace. “Captain, we’re coming eight up on the confluence.”
Trace nodded. “Right. Everybody, get to your stations. Break time’s over. The big river’s mood doesn’t look bad today, but wrestling this bitch of a barge through the turbulence where the streams join could get triple ugly triple fast.”
“You best put your toys away and step lively too, Ricky,” Ryan said. “I think we need to have weapons in hand when we hit the Sippi. With the captain’s permission, of course.”
“Why’s that?” Myron asked. The bespectacled engineer sounded more curious than challenging.
“Junctions are good places for bad things to happen,” J.B. stated, settling his fedora more firmly on his head. “Like crossroads. Reckon rivers aren’t any different.”
“They 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