Haven's Blight Read Free Page B

snapped up, venting a squealing roar of pain and fury.
    It dived with breathtaking speed. But like Jak, Ryan felt the creature’s muscles bunch in preparation. Clutching the panga in his teeth, he threw himself toward the rail of the damaged boat, flinging out a hand.
    His fingers reached just short of the rail. Then a bone-white hand gripped his wrist, his other hand clamping on Jak’s wrist. Ryan’s boots thumped into the white hull. A moment later he was clambering over the rail, helped by a dozen hands, which shortly were clapping him on the back.
    “Whew,” Mildred said explosively.
    Krysty let loose the breath she’d unconsciously been holding, as well. “That man just doesn’t do anything that isn’t heart-stopping, does he?”
    But Ryan was brushing off the Tech-nomads’ congratulations. He gestured angrily. From her vantage point on the ship, trailing the other now by no more than forty yards, Krysty could see what he meant with painful clarity.
    A dozen or more of the monsters still beset the squadron. No matter how dramatic, everything the defenders had done had amounted to a pinprick. Nothing more.
    With a snarl of disgust Isis threw down her own BAR. Its barrel was glowing red now. It was almost certainly ruined, burned out. More to the point the heat would have warped the barrel, which could trap a bullet before it reached the muzzle. That meant there would be nowhere for the expanding gases of the next fired cartridge to go, except by blowing the receiver apart in the captain’s face.
    If she was lucky, that would chill her.
    “This isn’t working,” she said. “If there was some way to discourage the bastards…”
    Mildred hauled up her longblaster and cranked out all eight shots at a mutie making right for them. The empty 8-round steel clip flipped free with a ching. Krysty saw red streamers in the water before the humped form vanished again.
    “Oww,” Mildred moaned. “I feel like a mule’s kicked my shoulder. With sharpened shoes on. Do you have any explosives? They might not kill the things, but—”
    A roar made all three women turn to look aft. The Finagle was crossing Egret ’s stern. A geyser of water, dark with a white crown, erupted from the bayou close beside the steamboat’s starboard hull. Behind Stork the equally storklike figure of Doc Tanner wound up, raising his left leg and cocking his right arm way back, then hurling an object at an angle off the Finagle’ s stubby bow. It splashed among at least a quartet of the huge forms. A moment later another waterspout blasted upward.
    “What was that?” Isis exclaimed, shading her eyes with her hand.
    “Bombs!” Mildred replied. “J.B.’s making up bundles of some kind of explosive and passing them off to Doc!”
    “Son of a—” the captain said.
    “We got dynamite, too,” Jammer said from right behind her. Krysty could barely hear for the ringing in her ears. “Waterproof fuse. Whole nine yards.”
    The sailing master showed his brown gap-toothed grin. “Never know when you might need to shoot a channel to clear passage.”
    Another dirty fountain erupted, then another. The waters around Hope churned white with the furious efforts of the giant aquatic muties.
    But Krysty quickly saw the water was being churned by the creatures’ frenzy to escape. A dead monster floated to the surface, belly up, distended and already turning blue from internal organs ruptured by shock waves transmitted much better through water than mere air. The rest seemed to be protected by the thickness of their hides, along with muscle and blubber and whatever else lay beneath. Judging by the speed they made, they weren’t hurt badly.
    “I hope they’re not permanently injured,” Krysty said. “Now that they no longer threaten us.”
    “Yeah,” Isis said. “So long as they keep running They don’t like the shock waves much.”
    Mildred sighed heavily. “So, what the hell were those things, anyway? They looked familiar,