Haven's Blight. James Axler

      Chapter One

      With a loud splash, something huge flew out of the black bayou water and smashed to pieces the water-strider boat pedal-driven by the gangly young Tech-nomad called Scooter. The motion of the dark form breaking the surface had caught Krysty Wroth’s eye as she stood in the stinging sun by the rail of the yacht Snowy Egret talking with Mildred Wyeth. Now she stared horrorstruck as the enormous shape slid back below the surface as if being absorbed into the thick water. Her long red hair stirred around her shoulders, although there wasn’t a breath of wind on the bayou.

       A cry of fury and despair came from New Hope, the lead ship of the Tech-nomad convoy. Krysty looked that way to see a woman built not that much differently than she was, buxom and broad-shouldered, standing in the prow shouting for someone to do something. She had a brush of russet hair, and was dressed in a dark green tank top and baggy camou cargo pants with lots of pockets, clothing the Tech-nomads seemed to like.

       “That’s Jenn,” Mildred said. “The poor bastard’s woman.”

       The group’s healer, Mildred was shorter than Krysty and stockier. A fairly light-skinned black woman, she, like Krysty, wore a long-sleeved shirt. And like the ivory-skinned Krysty, she had a tendency to burn in the harsh Gulf of Mexico sunlight. Her hair, braided into beaded plaits, was covered by a floppy canvas hat.

       “They’re all around us!” a voice shouted. Krysty looked around to see mounds resembling living hills of water rolling on all sides of the little fleet. The other water-striders were fleeing as fast as their pilots’ legs could drive them. Their function was to scout out danger.

       They had.

       Krysty saw Ryan, the companions’ nominal leader, up on the Hope’s bow beside Jenn, forward of the first of its three weird cylindrical rotor sails. The tall and rangy man, his long black hair tossed by the stiff breeze, shouldered his Steyr sniper rifle, bringing the eyepiece of its telescopic sight to his single piercing blue eye. Despite the danger of the vast dark plunging forms surrounding him, Krysty’s heart thrilled to the sight of him. To her he epitomized everything good about a man in a desolate world.

       Beside Ryan the slim form of Jak Lauren crouched on the rail, clutching a guyline in one hand. His big .357 Magnum Colt Python revolver glinted in the other. Krysty thought the albino team resembled an updated version of a typical pirate from one of the few picture books she’d read as a girl. Which was ironic, in that pirates were a major reason the normally pacific—and reclusive—Tech-nomads had hired the six companions onto the convoy. The companions and Tech-nomads had a history.

       In general Ryan and his companions were aboard to provide protection against nautical dangers. Such as seaborne raiders—and whatever the gray shapes were, easily the size of land wags, humping the dark water all around and vanishing beneath.

       “These people are pretty well-heeled for pacifists,” Mildred muttered, unslinging the weapon their employers had lent her to augment her favored ZKR 551 target revolver. It was an M-1 Garand semiautomatic military rifle that had been elderly when Mildred herself was born, decades before the skydark. Longblasters were also coming into view up on the white rotor-ship ahead of them. Jenn waved bare sun-browned arms, shouting at people not to shoot for fear of hitting Scooter.

       To Krysty’s distress she could see no sign of the pilot of the stricken scout boat. Just a few long splinters of wreckage bobbing near a green bank of the broad pool the convoy was crossing, between stands of cypress hung with Spanish moss.

       “Whatever these creatures are, they must weigh tons,” Krysty said.

       “Not much hope for that poor man,” Mildred agreed. “Damn thing looked as if it came down right on top of him.”

       Shots cracked from the Hope. Jenn screamed. Ryan lowered his SSG to grab her upper arm and give her a good shake.

       The Egret lurched below Krysty’s feet and she lost her balance. Mildred’s hand clamping on the woman’s arm saved her from slamming her ribs against the sailboat’s lovingly polished brass rail. She smiled and nodded her gratitude.

       The ship’s captain strode up to them with long strides of her long slim legs. Her name was Isis. She had long silver hair caught in a topknot that hung far down her slim back. Her complexion was dark olive, her face narrow, high-cheekboned, with dark eyes set on a slant and showing distinct epicanthic folds. She was a tall woman, and was ignoring a little grubby hairy guy in shorts whose splayed bare feet were padding on the deck, taking two steps to her one to keep up.

       “I told you, Ice,” he was saying. “I told you and told you. These things hate power craft. It’s in their genes from predark.”

       “It’s dead calm here, Jammer,” she said without urgency. “If we spend too much time sitting like logs in one place, the Black Gang’ll be all over us.”

       Stopping by Krysty, she held out a long, dark object with one bare arm.

       “Here,” she said. “That thump was one of these mutie monsters trying to stave in our hull. My sailing master’s right. They hate us. And they’re big enough to take us down if they get a good run.”

       Despite her own substantial strength, Krysty almost dropped the object when she accepted it in both hands. It was a Browning Automatic Rifle; she knew it weighed upward of twenty pounds.

       “Time to earn your keep,” Isis said. Her disreputable-looking companion, Jammer, dropped a canvas bag full of loaded 20-round magazines at her feet. The heavy BAR, actually a light machine gun—light being a relative term—shot the same ammo as Mildred’s Garand, .30-06. It was potent enough that both women, neither of whom was shy about firearms or afraid of a little recoil, were glad their longblasters were both on the hefty side. Especially since they didn’t have to carry the things.

       That was the sweetest part of this gig: they didn’t have to hump it at all. They had ridden a hundred miles of Gulf Coast with no more effort than it took to get along with their employers. They admittedly could be a prickly bunch, although as Mildred said they preferred to avoid conflict rather than to seek it out.

       And now conflict had sought them out.

       “What are those things?” Mildred called after the captain as she moved on, snapping orders to her crew in a voice that cracked like a whip without being raised.

       “Big and pissed,” Isis said without turning her head. “Shoot them.”

       With a loud, meaty thump the Egret heeled hard to starboard, throwing Krysty and Mildred against the port rail. Krysty set her butt on the low rounded housing of a gangway that led below and swung her legs across. Her companion putted around abaft the housing, clutching her beefy rifle and muttering.

       The corrugated rubber soles of the red-haired beauty’s boots thumped the deck. The far rail was still angled up against the sky. Peering over, she saw a vast gray shape rolling in the thick, murky water alongside the Egret’s sleek hull.

       “Crap!” Mildred exclaimed, joining Krysty and peering over. The gray mound disappeared, then came back with another shuddering impact, trying to capsize the seventy-foot yacht and making a good go of it. “Whatever those things are, you shoot them and they find out, there’s gonna be trouble!”

       “One way to find out,” Krysty said grimly. She shouldered her heavy weapon, hung it over the rail with the muzzle not three feet from the heaving gray back, and fired.

       She took no pleasure in harming any of Gaia’s creatures, but Krysty was no more a vegetarian than she was a pacifist. She respected, indeed in effect worshipped, the natural cycle of life. It had amused her once, when Mildred told her an activist of her