Outlanders 39 Hydra's Ring, page 14
A loop of rope snaked out from the rail, and Seng Kao secured it to the piling. A wooden gangplank stretched from amidships and clattered down loudly on the end of the pier. A medium-sized man appeared at the rail. The outlanders knew without benefit of a formal introduction that he was Captain Sun Fan.
He looked to be in his forties, with the long head and flat-featured face of a northern Chinese and a body as solid as the statues of Buddha they had seen earlier. He wore a blue-crowned nautical cap, a sleeveless black shirt and white, baggy ducks. The knees bore dark stains. His bare, muscular arms were covered with red-and-gold tattoos—serpentine dragons coiled seductively around simpering, naked girls.
Sun Fan did not seem surprised to see the five people standing on the dock. He exchanged brief words in Mandarin with Seng Kao, then declared in surprisingly good but somewhat broken English, "Told to expect you. Good thing you show up—this be my last down- river trip until further notice. All other boats been took by Wei Qiang."
No one responded for a long, awkward moment of surprise. Then Lakesh ventured, "Who told you to expect us?"
Gesturing impatiently, Sun Fan retorted, "Who you think? Come aboard, we behind schedule, got pirates to watch out for, too. This be their last chance at me so they be especially ambitious."
Without hesitation, Seng Kao strode up the gangplank, pausing long enough to clasp the captain's hand as he passed by. The outlanders did not move, and Sun Fan challenged loudly, "Well? Stay or go, no mind to me."
Kane, Brigid and Grant all exchanged questioning glances, then one by one they marched up the gangplank. Lakesh trailed after them, removing the rope from the piling. He moved slowly, almost reluctantly. When all of the outlanders stood on the quarterdeck,' tattooed sailors wearing white headbands and pantaloons brought out long wooden poles and used them to push the junk away from the pier.
Turning to Sun Fan, Lakesh asked, "Your destination is Yichang?"
The captain nodded. "Of course. That where I dropped off Tui Chui Jian, yesterday at dawn."
Kane surveyed the crowded deck, noting that most of the people seemed to be peasant farmers and traders. Men and women alike wore conical straw hats and blue coolie jackets. "They're going there, too?"
Sun Fan smiled, but without mirth. "They got no choice but flow with the current, to let it carry them to end of the line where the Yarkand empties into the Yangtze. All of us, as you Americans say, am in same boat together."
The junk turned slightly to port, the ancient engines chugging louder. Captain Fan offered them cups of tea and told them to find places among the passengers to spend the rest of the voyage. Even as he spoke English as the congenial host, he interrupted himself to snap out orders in Chinese and his dark, darting eyes missed nothing that went on about the boat.
"Do you usually have so many passengers and so much cargo?" Grant asked, gesturing to the press of humanity and animals. A cow lowed somewhere aft.
"Trouble is brewing all over Xian," the captain replied. "Lots of talk driftin' downriver that Wei Qiang will conquer all of China, then Burma and Laos. Add to that, outbreaks of disease and crop failures, things aren't good. You sure you want to get off at Yichang?"
"We're not sure of anything, truth be told," Lakesh said frankly. "Is there trouble in that place?"
Sun Fan shrugged. "Smallpox, or so I've heard. Not an epidemic yet, but that could change."
"Are all these people going there?" Brigid asked.
"Yes. There is no village beyond. The Yarkand feeds directly into the Yangtze, and after Yichang it's too damned full of pirates for me. I can handle the river rats 'long this here stretch, but the Yangzte is like a sea. I'll unload what I have here, then settle down for while before I make a return trip. Mebbe you be coming back with me?"
A sailor approached, bearing a wicker tray holding clay cups of dark liquid. An unfamiliar odor floated up from the tea, and only Lakesh and Seng Kao took the cups.
"Maybe," Kane said uncertainly. "It depends on our business there."
"You mean if you find Tui Chui Jian or if Wei Qiang and his army ain't taken the place over already?" He chuckled, as if he were untroubled by the prospect. "Your heads be ones at risk, not mine"
"And why is that?" Grant challenged.
Sun Fan shrugged. "Wei Qiang knows I provide valuable service. He may want to put me under exclusive if he make Xian his home base, like the Dragon Mother did."
Lakesh's hand paused in lifting the tea cup to his lips. "That's rather mercenary, isn't it?"
The captain's eyebrows drew down. "Don't know what that means. I'm in a business that can only stay in business by Join' business. The Dragon Mother go 'way, no more contract. Wei Qiang be here now, mebbeso give new contract."
Seng Kao, despite his devotion to Tui Chui Jian, did not criticize his cousin's policy.
Sun Fan excused himself and crossed the deck, climbing a short set of steps to the pilothouse atop an elevated superstructure placed amidships. Seng Kao joined him. Despite the captain's instructions to the outlanders to find a place to sit among the passengers, it was easier said than done.
Kane surveyed the crowded forward deck of the junk, watching the people curled up in every corner among the piles of cargo. It was truly a tumbled mass of humanity, moving like a sluggish tide, stirred by the urging to go somewhere and find a new place where life might be just a little bit better. Women and children gazed at them curiously, even a bit fearfully. The men's faces remained studiedly neutral.
Sun Fan's crew was a burly, rough-looking collection of men, reminiscent of the Mongol tribesmen they had encountered years ago in the Black Gobi. They were short and husky with swarthy faces and slitted eyes glittering with suspicion of the outlanders. Under the circumstances, Kane couldn't blame them.
Folding his arms over his chest, Grant gusted out a weary sigh. He rested his weight on the rail, ignoring how it creaked beneath him. "So far this trip to China has been about as rich and culturally rewarding as the last time we were here."
"Yeah," Kane agreed. "But at least we're getting to see more of it." With both arms he gestured expansively to the boat and the river. "Gee, I never dreamed of seeing or smelling anything as exotic as this—how about the rest of you?"
Lakesh ignored the sarcastic inquiry and scanned both banks, although there was little to see but a few dark and empty houses on their tall stilts above the river mud. "I wonder how serious a threat pirates actually pose along this waterway."
Brigid tossed back a strand of hair. "I'd say sailing into an outbreak of smallpox is a little more serious."
"The captain said it wasn't an epidemic," Grant pointed out.
"True," Brigid conceded, "but any place that's a hotbed of disease, especially one that could cause disfigurement, doesn't seem like Erica's first destination of choice."
She cast Lakesh a penetrating glance. "Does it?"
For a moment, Lakesh seemed unaware of both Brigid's gaze and the implications of her statement. Then he glared at her, forehead furrowed in angry confusion. "You're asking me?"
"I am."
"How should I know?" he demanded with asperity.
"You've known Erica a hell of a lot longer than we have," Kane reminded him. "Longer than we've been alive."
"I was acquainted with her," Lakesh stated. "I didn't really know her. Not until she..." His words trailed off.
"Until you let her and Sam—Enlil—gate into Cerberus?" Grant supplied.
Lakesh refused to be baited and turned his back on the big man, but his thoughts flew back to the first time he had glimpsed Erica van Sloan, in the cold corridors of the Anthill. He and the majority of Totality Concept scientists had been taken there days before the nuclear war. He barely remembered her, and wouldn't have paid any notice to her at all except for a couple of very distinctive characteristics—first was her statuesque beauty, surprising for a cyberneticist and the fact she had been attached not just to Operation Chronos but to the project overseer, Dr. Torrence Silas Burr.
Like Lakesh, she had been revived when the Program of Unification had reached a certain stage. She was only one of several preholocaust humans, known in the vernacular as "freezies," resurrected to serve the baronies. When he saw her again, well over a century later during a council of the nine barons, she was a withered old hag hunched over in a wheelchair, looking nothing like the tall, vibrant, superbly built beauty he had seen striding through the Anthill.
After delving into the Cerberus database, he learned that Erica van Sloan was of half Latino and half British extraction, possessing both a 200 point IQ and a beautiful singing voice. At eighteen years of age, the haughty, beautiful and more than a trifle arrogant Erica earned her Ph.D. in cybernetics and computer science. She wanted to pursue a singing career, but within days of her graduation from Cal Tech she went to work for a major Silicon Valley hardware producer as a models and systems analyst.
Eight months later, she left her six-figure salary to accept a position with a government-sponsored ultra-top-secret undertaking known as Overproject Whisper. In the vast installation beneath the Archuleta Mesa in Dulce, New Mexico, she served as the subordinate, lover and occasional victim of a man who made her own officious personality seem mousy and shy by comparison.
Torrence Silas Burr was brilliant, stylish, waspish and nasty. He excelled at using his enormous intellect and equally enormous ego to fuel his cruel sense of humor. The word love had never been part of Erica's emotional vocabulary, so she substituted for it the word submission and Burr took full advantage of her devotion. He delighted in belittling and degrading not just her, but the other scientists assigned to Overproject Whisper.
The one scientist he could not deride was Lakesh, who was responsible for the final technological breakthrough of Project Cerberus, which permitted Operation Chronos to finally make some headway.
Although the Totality Concept projects were rarely coordinated, the techs of Operation Chronos used Lakesh's mat-trans discoveries to spin off their own innovations, and achieve their own successes. Operation Chronos dealt in the mechanics of time travel, forcing temporal breaches in the chronon structure. Its essential purpose was to find a way to enter "probability gaps" between one interval of time and another. Inasmuch as Project Cerberus utilized quantum events to reduce organic and inorganic material to digital information and transmit it through hyper dimensional space, Chronos built on that same principle to peep into other time-lines and even "trawl" living matter from the past and perhaps even the future.
Although more than one hapless human being was snatched from a past line and brought forward into the present, Burr had only one proved success with a trawling subject, who arrived in the twentieth century sane in mind and sound of body.
But on the eve of the nuclear conflagration, Burr vanished, leaving both the Anthill and a disconsolate Erica to try to fill the vacuum. She coped with the desertion of her lover by volunteering to enter a stasis canister for a period of time, to be resurrected at some future date when the sun shone again and the world was secure.
When Erica awakened from her long slumber, the Anthill installation suffered near catastrophic damage and a number of stasis units had malfunctioned. Her canister was one of them. Due to that malfunction she was revived as a cripple.
Like Lakesh and several other predark humans, Erica was resuscitated to serve the baronies and to use her technological skills to contribute to the furtherance of baronial rule.
Then Enlil, in the guise of the childlike Sam, restored her youth by the same method he later used on Lakesh through the introduction of nanomachines into her body.
A surprised murmur from Kane commanded his attention and drew him back from the past. He turned around as the man fumbled in his war bag. "What is it?"
Kane stared at the open water beyond the junk's stern. "I thought I saw something."
"Besides black?" Brigid asked.
Squinting, Kane caught a fleck of white on the broad surface of the Yarkand. Bringing up the binoculars, he flicked on the IR illuminator and put them to his eyes.
"Well?" Grant asked gruffly.
Kane didn't respond for a moment, concentrating on locating the speck again. It was a low-slung, single-sailed sampan about fifty yards behind the junk. A tiny straw- plaited cabin humped up from amidships. The boat was not outfitted with running lights, but he glimpsed ghostly shapes clustered astern. He counted three men.
The sampan's prow cleaved straight and smooth through the water so Kane figured the boat was powered by an outboard motor, even though he couldn't hear it over the racket of the junk's twin diesels.
"We're being followed," Kane announced, handing the binoculars to Brigid.
"I don't doubt it," she replied wryly, peering through the eyepieces. "This ship could be followed from deep space."
After gazing at the sampan for a few seconds, she passed the binoculars to Grant, commenting, "Three men aren't much of a danger."
"Assuming those three are all we have to worry about," Grant muttered as he swept the lenses back and forth over the river's surface.
"You think there may be more?" Lakesh asked tensely. "Could be," Grant said negligently.
Lakesh frowned, then cupped his hands around his mouth and called for Sun Fan. The captain came down from the pilothouse and crossed the deck to join them, stepping over several sleeping children with an aggravated grimace.
After surveying the sampan through the binoculars and exclaiming incredulously over their ability to turn night into a gray-green equivalent of dusk, he declared matter-of-factly, "River rats working for old Chien Ho's crew."
"Who is old Chien Ho?" Kane wanted to know.
"The main pirate hereabouts. Those three are just keeping tabs on us—make sure we don't put ashore someplace and screw up Chien's plan."
"What plan is that?" Brigid asked, her tone troubled. Sun Fan handed her the binoculars. "Most likely an ambush downriver, afore we get to Yichang."
"You don't seem too worried about the prospect,"
Grant observed sourly. "You've got the welfare of your passengers to think about."
Seng Kao spit over the side, then waved to the mass of people huddled on the deck. "It always like this," he stated wearily. "Farmers and traders go back and forth, up and down river anytime things get bad where they live. They be a superstitious bunch, never learn anything new. Soon they wake up and light their damned charcoal cook fires on my clean wooden deck, and I'll have to kick some asses, maybe throw a few overboard."
"That seems rather a harsh penalty," Brigid opined.
Seng Kao eyed her haughtily. "You ever have smelly farmers with their stinkin' pigs come your house and set fires on your floor, you not think so."
The captain sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. "The river gets narrower 'tween here and Yichang, waters more shallow. But we make it there okay. After that..."
He shrugged and returned to the pilothouse, picking his way over slumbering people and animals.
Grant gazed after him in angry surprise. "What the hell is this—" he heaved his shoulders in an exaggerated imitation of Sun Fan's shrug "—supposed to mean?"
The corner of Kane's mouth quirked in a dour, humorless smile. He raised his right arm, bending it at the elbow. A tiny electric motor whined as he flexed his wrist tendons and the Sin Eater snapped out from the sleeve of his coat firmly into his hand. "I'm going to interpret it as a suggestion that we check over our weapons."
Chapter 17
Kane awakened instantly, his upper body snapping erect and dislodging Brigid's head from his shoulder. For a split second, he wasn't certain what had woken him, then he realized the steady throb of the diesel engines had dropped in volume, the rhythm slowing. The change in the sound had penetrated his sleeping mind.
Kane peered around at his surroundings as Brigid rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. She and Kane were half-prone, leaning up against a burlap-wrapped bale of fabric. He saw Grant sitting nearby, lifting his head with a startled jerk. There was no sign of Lakesh.
"What's going on?" Brigid asked drowsily. "Are we there yet?"
Kane glanced up at the sky. There was no sun. Gray clouds tumbled overhead, a pale sunlight peeping through them. He consulted his wrist chron and for a couple of seconds didn't believe what the glowing LCD told him. Then he remembered it was still set on Montana time and he performed quick calculations in his head.
"It's about 5:30 a.m.," he said.
Brigid pushed herself to her feet, grimacing as she kneaded her lower back. "Then we should be arriving at Yichang."
Kane felt stiff and sore, rusty and bad-tempered as he always did after sleeping in his clothes. He stood up and affected not to notice the slight difficulty Grant experienced as he used the corner of a crate to heave himself upright. The big man stumbled unsteadily to his feet, wincing in pain. More than a year ago he had suffered an injury that resulted in partial paralysis, and occasionally he experienced trouble with his left leg.
A thin mist floated above the surface of the river, blotting out details of the western bank as the junk's whistle shrieked a greeting. The dim outline of a village slowly emerged from the fog. No one on the deck spoke, even though most of the passengers were awake and stirring. A blanket of tension lay over them. Their expressions were solemn and anxious as they looked out at Yichang, still a hundred yards beyond the ship's bow.
A teenaged girl, a straw hat hanging from a cord about her throat, cast an apprehensive glance over her shoulder at Kane. Her black hair was cut in a straight line across her forehead, and the expression on her round face was one of a silent plea—she wanted to be reassured that everything was all right in Yichang.
The village sprawled in a bizarre jumble of architectural styles. On the waterfront there were thatch-roofed huts, several with upturned eaves supported by stilts. A number of tin-roofed sheds spread out over the landing, on either side of a single pier that thrust out like a gnarled finger into the river.
As Sun Fan had said, the Yarkand was definitely narrower here, the current much faster. Foam floated along the surface. A flotilla of fishing boats, most of them skiff-like sampans, were tied up along the bank and to the dock itself, but no one seemed to be around them. Kane looked out at the flowing river, listening to the creak of the rigging and the throb of the engines.
