Chapter Twenty-Five

 

Ryan kept the Steyr in both hands as he walked down the incline. Despite the help he had given them, the fur-clad people hadn't chosen to come out of hiding. The line of warriors shifted, coming on point to face him. Since there appeared to be only one of him, they were braver.

 

One of the warriors stood and approached Ryan. He carried an ice ax in his hands. Someone had altered the handle, though, adding a four-foot-long bone shank instead of the foot-long metal handle, increasing the weapon's reach.

 

Ryan halted just out of what he considered to be easy bow-and-arrow range.

 

Through the narrow face of his hood, the fur-clad warrior looked Indian. His features were dark, with marked cheekbones, his hair a raven's-wing black. He wore fur mittens that covered his hands but allowed him to use his ax freely.

 

The man spoke in a guttural language.

 

"Don't understand a word you're saying," Ryan said in a nonthreatening voice. He looked past the man and saw that despite his actions of gunning down their attackers, he had gained no new friends. That was okay, though. It proved that the crowd he was facing was a savvy lot.

 

Even as he stood there, several warriors were seeking out the men he had shot. They finished off those who survived with knives, and took the weapons, brandishing them and yelling in that same guttural language as the warrior who addressed Ryan.

 

"You speak English," the warrior said.

 

"Yes," Ryan replied. And from the look on the man's weathered face, he didn't know which of them was more surprised about the other's ability.

 

The warrior nodded. "You're Russian?"

 

"No."

 

"Then what?"

 

Ryan shrugged. "I'm from a place called Deathlands. Heard of it?"

 

The warrior shook his head.

 

"Had another name a long time ago," Ryan said. "Called itself the United States."

 

"American," the warrior stated.

 

"Guess so." Ryan didn't really consider himself anything but free. But when the companions had made a jump to Moscow, Ryan had been surprised to find how much patriotism remained in him for the old, dead country. "Those men were Russian?"

 

"Yeah."

 

"Who are you?" Ryan asked.

 

"My name's Harlan," the warrior said. "I'm chief of this tribe. Have you got boats?"

 

Ryan shook his head. "I was hoping you would have."

 

Harlan narrowed his eyes. "How did you get here?"

 

"That's a long story, Chief."

 

"Don't have time for a long story," the chief said. "As soon as Vitkin finds out his search-and-capture team is dead, he's going to come hunting."

 

 

 

THE ALLIANCE between the companions and the fur-clad people was uneasy. Ryan and his small group sat together, except for Doc and Mildred, who helped with the wounded. The med kits they had packed in the redoubt to carry them through their excursion exhausted quickly, but most of the Inuit were taken care of.

 

Ryan knew Chief Harlan didn't buy his story about having been part of a trading ship that had blown off course and went down only a short distance from the iceberg, but the Inuit leader didn't press the issue. Ryan didn't want to give up the gateway, or the redoubt, if he could help it.

 

Harlan's own story was that he and his tribe were trying to get some of their people back from the Russian Captain Gotfrid Vitkin after the chunk of glacier had split off from the main mass.

 

Ryan hadn't quite gotten used to the way the chief could slip from his native tongue into English so easily. Harlan said his ancestors had been part of a British science observatory in the Arctic Circle at the time of the nukecaust, and they'd been taken in by the Inuit. When everything froze over, there weren't many other places to go, so they'd become more Inuit than British.

 

"The quakes had gotten worse than usual in the area lately," Harlan said. "Still, no one expected all the ice masses to tear free the way they had. We tracked this iceberg for two days before we found the right one."

 

"Where are your boats?" Dean asked.

 

"Vitkin's sailors shot them up," Harlan answered. "We got caught coming onto the iceberg less than an hour ago. Vitkin's got to be getting desperate."

 

"Why?" J.B. asked. "If he's a captain, then he's got a ship."

 

Harlan laughed without humor. "He's got a ship, all right. But it's mired in the ice. Been there since skydark."

 

The battle between the Russians and the Inuit had raged for decades, according to Harlan. They had started out trading back sixty years earlier when Harlan's wandering tribe had found the Russians.

 

"Vitkin has a ship?" J.B. asked, pausing in the middle of stripping a piece of pemmican one of the Inuit women had passed out to the companions.

 

"Yeah," Harlan said, then added a Russian phrase. "Means Red Star of Glory or something like that. After all these years, who cares, you know?" He shrugged. "Anyway, the story my ancestors handed down to meand most things are stories around here, because paper and pencil is a luxury, not to mention extra weight you have to lug aroundthe Russians were some sort of strike team sent into the area to take out some secret base the Americans were supposed to have. Who knows if any of that is true?"

 

Ryan ate his pemmican, working around the salty taste of it, and didn't say anything.

 

"Vitkin's father's father or something like that, so the story goes, was the original captain of the ship," Harlan went on. "Supposed to have been some other ships, but they all got lost in a battle. Only thing that survived was the Red Star of Glory . And it's locked up in the ice."

 

"Vitkin has some of your people?" Krysty asked.

 

"Yeah. See, back in those days, you didn't find many Russian sailor women," the chief said. "Vitkin's ancestor, to keep up the population, started trading with the Inuit peopleother tribes than oursand traded a few guns for young women. Chiefs made the deals. Up here, a large tribe is a pain in the ass to take care of. You're always on the move, always looking for enough food to get you by."

 

"Seems to me," Albert said, "that the Russians would have the same problems. Did they trade for food?"

 

"A little. Stuff that they wanted. They had a lot of stores on ship, though. And the original Captain Vitkin didn't want to become dependent on the Inuit."

 

"Except for women," Dean said.

 

"Right. But after a while, he started raising his own women. Didn't want to lose the Russian bloodline, you see."

 

"How inbred are they?" Ryan asked. He had seen small villages so phobic they killed outlanders outright with no thought at all to their own gene pool, degenerating quickly in a matter of a few generations.

 

"Pretty badly," Doc said, approaching the group.

 

"Got a lot of stale genes," Mildred added. "Those dead guys I got a look at have mismatched arms and legs, cranial problems, cleft palates, no chins, and an assortment of other prime indicators that daddy's not been rutting far from the old homestead." She hunkered down and helped herself to the pemmican.

 

"That's what the latest Captain Vitkin was doing when he captured our people," Harlan said. "Trying to add to his bloodstock. After his father started killing some of the Inuit who came to trade with him, getting medicines and guns, everybody said fuck him, who needs it? They go out, pound a seal to death when it's asleep, had a new set of clothes, fat for their lanterns if they had or wanted them, and meat for a week. Russians were the ones who needed something."

 

"But he captured your people?" Ryan said.

 

Harlan grinned. "Sure. We let him."

 

"Why?" Krysty asked.

 

"Vitkin has guns," Harlan said. "With the ice breaking up the way it has, hunting and fishing areas among the Inuit are getting more tense. Man who has the most guns is going to get to hunt and fish. Everybody else is going to starve. Me, I intend to have a bigger tribe."

 

"And do what?" Ryan asked.

 

"Mebbe go south," Harlan said.

 

"Lot of ocean to cover."

 

"Vikings did it," the chief said confidently, "in really small boats."

 

"Then why let Vitkin capture your people?" Dean asked. "Seems stupe."

 

Ryan gave his son a glance, letting Dean know he had said more than was necessary.

 

Dean nodded.

 

"Actually it's a pretty smart thing to do," Harlan said. "Vitkin's numbers aboard the ship have gotten low. They're having a lot of stillborn lately because their gene pool is so messed up. But the Russian sailors are lazy. They get our women on the ship, they have sex with them, hope they turn up pregnant and use them as slaves to cook and clean."

 

"You sent those girls into that?" Doc asked in an incredulous voice.

 

"That's cruel," Mildred said.

 

Harlan looked defensive, as if afraid he were going to lose the goodwill of his new friends. "I asked for volunteers. I had four girls who said they would go. No pressure from me. Sex is sex. Enjoyed sex a time or two with a couple of them myself. You've got to have something to do when it's too cold to go out and do anything else. Hated to see them go."

 

Ryan didn't like the idea, but he saw the logic in it.

 

"And they were trading off a few months of discomfort against a training that would make them valuable," Harlan went on.

 

"As maids and gaudy sluts?" Mildred asked.

 

"I don't know about gaudy sluts," Harlan said.

 

"A girl who sells sex for money," Mildred elaborated.

 

"No." Harlan waved the accusation away.

 

"Cooking and cleaning aren't the only things the girls get trained on. Vitkin also puts them to work making reloads for their weapons and doing some repair work on the guns." His eyes widened. "Do you know how much those girls will be in demand when they get away from the Russians?"

 

"Why hasn't anyone ever done it before?" Ryan asked.

 

Harlan swiveled his gaze to the one-eyed man. "Hell, they have. You think I thought of this all on my own? A lot of Inuit tribes who have chiefs like me have thought of this. I bet there's nine tribes I know of right now who've benefited from their girls getting on the Russian ship, then escaping and bringing back the knowledge they learned. This is just business. Why do you think the Russians try to hang on to their own gene pool so long? They have sex the second and third generations because the kids generally won't try to escape the ship. Soon as they're born and up and around, the Russians kill the mother. Or the mother escapes and leaves them there because it's too hard to escape carrying a baby."

 

"But the more the Inuit learn from the Russians," Mildred said, "the less reason they have to go back."

 

Harlan smiled and nodded like a teacher who had just gotten the correct answer to a difficult question from the brightest of his students. "Exactly. Got a tribe who sent a few girls in to learn the hydroponics procedure the Russians developed on the ship, got two girls back, which is a pretty good return. That was twenty years ago. Now they're set up in a ville on a coastline where they can reach the dirt, put in some of the seeds the Russians got from gutting the birds in the area and raise a few vegetables that hadn't been seen in this area before. Other tribes work themselves to death finding things to trade them."

 

"The Russians had a hydroponics farm set up on the ship?" J.B. asked.

 

"No," Harlan answered. "They set one up after they found out how trapped they were."

 

"A goodly number of the sailors for the Russians at the time," Doc put in, "were men taken from the collective farms. They were conscripted by the government to learn the navy after learning how to farm in bleak conditions sometimes not too unlike what we're seeing here. It makes sense that some of the crew would be able to put a hydroponics farm together."

 

"How long have your girls been on board the ship?" Ryan asked.

 

"Three months, give or take a couple weeks," Harlan replied. "The plan was to leave them there for three months. They got ways of keeping themselves from getting pregnant too easy. Six months, they would have learned a lot of things. Then this quake hit and set this iceberg loose. The tribes, we all saw it coming. Just figured we had more time."

 

"How many Russians do you think there are?" Ryan asked.

 

"Able and willing to fight us?"

 

"Yeah."

 

"Twenty, maybe as many as forty."

 

Ryan looked at J.B., turning the numbers around in his head. "What do you think?"

 

"If Harlan's people join in," the Armorer said, "it puts us closer to even. We wait until dark, give them time to bed down, mebbe it'll get a little easier if we can put a boarding party onto the ship and reduce the numbers before all hell breaks loose."

 

Ryan nodded, then looked around at the rest of the group, waiting.

 

Everyone was in favor of throwing their lot in with the Inuit and taking the Russian ship. "We don't really have a choice if we want to get off this iceberg, lover," Krysty said.

 

In the distance another cannon burst of cracking ice sounded. The glacier shivered, the ground actually seeming to bob beneath their feet.

 

"Wow!" Harlan exclaimed. "That was a big one."

 

Ryan turned back to the chief. "Let's go take a look at that ship."