James Axler – Starfall

Donovan saw his indecision. “Let them go. I give you my word that you don’t have anything to worry about from me.”

“I don’t know that your word is worth anything yet.”

“Those boys look able to take care of themselves out there. And you’re going to have to trust me to some degree at some point if you’re going to save your lady friend.”

“Man’s right,” J.B. said at Ryan’s elbow. The Armorer had come up so quietly Ryan had never heard him. “Jak and Dean aren’t going to get in so deep with this bunch that we can’t get them out. Donovan here appears purely motivated about saving his boat.”

Ryan knew that was true, and he knew J.B. was hinting about the explosives he’d made on the journey.

“Better to find out now, while we’re not in it up to our necks, how much you can trust him,” J.B. pointed out Jak and Dean had disappeared from camp as soon as they’d been told.

“YOU NEVER SAID what your cargo was,” Ryan said. He stood belowdecks in Calypso, watching as Donovan shone a bull’s-eye lantern around the interior of the sailboat.

Donovan stood in waist-high water, the rhythmic crank of the hand-powered bilge pump echoing all around him. “Piece of a space station that come down a few months ago.”

“Shostakovich’s Anvil?” Ryan asked.

Turning, Donovan was careful to keep the main intensity of the lantern from Ryan’s face, but he draped part of the glow over him. “You know about it?”

“Saw it come down,” Ryan answered.

“Where were you?”

“In the Smoke Creek Desert.”

Excitement flared in Donovan’s face. “The space station broke up somewhere over that area.”

Ryan nodded. “You ever recover any pieces of the space station?”

“No. We sent teams in there, but no one ever found an impact area. The piece of Shostakovich’s Anvil that I was carrying came over from what used to be Washington State. The people tracking the space station’s breakup charted it, then traded with a bunch of scavengers who’d located it. I was making the final haul with it back to the Heimdall Foundation when the river pirates jumped me.”

“A big piece of the space station went down in the Smoke Creek Desert,” Ryan said.

“We knew it had, but we didn’t find an impact area. Figured muties carried it off, mebbe. Some of them seem to have an affinity for predark tech. Can’t use and don’t seem to understand it, but they worship it all the same. Recovered some nice pieces from them over the years. Or we thought it might have been scavengers.”

Ryan scanned the damage he could see to the boat’s hull. It looked like axes had been used on the planks, creating crosshatches of white-scarred wood. “Where it fell,” he said, “it would take a mighty determined man to get it out.”

“Where?”

Ryan looked at the man and shook his head. “If we get Krysty back to herself, I’ll tell you. You’re not the only feller playing with a hole card here.”

Chapter Thirty-One

“A couple days’ work should see us clear of most of the damage.”

Ryan sat on the other side of a campfire from Donovan. The Heimdall Foundation man lounged back against a tree that had been felled to provide firewood.

“We can even do most of it while we’re being towed,” he went on. “Troy tells me he’s managed to save one of the gasoline-powered bilge pumps, and it’ll be working come morning. With the hand-cranker you’ve let us bor­row, we should be able to make a real move on getting Calypso dry. Got men cutting new timbers now that’ll serve us till we can put up in dry dock back at the Foundation.”

“How big is this place?” Doc asked. He held a thin branch with a piece of turkey meat on the end, browning in the campfire. All of them had eaten big meals, mixing the self-heats from the stores of both boats, as well as the meat the hunting party had brought back.

“The Foundation?”

“Yes.”

“It’s a big place,” Donovan replied. “Other than that, I’m not going to say too much. We’ve survived this long by keeping our secrets secret.”