I pass Mercy crouching in the stairwell, where I'd instructed her to stay put. She grins at me, big eyes gleaming.

  "Murder!" she says.

  "If any raiders make it to the deck, get up there and kill them."

  She gives an emphatic nod.

  Below decks, the cutter reeks of gunsmoke and burning viscid. I edge past Raz in the engine room and hurry to the gun deck. On either side of the room a sliding panel in the hull protects a gunport, and each has the barrel of a cannon sticking out of it. What were originally Navy guns are almost unrecognizable now under various kludge fixes and "improvements".

  "Fucking ," Owain shouts in frustration, struggling to seal the breech with a heavy screw-wheel. "Can't … even … get … a simple … to work!"

  It finally clangs home. Three more shells, each the size of my hand, sit in a bucket beside him. If that's all the ammunition we have, it's a good thing they've mostly held their fire.

  Agni, on the other side of the room, leans against her own weapon as though it's the only thing holding her up. Her face is pale under a coating of grit.

  "Bunch of trikes coming in on this side, sir," Owain yells.

  "Hold off till you're sure you'll hit something," Agni wheezes. "And don't call me --"

  "Is there a red groundcar?" I have to shout to be heard over the clatter of the engine room.

  "Kal?" Agni glances back at me, eyes bloodshot. She looks half-dead already.

  "Theo signaled her family," I say encouragingly. "We're nearly there."

  "We'd better be," Agni says. "There's more of these fuckers than I have shells."

  "I see something red," Owain reports. "Behind the trikes. Getting closer!"

  "Hit that one," I tell him. "Some kind of high priest. It might make them back off."

  He nods and bends over his weapon. Agni staggers over, bending beside the gunport to help spot. She mutters yardage and elevation, and Owain shifts the gun, then takes hold of the big lever. Agni jams her hands over her ears, and I hurriedly follow suit.

  . This close it's like a kick to the chest. A tongue of flame obscures the gunport, followed by a pall of smoke that's quickly ripped away. A spray of sand erupts among the trikes, well ahead of the red groundcar. The raiders frantically swerve clear.

  "Shit!" Owain bellows. He rapidly unscrews the breech block, yanks the spent cartridge, and swears again as it burns his fingertips. Agni rams another one in and together they wrestle the block back into place.

  I want to help, but I have no idea how. All I can do is grab Agni's arm when she stumbles and help keep her standing.

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  "Down," she says, coughing. "Down, down, just wait until it's flat --"

  There's a boom from one of the lead trikes, like an echo of our own. With a sound like six inches of barbed harpoon erupt from the wall beside my head. I stagger back, pulling Agni, as another harpoon punches through on the opposite side of the gunport. Owain stands up behind the weapon, trying to spot his target.

  "Wait!" Agni shouts.

  "I can --" Owain begins, and then with a wet squelch he takes the third harpoon right in the chest. The impact tosses him across the room and against the opposite gun. He stays there a moment, looking confused, hands clawing feebly at the shaft that impales him. Then the cable goes taut as the trike hits the brakes, dragging Owain back like a toy and slamming him against the gunport. The barbs catch on the metal lip, and with a horrible shriek of tortured steel a five-foot strip of hull plating peels away entirely, taking all three harpoons and Owain's shattered corpse with it.

  "Fuck me," is all Agni can manage, while I speak the much more eloquent language of running the fuck away. Dust and flying grit immediately fill the gun deck with a blinding maelstrom, and it's all I can do to drag both of us into the engine room. Raz slams the hatchway closed behind us and puts his back against it. Agni immediately doubles over in a coughing fit, each heave splattering blood on the deck.

  "Board … us … next," she wheezes. "Want … ship … back."

  I have to help Theo. I push Agni into Raz's arms.

  "Don't let them open that door," I tell him.

  "I will jam it with my corpze," he says solemnly.

  Quarter had called him a coward, but he certainly doesn't sound like one now. Time to figure that out later. I pound back upstairs, past a confused-looking Mercy, and find Theo crouched behind the engine cowling. She ducks out to send a shot at one of the trikes, then retreats as a couple of hurled spears skitter off the metal. I throw myself down beside her.

  "They took out the --"

  "I fucking saw," she snaps.

  "Owain's dead."

  "Lucky him." She looks over her shoulder, where more trikes are gathering. "If they have that much firepower they could have scrapped us by now."

  "Agni says they want their ship back."

  She snorts. "Probably want back, too. Promise you'll shoot me if we lose?"

  "Um, no. I don't think --"

  She rolls her eyes. "Fine, I'll fucking shoot myself. Gonna take a few more of the bastards with me first, though."

  Theo leans out and snaps off another shot, crowing as someone goes down.

  "What about your family? Are they coming?"

  "How the fuck should I know? I've been a busy --"

  Something clangs against the hull. I risk a look and see two trikes pulled right alongside, raiders climbing through the new gap in the hull onto the ruined gun deck. Something tells me Raz's corpse isn't going to be enough to hold the door.

  "Mercy!" I shout. "Downstairs! Help them in the engine room!"

  Her head pops up from the stairwell, looking distraught. "Protect!"

  "If they get to the engine we're all dead!" I tell her. "You're protecting me either way!"

  She hesitates for a moment, then ducks out of sight. I dive for the sack of firebombs.

  There's one left. I grab it as a spear clatters past me to the deck. The boarding trikes are an easy target, right below the rail; I pull the pin, drop the bomb, and throw myself flat to avoid another spear. Flame blooms with a whumph and bits of vehicle go spinning away. Theo cackles wildly, stepping out to gun down a raider about to hurl her weapon. I turn back to her and freeze.

  "Theo, !"

  She drops without hesitation, and a blade the size of an end table slices past inches from her scalp, slamming into the engine cowling and leaving a deep gash. It belongs to an extremely large man who wears a leather apron around his paunchy waist and absolutely nothing else, the better to display the sign of the Fifth carved in fresh, bleeding wounds across his chest. A smaller version is chiseled into his forehead, just to alleviate any doubts as to where his loyalties lie.

  His penchant for proving devotion through self-trauma doesn't end there. The cleaver-like weapon that nearly decapitated Theo isn't held in his hand but rather an integral part of his right arm, the blade extending from a knot of twisted flesh just below the elbow. Not the most elegant bit of fleshcrafting I've seen, but evidently it gets the job done. Behind him is the red groundcar, lashed to the rail with a grappling hook and rapidly disgorging cannibals onto our deck.

  Slaughterborne's war-priest has evidently arrived.