Off Armageddon Reef (84 page)

The range was little more than forty yards, and
Dreadnought
's gunners might as well have been at target practice. It wasn't physically impossible for them to miss, but it would have been very, very difficult.

Twenty-seven guns hammered their hate into
Royal Bédard
with absolutely no warning, no time for the galley to prepare. Her own guns were secured. Her off-duty crew were in their hammocks. Her captain was asleep in his cabin. Her Marines were neither armed nor armored. That dreadful avalanche of cast-iron shot came howling out of the heart of the storm like an outrider of Hell, almost directly down the centerline of the ship, and the carnage it inflicted was unspeakable.

Paladin
, thirty yards farther away, might have expected to fare better at the greater range, but her lighted stern windows offered an even better target…and far less protection than
Royal Bédard
's stoutly planked bows. The devastating broadside ripped into her, rending and killing, and the shrieks of the maimed and dying followed on its heels.

Lywys Gahrdaner, the Earl of Thirsk, stirred in his sleep at the sudden rumble. He grimaced, not quite waking, his sleeping mind identifying the sound of thunder which might have accompanied any storm, far less one as strong as the one pounding at Armageddon Reef this night.

But then it came again. And again.

His eyes popped open…and it came
again
.

Dreadnought
answered to her helm. She swung to starboard under topsails and headsails alone, streaming smoke from both broadsides, as she turned away from
Royal Bédard
and deeper into the main anchorage. Her long bowsprit thrust into the Dohlaran formation like a lance, and her starboard battery roared again as she swept around
Paladin
's port quarter. She pushed between her target and
Archangel Schueler
, lying almost directly west of her. The two of them, like every other ship in the Dohlaran force, had been carefully anchored far enough apart to allow them to swing to their anchors without risk of collision, and that left ample room for
Dreadnought
to slide between them.

Captain Manthyr stood behind his helmsmen, one hand resting on each seaman's shoulder, almost crooning his orders into their ears. He conned his ship with exquisite care, and smoke and thunder jetted from either broadside, blasting into the anchored ships whose crewmen were only just beginning to rouse from exhausted slumber.

Behind her, HMS
Destroyer
followed her as she threaded her way deeper and deeper into the mass of anchored galleys. And behind
Destroyer
came
Danger
, and
Defense
, and
Dragon
.

“All hands, stand by to anchor!” Manthyr shouted.

“Stand by to reduce sail!” Lieutenant Sahdlyr barked through his speaking trumpet, while Midshipman Kohrby crouched beside the anchor party in the stern.

“Let go the stern anchor!” Manthyr commanded, and Kohrby echoed the order. The anchor disappeared into the whitecaps, and the cable led aft down the center of her berthdeck smoked as it burned across the sill of one of her after gunports.

“Clew down!” Sahdlyr shouted.

The officers in charge of each mast repeated the order, and the seamen at the pinrails eased the halyards, lowering the topsails' yards into their lifts and spilling their wind. Other seamen tended the buntlines and leechlines as the yard came down, and Sahdlyr watched closely.

“Round in the lee brace! Clew up the topsails!”

The canvas disappeared as the hands on the clewlines hauled it up to the yards and belayed. More men on the foredeck took in the jibs while the anchor hawser ran out, and the ship came to a stop as the flukes of her anchor dug into the bottom of Crag Reach.

“Clamp on the spring!” Manthyr ordered, and Kohrby's seamen made the already prepared bitter end of the spring cable fast to the anchor hawser just outside the gunport.

“Hands to the after capstan!” the captain shouted, and the seamen previously detailed went running to the capstan to take tension on the spring.

Earl Thirsk stumbled out of his cabin into the rain, barefoot, wearing nothing but his breeches, as still more cannon began to thunder. He hurled himself up the ladder to the top of the aftercastle, ignoring the icy water sluicing over his naked torso as he stared in horrified disbelief at the savage flashes lighting up the rain.

It was a sight such as no Safeholdian had ever seen before. The Charisian cannon rumbled and roared, the muzzle flashes impossibly long and brilliant in the darkness. Smoke gouted, fuming up in sulfurous clouds reeking of Shan-wei's own brimstone. Each muzzle flash etched every plunging raindrop against the night, like rubies, or diamonds of blood, and the banks of smoke towered up, lit from below, like the fumes above erupting volcanoes.

And there was nothing at all the Earl of Thirsk could do about it.

Royal Bédard
lurched as yet another galleon—the sixth, Lieutenant Blaidyn's cringing mind thought—swept slowly past her bow, cannon thundering. The lieutenant stood at the top of the port forecastle ladder—the starboard ladder was a shattered ruin, like the mast whose broken stump stood ten feet off the deck—clinging to the forecastle rail for support, and the calf of his right leg had been laid open by a splinter as if by a sword. He felt hot blood sheeting down his leg but ignored it as he ignored the rain while he shouted encouragement to the seamen trying to get two of the galley's bow chasers loaded despite the round shot howling around their ears.

But then he smelled the smoke. Not powder smoke, rolling on the rain-slashed wind from the enemy guns, but a far more terrifying smoke. The smoke of burning wood.

His head snapped around, and he blanched in fresh horror. The severed mast had fallen across the decks at an angle, draping the broken yard and its burden of sodden canvas across the midships hatch. But now smoke billowed up out of the half-blocked hatch, funneling through the fallen rigging and wreckage, thickening into a dense, flame-lit pillar as it streamed up around the yard and mast.

He didn't know what had happened. Most likely, one of those lighted lanterns below decks had been shattered, spilling flaming oil across the decks. Or it could have been an accident by one of the powder monkeys trying to carry ammunition to the guns. It might even have been a flaming wad, hurled out of one of the Charisian cannon.

But it didn't really matter how it had started. Wooden ships' worst enemy wasn't the sea; it was fire. Built of seasoned timbers, painted inside and out, caulked with pitch, rigged with tarred cordage, they were tinderboxes awaiting a spark, even in this sort of weather, and
Royal Bédard
's spark had been supplied.

Under other circumstances, the fire might have been fought, might have been contained and extinguished. But not under
these
circumstances. Not while round shot continued to crash through the ship's hull, mangling and disemboweling terrified crewmen whose exhausted brains were still clawing their way out of sleep and into nightmare.

“Abandon ship!
Abandon ship!
”

Blaidyn didn't know who'd shouted it first, but there was no fighting the panic it induced. For that matter, there was no
point
fighting it, and he dragged himself the rest of the way up the ladder and across to the port bulwark. He peered down over it, and his jaw clenched. The galley's boats had been lowered when she anchored, and men were flinging themselves over the side, struggling through the water, trying to reach that at least temporary sanctuary.

Blaidyn turned at the bulwark. One of the gun crews was still fighting to get its weapon loaded, and he limped back over to grab the closest man by the arm.

“Forget it!” he shouted. “There's no time! Over the side, boys!”

The rest of the gun crew stared at him for a moment, wild-eyed. Then they were gone, scrambling over the bulwark. Blaidyn watched them go, then turned to take one last look around the deck, to be sure everyone was gone or going.

Flames were beginning to spurt out of the hatchway. He could feel their heat on his face from here, even through the rain, and he tried to close his ears to the agonized shrieks of men trapped below in that blazing inferno.

There was nothing more he could do, and he turned to follow the gun crew…just as a single round shot from a final thundering broadside struck him squarely in the chest.

Fourteen minutes later, the flames reached his ship's magazine.

At least three of the anchored galleys were on fire now, illuminating the anchorage brightly despite the rain. Merlin stood beside Cayleb on
Dreadnought
's quarterdeck as the galleon's guns continued to rave at their targets, and the wild vista of destruction all about him dwarfed anything Nimue Alban, who'd warred with the power of nuclear fusion itself, had ever seen with her own eyes.

The ship was no longer moving. She was motionless—not as stable as a shoreside fortress in these whitecapped waters, perhaps, but close enough to it for gunners accustomed to the rolling, pitching motion of a ship at sea. Scoring hits on equally anchored targets was child's play for them under these conditions, and their rate of fire was far higher than it would have been from a moving ship's deck. They loaded and fired, loaded and fired, like automatons, reducing their targets to shattered, broken wrecks.