The Guns of Two-Space (6 page)

The cats had all gathered in the hospital, curled up in corners, peering out from beneath bunks, or sitting at Elphinstone and Vodi's feet, grumbling and mewling plaintively about the inconvenience of it all. They were making it clear that they were unhappy with the situation, and they were ready to take their complaints to the management, thankyewverymuch. Meow.

Doc Etzen and Doc Brun, their two corpsmen, stood at the upper and lower hatches with their aid bags, ready to provide triage, immediate lifesaving medical attention, and to direct the evacuation of the wounded.

Roxy, the one-eyed old cook, stood by with her mates, ready to refresh the scuttlebutts and to act as litter-bearers. And old Roxy was a hell of a shot with a pistol and sudden death with her meat cleaver if push came to shove.

Deep in the hold the carpenter and his mates formed a damage-control party, standing by to provide repairs to the precious Keel, brace up structural damage, or to sally up and assist Hans or the bosun with repairs to masts, yards, and spars.

In the rigging, on the quarterdeck, in the surgery, and in the hold, all was ready. But the battle would be won or lost by the guns and their crews.
They
were the deadly, destructive arm of the complex compound organism that was their Ship. The success or failure of the guns would mean the difference between continued life... or a cold, painful, lonely death, with their frozen lifeless corpses floating forever through interstellar vacuum.

Captain Melville had developed a strategy that played to the strengths of the
Fang
and her crew. And their great advantage, their edge over any potential opponent, was the tremendous accuracy of their 24-pounders when Melville was personally aiming the guns.

Gunpowder would only smolder in two-space. To make a pistol, a musket, or a cannon "fire" a projectile you had to place a specially designed Keel charge at the base of the barrel, which protruded out from the back of the barrel like a glowing white nipple. A musket ball or cannonball was rammed down the muzzle, and at the breech end of the barrel it lodged against the Keel charge. Two-space weapons didn't have or need a normal trigger. When the firer made physical contact with the "nipple" of the Keel charge it generated a pulse of directed energy that blasted the projectile down the barrel. The Keel charge could be used repeatedly, and it actually got better with time.

The Keel charges on the guns were small versions of the large Keel that ran the length of the Ship and gave them the ability to exist in two-space. Like all Keels they had a coat of glowing white Moss on them and the Moss was sentient. Not only was the Ship alive, but the pistols, muskets, and cannons in two-space also had a degree of intelligence. The firer could actually use the innate intellect of the gun to help direct the bullet or cannonball toward its target. Over time the gun captain and the gun became a team, developing a high degree of accuracy, like a horse and rider, or a hunting dog and a hunter learning to work together, forming a synergy, a gestalt that was greater than the sum of the parts.

The bigger the gun, the greater the intelligence. Pistols and muskets were barely sentient, sending an empathic "purr" of pleasure and eagerness to the person who fired them. The 12-pound cannons were like puppies, sending a telepathic, dog-like yelp of fierce delight that registered clearly in the firer's mind. But the 24-pounders were something else entirely. Melville and his crew had boarded and captured the
Fang
, complete with her cannon. Later, when
they
were the ones manning the 24-pounders in combat, they were stunned by the bloodlust that emanated from these huge cannons when they were fired. A bloodlust that was a distant echo of the savage spirit of the Ship herself.

In one critical battle Melville had learned how to harness the savage malevolence of the cannon with the deadly computing power of the Ship. This was a technique that the Guldur had never developed, and the
Fang
s had gone out of their way to keep it a secret.

With few exceptions, only a Ship's captain was in true telepathic contact with his Ship. Melville had learned, almost by accident, how to use this telepathic contact with
Fang
, while firing the 24-pounders, to make a supernaturally accurate and deadly combination. In essence the young captain became a human circuit, an organic relay, between his Ship and the cannon, guiding, directing, and channeling the alien, malignant spirits of both the gun and the Ship into a fell, fey, and phenomenally accurate killing team.

In one way they were like a horse, a dog, and a rider, all telepathically linked into a deadly killing team. From another perspective, Melville, his Ship, and his 24-pounders could be viewed as a human, an alien AI, and a sentient alien gun, all acting as one, in a fierce, feral totality of extraordinarily accurate death and destruction.

Thus, the accuracy and power of the their 24-pounders when the captain was directing them gave the
Fang
a tremendous advantage in combat. Their
other
major strength was their ability in a boarding action. Melville's tactical creativity and leadership skills, his crew's ferocity and combat experience, his subordinate leaders' experience and competence, and their enemy's persistent inflexibility, all combined to give them an edge in a boarding operation. So, at close quarters Melville preferred boarding to battering, and at a distance he preferred the fine-work of exact, very carefully aimed gunfire. His crew knew this, and they prepared carefully for either eventuality.

The scene was the same on both the upper and lower main decks. The members of the gun crews were at their cannons, each man (or Guldur or Stolsh) in a place he knew intimately well, each with his own particular handspike, crow, ram, bed, quoin, and train tackle all neatly at hand.

Swords and pistols were in racks close to hand. Each gun crew was ready to swing into close combat at an instant's notice, acting as an organized squad under the command of their gun captain, either to repel boarders or to form a boarding party.

A supply of carefully selected and inspected roundshot, canister and grape was standing by in the shot garlands beside each gun. The precision cannon fire that their captain intended to use required a glass-smooth roundshot, and the shot was always rusting, or it had small clumps of packing grease still on it. The job of chipping, cleaning and polishing the round shot was like cleaning a kitchen or sharpening a knife. It was a job that was never really completed, and now the gun crews were dedicating their attention to this task with renewed vigor.

The petty officers, midshipmen, and officers stood out at intervals on the deck, blue-jacketed markers in the chain of command. The master gunner, Mr. Barlet, stalked the gun line on the upper deck, checking his guns and their crews. Gunny Von Rito did the same on the lower deck.

To Asquith's uneducated eye it seemed as though the Ship had magically transformed itself in a brief instant of turmoil and motion. The commotion stopped, and suddenly there was perfect order. Assembled around their guns, spaced evenly in the rigging, and at their stations on the quarterdeck, the entire Ship was standing at the ready. Ready for battle. Ready to kill or be killed, with emphasis on the former and disdain for the latter.

Killing was what they did, and they did it well.

In the stern of the Ship, next to the upper quarterdeck, a red-coated marine detachment waited under the command of the huge Corporal Kobbsven. They would be the shock troops for any boarding action. Some of them were eager. Some were fearful. Many were resigned to their fate. And some were... uncertain.

"Corp'ral," asked private Dwakins, "wat's a wreckdum?"

Unfortunately, Dwakins had turned to the wrong person. When they were passing out brains and brawn, Kobbsven put both hands in the same bucket.

The redoubtable Corporal Kobbsven's mustache contorted, and his single eyebrow did the work of two (and it did it admirably well) scrunching together in an intense effort at concentration. Then, after a considerable (and apparently fruitless) effort to achieve a reasonable facsimile of intelligent thought, the corporal said, "It's vat we's goin' ta do ta dem bastards. Yah, yew betcha."

On a cruiser won from an ancient foe,
As it was in the days of long ago...
She opened fire at seven miles—
As ye shoot at a bobbing cork—
And once she fired and twice she fired,
Till the bow-gun dropped like a lily tired...

"Ballad of the Clampherdown"
Rudyard Kipling

Now the
Fang
began the slow dance of death with her four consorts. It would take hours, maybe even days for this stately ballet to play out. The first encounter would be a meeting engagement, with both Ships moving straight toward each other. After that Melville planned to make a run for it, with the enemy strung out behind him in a long stern chase.

The first Guldur Ship would be upon them soon enough, but there was time for the captain to visit every gun, place a hand on each shoulder, and call each sailor by name. He began on the upper gun deck, working

counterclockwise from the quarterdeck. The guns were organized into four batteries, each under the command of an officer. The redside upper battery consisted of one 24-pounder and three 12-pounders. The first gun on the redside was a gleaming brass 24-pounder, nicknamed Malicious Intent by its crew. Then came three black iron 12-pounders, Bad Ju-Ju, Sue-Sue, and Deep Doo-Doo, all surrounded by their proud crews. These four guns formed the upper redside battery under the command of Midshipman Lao Tung.

Each crew was fiercely proud of their 24-pounder's savage spirit but they were also somewhat in awe of it, so it was reassuring to have their captain and master gunner come by to give them an encouraging word.

As he approached the bow of the Ship Melville came to Sudden Death, a 24-pounder that was ordinarily on the greenside, but had been moved up to the bow gunport in preparation for the coming head-on battle. Moving on around to the greenside, there were Assault and Battery, the two 12-pounders in the upper greenside battery. Then there was the gap where Sudden Death sat when it wasn't in the bow, followed by Cold Blooded Murder, another of the vicious 24-pounders. These four guns were under the command of Lt. Buckley Archer.

Melville looked with sorrow at the spot occupied by Bad Ju-Ju, which was designed to take a 24-pounder but was currently filled with a 12-pounder. Then he looked with equal sadness at the gap that had been left when Sudden Death was moved to the bow.

When they had captured the
Fang
there were eight of the brass 24-pounders aboard. Melville and his officers were amazed by the size of these guns. For centuries everyone had believed that the nature of two-space "technology" limited the practical size of any Ship or gun. It was not possible to build a gun that could throw a cannonball bigger than twelve pounds, and it was not feasible to build a Ship with a Keel any longer than their
Fang
. There were smaller Ships and guns, but none larger.

These 24-pounders were the Guldur "secret weapon"—a cannon with a throw weight twice as large as anything anyone had ever seen before. But the Guldur had apparently been limited in their production capacity, and on all their Ships they had left the bow and stern gunports empty, with a system of tracks in the deck to move the guns to those positions. In an ideal world the
Fang
would have had four more 24-pounders, to fill the upper and lower gunports in the stern and the bow. In Melville's mind those absent guns felt like missing teeth to a probing tongue.

To aggravate the situation, the Sylvans on Osgil had insisted on taking two of his 24-pounders! Oh, they had paid for those guns, and paid well, in money, honor, and political support. And they had replaced them with some of the finest 12-pounders in the galaxy. But Melville still hated to see two more gaps in his "teeth."

To say that he looked with sorrow or sadness at the spots where a 24-pounder should sit was not quite accurate. He did feel those emotions, but at times like this what he felt could be better described as a
lust
. He yearned for a full compliment of guns for his Ship like some men covet women or wealth. And if this battle turned out as planned, soon he would have a few more 24-pounders to fill some of those gaps,
and
he would have a few of the Guldur Ships to contribute to the Navy of Westerness. That would teach the bastards to attack him and his Ship!

Meanwhile, the crew of the
Fang
had compensated for the shortage of 24-pounders by putting 12-pounders everywhere that they would fit. The number of spots where they could put a 12-pounder was limited by the deck space taken up by their four cutters, and the long recoil on the 24-pounders combined with the tracks needed to shift those huge guns to the gunports in the bow and stern. Still there was room for two 12-pounders in each of the stern cabins, and two more on each of their upper and lower broadsides. And there were two additional 12-pounders replacing the 24-pounders taken by the Sylvans.

The upshot of it all was that the
Fang
currently carried fourteen 12-pounders and six 24-pounders. On any other human, Sylvan, or Dwarrowdelf Ship in the galaxy, the 12-pounders would be the primary armament. Aboard the
Fang
the 12-pounders took second place, a distant second, to the devastating, malignant power of the 24-pounders. Especially when they were being fired by Melville. Those damned guns were deadly... there just weren't enough of them to satisfy their captain.

In his fear and confusion, Cuthbert Asquith XVI found himself gravitating toward Lt. Archer, the young officer who had gone out of his way to be friendly to the little earthling during the pistol match. Archer was in command of the two 12-pounders and two 24-pounders of the upper greenside battery, but his superbly trained crews had everything under control, and there was really very little for him to do at the moment. Thus the dapper young lieutenant was quite happy to spend a few minutes in conversation with Asquith.