Throne of Stars (14 page)
Authors: David Weber,John Ringo
“Put your helm alee, Captain!” he ordered, and T’Sool waved two arms at his helmsman.
“Hands to sheets!” the Mardukan captain bellowed through the bedlam. “Off sheets!” Seamen who had learned their duties the hard way during the voyage scampered through the smoke and fury to obey his orders even as the gunners continued to fire, and T’Sool watched as the line-handlers raced to their stations, then waved at the helmsman again.
“Helm alee! Let go the sheets—handsomely there!” he thundered, and the helmsman spun the wheel.
Hooker
turned on her heel like the lady she was, coming around to port in a thunder of canvas, with a speed and precision none of the raiders would have believed possible.
“Haul in and make fast!” T’Sool shouted, and the schooner settled onto her new heading, with the wind once more broad on her port beam. The sail-handlers made the sheets fast on the big fore-and-aft foresail, and her broadside spat fresh thunder as she charged back across her enemies’ sterns.
There were
no
guns—bombards or swivels—to protect the raiders’ sterns, and the carnage aboard the Lemmaran ships redoubled as the lethal grapeshot went crashing the entire length of the vessels. A single one of the iron spheres might kill or maim as many as a dozen—or even two dozen—of the raiders, and then the anti-
coll
bead cannon mounted on
Hooker
’s after rail opened fire, as well.
For the first time since the Marines landed on Marduk, their high-tech weapons were almost superfluous. The ten-millimeter, hypervelocity beads were incredibly lethal, but the storm of grapeshot and the flying splinters of the ships themselves spread a stormfront of destruction broader than anything the bead cannon could have produced. The beads were simply icing on the cake.
“Bring us back up close-hauled on the port tack, Captain T’Sool!” Roger snapped, and
Hooker
swung even further to port, riding back along a reciprocal of her original course that took her back up between the battered raider ships towards
Prince John
’s position. Both broadsides’ carronades continued to belch flame with deadly efficiency, and Roger could clearly see the thick ropes of blood oozing from the Mardukan ships’ scuppers.
The flotilla flagship broke back through the enemy’s shattered formation with smoke streaming from her gun ports in a thick fog bank shot through with flame and fury. Another raider’s masts went crashing over the side, and Roger sucked in a deep, relieved breath of lung-searing smoke, despite his earlier confident words to Pahner, as he saw
Prince John
.
The broken foremast had been cut entirely away; he could see it bobbing astern of her as she got back underway under her mainsail and gaff main topsail alone. It was scarcely an efficient sail combination, but it was enough under the circumstances. Or it should be, anyway. She wasn’t moving very quickly yet, and her rigging damage had cost her her headsails, which meant the best she could do was limp along on the wind. But her speed was increasing, and at least she was under command and moving. Which was a good thing, since raider Number Four had somehow managed to claw her way through the melee.
The
Johnny
had seen
her coming, and her carronades were already pounding at her opponent. The bigger, more heavily built raider vessel’s topsides were badly shattered, and her sails seemed to have almost more holes in them than they had intact canvas, but she was still underway, still closing on the damaged schooner, and the big, slow-firing bombard protected by the massive timber “armor” of her forecastle was still in action. Even as Roger watched, it slammed another massive round shot into the much more lightly built schooner, and he swore viciously as splintered planking flew.
“It
would
be the
Johnny,
” he heard Pahner say almost philosophically. He looked at the Marine, and the captain shrugged. “Never seems to fail, Your Highness. The place you least want to get hit, is the one you can count on the enemy finding.” He shook his head. “She’s got quite a few of the Carnan aboard, and they already took a hammering when we lost
Sea Skimmer
.”
“Don’t count your money when it’s still sitting on the table,” Roger replied, then turned to Julian. “All ships,” he said. “Close with the pirates to leeward and board. We’ll go to
Johnny
’s assistance ourselves.”
“Your Highness,” Pahner began, “considering that our entire mission is to get you home alive, don’t you think that perhaps it might be a bit wiser to let someone else go—”
Roger had just turned back to the Marine to argue the point when Pahner’s helmet visor automatically darkened to protect the captain’s vision. Roger didn’t know whether or not
Prince John
’s Marine detachment had originally set up a plasma cannon for their anti-
coll
defense system. If they had, he thought with a strange detachment, they were probably going to hear about it—at length—from Pahner and the sergeant major. But it was also possible that they’d switched out the bead cannon at the last minute while the rest of the crew worked on repairs to the schooner’s crippled rigging. Not that it mattered. Raider Number Four had managed to get around behind
Johnny
’s stern, where her deadly carronade broadside wouldn’t bear. And in achieving that position of advantage, the pirate vessel had put itself exactly where the schooner’s crew wanted it.
The Marines’ plasma cannons could take out modern main battle tanks, and if
Hooker
’s bead cannon hadn’t seemed to add much to her carronades’ carnage, no one would ever say that about
Prince John
’s after armament. The round ripped straight down the center of the target ship, just above main deck level. It sliced away masts, rigging, bulwarks, and the majority of the pirates who had assembled on deck in anticipation of boarding. What was worse, in a way, was the thermal bloom that preceded the round. The searing heat touched the entire surface of the ship to flame in a tiny slice of a second, and the roaring furnace became an instant sliver of Hell, an inferno afloat on an endless sea that offered no succor to its victims. Those unfortunate souls below decks, “shielded” from the instant incineration of the boarding party, had a few, eternal minutes longer to shriek before the bombard’s powder magazine exploded and sent the shattered, flaming wreck mercifully into the obliterating depths.
“I thought we wanted to capture the ships intact,” Roger said almost mildly.
“What would you have done, Your Highness?” Pahner asked. “Yeah, we want to capture the ships, and recapture the convoy, if we can. But
Prince John,
obviously, would prefer to avoid being boarded herself.”
“And apparently the Lemmar agree with that preference,” D’Nal Cord observed. “Look at that.”
He raised an upper arm and pointed. One of the six raider vessels drifted helplessly, completely dismasted while the blood oozing down her side dyed the water around her. Her deck was piled and heaped with the bodies of her crew, and it was obvious that no more than a handful of them could still be alive. Three more raiders each had one of the flotilla’s other schooners alongside, and now that
Hooker
’s carronades were no longer bellowing, Roger could hear the crackle of small arms fire as the K’Vaernian boarders stormed up and over them.
Prince John
’s plasma cannon had accounted for a fifth raider, but the sixth and final pirate vessel had somehow managed to come through the brutal melee with its rigging more or less intact, and it was making off downwind just as fast as its shredded canvas would allow.
“Do we let them go, or close with them?” the prince asked.
“Close,” Pahner said. “We want to capture the ships, and I’m not a great believer in giving a fleeing enemy an even break. They either surrender, or they die.”
“They’re not letting us go,” Vunet said.
“Would you?” Cies shot back with a grunt of bitter laughter as he looked around the deck.
The crew was hastily trying to repair some of the damage, but it was a futile task. There was just too much of it. Those damned bombards of theirs were hellishly accurate. Unbelievably accurate. They’d smashed
Rage of Lemmar
from stem to stern and cut away over half her running rigging, in the process. Coupled with the way they’d shredded the sails themselves, the damage to the ship’s lines—and line-handlers—had slowed their escape to a crawl.
The bombards had done nearly as much damage to the crew, as well. The quarterdeck was awash in blood and bodies, and the crew had put a gang of slaves to work pitching the offal over the side. The enemy’s round shot had been bad enough, but the splinters it had ripped from the hull had been even worse. Some of them had been almost two-thirds as long as Cies himself, and one of them had gutted his original helmsman like a filleted fish. Nor was that the only crewman who’d been shredded by bits and pieces of his own ship. Some of that always happened when the bombards got a clear shot, but Cies had never imagined anything like
this.
Normal bombard balls were much slower than the Hell-forged missiles that had savaged his vessel. Worse, he’d never seen any ship that could pour out fire like water from a pump, and the combination of high-velocity shot and its sheer volume had been devastating beyond his worst nightmares of carnage.
Now the
Rage
was trying to limp to the south and away from the vengeful demons behind her. He’d hoped that with one of their own crippled (by what, for all intents and purposes, had been a single lucky shot) the other four might have let his own ship go. But it appeared they had other plans.
“We could . . .” Vunet said, then paused.
“You were about to suggest that we surrender,” Cies said harshly. “Never! No Lemmar ship has ever surrendered to anyone other than Lemmar. Ever. They may take our ship, but not one crewman, not one slave, will be theirs.”
“They’re not heaving to,” Roger said with a grunt. “Captain Pahner?”
“Yes, Your Highness?” the Marine replied formally.
“If we really want that ship intact, this is about to become a boarding action. I think it’s about time to let the ground commander take over.”
“You intend to take them on one-on-one?”
“I think we have to, if we don’t want them to get away,” Roger replied. Pahner gazed at him, and the prince shrugged. “
Pentzikis
,
Tor Coll
, and
Sea Foam
already have their hands full.
Prince John
can probably take the fourth pirate—I doubt there’s more than a couple dozen of these Lemmar still alive aboard her, and she sure as hell can’t get away with no masts at all. But this guy in front of us isn’t just lucky. He’s smart . . . and good. If he weren’t, he’d be drifting around back there with his buddies. So if you want him caught, we’re the only one with a real shot at him.”
“I see. And when we catch up with him, you’ll be where, precisely, Your Highness?” Pahner asked politely.
“Like I say, Sir,” Roger said, “it’s time to let the ground commander take over.”
“I see.” Pahner gazed at him speculatively for several moments, considering what the prince
hadn’t
said, then nodded with an unseen smile.
“Very well, Your Highness. Since boarding actions are
my
job, I’ll just go and get the parties for this one assembled.”
CHAPTER TEN
“Come off the guns and rig the mortars!” Despreaux ordered, pulling gunners off the carronades as she trotted down the line of the starboard battery. “We’re going to be boarding from port!”
The
Ima Hooker
was slicing through the water once more, rapidly overhauling the fleeing pirate vessel. It would have been difficult to guess, looking at the sergeant’s expression, just how unhappy about that she was. Not that she was any more eager than Captain Pahner to see the raiders escape, if not for exactly the same reasons. Nimashet Despreaux had a serious attitude problem where pirates—any pirates—were concerned, but she would have been much happier if at least one of the other schooners had been in position to support
Hooker
. There were still an awful lot of scummies aboard that ship, however badly shaken they must be from the effects of the carronades. And as good as the K’Vaernians and their Diaspran veterans were, hand-to-hand combat on a heaving deck was what the Lemmar did for a living. There were going to be casualties—probably quite a lot of them—if the raiders ever got within arms’ reach, and a Mardukan’s arms were very, very long.
And Despreaux was particularly concerned about one possible casualty which wouldn’t have been a problem if any of the other schooners had been in
Hooker
’s place.
But at least if they had to do it, it looked as if Roger intended to do it as smartly as possible. He was steering almost directly along the Lemmaran ship’s wake, safely outside the threat zone of any weapon the raider mounted. Given
Hooker
’s superior speed and maneuverability, Despreaux never doubted that Roger would succeed in laying her right across the other ship’s stern. Nor did she doubt that he would succeed in raking the pirate’s deck from end to end with grapeshot with relative impunity as he closed. After which,
Hooker
’s crew and Krindi Fain’s Diasprans would swarm up and over the shattered stern and swiftly subdue whatever survived from the Lemmaran crew.
Sure they would.
And Roger wouldn’t be anywhere
near
the fighting.
And the tooth fairy would click her heels together three times and return all of them to Old Earth instantly.
She skidded to a halt beside another device that was new to Marduk. The boarding mortar, one of three carried in each of
Hooker
’s broadsides, was a small, heavy tube designed for a heavily modified grapnel, affixed to a winch and line, to fit neatly into its muzzle. Charged with gunpowder, it should be able to throw the grapnel farther and more accurately than any human or Mardukan. Of course, that assumed it worked at all. The system had been tested before leaving K’Vaern’s Cove, but that was different from trying to use it in combat for the very first time.
Despreaux pulled open the locker beside the mortar, dragged out the grapnel, and affixed the line to the snaphook on its head as one of the gun boys ran down to the magazine for the propelling charge. He was back in less than a minute with a bag of powder, and Despreaux watched one of the Mardukan gunners from the starboard battery slide the charge into the heavy iron tube. A wad of waxed felt followed, and then Despreaux personally inserted the grapnel shaft and used it as its own ramrod to shove the charge home. When she was certain it was fully seated, she stepped back. A hollow quill, made from the Mardukan equivalent of a feather and filled with fulminating powder, went into the touchhole, the firing hammer was cocked, and the mortar was ready.
All three of the portside weapons had been simultaneously loaded, and Despreaux spent a few seconds inspecting the other two, then activated her communicator.
“Portside mortars are up.”
“Good,” Roger replied. “We’re coming up on our final turn.”
Despreaux grabbed a stay and leaned outboard, careful to stay out of the carronade gunners’ way as she peered ahead beyond the sails and the tapering bowsprit.
Hooker
was coming up astern of the Lemmaran ship rapidly, and she heard the rapidfire volley of orders as seamen scampered to the lines. One of the portside gunners rapped her “accidentally” on the knee with a handspike, and she looked up quickly. Mardukan faces might not be anywhere near as expressive as human ones, but she’d learned to read scummy body language in the past, endless months, and she recognized the equivalent of a broad grin in the way his false-hands held the handspike.
She gave him the human version of the same expression and got the hell out of his way as the gun captain squatted behind the carronade and peered along the stubby barrel. Then he cocked the firing hammer.
“Back all sails!”
Now that the battle had resolved itself into a series of ship-to-ship actions, Roger found himself an admiral with no commands to give. It was all up to the individual ship captains now, like T’Sool, and Roger decided that the best thing he could do was get out from underfoot.
And he was planning on sitting out the boarding, as well. Everyone’s comments on the stupidity of his putting himself out on a limb were finally starting to hit home. If he took point, the Marines aboard
Ima Hooker
wouldn’t be able to pay attention to taking the ship, or to keeping themselves alive, because they would be trying too hard to protect him. So he’d taken a position in the ratlines, where he could observe the fighting without participating.
Getting a good look required that elevated position, because the ships could hardly have been more unlike one another. The Lemmaran was a high-sided caravellike vessel, fairly round in relation to its length, whereas the schooner was long, low, and lean. The result was a difference of nearly three meters from the top of the schooner’s bulwarks to the top of her opponent’s.
The boarders from
Hooker
would be led by some of the Diaspran veterans, under the command of Krindi Fain, with the human Marines—led by Gunny Jin—as emergency backup. The Diasprans weren’t exactly experienced at this sort of combat, but the K’Vaernian seamen had explained the rudiments of shipboard combat to them before they ever set sail, and they’d practiced for it almost as much as they’d practiced their marksmanship. Given the disparity in the height of the two ships’ bulwarks, even the Mardukans were going to find it an awkward scramble to get across the raider’s high stern, but at least the savage battering the carronades’ grapeshot had delivered upon arrival gave them an opening to make the crossing.
On the other hand, not even the Mardukans had been able to actually see across to the other ship from deck level. That was one reason Cord had joined Roger, perching precariously in the ratlines, along with his nephew Denat. The other reason was to get them close enough to Roger to let them throw up their outsized shields in the event that the Lemmar decided to hurl their throwing axes at him.
Roger watched the Marines forming up behind the Mardukan boarders and was just as glad that Despreaux was in charge of the grapnel mortars. For better or worse, he worried more about her than about the other Marines. Managing the grapnels, and the fast winches they were attached to, she would be in no position to participate. Whether that was simply a happy coincidence or something Pahner and Kosutic had considered with malice aforethought when they detailed her to the job, he didn’t know. Nor did he particularly care. Not as long as it kept her out of the firing line.
The final broadside roared, and Roger nodded in grim approval as the hurricane of grapeshot swept most of the pirate ship’s afterdeck clear. It also did a splendid job of cutting away rigging and what was left of the ship’s canvas. It looked like the spars themselves were still more or less intact, though. Rerigging this prize would be an all-day task, but one that would be nowhere near as difficult as repairing the ships that had lost entire masts.
He watched as Despreaux ordered the mortars to fire and the lines flicked out across the enemy ship. The grapnels flew straight and true, arcing over the Lemmar ship’s stern rail, and the Mardukan sailors on the fast winches started reeling them back in. The mortars appeared to have been a successful experiment, he observed, and allowed himself a certain smugness as the author of the idea. Trying to do the same thing with hand-thrown grapnels would have been a chancy process, at best.
Pedi Karuse refused to give in to despair. The worst had happened the moment the Krath raiding party hit the village. From there, it was only a matter of how long it took her to die.
In a way, her capture by the Lemmar had actually stretched out her existence. They were probably going to sell her back to the Fire Priests, eventually. Or she might end up as a bond slave, or in the saltpeter mines. But at least she wasn’t on a one-way ticket to Strem. Or already a Handmaiden of the God.
So she’d been prepared to look upon her current situation with a certain degree of detachment, biding her time and husbanding her strength against the vanishingly slim chance that she might actually find an opportunity to escape. That attitude had undergone a marked change in the past few hours, however.
The problem, of course, was the peculiarly Lemmaran method of dealing with boarding actions. The Lemmar had a simple answer to the possibility of capture: don’t allow it. In part, their attitude stemmed from their dealings with Fire Priests; unlike the Shin, they flatly refused to let themselves be captured to face the Fire Priests’ . . . religious practices. But an even larger part of their attitude was the terror factor; no Lemmar would ever surrender under any circumstances, and they made certain all of their enemies knew it.
Generally, that meant that the Fire Priest’s guards didn’t bother trying to capture Lemmaran ships. They might sink them, but fighting a suicidal enemy hand-to-hand was a casualty-heavy proposition which offered minimal profit even if it was successful. Nor did the Fire Priests raid the Lemmar islands. They might have taken Strem away from the Confederation, but the island itself was all they’d gotten. And if they wanted to keep it, they’d have to completely repopulate it, since the Lemmar had killed even their women and children, rather than have them captured.
What that meant for Pedi Karuse, and the half-dozen other captives chained on the deck of the
Rage of Lemmar,
was that having avoided the Fire Priests on Krath, having avoided being shipped to Strem, and having lived through the splinter-filled hell of the broadsides, they were about to be slaughtered by their captors.
Some days it just didn’t pay to do your horns in the morning.
She flattened herself as close to the deck as her chains allowed, even though her brain recognized the futility of her instinctive reaction, as another enemy salvo hit. Most of this one was aimed high, something that whistled through the air with an evil sound and shredded the ship’s rigging like a
greg
eating a
vern
. But some of it flew by lower, and a splinter the size of her horn took one of the other Shin slaves in the stomach. It was really a rather small splinter, compared to some of the others that had gone howling across the deck, but the slave seemed to explode under the impact, and his guts splashed across the red-stained deck . . . and Pedi.
Even over the screams and the thunder of the enemy guns, she could hear the prayers of the captured Guard next to her, and the sound finally pushed her over the brink as her fellow clansman’s blood sprayed over her.
“Shut up!” she shouted. “I hope you burn in the Fires for the rest of eternity! It was your stupid Guard that got me into this!”
There wasn’t much she could do, with her arms chained behind her and coupled to the rest of the slaves, but she did her best—which was to lean sideways and snap-kick the stupid Krath in the head. It wasn’t her best kick ever, but it was enough to send him bouncing away from her, and she grunted in delighted satisfaction as the other side of his skull hit a deck stanchion . . . hard.
“Shin blasphemer!” He spat in her direction. “The Fire will purify your soul soon enough!”
“It will purify you both,” one of the pirates said as he drew his sword. “Time to show these
vern
why you don’t board the Lemmar.”
“Piss on you, sailor!” the Shin female snarled. “Your mother was a
vern
and your father was a
kren—
with bad eyesight!”
“Piss on
you,
Shin witch,” the Lemmar retorted, and raised his sword. “Time to meet your Fire.”
“That’s what you think,” Pedi said. She flipped her legs forward and both feet slammed home as she snap-kicked the pirate in the crotch. He bent explosively forward in sudden agony, and she wrenched herself as far upward as the chains allowed. It was just far enough. Their horns locked, and then, in a maneuver she knew would have left her bruised and sore for a week if she’d been going to live that long, she let herself fall backward and hurled the much larger male over her head and onto his back. Another wrench unlocked her horns just before he crashed down on the planking, and she flipped herself upward onto the back of her head, spun in place on the pivot of her manacles, and drove both heels down onto the winded pirate’s throat.
The entire attack was over in a single heartbeat, along with the pirate’s life, and she bounced back up into a kneeling position on the deck to survey the remaining pirates, clustered to repel borders.
“Next?” she spat.
Several of the Lemmar swore, and two of them started towards her to complete the imperative task of killing their captives. But before they could take more than a single stride, a grapnel came flying through the air. It was only one of three, but this particular grapnel landed two meters in front of Pedi, with the line running between her and the Krath guards.
“Oh, Fire Priest shit,” she whispered as the four-pronged hook began skittering rapidly back along the deck. It was headed for the after rail, gouging splinters out of the planking as it went . . . and aiming directly for the chain binding all the slaves together.
It caught the chain and barely even slowed as it ripped away the forward of the two heavy iron rings that had anchored it—and the slaves—to the deck.
“This is gonna
hurt
!”
