Carnifex

9/7/467 AC, Motor Yacht Suzy Q, Xamar Coast

The storm trick wouldn't work more than once. At least, it wouldn't work twice in a row. The classis needed something else, rather, several somethings else.

The Suzy Q was one of those things. Oh, she was a real yacht, all right, one hundred and ten feet worth of outrageous luxury. Even the girls aboard were luxury models, hookers taken from the Wappen von Bremen and paid a hefty bonus for sunning themselves topless on the forward deck. Everyone had been surprised that so many of the girls had volunteered when asked. Six had been needed, thirty-two had volunteered, and that was even before the danger bonus was mentioned. Who knew; perhaps they had begun to think of themselves as legionettes.

Whatever the motivation, they did a very impressive job, sunning and stretching, nonchalantly showing off their assets to the fishing boats they passed. The classis assumed, not unreasonably, that at least some of those boats reporting directly to Pirates-R-Us.

In anticipation of that, the boat was not quite so yacht-like under the surface. Both sides and the stern had been heavily reinforced with resinated aramid-fiber armor plates. Three .41-caliber machine guns were positioned, each side, to fire outward, as was a seventh to fire astern. The machine guns had been modified with a special jacket for water cooling. They could fire for half an hour or more before the barrels overheated. As a matter of fact, the half hour was about as much as the testing committee had cared to check. No one really knew how long they could fire without a let up. Besides the .41s, under the forward deck a single front-shielded 20mm was poised to be raised by hydraulics. An additional seven Cazadors and an equal number of sailors posed as crew in civilian dress, over and above the hidden seventeen slotted to man the machine guns and 20mm.

The Cazadors didn't get the girls' danger bonus, though they drew normal combat pay.

Centurion Rodriguez, admiring the girls from the wheel house, thought, Screw the bonus; watching the girls is bonus enough. Standing next to him the Suzy Q's skipper, Warrant Officer Chu, had much the same thought.

Both were making plans for their next scheduled visit to the von Bremen.

"Sweet duty," mused Rodriguez.

"That it is," agreed Chu. He pointed at the boat's radar screen. "But it's about to get a lot less sweet."

"Suzy Q this is Ironsides; company coming."

Chu picked up the microphone and answered, "We see 'em coming, Ironsides. No problem, just the one boat."

"Shall I have the girls start their routine?" asked Rodriguez.

Chu noted the distance on the screen by eye. He shook his head slightly. "No . . . wait a bit. They won't be here for half an hour. But why don't you have the Santisima Trinidad close it up some?"

* * *

The pirate vessel was crammed to the gills with mujahadin. At least, they liked to style themselves as holy warriors; it gave them a warm and fuzzy feeling to be doing the work of God while filling their pockets.

"And aren't those some bits of divine workmanship?" asked the boat's chief, rhetorically, looking over the exceptionally well-breasted and tanned girls standing by the target's bow and gesturing frantically. "And won't they bring a good price at market."

He'd asked rhetorically but his assistant had been listening even so. "The boat itself will bring a better one," he said, "and anyone who can afford that boat and those girls will probably bring a better ransom still."

"Oh, look," tsked the pirate chief. "We've frightened them; they're running below. Well, that won't matter. Cheat of us our gaze now, we'll enjoy your bodies all the more later."

The chief turned to his assistant. "Fire a shot across their bow and tell them to kill engines and prepare to be boarded."

* * *

Women end up whoring for any of a huge number of reasons. Some, albeit few, actually like the work. Others have no other skills. Some are lazy, and those often do very poorly even at hooking, while others just want to raise a lot of money in a hurry and then retire back home where no one knows what they've been and done.

Jaquelina Gonzalez's reasons were none of those. At the age of fourteen, she'd had the poor judgment to get involved in one of Colombia Latina's innumerable guerilla wars. Worse, she'd chosen the wrong—the losing—side. Undocumented, fleeing for her life, with no assets but those God had given her and no skills that anyone wanted, she'd found herself drifting into whoredom as a better alternative to starvation. Unofficially, she was the leader of the girls on the Suzy Q, and one of the senior hookers on the Wappen von Bremen, as the girls counted such things.

For the life of her, she could not have answered why she'd volunteered for this job. Maybe it was merely to get away from the von Bremen for a while. Maybe it was something else.

Whatever her reasons, Jaquelina had serious doubts about her wisdom once the pirate vessel got close enough for her to see the men waving their rifles and machetes. Rape? Well, she'd been raped before and survived it. Torture? Yes, she made the mistake of being captured once and so she knew about torture. Come to think of it, though she really didn't like to think of it, the two—rape and torture—had gone together.

"Come on, ladies," she ordered, "time for us to go below."

She waited at the hatch, shoving the other girls ahead of her, before she, too, went below to the armored compartment built especially to house them. Just before descending, Jaquelina heard a familiar blast from forward of the ship.

* * *

The pirate chief saw a portion of the forward deck begin to rise and was very quick to add up two plus two and come up with "Holy fucking shit; it's a trap." When a three meter long section of the port side of the boat swung out he directed an RGL gunner to fire, "For the love of Allah and the hope of seeing your family again!"

The RGL flew true and a gaping wound appeared in the target's side. Dimly, through the smoke from the blast, the pirates could see what had to be a machine gun and perhaps a body slumped over it. Two more shells flew in short order toward the rising 20mm, missing it but hitting the shield and sending the men waiting to man it sprawling. The Xamaris had little time for congratulations as two more openings appeared, even as a much larger gun continued to rise on the deck.

The 20mm sat unaimed and unmanned until a couple of Cazadors could be rousted from below. When they arrived, the larger gun began to toss out its shells, knocking down the Xamari pirates in groups.

"Close and board!" screamed the pirate chief. "It's our only chance!"

* * *

Two of the girls with her screamed when the boat was rocked by the blast. Barely, Jaquelina restrained herself from pasting them. Didn't they know what they volunteered for? Then again, did I?

She felt a bit better once the other guns opened up. But then she realized there was no fire coming from amidships, the same direction as had come the blast. Jaquelina, too, could add two plus two and come up with "Holy shit."

"Oh, fuck," she whispered, then asked, "Who'll come with me?"

* * *

The fire was terrible. The pirate boat had no armor, and its wood was little more than tissue paper to the heavy guns engaging it. The infidels' main gun, on deck, simply tore the wheel house and most of its occupants to bits.

The chief of the boat, miraculously unhit so far, lay on his belly amidst a layer of spilled blood, torn flesh and bits of shattered bone. One arm upraised and his hand grasping the wheel, he steered through a hole made by the enemy and he steered directly for the target ship. Already, the larger gun was overshooting. He suspected he was under its arc of fire. Already the boat had closed to the point that the two remaining heavy machine guns could only fire at its stern corners. There was a chance if, and only if, the pirates could get close enough to board. And that seemed at least possible.

* * *

Only one girl was willing to go on with Jaquelina, her friend and lover, Marta. Marta was an enormous amazon of a woman, dwarfing Jaquelina in every dimension. Nervous—well, terrified, to be honest—the amazon followed the little hooker out of their armored shelter and down the smoky central corridor of the ship until they reached amidships. There, they turned to the direction from which had come the earlier blast.

Marta shrieked when she saw one crewman, sans head, laying on the blood-soaked deck. The other gunner was slumped over his gun, burned and barely breathing.

"Shut up, Marta," Jaquelina ordered as she went to the slumped and hurt gunner. "This one's still alive."

Together, the two eased the hurt Cazador to the bloody deck. The boy's face was a mess, which caused Jaquie to tsk and Marta to shudder.

"He'll live, I think, though he won't be very pretty," Jaquie announced.

Marta didn't reply directly, pointing instead out the hole in the hull and saying, "Maybe he'll live. We won't."

Jaquie's eyes followed Marta's pointing finger. There, a scant fifty meters away, the chewed up bow of their attackers plowed a shallow furrow in the sea.

"Fuck!"

Jaquelina tore her gaze from the enemy vessel and let it come to rest upon the gun. Looks like . . . mmm . . . a scaled-down version of the FS Model Fifty heavy machine gun. Well . . . I know how to use one of those, courtesy of the Arenista National Liberation Front. That jacket around the barrel looks funny but . . . oh, it's for water cooling. Those can fire a lllooonnnggg time without overheating.

She knelt down behind the gun. Ammunition's already fed. Looks like . . . mmm . . . three hundred rounds; two boxes.

"Honey, we're in business," she said to Marta. "Go grab a couple more cans of ammunition."

Jaquie's right hand lowered to the wheel on the gun's traversing and elevating mechanism and began to twist it counter-clockwise to raise the line of fire. Her left hand took hold of the left spade grip. She rested that thumb on the gun's butterfly trigger. Scrunching herself as low as possible, so as not to be seen by the pirates massing on their ship's bow in preparation for a boarding, Jaquie shifted her right hand to the traversing wheel and moved the gun's traverse to the right side of the mass of pirate humanity.

"Now we wait until they line themselves up," she muttered. "Come to Mama, babies."

* * *

Centurion Rodriguez and Warrant Chu were more or less pinned in the wheelhouse. While Chu tried to steer the boat a port to gain a little distance from the pirates, Rodriguez attempted to poke his head around the fortified wheelhouse corner to return fire on them.

"Fucking bastards!" Rodriguez cried out, jerking his head back and rolling in pain on the deck while clawing wooden splinters from his face and one bloody eye.

* * *

Jaquie had blood in her eye as the pirate ship closed to within fifteen meters. She made a quick, fine adjustment to the traversing wheel and used her thumb to depress the gun's trigger. The pounding of the heavy machine gun's blast in the close confines of its cabin was painful to her ears. Even so, she kept up the fire with her left hand while twisting the traversing wheel with her right. In her line of sight she saw pirates bowled down, spraying blood. As often as not, the heavy bullets punched right through two and even three and four men before continuing on. She heard their cries of victory turn to despair and the sound raised a wicked grin on her face.

The gun gave a clang and the grin turned to a grimace of pain. A return shot, aimed or just lucky, had hit it causing the bullet to carom off the side plate to bury itself in her right side, just below the ribs. Even so, she never let up with her left thumb nor stopped traversing with her right hand.

Note to self: Next time I really need to ask for body armor.

* * *

Chu let go the wheel to pull Rodriguez back behind fuller cover. The blood flowed too thickly for the sailor to see the damage. He pulled a water bottle from a holder above deck and poured its contents over the centurion's eye.

This is probably a mistake, he thought, as he reached to remove a thin spike of wood from the white of the eye. Rodriguez screamed, once, as the splinter was removed. Blood flowed even more freely afterwards. Still, the pain became more or less manageable.

"Thanks, Chu," he whispered. "See to the defense . . . I'll be all right."

* * *

Blast the pirates into eternity Jaquelina could do, wounded or not. What she could not do was stop the progress of their boat. It continued on, closer and closer, until it rammed the side of the Suzy Q, staving it in and causing water to pour through the rupture.

"Marta!" she screamed, "See to the wounded boy and let's get the fuck out of here!"

Jaquelina stood up and backed away from the gun. Blood suddenly began to rush from her wounded side.

"Mierde," she muttered, and promptly fainted.

* * *

The bilge pumps kicked in automatically, relieving Chu of the burden of flipping a switch while trying to lead his own crew and the Cazadors. Whatever or whoever it was who'd taken over the central .41 on that side might have knocked the pirates' dicks loose, but just couldn't stop the boat or kill them all.

Well before he'd been enticed into becoming a squid, Chu had been a pretty fair riflemen with the Fourth Tercio. He picked up Rodriguez's bayoneted rifle and, screaming something unintelligible even to himself, launched himself bodily to the spot where his hull was breached and the pirates oozing over the side.

He was joined at the boarding point by Legionario Tomás Guillermo, the latter likewise charging forward with bayonet point to the front. The prow of the pirate vessel was on a rough plane with the side of the Suzy Q. They met, Chu and Guillermo on the one side, half a dozen half-panicked pirates on the other. The pirates towered over the little legionaries but, since both the legionaries had body armor—better still, training—the first two Xamaris met went down with screams made gurgling by the blood filling their lungs.

"Get the fuck away from my fucking ship you scum-sucking bastards!" Chu cried.

* * *

By the time Marta got on deck, Jaquelina carried under one arm and the burnt legionary slung over her shoulder, the other hookers had also emerged. Marta set Jaquie down gently and just as carefully laid the legionary alongside her.

"Does anybody know first aid?" Marta asked.

"Sure," answered one of the girls, brightly. "I know just what to do; I've watched the legionaries." She then proceeded to fill her not unimpressive lungs with air and screamed "Medddiiiccc!"

* * *

With their own boat sinking under them, the legionaries had little choice but to swarm the other. Leaving their machine guns and grabbing rifles, they followed Chu and Guillermo in a surge over the gunwales. The pirates had little chance of stopping that charge. While the bodies and not-quite-yet bodies were being rolled over the side to the gathering sharks, the legionaries collected their wounded and dead and carried them across. A half dozen pirates they saved for questioning. Besides, Fosa had said he thought it would be good for morale for the rest of the fleet to see some of their enemies hang.