March to the Stars

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!"

Pedi leaned forward and tightened her muscles against what was coming, but it was still incredibly painful when all four of her chained-together arms were wrenched backwards. Only one of the rings had come out of the planking, which made it even worse. Instead of dragging them all straight aft, the rampaging grapnel cracked the chain like a whip. Sparks flew as the grapnel's tines raked furiously down the heavy links, and someone's scream ended in a hideous, gurgling groan as the grapnel disemboweled him. She could hear the other slaves screaming as the whole group was snatched along the deck until the grapnel finally yanked entirely free of the chain. But not before it had slammed all of them brutally into the ship's starboard bulwark.

She felt as if her arms had been pulled out of their sockets, and when she looked sideways, she saw that that had literally happened to one of the other Shin. But she refused to let that stop her as she rolled over on her head again and slipped her legs between her arms.

That contortion would have been difficult enough for a human; most Mardukans would have found it virtually impossible, but the same training which had saved Pedi's life against the first pirate came to the fore once more. She folded practically in half and slipped first one, then the other leg out until she could lie with her arms bound in front of her. Of course, they were now flipped around, false-hands above true-hands, but her wrists slid in the manacles to let her relieve the pressure on her elbows and shoulders, and even with false-hands high, she was happier this way. Besides, it was also an insulting hand gesture, which suited her frame of mind perfectly.

Roger had been paying strict attention to the preparations for the attack. Despite his concentration on other things, he'd been vaguely aware of the low-voiced conversation between D'Nal Cord and Denat, but he hadn't paid it very much attention. Not until Cord suddenly snapped an angry retort at his nephew. The deep, sharp-edged sentence was short, pungent, and spectacularly obscene.

"What?" Roger's head whipped around at the highly atypical outburst from his asi.

"They appear to be trying to kill their prisoners," Denat said with a gesture towards the other ship.

Roger followed the waving true-hand and saw half a dozen Mardukans chained to the deck near the center line. One of them was only too obviously dead, clearly a victim of Hooker's broadsides. A chain, stretched between two raised iron rings, joined them all together, running up through a complex four-point restraint behind each Mardukan to hold his arms behind him. As Roger watched, one of the grapnels caught the chain, and he winced in sympathetic pain as it ripped one of the chain's anchoring rings out of the planking and yanked the prisoners across the deck. It also killed another of them, and then the rest of the captives were slammed into the ship's bulwarks with more than enough force to kill anyone who hit awkwardly. Indeed, it looked to Roger as if all but one of them had been injured, possibly severely. But that didn't prevent several more of the Lemmar from advancing on them with swords ready just as Hooker's boarders started over the side of their own ship.

Pedi Karuse rose on her knees once more, examined her situation, and allowed herself one vicious curse. The grapnel had only managed to rip out one ring; the other one remained firmly fixed to the deck, still holding her prisoner. Worse, the other slaves chained to her had fared far worse than she had as they were hurled against the side of the ship and lay about like so many more inert anchors. Aside from having her arms in front of her again, she was as helplessly chained as before, and she looked aft, where the first of the boarders were coming over the stern. At first, she thought they might be Shin, for they wore bright blue harnesses, like those common to the Fardar clan. But in the next instant, she realized that it couldn't be her people. The boarders were using weapons she had never seen before, and their tactics were unlike any Shin.

The first wave over the transom formed a shield wall, more like the sort of thing Krath heavy infantry would do, which held off the pirates while reinforcements swarmed aboard behind them. The second rank bore something like long-barreled arquebuses. Unlike any arquebus Pedi had ever heard of, however, these had no problem with water or weather—as they demonstrated with the very first volley. At least some of that many normal arquebus would have had their priming soaked during the crossing, but all of these weapons fired successfully into the mass of pirates hammering at the shield wall.

The long-barreled arquebuses also had knives on the ends, and after the first volley the entire group charged forward. They wielded the guns more like spears than firearms, but they did so with a discipline and purpose that was decidedly un-Shin-like. They strode forward in step and struck in unison, while the shield bearers stabbed forward with short spears, sliding the thrusts upward from below their shields.

Unfortunately, she didn't have long to contemplate this new mode of warfare before some of the pirates recalled their duty as Lemmar and decided that killing bound captives was a better use of their time than fighting the boarders. She finally knew despair as four of the pirates approached, one of them slicing down to kill the mostly unconscious Guardsman while two more approached her warily.

"Lemmar slime! I'll eat your tongues for my breakfast!"she shouted, bouncing up to spin a kick into the nearest one's belly. He flew backwards, but so did she, and as she slammed down on her back, the one she hadn't kicked sprang forward, sword upraised.

Roger lost track of the prisoners as he watched the boarding party foam across onto the other ship's deck's under Krindi Fain's direction. Once again, the young Mardukan was proving his stuff, first sending over a small team of assegai-and-shield troops, then following it up with a double line of rifles. A command rang out, the assegai troops squatted instantly and simultaneously, with their shields angled, and the riflemen fired a double volley over their heads. The massive bullets smashed into the tight-packed Lemmar, and the Diasprans followed up immediately with a bayonet charge that was a beautiful thing to see. The combination scattered the remaining Lemmar defenders on the pirate ship's afterdeck, and the boarders stormed ahead towards the surviving clumps of raiders further forward.

"Yes!"

Even as Roger yelled in triumph, he felt rather than saw Cord leave his side. His head snapped around, and his eyes widened in a moment of pure shock as the shaman bounded down the ratlines. The huge Mardukan moved with unbelievable speed and agility, and then he flung himself through the air, onto the enemy deck.

He landed, absolutely unsupported, half-way up the ship from Hooker's boarders. And as if that hadn't been enough, he'd thrown himself in front of what must have been the largest single remaining group of Lemmar still on their feet—a cluster of about twelve, with four in the lead and six or eight more following.

Roger couldn't believe it. In every battle, from the day he had first saved Cord's life, his asi had always been at his side, guarding his back. The only time he hadn't been, it was because he'd been too seriously wounded in the previous battle to stay on his feet. It was an unheard of violation of his asi's responsibilities for him to desert his "master" at such a time!

The prince didn't even curse. Cord had backed him too often for him to waste precious seconds swearing. He just checked to ensure that his revolvers were secure in their holsters and his sword was sheathed across his back.

Then he leapt outward in Cord's wake.

The Lemmar with the sword snarled at Pedi and brought his weapon flashing down... only to be flung violently backwards by the enormous, leaf-bladed spear which suddenly split his chest.

Pedi didn't know where the fellow, frankly dangling, above her came from, but he was the best sight she'd ever seen in her life. Even from this angle.

The guy was old and naked as a slith,without even a harness, much less a bardouche, but he wielded his huge spear with a deft touch that reminded her of her father's personal armsman back home. That old armsman had seen more battles than she'd seen breakfasts, and could whip any three young bucks while simultaneously drinking a cup of wine. And it looked like this fellow was cut from the same cloth.

Nor was he by himself, although she'd never seen anything weirder than the creature beside him. It looked like a two-sren-tall vern. It had only two arms, long yellowish head tendrils, similar in color to her own horns, dangling down its back and gathered together with a leather band, and a most peculiar pistol in either hand. Right behind the two of them came another odd creature that looked like a cross between a sorn and an atul. It was longer than she was tall, about knee-high on the old guy with the spear, equipped with a most impressive set of fangs, and striped in red and black. The... striped thing hit the deck, took one look around, and charged into the pirates with a keening snarl.

Definitely the oddest threesome she'd ever seen, she thought with an oddly detached calm.

The older fellow took out two more of the pirates with his spear—another thrust to the chest, and the second with a really economical throat slash that was a pleasure to watch—and the striped creature dragged another down with jaws that took the pirate's head neatly off. But the rest of the Lemmar had formed up to charge, and they'd attracted at least another dozen of their fellows to assist them. The fresh cluster of assailants caught the attention of the red-and-black whatever-it-was, and the creature looked up from its initial victim to lunge forward in a counter-charge... just as the maybe-vern cocked his pistols.

Pedi considered pointing out that there was no way two pistols, especially pistols as puny as those, were going to stop two dozen pirates. Fortunately, he opened fire before she could. Her father had told her often enough to observe before she opened her mouth, and he turned out to have been right once more as the pistols spat shot after shot. They were accurate, too, as was the shooter. Each round hit one of the pirates just below the armoring horn prominence in a thundering cascade of explosions. After a few moments, all that was left was a drifting pall of gunsmoke and dead pirates with shattered, brain-leaking skulls.

Beauty.

Captain Pahner nodded in approval as the Diaspran infantry swept across to the enemy ship. Fain was no officer to let the enemy get the upper hand, and the young captain had thrown his assegai troops across the instant the vessels touched, even before Pahner could pass the order, then followed up with his rifles in an evolution so smooth it was like silk. Effective subordinates were a treasure, and Krindi Fain was as good as any the Marine had met since Bistem Kar.

Everything rikky-tik, he thought.

In days to come, Armand Pahner would reflect upon the premature nature of that thought. He would ponder it, as a sinner pondered the inexplicable actions of an irritated deity. He would wonder if perhaps, by allowing himself to think it, he had angered the God of Perversity, and Murphy, who is His Prophet. It was the only offense he could think of that might have explained what happened next.

Even as he allowed himself to enjoy Fain's success, something flickered at the corner of his eye, and he turned his head just in time to see Roger take a flying leap off of the ratlines, catch the hanging end of a severed Lemmar shroud, and go swinging through the air like some golden-haired ape to land square-footed on the enemy deck.

Pahner just... looked for a moment. He was that shocked. The prince, with Dogzard right on his heels, had landed next to his asi... in exactly the right spot to draw the last remaining formed group of pirates like a magnet. There was no way in hell for Pahner to support them, either. Even if he told the sharpshooters to cover the noble idiot, the Lemmar would be on the pair before the snipers could understand the order and redirect their fire.

Cord took down one of the group, which appeared to be intent on slaughtering the captives who'd been chained to the deck. Dogzard dragged down a second pirate, and the shaman dispatched another pair with ruthless efficiency as Roger drew both pistols, and then the prince opened fire. The revolvers—considerably smaller than the monsters Rastar favored, but still firing a twelve-millimeter round with a recoil sufficient to dislocate many humans' wrists—were double-action. Roger's rate of fire was far slower than he could have managed with his off-world bead pistol, but it was impressive, nonetheless. Especially to pirates from a culture that had never been exposed to the concept of repeating firearms at all. The deck of the Lemmar ship was already heavily obscured by the gunsmoke from the Diaspran rifles and Hooker's final broadside, but visibility abruptly deteriorated still further under the clouds of smoke pouring from His Highness's pistols.

It was fortunate that, once again, good subordinates were coming to Pahner's rescue, as at least two of the sharpshooters began engaging the group attacking the prince on their own. The captain could hardly see what was going on aboard the other ship, but it was also obvious that Fain had spotted the action and ordered his assegai troops to advance. The Diasprans were going to have to be somewhat cautious, though, since they were advancing more or less directly into Roger's fire.

The deck of the Lemmar ship had been cleared, but there seemed to still be plenty of the pirates below decks. Some of them were attempting to fight their way up through the hatches, while others were defending still other hatches Diasprans were trying to fight their way down through. With, of course, Roger squarely in the middle of it all.

Whatever had happened to the now fully obscured prince, Pahner somehow doubted that Roger was dead. Whatever severely overworked deity had dedicated his full time and effort to keeping the young blockhead alive would undoubtedly have seen to that. On the other hand, what might happen to Roger when one Armand Pahner got his hands on him was a different matter.

He'd promised he wasn't going to do this sort of... shit anymore.

A sudden, ringing silence filled Pedi's ears, and she realized she was on a deck clear of (living) pirates, still chained, lying on her back, and looking up at this old fellow... dangling... above her. And while the sight had been welcome, in one way, the angle could have been better. Not to mention the fact that her neck and shoulders hurt like hell.

"Ahem," she said as sweetly as she possibly could under the circumstances. "I don't suppose you could be convinced to take these chains off me?"