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"I can see some damage aft." Pahner had the zoom dialed up on his helmet visor. "It looks like Number Four and Number Five were concentrating fire on her. She looks pretty beat up."
"I don't doubt it," Roger grunted. "Those are dammed big ca
* * *
"What do they think they're doing now?" Vunet demanded as Rage of Lemmar's bombard thudded again.
"Just at a guess, I'd say they're finally getting ready to shoot back at us," Cred Cies said bitingly as the smooth sides of the strange, low-slung ships were suddenly barbed with what certainly looked like stubby bombard muzzles.
"With those tiny things?" the mate made a derisive gesture of contempt.
"With those tiny things," Cies confirmed.
"My son could hurt us worse with a toy sword," Vunet scoffed.
* * *
Given its angle of approach, the K'Vaernian flotilla could have opened fire with its forward pivot guns even before the Lemmar did. Roger, however, had chosen not to do so. Powerful as the pivot guns were, it was unlikely that they could have incapacitated any of the raider vessels by themselves without using the explosive shells, which would probably have destroyed their targets completely. Wooden ships waterproofed with pitch and covered with tarred rigging were tinderboxes, just waiting for any explosive shell to set them ablaze. And even if that hadn't been the case, Roger had had no interest in alerting the Mardukan pirates to the power of his vessels' weapons. The K'Vaernian Navy had been unimpressed by the carronades when they first saw them ... and with considerably less excuse, since the K'Vaernians had already seen human-designed artillery in action at Sindi. The longer these scummies remained in ignorance about their capabilities, the better.
But the time for ignorance was about over. Especially for Prince John. Roger could see axes flashing on her forward deck as her crew frantically chopped away at the rigging holding the wreckage of the foremast against her side. If things worked out the way he pla
In the meantime ...
* * *
"Fire as you bear!"
Ima Hooker and her consorts each carried a broadside of twelve guns. Once upon a time, on a planet called Earth, those guns would have been described as eighteen-pounder carronades—short, stubby weapons with a maximum effective range of perhaps three hundred meters. Beside someone the size of a Mardukan, they looked even shorter and stubbier, and perhaps the pirate captains could be excused for failing to grasp the menace they represented. Certainly Roger had done everything he could to keep the Lemmaran crews from doing so ... until now.
Despite the threat bearing down upon her, the Prince John did not fire first. Her guns, like those of every unit of the flotilla, had been loaded for a basically antiperso
Of course, even with their superior weapons, four schooners might find themselves just a bit hard-pressed to stop six raiders from getting past them.
Or perhaps not.
* * *
Cred Cies watched in disbelief as the side of the nearest enemy vessel disappeared behind a billowing cloud of dirty-white smoke. Those short, silly-looking bombards obviously threw far heavier shot than he had believed possible. The quantity of smoke alone would have made that obvious, but the hurricane of iron slamming into his vessel made it even more obvious. Painfully obvious, one might almost have said.
Those low-slung, infernally fast ships slashed down into the Lemmaran formation, and as they did, they showed him exactly why they'd adopted the approach they had. The raiders' bombards might have gotten off three or four unanswered shots each as the strangers drove in across their effective range, but the accuracy of those shots had left much to be desired. One of the enemy vessels had been crippled, and had clearly taken casualties, as well, but the others were unscathed.
Now they swept into the intervals in his own formation, and his teeth ground together in frustration as he realized that even as they did, they were actually reducing sail. They were slowing down, sacrificing their impossible speed advantage, and the shriek and crash of shot—the dreadful, splintering smash as round shot slammed into and through his own ship's timbers—was like a hammer blow squarely between the horns as he realized why.
* * *
"All right!" someone shrieked, and it took Roger a moment to realize that it had been him. Not that he was alone in his jubilation.
The endless hours of drill inflicted upon the K'Vaernian gu
Roger wanted to leap to the rail to help serve one of the guns personally. The strength of the fierce, sudden temptation took him by surprise. It was as if the screams of his enemies, the sudden spray pattern of blood splashed across the lower edges of the square sails as wooden "splinters" two meters and more in length went smashing through the raider crews like ungainly buzz saws, closed some circuit deep inside him. It wasn't hunger ... not precisely. But it was a need. It was something all too much like a compulsion, and deep inside him a silent, observing corner of his brain realized that Nimashet had been right to worry about him.
But there was no time for such thoughts, and it wasn't fear of his own i
Hooker's carronades bellowed again and again. Not in the single, senses-shattering blast of the perfectly synchronized opening broadside but in ones and twos as the faster crews got off their follow-up shots. There was more thunder from overhead as sharpshooters—Marines with their big bolt-action rifles, and Mardukans, with their even bigger breech-loaders—claimed their own toll from the enemy.
The main "broadside" armament of the Lemmaran ships was composed of "swivel guns," which weren't much more than built-up arquebuses. They were about fifty millimeters in caliber, and they had the range to carry to the K'Vaernian schooners slicing through the Lemmaran formation, but without rifling, they were grossly inaccurate. On the other hand, the already short range was going to fall to zero when the flotilla finally closed to board the raider ships, and the swivels could still wreak havoc among the infantry who would be doing the boarding. So the sharpshooters were tasked with taking out the gun crews, as well as any obvious officers they could spot.