March To The Stars

his attention back to T'Sool.

'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