March To The Stars

sea: big fish ate little fish, and at the moment this clumsy tub of a merchant ship might turn out to be a very small fish indeed if it came to that. So if he could get through this encounter by simply selling some of the cargo— especially for a good price—so much the better. After all, he hadn't paid for any of it!

And if the negotiations went badly, these two peculiar 'pursers' could become Servants, for all he cared.

* * *

Roger caught the thrown line and went up the side of the ship hand-over-hand. Like the other merchantmen they'd taken, this one was nearly as round as it was long. The design made for plenty of cargo space, and with enough ballast, it was seaworthy—after a fashion, at least. But the ships were slow, terribly slow. If this thing could break six knots in a hurricane, he would be surprised.

It was also the largest they had so far encountered, which probably meant the prize crew was going to be larger, as well.

He reached the top and nodded at the staring Lemmar who'd thrown the rope, keeping his hands well away from his sides and the one knife he openly carried on his belt as he swung over the rail. Two of the pirates greeting him held arquebuses lightly in their true-hands, not pointed exactly at him, but close. There was a third pirate by the helmsman, and another directing a work party up forward. There'd been five pirates aboard three of the four ships they'd already taken, and seven aboard the fourth, so there was at least one still unaccounted for here. Given the size of the ship, though, Roger's guess was that there were at least three more somewhere below-decks. Possibly as many as five or six.

Rastar climbed over the side behind him and made a complex, multi-armed gesture of greeting.

'I greet you in the name of K'Vaern's Cove,' he said in the language of the Vashin. 'I am Rastar Komas, formerly Prince of Therdan. We are, as we said, in need of provisions. We need ten thousand sedant of grain, at least fourteen hundred sedant of fruit, four thousand sedant of salted meat, and at least seven hogsheads of fresh water.'

Roger nodded solemnly to Rastar and turned to the obviously totally uncomprehending pirates.

'This is Rastar Komas, formerly Prince of Therdan,' he announced through his toot. 'I am his interpreter. Prince Rastar is now the supply officer for our trading party. He has listed our needs, but to translate them properly, I require better knowledge of your weights and measures, which must obviously be different from our own.'

He paused. The prize crews of the other four ships had all reacted in one of two ways at this point in his little spiel, and he and Rastar had a small side bet as to which of those responses this group would select.

'You said something about gold?' the larger of the arquebus-armed pirates asked.

Ah, a type two. Rastar owes me money.

'Yes. We can pay in gold by balance measure, or we have trade goods, such as the cloth from which this cloak is made.'

Roger spread the drape of the silken cape to the sides, then spun on his toes to show how well it flowed. When he turned back around, his hands were full of bead pistols.

The inquisitive pirate never had time to realize what had happened. He and his companion were already flying backwards, heads messily removed by the hypervelocity beads, before he even had time to wonder what the strange objects in the outsized vern's hands were.

'By the Gods of Thunder, Roger!' Rastar complained as he took two shots to drop the Lemmar by the helmsman. 'Leave some for the rest of us!'

'Whatever,' the prince snapped. A third shot dispatched the pirate who had been supervising the work party up forward, and he kicked the arquebus out of the hands of a twitching body at his feet. Then he turned to examine the hatches as Kosutic swarmed over the side. The work party forward had taken cover behind the body of their erstwhile supervisor and showed no inclination to move out from behind it, so he couldn't form any idea of where the other pirates might be hiding.

'Take the stern. We'll start from the bow,' he said, stepping forward. 'Be careful.'

'As always,' Honal answered for his cousin. The Vashin noble jerked the slide on his new shotgun, which had a six-gauge bore and brass-based, paper cartridges. Then he tossed off a salute. 'And this time, watch your head,' he added. 'No ramming it into the undersides of decks!'

'Speaking of which,' Kosutic said, clapping the prince's helmet onto his head. 'Now be a good boy and flip down the visor, Your Highness.'

'Yes, Mother,' Roger said, still looking at the forward-most hatch. It was lashed securely down from the outside, but it could just as well be secured from the inside, as well. He flipped down the helmet visor and sent out a pulse of ultrasound, but the region under the deck seemed to be a cargo hold, filled with indecipherable shapes.

'What do you think?' he asked the sergeant major.

'Well, I hate going through where they expect, but I don't want the damned thing to flood, either.' Kosutic replied.

'At least they didn't have any bombards before they were captured,' Roger pointed out. 'Which means there's no powder magazine, either.'

'Point taken,' Kosutic acknowledged. 'Swimming beats the hell out of being blown up, I suppose. But that wasn't exactly what I meant.'

'I know it wasn't,' Roger replied, and took the breaching charge the sergeant major had extracted from her rucksack. He laid out the coil of explosive on the foredeck and stood back from the circle.

'Shouldn't be any flooding problem coming down from above,' he pointed out. 'And I'm sure we can convince the original crew to fix any little holes in the deck for us later.'

A deep 'boom' sounded from the after portion of the ship as Honal broke in his new shotgun, and Roger reached for the detonator.

'Fire in the hole!'

* * *

Honal once again acknowledged how much the humans had taught the Vashin. The human techniques of 'close combat,' for example, were a novel approach. The traditional Vashin technique for fighting inside a city, for example was simply to throw groups at the problem and let them work it out. But the humans had raised the art of fighting inside buildings, or in this case ships, to a high art.

He jacked another of the paper-and-brass cartridges into the reloading chute and nodded at his prince. Rastar had finally finished reloading one of his revolvers and nodded back. They were more than halfway through the ship, and so far they'd encountered four more of the Lemmar. None of the pirates had survived the meeting, and given that only one of the Krath seamen had been killed along the way, the 'breakage,' as the humans termed it, had been minimal.

Rastar closed the cylinder and eased cautiously forward towards the bulkhead door in front of them, then paused as he heard the distinctive 'Crack!' of one of Roger's bead pistols. Then both Vashin heard a second shot. And a third.

'Careful,' Rastar said. 'We're getting close. One more compartment, maybe.'

'Agreed,' Honal replied, barely above a whisper, as he lined up on the latch of the door. 'Ready.'

'Go!'

Honal triggered a round into the latch and kicked the door wide, then stood to the side as Rastar went through it. The space beyond was apparently the ship's galley, and the only occupant was one of the Krath seaman—the cook, or a cook's mate, presumably—crouching in the corner with a cleaver in his hand. There were, however, two more doors: one in the far bulkhead, and one to starboard.

The sound of Roger's fire had come more from starboard, so Rastar kept one eye on that door in case the prince came barreling through it.

'Clear,' Rastar called ... just as the far door opened.

The Lemmar who came through it (a senior commander, from the quality of his armor and weapons) was tall as a mountain, and clearly infuriated. He'd turned to his left, towards the starboard door, as he entered, so he'd