A shock wave through the deckmesh and shower of enormous plastic-covered wire splinters caused him to turn for an instant, despite his training to the contrary. The taffrail behind him had been shattered by an enemy thrust. In another instant, a long cabelle, part of the vessel’s running rigging, fell from high aloft like a great ponderous snake, bringing a single human body down with it, to smash itself upon the quarterdeck not a measure from where he stood.
The starship shuddered hard as Phoebus returned the deadly compliment, to slightly greater effect, he thought, than the enemy had been able to manage. A scurrying maindeck crew quickly cleared away the damage. Never allowing himself to be moved—naturally, he had known the dead Skyan crewbeing since she had been a child—he peered into the navigational instrument, turned and looked at the §-field, and hoarsely shouted another order closing the distance between the Osprey and what he thought of, from long habit, as her nearest victim.
The encircling sphere had begun to collapse as the eight other vessels of the enemy fleet, hungry for what they imagined would be part of an easy victory, attempted to close in for what they thought would be the kill. He grinned, knowing from experience that the idiots would do themselves vastly more damage with this foolish maneuver than they would ever be able to do to him. The deck lifted beneath his tingling feet as the Osprey was struck in her stern. He was not the sort of captain to call continuously for damage reports. As always, whatever happened, he would stand on and count the cost afterward.
And then, as if to prove him right, the other two ships he had attacked, in a belated and clumsy attempt to close with him, collided with one another, their §-fields merging like soap bubbles, their spars and sails and cabelles entangling with one another, their masts shattering like paper toys. They were close enough to see, now, and he knew that the occasional bright sparks he saw upon the §-field margins were unfortunate crewbeings thrown into it and annihilated. Phoebus thrust again and again into the tangle, taking both vessels from the fray—there was a horrendous explosion and fire upon the maindeck of one of them—possibly denying the hated enemy any further use of either of them, forever.
Meanwhile, their first opponent sheered off abruptly, the hot and heavy concentration of Osprey’s bellicose attentions having dismasted her below the foretier, throwing a deadly rain of broken cabelles, sails, and spars onto the tiers below and to the maindeck, collapsing a portion of her §-field upon itself, and engendering a dangerous overload and feedback that must have set every metal object upon the ship coruscating with what was known as St. Lucas’ Fire.
Although he had never much cared for steering only by what could be seen over his shoulder, even Arran could tell by the hot, sickly pulsing at that spot within his own §-field—the colors formed a halo about the naked-eye image of the rapidly failing vessel—that he and Phoebus had hurt the enemy badly.
Osprey had passed through the theoretical boundary of the sphere they had attempted to form about her. Shouting a warning to his gunnery chief and first mate, Arran issued orders to reverse the vessel’s course and reengage the foe.
Three down, he thought.
Eight more to go.
CHAPTER XXXI:
HEAT AND CLAMOR
The Osprey made a wide, soaring loop.
This time, with the tachyon wind at her best point of sailing, she sped relentless, down toward the least of her foes, hungry for a quick kill. Four from eleven was a third; if Osprey were ruthless, the remaining two-thirds, captained by unimaginative fools, would find discretion was the better part of survival.
Meanwhile, a reckoning had come due. Arran’s harriers had all come back with only the minor sort of casualty that might result—a sprained ankle, a jammed thumb, a bloody scalp cut—had they been launched for recreation at a picnic. It had been his armed boats which had forced the collision between enemy vessels, using hastily decollimated projectibles against their §-field envelopes to thrust one of them sufficiently off course that disaster ensued. A daring risk that, but most delightful to a captain. Mr. Tompkins was to be commended.
Aboard the Osprey there had been one fatality, the young woman—part of Arran’s memory was going mad trying to recall her perversely disremembered name—jarred from the starboard mainspar, who had fallen to a grisly death at his feet. There had been the usual insults to decks and rigging; the enemy were astonishingly bad projecteurs. Belowdecks, breakage had been limited to what starsailors were inclined to describe casually as “the odd dish here and there.”
A dismaying exception was their lubberlift, which had been smashed within its framing and would require rebuilding almost molecule by molecule. For the remainder of this voyage, did they desire to make a planetfall, it would be by steam launch. The liftdeck itself had been sealed, frozen and airless—the stern chaser crews had escaped—and would call for extensive repairing, as well.
And, although Arran had not noticed it at first, there had been one other minor casualty upon the quarterdeck, when some thirty siemmes of the wire that the vessel was constructed of had been driven through his left bicep, missing the bone and any major blood vessel. Krumm himself had tied it off only a minute ago. No more than that could be attempted until after the present engagement ended.
“Mr. Krumm,” in lieu of the sailing master, acting as first officer, who had gone aloft to inspect damage, Arran addressed his friend. “Greatly loath as I am to trouble you just now, would it please you to tell me off a boarding party?”
“Aye aye, sir.” Phoebus raised his eyebrows, but obeyed. They had not discussed such a possibility, but Henry Martyn was famous for what appeared to others to be spur-of-the-moment improvisations in the heat and clamor of the battle. Allowing for that proclivity, Phoebus made preparations, as a rule, well in advance of any anticipated necessity. Upon this occasion, it was merely a matter of barking a single command, and a dozen grim-looking but jocular crewbeings materialized at the break of the quarterdeck, ready, eager to be issued thrustibles, take their place upon the taffrail, risk their lives by leaping onto the deck or into the rigging of a hostile vessel. Arming his common hands this way (an obvious enough tactical recourse, in his mind) was another “unfair” practice that had set the ’Droom howling for Henry Martyn’s blood.
Now Arran looked to his own weaponry. It was a long while since he had wielded them at full power against anything but inanimate targets. He had sparred with Phoebus and his eldest daughter at reduced settings, trading his harmless slaps for their gentle pushes. Something always felt different about that, however, something subtle, he could not describe. Thrustibles partook of the same technology that spun a §-field about a starship, altering many of its basic physical properties. Perhaps they took a different sort of hold upon the fabric of reality at different power levels. Where the §-field about a starship made mass possible without inertia, thrustibles made inertia possible without mass, and separated action (energy set in motion in one direction) from reaction (an equal amount of energy set in motion in an opposing direction).
Thrustibles consisted of a power module the length, width, and thickness of a hand, gently curved and attached to the forearm just below the elbow, and an axis the diameter of a little finger, extending from the power pack, along the top of the forearm (where it was attached at the wrist) to just forward of the second knuckles. The axis terminated in a small lens through which both a designator beam and the primary energies of the weapon were transmitted. Near the lens hung a yoke, a palm-piece the forward edge of which served as safety and designator switch. Squeezing upon it threw a scarlet beam. Pressing upon its end with the thumb released a bolt of pure, unidirectional kinetic energy. Such a thrust could last only an instant without destroying the device. Along the axis (some long-forgotten engineer having made a virtue out of necessity) a secondary, or spillover §-field served as a highly effective defensive shield.
Usually near the lens or the power pack, a dial adjusted the destructive energies of the weapon from a penetrating beam the d
iameter of a needle, to a manwide ray capable of breaking ribs, fracturing the sternum, rupturing the diaphragm, stopping the heart. Somewhere in between, it was possible to punch a fist-sized hole in an antagonist and see daylight through him before he fell.
Manufactured just for Oplytes, Arran’s weapons differed from the ordinary thrustible. Neither polished nor embellished, they were finished in a matte gray-green. Their power packs were thick—one hand lying atop another. The axes, which had required shortening to fit Arran, were not cylindrical, but flattened, and at the working ends, the primary lenses were flanked by a pair of lasers, angled so the thrusteur could instantly estimate his range to the target.
Now it became time to issue instructions to the eagerly awaiting boarding party.
“Mr. James, you will gain control aloft. There is no time for niceties. Any crewbeing who will not surrender, thrust and cast into the §-field. Take Karlan with you—those moustaches of his should frighten the watch out of the rigging—and Holder, with his ship-wife, ‘Dangerous Pat,’ as she is called belowdecks.”
The man with the impressive moustache looked mildly insulted—although with fighting in the offing, it was hard to tell about people’s expressions; perhaps he was merely playing along with the captain’s jest—but the woman grinned.
Louis James was a young, dark, slender officer who had come by his gentle disposition naturally. He had been compelled by the exigencies of a strenuous existence to study ruthlessness as if it were a subject in a textbook, and had passed with marks that were more than satisfactory to his captain. He nodded at Arran and gave a proper answer, then looked to his thrustibles and stood ready.
“For my own part,” Arran told them, “I shall want Lieutenant Nadja with me upon the enemy quarterdeck, along with our deceptively kindly Mr. Famularo, and my ship’s technician Mr. Gibes.” Nadja, he knew as a woman of few words who understood well how to put what she believed into action. He had sparred with her once or twice and respected her considerable skill with a thrustible. Gibes was a man who could twist two wires together and make them into a weapon or transportation home.
“Mr. O’Brien, you shall be needed, too, does it please you. Take Farnham, whose game temperament inspires all those about him, Heil, and Cooley to the maindeck with exactly the same instructions I just gave Mr. James.”
“Aye aye, sir!” O’Brien grinned up at him through a bandit’s mask of battle-soot.
Unable to resist, Arran grinned back at him. “Mr. Lukes.”
“Aye, Captain.” Lukes, a new crewman, was a hand so cool in the heat of battle he was known by all his fellow beings in his last berthing as the “Ice Man.”
“Mr. Lukes, take you the Knoxes and Mr. Irakliotis to the liftdeck of the enemy vessel. When you receive word from me, release her lubberlift, severing the cabelle inboard. Are we able afterward, we shall take it to replace our own.”
“Aye, sir!” Lukes smiled. It was the sort of task that he relished—the enemy’s lubberlift would never be taken without a fight—and the sort of company he liked keeping. Contemplative Christopher and cheerful Jeffrey Knox happened to be first-rate starsailors, feared by every opponent whom they had ever permitted (from sheer generosity Jeffrey was always quick to explain; from pure civility, Christopher invariably corrected him) to live through defeat. Leo Irakliotis, late of the Ceonine University of Hanover, was a storyteller and philosopher, who also knew more about the subatomic workings of §-fields than anyone else living in these strange, scientifically incurious times.
“Next to last, but far from least, Warrant Officer Suprynowicz.”
“Captain?” the man answered Arran, as always, in a misleadingly languid voice.
“As comm officer, all will depend upon you. As soon as we are in range, take that laser-cannon of yours and begin telling my opposite number that we surrender.”
“Captain?” The word alone was an unusually articulate question.
Arran laughed. “I would not have you lie. Simply begin the process of telling him that we give up, employing as loquacious a manner as possible—imagine that I am paying you by the word—but do not ever quite finish. Let the captain draw whatever conclusion he will. While he is thus preoccupied, we shall board his starship and spoil his whole day for him, if not his entire career.”
This time the laughter was shared all round and lasted the boarding party as they climbed up, onto the taffrail, holding onto lines and stanchions, and waited. Arran knelt where he was perched to have a last private word with his first officer, who had remained with both of his feet planted firmly upon the quarterdeck.
“With the course corrections that I will rely upon you to make, we should not quite collide with our opponent, but meet them perpendicularly, our two vessels crossing at the mizzentiers. Stay with her, Phoebus. I mean to have my way with her, to take her captain prisoner, steal her lubberlift to replace our own, and turn her into something her fleetmates will wish they had never seen.”
“Sir?” There were times when Arran could puzzle even his old friend and mentor.
“I will send the boarders back, and come myself at the last, after which we shall wish to separate as rapidly as possible. Lay in our course to place her between us and her mates. We will then make good our break, away from the fight.”
Phoebus nodded. “I believe I understand, Captain. You may rely upon me.”
“Good,” He began to get up, then thought better of it, kneeling again. “Phoebus?”
“Yes, my friend?” The choice of words sounded ominously to Arran like a farewell.
Looking this way and that, Arran reflected—out of a habit that he had long ago fostered to calm himself at such nerve-wracking moments—that his audacious design depended, like that of any other boarding party, upon a fact that when two §-fields intersected, they coalesced, as it was often explained, like two enormous soap bubbles, becoming one great §-field, centered upon a locus that depended upon which of the two vessels had the greater generating capacity. Through such a window of §-intersection, which could be maintained only for minutes before the least of the vessels’ generating capacities became overloaded—but which might, by incompetence or misadventure, as easily last only a fraction of a second—he and his crew would leap aboard the enemy vessel.
Arran cleared his throat, “Er, never tell Loreanna that I did this, will you?”
Krumm laughed heartily and slapped him upon the back, nearly pushing him off the rail where he knelt, and out into the §-field. “As I say, rely upon me!”
Suddenly, from the least sapphire spark, there bloomed a rapidly growing circle with blinding edges of pure azure. The §-fields of the starships were coalescing. In a moment the edges had disappeared as two §-fields became one. From Osprey’s battered taffrail, Arran delivered himself of an ecstatic war shout, echoed by his henchmen, and, seizing a line, leapt onto the dorsal spar of the enemy starship’s mizzentier. Securing the line, he suffered a shock—but hardly an unexpected one—as the pull of gravity rotated a full quarter circle.
Enemy crewbeings shouted alarums to one another, scurrying to repel Arran and his boarding party. The enemy officers were considerably slower to begin barking orders, and more than a trifle hysterical, if Arran was any judge of such matters. The mizzen-yard he balanced upon vibrated with the contradictory strains of both vessels, locked grimly together, starsails and helms set to cross-purposes, and with irregular thumps as his forces landed upon it behind him.
Mr. James, moustachioed Karlan, Holder, and “Dangerous Pat” were already swarming up the staysail sheets toward the maintier and points aloft. Arran knew that their success up there would guarantee that of the entire boarding party.
“Forward, my hearties!” Arran shouted. “Fight your way in-board!”
Nadja, the only female Arran had ever known to make effective use of two thrustibles, Famularo, and Gibes, were right behind him as he knew they would be, followed by Mr. O’Brien, “Mad Michael” Farnham, Cooley, and Heil, who had proved i
t a small galaxy by hailing from the same planet as Holder and Krumm. The eight of them were already depopulating the mizzentier of its starsailors, using their thrustibles to pluck them from spars and rigging like so much ripe fruit.
Mr. Lukes, along with Chris and Jeff Knox and Mr. Irakliotis, were out of sight already, having swung directly to the maindeck to force their way below. Although he intended taking control of the quarterdeck and maindeck, Arran had chosen this route along the mizzenspar for himself and his eight accomplices, in order to share the vital task of mopping up aloft with Mr. James and his party.
Before Arran was altogether prepared for it at a conscious level, he had already blocked a challenging impulse with the protective axis §-field of his left thrustible. The reflexive return thrust that had saved his life so many times before, caught his adversary—a shaven-headed ruffian in striped shirt and kefflar trousers that may once have been white, hanging amongst the mizzen staysails like a flea in a hammock—in the chest. It seemed to Arran, who had not quite grown accustomed to the new ship’s orientation, that the villain rocketed sideways, abruptly, past him and to the right, screaming as he did so and making a horrible broken melon noise as he plunged onto the maindeck, headfirst.
Behind him, somebody—probably out of sympathy—laughed grimly. But Arran scarcely heard either sound, for he was already preoccupied, defending himself against another contender, an officer this time, standing spraddle-legged upon the quarterdeck to Arran’s “right” (Arran shook his head; now the fellow appeared to be below him), blocking, thrusting, blocking, and thrusting again.
Arran felt, rather than heard, the thrum of a near miss close beside his ear. Then a well-sent thrust took his enemy in the face, Arran’s Oplyte-sized thrustible flattening the officer’s head for an instant, raising its internal fluid pressure until, with a dull explosion, it burst in a thick red mist that gave rise to a momentary eerie sparkling within the §-field margin behind the man. The headless corpse pitched over the break of the quarterdeck onto the maindeck.
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