Two Space War
Page 12
From this position Fielder could see the comparative lack of sailors and marines on the lower side. And that mad, demented, berserker Broadax stood in the lower bows waving her silly hatchet, glaring out from beneath the obligatory iron Dwarrowdelf helmet. On the upper side the crow's nests were crowded and the bow was packed with marines.
Melville, the damned fool, had left the quarterdeck and was moving to the front of the marines on the upper deck. A single blue jacket in a sea of red, showboating as he waved two big, double-barreled pistols in the air. All sails hung free on both Ships, and they coasted gently together. Kestrel's upper guns were blazing away at the Guldur's upper rigging. Her lower guns were hammering the enemy's lower guns. If only they could prevent a blast from those big guns that would shake the Kestrel's Keel loose.
"Come on, you bastard. Come on." For the first time in many days, hope began to kindle in Fielder's heart. "You know," said Fielder to no one in particular, "when trouble arises and things look bad, there's always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command. Very often, that individual is quite mad."
Down in the lower gundeck, as they approached the Guldur, red bow to red bow, Mr. Barlet got one last shot off with the red bow chaser. <
Stopping a gun from loading is really not too difficult. Stopping a loaded gun from firing is far more difficult. Good as he was, Barlet and his gunners weren't able to stop one of the enemy's guns from firing. Just as they drew together with the enemy, the huge cannon fired.
"CH-DOO-OOM!!!" The Kestrel shuddered from stem to stern. Her severed mainmast shuddered and swayed as it hung in the rigging. The butt end of the shattered mast ground into the decking. Those with their feet or hands in contact with the Elbereth Moss felt their Ship groan in agony and effort.
Down in the hold Mr. Tibbits moaned in pain as he held onto the shards of the Keel, lending his spirit and soul to that of his Ship. He was using his body as a living conductor to link the sundered pieces of the Keel. The soul of his dying Ship ran through him.
The blast tore through the hull in the lower red bow and came out the lower green bow. The shot was devastating, but it didn't touch the Keel. Kestrel, the faithful Ship that had served the men of Westerness for over a century, was able to hold on for a few minutes more.
Melville raced across the fo'c'sle to join the marines waiting patiently in the upper bow. All around him men lay still in hiding, beneath heaps of sails and ropes, and inside the phony cutter. Most of them clutched double-barreled muskets with fixed bayonets. Random musket balls from the enemy's rigging punched through their cover and hit some of the sailors lying beneath, wounding many of them, killing some. But there was never a sound or a twitch that would give them away as they lay in hiding, bleeding and dying.
Melville leapt over and around many of them, stepping on a few. Again there was no sound from them. A strange, awesome and powerful joy was building in him. He'd abandoned all options but one. His plan was working, and now it was time to kill.
His monkey slipped down the back of his jacket, down his pant legs and onto the deck as Melville moved to the forefront of the boarding party. He was relieved to see the little creature get out of harm's way, but now he was worried that it might be left on board the Kestrel when she sank. This worry was relieved and the original concern returned when the monkey scampered up his back with a wooden belaying pin clutched in its upper two paws. The marines around Melville grinned and cheered at the little monkey's mock ferocity as it waved the belaying pin in the air above the young captain's head.
Melville looked at the marines crouched at the railing and he looked at the sailors hiding around him as he thought,
Biding God's pleasure and their chief's command.
Calm was the sea, but not less calm was that band
Close ranged upon the poop, with bated breath,
But flinching not though eye to eye with death.
The enemy was massed at the railing, a demonic, canine mass of Guldur. A wall of fur the color and hue of every dog on earth, and some never seen on earth. Most of them were crisscrossed with white bandoleers. Furred claws clutched muskets, pistols and swords. Atop it was a sea of slavering snouts, yellow fangs, howling red mouths, and glaring eyes. Above that were the gray furred Goblan ticks, perched on the curs' backs. Their smaller fists clutched smaller swords, pistols and rifles, with their big-eyed, big-eared heads glaring out from on high.
As this howling mass drew near, a little piece of Kipling occurred, unbidden, to Melville:
But now ye wait at Hell-Mouth Gate
and not in Berkeley Square.
The Ships came within arm's reach. Grappling hooks flew over from both sides to hold the vessels together in a death grip. But whose death?
Chapter the 6th
Boarding Action:
I Shall Not Die Alone, Alone
High in the wreck I held the cup,
I clutched my rusty sword,
I cocked my tattered feather
To the glory of the Lord.
Not undone were the heaven and earth,
This hollow world thrown up,
Before one man had stood up straight,
And drained it like a cup.
"The Deluge"
G.K. Chesterton
Gunny Von Rito was lying inside the canvas "cutter," peering through holes in the sailcloth. Just as the enemy was ready to leap at them he touched off the two 12-pounders hidden under the canvas. A bullet-headed, barrel chested, broad shouldered man with a criss-cross pattern of scars on his face and bald head, he looked as though his past assignments included serving as the regimental battering ram. His arms reached out far enough for him to simultaneously touch the Keel charges of both the cannons that flanked him. <
The two guns held a double load of grape. The enemy was at point-blank range, with no cover at all. Each cannon belched out twenty-four pounds of half-inch balls, blasting through the sailcloth camouflage and exploding into the approaching mass of Guldur. The big guns recoiled back across the fo'c'sle with stunning force. The sailors had avoided hiding in this area, lest they be smashed by their own guns. The for'ard gun recoiled so hard that it punched through the green-side railing and fell into the sea, where it bobbed once and sank, disappearing into interstellar space.
Melville stood between the cannons, with enemy musket balls whizzing past him. For him the cannon blast was as though he'd blinked his eyes and suddenly the enemy was no longer there. Only a red mist hung in the air where they once stood. An instant before there'd been a barking, slavering mass of enemy troops. Now there was a yelping, whining, groaning, mass of twitching bodies and slick red fur.
Before the stunned enemy could fill the gap, Melville and the men of Westerness began the process of violently abandoning Ship.
Lieutenant Broadax stood in the lower bow, clenching her cigar in her teeth and roaring her defiance at the furry mass confronting her. The curs and their ticks up in the rigging were terrible shots, but the sheer volume of enemy fire had already dropped several of her marines as they crouched behind the railing. Some died where they lay. Some of the wounded crawled back to the for'ard hatch and dropped down. Other wounded marines lay moaning and helpless, sick with fear that they might be left behind on a dying Ship when it was time to retreat.
Broadax hadn't been able to remove the little spider monkey from her back. Now it clung to her, gibbering with apparent terror, "Eekeekeekeek-ah! eekeekeek-ah! eek-ah! eekeek-ah!" as it waved some silly chunk of a broken spar around with its two upper hands.
> The curs were holding their fire for one last point-blank volley. Broadax heard the bark of their commander, which was the signal for them to hit the deck.
Hitting the deck like this was a "dishonorable" act that distressed the curs greatly. But, as Broadax had put it to her marines, "Always remember, boys, incomin' fire has the right of way!" Most of the Guldur volley whizzed over their heads. Then the men of Westerness leapt up and each marine emptied both barrels into the wall of fur in front of them.
Already the Westerness sailors in Kestrel's lower-side rigging were down on the deck and scurrying through the hatches. A wave of ticks came across from the enemy rigging, close on their heels. The sailors quickly closed and secured all the hatches except for the one immediately behind the marines in the lower-side bow.
Broadax swung her ax in a glittering, lethal figure-eight, and all the marines put in one solid bayonet thrust. Then they fell back around the hatch that led down into the gundeck below, crouching to pull their wounded and dead with them as they went. They didn't always succeed. In trying to rescue their wounded, several others were killed or injured, lying in bleeding, red-jacketed heaps.
The ladder to the gundeck below had been removed and the marines simply fell down through the hatchway, one-by-one, trusting the sailors below to catch them. The sailors held a piece of stout sailcloth stretched taut between eight of them. When healthy marines hit the cloth they were unceremoniously flipped off. When wounded marines hit they were rolled gently off where they were immediately carried down to the lower hold, through the plain of Flatland, and into the rear of the main boarding party. There the ship's boys and the lightly wounded would help them in evacuating to the enemy vessel.
Broadax went last, backing into the hatchway. With her left hand she reached out and tossed two marines back through the open hatch behind her, while cutting the knees out from under a row of Guldur with one powerful sweep of the ax in her right hand. "To the axeman, all supplicants are the same height."
A wave of fur, fangs and steel came at her and she simply fell back through the hatch, covered with a mountain of snarling, clawing, slashing Guldur. Her ax flashed in an intricate, deadly pattern as she fell. Her spider monkey clung tight with six legs. The club in its two uppermost legs delivered a flurry of blows all around Broadax's head as they fell backwards, the monkey gibbering all the while. A despairing "Eeeeeek!" trailed behind them along with a wisp of cigar smoke and spray of blood.
Broadax's body, covered with a mass of curs and ticks, hit the outstretched canvas held taut by the sailors.
"Thump! Eeekeekeek!"
The weight was far too great and the impact snatched the canvas from the sailors' hands. The whole mess hit the deck with a sickening thump. "Whumph! Urr . . . urrk . . . urkk?" A flurry of bayonets skewered the mass of Guldur and Goblan, flicking them off of the pile like pitchforks might toss hay bales.
The Guldur above hesitated for one split second as they looked down into the open hatch. The pile of bodies shuddered and shifted as Broadax struggled to her feet and staggered out from under the hatchway with a small mountain on her back. Her marines continued to flick curs and ticks off of her. Her monkey broke free of the clinging attackers and renewed its flurry of blows with its chunk of wood, slapping away anything that approached Broadax's head, while its sharp teeth snapped at anything in reach.
"Ye damned blueboys!" Broadax bellowed.
She pitched one hapless Goblan against the bulkhead with her left hand ("Thump! Urk!"), thrust the haft of her ax back and down into the gut of a Guldur ("Thud! Huuuu!"), then thrust the blade up into the conjunction of several others ("Yelp! Ark!") as she smashed her face into a hairy dog face, extinguishing her cigar in an enemy's eye ("Aaaargh!").
"Ye only had one job," she howled, continuing to harangue the unfortunate sailors. "Just one thing. Hold the damn tarp. Was that too damned hard fer ye?"
"Mumph? Mumph!" her monkey added. Its comment muffled by the Goblan neck in its mouth.
The wounded and most of the sailors had already retreated down through the next hatch, into the hold. After one brief hesitation the Guldur continued to hurl themselves through the maindeck hatch, and the marines continued to stab and slash into the mass of Guldur and Goblan bodies as they fell and slid down. Again the marines backed into the next hatchway, falling through one-by-one, dragging their dead and wounded with them into the lower hold.
Once again Broadax was the last one through. This time there were fewer Guldur besieging her, since the first hatchway formed a bottleneck that limited the number who could come through. She actually had the situation reasonably under control as she chucked a wounded marine back into the hatch behind her and fell back into the hold with only a handful of enemy clinging to her.
"Eeeeeek!"
The hatch was propped open above her, and as soon as she fell through onto the canvas ("Thump! Eeekeekeek!") the prop was pulled out and the hatch slammed down into place. Or almost into place, since there were various bits and pieces of screaming, yelping Guldur and Goblan protruding from the seam, where they'd been trapped as the hatch slammed shut. Bayonets flashed and they quickly became, in a very real sense, dead weight.
Here in the hold the Keel generated around 1.25 gees, and again the weight of Broadax and her entourage of curs and ticks was too much for the sailors holding the tarp. They hit the deck with a thump, "Whumph! Urk . . . urk . . . urkk?"
Broadax bellowed, red faced as she swept the luckless sailors with blazing eyes and a mangled stogie. "Oh ye bastards. Ye damned bluebelly bastards," she howled, rolling the smashed remains of her cigar in her teeth. "I'll get ye for this. I swear I will."
"Eek. Ge-eek-eek-ook!" Her monkey added threateningly.
Together she and her marines quickly dispatched the Guldur that had entered with her. Broadax stood in resplendent, gory red glory. Her red marine jacket and sailcloth trousers had been slashed to a few tattered ribbons. Only her round iron helmet and her coat of fine Dwarrowdelf chain mail remained, but they were again covered with a red jacket. As were her hair, face, head, arms, and legs. A solid layer of red blood coated her from head to toe. Her monkey, too, was like a sticky red wraith, barely discernible from the rest of her body as it moved about. Indeed, the monkey blended in with the rest of her like some bizarre, macabre extension of an alien being. Together they formed a symbiotic fellowship that was a living incarnation of death.
Above them the Guldur were pulling up on the hatch. Several ropes suspended from the hatch. Numerous sailors and marines hung from these ropes, using their weight to keep the hatch down as the ropes were secured to tie-off points on the deck.
Meanwhile a mass of marines flicked their bayonets up at the protruding bits of Guldur. They expertly removed the fragments of organic debris that blocked the hatch from seating firmly, like a surgeon would use a scalpel to remove the debris and decay that stopped a tattered wound from sealing tight.
The hatch finally fell fully into place and was dogged down firmly. They made one last check of all the hatches and flipped a piece of canvas so that it concealed the exposed, shattered Keel. Above them the enemy was already hacking at the hatch covers, but it would take time to cut their way through. They dove through the hatch to the upper hold where they would pick up Mr. Tibbits and make their final departure, posthaste.
Melville leaped joyfully onto the railing and hurled himself into the gap created by the cannon blast, grasping a double-barreled pistol in each hand. His bare feet slipped and skidded on the writhing, moaning, yelping mass of bloody fur as he landed. His monkey clung to his back with six legs and swung its belaying pin around with its top two legs.
To his left were Corporal Kobbsven and Gunny Von Rito. The massive Kobbsven bore a mighty, two-handed claymore, and Von Rito had only an ancient K-bar fighting knife in his hand.
To Melville's right was the ranger, Josiah, with Valandil's dog at his side. As soon as he stood up, Josiah threw his rifle to his shoulder and fired two shots. <
Petreckski followed immediately behind Melville, already firing the pistol in his right hand, with more ready in his belt. <
The majority of the Kestrel's marines were fanning out to their left and right, followed by wave after wave of her sailors, ship's boys and ship's dogs. These were followed by the cook, the medicos, the wounded, and a furry mass of very irate cats.
The goal was to gain and maintain momentum. They couldn't permit themselves to be trapped in the bow of the enemy's Ship. They needed to spread out so that their superior numbers could be brought to bear. It was vital that they make a space for the entire crew to escape. Each crewman aboard the enemy Ship was another life saved and another warrior who could hurt the enemy.
Melville ran forward across the dying, writhing, yelping mass and pointed his pistol at the first Guldur to raise up in front of him. The curs stood on their hind legs, and their clawed paws gripped swords and pistols every bit as well as a human could. But their heads were purely canine . . . or lupine. The men of Westerness preferred to think of them as canine. Curs and mutts, not wolves. However, the distinction was moot when one came at you with its fangs bared, a sword in its paw, and a Goblan tick on its back.