by Alex Archer
Bullets struck the bridge windows, blowing them inward in a shower of shattering glass and blazing-hot lead. Annja curled up against one of the bridge consoles and tried to make herself as small a target as possible. She wasn’t worried about the gunman being able to hit her—she was below his line of sight, after all—but a ricochet could be just as deadly and she didn’t want to take any chances. Nearby she could see Captain Vargas doing the same.
Unfortunately, not everyone who was on the bridge had heeded her warning. One of Vargas’s crewmen—Annja hadn’t even had time to learn his name since she’d come aboard—took a bullet right through the throat and was dead before his body hit the floor. She could see him from where she lay, his eyes open and staring but not seeing anything.
Soon the shooting stopped.
Annja stayed where she was, waiting, even going so far as to yank Vargas back down to the ground when he started to get up. If the gunman had simply run out of bullets, he might start shooting again as soon as he swapped out the gun’s magazine, and she didn’t want either of them to be caught in the open when he did.
When nothing but the roar of the motor launches’ engines reached their ears, Annja scrambled to her feet and let Vargas do the same. Keeping as much of herself below the edge of the bridge controls as possible, she peeked out the now-shattered window.
The pirates’ boats were to the port side of their bow and would be on them shortly. The men aboard were cheering and brandishing their weapons, no doubt thinking they’d already won the battle.
Annja intended to show them there was lot more fight left in this opponent than they’d ever imagined.
“Keep your head down,” she barked at Vargas, when, glancing around for a particular item she knew had to be here somewhere, she saw him starting to get to his feet.
A quick burst of gunfire crashing through the now-open bridge windows convinced him of the wisdom of listening to her.
“What do they want?” he asked in a quavering voice.
“At a guess I’d say the ship.”
“My ship? They wouldn’t dare!”
They would dare and, in fact, had already done so. And if someone didn’t get out there and stop them before they could take things to the next step, they were in a whole heap of trouble.
Stealing the ship made sense, in a warped and twisted kind of way. Selling something like the Neptune’s Pride would be a challenge, Annja knew, but so would simply letting it sit and rot on the tide. At the very least they could strip her of useful equipment and then carve her up into smaller pieces, selling both the equipment and the scrap metal for a profit.
If they were smart, they might even do one better: they might keep the boat for themselves. A quick paint job and a few changes to the identification numbers would give them a ship that could be used to further their piracy efforts, particularly if they could get the vessel legitimately registered through some foreign nation that didn’t look too closely at where the vessel had come from.
That wasn’t what sent a shiver of apprehension up Annja’s spine, however. No, that was a result of the fact that she knew she and the rest of the crew, Captain Vargas included, would either be killed outright or kept alive just long enough for the kidnappers to receive a ransom, at which point they’d be killed, anyway. In order to survive this thing, they had to keep from getting captured.
That meant keeping the pirates off the ship for as long as possible.
All this flashed through her thoughts in an instant, helping her make up her mind. She turned and headed across the room toward the door.
“Wait! Where are you going?” he whispered frantically as he saw her getting ready to leave the bridge.
“Someone’s got to stop us from being boarded, right?” she replied, then slipped out the doorway onto the narrow walkway just outside. The sound of the engines was growing louder; it would be only moments before they were alongside. She could even hear the men aboard shouting to one another, but couldn’t make out what was being said. She hurried over to the steep set of stairs—almost a ladder, really—leading down to the main deck and raced down them as fast as she dared.
Just as she reached the main deck, she ran into Claire and Marcos coming up the stairs from below.
“What’s going on?” Claire exclaimed upon seeing Annja racing toward them.
“Pirates,” Annja told her. She didn’t have time to explain anything beyond that, for the patrol boats were closing in.
Thankfully, Claire didn’t need anything more. Annja could see the woman was practically bursting with questions, but Claire managed to hold on to them all with the exception of the most important.
“What do we do?”
“Keep them from getting on board,” Annja said. “No matter what. If they do, we’re all in even more danger than we’re in right now.”
“How?”
Excellent question. Just how were they going to keep the men from boarding?
“Are you or any of your men armed?” she asked.
Claire shook her head. “We’re carrying a pair of rifles as part of the expedition’s gear, but both of them are packed away with the rest of the supplies. There’s no way for us to get to them in a hurry.”
Annja had her sword, and she wouldn’t hesitate to use it when the time came, but it wasn’t going to do them much good against armed opponents. They needed something to keep the pirates at a distance; if they were close enough for Annja to need her sword, then she and the others aboard the Neptune’s Pride had already lost.
As the sound of the approaching motorboats filled her ears, Annja’s gaze fell upon the glass-fronted case mounted on the side of the ship. Inside was a long-handled ax and yards of coiled hose, both designed to be used in case of a fire on board the boat.
For Annja, the sight of them was like water to a man dying of thirst.
“Help me! Quickly!” she exclaimed, racing over to the case, Claire and Marcos on her heels.
Annja didn’t have time to locate the key, so she lifted one booted foot and kicked out sharply, driving her heel through the front of the case and shattering the glass. Reaching inside, she grabbed the ax and tossed it to Claire, who snatched it out of midair. Annja then grabbed the front of the fire hose, handed it to Marcos and ordered him over to the side of the boat with it in hand.
Marcos didn’t ask any questions, just did as he was told, trusting that she had a plan. They hauled the hose free of its moorings and, with Claire crouching by the lever that controlled the flow of water, hunkered down below the waist-high edge of the boat, waiting for the right moment.
The plan, if you could call it that, was simple. Annja intended to wait until the pirates were getting ready to throw the grappling lines she’d seen in their hands. Just before the lines were thrown, she and Marcos were going to pop up into view, holding the fire hose between them, and hit them with a blast of high-pressure water. Given that the stream of water would have more than two hundred pounds per square inch of pressure behind it, it should be powerful enough to knock the pirates right off their feet.
She hoped.
Only one way to find out.
The thrum of the Pride’s massive engines sounded in weird counterpoint to the throaty roar of the patrol boats’ smaller ones. Annja chanced a quick look over the side, knowing that they had to time this right if it was going to work.
Her glance showed her one of the patrol boats sliding in toward them while the second hung back by fifty feet or so. The pirates standing in the bow of the first boat were spreading out slightly, their weapons slung over their shoulders or resting on the deck at their feet as they prepared to use the boarding lines in their hands.
It was now or never.
Annja shouted, “Now!”
Claire threw the lever, releasing the hundreds of pounds of water held in the reser
voir hidden behind the bulkhead at her back. At the same time, Annja and Marcos popped to their feet, the thick canvas fire hose supported between them, and pointed at the pirates standing exposed in the bow of their boat.
The stream of water shot out from the deck of the Neptune’s Pride and hit the pirates at about knee level, knocking them right off their feet. Several of them were thrown backward along the deck into their waiting companions but at least two were knocked right overboard without even knowing what had happened to them.
In response to the unexpected attack, the patrol boat carrying the would-be boarders veered sharply away from the Pride’s hull and Annja wanted to cheer. She knew it was only a temporary respite, that the pirates had been caught by surprise and would certainly try again, but it was a good feeling just the same. Claire grasped the lever controlling the water flow and it shut off again, allowing Annja and Marcos to drop back down below the waist-high bulkhead beside them, out of view of the pirates. Annja shot a grin at Marcos, who returned it with equal fervor.
Score one for the good guys.
The pirates weren’t going to give up easily, however, and they let the defenders aboard the Neptune’s Pride know it seconds later. Bullets thundered into the thick steel of the waist-high bulkhead next to Marcos and Annja and along the back wall, against which Claire crouched near the hose controls, sending sparks and hot pieces of steel ricocheting in various directions.
In truth, the position the three of them—Annja, Claire and Marcos—had taken was precarious, at best. All the attackers really had to do was keep the trio pinned down with constant gunfire while the grapplers threw their hooks and pulled themselves up the ropes to the deck above their heads. With bullets filling the air around them, the defenders would be unable to get the hose back into position and take another shot at them without revealing themselves to the danger of getting shot and the pirates would be able to reach the deck unimpeded.
Any decent tactician would have seen it.
Thankfully, the men in the boats were nothing more than common thugs who probably relied on simple violence or the threat thereof to get what they wanted. Tactics was not something they were schooled in, something they proved by emptying their guns at the spot where Annja and Marcos had been hiding.
The pair were no longer there, however.
As the bullets whipped and whined overhead, Annja signaled that Marcos should follow her, and the two of them crawled on hands and knees about fifteen feet or so away from their last position, leaving Claire to continue controlling the water flow.
As soon as the shooting stopped, Claire hit the water controls, the duo popped up a second time and again hammered the pirates with a stream of high-powered water.
This time, they knocked the man off the roof of the wheelhouse and even managed to shatter the glass in the wheelhouse windows before the boats veered off a second time.
It was at that point that the pirates made what Annja hoped would prove to be a fatal mistake.
9
Annja heard one of the pirate boats rev its engines. Glancing over the side for a split second, she saw it race away from the other boat, headed toward the prow of the expedition ship. With the engines capable of producing almost three times as much horsepower as the Neptune’s Pride, the patrol boat was quickly able to match and then overcome the Pride’s speed. It shot ahead of the larger vessel and then crossed over in front of it.
Come on, Vargas, run her down, Annja thought, but she knew there was no way the Neptune’s Pride could ever do such a thing. At a ponderous twelve knots, the expedition ship was practically standing still compared to the sixty-five to seventy knots that the patrol boat could manage. The smaller vessel would have to be practically still for the larger one to do what Annja was dreaming of.
Still, it never hurt to hope.
She realized that the pirates were splitting their forces, hoping to come at them from two sides. By doing so they might succeed in getting men aboard in one location or the other before Annja and her compatriots could stop them.
She wouldn’t let that happen.
“They’re headed for the opposite side,” she said to Marcos. “Can you hold them off here?”
“Provided they don’t get smart and coordinate their climbing and firing efforts, yeah. What about you?”
“I’ll hold them off on the other side. Hopefully by then the captain will have called in the coast guard or something.”
“Out here?” Marcos scoffed. “Good luck with that.”
Claire, who’d been listening to the conversation, broke in and asked, “Where is Vargas? Is he all right?”
Annja pointed to the bridge above them. “He was when I left him. Can’t say the same for one of the other guys, though.” The memory of the man falling before her, hands to his throat, flashed through her mind but she shoved it aside. She’d have time for regrets later. Right now she had to keep them from being boarded.
Staying as low as she could, she raced down the length of the boat until she came to one of the corridors that ran perpendicularly across the vessel. Bullets pinged off the door as she hauled it open, and she felt one of them burn its way across the back of her calf but then she was through, the heavy steel bulkhead door closing behind her as protection.
She ran pell-mell down the corridor, praying none of the crew suddenly showed up and opened a door in her path as she raced for the one at the far end. Thankfully, none did.
Reaching the other side, she hauled down on the lever to open the door but kept it from doing so with her other hand. She didn’t want to yank open the door and instantly give away her position to the pirates, who had no doubt reached this side of the ship by now, as well. Instead, she slowly opened the door a few inches, peering out through the crack.
The patrol boat was just now coming up alongside the ship, moving in the same direction as the larger vessel. Annja quickly realized that it must have swung across the Pride’s bow and then come about in a wide circle that allowed it to approach the ship from the rear. Its greater speed had allowed it to catch up easily and in just moments the pirates would likely make another attempt at getting aboard.
It was up to Annja to stop them.
But with what?
There was probably a fire hose on this side of the vessel, too, but as powerful as it was, it took two people to hold it steady against the flow of the water, so repeating what they’d done on the other side of the ship was out of the question for her alone. Like the rest of the crew running around Neptune’s Pride, she didn’t have a firearm handy, so there was no way she could keep them from getting close to the ship.
No, she would have to wait until the pirates were all but aboard the ship and then take the fight to those she could reach. It wasn’t the best of plans, but it was the only one she had.
So be it.
Annja summoned her sword to hand, feeling it materialize in her grip with just a simple thought. As always, its presence was reassuring; she felt she could conquer just about anything when she had the sword in hand. So far, that had always proved to be true, but she was enough of a realist to know that at some point she was probably going to run into an enemy that was faster, stronger and smarter than she was, sword or no sword. Today, however, was not that day.
She peered out through the opening, noticed the patrol boat pull up alongside the Neptune’s Pride almost directly opposite her present position.
She watched as the men in the bow of the boat readied their ropes and flung them up and over the side wall of the Pride.
In her head, she started counting down from five.
On one, she burst out the door, her gaze locked solidly on the hooks clamped to the Pride’s bulkhead, her sword raised high.
Shouts rose from the deck of the patrol boat and Annja knew she had seconds, at best, before the startled pirates opened fire.
As the first of the pirates pulled the trigger of his weapon and bullets began to pepper the wall where she’d only just been, Annja brought her sword down against the rope attached to the first of the grappling hooks.
The edge of the weapon, honed to razor sharpness through the same mystical process that allowed it to exist in the first place, slashed through the thick hemp rope as if it wasn’t even there.
Annja heard a muted cry reach her from over the side of the ship as the pirate who had been climbing up the rope suddenly found himself falling unexpectedly toward the water rushing by below him.
Annja barely noticed; her attention was already on the second rope ahead of her.
She slashed through that one as well, heard an equally surprised cry followed by a splash from below.
As before, Annja paid it no mind. One grappling hook remained.
By now the pirates had gotten over their surprise at her appearance, however, and their shots were much more accurate. Bullets whipped through the hair hanging alongside her neck, missing her flesh by a half inch or less. Sooner rather than later one of those bullets was going to find its mark, she knew.
Still, she raced forward.
Annja’s heart was pounding and she could hear her own breathing, drowning out the shouts of the pirates, the sound of their weapons, even the roar of the patrol boat’s engine. Nothing mattered but that final grappling hook.
Another five steps separated her from it.
The pirates took aim at her running form. A bullet ricocheted off the blade of her sword, sending vibrations racing up and down her arm and threatening to knock the blade from her grasp, but she tightened her grip, refusing to lose it at this point.
Three steps.
The blare of the ship’s horn filled the air with its thunderous roar. Annja didn’t know if Vargas had triggered the device to distract the pirates or signal for help but didn’t care. All she knew was that she had to cut that rope.