Who rush to glory or the grave!"
The warriors around him cheered. It was good to have a captain with Words, ancient, apt, and powerful Words ready to do his bidding. It let them know that their forefathers had been in similar straits and survived to tell of the experience. The speaking of Words at moments like this reached deep into their collective, cultural heritage to lift their spirits. Or, as old Hans put it, "Them Words can reach down inta the heart of a man what's pissin' his self with fear, an' pull 'im up by the short-an'-curlies!"
And then they slammed into the mass of defenders at the enemy's quarterdeck.
"Okay you bums, time to keep me safe for women everywhere!" cried Lt. Archer as their cutter, White-socks, approached the enemy's quarterdeck on the upper redside. The Guldur did not notice the cutter coming at their right flank as they focused on Captain Melville's boarding party.
"Sir, are ya sure that's not 'from women everywhere?'" asked Petty Officer Hommer, tossing his head to flip his hair out of his eyes as the two young warriors laughed together.
Then White-socks' single sail was slacked and an expertly tossed grapnel came up from the cutter's bow and thudded into the jollyboat along the enemy's upper redside. The cutter slewed drunkenly as the grapnel was pulled tight, and the sailor at the tiller brought them expertly along side the enemy.
"At 'em, boys!" cried Archer.
The lead elements of Archer's boarding party are standing on the yardarm of the cutter's mast, with the rest ready to follow. The young lieutenant is on the very end of the yardarm, with Hommer immediately behind him. Archer is balanced like a cat, with a pistol in each hand.
As they approach the enemy Ship, Archer leaps into the jollyboat that hangs from davits off the enemy's redside, firing both barrels of both pistols. "Crackcrack" first the right, then "crackcrack" the left, Archer thumbs the Keel charges on the two-space pistols as fast as he can put the front sights onto a target.
Four Guldur fall, each with a bullet smashing into its right ear. Then Archer drops his pistols and vaults the quarterdeck railing, drawing his sword as his feet hit the deck.
The rest of his small boarding party is right behind him, with Petty Officer Hommer in the lead, firing both barrels of their muskets into the unsuspecting enemy's right flank and leaping onto the quarterdeck behind their lieutenant. Little Midshipman Hayl is in their midst, waving his midshipman's dirk and screaming like a madman.
Archer's sword begins to take its toll just as the enemy becomes aware of his presence. An overhand slash of his terrible sharp blade beheads the first Guldur, slicing effortlessly through the hapless creature's throat and spine, and then continuing to cut his Goblan tick in half at the waist. The surprise of the flank attack combines with the speed of the blow and the sharpness of the edge so that the blade cuts completely through before the victims fully understand what has happened. The Guldur has a brief look of confusion on its face as its head tumbles back and a red fountain gushes up from its severed neck. The tick is able to look down into the intestines of the lower part of its body as it falls backward with an expression of horrible, frustrated rage upon its face.
Archer's return stroke eviscerates a Guldur who is turning toward him, and the hapless creature crouches and turns to its left, dropping its musket and holding its spreading entrails like a football player holding a ball.
To each side of him Archer's sailors advance with their bayonets flashing, but the impetus of their attack quickly stalls against the mass of enemy troops. Midshipman Hayl crouches low and scrambles through the boarding party to get to his designated position behind Lt. Archer.
Then Archer finds himself facing the biggest, blackest, ugliest Guldur he has ever seen, wearing an officer's harness, complete with a tick to match the size of its host.
He knows that this has to be the captain of the enemy's Ship, and his task is to defeat this creature. The smashing blows of the Guldur, combined with the attack from its tick, are too much for Archer and he knows he is outmatched. His arm is already numb from blocking blows, his monkey is overmatched by the smashing overhand clouts of the big tick on his opponent's back, and the sailors to his left and right are being pressed hard by multiple foes. Archer barely deflects one crashing sword blow as it slices a furrow into his left shoulder. Another scratches his right forearm.
The young lieutenant suddenly feels an awful sense of despair. Is this what it feels like to die? he asks himself. Is this what it felt like for those creatures I just killed?
While Archer and his group attacked the Guldur's right flank, Lt. Crater and the crew of his cutter hit the enemy from the opposite direction. Crater and his party leapt from the yardarm of their cutter onto the enemy's upper greenside, quickly cutting down the few Guldur who stood in their way. On this side the quarterdeck was still about five feet above them, with another three feet of railing above that. They slammed a volley of musket and pistol balls into the mass of enemy packed onto the quarterdeck above them. The Guldur reeled from this unexpected assault on their left flank, but they quickly rallied, and Crater's attack bogged down at the railing.
Melville and his men also found themselves stalled at the quarterdeck. He and his rangers were battling at the ladder, while the rest of his men shot and stabbed up at the defenders.
After many battles Melville had honed his situational awareness to a fine edge. He knew when Archer slammed into the enemy's right flank, and he was aware of Crater hitting the left flank. The primary objective of this attack was to have Archer personally defeat the Guldur who was currently in command of the Ship. That was the key to getting the Guldur Ship to accept Archer as the new captain.
Melville knew from personal experience that the enemy's captain would be the biggest, toughest, most skillful fighter aboard. He also knew that young Archer would not be a match for such an enemy. Melville was hoping that the slaughter of the Guldur crew inflicted by the Fang's cannon fire would have whittled down the enemy's chain of command to the point where a less capable opponent would be in charge. In fact, he was betting Archer's life on it.
Through the mass of bodies in front of him Melville could catch glimpses of a huge, shaggy black form moving toward Lt. Archer's boarding party, and he had a sudden, morbid sense that he had lost his bet and Archer might pay for it with his life. The young lieutenant had trusted his captain, and Melville was sick with dread at the possibility of having sent Archer to his death.
Well, thought Melville,
The mouse that always trusts to one poor hole
Can never be a mouse of any soul.
He had prepared for this possibility. This mouse had another hole. His plan was to attack at the enemy from every possible angle, and there were still one or two directions yet to come into play. It was a slim reed to grasp, but he would do the best he could on his end and hope that Broadax, or Ulrich and Hans would be successful on their fronts.
"Rangers!" Melville called out to Josiah and Valandil, "Archer's fighting their captain. Wound the captain if you can, and Pop the tick off his back. He's a black, shaggy cur."
Without a word the rangers both took a step back, dropped their swords, and unslung their muskets. Having these slung over their backs had been a hindrance to the rangers' swordsmanship throughout the battle, but they understood the plan and had been keeping the muskets in reserve for such an occasion.
Among the swirling mass of creatures on the quarterdeck above him Melville saw Petty Officer Hommer, fighting at Archer's right side, take a musket ball in the chest. He felt anger and sadness as he watched Hommer, a beloved old Shipmate, fall. That helmet of blond curls drooped down as the young NCO sagged to his knees and then keeled over onto the deck, dropping his musket from nerveless fingers.
As full-blown poppies, overcharg'd with rain,
Decline the head, and drooping kiss the plain—
So sinks the youth; his beauteous head, deprest
Beneath his helmet, drops upon his breast.
Melville found
himself fighting alone at the base of the ladder going up to the enemy's quarterdeck. Without his two rangers beside him he was suddenly too busy to worry about Hommer or Archer... or anything else besides survival.
But he was not truly alone. His monkey clung tightly to his neck, blocking bullets and blows with its belaying pin, and his dog, Boye, and Josiah's dog, Cinder (along with their belaying pin-equipped monkeys) stayed at the captain's flank. And Brother Theo and Grenoble provided support from behind him, while his sailors closed in from his left and right. After a brief instant of grave danger Melville was able to hold his own in the fierce melee.
Amidst the milling, scrambling throng above them the two rangers spotted one tick that projected up above the mass. In an instant they both took a shot, their muskets cracking together as one, and the tick went down. But they could not get a shot at the enemy captain.
Hans was the Fang's best boat handler, perhaps the best in the Westerness Navy. With consummate skill the old sailor swung the jollyboat, Rip, around Archer's cutter and across the Guldur's stern at breakneck speed. Ulrich was perched up on Rip's tiny yardarm, and as they shot past the enemy Ship he leapt up and clung to the ledge below the stern windows. Swift and nimble as a deranged ferret, Ulrich scrambled up the stern and launched himself onto the quarterdeck railing with his monkey clinging tightly to his back.
The Guldur were all turned away from Ulrich, dealing with the attacks on their front and flanks. Balancing on the railing like some grotesque gargoyle, the vicious little coxswain promptly initiated a one-man onslaught on the enemy from a new and unexpected quarter.
Standing up on the taffrail gave Ulrich enough height to see a huge black cur beating down Lt. Archer's guard. This was clearly the enemy captain, and young Archer was obviously losing his sword fight. He was just seconds away from becoming dog meat.
As Ulrich was drawing his pistol he saw the tick fall from the enemy captain's shoulders. Two musket balls had entered the vicinity of the tick's left ear and punched out the right side of its head, blowing its brains out in a fine, pink mist. Ulrich knew that this was probably the rangers' doing, but he also understood that the force down on the main deck was unlikely to get a good shot at the enemy captain, who was well back on the quarterdeck.
Quick as a mongoose, Ulrich snapped off a shot that shattered the Guldur captain's right forepaw. Then the second barrel took advantage of a momentary gap in the mass of Guldur defenders to smash the enemy's left ankle. He might have been able to put a bullet in his target's head, but the goal was not to kill the enemy captain, only to weaken him enough to allow Archer to win his duel.
The enraged Guldur forces standing behind their captain turned to face their new tormentor. Every loaded musket was turned on Ulrich, sending a hail of bullets whizzing toward him. Any Guldur who was not in direct, hand-to-hand combat with an opponent turned and charged at Ulrich in a furry tide of seriously pissed-off mutts.
With a "Thwack!" and an "Eek!" his monkey's belaying pin deflected a head shot, but two bullets hit Ulrich like fists smacking into a block of beef. One went through his right lung and out his back. Another shot made a direct hit on his right thighbone.
Everything slowed to a crawl as Ulrich fell backward, and he had plenty of time to note that he barely felt the through-and-through in his lung, but the hit to his thighbone hurt like hell. He had heard that in the heat of battle you usually wouldn't feel a flesh wound but bone hits hurt, and he was strangely intrigued to recognize that this was painfully correct.
With a snarl of defiance Ulrich dropped back into the cold embrace of two-space that waited below him. His right hand tossed an empty pistol into one cur's onrushing face, while his left hand flipped a dagger into another's throat. The last thing the Guldur defenders saw was Ulrich's monkey echoing its master's snarl and hurling its tiny dirk into a cur's eye.
Lt. Archer watches the enemy's blade come hammering down at him. The Guldur captain is not using any finesse, just pure brute strength to pound down his guard, and it is working. Slow-motion time makes the blade come down at an agonizing crawl. There is a horrific despair welling up in his chest as he watches the hated blade come down. I don't want to die, he thinks. Dear God, I don't want to die!
Then he sees the blur of two bullets punch into the left temple of his opponent's tick. He had heard that the effects of slow-motion time could be so intense that you can actually see bullets, and now here it was. The tick gets a confused, cross-eyed look on its face. The right side of its face balloons out and then the hateful creature's brains spray slowly out of the right side of its skull. Archer's monkey cries out with an "Eek!" of joy and relief as it watches its foe slump to the deck.
Then a bullet slams into the Guldur captain's right arm and his right forepaw begins to lose its grip on the descending blade. Archer's numb arm moves his sword up and deflects the now weakened blow, assisted by a "smack!" from his monkey's belaying pin.
The Guldur's left forepaw reaches across and reinforces his right, beginning to fight two-handed, just as another bullet cuts his left hindpaw out from under him. The creature falls to his left with his guard still high, and Archer swings a weak, sweeping, waist-high, horizontal blow that sends a ropey flood of guts flowing out of his opponent's body.
With a howl of outrage a Guldur sailor beside the falling enemy captain thrusts his bayonet at Archer's chest. The young lieutenant is just beginning to feel a wave of relief, and now once again he sees death coming at him and he knows that he is out of position to block this blow.
In mid-thrust the Guldur's glaring eyes and fierce concentration gives way to a distorted mask of agony. Then it looks down in horror as its guts, and their contents, flow out onto Midshipman Hayl like a cauldron of sickening, stinking stew being poured over the little middie's head.
Hayl had been scurrying underfoot. When he saw a cur about to attack Lt. Archer, he thrust up with his horrifically sharp, double-edged blade and literally stirred the Guldur's guts. He inserted his midshipman's dirk just above the pelvic bone and was astounded at how easily it slipped in. He sliced up in a broad arc to the solar plexus, and then down and back up in a spiral motion. He continued to be amazed and strangely pleased at how effortlessly the blade slid through the Guldur's body. Then his pleasure turned to dismay and disgust as the hot, reeking contents came pouring over him in an unholy baptism of bubbling blood and diverse foulnesses.
"Eep!" said his monkey.
Ulrich's bullet-riddled body falls down off the Ship's stern and into the merciless maw of two-space. He can clearly see the stern of the Guldur Ship churning through two-space as he falls, and he is not sure which is worse: seeing the awful blue depths of two-space coming at him, or the Ship moving away from him. He closes his eyes as he punches through the plane of two-space and feels an awful, biting cold wash over his body, a brief preview of the icy death that awaits him.
"Brrr!!" squeaks his monkey, clinging helplessly around his neck.
The effects of slow-motion time make these seconds last for an agonizing eternity as Ulrich bounces back through the icy plane to the other side.
"Brrr!!" repeats his monkey with a screech of despair.
Then he seems to hang there, his last moment in life stretching on, and on...
"Dammit, Ulrich," says Hans, "gimme a hand here. I can't hold ya ferever!"
He opens his eyes to discover that, in a feat of incredible boat handling, old Hans has spun the jollyboat back around just in time to catch him on the rebound.
His monkey is stretched out between the two humans, with four hands keeping a death grip on Hans' arm while the other four are locked around Ulrich's skull. The little creature has a look of wild desperation on its face as it quietly gibbers a stream of incomprehensible monkey obscenities.
It slowly dawns on the little coxswain that maybe he is going to live. He reaches up an arm and a leg and hugs the boat's gunwales like an ardent lover.
"Damn!" says Hans, rolling him the rest of the way into th
e boat. "Them vacuum-suckers dun shot the hell out o' ya, lil' buddy."
"Thask mah technique, shee?" mumbles Ulrich. "Ik's a trick, shee? By bleeding I lures 'em inta a falsek sensa skecurity..."
The eviscerated Guldur captain and the sailor that Hayl had gutted both leaned forward in grisly bows and plunged to the deck. There was the briefest of pause before the remaining curs turned on Archer in a final spasm of fury. The press of Guldur in front of Melville had eased off, so he took this opportunity and stepped to his left, calling over his shoulder, "Give me a boost!" Then he sprung up and grabbed the top of the quarterdeck railing with his left hand. Numerous sailors helped to launch their captain up onto the quarterdeck. Melville vaulted over the rail, hacking to his right and taking off a cur's arm at the elbow. Then he slammed his sword to his left, driving down an enemy's sword and cleaving its skull with a blow that jarred his wrist.
Through a gap in the melee Melville saw a Guldur attacking Lt. Archer from the flank. This one appeared to have Archer dead-to-rights, but Melville had an ace in the hole. He twitched his left hand down to the small, over-and-under, double-barrel Colt pistol tucked into his belt, and with one fluid motion he drew the gun and snapped off a round at the Guldur.
This pistol was a family heirloom. It was centuries old and the intelligence in the pistol's Keel charge had developed into something that was remarkably vicious, and accurate. Most two-space pistols and muskets gave a faint <
The ball slammed into the Guldur's right rib cage just as it was raising its sword to strike Archer down. The bullet smashed through both lungs, unbalancing the enemy and flipping him over the rail into two-space.
Melville caught a glimpse of the Guldur falling back with a shrieking sob. The noise cut off like a door closing when the wretched creature fell through the plane of two-space. Then the sound of its despair reappeared when it bounced once and looked up at Melville with a final gurgling sob before it dropped forever into interstellar space.
The Guns of Two-Space Page 13