"Two minutes," came Trae's immediately reply. "Three would be better."
Thicelt shook his head. "Three minutes is too long. In these seas, we'd be wallowing the gods know which way by then. Even two is pushing it. But I can manage that by keeping a third of the oars going until the last minute." Again, he glanced at the pirate ship. "Whatever you're going to do, do it quick. There are archers and slingers on that ship. They'll be starting to bombard us with missiles once they get within fifty yards."
"Fifty yards," sneered Trae. "My guns can—"
"Not on a tossing ship they can't," said Jessep softly. "This isn't like missile fire on land, young sir. You'll be lucky to hit anything until they're almost alongside."
Trae looked a bit startled. For all that he and his gunners had practiced setting the tripod clamps for the arquebuses, they hadn't actually fired any shots so far on the voyage. Trae had wanted to save his ammunition, since he had no way of knowing if he'd be able to replenish it in the Southron lands.
"Of course," added Jessep, "the same applies to the pirates. Most of their arrows and sling bullets will go wild also. All of this missile firing before a boarding operation is mostly show anyway."
The implied insult caused Trae's face to darken a little. Still, he was wise enough not to snarl a rejoinder. Trae understood full well that he and his beloved gunners had yet to prove themselves in action. Brash he might be, but not even Trae was cocky enough to boast about feats he hadn't accomplished yet.
"Make sure you set them up on the lower bank only," interjected Thicelt. He jerked his head toward the pirate ship, which was now not more than two hundred yards away. "As low as that galley is, all of our soldiers will still be boarding from the upper deck. No other way to do it, since that's how the special bridges are designed."
"Pain in the butt, that," growled Jessep. "Having to charge down a steep ramp — loaded with shield and armor and assegai — even leaving aside the fact that we haven't tested the damn contraptions." He gave Thicelt a look which was not entirely filled with admiration. "Wish we had some simple old-fashioned claws."
By "claws," Helga knew, Jessep was referring to the traditional boarding ramps used by the Confederate army in their favored method of naval operation. The "claws" were nothing more complicated than wide planks, held upright and fit into prepared hinges along the rails just before action. And with spikes at the other end, which would drive into the wood of an opposing vessel when the planks were pushed over.
But there had simply been no way to adapt the demibireme to that tactic, which presupposed the large war galleys of the Vanbert regular navy. Instead, what Thicelt had done was redesign portions of the upper deck — already designed to be removed in the event of action — so that they would collapse down onto an enemy vessel alongside. He'd even added fittings for small spikes which could be inserted at the last minute. Those adaptations had not been the least of the cost to her father of getting this ship ready for her voyage.
The end result would be boarding ramps not much different from claws. In theory, at least. But like almost all soldiers, Jessep was conservative when it came to mayhem. The tried and true methods are best, and be damned to the fancy schemes of amateurs.
"They'll work," said Thicelt firmly. "We've tested them plenty of times."
Jessep left unsaid the obvious rejoinder: not in a real battle, you haven't. There was simply no point now in arguing about the matter. Thicelt's complicated boarding ramps would work or they wouldn't. Either way, Jessep was obviously not concerned about the outcome—a crack Vanbert hundred against twice their number of mangy pirates? surely you jest! — but simply the casualties. With proper claws, the Confederate marines would turn the pirate crew into so much ground meat. With these new-fangled things. .
He sighed heavily. "Whatever happens will happen. And now, young sir, you'd best get to it. You don't have much time left."
Trae was gone instantly, shouting orders to his gunners waiting on the deck below. The gunners began scurrying to their newly-designated posts. Helga was a bit puzzled to see how easily they seemed to interpret Trae's orders. Most of the words her younger brother was shouting were simply obscenities.
"That much he's got right," growled Yunkers. The former First Spear grinned at Helga. "Trained soldiers pretty much know what to do anyway. You just have to cuss at 'em to keep their brains working."
* * *
Afterward, Trae and his men would be able to boast endlessly. Which, to the regret of everyone else, they did.
The pirate vessel, as Thicelt predicted, had no difficulty eluding the demibireme's ramming attempt. Then, as the one-and-a-half slid by, the pirates pulled feverishly on their oars to close the distance. The one and only benefit of the ramming attempt was that it kept most of the pirate archers and all of their slingers out of the action. There was no room on that crowded vessel, with hundreds of men working at huge oars, for more than a handful of archers to fire a few missiles. Most of which, as Jessep had foreseen, went astray anyway.
Trae waited until the pirate ship was not more than ten yards distant. By then, Thicelt had removed all the rowers and Trae's gunners had set the tripod clamps at ten places along the lower deck which gave them a clear line of fire. At Trae's command — which was nothing more than a string of particularly obscene words — the first team of gunners set their arquebuses and fired.
None of it took more than a few seconds. The gunners themselves, following Trae's previous orders, were not even aiming at individual men. In fact, they weren't shooting at "men" at all. Not directly, at any rate. Their heavy, large-bored guns were simply pointing at the side of the pirate ship. The only sense in which "aiming" applied was that they were trying to hit the wooden wall of the enemy ship at approximately the height of the rowers' benches on the other side. "Hip-high," had been Trae's specific command. But. . with the heavy four-ounce balls fired by those two-man arquebuses, at point-blank range, anything close would do just fine.
And so it proved. The gunhandlers set their weapons, more or less "aimed," then braced for the recoil and closed their eyes when the other man of the team applied the slow match. A slightly ragged volley erupted, and one which was noisy enough to make the word "erupted" much more than a poetic allusion. It sounded like a small volcano, heard up close.
Looked like one, too. Immediately, the middle portion of the pirate ship vanished from sight, engulfed in a cloud of smoke. Helga, from her vantage point, could only see the bow and stern of the enemy. The faces of the pirates standing there, which only a moment before had been leering at her, were now so many studies in shock and confusion.
She thought that a bit odd, at first. Her former lover Adrian Gellert, after all, had been the one who first introduced gunpowder weapons to the world — using the pirates of the islands as his chosen instrument. And the Islanders had taken to the new weapons eagerly, as her father and Speaker Emeritus Jeschonyk had discovered to their dismay when the first Confederate assaults on the rebel island of Preble had been bloodily repulsed. That had been over a year ago. By now, Helga would have thought, pirates would be quite accustomed to gunpowder.
Then, seeing the rags in which the pirates on this ship were clad, she realized the truth. Like most Vanberts, Helga tended to think of "Islanders" and "pirates" as synonymous terms. But the truth was more complicated.
The Islanders could be separated into at least four distinct groups. There was the actual Kingdom of the Isles, ruled over by Casull the IV from his capital on the island of Chalice. Or, as he officially styled himself: "King Casull IV, Lord of the Isles, Supreme Autocrat, Chosen of the Sun God and Lemare of the Sea." Leaving aside the rhetorical flourish of the rest, the term autocrat was accurate enough. Except that the power of the King of the Isles, as great as it undoubtedly was, also had the historical characteristic of transience. Islander politics were even more notorious for treachery, double-dealing and palace revolts than the Confederacy's.
Then, there was — had been, rather — the smaller-scale but similar realm of Vase. The island of Vase, because it was located quite some distance from the main archipelago, had traditionally enjoyed independent status. Until Casull conquered it the year before, it had been ruled by the so-called Director of Vase. It had been in that old pirate chief's hareem that Helga had spent the most unpleasant year of her life, after she'd been sold by the pirates who captured her. The Director had been delighted to obtain a high-ranked member of the Vanbert aristocracy for one of his concubines. Even if, in practice, he hadn't been able to do much to enjoy his prize.
She grimaced, as a sudden image came back to her. A fat belly, heaving and covered with sweat, almost crushing her; and an old man's peevish voice, cursing her because he couldn't get an erection. He'd slapped her, that night, hard enough to leave bruises on her cheeks for days thereafter.
The ugly memory was blown away by another volley from Trae's guns. She was startled to realize that not more than a quarter of a minute had elapsed since the first. Trae really had trained his men well.
And he was using them intelligently, Helga thought. Trae had kept back half of his twenty two-man teams, having apparently decided that maintaining a good rate of fire was more important than the size of the volleys themselves. Now, as his teams switched places — one squad firing loaded and ready guns while the other picked up their second set of weapons — his decision proved itself. The second volley slammed into the side of the pirate ship before the cloud of smoke from the first had been dissipated by the slight breeze.
Confusion, she could remember her father telling her, is an even better weapon against an enemy than casualties. The pirates, she realized, had not had time to make sense out of what was happening to them before yet another volley ripped into their ranks.
Because of the smoke, she couldn't really see the casualties which were being inflicted by Trae's guns. But judging from the volume of the screams coming from amidships of the enemy vessel, as well as the dismay on the faces of those pirates she could see on the stern and bow—they weren't gloating over their projected rapine now, the stinking bastards—she thought the guns were tearing the enemy like a pack of predators tears a cornered greatbeast.
The unwanted image of a rapist's fat belly was replaced by another. The more slender waists of would-be rapists, sitting on benches, screaming as they stared at their shattered hip bones and ruptured intestines. Helga had seen what those lead bullets would do to a heavy pig, shot at close range. The thin planks of the pirate ship wouldn't slow them down much more than paper. If anything, she thought, the splinters the bullets would produce punching through the walls would simply double the casualties. And if pieces of broken wood sent sailing by four-ounce lead balls wouldn't do quite as much damage as the bullets themselves, they would do more than enough to put most of the men they struck half out of the action by the time the marines stormed aboard. "Half out of the action," against experienced Confederate infantrymen, was pretty much a euphemism for dead meat.
The first squad was back at their firing posts. Another volley, still before the cloud of smoke could vanish. Each two-man team in Trae's gunnery unit, Helga knew, had two arquebuses. With the weapons already loaded and the slow matches prepared, given the rate of fire they were showing now, that meant—
Another volley. Helga was almost shocked herself. They could manage four volleys in the first minute, before the pirate ship could even manage to close the final distance. She realized now that she'd allowed herself to be too influenced by Jessep's veteran experience. True, even with four volleys, the actual casualties inflicted would be relatively slight. She did the quick arithmetic in her head. Even assuming every bullet hit a pirate — almost certain, fired into such a packed mob, since for each one that missed another would punch through two men — then add another from splinter damage. .
Still, only forty men hit, out of probably two hundred.
Before she could get too smug about her newfound wisdom, however, Jessep Yunkers was shouting in her ear. "A fifth of them, by the gods! I'll wager my pension on it! And before we even hit the bastards with the blades!"
She turned and stared at him. The veteran's blocky face was almost split in half with a grin. Seeing her look of confusion, Jessep shook his head.
"Y've never been in a battle, lass." He was so excited he forgot his normal ma'am or young lady, and his eastern accent was thicker than usual. "A fift' gone in th'missile volley? We don' never hope fer more than a tent', even wit' dart volleys throwed by vets." His grin turned into a jeer, aimed at the pirates. "That'll break most any'un, much less these scum."
She followed his gaze. The sight of the pirates on the bow and stern — the midships was still obscured by smoke — showed her at once that Jessep was right. Those faces were full of panic, now, not dismay.
The sight brought her thoughts back to her earlier ruminations. In addition to the pirates of the archipelago and the other large islands of Vase and Preble—"pirates" so-called; in reality they were a well-organized kingdom in their own right — there were the pirates who laired along the coast of the continent. Too far south to be under Confederate control, and too remote to be ruled more than nominally by any Southron chieftain, these were simply pirates in fact as well as in name.
Not even that, Helga realized. Most of the time, these "pirates" would survive by fishing and selling the rare hardwoods they cut from the dense forests along the continent's waist. For all their undoubted seamanship, not to mention their ferocity when easy prey showed off their coastal villages, they had little of the disciplined organization of the Islanders proper. They weren't even that closely related racially, although they had adopted many of the Islander customs and usually worshipped Islander gods. Part Islander, part Southron — not to mention a heavy admixture of slaves escaped from the Confederate plantations to the north — they were mongrels by blood as well as habit. Tough, yes; as mongrels always are. But with a "discipline" that didn't begin to compare with the Islanders proper, much less Confederate soldiery.
The fourth volley erupted. That would be it, for the moment. Helga had watched Trae's men at practice, often enough, while her younger brother trained them on the family's estate. She knew that those clumsy guns, once fired, needed at least a minute to be cleaned and reloaded. A minute, at best. After a few rounds had been fired through the barrels, they needed to be set aside to cool before they could be used again. Trae had used the best metal he could find for them, but even those precious alloys would start to weaken once the barrels got too hot.
But in this instance, it was irrelevant anyway. Thicelt was already shouting at Trae, telling him to pull his gunners out of the way of the soldiers. The men of the hundred were on their feet, crouched, ready to topple the special sections of the upper deck onto the pirate ship's rail. By now, only a three-foot gap separated the two vessels — more than short enough to allow the sections to span the distance.
The gunners scrambled aside and the soldiers yanked out the pins which held the sections in place. Then, with a shout and heaved shoulders, toppled the improvised boarding ramps onto the pirate ship.
Then—
Nothing. At their First Spear's shouted command, they simply stood by the ramps, waiting. Helga was too confused to do more than notice that they weren't even hefting their weighted darts for an initial volley.
She heard Jessep's harsh chuckle. "I told you Uther was a good First Spear. Good as I was, truth be told — sure enough at his age."