Tesdorf Vadgaard recoiled from the missiles. It wasn’t as if he’d never seen smoke and flame before. In fact, in many ways, the new weapon was less terrifying than staring directly into an enemy ship’s broadside and seeing dozens of gun muzzles vomiting their flaming hatred. But no one of Vadgaard’s time and place had any experience of something like this. Of ruler-straight lines of smoke. Of roaring black monsters with tails of flame. Or of the brutal explosions as five of them smashed into Anthonette’s side like the hammer of Thor itself.
Three of them missed her completely. One of those hit nothing at all. A second hit one of the fishing boats Vadgaard had impressed to help transport the troops under his protection. It exploded squarely in the middle of the hapless infantrymen, slaughtering them like so many tightly packed animals and blowing the thinly planked hull apart. What was left of the fishing boat rolled over and sank within minutes.
The third of the “misses” exploded against the mainmast of a transport brig. The mast snapped like a sapling in a tornado, and the ship staggered aside as the flaming remnants of its mainsail set fire to her standing rigging. An inferno roared and bellowed as it consumed the heavily tarred cordage.
Vadgaard had no idea how much powder each of those missiles carried. Nor did it matter. One of the ones which hit Anthonette skipped off of her stout planking. Another exploded in the instant of contact, blowing a smoking, splintered crater in the surface of her side. Two more of them buried themselves in her thick timbers before they exploded. Those two ripped huge, ragged holes and shattered planking like sledgehammers. They also threw geysers of flaming debris into her rigging and cordage. No doubt, Vadgaard thought, the fires that debris started would have doomed her anyway, just as surely as the blazing brig beyond her, but it scarcely mattered. Because the fifth missile plunged directly into an open gun port and exploded inside the ship.
The force of the blast ripped up through Anthonette’s deck in a hurricane of smoke, fire, and splinters. Pieces of men came with it, and some of the men from whom those pieces came shrieked in agony. The mainmast fell—slowly, at first, but with rapidly gathering speed—as the shattering explosion cut it off like an ax just below the level of the deck. More blazing debris started still other fires all along her topsides, but that was nothing compared to the wavefront of flame cascading through her mid-deck spaces.
The wavefront that found her magazine.
Eddie felt the explosion like a body blow, and elation flashed through him on a wave of triumph. It had worked!
But even as he realized that, he had to grab suddenly for whatever handhold he could find. The Outlaw slewed wildly to port as Larry flinched instinctively away from the rockets’ back blast. At a lower speed, it would have been a scarcely noticed bobble, a small kink in the Outlaw’s wake. At their actual speed, it sent the thundering boat sprawling to port in a sliding, fishtailing, spray-shrouded momentary loss of control.
It was a small thing, really. It only seemed larger because of their speed.
And because that unplanned change of course carried them directly through the arc of Christiania’s broadside.
Time seemed to have stopped. Bits and pieces of what had been Anthonette rose into the air like the petals of some obscene, fire-hearted flower, and Vadgaard cringed away from its fury. Fire was the most deadly foe of any wooden ship, and he sensed the panic which possessed Christiania’s sailing master as the flaming shower of wreckage began to descend once again. It was a panic Vadgaard understood perfectly, but he had no time to feel it himself.
The Americans had destroyed three of his ships and killed hundreds of his men with their horror weapons, but for all of their marvels, they weren’t gods. They were mortal, and as they put their helm hard over to break away from their attack, their course brought them where he could get at them. They were moving so quickly there was no possibility of adjusting his gunners’ aim. Indeed, there was no point trying to aim at all, but Tesdorf Vadgaard would see himself damned and in Hell if he didn’t at least try.