“Those two ships are turning toward us,” said Calvus, as if to put paid to the hopeful doubt in the agent’s mind. Perennius glanced sidelong at the tall man, wondering just how sharp his eyesight really was. “Why are they doing that?”
“Herakles, Captain!” cried the lookout who had given the initial alarm a minute before. “They’re making for us! Pirates!”
“That seems to me to cover it, too,” said Perennius. He struggled to keep from vomiting. Disaster, disaster . . . not unexpected in the abstract, but its precise nature had been unhinted only minutes before. The voyage had been going well. The oarsmen and the Marines were both shaking down in adequate fashion –
Across the surface of the agent’s mind flashed a picture of his chief, Marcus Optatius Navigatus, burying himself in trivia as the Empire went smash. It was easier to think about the way a rank of Marines dressed than it was to consider chitinous things that spat lightning – or the near certainty that he would have to battle pirates with a quarter of the troops he had thought marginally necessary to the task.
Screw’em all. Aulus Perennius had been given a job, and he was going to do it. Not “or die trying”; that was for losers.
There were men shouting on deck and below it. The captain was giving orders to the coxswain through a wooden speaking tube. The agent turned his eyes toward the putative pirates again. They were still distant. Though interception might be inevitable, it would not be soon. With genuine calm rather than the feigned one of a moment before, Perennius said, “It could be that these aren’t simply pirates, Calvus. Like the bravos we met in Rome weren’t just robbers. Can you protect us against thunderbolts here like you did then?”
“No,” Calvus said as he too continued to watch the other sails. The upper hull of the nearer of the vessels was barely visible. It was a sailing ship, and that was at least some hope. “Their weapons – and I can only assume that what you face here is identical to what we knew – their weapons will strike at a distance of – ” a pause for conversion. The agent would have given a great deal to know the original measurement – “two hundred double paces, a thousand feet. My capacity to affect anything physical, or even – ” a near smile – “mental, falls off exponentially with distance. At ten feet, perhaps, I could affect their weapons. No further.”
“All right, we’ll keep you out of the way,” Perennius said. His mind was ticking like the fingers of an accountant. “Put you on an oar, you’re strong, or maybe the cabin’s the best idea, just in case we do get close enough you can – ”
“Aulus Perennius,” the traveller said, interrupting for the first time, “I said that if there are Guardians on those ships, they can tear this craft apart from a thousand feet.”
“And if it’s just pirates, they can’t!” the agent snapped back. “Think I didn’t goddam listen to you?” He pointed toward the cabin into which Gaius and Sestius had disappeared at a run. Their armor was there. “I’ll have hell’s own time finishing this job if you’ve caught a stray arrow on the way. And if it’s your lobster buddies after all, well … I just might be able to arrange a surprise for them
even at two hundred paces. For now, get to blazes out of my way so that I can get on with what I need to do!”
Which was to kill people, the agent thought as he strode to the forward fighting tower. “You two!” he shouted to a pair of nervous-looking seamen. “Give me a hand with these cables!”
It was nice to have a skill that was in demand.
Perennius and his scratch team had three sides of the tower cleated together and were raising the fourth when Sestius and a pair of the Marines staggered forward. The soldiers were in armor and were carrying the ballista. With its base and a bundle of iron darts, it was a load for all of them.