Walking back a step, Brandon felt a chill run along his spine. Make. The first man said make, not try, or experiment. And now open rebellion? Shitfire, it had finally happened. Some brainboy figured out the formula. Or at least, a formula. If the proportions were wrong, it would only sizzle and not send a cannonball more than a few feet. Only one way of finding out if it worked, or was just black dirt.
“Open that bastard gate right now!” Brandon bellowed at the top of his lungs, drawing his revolver. “Or I’ll level the whole ville!”
“Fuck you, spud. Death to the Lord Bastard!” a sec man shouted from the wall, pointing a flintlock and firing.
There was a hum past his head and Brandon dived for cover, as both of the .50-machine guns on the PT boats cut loose, the heavy-duty rounds raking the wall. Bricks shattered under the impact of the massive rounds, and sec men toppled from view.
Thor fired, and the sniper reeled with most of his head gone. In reply, a cannon in the wall roared, and a rain of shots harmlessly peppered the beach, churning the sand. But more sec men replaced the fallen, and a dozen longblasters started shooting, gray smoke masking the gunmen on top of the wall. The pilot of the escort boat cried out as his chest erupted in blood, and he staggered along the deck from the wheelhouse, trying to hold in his guts.
“Attack!” Brandon shouted, running for PT 264 and wildly firing his blaster at the rebels above.
“Cold Harbor free forever!” the people on the wall shouted, as a flurry of arrows hit the PTs, doing no real damage, and then another cannon stridently spoke, the water between the dock and a boat rising in a tall geyser from a near miss.
“LAND HO!” a pirate in the crow’s nest shouted. “Cold Harbor due west!”
The smoky peak of the volcano came into view over the horizon as the huge windjammers raced onward, sails bursting with the wind. Quickly the rest of the jungle island rose from below the horizon. Some sort of mist was covering the ville, maybe a fog bank, but it hid the pirate fleet from the helpless landlubbers. There would be no need to wait until night. This was the perfect time to attack.
“Catch them with their pants down,” Giles said eagerly, limping to the railing with the aid of a crude crutch made from a tree branch. His left leg was gone from the knee down, the stump too tender yet to strap on a wooden pegleg.
It hadn’t taken Bachman long to acquire seven other ships to stage a raid on as big a prize as a full shipload of black powder. And even if the captains and crews of their sister vessels weren’t seasoned fighters, eight windjammers was an armada. All counted, the fleet carried more than a hundred cannons of assorted sizes. That was almost as much as the ill-fated flotilla that had attacked Maturo Island a hundred moons ago. But this was no predark fortress armed with Firebirds and rapidfires. Just some fat fisherman with a bunch of old cannons, half of which probably didn’t work.
Standing at the wheel, Captain Bachman removed his wicker hat as he sniffed the air. “Is that Petey smoke I smell?” he asked the crew at large.
“Look!” a bosun shouted, leaning far over the gunwale to point. “Must be a dozen of the things in the harbor, skipper!”
“That many?” a pirate asked, surprised. “Are they attacking the ville?”
“Looks like,” another pirate growled, loosening the sword at his side. “What’s going on, skipper?”
“Nuked if I know,” Bachman said, studying the island through his glass. “Mebbe they didn’t pay for all that black powder the Constellation was carrying and now the lord bastard wants it back, with interest.”
“Or maybe Kinnison is finally building a second fortress,” Red Blade growled, advancing to the railing of the quarterdeck and gripping the wood hard. “Not going to rule in secret anymore, just gonna take over, island by island.”
“Always knew he’d try some day,” Giles said gruffly, shifting to the motion of the vessel.