“You fucking idiot!” shouted Menander. He was so infuriated that he repeated the curse three time over, despite the utter impossibility that Eusebius could hear him.
He started pounding the rail of his ship with frustration. Already he could see the Malwa picket boat picking up the tempo of its oars. The Victrix’s advantage in combat lay entirely in a head-on attack, using its irresistible weapon protected within that heavy bow shield. From astern—and the clumsy jury-rigged paddle wheeler was no faster than an oared ship—the advantage would lie entirely with a vessel designed for boarding. Between the steam engine which drove it and the fire cannon in the bow, the Victrix was far too cramped to carry a large crew. And half of them were mechanics, not soldiers. Before the Victrix could reach the drifting barge and secure another cable, the Malwa picket boat would have overhauled it and overwhelmed the fireship’s crew.
The only thing the Victrix had to fend off such an attack was the Puckle gun mounted in an armored shell atop the engine house. It was basically a large, long-barreled cap-and-ball revolver on a stand, which was operated by a two-man crew. All nine of its chambers could be fired in quick succession by a gunner turning a crank, whereupon the cylinder could be removed by the loader and replaced by another. It gave them the closest thing possible to a true machine gun, short of the heavy and unwieldy mitrailleuse assigned to the field artillery.
The Puckle gun was a handy little weapon, admittedly. But Menander had no illusions that it would be enough to drive off as many men as the Malwa had crammed into that picket boat.
The pilot of the Justinian came to Menander’s side. Clearly enough, the man had reached the same conclusion. “What you get for trying to make a damned artisan a naval officer,” he snarled. “He’s just going to lose his own ship in the bargain.”
Menander sighed. He took the time, before bowing to the inevitable, to regret once again that the mad rush in which Belisarius’ change of strategy had thrown everything had left many projects unfinished in its wake. Among them had been the plans which he and Eusebius had begun to develop in Charax for designing an effective signaling system by which a fleet could be controlled by a single officer. Which would be him, not—not—that damned artisan!
As it happened, he and Eusebius had developed part of the system. The easy part. Signal flags hoisted in daylight. But those flags—all of them neatly arrayed in a nearby chest—would be useless in the middle of this dark night. They had never gotten as far as designing a system of lamp signals.
“Nothing for it,” he growled. “If we turn back, we’ll just be compounding the damage. Maintain course.”
“Aye,” said the pilot, nodding his approval. “Spoken like a navy man.”
* * *
“Let’s hope this works,” muttered Eusebius. They had almost reached the stranded barge. He was standing just outside the bow shield, leaning over the rail in order to gauge the distance between the Victrix and the pursuing picket boat. Then, deciding the range was about right, he looked up at the fortress.
So far, the Malwa had maintained volley fire. Eusebius wasn’t quite sure why they were doing so, since the undoubted advantage of volley fire on a battlefield was a moot point in this situation. He suspected that the Malwa commander was afraid that, working in the dark, crews left to their own pace might hurry the work and cause a disastrous accident.
Whatever the reason, he was glad of it. The maneuver he was about to try would leave the Victrix more or less stationary for a time. He was still far too close to the fortress to want to take that risk, until a volley had been fired. Thereafter, it would take the Malwa gunners long minutes to reload the huge guns. Long enough, Eusebius thought, to carry out his hastily conceived plan.
The dark outlines of the fortress were suddenly backlit by the enormous flash of the guns. The instant Eusebius saw the guns erupting, he leaned into the bow shield and shrilled at Calopodius: “Now! Now!” The words barely carried over the roar of the cannons.