“Sir,” he said, looking up through his tears, “you know that besides the captain, the other person the Ship talks to, just a little, sometimes, is her carpenter? With the captain dead she’s talkin’ to me. She’s mad for vengeance. She wants at that bastard of a Guldur, but she can’t, sir. She can’t. I’ve done all I can, but she can’t keep hangin’ on. Any second now she’s gonna pop into vacuum and we’ll all die. We gotta get outa here!”
“Chips! Mister Tibbits!”
“Yessir?” he asked, looking up through tear blurred eyes at the young lieutenant.
Quietly Melville continued. “It’s time to act like an officer of the Westerness Navy. Kestrel needs us now, more than ever, to do our duty. Our full duty. Whatever that may be. Whatever cup is set before us, we must take it. Now, tell me the rest of what happened.”
“Aye, sir. Sorry, sir.”
On the Ship above them all pretense of work stopped and everyone watched. This was the cue for Broadax and Hans to go into action.
“Ye damned blueboys!” shouted Broadax, turning her cigar stub and withering, concentrated, bloodshot Dwarrowdelf glare on them. “Git yer tails to yer business while yer betters tends to theirs!” She randomly selected a poor soul to torment. ” ‘At means you, Andrest! If ye was any denser, I swear light’d bend ’round ye!”
Not to be outdone, Broadax’s fellow NCO added his two bits. “An jist wat do ya think yer doin’ Jonesy!” said Hans, spitting a stream of tobacco juice overboard as he selected another random victim. “You pay attention ta yer work. Nothin’ is foolproof fer a truly talented fool like you!”
Then the two NCOs went about the age-old task of glowering at subordinates, but they stayed close, where they could hear the rest of the carpenter’s tale.
* * *
Tibbits drew a deep, shuddering breath and continued. “The bastards opened fire, but it must take forever for those big guns to reload. We was stunned, but we had all the red-side guns manned, and we fired right back. Ol’ Guns, Mr. Barlet, he let ‘er rip, right through our hatch covers, with four above, and seven below. Thirteen 12-pounders, all loaded with double shot at point-blank range can do the Elder King’s own damage sir! As we was pullin’ off, we hit them again, and then again, all on what we’d call their green-side. We musta hurt the bastards, but all the shots was into their hull, none of their masts or riggin’ was damaged much, so it didn’t seem to slow them down any.”
“Chips, this may be very important,” Melville said, gripping the old sailor’s shoulder. “As you remember it, do we have an advantage of height in the waist?”
“Aye sir, over a yard’s height advantage, all the way across, except where there was a funny little half a quarterdeck. It’s really more like a connin’ tower on the corner, astern. Above, their quarterdeck is on the red-side, while below it’s on the green-side. They have a little jollyboat on davits hangin’ off the quarterdeck on each side, so it’d be tricky to board from their rear quarter. That boat’ll keep you from gettin’ close.
“Their guns are rigged all weird, too. On the green-side they have the guns all for’ard above the plain of Flatland, and all astern below. On the red-side, all the guns below are for’ard, while the ones above are squished back astern.”
“Good. As I understand it, the jollyboat would hamper boarding astern, on either side. But on the red-side, above, they don’t have a gun for’ard. And we could board her from there, from the for’ard upper red quarter, without worrying about those guns?”
“Aye . . . aye, I guess so, sir. Unless they swing that gun up for’ard, as a bow chaser. But so far they haven’t done that above, just the one gun below. It must be damnable hard to swing the gun up front, and they probably want a full broadside on at least one side. I know I would, if I only had four guns to a broadside.
“But, Lootenant,” Tibbits continued, “the ones below will rake us like hell’s own furies.”
“Aye Chips, but we won’t be below. They don’t know that our Ship is dying. We’ll smash our bows together, red-side to red-side. Everyone, including the cook and her cat, will be hidden away, ready to board from that one quarter. Even if we begin to sink from the impact, it won’t matter, because we’ll all be on their Ship. Meanwhile, down below, they can board our Ship, and they’ll die with the Ship! Can you think of a more fitting end for the bastards?”
“Aye, sir,” said the old carpenter, looking up through his tears with a faint glint of hope in his eye.
“Now, you say we had double shot in the first volley. Did that volley penetrate their hull?”
“Aye, sir. Punched clean through the hull on this side. I don’t know where they went after that.”
“And the other volleys? Did they penetrate?”
“Aye, sir. Best I can tell they did.”
“Good,” said Melville. “And did they have a lot of their Goblan ‘allies’ up in the rigging?”
“No, sir. No, they made it look all peaceful like. Almost no one was in the riggin’. That was most of why we managed to get away. Everyone, curs and ticks both, musta been packed in below decks. You think we mighta chopped them worse than we can know?”
“Oh, aye, Chips. Aye.” Melville knew that he was also speaking to nearly a hundred listening ears as he said,
“Read here the moral roundly writ
For him who into battle goes —
Each soul that hitting hard or hit,
Endureth gross or ghostly foes.
. . . blown by many overthrows,
Half blind with shame, half choked with dirt,
Man cannot tell, but Allah knows
How much the other side was hurt!”
“Dear Lady Elbereth,” said Tibbits, “I hope we made the bastards pay for what they did to poor old Rick Crosby and the others.”
Melville knew that, in the words of Lord Wavell, “When things are going badly in battle the best tonic is to take one’s mind off one’s own troubles by considering what a rotten time one’s opponent must be having.”
“You tell me Chips. Fifty-two 12-pound balls bouncing around inside that Ship. Each one must have created hundreds, thousands of splinters as it busted its way in. You can bet the doggies and their Goblan ‘ticks’ were sucking shot and splinters that day. Aye, we made the bastards pay, and we’ll make them pay even more! Now, wrap up quickly and tell what happened after that.”
“Well, then came the weird part, sir. We ran straight east, ’cause that’s how we lay when we was snookered by that bastard. We spotted a line of Guldur Ships, stretched out to the north and south, all headed west, toward Stolsh. It was an invasion fleet! The biggest damn fleet you ever saw. Mostly transports, runnin’ real slow, but there was a sizable batch of frigates with them, too.
“We figured they must be plannin’ to take out the whole Stolsh Empire in one punch. The one we ran into musta been part o’ their scout screen. Their job bein’ to get rid of anyone who could warn the Stolsh. That’s got to be why they did for us like that, the bastards.
“We veered off from them pretty easy ’cause they was goin’ so slow. We slipped around that vacuum scummer what sucker-punched us, ’cause you know those Guldur can’t sail worth a damn. But with the damage we took we couldn’t put stress on the mainmast or the Keel, and so we couldn’t pull far ahead of the bastard. We seen him signal to his fleet, so he must’ve told them not to worry about us, ’cause we was hurt bad. The bastard probably didn’t want to share any of the loot and glory.
“Lootenant Fielder said we could escape to this world here. That it was our only chance. So here we are, and that bastard of a Guldur vacuum sucker is right behind us, sir.”
“Can Kestrel fight, Chips? Can she handle a boarding action?”
“Aye, maybe she can hold out for a little while. She could take a solid smack in the bows and it might just compress the Keel, but anythin’ from the side is apt to crack that Keel the rest of the way. But how can we fight that bastard’s guns? They swung one of those monsters up front, for a bow chaser, on the lower side, and what we saw would curl your hair. They was shootin’ at us at ranges two times what our 12-pounders can do. How can you fight guns like that?”
“Chips, did they ever hit us?”
“Well, no sir. Except for a few that passed through our sails and our riggin’. One of those took out the sailin’ master.”