Melville looked at the marines crouched at the railing and he looked at the sailors hiding around him as he thought,
Biding God’s pleasure and their chief’s command.
Calm was the sea, but not less calm was that band
Close ranged upon the poop, with bated breath,
But flinching not though eye to eye with death.
The enemy was massed at the railing, a demonic, canine mass of Guldur. A wall of fur the color and hue of every dog on earth, and some never seen on earth. Most of them were crisscrossed with white bandoleers. Furred claws clutched muskets, pistols and swords. Atop it was a sea of slavering snouts, yellow fangs, howling red mouths, and glaring eyes. Above that were the gray furred Goblan ticks, perched on the curs’ backs. Their smaller fists clutched smaller swords, pistols and rifles, with their big-eyed, big-eared heads glaring out from on high.
As this howling mass drew near, a little piece of Kipling occurred, unbidden, to Melville:
But now ye wait at Hell-Mouth Gate
and not in Berkeley Square.
The Ships came within arm’s reach. Grappling hooks flew over from both sides to hold the vessels together in a death grip. But whose death?
Chapter the 6th
Boarding Action:
I Shall Not Die Alone, Alone
High in the wreck I held the cup,
I clutched my rusty sword,
I cocked my tattered feather
To the glory of the Lord.
Not undone were the heaven and earth,
This hollow world thrown up,
Before one man had stood up straight,
And drained it like a cup.
“The Deluge”
G.K. Chesterton
Gunny Von Rito was lying inside the canvas “cutter,” peering through holes in the sailcloth. Just as the enemy was ready to leap at them he touched off the two 12-pounders hidden under the canvas. A bullet-headed, barrel chested, broad shouldered man with a criss-cross pattern of scars on his face and bald head, he looked as though his past assignments included serving as the regimental battering ram. His arms reached out far enough for him to simultaneously touch the Keel charges of both the cannons that flanked him. > “CHO-OOM!” >
The two guns held a double load of grape. The enemy was at point-blank range, with no cover at all. Each cannon belched out twenty-four pounds of half-inch balls, blasting through the sailcloth camouflage and exploding into the approaching mass of Guldur. The big guns recoiled back across the fo’c’sle with stunning force. The sailors had avoided hiding in this area, lest they be smashed by their own guns. The for’ard gun recoiled so hard that it punched through the green-side railing and fell into the sea, where it bobbed once and sank, disappearing into interstellar space.
Melville stood between the cannons, with enemy musket balls whizzing past him. For him the cannon blast was as though he’d blinked his eyes and suddenly the enemy was no longer there. Only a red mist hung in the air where they once stood. An instant before there’d been a barking, slavering mass of enemy troops. Now there was a yelping, whining, groaning, mass of twitching bodies and slick red fur.
Before the stunned enemy could fill the gap, Melville and the men of Westerness began the process of violently abandoning Ship.
Lieutenant Broadax stood in the lower bow, clenching her cigar in her teeth and roaring her defiance at the furry mass confronting her. The curs and their ticks up in the rigging were terrible shots, but the sheer volume of enemy fire had already dropped several of her marines as they crouched behind the railing. Some died where they lay. Some of the wounded crawled back to the for’ard hatch and dropped down. Other wounded marines lay moaning and helpless, sick with fear that they might be left behind on a dying Ship when it was time to retreat.
Broadax hadn’t been able to remove the little spider monkey from her back. Now it clung to her, gibbering with apparent terror, “Eekeekeekeek-ah! eekeekeek-ah! eek-ah! eekeek-ah!” as it waved some silly chunk of a broken spar around with its two upper hands.
The curs were holding their fire for one last point-blank volley. Broadax heard the bark of their commander, which was the signal for them to hit the deck.
Hitting the deck like this was a “dishonorable” act that distressed the curs greatly. But, as Broadax had put it to her marines, “Always remember, boys, incomin’ fire has the right of way!” Most of the Guldur volley whizzed over their heads. Then the men of Westerness leapt up and each marine emptied both barrels into the wall of fur in front of them.
Already the Westerness sailors in Kestrel’s lower-side rigging were down on the deck and scurrying through the hatches. A wave of ticks came across from the enemy rigging, close on their heels. The sailors quickly closed and secured all the hatches except for the one immediately behind the marines in the lower-side bow.
Broadax swung her ax in a glittering, lethal figure-eight, and all the marines put in one solid bayonet thrust. Then they fell back around the hatch that led down into the gundeck below, crouching to pull their wounded and dead with them as they went. They didn’t always succeed. In trying to rescue their wounded, several others were killed or injured, lying in bleeding, red-jacketed heaps.
The ladder to the gundeck below had been removed and the marines simply fell down through the hatchway, one-by-one, trusting the sailors below to catch them. The sailors held a piece of stout sailcloth stretched taut between eight of them. When healthy marines hit the cloth they were unceremoniously flipped off. When wounded marines hit they were rolled gently off where they were immediately carried down to the lower hold, through the plain of Flatland, and into the rear of the main boarding party. There the ship’s boys and the lightly wounded would help them in evacuating to the enemy vessel.
Broadax went last, backing into the hatchway. With her left hand she reached out and tossed two marines back through the open hatch behind her, while cutting the knees out from under a row of Guldur with one powerful sweep of the ax in her right hand. “To the axeman, all supplicants are the same height.”
A wave of fur, fangs and steel came at her and she simply fell back through the hatch, covered with a mountain of snarling, clawing, slashing Guldur. Her ax flashed in an intricate, deadly pattern as she fell. Her spider monkey clung tight with six legs. The club in its two uppermost legs delivered a flurry of blows all around Broadax’s head as they fell backwards, the monkey gibbering all the while. A despairing “Eeeeeek!” trailed behind them along with a wisp of cigar smoke and spray of blood.
Broadax’s body, covered with a mass of curs and ticks, hit the outstretched canvas held taut by the sailors.
“Thump! Eeekeekeek!”
The weight was far too great and the impact snatched the canvas from the sailors’ hands. The whole mess hit the deck with a sickening thump. “Whumph! Urr . . . urrk . . . urkk?” A flurry of bayonets skewered the mass of Guldur and Goblan, flicking them off of the pile like pitchforks might toss hay bales.
The Guldur above hesitated for one split second as they looked down into the open hatch. The pile of bodies shuddered and shifted as Broadax struggled to her feet and staggered out from under the hatchway with a small mountain on her back. Her marines continued to flick curs and ticks off of her. Her monkey broke free of the clinging attackers and renewed its flurry of blows with its chunk of wood, slapping away anything that approached Broadax’s head, while its sharp teeth snapped at anything in reach.
“Ye damned blueboys!” Broadax bellowed.
She pitched one hapless Goblan against the bulkhead with her left hand (“Thump! Urk!”), thrust the haft of her ax back and down into the gut of a Guldur (“Thud! Huuuu!”), then thrust the blade up into the conjunction of several others (“Yelp! Ark!”) as she smashed her face into a hairy dog face, extinguishing her cigar in an enemy’s eye (“Aaaargh!”).
“Ye only had one job,” she howled, continuing to harangue the unfortunate sailors. “Just one thing. Hold the damn tarp. Was that too damned hard fer ye?”
“Mumph? Mumph!” her monkey added. Its comment muffled by the Goblan neck in its mouth.
The wounded and most of the sailors had already retreated down through the next hatch, into the hold. After one brief hesitation the Guldur continued to hurl themselves through the maindeck hatch, and the marines continued to stab and slash into the mass of Guldur and Goblan bodies as they fell and slid down. Again the marines backed into the next hatchway, falling through one-by-one, dragging their dead and wounded with them into the lower hold.
Once again Broadax was the last one through. This time there were fewer Guldur besieging her, since the first hatchway formed a bottleneck that limited the number who could come through. She actually had the situation reasonably under control as she chucked a wounded marine back into the hatch behind her and fell back into the hold with only a handful of enemy clinging to her.