“You heard the Skipper,” the gunner said, just to be sure, and Ruhsyl nodded.
“Aye, so I did,” he murmured back, and waited a moment longer, feeling the rhythm of the schooner’s motion in his brain and bone. And then thirty years at sea, coupled with five long years of intensive gunnery training and an inherent sense of movement no mere training could have imparted, came together behind those dreamy eyes, and he stepped smartly to the side and jerked the lanyard.
The friction primer worked perfectly, and the 14-pounder bellowed, spewing out a smoke cloud that shredded instantly on the wind.
* * *
Truskyt Mahkluskee pursed his lips as dark brown gun smoke spouted from the Charisian’s pivot gun. She’d opened fire at a greater range than he’d hoped for, but at least he’d been right to anticipate that she’d come to a southwesterly heading to hold the wind and the weather gauge. Barring some catastrophic damage aloft, Serpent should be able to keep her opponent in the play of her starboard guns—and both of her 18-pounders. Of course, at this range and in these seas, the chance of actually hitting the bastards wasn’t especially good. Still.…
“As you bear, Klynmywlyr!” he called to the sandy-haired gun captain crouched over the aftermost 18-pounder’s breech, firing lanyard in hand, and—
Something punched through the brig’s jib. It plunged into the water forty yards off her larboard bow.
And exploded.
Both 18-pounders fired as one, like an echo of that explosion, but Mahkluskee felt the blood draining out of his face as the water spout rose on the far side of his ship.
* * *
“Not so bad, Sir,” Stywyrt Mahlyk remarked thoughtfully. Admiral Sarmouth’s coxswain—who’d somehow become Lieutenant Aplyn-Ahrmahk’s coxswain—stood in his customary position, festooned with pistols and cutlasses, arms crossed, watching Hektor’s back. “Mind, I’d not be telling Wyllym that. Man’s head’s already too big for his hat!”
Hektor snorted, but Mahlyk had a point. In fact, that first shot had landed remarkably close to its target, and he smiled thinly as the SNARC’s remotes projected Mahkluskee’s reaction to it onto his contact lenses.
Instead of the 14-pound round shot or 8-pound shell the smoothbore 14-pounder had fired, the new, rifled weapon fired a cylindrical solid shot that weighed almost forty-five pounds … or a 30-pound explosive shell packed with just over five pounds of black powder and an improved version of Ehdwyrd Howsmyn’s original percussion fuses. It was longer ranged, heavier, and far, far more destructive than the old “long fourteen” had ever hoped to be.
Serpent’s forward gunports flashed fire, belching their own smoke clouds, and he watched the round shot slash across the wave crests in explosions of white. Like the 14-pounder, they had more than enough range to reach their target. What they didn’t have was Petty Officer Ruhsyl, and the Dohlaran gun captains hadn’t fired at exactly the same moment. One shot actually plowed into the water fifty or sixty yards short of Fleet Wing’s side. The second, fired at a different point in the brig’s roll, went high, whimpering across the ship without hitting a thing and plunging into the sea at least two hundred yards beyond the schooner.
Not good enough, Commander Mahkluskee, Hektor thought coldly.
* * *
“Shit!”
Unlike Mahkluskee, Lieutenant Achlee couldn’t hide his reaction as the Charisian shell threw up that telltale column of water. He wheeled around to his commanding officer, eyes wide, and opened his mouth, but Mahkluskee’s sharp headshake shut it again before anything else came out.
“See if you can edge a little closer to the wind,” the lieutenant commander told the grizzled seaman on the wheel, and showed his teeth in a thin smile. “I think we’d best get as close to her as we can.”
“Aye, aye, Sir,” the helmsman acknowledged, but he was an experienced man. His eyes met his captain’s with the knowledge that Serpent was getting no closer to Fleet Wing than Fleet Wing chose to allow. No square-rigged vessel could match a schooner’s weatherliness at the best of times, and Serpent was slower, to boot.
“Get forward, Karmaikel,” Mahkluskee continued, turning back to his first lieutenant. “I want you as far away from me as possible in case something … untowards happens. Besides—” his smile was even thinner than the one he’d shown the helmsman “—it can’t hurt to have your presence encouraging Klynmywlyr’s efforts. Just don’t joggle his elbow.”
* * *
“That’s right, lads,” Wyllym Ruhsyl encouraged as the fresh charge went down the barrel and the loader indexed the shell’s studs into the barrel’s rifling grooves. It took a fraction of a second longer than simply inserting a round shot or a smoothbore shell, but this gun crew had fired well over a hundred rounds since they’d acquired their new weapon. The loading number could have seated the rifling studs in the dark in the middle of a driving rain—in fact, they’d practiced blindfolded to simulate doing exactly that—and the shell slid smoothly down onto the bagged charge. A gentle stroke with a rammer settled it against the charge, a fresh primer went into the vent, and Ruhsyl reached for the lanyard.
“Clear!” he snapped, and waited long enough to be sure every member of the crew was safely out of the way.
Then he bent over the breech again, lining up the dispart sights which only the Charisian Navy used, watching the muzzle of his gun rise to point only at sky, then slowly dip until it pointed only at sea. The trick was to catch it at precisely the right point in the cycle—the point at which the inevitable delay in the charge’s ignition would coincide with the moment the muzzle aligned perfectly on the Dohlaran brig. It helped immeasurably that Ehdwyrd Howsmyn’s quality control assured such uniform burn times on the primers supplied to the fleet, but the best quality control in the world couldn’t guarantee truly uniform times. There was always some variation, and the only “fire control” available was an experienced human eye and sense of timing.
As it happened, Wyllym Ruhsyl had both of those.
* * *
Fresh smoke blossomed from the Charisian’s waist, and a second shell screamed through the air. This time, the gunners had fired a little high, however. The projectile made a sharp, flat slapping sound as it punched through Serpent’s main course and exploded at least a hundred yards clear.
Maybe that first shot was a fluke, Mahkluskee told himself. It could’ve been.
He told himself that very firmly … and never believed it for a moment.
* * *
“Shan-wei!” Ruhsyl snarled as his second shot went high.
“Told you not to miss.” Zhowaltyr had to raise his voice, but his dry tone came through Ruhsyl’s protective earplugs quite well. “Not like those shells grow on trees out here, y’know!”
The gun captain glared at him, but wisely didn’t reply.
“Load!” he barked instead, and his crew sprang into motion once more.
* * *
“Fire!” Jyrdyn Klynmywlyr snapped, and the 18-pounders bellowed afresh.
The stinking cloud of gun smoke streamed back across the deck, and he squinted through it, straining to see the fall of the shot. At this range, there wasn’t much time for the smoke to clear, but he saw the flash of white as at least one of the round shot went bouncing and bounding across the waves well astern of the Charisian schooner.