“Good. Lead Mr. Silva to the magazine. Take two of these other men. We need weapons and ammunition! We’ll pass well enough up here for now, Mr. Cook and I.”
Silva knew she meant to guard against treachery. He wasn’t sure how she’d do that, but he also knew it would be pointless and time-consuming to argue with her. “All right, Miss Tucker, we’ll be back in a flash!” He turned to Brassey and two of the men who’d been hauling the rope. “C’mon!”
“Fire!” bellowed Rajendra. With a stuttering, rolling, earsplitting bark of thunder, Ajax vomited an uneven broadside port and starboard. Silva and his pickup team of commandos vanished in the swirling smoke.
“Follow me,” Brassey cried. As he’d explained, Ajax had two magazines. The one they sought was aft, beneath the orlop and essentially below the waterline, which afforded it some protection from enemy shot. They met a steady stream of grim-faced, sweaty boys hurrying back to the guns, charges in their pass boxes. Reaching the magazine, they found it virtually deserted, the powder boys having already come and gone. The first compartment had a lantern illuminating racks of muskets. Silva was surprised and joyful to see the Doom Whomper secured at the far end of one rack along with his shooting pouch and belt. From the belt still hung his holster, magazine pouches, cutlass, and ’03 bayonet in its scabbard. The bayonet was a respectable “sword” in its own right.
“Hot damn!” he hissed, wrapping the belt around his waist and clipping it in place. He then grabbed his massive rifle. He could see movement in an adjoining compartment through a thick pane of wavy glass. The gunner and his mates, most likely, preparing charge bags.
“Whose side’s the gunner on?” Silva asked.
“I don’t know,” Brassey confessed.
“Okay. You fellas get a double armload o’ them muskets and some cartridge boxes. Anything in ’em?”
“There should be a battle load of forty rounds apiece,” one of the men supplied. “The door is usually locked and guarded.”
“Huh. Well, gather all you can carry and take ’em up.” He grinned. “If anybody asks, say it’s Billingsly’s orders!” While the men did as he said, Silva turned to Brassey. “Loose shot and powder? How ’bout musket flints?”
Brassey pointed. “Those small kegs hold balls and flints, but powder will be in there,” he said, referring to the space where the gunner was.
Silva nodded. Taking off the Imperial ordinary seaman’s striped shirt, he quickly knotted the sleeves and dropped two thirty-pound kegs of shot and a single keg of flints into it. Tying it all together, he handed it to Brassey, who staggered under the weight. “You handle that?”
“I’ll manage,” said the youngster.
Seeing the other men festooned with muskets, cartridge boxes, and a few baldrics with cutlasses and bayonets, Silva sent the group on its way. “I’ll get powder,” he said, shooing them off.
Another shattering broadside shook the ship. Any minute now, the compartment would fill with powder boys again. Hmm. Backing out of the magazine, he slipped into a compartment across the passageway, leaving the door open a crack so he could see. He smelled something pungent and glanced behind. “Well, well,” he muttered. “Rum, by God!” One of the short, thick black glass bottles must have cracked and soaked the padding around it. There was a sack hanging on a hook and he filled it with the bottles, leaving two aside. Pulling the cork on one, he took a long swig. “Ghaaa!” he hissed appreciatively. Not great, but not bad. He wondered what they used for sugar? Lowering the bottle, he took a length of light line that had probably once bound the padding together and stuck one end into the bottle. Then he wrapped it around the open mouth and tied it. Nothing to do now but wait.
Soon, the boys had all apparently come and gone and he slipped back across the passageway. He held both bottles by their necks between the fingers of his left hand, and drew the cutlass with his right. Anyone who saw the cutlass would know it didn’t belong. It was longer, straighter-and much better-than anything like it on the ship. He shrugged. Time to do his thing. He’d behaved himself long enough.
“Open up!” Silva growled at the inner door. A short man with spectacles and the almost universal Imperial mustache opened the heavy door and peered out. Silva drove the cutlass into his chest and pushed his way inside. Without a sound, the man slid off the blade and onto the deck when Silva lowered the cutlass and regarded the other man. He was bigger and might require more exercise.
He screamed shrilly.
So much for first impressions, Silva thought, and pinned the man to the bulkhead. The gunner, or mate-whichever he was-screamed even louder. “Well, shit!” Dennis hissed indignantly, skewering the man again. “I’ve seen bunnies make manlier noises when a dog gets ’em by the ass!” Still sobbing, but mortally wounded, the big man fell to the deck when Silva freed the blade.
Quickly, he laid the cutlass on the gunner’s table and hung the rope and rum bottle from a hook on the beam overhead. Snatching up a fifty-pound keg of powder, he hurried to place it in the passageway. He knew he was running out of time. Imperial drill for deterring mountain fish seemed to be three broadsides, and the next would fire any minute. He didn’t know what would happen after that. He doubted the powder boys would return the pass boxes to the magazine-there was limited space inside, after all-but somebody was liable to come down. He ran back inside, picked up another barrel of powder, and smashed it against the deck.
“I thought I might find you here,” came a voice from the armory compartment.
Silva looked up. “Well, how do, Mr. Truelove,” he said. “For some reason, I thought you might too.” He nodded at the pistol held casually in Truelove’s hand. “You gonna shoot that in here?”
Truelove grimaced at the pistol and slid it on his belt, where it hung by a hook. “I don’t suppose I really need it. I’m actually quite good with a sword. I’ve seen you use one, you know, at Baalkpan, before I gave you that little tap on the head. You fight quite… dynamically and enthusiastically… but your sword work is just that: work. To me, it is play.”
“Why’d you conk me then?”
Truelove shrugged. “Unsportsmanlike, I know, but necessary at the time. Perhaps now we might meet each other properly?”
“Sure. Just a couple o’ questions first. ’Twixt gentlemen.”
Truelove nodded. “Of course. Adversaries should know each other at times like this, and I already know a good deal about you.”
“How did you know I’d be here?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Call it intuition. You are a resourceful man. I thought it likely you might take advantage of the situation facing the ship. I don’t know what you hope to accomplish, but I’ve no doubt you have a plan. I almost regret thwarting you. I view you as a fellow professional in a way, and suspect I would have enjoyed seeing your plan unfold.”
So, thought Silva, he’s here on a whim. Everything else might still be going swell. He had no doubt Truelove was better with a sword, since Silva had no proper training at all. A real fight wouldn’t do, and besides, it might take too long and draw too much attention. A moment earlier he’d been in a rush. Now he needed to stall. “Why Billingsly?” he asked conversationally. “A fella like you’d go just as far on the right side, I figger.”
Truelove laughed. “Well, let us just say that I had gone quite as far as I could in His Majesty’s Secret Service, and I like money. Yes, indeed.” He nodded at Silva’s cutlass and reached for his sword. “Shall we be about it then?”
“Sure, but there’s just one thing you may not know about me,” Silva said, shaking his head with a conspiratorial grin and a prolonged display of being a man with a great secret.
“Oh?”
The third broadside erupted, jarring the ship and making the lantern in the adjoining compartment jump. Silva launched himself like a torpedo and struck Truelove in the chest with his head before the man could clear his blade. They sprawled together in the armory compartment, and quicker than his opponent could recover, Silva’s mighty fists were already slamming into his face like pile drivers. Truelove was still trying to free his sword, but with six inches of the blade free, Dennis paused long enough to grasp the man’s hand in his and wrench it to the side, breaking several of Truelove’s fingers against the guard and snapping the blade off at the top of the scabbard. He pitched the twisted guard in among the musket stocks. The last thing Truelove might have heard before darkness took him was Silva’s final, gasping explanation: “Sometimes I can be a little unsportsmanlike too.”