Eddie unholstered Ed Piazza’s HP-35, leaned over the heavy-timbered pulpit of the weapon position and, both hands on the pistol’s grip, began unloading its thirteen-round magazine down among the pirate-crowded thwarts of the barca-longa.
Bodies started falling, men cursing. Not more than half of Eddie’s shots were hits, and less than half of those were lethal or even extremely serious. But the sudden and unexpected volume of fire from so strange-sounding a weapon—each report as sharp and spiteful as a cracking whip made of lightning—almost froze the pirates. In the very next second, they were diving for cover as they became aware of the murderous swath the weapon was cutting among their crew.
Eddie fished in his ammo pouch for the next magazine as he pressed the magazine release. The old box slipped out just in time for him to run the next one up and into the handle—and the first pirate face appeared over the gunwale.
Fortunately, it wasn’t a face alone that could kill him—although this one is damned near ugly enough!—but rather, the weapon-filled hands that were soon to follow it. Eddie thumbed the slide-lock, brought up the pistol as the slide rammed forward and primed it, and fired twice into that ferocious, nearly animalistic face. At a range of two feet.
Eddie did not see the effect of the bullets. The weapon bucked and the face disappeared. He leaned back out over the pulpit-mount to unload the rest of his second magazine down into the barca-longa—and discovered just how combat-hardened and reactive pirate crews were.
Had he not stumbled a bit on his weakening left leg, the first volley of counter-fire from the pirate musketeers below him would probably have been lethal, or at least debilitating. As it was, one ball came close enough to audibly whisper past his right ear. Tempted to duck down, Eddie forced himself to assess the scene in the boat: no other readied pieces. The rest of the pirates were either reloading or getting on the Jacob’s ladders to board.
Eddie steadied the HP-35 with both hands, tracked along the men who were reloading the muskets and two-tapped each one of them. Again, after the first two seconds, pirates were diving in every direction for cover. And just as the HP-35’s slide came back and stayed back, two pairs of grimy hands came up over the gunwale, one holding a long-wicked looking life.
Eddie gulped, ejected the second magazine, fished around for the third one. He took a quick step back—
—and ran into buff-coated Lieutenant Gallagher. “We’ll take it from here, if’t please you, Commander.”
Eddie nodded as two other Wild Geese pushed past and slashed at the grimy hands with their sabers. Shrieks of agony plummeted toward the water as the Irish mercenaries drew their pepperboxes and, hugging low to the rim of the weapon-mount, sent their deadly waves of fire down into the barca-longa. Cries rose up in three different languages to back oars and get the hell away from the steamship.
Eddie half stumbled down the stairs to the main deck, where Svantner was running toward him, a hand extended in concern. Eddie waved it off. “That runner—that boy—he needs help. He was—”
“Already attended to, sir. And you? Are you unhurt.”
“Yes, damn it. Now stand still for a second and report. Are we at full steam?”
“Yes, sir. We should be able to pull away and—”
Looking over Svantner’s right shoulder, scanning to see how his ship was doing, Eddie caught sight of the rear end of a piragua disappearing beneath the arc of the starboard quarter gunwale, heard the Big Shot swivel gun covering that section of the ship fire. Bodies splashed in the water, but not all of them seemed to have been hit by the immense gun. It looked like some of the piragua’s crew had jumped in. And Eddie realized: the piraguas were too low to the water to have any chance of putting boarders on Intrepid’s decks. Which meant, if they closed in this far, and their crews were jumping out—
“Spar torpedo! Sink that piragua! Any gun that can bear! Sink—!”
Eddie, running stiffly in that direction as he shouted the warning, heard a dull th-tunk, as if a spear or hook had embedded itself in the hull timbers. The piragua, rowed at speed, had probably lodged a prow-spike into Intrepid. “Shoot the torped—the petard!” Eddie changed in mid-sentence, realizing that older word would be more immediately understood. “Or shoot the boom it’s on! Just shoot—!”
The Big Shot spoke again, but its discharge was drowned out by a roar that shook the deck out from under Eddie’s feet and sent part of the quarterdeck’s stanchion-and-bedroll sides flying up among the mizzen sheets. The hazard bell began ringing in engineering and as Eddie picked himself up off the deck, he couldn’t be sure if he was staggering or Intrepid was listing.