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.He looked at the Marine,and the captain shrugged."Never seems to fail, Your Highness.The place youleast want to get hit, is the one you can count on the enemy finding." Heshook his head."She's got quite a few of the Carnan aboard, and they alreadytook a hammering when we lostSea Skimmer.""Don't count your money when it's still sitting on the table," Roger replied,then turned to Julian."All ships," he said."Close with the pirates toleeward and board.We'll go toJohnny's assistance ourselves.""Your Highness," Pahner began, "considering that our entire mission is to getyou home alive, don't you think that perhaps it might be a bit wiser to letsomeone else go "Roger had just turned back to the Marine to argue the point when Pahner'shelmet visor automatically darkened to protect the captain's vision.Rogerdidn't know whether or notPrince John's Marine detachment had originally set up a plasma cannon for their anti-coll defense system.If they had, he thought with a strange detachment, theywere probably going to hear about it at length from Pahner and the sergeantmajor.But it was also possible that they'd switched out the bead cannon atthe last minute while the rest of the crew worked on repairs to the schooner'scrippled rigging.Not that it mattered.Raider Number Four had managed to getaround behindJohnny's stern, where her deadly carronade broadside wouldn't bear.And in achievingthat position of advantage, the pirate vessel had putitself exactly where the schooner's crew wanted it.The Marines' plasma cannons could take out modern main battle tanks, and ifHooker's bead cannon hadn't seemed to add much to her carronades' carnage, no onePage 76 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.htmlwould ever say that aboutPrince John's after armament.The round ripped straight down the center of the targetship, just above main deck level.It sliced away masts, rigging, bulwarks, and the majority of the pirates whohad assembled on deck in anticipation of boarding.What was worse, in a way,was the thermal bloom that preceded the round.The searing heat touched the entire surface of the ship to flame in a tinyslice of a second, and the roaring furnace became an instant sliver of Hell,an inferno afloat on an endless sea that offered no succor to its victims.Those unfortunate souls below decks, "shielded" from the instant incinerationof the boarding party, had a few, eternal minutes longer to shriek before thebombard's powder magazine exploded and sent the shattered, flaming wreckmercifully into the obliterating depths."I thought we wanted to capture the ships intact," Roger said almost mildly."What would you have done, Your Highness?" Pahner asked."Yeah, we want tocapture the ships, and recapture the convoy, if we can.ButPrince John, obviously, would prefer to avoid being boarded herself.""And apparently the Lemmar agree with that preference," D'Nal Cord observed."Look at that."He raised an upper arm and pointed.One of the six raider vessels driftedhelplessly, completely dismasted while the blood oozing down her side dyed thewater around her.Her deck was piled and heaped with the bodies of her crew,and it was obvious that no more than a handful of them could still be alive.Three more raiders each had one of the flotilla's other schooners alongside,and now thatHooker's carronades were no longer bellowing, Roger could hear the crackle of smallarms fire as the K'Vaernian boarders stormed up and over them.Prince John's plasma cannon had accounted for a fifth raider, but the sixth and finalpirate vessel had somehow managed to come through the brutal melee with itsrigging more or less intact, and it was making off downwind just as fast asits shredded canvas would allow."Do we let them go, or close with them?" the prince asked."Close," Pahner said."We want to capture the ships, and I'm not a greatbeliever in giving a fleeing enemy an even break.They either surrender, orthey die."* * *"They're not letting us go," Vunet said."Would you?" Cies shot back with a grunt of bitter laughter as he lookedaround the deck.The crew was hastily trying to repair some of the damage, but it was a futiletask.There was just too much of it.Those damned bombards of theirs werehellishly accurate.Unbelievably accurate.They'd smashedRage of Lemmar from stem to stern and cut away over half her running rigging,in the process.Coupled with the way they'd shredded the sails themselves, the damage to theship's lines and line-handlers had slowed their escape to a crawl.The bombards had done nearly as much damage to the crew, as well.Thequarterdeck was awash in blood and bodies, and the crew had put a gang ofslaves to work pitching the offal over the side.The enemy's round shot hadbeen bad enough, but the splinters it had ripped from the hull had been evenworse.Some of them had been almost two-thirds as long as Cies himself, andone of them had gutted his original helmsman like a filleted fish.Nor wasthat the only crewman who'd been shredded by bits and pieces of his own ship.Some of that always happened when the bombards got a clear shot, but Cies hadnever imagined anything like this.Normal bombard balls were much slower than the Hell-forged missiles that hadsavaged his vessel.Worse, he'd never seen any ship that could pour out firePage 77 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.htmllike water from a pump, and the combination of high-velocity shot and itssheer volume had been devastating beyond his worst nightmares of carnage.Now theRage was trying to limp to the south and away from the vengeful demons behindher.He'd hoped that with one of their own crippled (by what, for all intentsand purposes, had been a single lucky shot) the other four might have let hisown ship go
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