Free Ships from the West by Paul Kearney Page B

to a baulk of broken timber that transfixed him. He writhed there in astonishment, grasping the bloody stave that now protruded from his belly, wound round with blue innards.
    Crowds of the beetle-warriors swarmed across the
Pontifidad
like cockroaches crawling over some vast putrefying carcass. There was no escape for the survivors of the ship’s company still on deck. They stampeded for the hatches. Hawkwood found himself in the midst of a crowd that bore him along towards the quarterdeck companionway. He fell to his knees, buffeted by the frenzied sailors, but elbowed a space and laboured upright. His numbed mind followed him down the companionway with the others, and at the foot of the companionway he paused, looking about him.
    Battle lanterns still burning in the tween decks, though they hung at an angle with the list of the ship. It was suffocatingly hot, and the smoke smarted his eyes, racked coughs out of his heaving chest. He opened the door which led to the officers’ quarters aft, and was met by a hungry rush of flame that tightened the skin of his face and shrivelled his eyebrows. Nothing could live there. He slammed shut the smoking door, and headed forward with no thought in his mind except to escape the flames below and the carnage above.
    He passed clots of wounded men who had dragged themselves down here to die, and slipped in their blood as the ship listed further. They must have holed her below the waterline somehow. Then the space between decks opened out into the middle gun deck. Hawkwood found himself in a dark nightmare lit by battle lanterns, crowded with panicked figures who were setting off the great guns in a disorderly broadside. They had something to fire at now, but their elevation was too high; the shot was passing over the hulls of the enemy craft grappled alongside. Hawkwood screamed at them to depress their pieces, and when they stared at him blankly he seized a handspike himself and wedged the nearest culverin up with a quoin so that the muzzle tilted downwards. It was loaded, and he stabbed the lighted match into the touch-hole with a savage joy. The gun jumped back with a roar, and beyond the port he glimpsed a spout of broken timbers.
    But up through the gunport there squeezed now a glinting mass of the enemy, their pincers splintering wood. Hawkwood clubbed them back with the handspike, but they were squirming in through every port on the deck. Men left the guns and began fighting hand-to-hand, crouched under the low deckbeams. It looked like a battle fought far below the earth, in the subterranean chamber of a steaming mine.
    Part of the deck about the main hatch above their heads collapsed in a cataclysm of burning timber. It came down on the gun crews like a wooden avalanche. With it fell a mass of the glinting enemy. The beetle-warriors rolled like balls, righted themselves, and began laying about with hardly a pause. The awful pincers lopped off men’s limbs and the black armour was impenetrable save at the joints. The gun crews fell back. Hawkwood tried to rally them but his voice was lost in the tumult. Stooping under the deck beams, he struggled forward again. Another hatch leading downwards. He followed it, borne along by a terrified mob of gunners with the same end in mind.
    The orlop. They were below the waterline now, close to the hold.
    ‘ will die down here,
Hawkwood thought. When a ship’s crew was forced below the guns, she was finished.
    There was water sloshing about his ankles. Somehow the enemy had holed the ship, attacking from the sea as well as the air. The
Ponlifidad
was dying, and when she gave up the struggle against the pitiless waves she would take hundreds of trapped men with her. The pride of Hebrion, she had been. Hard to grasp that such a vessel could be destroyed, and not by gunfire or storm, but by - by what?
    His hands were agony to him now. Hawkwood staggered out of the way of the crowd coming down the hatch and fell to his side. The salt water