Free Abney Park's The Wrath Of Fate by Robert Brown

answered with mock pride, “Well, I put things into motion that ended him. People are easy to motivate, and motivating pirates towards revenge is particularly easy.”
    The doctor laid his gray fragile head on the rough pillow, “And I feel no guilt. If he hadn’t made so many enemies in the short time he’d been captain, he wouldn’t have been so easy to dispatch.” He closed his eyes, and mumbled, “Imagine the damage he would have done if the world’s most powerful weapon had been left in his hands.”

THE BATTLE OF ARCOT

 
    To hear history books tell the story, the Battle of Arcot was a heroic example of an underdog, Robert Clive, fighting against insurmountable odds. By “using his clever wit”, he “overcomes insurmountable odds and saves the day”. In truth, the odds were grossly in his favor. Robert Clive took more than the city of Arcot with more than five thousand soldiers, easily defeating a part-time militia, seizing food, supplies, wells, and enslaving the city in the name of the East India Company. By holding the city of Arcot, the British Crown divided the forces of Chanda Sahib, which would weaken India’s defenses against this conquering nation. Ultimately this would prove to be the fall of India as an independent nation for next one hundred years to come.
    Even if you overlook the military advantage of holding the city of Arcot, you still have a city being held by an evil empire. I’m not passing judgment on England; to the best of my knowledge most countries have been “Evil Empires” at some time or another. This was their era. I lived in India as a small boy while my mother did anthropological fieldwork there, so when conversation in the map room turned to “what shall we do next” it occurred to me that if we overturned that one battle, we could overturn decades of the slavery of India.
    As we appeared over the city in 1751, Clive’s fortifications of the city easily held out against the surrounding forces of Chanda Sahib.
    From above, the city looked like the geometric pattern of a Persian carpet. A patchwork of walls and buildings with circular towers placed at each corner, British cannons bristled from the tower sides like points of stars. There were square courtyards, with little flower-shaped wells or fountains in the middle, and little patchwork-like buildings, crawling with people. Lines of regimented soldiers could be seen placed around crowds of the native city dwellers.
    We were still very high up, and we could see tents to the southwest, and barracks, and the war beasts of Chanda’s forces. Not a small force, but it was ill-equipped to withstand the British cannons Clive had placed in the many towers around the city. Even if Chanda could get to the walls without the cannons pummeling his soldiers into the bloody sand, all he could do is stand at the gate of the city and knock.
    The hot wind of summer dusk was blowing little spirals of dust below us as we slipped over the walls of the city toward the siege camps. Boys, tiny in the distance below us, ran along the city walls yelling up at us. Some met the butt of a rifle from Clive’s border guards.
    We descended our rope ladders at gunpoint in the middle of a empty elephant paddock. Ironically, one of our Victorian sailors had learned to speak Hindi when he was stationed in the still occupied India one hundred years in the future. He had a tough time convincing turbaned soldiers that we shared a common enemy, and were here to help. It was obvious that we could help, our flying warship was holding Chanda’s soldiers in awe. Our skin color and accents were no different from the enemy’s (with a few exceptions among the crew) but I think in the end it was our clothes that convinced them we had nothing to do with the East India Company.
    That night we met with Chanda and his generals. We told them we were sent from a country called “Imairika”, and that the English were our common foe. Hell, it might have been true at