Blackjack Wayward (The Blackjack Series) (8 page)

One of them stepped forward, barking orders in their strange language, something Drovani’s translation spell failed to pick up, and an instant later, that man’s face exploded in blood. I heard the report of a heavy weapon above me, and, daring a glance, I saw Morlocki and Brutalis hanging from the damaged rigging, their weapons spurting fire and smoke. Morlocki was hanging from a yard arm that was dangerously curved from his heavy bulk. Brutalis used his feet to hold on to two separate ropes, his body inverted, firing two massive hand cannon more suited for a big person like Morlocki or I than for his smallish frame.

One after the other, Vershani dropped from their gunfire, and I took the moment’s pause and rushed forward, swinging the spar like a bo staff. Just as I charged, the mummy guy showed again, coming up the stairs like a dervish, his blades flashing and dropping all opposition in his path. He saw my maneuver and charged from my flank, doubling the effect of my attack.

A man with a spear stepped toward me, aiming his weapon at my chest, but his head exploded from a well-placed Brutalis shot and his body crumpled at my feet. Behind him, another aimed a rifle at me, but before he could fire, the man’s chest erupted in gunfire, and he collapsed.

Between Morlocki and Brutalis firing away and the mummy guy charging to my left, the Vershani were softened for my rush, and some even turned in retreat. I crashed into the bunch, feeling the spar bend in my arms. I knocked over the first few, crushing one’s head under my heavy boot. Those who didn’t clear out, I pinned back against the gunwale. I pressed with all my strength. The wooden barrier gave, cracking outward, and the men I pinned against the spar went with it, falling off the back of the enemy ship into the murky depths. Not many of our opponents were hurt or down, but my charge had the effect of clearing out the deck just enough for my companions to join me. Morlocki thumped on the deck, and Brutalis swung his form upright and landed beside us. The cloth-wrapped warrior stabbed one, then another, and a third in as many seconds, coming up to us. We formed a semi-circle, still surrounded, but now four of us, facing off against ten times as many.

“Not good,” Brutalis said, reloading one weapon with his left hand, tail, and right foot, and firing away with the other gun. His pistols were massive things, and each bullet fired was the size of one of my fingers. When they found their target, they blew a hole in the chest of the man they hit, travelled through his chest, and hit the one behind him. Morlocki had one weapon, much larger, but it fired a steady stream of flechette missiles instead of bullets. It was a machine gun on steroids, shooting thousands of those little darts, covering our enemy in a blanket of pain. The mummy pirate had his two machetes, and anytime an enemy got close to them, they flashed with deadly accuracy, splashing blood across the deck. I had the remnants of the spar, now just enough to pass for a two-handed club or a bat. I stabbed the jagged end outward and swung it with none of the skill of my companions, but when I hit someone, they felt it. Several of the Vershani got wise and engaged some energy shields from their copper-stained bracers. They soon had formed a front rank shield wall, with a dozen jagged tridents lining the top.

“Not good,” Brutalis said again, prompting Morlocki to look around desperately. We were moments away from the Vershani being organized enough to charge us, and when they did, it was over.

The big ape-fellow leaned over the fractured railing behind us, the front bulwark of the ship’s bow. Without another word, he hopped over the side and disappeared.

“That’s an idea,” Brutalis shouted, emptying his guns and following his partner. The mummy guy went next, and I went last, hurling the chunk of spar to slow down the rushing Vershani, hoping something would catch our fall.

We landed on the forepeak, or beak, at the base of the figurehead, which on the Vershani ship was a pronounced structure, fifty feet high and arched in the form of a wicked-looking serpent bearing a feral scowl. It would only take the warriors above us a few moments to realize what had happened, leaving us with few precious seconds to find a way to safety.

Brutalis was way ahead of me. He was fumbling with the barrel of one his weapons, twisting it with his tail, making it wider and wider with each turn, until the barrel was wide enough to fit my fist. Doing the same to the other weapon, he set his aim at the bulkhead directly in front of us.

“Brace me,” he said, and once Morloki and I held him up, he opened fire. Pieces of the ship’s hull exploded outward, as if hit by a howitzer. The three of us were buried with shards and chunks of ship, but once we threw the debris aside and the smoke cleared, we noticed a huge, gaping hole in the side of the ship.

“Not bad for a little ball of fur” I said, patting Brutalis on the shoulder and moving past him to enter, when the mummy guy rushed through first. He was fast and agile, slipping past me like a squirrel on a tree. Brutalis went next, then I did, and Morloki came last, needing me to pull him in as the Vershani pelted his heavy armor with gunfire. We were inside a small storage room, cramped with boxes, sacks, and jars stacked high against the walls, leaving only a narrow hallway to maneuver through.

“Follow me,” the mummy man said, with a voice that was familiar, leading through the winding pathway amongst the storage.

“Wait a minute,” I snapped. “Who the hell are you?”

The man turned to me and shrugged, slipping off the face mask from the swathed wrappings that held it in place.

It was Drovani, flashing me a silly grin.

“Why the disguise?”

“I can hardly trust these fellows,” he said, motioning to Brutalis and Morloki, “to tell between myself and the others.”

I smiled. “I trust you this much.” I held up my index finger and spaced less than an inch apart.

“Soon, we will be great friends,” he said, “but we must hurry. They will take her to the escape launch, and we won’t be able to pursue then.”

“Her?” Brutalis said, dialing down his pistols.

“Come,” he said, and he rushed on. He and Brutalis could make it through the alleyway amongst the stored goods without problems, but Morloki and I were too big and clumsy, and as we went, we shoved things aside, without care for spilling what they might contain. Above, the gunfire continued unabated as the Vershani made a final stand against our forces.

“If he does anything funny,” I said to Morloki as we muscled through, “kill him.”

He smiled, motioning to Brutalis. “That’s his job.”

“Oh?”

“Cap’n told Brutalis to watch him. She don’t trust the silly gold man. He goes over if he tries anything funny.”

I threw across a folded sail, hurling it into a bunch of jars with a loud crash, clearing the way to the door.

“And you?”

“I was told to watch you.”

He patted my shoulder and ran past to meet the others by the door.

Through the door lay the Vershani ship’s main gun deck. The rows of guns were rolled in and stowed neatly, and the portholes, nearly invisible from outside the ship, were clearly delineated, denoting the skill of their craftsmanship. The entire deck was enclosed, lit only by hanging oil lamps interspersed along the length of the ship that jostled along with the fight above.

The deck was guarded by only a few Vershani warriors, and by the time I reached my companions, our opposition was dead. We could hear the ongoing gunfight on the main deck from a nearby stairwell that led above, to the carnage, and farther below decks as well. The gun crews were here, on this deck, but cringing at the far end, in fear of our wrath. Upon further inspection, we saw they were a different species altogether. The huddled mass was a wretched mess, dressed in rags and swaths of dirty cloth, with clumped hair and haggard faces.

“Who are they?” I asked.

“Who cares,” Morlocki said, grabbing the last fellow that was putting up a fight and breaking his neck.

“Galley slaves,” Brutalis told me, following my gaze. “They do the dirty work.”

“So they are like us,” added Morlocki, rubbing his bloody hands.

“Slaves? I don’t like this,” I said.

“No time for this,” Drovani shot in, moving closer to the open stairwell.

I leaned into the stairs, trying to listen and maybe get a look, but there was no way to stick my head out safely. Besides, the whole well was covered with billowing gun smoke.

“Sounds like our boys are still pinned,” I said, then turned to Drovani. “So where’s this V.I.P. that you want? Where will they keep him?”

He thought for a moment, his gaze down on his dead countrymen.

“I would barricade the captain’s cabin,” he said. “Perhaps send some men below to the emergency launch, to bring it to the front of the ship, to a window or ledge. Escape that way.”

“So why don’t we just commandeer the launch and surprise attack?” Brutalis motioned down the stairs.

“They will have a hundred warriors or more protecting our target,” Drovani said softly. “No, we must drive them out somehow.”

“A fire?”

“No, my ape friend,” the Vershani said in response to Morlocki’s suggestion. “The smoke would kill us here.”

I looked around and got an idea.

“You want to drive them out, right?”

He nodded.

“And those guys up there, on the top deck,” I continued, pointing upward. “Those guys we just fought, they’re protecting the captain’s cabin, just below them, right?”

He nodded again, not following.

“If something happens up there, something devastating, that kills a lot of them, they’ll run for the launch, right?”

“Yes,” he said, suddenly excited. “If they come down for the launch, we can intercept and replace them, then–”

“No, no, no,” I interrupted. “Something so bad that they just run for it, they take the V.I.P. and make a dash for the launch right then and there.”

He shrugged, “Perhaps, but it would have to be something substantial for them to leave their defenses.”

I looked over at the nearest heavy cannon, sitting idle atop the wooden gun carriage, and smiled.

“I have an idea.”

I’m an engineer by training, and for a while there, it seemed as if it would be my career. When I failed my attempt at a normal life, I used my engineering skills to make a name for myself as a super villain, building special gadgets that I concealed on my suit and on the tips of my arrows, with some special surprises in case anyone would fuck with me. Figuring out the proper angle to fire a cannon to do the most damage at the fighting Vershani soldiers on the forecastle was easy for me, even with Drovani going on about how careful I had to be to not injure the target of our whole exercise: a V.I.P. barricaded in the captain’s cabin, one deck above us.

We cut out one of the massive guns from its rope webbing, designed to keep it in place, and loaded it. Then Morlocki and I heaved the front wheels of the gun carriage up, using a second gun to brace it at the proper angle. I fiddled with the screw riser control, to endless pleadings by Drovani, and came up with what I thought was a good shot.

“This is insane,” Brutalis said, shaking his head, watching the whole procedure while simultaneously watching our backs.

“Insane is usually what works for me,” I said as I pulled the ten foot-long rope attached to the firing trigger.

The cannon shot echoed around the room as the shell fired through the roof of the gun deck. We were enveloped in choking smoke and fire spread through the roof a few moments later. The recoil sent the entire gun carriage and barrel crashing down through the deck, pummeling into darkness. A secondary explosion of wood and debris sent us all diving for cover. In fact, the heavy cannon kept going through the decks beneath us and out the bottom of the hull, leaving a wake of splintered wood, mangled metal, and the strange white stuff that the ship was made of.

I stood first and raced to the hole opened by the cannon shell. For a while, my vision was like one of those old movies with the flickering frames, everything moving in slow motion. Though smoke filled the air, I could see through that my shot had been well aimed. It had first impacted into the barred front doors of the captain’s cabin, smashing them aside and leaving a gaping hole for our troops to assault. After that, the heavy shell had smashed through the top roof of the cabin, coming out the forecastle deck and wreaking havoc amongst the Vershani warriors we had fought just moments before. I could only guess what the damage up top had been, but the resounding cry of charge from our pinned men at the rear of the ship told me all I needed to know. We had broken the impasse.

“It worked!” I yelled, helping Drovani to his feet.

Drovani rushed to the stairs and hid behind one of the cannon.

“Get ready,” he said, drawing his twin machetes.

Big Morlocki found a vantage point behind some fallen timbers near the stairwell, and Brutalis hung upside down from the roof, near the jagged portal we had just made. He flattened himself out along a beam and was almost invisible.

I had nowhere to hide, and I didn’t even know how to use the damned swords Drovani had given me, so I walked right up to the stairwell, and stood at the ready. Whatever was coming down here, I was going to meet it head-first. I’ve faced one of Earth’s most powerful superheroes one-on-one, and I beat him down. I stopped Dr. Retcon from destroying the world. I beat the Mist Army single-handed.