Keith Laumer: Dinosaur Beach

The damned fool, I heard myself snarling. Dump the cannon over the side to lighten ship; our only chance is to outrun them, and even that’s impossible…

Something screamed through the air like a rocket and a length of rope came coiling at me and caught me across the face and threw me across the deck. Somebody jumped over me; a piece of spar the size of my thigh slammed the deck and bounced high over the side. The ship was heeling again, coming around; things were sliding across the deck; then the sails were slatting, taken aback. Wind swept across the deck, cool and sweet. More thunder, more crashes, more yells, more running feet. I found a sheltered spot in the scuppers, not too fastidious now about the pinkish scum sloshing there, and watched the mainmast lean, making noises like pistol shots, and go crashing over the windward side, trailing a ballooning tent of cloth that split and settled over the stern and was pulled over the side by the current, taking along a man or two who were trapped under it. Things were falling from above like the aftermath of a dynamite blast. Something dark loomed and suddenly spars and sails were sliding across up above, and then an impact threw me on my face and went on and on, grinding splinters, snapping lines, tilting the deck…

I slipped and slithered, caught a rope, held on, jammed against the side of the small cabin. The galleon was still scraping alongside, looking enormous. Men were in her rigging and lined up along her waist ten feet above our deck, shouting and waving fists and swords. I was looking down the black muzzles of cannons that slipped past, staring from dark square windows with smoke-blackened faces grinning behind them. Grappling hooks came down, slid and caught in the splintered decking. Then men were leaping down, spilling over the rail, overrunning the deck. The seaman who had yelled at me ran forward and a saber swung at his head; it didn’t seem like much of a blow, but he went down, very bloody, and the boarders crowded past, fanning out, yelling like demons. I hugged the deck and tried to look hors de combat. A big barrel-chested fellow swinging a machete with a badly bent blade came bounding my way; I rolled far enough to get a hand on my Mauser and got it up in time and put two through his broad, sweat-gleaming, hair-matted chest and kicked aside as he fell hard on the spot where I’d been lying. In the mêlée the shots hadn’t been audible.

A little fellow with bare, monkeylike legs was trying to climb the foremast; someone jumped after him, caught him, pulled him back down. Someone went over the rail, alive or dead I wasn’t sure. Then they were just milling around, yelling as loud as ever, but waving their cutlasses instead of hacking with them—except for the few who were lying here and there like broken toys, ignored, out of it, holding their wounds together with their hands and mumbling the final Hail Mary’s.

Then I saw the Karg.

There was no doubt of his identity. To the untrained eye a Class-One Karg—the only kind ever used in Timesweep work—was indistinguishable from any other citizen. But my eye wasn’t untrained. Besides which, I knew him personally.

He was the same Karg I’d left in the hotel room back in Buffalo, defunct, with a soft-nosed slug in the left zygomatic arch.

Now here he was, pre-Buffalo, with no hole in his head, climbing down onto the deck as neat and cool as if it had all been in fun. From the draggled gold lace on his cuffs and the tarnished brass hilt on his sword, I gathered that he was a person of importance among the victors. Possibly the captain; or maybe officer in charge of the marines. They were listening to him, falling into ragged ranks, quieting down.

The next step would be the telling off of details for a systematic looting of the ship, with a sideorder of mercy killing for anyone unlucky enough to have survived the assault. From what I remembered of conditions in the holds of Spanish ships of the time, a fast demise was far preferable to the long voyage home, with the galleys at the end of it. I was just beginning to form a hopeless plan for creeping out of sight and waiting for something that looked like an opportunity to turn up, when the door I was lying against opened. Tried to open, that is. I was blocking it, so that it moved about two inches and jammed tight. Somebody inside gave it a hearty shove and started through. I saw a booted leg and an arm in a blue sleeve with gold buttons. He got that far and stuck. Something on his belt seemed to be caught in the door hardware. The Karg’s head had turned at the first sound. He stared for a long, long time that was probably less than a second, then whipped up a handsome pearl-mounted wheellock pistol, raised it deliberately, aimed— The explosion was like a bomb; flame gouted and smoke gushed. I heard the slug hit; a solid, meaty smack, like a well-hit ball hitting the fielder’s glove. The fellow in the door lurched, thrashed, plunged through and went down hard on his face. He jerked a couple of times as if someone was jabbing him with a sharp stick, and then lay very still.

The Karg turned back to his men and rapped out an order. The boys muttered and shuffled, and shot disappointed looks around the deck, and then started for the side.

No search, no loot, just the fast skiddoo.

It was as if the Karg had accomplished what he had come for.

In five minutes the last of the boarders were back aboard their own ship. The Karg stood near the stern, patient as only a machine can be. He looked around, then came toward me. I lay very still indeed and tried to look as dead as possible.

He stepped over me and the real corpse and went into the cabin. I heard faint sounds, the kind somebody makes going through drawers and peeking under the rug. Then he came out. I heard his footsteps going away, and opened an eye.

He was by the weather rail, calmly stripping the safety foil from a thermex bomb. It gave its preliminary hiss and he dropped it through the open hatch at his feet as casually as someone dropping an olive in a martini.

He walked coolly across the deck, stepped up, grabbed a line, and scrambled with commendable agility back to his own deck. I heard him—or someone—yell a command. Sounds of sudden activity; sails quivered and moved; men appeared, swarming up the ratlines. The galleon’s spars shifted, withdrew with much creaking and tearing of the defeated galleass’s rigging. The high side of the Spanish ship drew away; sails filled with dull boom! s. Quite suddenly I was alone, watching the ship dwindle as it receded downwind under full sail.

Just then the thermex let go with a vicious choof! belowdecks. Smoke billowed from the hatch, with tongues of pale flame in close pursuit. I got a pair of legs under me and wobbled to the opening, had to turn my eyes from the sunbright holocaust raging below. The tub might have steel walls, but in 5000° heat they’d burn like dry timber.

I stood where I was for a few valuable seconds, trying to put it together in some way that made some variety of sense, while the fire sputtered and crackled and the deck wallowed, and the shadow of the stump of the mainmast swung slow arcs on the deck, like a finger wagging at the man the Karg had shot.

He lay on his face, with a lot of soggy lace in a crimson puddle under his throat. One hand was under him, the other outflung. A gun lay a yard from the empty hand.

I took three steps and stooped and picked up the gun. It was a .01 microjet of Nexx manufacture, with a grip that fitted my hand perfectly.

It ought to. It was my gun. I looked at the hand it had fallen from. It looked like my hand. I didn’t like doing it, but I turned the body over and looked at the face.

It was my face.