Harry Turtledove - Opening Atlantis

If they didn't, they would die. The marines surged forward. The ones with bayonets plugged into the muzzles of their muskets used the weapons as spears, impaling corsairs who couldn't get at them to reply. Other marines kept a deadly hail of bullets in the air. So did some enemy fighters in plain clothes. They could hit a man at two hundred yards, sometimes farther. There weren't that many of them, and they didn't fire fast, but they caused trouble all out of proportion to their numbers.

Red Rodney sprang like a wolf. He beat a bayoneted musket aside with his sword, then struck the marine holding the piece. His stroke clove the bullock from crown to chin. The man toppled, dead before he hit the ground.

But another marine lunged at Rodney Radcliffe, forcing him to jump back or be spitted. The pirate chief managed to escape. The marine in the second rank stepped up to the first, and the line rolled ahead as it had before. One dead marine? So what?

Radcliffe had always scorned such regimentation. A man, he thought, should fight for himself, for his hope of glory or gold or women, willing or otherwise. To fight because it was your job, as if you were a chandler or a cordwainer? Where was the glory in that?

Nowhere at all, which didn't mean it didn't work. The marines, job or no job, advanced. The corsairs, glory or no glory, fell back-or else they just fell, and did not rise again. The marines systematically finished them off, one after another. For all Red Rodney's cries and exhortations, he couldn't stop the foe. Fear began fighting fury in his heart.

William Radcliff stood with a pair of marines on the roof of a three-story building in southern Avalon. "Hoist the red flag," he told them.

"Right you are, sir," they chorused. They probably would have said the same thing if he'd told them to jump off the roof. (The building was a house of ill fame. To the bullocks' undisguised disappointment, the girls had fled.)

One of the marines had a big square of red cloth. The other carried a long pole that would do for a flagstaff. William had some tacks with which to fasten the cloth to the pole. Once that was done, they waved the makeshift flag. You could see it a long way. With luck, even the sailors in the fleet would be able to spy it.

Radcliff hoped they could. They were supposed to be looking for the signal. It ordered them to put sailors into boats and attack the sea wall. The marines had drawn a lot of defenders from it. The cannonading had killed more-and should have breached the wall as well. If the sailors could gain lodgements…If they could do that, then Avalon, assailed from flank and rear at the same time, was bound to fall.

Wasn't it?

Thwock! A bullet tore through the red cloth. The corsairs might not know what the signal flag meant, but they knew they didn't like it. As if I care, William thought.

He walked to the edge of the roof for a crow's-nest view of the fighting. Another bullet snapped past his head. He ducked. That wasn't cowardice-even the nerveless marines did it. But then he stepped back-no point giving the freebooters an easy shot at him.

Besides, he had a pretty good idea of how things were going. His ears could tell him almost as much as his eyes. The pirates hadn't given up. All the same, the marines were steadily driving them back. If the sailors could break into Avalon by way of the sea wall, he wouldn't have wanted to wear his cousin's shoes.

"You men keep on," he told the bullocks with the signal flag. "I'm going down to fight some more."

As he started down the stairs, he heard one marine tell the other, "I didn't think the old bugger had so much fire in his belly."

I'm not old, Radcliff thought indignantly. Next to the marines, he was. He hurried down. He almost tripped on the stairs and broke his neck; that would have been a humiliating way to show he really was the antiquity the bullocks thought him. But he caught himself and went outside without further damage.

Smoke filled the air. A lot of it was brimstone-stinking gunpowder smoke-a lot, but not all. Several fires blazed in Avalon now. Fire was always the great fear, ashore and at sea; once it caught hold, it was hard, terribly hard, to fight. Even if the pirates somehow threw back the forces that harried them, their haven would never be the same.

Their haven will never be their haven again, William thought, determination filling him. He didn't think he could end all piracy in the Hesperian Gulf by seizing Avalon. He did hope he could break its back. That would be enough to satisfy him. It might even be enough to make him go down in history. He laughed at himself when that occurred to him. As long as his ships could get where they were going without let or hindrance, history didn't count.

Two marines came out of a grogshop. Blood dripped from one man's bayonet; blood and brains fouled the stock of the other's musket. They both nodded respectfully. "Couple of bastards in there who won't bother their betters any more, sir," said the man with the nasty musket.

"Good riddance to them," William said. "May we comb out the rest of the lice in Avalon the same way."

Nodding, the marines hurried forward, toward the struggle. Radcliff followed more sedately. As befits my years, he thought with a wry grin.

He didn't want only pirates picked at random dead. He wanted to know their chieftains were gone-Goldbeard and Cutpurse Charlie and the other flamboyant leaders who could gather a good-sized fighting tail behind them with a snap of the fingers. And, most of all, he wanted Red Rodney Radcliffe swept from the face of the earth. Even if they spelled the name differently, Red Rodney blackened it with every breath he took. Only fitting, then, that he shouldn't take many more.

William's hand tightened on the basket hilt of his sword. If he could dispose of his cousin himself…it would be something out of a romance. William shrugged. He was willing to forgo the glory-and the risk of getting killed instead of killing-if he knew someone had put paid to Rodney Radcliffe.

A great clamor of musketry broke out to the northwest. William almost forgot his cousin. The landing from the sea was starting. If the sailors could break in…"Avalon is ours," he muttered.

When Red Rodney Radcliffe heard the commotion behind him and to his right-the commotion from the sea wall-he stopped dead in the middle of a narrow, unpaved street. Had a marine with a charged musket or a bayonet stood close by, he would have died in truth, his guts spilling over the mud and slops. His hopes had been low. They sank further now.

Ben Jackson knew that clamor for what it was, too. "Are they in?" the mate asked hoarsely. "Can they get in there?"

"I…don't know," Radcliffe answered. Under the circumstances, it was about the worst thing he could have said.

"What do we do?" Jackson demanded. "Go back to Black Hand Fort and stand siege?"

Red Rodney only grunted. It wasn't a hopeful grunt. The great captains' forts weren't provisioned for long sieges. They were strongholds where crews lived, from which they sallied, and to which they retreated in time of crisis. They were made to hold out other pirate bands, not determined soldiers. No one who built them had imagined soldiers could break into Avalon.

All that flashed through Radcliffe's mind in a heartbeat. He shook his head. "Not unless we have to. We've got to drive them out, not let them drive us in."

Jackson nodded; he could see that, too. But he listened to what was going on at the sea wall. "I think they are in, damn them," he said.

"I think so, too," Radcliffe said. "That doesn't mean we can't drive them out again, though…does it?" He wished, too late, he hadn't added the last couple of words.

Ben Jackson shook his head like a hunted animal-which, at the moment, he was. Red Rodney was another one, and he knew it. Well, some hunted animals had teeth and fangs of their own, and could turn the tables on their pursuers. Not many beasts in Atlantis did, but that wasn't true through most of the world. The pirate chief aimed to fight back as long as he could.