Throne of Stars by David Weber, John Ringo Read Free Book Online Page A

up, ready, by the gun when all hell broke loose. It was against normal practice to pile charges for the ship’s guns on deck. Partly that was because black powder was too dangerous. Sparks or open flame weren’t the only things that could set it off; even the friction of grinding a few loose or spilled grains underfoot could do that, under the wrong conditions. But mostly it was because it would have been too easy for the powder to become wet and useless. But this particular weapon had been designed for just this contingency, and the need to get it into action as quickly as possible had dictated ready availability of ammunition. The humans had empty stores containers, plasteel boxes that maintained temperature and humidity, and one of those had been pressed into duty as a standby magazine.
    Now the Mardukan gun crew threw back the lid and snatched out the first cartridge. The charge bag was small, only half a kilo or so of powder. But it would throw the harpoon far enough, and without shattering the hardwood shaft.
    As the gunner shoved the charge into the muzzle, the assistant gunner assembled the harpoon. Fitting the steel head to the shaft took only a moment, then the coiled line was attached with a human-designed clip. Last, the plug-based shaft was shoved down the barrel of the cannon, acting as its own ramrod.
    But drilled and quick as the gun crew was, all of that took time. Time Sea Skimmer didn’t have.

    Krindi Fain had often wondered if he was going to die. He’d wondered the time a stone wall fell on the crew he was working with. That time, he’d been sheltered by a few sticks of scaffolding, and he’d survived. He’d wondered again, as a private in his first pike battle, by the canals of Diaspra. And he’d wondered repeatedly while fighting the Boman inside and outside of Sindi. But he hadn’t known he was going to die.
    Until now.
    The beast opened up its maw, and he grunted in anger as he saw it surging up behind the sinking ship once again. He could see bits of wood and cloth, and red flesh, sticking to the thousands of teeth lining the inside of the fish’s mouth. But he still didn’t scream. He was frightened. God of Water knew he was! But he was going to go to his God as a soldier and a leader, not a coward.
    And so, instead of screaming, he paused for a moment. That brief pause, so necessary for everyone to get fully lined up. And then, he yelled “ Fire! ”
    Five of his men were still more or less on their feet, with their wits sufficiently about them to obey his command, but they were almost incidental. The two things that drove the fish off were Erkum and the prince.
    The five rifle bullets all impacted on various places in and around the mouth. Two of them even penetrated up into the skull of the fish, but none of them did any vital damage, nor did they particularly “hurt.”
    Erkum’s round, on the other hand, hurt like hell.
    The sixty-five-millimeter bullet penetrated the roof of the mouth and traveled upward, blowing a massive tube through the skull of the sea monster. By coincidence—it could have been nothing else, given the quality of the marksman—the huge slug severed the right optical nerve, blinding the fish on that side, and blew out the top of its skull in a welter of gore.
    At almost the same moment, the prince’s round entered the back of the beast’s head.
    It wasn’t the pith shot Roger had been trying for, but the round was much higher velocity than anything the Mardukans had, and it generated a significant “hydrostatic shock” cavity—the region in a body that was damaged by the shock wave of a bullet. In this case, the prince had missed his shot down and slightly to the right, but the region that the shot passed through was directly beneath the spinal cord, and the shock wave slapped against that vital nerve.
    The combined result was that instead of slurping down the rest of the Sea Skimmer , the fish thrashed away to port and dove. But it did so wildly,