"We want none of you!" the pirate spokesman added harshly. "Stand clear, I say!"
"We're just here to buy!" Roger shouted up at him, taking over with the toot-given fluency in the local languages Rastar couldn't hope to match. "We've crossed the eastern ocean, and it was a longer voyage than we expected! We're short on supplies—especially food!"
He gazed upward, watching the Mardukans silhouetted against the gray-clouded sky, and glad that both Pedi Karuse and Tob Kerr had been able to confirm that it was fairly common practice to barter with chance-met ships when one's own supplies ran short. Of course, one normally avoided dealing with people like Lemmar raiders in the process, but there was—as far as these raiders knew—no way for the people in the small boat sailing up beside them to realize they weren't honest merchant traders.
"We'll send two people aboard—no more!" Roger added, his tone as wheedling as he could manage. "And we'll transfer anything we buy to small boats, like this one. Don't worry! We're not pirates—and our ship will stay will clear of you! We're willing to pay in gold or trade goods!"
There was a short consultation among the members of the prize crew, but in the end, as all of their fellows had done, they finally acquiesced.
"Keep your hands out from your sides—even you, vern-looking fellow! And only two! The leaders, not their guards."
"Agreed!" Roger called back. "But be warned! Our ship is faster than yours, and more heavily armed. And we aren't 'leaders'—just pursers and good swimmers! Try to take us prisoner, and we'll be over the side so fast your head swims. After which our crew will swarm over you like greg, and we'll take what we need and feed you to the fish!"
"Fair enough!" the Lemmar captain shouted back with an undergrunt of half-genuine laughter. He wasn't entirely happy about the situation, of course. After all, he'd seen how rapidly Hooker hadoverhauled his own lumbering command, so he knew perfectly well that he could never hope to outrun her. And however undersized those bombards looked, the strange ship obviously mounted a lot of them, whereas his captured merchantship mounted no more than four pathetic swivels. Nor was he unaware of the ancient law of the sea: big fish ate little fish, and at the moment this clumsy tub of a merchant ship might turn out to be a very small fish indeed if it came to that. So if he could get through this encounter by simply selling some of the cargo—especially for a good price—so much the better. After all, he hadn't paid for any of it!
And if the negotiations went badly, these two peculiar 'pursers' could become Servants, for all he cared.
Roger caught the thrown line and went up the side of the ship hand-over-hand. Like the other merchantmen they'd taken, this one was nearly as round as it was long. The design made for plenty of cargo space, and with enough ballast, it was seaworthy—after a fashion, at least. But the ships were slow, terribly slow. If this thing could break six knots in a hurricane, he would be surprised.
It was also the largest they had so far encountered, which probably meant the prize crew was going to be larger, as well.
He reached the top and nodded at the staring Lemmar who'd thrown the rope, keeping his hands well away from his sides and the one knife he openly carried on his belt as he swung over the rail. Two of the pirates greeting him held arquebuses lightly in their true-hands, not pointed exactly at him, but close. There was a third pirate by the helmsman, and another directing a work party up forward. There'd been five pirates aboard three of the four ships they'd already taken, and seven aboard the fourth, so there was at least one still unaccounted for here. Given the size of the ship, though, Roger's guess was that there were at least three more somewhere below-decks. Possibly as many as five or six.
Rastar climbed over the side behind him and made a complex, multi-armed gesture of greeting.
"I greet you in the name of K'Vaern's Cove," he said in the language of the Vashin. "I am Rastar Komas, formerly Prince of Therdan. We are, as we said, in need of provisions. We need ten thousand sedant of grain, at least fourteen hundred sedant of fruit, four thousand sedant of salted meat, and at least seven hogsheads of fresh water."
Roger nodded solemnly to Rastar and turned to the obviously totally uncomprehending pirates.
"This is Rastar Komas, formerly Prince of Therdan," he announced through his toot. "I am his interpreter. Prince Rastar is now the supply officer for our trading party. He has listed our needs, but to translate them properly, I require better knowledge of your weights and measures, which must obviously be different from our own."
He paused. The prize crews of the other four ships had all reacted in one of two ways at this point in his little spiel, and he and Rastar had a small side bet as to which of those responses this group would select.
"You said something about gold?" the larger of the arquebus-armed pirates asked.
Ah, a type two. Rastar owes me money.
"Yes. We can pay in gold by balance measure, or we have trade goods, such as the cloth from which this cloak is made."
Roger spread the drape of the silken cape to the sides, then spun on his toes to show how well it flowed. When he turned back around, his hands were full of bead pistols.
The inquisitive pirate never had time to realize what had happened. He and his companion were already flying backwards, heads messily removed by the hypervelocity beads, before he even had time to wonder what the strange objects in the outsized vern's hands were.
"By the Gods of Thunder, Roger!" Rastar complained as he took two shots to drop the Lemmar by the helmsman. "Leave some for the rest of us!"
"Whatever," the prince snapped. A third shot dispatched the pirate who had been supervising the work party up forward, and he kicked the arquebus out of the hands of a twitching body at his feet. Then he turned to examine the hatches as Kosutic swarmed over the side. The work party forward had taken cover behind the body of their erstwhile supervisor and showed no inclination to move out from behind it, so he couldn't form any idea of where the other pirates might be hiding.
"Take the stern. We'll start from the bow," he said, stepping forward. "Be careful."
"As always," Honal answered for his cousin. The Vashin noble jerked the slide on his new shotgun, which had a six-gauge bore and brass-based, paper cartridges. Then he tossed off a salute. "And this time, watch your head," he added. "No ramming it into the undersides of decks!"
"Speaking of which," Kosutic said, clapping the prince's helmet onto his head. "Now be a good boy and flip down the visor, Your Highness."
"Yes, Mother," Roger said, still looking at the forward-most hatch. It was lashed securely down from the outside, but it could just as well be secured from the inside, as well. He flipped down the helmet visor and sent out a pulse of ultrasound, but the region under the deck seemed to be a cargo hold, filled with indecipherable shapes.
"What do you think?" he asked the sergeant major.
"Well, I hate going through where they expect, but I don't want the damned thing to flood, either." Kosutic replied.
"At least they didn't have any bombards before they were captured," Roger pointed out. "Which means there's no powder magazine, either."
"Point taken," Kosutic acknowledged. "Swimming beats the hell out of being blown up, I suppose. But that wasn't exactly what I meant."
"I know it wasn't," Roger replied, and took the breaching charge the sergeant major had extracted from her rucksack. He laid out the coil of explosive on the foredeck and stood back from the circle.