One long, rolling crash as the gun captains jerked their lanyards and the twelve heavy cannon fired within a second of each other, at point-blank range.

"All yours, 'dapa!" Marian shouted and dropped down the rope ladder with reckless speed.

"Stretch out!" the middie shouted at the tiller of the longboat she landed in, her voice crackling with stress.

They heaved at their oars with panting, grunting effort that made the slender boats sweep forward, despite the weight of the Guard sailors who packed them to the gunwales, armed and cheering.

Four boats were pulling for the Stormwind, two for the smaller schooner. That looked to be out of action; she could see blood running in thin streaks through the ship's scuppers. Christ, and I thought that was a figure of speech.

Stormwind had taken bad hits too. Alston was relying on speed and surprise and the stunning effect of those first broadsides to keep them away from their cannon. The next thirty seconds would tell if it was enough.

"Thus, thus!" Alston shouted. Suddenly it was there, looming huge from the low-riding longboat. " Up and at them! "

"UP AND AT 'EM!" roared the laden boats.

A Tartessian cannon did fire, but too late-the ball went overhead, close enough for her to feel the ugly wind and know that fifteen seconds earlier it might have decapitated her as cleanly as a guillotine. Then they were up against the forepeak of the Stormwind, wood grinding on wood. Marian leaped up and swarmed up one of the ropes with a shout of "Follow me!"

Her head came level with the rail, to see a Tartessian bleeding from half a dozen superficial wounds rushing at her with a boarding pike. She drew her pistol one-handed, raked the hammers back against her thigh and fired. The long steel head of the pike scored across her side like a line of cold fire.

A flip put the barrels of the pistol in her hand. She smashed it into the man's face, and his nose went flat in a spurt of blood. He roared and reeled backward. That let her get her legs down on the Stormwind's deck and take a full-armed swing. Bone crumpled; she threw the pistol in the next Tartessian's face and swept out her katana. That draw turned into a cut, diagonally down from the left with her foot stamping forward. The ugly jar of steel in meat and bone hit her wrists, and she ripped the blade through its arc with a whipping twist of arms, shoulders, gut.

"Dissaaa!"

Something slapped her head around, stinging pain; the sensory data were distant, nothing to pay attention to unless it crippled her-she felt calm and utterly alive at the same time, information pouring in through ears and eyes and skin and out in the movements of her sword and orders. For a moment the two forces were locked together, blows given and received chest to chest. Her katana jammed in bone, and someone kicked her feet out from underneath her while it was stuck, by accident or design.

Training saved her, making muscle go limp as she fell to the blood-slick boards. She drew the shorter wazikashi and her tanto-knife, but there was no way to parry the clubbed musket that a short, thick, heavy-bodied Tartessian sailor was raising to beat out her brains. Then the Tartessian screamed and fell back, his face half sliced off by a boarding ax in the hands of a Chamberlain. The crewman was a Sun People tribesman, and the battle madness of his folk was on him, eyes showing white all around the iris, moving with a lethal, inhuman fury…

Alston flipped herself back to her feet. "You!" she shouted, grabbing the bosun. The fighting had surged past her a little. "Get that!"

She pointed to a small stubby carronade standing to port of the enemy ship's wheel, a flintlock piece with the hammer cocked- ready, but the enemy had been surprised before they could use it. The bosun nodded, understanding her gesture if not her voice in the overwhelming noise. He and she and half a dozen others grabbed the little cannon and ran it forward.

"Way, there!" they called.

The Guard fighters parted, and there was a single moment to see the appalled faces of the Tartessians before she jerked the lanyard. It leaped backward, right up the quarterdeck and through the stern rail, but it had done its work… and it was loaded with grape.

The enemy gave way, turning and running down into the waist of the ship. Marian paused an instant to recover her sword, aware in some distant corner of her mind that the sensation of her feet sliding greasily in a pool of blood and body fluids would come back to her later. And the stink, the stink…

The Marines among the boarders fell out, reloaded their rifles, and volley-fired from fo'c'sle and quarterdeck, effective beyond their numbers in their crisp discipline and the ordered glitter of their bayonets. A Tartessian threw down his cutlass and fell to his knees, holding out his hand for quarter. There was an instant's wavering, and then the enemy's morale broke like a glass jar dropped on a granite paving stone.

"Cease fire!" Marian called as the rest of the enemy joined the first. "Belay fighting, there-cease fire!"

She stood, suddenly conscious of pain and of blood pouring in a wet sheet down her neck and her side. Her fingers went to one ear as a Tartessian in an officer's gaudy tunic came and knelt, offering his sword. She took it, wincing at the same time.

Well, there goes the earlobe, she thought, as the boarders began cheering, loud even after the memory of combat. One ran cat-nimble up the Stormwind's rigging, slashed the crowned mountain of Tartessos down from the mast and ran up the Stars and Stripes.

The cheering spread across the water, and the Republic's flag was flying from Sun Dancer too. Alston felt her knees begin to buckle and clamped her fingers on the wound despite a sensation like a red-glowing steel spike thrust through the side of her head. Head wounds always made you bleed like a pig for some reason; the one in her side was deeper but not leaking as badly.

If this keeps up, eventually I'm going to be held together entirely by scar tissue, she thought, then called aloud:

"Ensign! Get the first aid going for the wounded and signal for the medics. Bosun, I want these prisoners disarmed and under hatches. You, there-"

Despite fatigue, despite the grief of losses and the pain of wounds, she felt a surge of sheer joyous relief. They were going home.

Home. Most beautiful word in the language.

(February, Year 10 A.E.)

March, Year 10 A.E.

Thump.

William Walker jackknifed backward as the padded foot slammed into his leather-armored midriff. Go-with, he thought, and threw himself backward into a tumbling roll that brought him upright again in time to block a follow-up spinning back-kick. Ohotolarix closed in, moving lightly on the straw mats of the practice arena, grinning through the bars of his boiled-leather helmet, gloved hands up.

A roar went up from seats around the practice circle where the audience-officers and senior noncoms of his Royal Guard-cheered and yelled, shouting advice and comments. The Iraiina was a big man by the standards of this era, eight years younger than his overlord and a natural athlete. He bored in with a flurry of punches, back-fist strikes, then a sweeping takedown with his shin.

Walker grinned himself as he leaped over it, nearly chest-high, and his own foot lashed out-the showy jumping side-kick, rarely practical. Walker spun, then hooked a foot in under the short ribs. They went into a grapple, falling and rolling, hands finding and breaking leverage-holds. At last Walker caught his guard-captain in a scissors lock and mimed slamming the heel of his palm into his face, the killing blow up under the nose. He rose and offered the Iraiina a hand, pulling him up.