Read Online Pirates of the Timestream by Steve White - Free Book Online
Authors: Steve White
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should help. As for Boyer and Nesbit, the target designators should enable them to perform as well as a carpenter and a doctor were expected to.
“What if somebody notices a tiny little dot of light on someone else just before that person gets shot?” asked Da Cunha dubiously.
“He’ll blink, feel slightly puzzled for a moment, then shake his head and forget it,” Grenfell asserted confidently. “It simply isn’t part of his reality structure.”
On Nesbit’s first try, the target designator did him no good. Unprepared for the musket’s kick, he almost fell over backwards and sent the ball flying over the target. Afterwards, he gradually improved, and when he finally managed to put a ball through the target board (though not in the circle) he looked fit to burst with pride. Jason sighed. A surgeon’s mate wouldn’t be expected to be a crack shot, and at any rate the chief concern at the moment was to familiarize everyone with the mechanics of loading and firing: the pouring of the powder down the muzzle, followed by the lead ball with its rammed-in wad of rag. Everyone bitched about the awkwardness and inconvenience, but Grenfell assured them that matchlocks were a lot worse.
Naturally, single-shot muzzle-loading longarms were no good for boarding actions involving fast and furious close combat. They went back inside the armory to see what a buccaneer typically used for that: a brace of pistols—flintlocks, which for reasons Grenfell was unable to explain, had caught on for handguns before they did for muskets—and a cutlass. The latter was a short, slightly curved sword with a wide single-edged blade and a crude basket hilt like a metal shell protecting the whole sword hand. Mondrago, whose real forte was edged weapons, looked at it somewhat askance.
“The workshop deliberately made it look crude,” Grenfell explained. “The original ones were pretty low-quality. These, on the other hand, are better than they look, thanks to modern metallurgy.”
Jason hefted his pistols. One of them differed from all the others, for it incorporated another of the devices that Rutherford had grudgingly allowed. The handgrip concealed a very small sensor whose only function was the short-range detection of active bionic body parts. It was connected with Jason’s brain implant via a hookup the latter possessed for remote linkage with such devices, so its findings automatically appeared on his neural heads-up display—a useful capability whether the hat he was currently wearing was that of the Hesperian Colonial Rangers or the Temporal Service Special Operations Section. He had been able to overcome Rutherford’s jitters by pointing out that they needed a means of recognizing enhanced Transhumanists for what they were.
They had a few days to practice with the various weapons. They were also issued their clothing: tuniclike shirts of coarse cotton, rawhide breeches, pigskin boots, and the broad-brimmed hats that were a necessity in the tropical sun. Da Cunha was dressed pretty much the same as the men, albeit with a shirt of somewhat better quality and even slightly frilly; any unmarried woman in Port Royal’s pirate quarter who dressed in the era’s full-skirted feminine styles was presumed to be a whore. They all acquired the tattoos without which seafarers of the period would have seemed naked—or at least the semblance of such tattoos, by grace of dermal imprint circuitry.
Nesbit was disappointed in the outfits, having expected something more colorful and flamboyant. It was explained to him that pirates only decked themselves out in gaudy silks, damasks and velvets after plundering a merchant ship laden with such fripperies, which never lasted long. He had other disappointments in store. One was the fact that black flags (with skulls and crossed bones, or full skeletons, or bleeding hearts, or whatever), while not unknown, were not the pirate flags that were truly feared. Such a flag meant that quarter would be
“What if somebody notices a tiny little dot of light on someone else just before that person gets shot?” asked Da Cunha dubiously.
“He’ll blink, feel slightly puzzled for a moment, then shake his head and forget it,” Grenfell asserted confidently. “It simply isn’t part of his reality structure.”
On Nesbit’s first try, the target designator did him no good. Unprepared for the musket’s kick, he almost fell over backwards and sent the ball flying over the target. Afterwards, he gradually improved, and when he finally managed to put a ball through the target board (though not in the circle) he looked fit to burst with pride. Jason sighed. A surgeon’s mate wouldn’t be expected to be a crack shot, and at any rate the chief concern at the moment was to familiarize everyone with the mechanics of loading and firing: the pouring of the powder down the muzzle, followed by the lead ball with its rammed-in wad of rag. Everyone bitched about the awkwardness and inconvenience, but Grenfell assured them that matchlocks were a lot worse.
Naturally, single-shot muzzle-loading longarms were no good for boarding actions involving fast and furious close combat. They went back inside the armory to see what a buccaneer typically used for that: a brace of pistols—flintlocks, which for reasons Grenfell was unable to explain, had caught on for handguns before they did for muskets—and a cutlass. The latter was a short, slightly curved sword with a wide single-edged blade and a crude basket hilt like a metal shell protecting the whole sword hand. Mondrago, whose real forte was edged weapons, looked at it somewhat askance.
“The workshop deliberately made it look crude,” Grenfell explained. “The original ones were pretty low-quality. These, on the other hand, are better than they look, thanks to modern metallurgy.”
Jason hefted his pistols. One of them differed from all the others, for it incorporated another of the devices that Rutherford had grudgingly allowed. The handgrip concealed a very small sensor whose only function was the short-range detection of active bionic body parts. It was connected with Jason’s brain implant via a hookup the latter possessed for remote linkage with such devices, so its findings automatically appeared on his neural heads-up display—a useful capability whether the hat he was currently wearing was that of the Hesperian Colonial Rangers or the Temporal Service Special Operations Section. He had been able to overcome Rutherford’s jitters by pointing out that they needed a means of recognizing enhanced Transhumanists for what they were.
They had a few days to practice with the various weapons. They were also issued their clothing: tuniclike shirts of coarse cotton, rawhide breeches, pigskin boots, and the broad-brimmed hats that were a necessity in the tropical sun. Da Cunha was dressed pretty much the same as the men, albeit with a shirt of somewhat better quality and even slightly frilly; any unmarried woman in Port Royal’s pirate quarter who dressed in the era’s full-skirted feminine styles was presumed to be a whore. They all acquired the tattoos without which seafarers of the period would have seemed naked—or at least the semblance of such tattoos, by grace of dermal imprint circuitry.
Nesbit was disappointed in the outfits, having expected something more colorful and flamboyant. It was explained to him that pirates only decked themselves out in gaudy silks, damasks and velvets after plundering a merchant ship laden with such fripperies, which never lasted long. He had other disappointments in store. One was the fact that black flags (with skulls and crossed bones, or full skeletons, or bleeding hearts, or whatever), while not unknown, were not the pirate flags that were truly feared. Such a flag meant that quarter would be
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