The King's Commission by Dewey Lambdin

screaming like frightened horses, and Desperate staggered as heavy shot burst through her sides. The deck below Lewrie’s feet jumped, almost throwing him to his knees.
    â€œEighteens if they’s a pound!” Monk managed to say, grabbing onto the binnacle and traverse board table to stay erect.
    â€œNo more than twelve-pounders, surely, Mister Monk,” Alan said in a shaky voice, trying to maintain that maddening sang froid demanded of a professional Sea Officer.
    â€œFelt like eighteens, anyway,” Monk spat.
    As the smoke began to rag away, Alan could see that the enemy was now on a parallel course, just two cables off. She would not get closer; but then he realized, she didn’t have to, for she could lay out there a fifth of a nautical mile away and shoot Desperate to lace unless they did something soon.
    â€œHelm up, quartermaster!” Treghues yelled through the din as the guns belched fire again. “Bear down on her!”
    Two loblolly boys stirred the savaged body of a petty officer by the tom-up starboard gangway. They shrugged and rolled the
body to the hole in the bulwarks and tipped the corpse over the side.
    â€œThat was Mister Weems!” Alan burst out in shock.
    â€œAye, poor bastard,” Monk agreed. “There’ll be an openin’ fer a new bosun’s mate tamorra.”
    A screaming waister was picked up on a carrying board and taken below to the cockpit surgery as they watched. There was nothing to be done with the dead or the hopelessly wounded but to get them out of sight and out from under foot. Words could be said later from the prayer book.
    More shot screamed in, and Desperate reeled with its impact. More screams from the waist, a puff of smoke from the nettings that set hammocks writhing like a box of worms as a round-shot scattered them. A Marine keened and fell from the gangway clutching his belly. Dull flames licked around the torn canvas from a small explosion, and men from the larboard side rushed to pour water on the fire before it could take hold and eat their ship.
    One cable’s range now; two hundred yards. Alan went forward to the quarterdeck rail to look down into the waist. A larboard gun had been overturned and its crew decimated. As he watched, the loblolly boys dragged another screaming unfortunate to the midships hatch, a man as quilled with jagged wood splinters as a hedge-hog. The dead Marine was being passed out a larboard gunport and someone was retching bile as he used a powder scoop to shovel up the man’s spilled intestines. The gun crews labored away with their scarves around their ears to save their hearing, intent on their artillery. Burney, up by the fo’c’sle, and Avery in the waist, were pacing among their men, shoving them to their places and speeding them along. Then the guns were barking and recoiling back against their breeching ropes, hot enough now to leap from the deck instead of rolling backwards on their small trucks.
    Another broadside from the French, and this one felt like an earthquake. Alan clung to the hammock-nettings as the ship felt as if she had been slammed to a halt. Something whined past his head, and the hammocks before him punched him in the crotch. He looked down as he was bent over by the pain and saw a chunk of the bulwark, nearly three inches across and a foot long, sticking from the far side of the barrier.
    â€œBloody Christ!” he yelped, feeling his crotch in fear he had been de-bollocked, and was relieved to feel that his “wedding-tackle” was still there. The deck continued to tremble with each
strike and there was a lot of screaming from back aft as he winced with his pain.
    â€œLewrie, stir yourself!” Treghues bellowed, pointing behind him to the wheel, where men lay tom and bleeding.
    Alan limped aft, bent over. Mr. Monk was propped up by the binnacle with Sedge bending down over him. The rotund sailing master had been struck in the leg with a