Page 80 of Rears & Vices

Nevertheless, he snapped, “You certainly hadn’t!” incensed to be interrupted, overruled. “You said suppressive fire! Which is effective only so long it is sustained!”

The crew halted, watched them uneasily. Shite. The start of battle, and him undermining Vee’s authority⁠—

Vitaliy clutched his arm, pulled him close. “You will blow us all to heaven,” he muttered in his ear. “No,” he said, as Everard stiffened, “don’t be insulted; it is nothing to do with skill. I will show you why.” He ordered up to the second deck, “Repeat larboard fire ’til we’ve tacked about!”

They did, guns ablaze; and just like that, Everard was made redundant again.

“I’ll blow us to kingdom come, will I? But a crew with no cadence, firing at their leisure won’t?”

Vitaliy ignored this and released him. “Come down with me. They can spare you.”

“Of course they can,” he said bitterly. He thought now he must’ve looked quite the fool, running up and down, trying to rope a pirate crew into a Navy rhythm.

“They can spare me, too,” Vitaliy said. “Milly has the helm.”

Curiosity was winning over anger. Slightly.

“Down… to the hold?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“You’ll abandon your post? Now? As they surely overtake and board us?”

Vitaliy frowned. “There’s no one else for this,” he said. He slung himself down the ladder, into the deep, dark hold.

Everard followed. What did that mean? Something Vitaliy couldn’t trust to another soul.

Vitaliy jumped down from the last rung and brushed off his palms. He picked his way across the keel, unerringly pushed through straw bales and hanging stores to the stacks of hogsheads.

Everard, not knowing what he searched for, paused to scratch his comedown-trembling fingers against the velvet skull and flicking ears of a white ship’s cat lounging in its hammock. It blinked sleepily at him, too full on rats to be more than nonchalant at the scrape and boom of guns directly above.

Vitaliy disappeared aft and didn’t ask him to follow.

Everard felt absurd to be idle.

“White can’t be an advantage to you, down here in the dark,” he murmured to the cat. “Brave little thing.”

The cat splayed claws and kneaded the miniature hammock, and then leapt down to the keel and trotted off, tail high, in the direction Vitaliy had gone.

There was an abrupt lull in the guns, seawater slapping against the hull; they’d completed the tack.

Vitaliy emerged—sidestepping the cat—with a trunk over his shoulder, not much larger than Everard’s own little sea chest.

“Funny the cats haven’t scattered, what with the guns,” Everard said.

Vitaliy glanced back. “That cat is white.”

“And so?”

“White cats are frequently deaf.”

“Huh.” Not such a disadvantage, after all. “What’s in the trunk?”

“I will show you—in the greatcabin.” Vitaliy dug in his pocket, held out the magazine key on a lanyard. “We’ll need a twelve-pound keg.”

“A keg? You’re jesting.”

Vitaliy stared at him. He wasn’t jesting.