Herrick dropped his sword. “Fire!”

The captains jerked their lines and the whole world fell apart in the staggering, uneven broadside. Choking smoke billowed back through the ports, rasping the lungs and filling every eye as the guns lurched angrily back on their tackles. It was like hell, too terrible to understand.

But already the gun captains were yelling like fiends, urging and hitting at their stunned gunners as the powder monkeys ran forward with fresh cartridges and new, gleaming balls were lifted from the racks.

Pryce knocked down a man’s arms and screamed, “Sponge out, you bastard! Remember what I taught you! You’ll blow us all up if you drop a charge into a burning gun!” The man mumbled dazedly and obeyed him as if in a trance.

Herrick shouted, “Reload there! Lively, lads!”

Allday waited a few more minutes and then threw his weight on the tackles. Squealing like angry pigs the gun trucks rumbled forward again, the muzzles racing each other to be first through the ports.

But the Phalarope was almost into the Andiron’s bow. A few more feet and it seemed as if both ships would smash into each other, to die together in locked combat.

“Fire!”

Again the savage roar of a broadside, the deck yawing away beneath them with its force. But this time more ragged, less well aimed. Through the din of shouts and groaning spars Allday heard some of the balls strike home, and saw Maynard, one of the midshipmen, waving his hat in the streaming smoke and yelling to the sky, his words lost in the guns’ roar.

The Andiron must have fired simultaneously with the Phalarope, her gunfire lost in the general thunder of noise. There was more of a feeling than a sound, like a hot wind, or sand blasted across a parched desert.

Allday looked up as the sails jerked and twisted as if in agony. Holes were appearing everywhere, and from high aloft came a falling tangle of severed halyards and ropes. A block dropped on to the breech with a loud clang, and Pryce said without looking up from his priming, “The bastards fired too soon! The broadside went right over our ’eads!”

Allday peered through the port, still dazed, but understanding at last what Bolitho had done. The Phalarope had not turned away, had not offered her stern for punishment. Her sudden swing to attack had caught the enemy off balance, and rather than risk a senseless collision he had hauled off so that his first broadside had failed to make real contact.

He heard Herrick call across to Lieutenant Okes, “By God, Matthew, that was a close thing!” Then in a wilder tone, “Look at the masthead pendant! The wind’s veering!”

There was bedlam as the enemy ship swung rapidly clear of the charging Phalarope. But so sudden or so unexpected was the attack that the Andiron’s captain had failed to notice what Bolitho must already have seen even as he steered towards possible disaster.