Chapter 55

The biggest problem facing us was time. The ship carrying the three lads; Prince Rashid of Temasek and his two buddies, boys raised as his playmates and the children of court advisors, was still at sea and it would remain at sea for at least two more days. If we waited until the craft made landfall at the enclave controlled by Lord Choy then we would be pushing up against the time that I had allocated for this mission. I had promised Nimue that we'd sail on the Sea Nymph in search of her sister in a week's time and we'd already used up three days of that time. Three more days and we'd only have one day left and I wasn't in the mood to break my word to my little elf. So we had a problem. Luckily we had plenty of solutions. The question was which solution we wanted to go with.

Captain Chang was all for doing whatever I wanted. Unfortunately the king and his advisors were not so keen. Chang arranged for me to meet the king after our chat in the tavern. The king was a small fat man who was clearly in his sixties and he was a worrier. He was anxious about his son, something I could understand considering that the boy was his heir. On top of that he was anxious about dealing with me. To put it bluntly he looked upon me as if I was a barbarian, which I had to admit was the common perception of most locals upon Game World of any outworlder regardless of whether they were good or bad. After all, the networks sent us here to stir things up and make things interesting for their viewers back home and the region of Pan-Asia had seen its share of assholes and murderers and just plain bastards. The king's advisors were another story. One wanted me tossed into the dungeon and tortured. One wanted me tossed into the streets and ignored. One wanted to know everything about Minos and the Grand Alliance. Several just stared at me coldly and whispered insults about my parentage to the king, emphasising the fact that they could never truly trust a barbarian. I just stood my ground and stared them down.

I put it to the king in plain, blunt language that I hoped he could understand. I had introduced myself as the King of Minos, Lord of Oak Hall, and Marshall of the Grand Alliance of the Inland Sea. It didn't impress anyone. It did however establish me as a foreign diplomat and not just some adventurer who was trying to con the king out of a bag of gold in exchange for helping rescue his son. I told the king I wanted gunpowder and explosives and I wanted access to his munitions works. That caused a major uproar amongst all the advisors and I was told just as bluntly that it was impossible. I just told the advisors to shut up and pay attention.

I then explained that I had access to men with a wide range of knowledge. I told them I had armourers and metalworkers and experts in the science of making better gunpowder and explosives. It wasn't a lie. Amongst the hundreds of recent arrivals on Game World that I had rescued there were a number of teachers and professors with a science background. There were also a couple of people who had worked in the chemical industry and they had told me that they knew a little about turning out products like dynamite and nitro-glycerine. All they needed was access to a facility that was already set up with the raw material and that was why I wanted access to the Temasekan munitions works. If my people really knew what they were talking about, life could get really interesting here on Game World.

The king heard me out and then he fretted some more and his advisors told him to ignore me. His naval advisor spoke up and told the king that he could mount an expedition to the pirate enclave within a week and that he would rescue Prince Rashid. I just laughed at that and told the man that by the time his ships had sailed, the prince would be spirited away and that any attack would fail given that the pirates would be ready for them. That just caused the king to fret some more.

Time was wasting and I knew it. The king was being indecisive and his advisors weren't helping much. Everyone had their own idea of how the prince should be saved and they all wanted their plan to be adopted. I just shook my head and decided I needed to wake up these people and make them face reality.

"Look," I growled loudly so that the king's advisors had no choice but to shut up, "the situation is simple. The prince and his buddies are on a ship that is now two days away from here and there is no way that any vessel within your navy can reach it before it makes landfall at Lord Choy's hideout. To mount a full scale expedition against Lord Choy will take at least a week to organize, if you want to do it right. Then it would have to sail to Lord Choy's hideout and lay siege to it. That means that the Temasekan military cannot get into place for at least twelve days and there is no guarantee that they will succeed in rescuing the prince. If you wait to hear from Lord Choy then you're looking at roughly two to three weeks of communicating back and forth and again you're not guaranteed to succeed. Lord Choy could ask for all the wealth in your royal treasury and still keep the prince as a hostage. Now I can offer you the rescue of the prince today and the defeat of Lord Choy tomorrow and all I'm asking for is access to your munitions works and some gunpowder. The choice is yours but you better make it now because unlike you, I don't have all the time in the world."

That just caused another round of squabbling and blustering and denials from the various advisors and some more waffling by the king. To shut everyone up I pulled out my ace card. I transported everyone to Oak Hall. It took them by surprise.

"As you can see," I said to the now silenced men, "I am capable of doing what I told you I could. The choice is now yours as to what to do next. You can advise your king to ignore me and I will simply send you back to your court and wash my hands of the whole situation or you can advise him to make a treaty with me and I will rescue the boy and deal with the pirates. What will it be?"

The decision was close. Surprisingly the advisors still wanted the king to ignore me. On my side were Captain Chang and the military advisor, Admiral Po of the Temasekan Navy. The man had swallowed his pride the moment I teleported everyone to Oak Hall. That had taken him by surprise and he immediately saw that I had a tactical advantage that should be exploited. In the end it came down to the king and this time the man didn't waffle. He accepted my terms on the condition that I saved his heir. He didn't even include me defeating Lord Choy in the deal. In return their continued resistance I teleported everyone back to the royal palace in Langhorne City and then thanked the king for his cooperation. I then excused myself. I ended up leaving with Captain Chang and Admiral Po. I knew I would need their help.

My quandary lay in just how much help I would ask for. To do what I had told the king I could do required help from the consortium and help from Oak Hall. It also required a little help from Chang and Po and the local soldiers in Langhorne City. At the very minimum I needed to move two strike forces into position and that meant that I needed the help of the consortium. One needed to drop on the Dark Wind so we could take it and the other needed to land near the pirate enclave so that we could march on it and take it without having to fight our way through their defences. It wasn't something I really wanted to do, but with the time restraints I had to go with what could be done and not what I wanted.

I resolved the above quandary quickly. I decided to lead a strike team against the Dark Wind that night while the vessel was still at sea and the crew was so far from land that they wouldn't be expecting anything. For this raid I'd use my own people plus one. That extra person would be Captain Chang. I would have him teleported into where the boys were being held and he could protect them if anyone went for the boys while the rest of my party took the ship. As for the taking of Lord Choy's pirate haven, I had to accept that it would need to be a joint operation. Over tea and breakfast I explained to Admiral Po what I expected from him. It would be his job to muster his troops and have them ready to deploy on a moments notice. He told me he could and I left him to it.

It had been a long night for my party and for Chang. I sent him off to get some rest and I had my party teleported home for the day so that we could rest and I could get my people organized. I had a quick talk to Tobias and told him what was up and I had a quick talk to Talbot and Danvers and then my mates. I told them all about the raid and what I needed from them. Elsa was in as were Talbot and Danvers. I showed them a plan of the Dark Wind that had been provided to me by Mai Woo and we all went over it. The vessel was twice the size of the Black Dragon. It had four masts and a single bank of oars, and it was manned by a crew of a hundred and forty men. Technically it was cargo vessel and it sailed without armaments, but we knew differently. While it might not have cannons aboard her, she did have a large store of rockets and fire arrows that her crew could use against anyone who got too close to her. Once we'd gone over the plans and I had handed out assignments, I headed off to bed.

Striking in the middle of the night made things easy for us. We picked up Captain Chang in Langhorne City and then we departed. Before teleporting out I had a quick chat with Admiral Po and told him to have his men ready to move within the hour. If all went well we would be back with the prince and his buddies by then.

My group went in as planned. The consortium dropped Captain Chang into the quarters where the prince and his friends were being held and they dropped my party onto the main deck of the Dark Wind. A watch was on duty when we got there and they were shocked at our appearance. Before they could react, my people leapt into action or to be more accurate, they released flights of arrows into the sailors.

Tobias and his men led the way this time. His men were broken into two forces. One faced the prow of the vessel when we popped in and the other faced the stern. As soon as their eyes adjusted to the dim light cast by the moon and the few lanterns fixed to the ship they took aim and fired. Those men on the main deck fell quickly as a result. While Tobias and his men drew new arrows and prepared themselves for more action, the rest of my party rushed the aft-castle. As we moved, an alarm sounded from above the aft-castle on the poop deck. A bell rang out in the night.

We didn't stop. I headed for the stairs leading up to the poop deck from the main deck. Behind me were Rory, Nimue, and Elsa. As we went, Dork headed towards a door that stood in the centre wall of the aft-castle. We knew from our intelligence that it led to a warren of cabins and storage rooms and to a ladder that lead down into the ship. Behind him ran Goiania, Talbot, and Danvers.

I was met at the top of the stairs by a man armed with a scimitar. He struck down at me as I came up the stairs. I blocked his blow with my shield and forced him to jump backwards. As I reached the top step he tried to hit me again and I block his strike a second time. This time I drove my sword under my shield and I plunged it into the man. The man let out a loud groan and then he fell away as I pulled my blade out of him. The man wasn't the only one to attack me. As I hit the poop deck I was attacked on two sides. There was a balcony jutting out from the poop deck that overhung the main deck with a balustrade that ran about it. The stairs up ran adjacent to this area and when I reached the top, I was attacked by a man standing there while another man came at me from towards the stern of the vessel. The man jabbed a pike at me which I deflected with my shield. At the same time I blocked the attack of the man rushing at me. The man was also armed with a pike and I was forced to parry it aside with my longsword.

Sensing my danger I moved forward and between the two men, pivoting towards my left as I did. This put me beyond the thrust of their spears and it placed me facing the man who had attacked me from the flank. Using my shield to protect myself from the other man, I struck out at the first man with my longsword. The man instinctively brought around his pike in an effort to block my attack, but his efforts were in vain. My sword cleaved through the shaft of the man's weapon and it continued on until it sank into the man's naked chest. The man screamed as the metal of my blade bit into him and then he dropped to the deck in a heap.

I didn't really need to worry about the second man. He did try to lunge towards me with his pike and he made an effort to get past my shield but he failed. Elsa had been right behind me and when she hit the poop deck she lashed out at the other man and dropped him long before he had a chance to be a real threat. After that it was a simple task to mop up the poop deck and secure it.

By then Dork was working his way into the cabins beneath us and he was certainly making his presence known. Whenever someone stuck their head out of a cabin to see what was going on, he simply wacked them on the head and eliminated them as a threat. If a man escaped him, Goiania or Talbot or Danvers went after the man. It didn't take much of an effort to finish off any resistance.

The real trouble came when men started pouring up onto the main deck in response to the alarm and that trouble only lasted for a few minutes. The first half dozen pirates that surged up from their quarters ended up as pincushions filled with arrows. Of course by then Dork had found where the prince and the boys had been held and he had kicked in the door so that a startled Chang could lead the trio of lads to safety. When they reached the poop deck a few minutes later, I decided that we'd had enough fun for one night. By my count there was probably around a hundred men still below decks who needed to be killed and I didn't want to do it since I had other work to do that night. Instead I had the consortium teleport the ship back to Oak Hall.

As far as I was concerned the ship was mine and I was claiming it. Once the vessel was sitting off of Oak Hall I called upon the consortium to teleport the pirates, without their weapons to the dungeons of Izmir. I figured that Lord Omar and his advisors could find a use for them considering their attitude about selling stuff that I sent them. Once that was done, I had the consortium teleport my party and Chang and the prince and his buddies back to Langhorne City. You should have seen the face of Admiral Po when we arrived. The man just gapped at us in wonder.

We didn't hang around long to discuss matters with anyone. Admiral Po made certain that the prince and his buddies got back to the palace without any problems and then we were off again. This time the consortium teleported us directly to Lord Choy's enclave.

The enclave was on an island off the coast of the landmass I knew as the Malaysian peninsula. From the intelligence I had seen I knew that there were a few thousand locals living on the island in addition to the pirates but there were no major concentrations. Most of the locals simply lived in small fishing villages and they tried to keep out of the way of the pirates. I didn't expect any problems from them.

The enclave was on a long narrow cove that was partially blocked by another island. That island housed some of the Temasekan cannons that the pirates had captured and a small guard. It was only one of three gun batteries that were scattered near the mouth of the cove. The other two were on the larger island on either side of the entrance into the cove. Each of the batteries was essentially a small self-contained village. The gun crews had slaves to help them tend to daily issues like feeding them and whores to keep them company at night. All three batteries were only accessible from the water and a watch was kept at all times.