“Are you serious, Formone?” asked one of the sailors. “We can’t go back there. Not a single one of us will get close enough to even scratch one of those behemoths. It would be suicide.”

“Maybe not suicide,” countered another sailor. “We could jump overboard if our boat is hit with one of those flaming balls.”

“Into what?” scoffed a sailor. “I am not sure what you were doing on the voyage from there to here, but I saw hundreds of sharks heading for the scene of the battle. No one overboard is going to survive out there. You might as well stay in the boat and burn to death.”

“If you aren’t willing to do what we came out here to do,” declared Formone, “you should give your boat to someone else. I plan to sink as many Motangan ships as I can before I die.”

“You’re nuts,” growled a sailor. “Show me a way to get close to those ships, and I will go with you, but I am not going back just to turn into a clova on a spit.”

“We just have to take them by surprise,” shrugged Formone.

“The last time, they saw us coming from a long ways off,” stated a sailor. “They didn’t understand what we were up to, and that is the only reason we got close enough to do any damage. We can’t do that again.”

“We can at night,” retorted Formone. “We know the direction that they are heading, and now we know their speed. It is simple to plot their location at any given time. We are small enough to sneak in between them without them noticing.”

“That might work,” mused one of the sailors, “but as soon as the first fireball goes off, it will be all over. We will be lucky to get two or three more ships.”