[b]New York City, Rebel American Colonies - 1836[/b]
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	"That is time gentlemen, you may fire when ready." Admiral Thomas Cochrane, 10th Earl of Dundonald, clicked his watch shut and nodded to the slew of officers who had been waiting patiently for this moment.

	"The signal to fire, if you please, Mr Wills." Captain John Ledsham had turned and snapped the order to a junior Lieutenant who saluted, slipped the knot holding the signal halliard in place, and quickly began to haul it hand over hand into the sky. The flags caught the wind and snapped out in a flash of colour.

	Mere seconds passed before the first of the bomb ships fired, the heavy mortar sitting in the belly of the boat roaring as it hurled a shell in a high ark before it plunged toward the city beyond. The sound had barely faded when another mortar fired, then another, until all twenty of the squat looking vessels were shuddering with the heavy concussion.

	"By god it makes a man proud to be British don't it?" An officer growled nearby and the Admiral had to agree as the first of the massive battleships began to tack and turn so that its guns could sweep the half finished fortifications that might have prevented the British attack.

	He could see blue coated soldiers running to the few guns that had been mounted when word of the approaching British fleet had first reached them. "Fools..." They would barely make a dent in the warships that crawled toward them on the flood tide, a steady breeze filling the huge sails.

	The first of the ships opened fire, the rolling thunder of the massive broadsides completely drowning out the heavy thud of the mortars. The rebel defences vanished in a cloud of dust, falling masonry, and a combination of canister and round shot. The rebel flag, mounted on a freshly limbed tree trunk, toppled almost instantly and vanished into the maelstrom below. Cochrane fancied he saw a cannon hit plumb on the barrel go flipping through the air like an Indian tomahawk. 

	It didn't take long, by the time the third man-of-war had emptied its broadside into the fort a single man stumbled into view and began to frantically wave a white flag. The fourth ship fired one shot before its guns fell silent and a minute later a launch filled with red-coated marines pulled away toward the island. 

	The first of the outer works had fallen but the city governor had refused to surrender and so now New York must suffer; the mortars fired on.