Day of Honor 01_ Ancient Blood - Diane Carey [19]
“Yes, I know what I said …”
“My grandparents sent me this program for my first Day of Honor. It was my mother’s, they got it from her human relatives on Earth.”
“But why a human experience?” Picard had to shout over the cannonfire. “It’s a Klingon holiday!”
“I know that,” the boy shouted back. “Since it was Captain James T. Kirk and Dahar Master Kor working together who founded the Day of Honor, and I’ve got both human and Klingon blood in me, I think I should be able to choose either one.”
Picard ducked a lashing line. “Yes, well—”
The boy grasped his arm. “You’re not going to freeze it, are you? Just because of some ship attacking?”
“Not the attack, per se … but this particular holoprogram is very old and doesn’t comply with the safety controls as well as the more up-to-date programs.”
“It’s not my fault. My Mother’s great-aunt has this journal made into a holoprogram over fifty years ago. She got it from her great-grandmother. The journal’s been in the family since—”
“Yes, I know. Since 1777!”
“You said I could choose! You said!”
“I said.”
Jean-Luc Picard found himself grappling an old style ship’s pin rail, his hands entangled in coiled sisal ropes hanging from belaying pins, wondering how children survived at all with so concrete a sense of right and wrong, and what had been once said that could never later be altered.
He had said. He had told Alexander to select an ancestor’s struggle with honor, and prepare to study that. He had expected the boy to select a Klingon ancestor, something relatively recent, with which Picard had some familiarity.
An officer in a blue jacket charged past him and hurried along the amidships deck, calling, “Reload and run ‘em out! Try a ranging shot, please, Mr. Nightingale! Ready on the heads’l sheets! Ready on the braces! MacCrimmon, cross on the weather side, you idiot! Wollard, that main brace is fouled, lee side! Up the shrouds with you!”
“Aye, sir!”
“All hands, wear ship!”
Picard looked up as three men scrambled up the supporting cables of the middle mast—the main. He’d played at this part of history, sailing ships and all, but the holoprograms made up for people of his age had built-in foolproofs. He could give an order to wear the ship then pull the wrong line, and the pretend ship would somehow compensate.
This wasn’t one of those foolproof programs. This was a journal of the real thing, and he found it even smelled different from a made-for-entertainment holoprogram.
Smoke spun like Spanish dancers through the infernal din of cannonfire. The boy at his side had proved more clever than Picard expected.
Instead of examining his Klingon heritage for a Klingon holiday, he had chosen a relative from his deeply buried human heritage and provided Picard with these holotapes, long ago dramatized from the diaries of that ancestor.
Now here they were, huddled on the bow of a ship of war, with canvas rattling above and the boom of battle drumming at close range.
He didn’t even know which battle this was. The year— 1777. The American Revolutionary War.
“Not my best period,” he muttered. His voice was snatched away by a tail of cannon smoke. “Couldn’t you have had a Napoleonic relative?”
“What?” Alexander huddled at his side, wincing at the sound of heavy artillery. The Klingon boy was incongruous here among the scrambling human crew. But this was a computer program, and the crew would see him as a human youth.
“Why did you choose this program?” Picard asked again. “The Day of Honor is a Klingon exercise.”
“I’ve been hearing about Klingon honor all my life,” Alexander said. “Stand your ground, choose strong enemies, fight forward, and die in battle. There has to be more to it. I wanted to see what’s in my human background. Maybe we can find something.”
“Maybe.” Picard grasped the lines nearest his head and pulled himself to his feet, then leaned over the ship’s varnished rail and peered downward. The letters on the nameplate were carved and painted— Justina.
He looked up then, into the rigging, to seek the skittering ensigns flying at the mastheads. There, whipping