Day of Honor 01_ Ancient Blood - Diane Carey [22]
Picard kept pulling. “We have to get these ships apart, or we’ll maul each other into the sea! Is that what you want?” Without waiting for an answer, he reached down, snatched a coil of line from one of the pins, and tossed it at the colonist. “Now, haul away, boy! We have to change the angle of this ship!”
The line was made fast to its pin, and stayed fast as the sailor paled a shade, belted his pistol, and did as he was told. He braced both feet on the bow rail of that ship and hauled back.
“When this is over,” the sailor called, “I’ll be shooting you, sir!”
“Better than drowning,” Picard drawled back.
Sir. Well, he was some kind of officer. He hadn’t even bothered to look at what kind of jacket he was wearing.
“Captain?” Alexander’s knobby head appeared below.
“Stay down. And don’t call me ‘captain.’” Picard kept the pressure on the bowsprit chains, though his arms were shuddering now. But the ship—the Chincoteague was moving!
Or perhaps the Justina was moving beneath him, under the combined force of his actions and the pulling of the other ship’s sailor on the line. The Justina began sluggishly swinging around, putting the ships more side by side than bow to beam. That allowed the bowsprit of Chincoteague to release its dance with the Justina’s foremast and bob freely in the rigging.
With the cooperation of the swells and a slacking breeze, the colonial ship’s bowsprit moved outboard another yard. It stalled, then began moving again, and this time floated completely out. In a surreal motion, the other ship continued moving away. Its hull turned abeam and the cannons began roaring once again.
True to his promise, the colonial sailor dumped the line joining the ships, fumbled off the rail, jumped down to the deck, and drew his pistol again. He aimed it as squarely at Picard as the bobbing of Chincoteague would allow, but Chincoteague drifted backward and was swallowed by a dense shroud of cannon smoke just as the sailor tried to take aim. He made a wild shot, but it was far off.
“Shrouds! That’s it!” Picard shouted victoriously and grasped the cables that supported the masts from side to side. Then he grasped the horizontally tied footropes. “And ratlines! Yes, of course. Ah, these were the days! Sometimes I wish we had things like this aboard the Enterprise!”
Ridiculous. What a thought.
“Why don’t we have them?” Alexander asked, appearing at his side.
“Because we don’t have masts to support. If you look up at these, you can see what they do.”
Alexander craned his neck to look up at the maze of lines and pullies. “This boat has too many things on it. Do you know what all this does?”
“No, not all of it,” Picard admitted. “I’ve played at the era, but I’ve never actually worked at it. I’ve paid more attention to tactics of these types of battles than the details of sail handling. Perhaps this is a good time to—”
His words were blasted apart by a half dozen cannonshots at stunningly close range. The Chincoteague’s brief dance with Justina had allowed both ships time to reload and run out their guns again. Now both ships had opened fire again.
Instinctively, Picard ducked and pushed Alexander down as the ship beneath them shuddered from hits on her hull. The sound of cracking wood was as disgusting as bones breaking, and was punctuated by the screams of dying men on the gundeck below.
Alexander pushed out from under Picard’s arm and looked along the deck, then suddenly drew a sharp breath and trembled. Not five steps away, a crewman lay shuddering and gasping, dying. He raised his head pathetically and looked at his own body, now a field of jagged splinters from the broken bulwark. A cannonball had come through the body of the ship between the deck and rail, skewered this poor man with dozens of sharp stakes, then plunged across the deck and out another passage it had carved for itself in the opposite bulwark. Picard still heard the water hissing where the hot ball struck, and there was a column of steam out there in the water.
Alexander struggled