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By Root 1113 0

that had happened in the distant past, and he couldn’t really save a life, but there was a certain stinging reality in the fact that this had happened. As he had told the boy, this was not a holonovel. It was true history. These men had fallen on this ship, they had bled into its planks, they had driven back the desperate colonial ship, and men had died there, too. This suffering beneath his hands was very real, a taste of a witnessed event without need of imaginary embellishment, and it was his responsibility, as the posterity this program had been created for, to appreciate what he was seeing for the truths it displayed.

But it was time for him to get some rest, and then command his starship again. Picard found himself oddly disappointed to return to the twenty-fourth century. It was a transition he would have to make several times in the next few days, and it never ceased to be disconcerting.

The next evening, Picard and Alexander returned to the ship, the program waiting patiently for their return to the 1700s.

Until the sun sank into the milky sky, they cleaned the ship and sorted the dead from the dying from the mightlive. Picard and Alexander both engaged in a crash course of squaring away a ship after a battle. The cannons had to be lashed down and cleaned. The wounded had to be tended with the eighteenth-century version of voodoo they called medicine, and, though appalling, it involved more common sense than Picard would’ve expected. He knew he had been guilty of disparaging the past as primitive, but they weren’t really primitive. They simply hadn’t the advantage of several more centuries of brilliant shoulders upon which to prop themselves. They were far more on their own than he had ever been, and he gained respect for them as this battered ship and crew saw to themselves without the advantage of retreating to a starbase for repairs and treatment. Whatever happened to them, they had to handle it.

He and Alexander became intimately part of that, and were learning very fast. Inevitably, the moment came when Picard, officer or not, helped carry a wounded man below.

What a heart-punching experience—he grimaced as his fingers sank into the blood-drenched flesh of the agonized sailor. The deck beneath his feet was gritty with a stew of powder grains, splinters, and blood. He fought to keep from retching.

Every “old” sailing vessel or museum ship he had ever visited had been clean as newspun cotton and had no particular odor. The cotton, oakum, and pitch once used to caulk decks had ages ago been replaced by epoxy and some kind of synthetic that looked the same, but wasn’t as messy.

This ship was different. It wasn’t a replica, or even a museum preservation. It was the real thing, in full function.

The moment his head went under the deck supports of the companionway hatch, his innards heaved under the assault of fumes of sulfur, tar, pitch, coal, bilge water, blood, oil-soaked sisal ropes, and the slimy excuse for drinking water. Eternal dampness pervaded the stenchy darkness, and for several minutes he could barely stay conscious. Every breath brought a wash of nausea. He was glad Alexander was up on the deck. Some things a boy should not have to endure. No lesson was worth this.

Even as he entertained that revelation, two boys younger than Alexander dashed past with lanterns, heading down the gloomy, stinking orlop deck, crunching on the sandcoated deck. Powder monkeys.

Children aboard a fighting ship …

If he had cherished any fantasies about living this way, they now faded fast.

Four hours later, the main deck was cleared of wreckage and wounded, the cannons were cooling, the ship’s carpenters were shoring up the holes blown in Justina by iron balls, crew were scrubbing the blood from the decks—and so, by the way, was Alexander—and there was talk of rowing ashore to pick out a tree that could replace part of a topmast that had been shattered.

Order was slowly and deliberately returning, with a remarkably steady sobriety. No one complained. Even the wounded resisted their moans. It was a sight to behold.