Day of Honor 01_ Ancient Blood - Diane Carey [48]
“Stand back, gentlemen,” Picard said as the line grew tight and hard as stone. If the line parted, or one of the knots came free, it would whip back and shear someone’s head off. Given the tenuous nature of this old-tech program, he couldn’t take a chance of that being himself or Alexander.
“Mr. Picard!” Edward Nightingale gulped as if holding down his dinner, and pointed frantically out onto the water beyond the ship. “Look! Sir, look!”
Two more ships were swinging out of an inlet! One was a single-masted ship with a fore-aft sail, large enough to deck perhaps a half dozen cannon, but the other was a two-masted ship of about eighty feet. Both that ship’s masts were square-rigged.
“More spider catchers are with them!” one of the two oarsmen said. “We gotta get on back!”
He struck off toward the rowboat, but Alexander Leonfeld plunged from his guard stance, caught the frantic sailor, and roughly held him back. “Bennett! We’ll be ambushed on the water!”
The brawny sailor swung around and wrenched his arm back. “You can’t order me! You’re not a Navy officer!”
“But I am,” Picard said, stepping between them. “Stand down, Mr. Bennett.”
Sergeant Leonfeld still didn’t let go of the panicked sailor, and that mastery of the moment reflected itself almost comically in Alexander’s face as Picard glanced at the boy. Leonfeld was ankle-deep in shore water, but seemed uncaring of that. He was determined that this man not be sacrificed to an impossible situation.
Helpless, the men and the boy watched in soul-sick frustration as two attacking ships and the spider catcher boats opened fire on the stranded Justina. The cannon blasts wakened the settling night with bright orange flashes and bits of flaming material. Red-hot bits rocketed through the darkness and sliced into Justina’s heads’ls, ripping them to shreds and leaving the shreds burning.
“Canister!” Nightingale choked. “Dear God, that brig’s using hot shrapnel against us! Oh, how impolite!”
Now, that Picard knew about. Bits of metal, nails, broken glass, heated up and poured into canisters, then fired out of a cannon, to blast apart in midair, scatter, and rip up anything it struck. It would set fire to sails and wood, and shred flesh on contact. Not nice.
Then again, neither was an armed phaser bank.
The Justina’s headsails were on fire now, causing the crew to scramble to put out the flames, thereby keeping them from efficiently returning cannonfire. Picard wished he could see what was happening on the deck as it tilted more and more.
The line—should they cut the line joining the frigate to the land? Or were the capstan men still pushing the bars? Still trying to warp the ship off the shoal?
No one had called from the relay boat. So far there was no order. And if the captain wanted the line cut, he could just as easily sever it from the deck.
The quiet bay at once became a hornet’s nest. Cannonfire was met with vicious and sporadic response from the Justina as the British ship’s crew struggled to run out her guns quickly. Rifle fire, though, cracked every few seconds from Justina’s deck. The grenadiers.
Beside Picard, Alexander Leonfeld’s whole body quaked with the same helplessness Bennett had expressed.
Shuddering, the grenadier sergeant suddenly raised his own rifle and took a quickly considered shot at one of the spider catchers. Snap-flash-CRACK.
And an eddy of acrid gunsmoke. Now his flintlock was empty. He rushed to reload it, while Alexander the swab gazed in mute adoration from a few steps away.
“Hold your fire, Mr. Leonfeld,” Picard said quietly.
The sergeant looked up sharply and demanded, “Why should I?”
“Because you could hit our own men in the