Chapter Twenty

THEY MADE IT TO THE DOCK ALIVE.

Behind them, patriots plunged through the streets, along with panicked residents, mostly women. Some of the women weren’t panicking at all, but were busily reloading muskets and relaying them to nearby men.

Picard led his little band to the top of the wharf, leading out to where the Justina rested at the point of deepest water, for her draft was a good ten feet deeper than any other vessel here.

“What’s holding us back, sir?” Bennett wanted to know when Picard paused.

“Looking for Committee of Safety guards,” Picard answered. “Seems they’ve all gone to defend the town. All right, let’s board and load.”

There were only the four of them now, their shoes throbbing on the dock as they ran out to the gangplank and charged onto the ship. The Justina was eerily quiet, without another living soul on board. And yet there seemed to still be a pulse of life here, as if the beast were just in repose waiting for its master to return.

So it was true … no ship was entirely inert. The life pulse of the shipwrights, the sailors, the officers remained on board somehow. She was alive.

“Is this your first action on this continent, Mr. Leonfeld?” Picard asked as they reached the main deck.

“Yes…”

“What dp you think so far?”

Sandy tightened visibly. He sighed twice. “I cannot believe it can work for the mob to decide … yet how can I tell a man like Patrick O’Heyne to go and be a collier because he was born to a collier? To go back to his ‘station’ in life? And my dear, decent Jeremiah, whose heart I know as my own … . How can the right of kings be less than divine and still be sacred?”

“Perhaps power flows the other way in a better world, Sergeant,” Picard said. “From the people to the government, instead of the other way round.”

Sandy shook his head. “You are a confusing man, sir! And I am confused.”

Picard nodded. “Congratulations.”

In the town, shouts pierced the night, the voices of commanders barking instructions spared them from pressing the issue.

“Close up!”

“Wheel right!”

“Forward!”

“Fix bayonets!”

“Uh-oh,” Picard uttered. “Mr. Bennett, arm phasers. Eh—instead of that, prepare a cannon to fire. We’re going to make the dock impassable.”

“Aye, sir!” Bennett sprang for a midships gun. “I’ll use the foredeck gun, sir, beggin’ your pardon. We’ll get a good punch taking the dock at a bit of an angle.”

“Very well. Help him, Sergeant.”

“Yes, sir.” Sandy put down his sea-issue rifle and hurried to assist.

As the skirmish escalated on the visible street beyond the wharf, Picard and Alexander crouched at the ship’s rail, weapons aimed. Dim outlines of redcoats and patriots picked through bloodsoaked bodies cluttering the ground.

It took time to load and run out a cannon, and before Wollard and Sandy were finished, several armed townsmen appeared on the wharf, running toward the extended dock that would bring them out to the ship’s T-shaped dock.

Picard raised his rifle and fired, but the unfamiliar weapon damned his aim, and shot downward and a foot to the left of the colonist he had sighted down. Fortunately, it did take out the dock plank the man was standing on, and the colonist fumbled and spun into the water. With a soaked rifle and heavy clothing, the floundering man was now paddling about uselessly, trying to find a way out of the water.

Alexander looked at the other colonists pounding down the dock. “Should I shoot?”

Picard glanced at the boy. “Do what you think is right.”

The boy stared at him, then looked down at the long rifle in his hands. Unexpectedly, he lowered the gun, and looked up again. “They’re only defending their say over their own lives. They just want to keep what they earn.”

At first he seemed to be waiting for approval for his words, but when none was forthcoming, Alexander glowered fiercely as if making up his mind a second time, put his rifle down, and turned his back.

In that silent moment, the halyards flapped against the mast, the water patted the ship’s planks, and the pop of riflefire pressed into the night, each percussion ticking off a second. A full minute went by, and still the boy did not turn.

“Mmm,” Picard mumbled. “Progress.” He gripped the nearest shroud and called, “How’s that cannon, Wollard?”

“Ready, sir!”

Bennett’s voice cracked on a grunt as he and Sandy put their shoulders to the lines. The loaded gun groaned out on its heavy truck. It took considerable strain, and all the leverage the blocks could offer for only two men to move that twelve-hundred-pound gun outboard through the gunport. Luckily, the gun carriage was weighted well, and the whole system of ropes and blocks were brilliantly arranged to do this, and the gun went out. Picard began to see why these ocean-going fighting ships, so much smaller than his starship, needed a crew almost as large.

He looked out at the approaching patriots. “Take aim on the dock and fire! Quickly!”

Bennett aimed the gun by shoving down a heavy stick that changed the elevation of the cannon’s back end, then Sandy shoved in a wooden wedge to hold the cannon in place. Sandy already had a spark reddening on a linstock—some kind of fuse—and Bennett snatched the linstock and touched it to the base ring. He avoided the actual touchhole itself, Picard noticed.

The explosion was instantaneous, thrumming the whole side of the ship with its concussion. Below, the dock dissolved into splinters, dispensing a half dozen patriots into the water. Four of them came up sputtering. Two never came up at all.

The ship’s two middle docklines now hung limp, tied to pilings that no longer had a dock. The two outer ones, however, bow and stern, were made off to other docks for stability, and held the ship to the boatyard. However, there was no longer a dock leading up to the side of the ship.

They were defensible now.

Scarcely had the thought of his success sunk in when a fleshy mass dropped before his eyes and clamped over his mouth, leaving only one nostril free so that he could barely breath. It was a human forearm, and he was caught! He pressed out one fitful “Mmmmmph!” as he was pulled backward off balance, and two more figures charged past him.

As he gripped the arm around his mouth and twisted around the other piece of meat that had coiled around his chest to keep him off balance, he watched the two invaders plunge up the maindeck toward the bow and attack Sandy and Bennett, and—horribly—he also saw Alexander charge the armed patriots!

The patriots had stripped off their jackets and shirts in order to swim effectively and climb the chains, and now their wet backs glistened in the first spark of morning light. Their shoulders flexed as they raised swords and brought them slashing down upon Bennett and Sandy. Sandy fell back and tumbled behind the foremast, then rolled to his feet and squared off to parry his opponent.

Bennett was less fortunate. The seaman took a shattering blow to the left cheekbone from the second patriot. Bennett bellowed his gutwrenching agony and dropped like a stone. As he lay on the deck, clawing at the destruction of his face, blood flowed freely from the wound, which continued to open as his skull lost its structural integrity.

And Alexander now reached the foredeck, snatched up the red-hot linstock, and took a mighty swing at the back of the man who had killed Bennett.

Picard dug his heels into the deck and heaved backward on the man holding him, squeezing part of his mouth out from behind the mighty forearm. “Hulllfff—”

Freeze program! Freeze program!

The arm tightened against his mouth. He tried to shove the words right out through his nostrils, but the computer evidently didn’t understand the command.

Engulfed in the horror of his own lack of foresight, Picard watched as the linstock in Alexander’s hands whipped down on the patriot’s bare back and dealt the man a searing burn, which the man repaid instantly by a swirl of flesh and steel. The man’s sword swiped toward Alexander. The boy ducked back and to one side, but the sword’s point laid open the tip of one shoulder and slashed diagonally across his chest as the patriot bent his elbow at the wrong instant.

Picard roared against the strap of human forearm that clamped his mouth. He forced his jaws open, and sank his teeth into the nearest muscle.

A howl of pain blew against his ear and the arm came loose. He rammed an elbow back and drove it into the man’s diaphragm, then clamped his hands into a rock and swung around, driving his makeshift club into the patriot’s ear. Dizzied and breathless, the patriot staggered back and fell on top of the maindeck hatch.

“Freeze—oh, to hell with it!” Picard rushed to the foredeck and drove a shoulder into the patriot, who was about to finish Alexander with another sword swipe. Together, Picard and the patriot went sprawling.

The man was half his age, but Picard was twice as mad. He grasped the armed man by the neck, raised him up a bit, then slammed his head into the deck. The sword clattered from the man’s numbed hand.

“Alexander!” Picard spun off his knees and scrambled to the boy, who was trying to sit up.

“I’m getting up!” Alexander insisted valiantly. “Don’t stop the program! It’s just a cut! That’s all!”

Damn, the boy was quick! Before Picard could hold him down he cranked his legs under him, grasped the ship’s rail, and hoisted himself up. The front of his shirt was soggy with plum-colored blood, and the same for the cut shoulder. One arm hung numb, but other than that he was looking out at the wharf.

“Look!”

British soldiers were swarming from the street onto the wharf, lined up just beautifully, and took stern aim at all the patriots on the docks.

“Cease fire!” a voice called from the docks. “Colonials, cease fire! Cease fire!”

Picard looked … it was Patrick O’Heyne, standing at about the middle of the main wharf, holding both hands up. His rifle lay on the wharf at his feet.

He was giving up, to spare the lives of the cornered patriots—people who had been led out here by the need to possess this ship.

The patriot sparring with Sandy backed off, and Sandy cautiously came around to Picard’s side. “The boy is wounded, sir,” he said.

“I know! What kind of swine attacks a child!”

“But, sir, it’s war,” Sandy explained simply, and of course he was right.

The patriot who was still standing on the deck stepped well away from them and waved to O’Heyne, then put his sword down reluctantly. He was giving up.

Like so much of the Revolutionary War, this skirmish had been for nothing but the philosophical point struggling to have its meager voice heard. The frigate Justina was once again a Royal Navy ship.

The night was blessedly cool against his hot skin and the hairs on his neck that were still standing from the electrical jolts.

On his way to the main doors of the jail complex, Worf had stepped through a half dozen fires set by Odette Khanty as she tried to block him from following her. She had kicked her awkward business shoes off and set fire to them, too. She was probably running now.

Worf refused to run. He balled his fists and stalked, step upon step, as regulated as a parade. His boots made an authoritative chunk on the brick with stride. He began to concentrate on the sound, for it brought his mind slowly back from the effects of the buffalo prod.

Behind him, the jail building burned more and more excitedly as the fires began to spread to floor cloths and fabric-covered chairs, and anything else. Even in a jail, fire would find something to consume, even if only the paint on the walls.

He felt like the fire. Ready to burn and determined to avenge his friend’s death.

He approached the balcony of the governor’s mansion, as he saw the guards there and the dozen or more police vehicles rolling or hovering into the courtyard behind him, drowning the courtyard in scene lights. They were all coming to arrest Odette Khanty. He ignored them. He saw his target.

A good day to die.

The police officers flooded from their vehicles and hurried across the courtyard toward the balcony. Worf felt them closing behind him, but he refused to break into a run. It was as if he had a deflector shield around his body. None of them approached him or tried to stop him. Whether they recognized him from the broadcast or simply wanted to concentrate on the woman, he did not know or care.

Each bootstep drove into his aching head like a nail. He wished he had treated Grant with more respect. How impressive—the data thread had still been there. Grant never gave it up. He might’ve bought himself a more merciful death if he had, but the thread was still there. Hours upon hours of circumstantial evidence that, when combined with Data’s recordings of Odette Khanty’s own words, would damn the woman to where she belonged. Anything Data recorded was admissible in court. They had her.

Yet the loss … it nearly took him down with every step. The vision of Grant’s body hanging there, ravaged, would not leave him alone.

Honor was not always being tough, he now knew. Bravery did not always define itself in raw strength. When strength—real strength—was required, Ross Grant had summoned it. Certainly, those hours must have been wretched persecution. Worf felt every minute of every hour now as he stalked his prey.

Anguish squeezed him hard. Action charged the courtyard as the police surrounded the mansion.

Worf climbed the brick stairs to the balcony and turned immediately to his right. He could still see her.

She was running along the wide balcony. Worf could not imagine where she thought she was going, but certainly a woman as clever as this one might have an escape plan or two worked out.

He didn’t care. He would walk—not run—after her if he had to walk into black space on the stairway of his own rage.

Sirens and flashing lights from far off before him cast the mansion’s balcony, and the form of Odette Khanty, in silhouette, as she pulled the iron chairs over into Worf’s path. The police were blocking her way. She would not get off this balcony.

He saw her glancing back at him and fancied that she was terrified of him as she ran and he walked. He hoped she was.

She disappeared unexpectedly. Worf heard the slam of a door. When Worf reached that place, he realized he was looking at a utility closet of some kind.

He kicked the door in.

She slammed another one in front of him. He kicked that in, too. When the door smashed before him, he noticed the T’kalla prod lying on the floor, its LOW BATT sign blinking.

There was no one in this room.

He looked up. A wall-mounted ladder led through some kind of conduit.

He climbed it.

“You can’t do this to me!” Her voice came down with a slight echo.

“Yes, I can,” he said, climbing steadily into the dimness.

“I’ll recover from this!”

“No, you will not.”

“I’ve got influence in places you never heard of!” “Not any more.”

He had no idea where she was heading, but he would meet her there.

He continued to climb. The metal rungs were cold on his hands, and he realized his fingers were twitching with pain.

The sky opened up before him. Mrs. Khanty had apparently climbed out of the conduit, and now there was sky. Night sky. In his mind Worf saw the shuttlecraft hovering out in space, dutifully broadcasting over and over the selfimmolating words of Odette Khanty in the cell.

The whole population would know, if they didn’t already.

And the profit was interesting. He hadn’t realized she had shot her husband in the first place.

There she was. As he climbed out of the conduit, he saw Odette Khanty at the edge of the roof. They were four stories high, all the way to the top of the mansion.

All around, the courtyard glowed with police lights and buzzed with activity. Below, people flocked to see what was happening.

All eyes were fixed on the edge wall of the roof, where Odette Khanty was trapped against the open air.

“Stay back,” she said as Worf walked across the roof toward her.

There was a short wall framing the roof. She climbed up onto it, having some difficulty with her narrow skirt.

Worf stopped.

She crawled a few feet along the brick riser, then paused. She had nowhere to go.

‘I’ll throw myself off,” she called on the wind that swept down.

“No,” Worf countered. “You will not.”

“You can’t win here,” she insisted. “I’ll go down as a trapped heroine. The people here will think it was all a plot. A frame. They love me!”

Worf felt the wind tug at his hair and cool his face. “The time has passed for that. You have done ten thousand heinous things in your life, and Ross Grant cared about every one of them. I care only about two.”

He stepped closer to her, close enough that he could easily have yanked her off the edge of the roof.

“One thing you should never have done,” he said, “was kill my friend.”

Baffled, Odette Khanty drew her brows together and peered at him as she remained there on her hands and knees, her black hat now missing and her stockings shredded by the brick.

“You came back for that?” she wondered. “For him?”

“Yes, for him.” Worf raised his hand.

One push. Barely enough to feel against his skin, and she would be gone. Gone, quickly and abruptly, with only a few moments of terror, a free-fall, and a quick death.

“And the other?”

“Your death will release the Rogues from their Oath of Sto-vok-or. They would be able to recover what honor is left to them, and perhaps gain more.”

“Wait,” she cried, “I release them, they are freed of their oath!”

“Thank you. Will you now restore my friend to life?”

“Don’t!” Khanty shouted as Worf reached for her.

He clasped her elbow as easily as plucking a flower, and dragged her away from the ledge.

Behind him, the conduit began burping policemen. One after another, they surged out onto the roof and formed a jagged half-circle around him and the woman. He knew they were there, but he did not look at them.

He looked only at her.

“Odette Khanty,” he said, “by authority of Starfleet and the United Federation of Planets, I place you under arrest for murder, attempted murder, extortion, espionage, and treason. Be glad you are in my custody, and not the custody of those who ‘love’ you.”