1799 Planetfall

by Chogan Swan

  Marcos looked west, reaching for his spyglass.

  “They are too low to spot from deck, Capitán. You'd better come aloft.”

  Marcos let the glass slip back into his pocket and leapt to the rigging, climbing the fifty feet to la cofa in a few heartbeats. Tiana moved over to let him step onto the braces next to her. He wrapped an arm around the mast and pulled out his glass.

  “¡Dios, Tiana! How did you see them? Let alone make out the flag.”

  She held her tongue for a moment as she focused her own glass on the flag. “They are headed north as well, but their heading will bring them closer to us, if we stay on course.”

  “I wonder if they are truly a Spanish ship. What else can you tell me?”

  “Their lookout is coming into view now. He is young and has pale skin and yellow hair. He has spotted us as well since he is shouting to the deck and pointing at us.”

  “¡Maldita Sea! For certain an English navy ship or privateer working out of Paranaguá for the Portuguese.”

  He called to the pilot, “Señor Contreras, make ready to come about and change heading to south-southwest, as quick as you can.”

  In seconds, la Niña Bonita had cut across the wind and was racing south again. The flag on the horizon vanished. They kept watch for it, with Tiana scanning the rest of the horizon as well. A quarter of an hour later it reappeared -- now heading east -- pursuing them.

  Marcos sighed. “The wind favors them, Tiana. We are in deep trouble.”

  “Marcos, why do you think you cannot win.”

  “I suppose we have a small chance, but only if the captain is a fool. The English, whatever their faults, are good sailors. His ship will be big because he is strong enough to go in search of prey, not hide near land where he can snap up a prize and avoid warships. Fast because the English use their slow ships to protect their merchant fleet, and he pursues us instead of staying on course to protect a convoy.”

  He tapped his signet ring on the mast thoughtfully.

  “It is too early to hope we can lose him in the night. We can probably cut closer to the wind, but that would only hasten the encounter. He has the wind in his favor and can engage at will. We have no long guns so he will be able to cut us apart before our carronades come in range.” He frowned, shaking his head. “The English are good shots, as we saw when they were our allies before Napoleon coerced our government into turning on them four years ago.”

  “You can't think of any way to avoid him?”

  Marcos considered. “If we keep running south and they are foolish enough to get directly behind us, then perhaps. Our upwind speed may be better than theirs. If we have room and cut closer to the wind, we may lose them or ambush from close range when we reach the islands and estuaries on the coast.”

  Tiana adjusted her scope. “I can see all of her now. If I describe her, could you make a good guess at her strengths?”

  Marcos nodded.

  “She has ten gun ports to a side,” Tiana said, “and they’ve changed their flag to a red one with a blue cross and an X outlined in white.”

  Marcos hissed between his teeth. “English privateer. She'll carry more than a hundred men and perhaps more than twenty guns, some will be twelve-pounders. The bow chasers will be long nines.”

  “They have two long boxes at the bow covered in tarps on the weather deck. Is that them?”

  Marcos closed his eyes and bowed his head. “Yes, that's them. More than twenty guns then.”

  “She’s a brig; twice as wide as us, so at a guess, a hundred fifty feet long. She's gaff-rigged too, but the rear sail is larger in proportion and the masts a third taller than ours. The topsails have two tiers, the lowest is triangular and continues the line of the mainsails. They have a large triangular jib sail that overlaps the front mainsail.”

  “¡Dios! A Netherlands fisher’s jib. They must be very fast.”

  “By the gain she is making on us… at least fifteen knots to our twelve.”

  “Fifteen knots….”

  “They aren't falling in behind us, but cutting closer to the west.”

  Marcos rested his forehead on the mast. He squeezed his eyes shut hard then took a long breath and straightened his shoulders. “The east has no hiding places. We'll have to surrender.”

  Tiana considered a moment. “I have another idea,” she said. “I’m going to capture her.”

  Marcos snapped his head around to stare at her. “You’re serious.”

  “Yes. I want a ship of my own. If a big, fast one—just asking for trouble—comes along, isn’t that too good an opportunity to miss?”

  She looked at the following ship and felt a strange hunger. “Would you tell Señor Contreras to resume our northerly heading? We may as well, it will save time later.”

  The sound of the guns from the approaching ship sounded again and two more cannonballs skipped past over the waves, this time on the starboard side of la Niña Bonita.

  “Do not wait too long before striking your colors,” Tiana said. “Ten minutes should be perfect.”

  Marcos nodded and gave her a quick embrace. “Tiana, you appear confident, but... I can't help feeling you are going to a brave death.”

  “Marcos, you told me yourself what to expect if discovered, so you know how they will try to treat me, especially if I am captured on your vessel. My mission leaves no choice in this.”

  She took off the borrowed cloak and handed it to him. Marcos held it spread out to hide her naked body from any of the crew who might glance toward the bow where they stood—though most of them were intent on the ship to the stern.

  She secured the bundle of twenty hardwood spikes to her harness with the cord from her boat, checked her knives one more time, pumped the pellet-throwing handgun to full pressure and holstered it behind her back. She hoped she would not have to use it, but its design was far too advanced to leave behind on a primitive world.

  Tiana put her hand on his shoulder and squeezed softly then turned and dove off the leeward side of the bow. She hit cleanly and arced her body to use the momentum to drive her toward the pursuing ship.

  Hands in front of her, she rippled her body through the water, rotating her head to watch for predators. The hissing of the copper plates on the hull of the English ship as it pushed through the waves grew louder. If she missed them when they passed, it would mean pursuing them until they slowed to board la Niña Bonita, far too late for her plan to work.

  A peek above the surface of the cloudy water helped her make sure of them and she soon had herself directly in their course. She dove again then rose to meet the hull and grabbed a seam of the overlapping plates, letting the ship pull her along like the suckerfish Marcos had described.

  Tiana worked her way along the hull to the rudder and climbed the steering assembly. The stern held seven windows, and the sill was an easy reach from the top of the rudder.

  Triumphant shouts from the deck sounded, a few moments later, the ship slowed; la Niña Bonita must have lowered her flag.

  She loosened the top of the bundle of spikes, pulled out six of them then transferred them to her tail. With both hands now free, she pulled herself to the open center window and raised her eyes over the windowsill briefly before dropping back to consider the options.

  The view had been through a narrow hallway with doors on either side that opened onto the gun deck. Her vision was limited by the cabins on either side, but the port side looked as though it held the majority of the men, so that was the side bearing on la Niña Bonita.

  A quick check on the other six windows showed the three on the starboard side were to the captain’s quarters, empty now, of course. The others were to the officer’s quarters; also empty. Good, there would be no surprises from this direction. The latch to the nearest window of the captain’s cabin had been loose. She flipped it open, and the odor of a man who bathed only seldom poured out. She slipped inside, wrinkling her lip in distaste.

  In spite of the stench, the bed linens were clean
and the bed neatly made; obviously, the captain had a servant do that for him. She stripped off the top sheet and dried her skin and the spikes to make sure nothing would slip as she started the next part of her task. Her tail wrapped around the spikes then snugged them to her waist, and a sheet became a sarong for her torso.

  If they believed she was a human female, they would underestimate her.

  According to Marcos, it was a foolish habit of men and especially English men.

  He had given her a few phrases to use in English he thought might help her confuse them, not that she was relying on them, but you never knew what might help. Even though she had the English/Spanish Diccionario in her head, she needed to hear the language spoken for a while before she'd be able to make use of the knowledge.

  Ready, she went out into the hall and crept down the stairs into the shadows behind a barrel of wadding. There were fourteen guns here: four carronades and three twelve-pounders to a side. She could deal with the two long nines on the weather deck later; they weren’t shooting at la Niña Bonita now.

  No one in the room carried a firearm; with the amount of gunpowder here it would be a stupid risk.

  Forty-five men were on the gun deck at the moment, but that might change when they raised an alarm unless she could block the entrance. The light coming down through the broad hatchway filled the other end of the room.

  The men on the gun deck were not talking much, only a quiet word occasionally as they awaited orders. How could she get to the other side of the room unnoticed? She started a flow of a fast-acting sedative to her mouth and licked her sharpened fingernails to extend her delivery methods.

  A boy descended the hatchway stairs carrying a bucket of water in one hand and a keg of gunpowder in the other. He was dark-skinned and about her size. He placed the keg in a bin near the door and took the water down the line of guns on the port side, adding a splash to the swabbing buckets next to each gun. No one paid the least attention to him. He finished the port side and crossed to the starboard, passing by her barrel.

  Tiana reached out, clamped her hand over his mouth and bit him on the neck.

  He went limp. She pulled him behind the barrel of wadding, stripped off his ragged coat and slipped it on over her harness. With her knife, she sliced a hole in the seat of his pants then pulled off the sheet and slid into them, tucking her tail around her waist to make it seem like a belt from the front.

  She emptied the bucket and walked toward the hatch, imitating his gait. Halfway to the hatch, one of the men on a starboard gun crew growled something at her, pointing to the swab bucket next to his carronade. She nodded and held her bucket, bottom up, to show it was empty and turned to hurry toward the hatch. The man made a sour sounding remark to another man, but no one moved to stop her.

  The hatchway latched with a wooden bar that hung on brackets above the opening. She stepped on the weather deck and pulled the heavy door on the starboard side closed then grabbed the other one.

  A man in a red coat with shiny brass buttons grabbed the door and snarled something at her. She pulled him inside with her as she closed it, tapping him smartly on the temple with her elbow. Then she tossed the bar into the locking brackets. The man in the red coat lay still, so she took a moment to wrap a chain around the bracket with a self-locking hitch.

  She checked the man in the red coat. He was still conscious, though groggy, so she scratched him.

  All the men on the gun deck were looking at her with wide eyes. Most had their mouths hanging open. She grinned at them and picked up the bucket to walk toward the first gun. When she got there, she took a stake from her bundle and drove it into the touchhole as hard as she could then smacked it in the rest of the way with a blow from the bucket. The rim fell off the bucket, and the staves spilled onto the floor.

  The gun deck went from shocked silence to shouts of anger. Ten of the men rushed her with outstretched arms; she dove under the gun and rolled past them. The crew for the next gun along the row had left it to try to grab her. She slammed a stake into its touchhole too then used the back of another stake to pound it flush.

  One man grabbed the sleeve of her coat. She ripped loose from his grip and shouted in the female human tone she had been practicing, “Unhand me, you brute.”

  The sleeve tore; two of the ragged shoulder patches went with it, leaving her breast bare.

  The gun deck went silent again.

  “That in’t Sam’l,” said a man to the side of her, who must have had an especially clear view. She pulled off the other sleeve and tossed it to him. She was now topless except for her harness. Their eyes were glued to her chest. Even the one to whom she had thrown the sleeve had ignored it, letting the cloth bounce off his chest and fall to the ground. A surge of testosterone filled the air and poured into her nose—visual stimulus—interesting.

  “Do any of you speak Spanish?” she asked in Español.

  A few, most of them dark-skinned, nodded or answered in the affirmative.

  “I am Princess Tiana. Please tell your companions I will give a place in my kingdom and pleasure greater than they’ve ever known, if they stand aside while I disable these guns. I will reward the one who translates what I say first.”

  One of the Spanish speakers translated her speech as fast as he could speak though he left out the last sentence.

  One of the dirtier men growled in English, “I ‘spect you’ll be doing that second thing anyway, slut. Get her lads!”

  Most of the men tried to grab her, but seven tried to stop them. She slid through a thin spot in the line and sprang to the next gun in line.

  “Rewards for the ones that help me then,” she called. “I will put the rest to sleep. No one will die if I can help it, but I will take this ship for my own.”

  Two of her seven men translated this and called out encouragement to others to join them. Evidently, they'd not been well treated under the malodorous captain’s command. Five more changed sides, and brawling broke out on the gun deck, making it easier to avoid the hostile ones.

  She worked her way through the guns, scratching those who tried to stop her. Soon the deck was still except for those who had helped her and the one who had threatened her with rape. He had his back against the side of the deck and was holding her helpers at bay with a dirk. One of her men lay on the deck, a stab wound in his stomach. Tiana sniffed; it had cut into an intestine.

  “Stand back,” she said to her men in Spanish.

  The one with the knife snarled. “I’ll–”

  She slipped through his guard, twisted the dirk from his grasp and swept his feet from under him, scratching him as he fell.

  Tiana picked up a piece of the jacket she had been wearing earlier, wadded it into a pressure bandage and pressed it to the stomach of the man with the stab wound. She slid her fingers underneath and ran her filaments inside the wound, stapling the intestine back together and injecting a painkiller and an antibiotic. She’d have to finish healing him later.

  “¿Como te llmas?” she said to him.

  “Juan,” he said, relaxing as the medication took effect.

  “You will not die, Juan,” she said, holding his head so he could look in her eyes. “Only sleep, and I will tend to your wound again when we have triumphed. I, Princess Tiana, promise you this.”

  He nodded, and she gently lowered his head to the deck.

  “One of you must stay with him and keep firm pressure on this cloth while I take the rest of the ship.” She looked them over to get a sense of them. Of the twelve, seven were dark-skinned, including the wounded one.

  “Will any on the top deck join us if given hope, or will I have to make them surrender?”

  “Not many, Princess,” said a dark and muscular one. “I am Abdusamad al Bahari. Those of us here are slaves or captives forced to work for Black John. The men above joined by their own choice. There are more chances to escape for those on deck, so we are kept below when near shore or another vessel. Do we need to kill these here, who are all
senseless?”

  “No,” Tiana said, “They are not to be harmed. I will sell them to la Niña Bonita as war prisoners. They will not wake till I am finished. I put the juice of the poppy in their blood.”

  A few of the men sighed in disappointment. Obviously, there had been scores to settle.

  “Do not worry. Their lives will not be easy now, and you will share in the prize; a much better revenge than giving them a quick death. Now quickly, I need a coat to look like one of the crew again.”

  Chapter 6 (Prize)

  Captain John Benton Stone fought to keep from grinding his teeth.

  The morning had seemed so promising: they'd actually run down a fast seventy-five foot sloop in good time; the money he'd spent to spirit away the Massachusetts ship designer to Bermuda had paid off.

  He'd chuckled the entire morning thinking on the two other designs stored in his cabin. He'd gotten them for letting the young genius go, after signing a backdated contract for the work. That had been the stroke of genius. The contract indemnified Stone from charges and insured the quality of the design. He'd suspected the man of sabotaging the designs, but when he saw hope of surviving, the wisdom of having his name connected to a fast ship had prompted corrections.

  Today the Sloop John had paid for it all, with la Niña Bonita covering his costs and leaving hundreds of pounds in profit.

  Now there were complications.

  He hated complications.

  Stone stood on the weather deck, shading his eyes against the late morning sun and glaring at the locked hatchway. The sounds of struggle that had been coming through the hatchway had stopped a few minutes ago. The first mate held his ear to the door, but still there was no clue what was happening inside. Stone recalled his marine sergeant going down the steps just before the doors closed, but he didn't answer when called.

  Not having access to his guns was bad; he might need to fire them; the little sloop was still not secured. He considered what to use as a battering ram to force the doors.