Blow Me Down (36 page)

I smiled with more confidence than I felt. “Don’t worry, Corbin’s taken charge of the defenses. Now let’s go out and help get people organized. You take the baby—is there milk to feed her?”

“Aye, we’ve goat’s milk,” Jez said, hurrying toward the backyard, where Renata kept a couple of goats and chickens.

“Renata,” I said, slapping my forehead. “That was her room that was empty, wasn’t it?”

“Aye,” Jez called back as she left the house, a bottle and the baby clutched in her hands.

“Come to the square when you’re done,” I yelled after her, then forced my protesting limbs into a lumbering trot as I ran back to the square.

Just in time to see the ships in the harbor blow up.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Holder gasped, as I staggered to a stop next to him. The townspeople had just split into two groups, one heading up the hill to tackle the fire, the other starting toward the harbor, Corbin at the lead. Everyone stumbled to a stop at the sight of one of the frigates blowing up, the blast so loud it hurt my ears, followed almost immediately by another ship, a smaller sloop, exploding in a fury of metal and wood.

I ran forward, pushing my way through people until I reached Corbin. He stood with his fists clenched, watching as ship after ship was blown up, the burning remains quickly sinking to the bottom of the deep harbor.

“Corbin?” I slipped my hand into his, wincing slightly when his fingers tightened around my blistered flesh. Around us, everyone was silent in stunned horror, the blasts coming with regularity now as the bigger warships—the frigates—took several explosions before they were utterly destroyed. “What are we going to do?”

The last warship exploded, bits of wood and metal and cloth raining down on the harbor. Corbin watched it impassively, and for a moment, my heart sank with the knowledge that he had given up, that Bart had won.

“I’m going to kill that bastard,” he finally said, turning to look at me. His eyes were quicksilver pools of fury so intense it sent shivers of dread down my spine.

“How?” I asked, silently cheering his spirit, but the practical side of me needing to point out the obvious. “The fire is almost on the town. Your crew is out, drugged, and no help. The ships are gone. The townspeople are scared and close to panic. How are we going to stop him?”

“We aren’t—I am. This is personal, between Paul and me. You just got in the way of his wrath to me.” He started to pull away.

“No, sir,” I said, shaking my head, squeezing his hand. “It may have started out like that, but this is
my
town, and
my
island, and
my
people, and I’m just as much a part of it as you. So if you go after Bart, I go after Bart. Only I don’t see how we’re going to with no ships left but a few dinghies and my borrowed sloop.”

Out beyond the crescent arms that guarded the entrance of the harbor, large black shapes moved against the horizon. Bart’s ships were coming. Corbin watched impassively for a few moments as the first ship sailed into the harbor, then he pulled me along with him as he started herding the people back toward the square. “Get everyone out of town,” he yelled to those people he’d designated as group leaders.

“How?” One of them cried, pointing at the hill where fire had the governor’s house fully engulfed. Beyond it a line of fire stretched out, sweeping a path straight for the town. “We can’t cross that!”

“The mines,” Corbin said, giving me a gentle push forward. “Take them through the mines to Careenin’ Cove. I have a ship there—a sloop, but everyone should be able to fit on her. Sweetheart, I know you want revenge just as much as I do, but I need you to do this for me—you have to lead the people to my ship. Get them there safely and set sail for Mongoose. Don’t worry about me—I can take care of myself.”

There was so much wrong with that ludicrous plan, I didn’t even bother to discuss it. “I don’t know where the mine is, let alone your secret way through it. You lead the people to the ship—I’ll take care of Bart.”

The look he shot me was priceless, and I mentally tucked it away in a file to be examined later, when I could appreciate the look of mingled love and exasperation. “Don’t even go there.”

“I just wanted you to see how it felt,” I told him, kissing his sooty nose, but sobering up as our dire situation was made clearer by the sound of the arriving warship opening fire on the town. She was still too far out in the harbor to hit the town, but the sound of her cannons thundering in the night air had a chilling effect. “If you’re the only one who knows the way through the mine—”

“I’m not. Holder!”

“Front and center, boss,” Holder said, pushing his way forward, saluting smartly. “I heard—you want me to take them through the mine?”

“Aye. Get them to the ship.”

“What about the crew and the ladies?” I asked, gesturing toward Renata’s house. “They’re all asleep. You can’t leave them there.”

“We’ll cart them to the mine, then leave them there until it’s over,” Holder said quickly, yelling for the carts that had been about to haul supplies to the fire line. “The fire won’t go into the tunnels, so they’ll be safe there.”

Bas stood forlornly at the edge of the crowd. I went to him, explaining that I wanted him to accompany Holder to the ship, smiling when he frowned at my request.

“Ye be goin’ to battle Bart?” he asked. Bran was back on his shoulder, cawing wildly at everyone.

“Yes, but don’t even think you’re going to come with us.”

“I’m yer cabin boy,” he said stiffly, and I knew I’d injured his pride.

“You’re the best cabin boy ever, but Holder is going to need help with the townsfolk,” I said quickly, attempting to smooth his ruffled feathers.

He squinted up at me. “Ye’re just sayin’ that to get me out of the way.”

“No, I’m not. I promise that you can come with me to the very next battle I go to,” I said, adding to myself that there was no way I’d risk the life, even the virtual life, of a child if I thought there was a good chance we wouldn’t survive the battle.

“Ye promise?”

“Cross my heart,” I said, doing just that, then totally embarrassing him by giving him a hug and a kiss on the cheek.

“Women,” he said disgustedly, wiping his face with the back of his hand. Bran squawked his agreement but hopped over to me. I kissed his head, too, then sent them both off to Holder.

“That takes care of getting the women and children from town, but how are we going to get Bart so we can beat the tar out of him?” I asked Corbin as he was organizing the remaining people.

He gave me a long look, then suddenly pounced on me, pulling me into a hard, fast kiss. “Have I told you today how much I love you, wife?”

“No, you haven’t, husband, but I’ll take issue with you over that later. There’s a villain to capture, first.”

“Aye, and we’re going to do that as any true pirate would,” he answered, releasing me as he turned to the remaining people. A handful of men and fewer women stood waiting. “My
Samurai Squirrel
is anchored next to your sloop. We’ll use the
Squirrel
to hunt down Bart and bring an end to both him and his vendetta.”

I looked from Corbin to the harbor, where the silhouettes of two more big ships were visible as they sailed into the harbor. The first ship—a frigate—was firing again, the shots reaching the docks, tearing them and the sloop to shreds. It would be only a few more minutes before the town itself would come in range of those big guns.

“How are we supposed to fight those ships with just one ship?” I asked, sick at the idea of Bart winning, but unable to see how we stood even a remote chance against him.

Corbin smiled, shocking me. “Sweetheart, you have to have a little faith in me.”

“I have oodles of faith in you,” I told him, trying to think of a nice way to phrase my thought that retreat may be our best bet. “I am a veritable font of faith in you. But that doesn’t negate the fact that one ship, shorthanded at that, against a herd of warships is bound to be doomed.”

“Fleet, not herd,” he said, giving me a gentle shove forward. “To Randy Daniel’s Cove, mates! We’ve got a ship to sail.”

“Randy Daniel’s Cove?” I asked as he pushed me along.

“Aye, it’s the name of the spot you chose to leave your sloop. Legend says that a pirate named Daniel used to meet his lady friend there, until one day her father discovered her and took her away. His ghost is said to haunt the cove, mourning his lost love.”

“Lost love,” I gasped, the memory of something Bart said chiming in my mind. “Bart said that you’d stolen his true love. He wasn’t talking about a woman—he meant this game.”

Corbin’s face was thoughtful in the light of the lantern he held. To the south of the town, Holder was leading a trail of people and carts toward the coast, where the entrance to the mine was located. They had to skirt the edges of the fire to get there, but I knew Holder would keep everyone safe. We were headed in the opposite direction, following the path that led to the tiny beach where my ship had been left. Fire had started attacking this side of the island, small patches of grass and dense shrubs burning, but we managed to avoid the worst of it, keeping a quick pace as we went single file through the overgrowth to the cliff path down to the sea.

“That makes sense—Paul always did seem possessive of the game, not wanting to make changes unless I insisted.”

“So he set up this whole convoluted plan to trap you to pay you back for . . . for what? You said he left you.”

“True, but only after we’d had some pretty serious arguments about the direction the game was taking. He wanted to turn it into a war-focused game, where players could be killed. I wanted it to be a social experience in which war between islands was just one facet—not the sole focus—and people could experience life as pirates. After he refused to take out some mechanisms for completely wiping out towns and entire crews, I fired him.”

I blew out a breath, my mind turning over the facts, trying to arrange them in a pattern that made sense. “You fired him, he vowed his revenge and set up this virtual mantrap, and he gets . . . what? He said it would ruin you, but I don’t see how.”

Corbin pulled me abruptly to the side as I was about to walk right into a burning patch of grass. “Watch where you’re walking, love. I suspect his plan is to destroy me in the game, which would disable my access to it. He knows I have just the one character to use—once I’m gone, he can do anything he wants, including corrupting the game data and even wiping the server clean.”

“He could kill the game itself?” I asked, pausing for a moment at the edge of the cliff path. Sharply angled, it led down to the tiny beach, little yellow blobs lighting the path as the makeshift crew started their way down it. The sharp tang of the sea stung my eyes, but I gritted my teeth and reminded myself that Corbin was just as tired as I was. I grabbed a root dangling from the edge of the cliff, and jumped the three feet to the path. “Don’t you have backups?”

“Several, but if he has the ability to kill the game, nothing will stop him from doing so every time I restore a clean version. Getting him out of the game isn’t the solution—I need to kill his character so his influences are gone, then I can run diagnostics and see what sorts of things he’s modified.”

The next few minutes absorbed all of my (breathless) attention as we worked our way down the path, my tired and overworked muscles making the journey much harder than it would have been in normal circumstances.

“What happens to us if we die in the game?” I asked Corbin as we reached the shore, pulling off my boots so I could wade out to his pretty blue and white
Samurai Squirrel.

“Nothing. Your character is deleted from the game, although the data remains so that you can’t resurrect yourself under the same name.”

“But what happens to you, the real you? The physical body, I mean.”

“Ah. You go to the log-in screen, where you can create a new pirate, or log off.”

The warm water stung the scratches on my legs as I held my boots up, wading out to the ship. “Wait a minute—are you saying we could have gotten out of the game by just dying?”

“No. You’re taken to the log-in screen—you still have to log off, and you can’t do that without using the glasses. Since Paul shut down the access to the glasses—that’s why we can’t feel them—it means there is no way for us to log off so long as his character is still online and influencing the game.”

“Damn,” I swore, accepting Corbin’s help up onto the ship. There went my plans for an easy way out of the situation.

Corbin took immediate charge of the ship, ordering people to various stations, putting those with knowledge of sailing in the key positions, quickly explaining to the others what they were to do.

“Can you take charge of the people on the sails?” he asked me after moving the couple of women around to the rigging, showing them the correct way to unfurl the sails and raise and lower the boom.

“Sure, although I hate to be responsible for any close-quarter sailing,” I answered. “Based on experience, there’s no way I’m going to be able to avoid getting us shot to hell.”

“You’ll be fine. Just get us to the harbor, and I’ll do the rest,” he said.

“What are you going to do?” I asked as he ordered the anchor lifted and the sails dropped.

“Start loading the guns. I’ve got twenty-four to load, and it’s going to take us a while to get them loaded.”

It did. It took until we were at the edge of the harbor before Corbin and the men had those twenty-four guns loaded. It wasn’t the number of guns that slowed him down—the process of loading a cannon was an exacting detail, one involving five men. The gun was first primed; then a long “worm” (long stick with scratchy things on the end) was shoved down it and turned a couple of times, scraping out any debris. Following that, a sponge piece (another long stick with a damp sponge on the end) was used to clean it further; then the charge was inserted and rammed down into the breech. Shot was then added, with the cannonballs being rammed tightly against the powder charge. After that, priming powder was poured into the primer vent, and the gun was ready to be aimed and fired.