Anne Dray's Arc

Chapter 13 of 28

By the second day in the reef, the fleet had stopped feeling safe and started feeling trapped. Anne walked the deck at dawn and heard it in the crews. Low talk. Talk that stopped when she passed. She had gathered every captain in the shallows and hidden them from the Crown. Now they had nowhere to go, and the grumbling had teeth. The captains gathered in a run-down cabin on the reef, its boards gray and its roof sagging. Kate Blackwater got there first. She sat with her boots up and her hat low, and she did not wait for Anne to speak. "We run. We hide. We run again." She looked around the room. "That your whole plan?" The other captains muttered agreement. Anne had freed Kate's ship with these same crews, and now Kate turned that debt into a challenge. Anne felt the room tip. One more day of hiding and the banner would mean nothing. "We don't run," Anne said. "We hit them." Kate snorted. "Their hulls can't reach us here. Ours can't dent their iron out there." The cabin door opened. Claire Redfield stepped in, still soaked from the crow's nest. She wasted no words. "Crown squadron. Six deep-hulled ships. Anchored at the reef mouth." She let it land. "They're waiting for us to come out." Anne moved to the door and looked. Six masts sat past the shallow water, still and patient. The Crown had learned. They would not enter. They would starve her out. Six ships crowding one narrow mouth. Anne saw the shape of it. "They can't come in," she said. "So they sit in one place. Bunched. Slow to turn." She faced the captains. "We don't fight iron sides. We hit the rudder seams. One ship at a time, from the shallows, where they can't follow us back." Kate lifted her hat. "And when they scatter?" "Then they've left the mouth open, and we sail out." Anne pointed at the long-barreled cannon lashed to the nearest deck. "We drag every long nine to the passage edge. We reach them. They can't reach us." The cabin went quiet. Kate studied her for a long moment. Then she stood. "Better than hiding." That was all. From Kate it was enough. Before dark, Anne's ships took position along the reef edge. The long nines fired across the shallows. The first Crown hull took shot after shot at its rudder and swung wide, crippled. The squadron broke formation to close the gap and left the mouth undefended. Anne stood on her deck and watched the Crown line come apart. The captains cheered around her. She had given them a bold stroke, and they had followed. The banner held. But the crippled Crown ship had drifted deep into her shallows before it stopped. Its crew now sat inside the reef, inside her one safe harbor, close enough to see every hull she owned.