"And the target's still Balmoran?" Megan asked, leaning into the stroking. It was actually pleasant; Paul had good hands when he bothered to use them.
"Uhm." Paul said. "And more good news. Chansa has an agent on the Bonhomme Richard, one of the stewards. He has orders to poison Talbot and the fleet admiral, Chang. Edmund never discusses his plans, so the fleet will be dropped into chaos. Then there's a two-edged sword: Celine tells me she finally has a way to overcome the personal protection fields."
"That's impossible!" Megan said.
"That's what I said," Paul smiled. "But she proved it. She uses some sort of special nannite. They generate a destabilizing field that interferes with the physics of the PPFs. Unfortunately, they do the same to teleport fields so they can't be transported by teleports. She's made little devices to produce them. The devices can be teleported. I'm considering a way to get some of the devices, and assassins, to Sheida's location. Take her out and it will destabilize the whole of the UFS."
"That should do it," Megan admitted. How do I get this information out? I know that Paul has got to be monitoring my meetings with the damned vendor! "Now, why are we talking?" she added, rubbing her breasts in his face. "Aren't there better things to be doing?"
* * *
"You might be wondering what we are doing," Shar Chang said to the assembled skippers and their dragon commanders. "Well, the answer is, I'm not going to tell you. You all know that we've been leaking information to New Destiny, even at sea. Some of you may be the leaks. I doubt it, but I couldn't believe it of Owen Mbeki. So you're going to get orders and you're going to obey them. I'll be giving you each written instructions. Most of them will be to detach yourself from the main body along with your battle group. The fleet is breaking up."
He looked around at the assembled skippers and then at the dragon commanders.
"You may be thinking: Why be so sneaky; the orcas and ixchitl will know where we are. Well, not if we can help it. From here on out I want continuous dragon coverage. But not the usual coverage. I want continuous dragon coverage on each of your task forces. What you're going to train in is anti-orca patrols. Any orcas will be engaged by the wyverns. The wyverns have proven that they can take on orca in the water. When a pod is spotted the carrier will be signaled and a flight of dragons will engage the orca. The water is cold so the riders will have to stay out of the attack. But many of the dragons have fought orca before and when they see them it's hard to keep them from attacking. Don't. Lead them to the pod and let them go. Recover them out of the water. Obviously, if the pod is too far from the ship for the dragons to swim back, don't engage. If they're that far out, they're not a threat. But if they close, kill them. Natural or Changed; we can't tell the difference until we're on them."
"Question, Admiral," Joanna said, raising a talon.
"Yes, Commander Gramlich?"
"Do we get to eat them?"
The question elicited chuckles, some of them hysterical. Even Shar grinned.
"Feel free," he said. "The supplementary orders to the other skippers are as follows; the only officer who will take navigational bearings is the skipper. No other officer had better have a sextant in his or her hand. The penalty for such will be immediate and unquestioned confinement to quarters with court-martial to follow. Skippers will take one reading per day. The exception to this will be the fleet command ship. Follow the command ship; they know where they are going. In the event that you are separated by storm you can open your second orders, which will give you a rendezvous. The second orders are to be kept under marine guard and the skipper, XO and navigational officer must all be present and in agreement for them to be opened. Is this clear?"
"Clear," the group said.
"There will be supplementary orders sent to all ships by the end of the day. These orders will be kept under the same conditions. Held by the marine commander in a box to which only the skipper has the key. There will be three such packets: Stonewall, Genghis and Belisarius. They will be opened only upon my signal.
"Maps are to be kept in the same manner; nobody has access to them but the skipper. You skippers will know where you are and in the event of the carrier commanders where you are going. Mer will transmit when you have arrived. If you are delayed by storm or bad winds, that will be relayed as well. For your information, the mer are implementing a deception plan that will indicate that we are not where we're going to be. Admiral Talbot?"
Edmund looked around at the group and nodded.
"In war you always want to know what your enemy is doing," he said, looking at the skippers one by one. "And they, in turn, want the same information. This naval war has been fought, to this point, with both sides knowing that information. To the greatest extent possible we wish to end that condition. As to what we are going to do, or how we are going to do it, you will get that information at your rendezvous. Admiral Chang?"
"That's it," Shar said, looking around at them again. "Good luck, and good sailing."
* * *
"Those are some damned strange orders," Karcher said as they flew back to the ship.
"They are," Joanna replied. "But I can guess the reason."
"So can I," Karcher mewed distastefully. "They're right about us bleeding information."
"Oh, it's more than that," the dragon replied. "You haven't known Edmund as long as I have. His mind is as deep and black as a bog. He never tells anyone what he plans, or if he tells them, half the time it's not what he actually does. Part of it, a big part of it, is to deny the information to the enemy. But the other part is that if he changes his mind, or the plan doesn't go as well as he planned, nobody knows it."
"That part I understand," Karcher said unhappily as they turned on final.
Chapter Nineteen
"Time to mix it up," Jason signaled, starting to ascend.
When Jason was given the go ahead to begin attacking the orcas and ixchitl, he'd already had a plan in mind. And, so far, the plan was working.
Finding the orca pods and ixchitl schools was almost the hardest part. But the delphinos were in tentative contact with natural schools of skimmer dolphins, the deep water dolphins that roamed every major ocean on earth. They were, in particular, capable of reading the skimmer's language, at least to the extent of their alarm calls when orca or ixchitl, which the skimmers had discovered were threats, were sighted.
Whenever such a call went up, delphino skimmer pods moved in close enough to determine if the pod was natural orcas or Changed. The differences, other than in the small pseudo-hands of the Changed, were slight, but generally they could tell without moving in close enough to be prey. And with ixchitl there was no question at all. Then they would take up positions around the pod or school and send out their alarm call.
Jason had shifted forces and had the selkies take over most of the inshore work of the underwater forces. With the mer thus freed up he had scattered "killer teams" around the ocean. When a target pod or school was sighted, more often than not there was a killer team somewhere in the vicinity. As soon as the course of the target was plotted the mer would move into position.
By and large, mer were shallow water creatures. But they were designed to handle deep diving just as well. They also were water-breathers, so they could stay down, as long as they got enough food to stave off hypothermia. Orcas and ixchitl, though, almost invariably moved in the top hundred meters of water. Ixchitl could and sometimes did stay deep. But they generally, like the orcas, traveled near the surface. Thus the killer team would dive deep and silently await the passing target.
In this case it was a small pod of Changed that was, apparently, moving in to try to localize one of the carriers. Edmund had said that it was a high priority that they not do so. Which made this group a double target.
They couldn't see, or otherwise detect, the pod from their current location, nearly three hundred meters below the surface of the water. But the skimmers were still sending out their broadcasts and they could more or less fix the location
of the pod that way. The skimmers had taken up points of an equilateral triangle around the Changed pod and as the triangle moved over their location, Jason sent his force silently upwards.
As he did he checked, again, that the supply ship was in position, sixty klicks to the southeast. He often thought that the supply ships were the real heroes of the plan. The small, fast schooners carried food and weapons for the mer and delphinos, moving around the ocean, unable to defend themselves from attack and depending solely upon the immensity of the ocean to protect them. Each of them also carried a medic and a hold that was partially flooded with seawater. In the, very likely, event of injury to the delphinos or mer, they could be evacuated to the schooner and if the injury was bad enough, but not too bad, they could be shipped to the shore.
He knew that they'd probably take some casualties this day and just had to hope that they wouldn't be too severe.
As the school of mer ascended they started to pick up very faint clicks from above. The orcas mostly ran silent when they moved but this group had lousy tactical discipline. On the basis of the sounds, Jason shifted their ascent slightly and increased speed. There was some danger to the change in speed. As they got into lower pressure water their tailfins could begin to "cavitate," creating low-pressure "holes" where the water would rush in and make a sound. So far so good, though: he could still hear no sound from his school.
It was becoming dark above and it was hard to pick out much in the water, clear as it was. But then he saw shapes above and to the left of the school so he shifted direction again, quietly extending his lance. When it was clear the orcas still had no inkling they were about to be ambushed, he put on a final burst of speed and sixty mer-men followed him into the attack.
* * *
Irkisutut was bored, angry, tired and afraid all at the same time. They had been running around the damned ocean on one wild goose chase after another for the last week. Headquarters didn't seem to know which way to send them so first they went one way then another, always in a fruitless search for the enemy's carriers.
What made it worse was that they had heard, both directly from distant alarm calls and from scuttlebutt from other pods that casualties had been enormous. Not only were the carriers sending out dragon patrols to hunt down the orca but the ever-be-damned mer had shifted from skulking around the harbors to attacking the pods. Most of his fellow pod leaders had been lost over the last week and he wondered how long it would be before it became his turn.
On top of that were the damned skimmers. He knew he was bracketed by skimmers, they were sending out constant chatter. But while orcas were fast, skimmers were damned lightning. He'd shifted track a couple of times trying to catch the damned things but they just greased away, laughing at him. Then when he turned back they got right back into position. All that chasing them did was wear out the pod.
And the pod was already pretty worn. They hadn't had a resupply in three days and there hadn't been much they could catch with the damned skimmers squealing along to either side. The open ocean was mostly desert anyway so the orca normally followed the currents, hunting at their edges where food was most abundant. This mission had had them chasing all over the ocean, though, and that meant where the food wasn't. They'd called for a resupply ship to rendezvous with them and gotten nothing but bullshit assurances that "something would come along."
And as he was thinking about that, something did.
* * *
The team of mer had spread into a pike-wielding hexagon, the underwater equivalent of a phalanx that they had worked out as the most efficient attack formation in these circumstances. It spread wider than the pod of orcas and engulfed it like a rising, metal-tipped, seine net. The first orca to be spitted was a youngster that had dived below the main pod and squealed an alarm just before he was struck between his pectorals by a pike.
The pod reacted quickly but in an undisciplined manner, some of them darting ahead to try to escape the enveloping mer and others diving to the attack. Most of the ones that dove ran into a solid wall of spear-points. Unwilling to brave the wall of metal they turned and darted for the surface. A few dove into the phalanx and were pincushioned for their bravery. Despite this the mer were careful to avoid opening up holes in their formation; they shifted position to maintain a solid, and ever narrowing, formation as teams stayed behind to finish off the wounded orcas.
* * *
Irkisutut darted ahead as the alarm call went up but quickly saw that he was going to be cut off by the mer. He turned to the side and realized that the pod was surrounded. After darting back and forth for a moment he did the only thing that made sense, building up speed and then leaping into the air to clear the ring of mer.
As soon as he hit the water he turned back towards the mer, darting in and capturing one in his conical teeth. He didn't stay around to be attacked by the rest, instead backing away as the ribcage of the mer crunched in his teeth. He dropped the dead mer-man and turned to attack again but the phalanx had shifted to half attacking inward while the rest covered their backs. He, too, was facing a wall of spears. There was nothing he could do but watch the rest of the pod slaughtered mercilessly.
"Damn you!" he bellowed as the last of the pod was finished off. "Freaks!"
"Go home, little orca," one of the mer taunted. "Go home and tell the rest of your fellows that you're no longer the top of the food chain!"
As the mer darted towards him he turned away and headed towards the east. Somewhere out there were other pods and a supply ship. Somewhere out there was safety.
There was nothing left for him here.
* * *
"Where in the hell are we?" Zora said as she mounted her wyvern.
"I don't know, Sergeant Fink," Herzer replied with a grin. "Somewhere in the middle of the Atlantis Ocean, but that's just a guess."
The carrier had been sailing for four days. And not in any sort of straight direction. She tacked, she turned, she sailed west, she sailed east, she sailed north and south. None of the tacks had been of equal lengths and given the state of wind and current they could be anywhere. Well, anywhere in the northern Atlantis.
Currently they were on a generally easterly course, as far as Herzer could tell. They'd been on it most of the day, but that didn't mean anything. He knew there were New Destiny forces to their north and south so either way they turned they were going to be going into battle.
He and Fink weren't battling today, though. The majority of the dragon-riders were brand new and today they were engaging in bombing practice. The ship's launch had been sent out three hours earlier and was now towing a target slowly to the east, falling behind the carrier with every minute. The target wasn't all that large and it bobbed around on the waves quite a bit. But that didn't answer why none of the riders had managed to hit it yet.
Herzer walked Lydy to the catapult and settled himself in position as the wyvern got a good grip on the launching balk and leaned forward eagerly. It took a bit of practice to get the wyverns used to the launching catapult but once they acquired the knack they loved it.
The catapult accelerated the wyvern to almost forty kilometers per hour in its short traverse and as it reached the end the wyvern flapped open her wings and took flight. The wings of a wyvern were enormous-they had to be to support the weight of the dragon's body and rider-and the mechanics of them were impossible without a large number of changes from the birds of prey they were based upon.
The first and most noticeable change was in materials. The wings and flight-bones were threaded through with a mesh of bioextruded carbon nanotubes, a monomolecule that was enormously strong for its weight. But beyond that there were subtle additions throughout the wyvern's body. The energy of flying meant that they got extremely hot, hot enough that their own body heat could cause brain damage. To reduce the dangerous build-up there was a small channel in their head that took in air at the front, blew it over the skull and released it at the back. This ensured that while they might become overheated it woul
d not affect their brain. It also was a noticeable portion of their total body cooling, since it was lined with water releasing membranes. The changes went on and on. Normal muscle could never support their flight, certainly not for any length of time, so they borrowed from bumblebees a special "reflexive muscle" that only had to flex in one direction. Internal tubules acted as springs to bring their wings back into "gliding" position automatically so they only had to "flap" and then release.
Despite all of the changes they could only stay aloft for a few hours so Herzer headed for altitude and then glided, waiting for the sergeant to catch up. As soon as she had formed up on his wingtip he headed for the distant dot that was the launch.
The launch had a crew of twenty oarsmen and a coxswain but at the moment most of the oarsmen were leaning on the side of the boat, watching the show. A previous division had formed up on the target and were dropping practice bombs. Herzer watched as, one by one, they all missed. Well, it was a small target. They were getting close. Most of them would have hit a ship.
John Ringo - Council Wars 03 - Against the Tide Page 23