by John Ringo
“Focus for a minute,” the admiral said. “You’ve got a job in front of you.”
“I was thinking about the mess system on the Hazhir,” Evan replied. “I think we can rearrange it so thatÑ”
“Evan,” Chang said with a chuckle. “Focus.”
“Oh, right,” Evan said, looking at him and widening his eyes. “You called me here, didn’t you?”
“Right,” Shar replied. “Look, Edmund wants all the carriers upgraded to match the Hazhir. The shipyards can work on that while they’re doing the repair damage, right?”
“I suppose,” Evan temporized. “But putting in the refrigeration system will require tearing out some deck. Nothing that can’t be fixed but it’s at least a three-day job.”
“Get with the shipyard. Show them the changes. They already have the word that they’re going to be doing it. Expedite it. Focus on that, not more changes. We need them turned around fast.”
“What about the other fleet units?” Evan asked.
“If there’s time,” Shar replied. “I hope there’s time.”
* * *
The fleet was decidedly limping when it came in. The ships entered the harbor in a straggle, hooking off to their prescribed buoys in any old way. Patched sails, braided rigging, bright patches of new wood for which the ships had run out of paint all told the story of a group that was worn out. Out of morale, out of energy and out of patience.
The wyverns that could fly had already landed and Edmund had been there for their arrival. The wyvern “weyr” was a long series of sheds with a graveled area about a hundred meters across running the entire length. The edge of the graveled area had been lined with chunked up beef carcasses for their arrival and then the work parties had cleared the area with the exception of three handlers, drawn from the marines, for each wyvern. The marines, in full armor, had helped the riders get their gear stripped off the dragons before they were let loose on the carcasses. There had been a few fights and some of the wyverns were going to require medical attention, but with food in their bellies the half-wild dragons had calmed down and let themselves be led into their sheds.
And a good quarter of the meat was still lying out in the sun; less than a third of the wyverns that had sailed with the fleet had been capable of flying off.
Now Edmund watched as the carriers carefully jockeyed up to the piers. The dragons that hadn’t been able to fly off were in bad physical shape. He could only hope that with food and some medical attention they’d be fit to fight by the time the fleet sailed again. He had been calling for wyverns from across Norau, and they were trickling in in ones and twos. But the fleet had already drawn down the available population. He wasn’t sure he could fully man even the remnant that had straggled in.
Lighters with fresh food were moving out to the ships at anchor. The crews had been instructed to stand down and stay on board overnight. In the morning they’d be brought in with full assembly scheduled for just before lunch.
The captains were putting off, though, coming in by small boats. They had been instructed to leave their executive officers on board and come ashore for a preliminary meeting. In the case of the carrier captains, with their senior dragon-riders. He had to prepare for that meeting. He didn’t think it was going to be pleasant.
Chapter Eleven
The meeting took hours. There was no other way to cover the battle and he knew it was only going to be the first. And it had been as bad as he expected.
The meeting was being held in the main dining room of the officers’ club, that being the only room large enough to accommodate all the ship skippers and the staff. The room was still packed and the windows had been kept closed so it was hot as Hades. And so were tempers.
The responses in the meeting ranged from anger, fury really, to almost comatose depression. The skipper of the Corvallis was especially quiet, almost catatonic. The senior dragon-rider, Major Bob Childress, though, was livid.
“We had no warning,” Childress said, for about the sixth time. “We just flew in fat, dumb and happy. The next time we go out, the riders are going to be nervous. Which means they’re not going to get in close enough for accurate bombing.”
“How do we deal with the anti-dragon frigates?” Edmund asked.
“I don’t know,” the rider said, angrily. “Attack from below? Maybe the mer?”
“Other ideas?” Edmund asked. “I’m not discounting that one, I just want more options.”
“Take them out first,” Chang responded. He’d spent most of the meeting quietly listening and taking notes. Mostly about the defensive quality of the answers the staff were giving. “Send in strikes specifically to take them out. Yeah, you’ll have to drop from high. And you’ll miss quite a bit. But once they’re gone, the carriers are vulnerable.”
“You’re assuming, General, that we’ll have carriers to return to,” Childress snarled. “In case you hadn’t noticed, they’ve got dragons, too.”
“Okay, that’s enough,” Edmund said. “The fleet is going back out. And we are going to engage the New Destiny fleet and this time we’re going to win. Can dragons fight air-to-air?”
“They can, but they’re not very good at it,” Childress said. “And they’ve managed to get theirs to flame.”
“Silverdrake.”
Edmund looked up at the non-sequitur from Vickie Toweeoo. She was the senior remaining dragon-rider on the Bonhomme Richard and he wished, badly, that Jerry Riadou had survived. But if wishes were fishes…
“What does that mean, Captain?” Edmund asked.
“Silverdrake are one of the three types of wyvern,” Vickie replied. “They’re sprinters. We’re using Powells exclusively. They’re a sort of medium-weight wyvern. Then there are Torejos. They’re heavy wyvern, good for long distances and they can carry more of a load. They don’t interbreed; it’s like they’re three different species. But if you’re going to fight air-to-air, use Drakes.”
“Silverdrake are too light,” Childress said. “And they’re also flighty. And bad tempered. And they’re only good for, what, maybe an hour in the air?”
“Two,” Vickie replied. “And they can outmaneuver the Powells. You just don’t like them because they’re prettier.”
“They’re ludicrous,” Childress snorted.
“They’re still the best dragon for air-to-air combat,” Vickie shrugged. “Even if they are a bit… colorful. We still need a weapon.”
“Put your two seconds in charge of figuring that out,” Edmund said. “Have them get with Evan. Although he’s going to have a lot on his plate.”
“We need to be able to protect the carriers and at the same time attack theirs,” Chang pointed out.
“We’ll work on it,” Edmund said. “Okay, people, I think we’re talking in circles at this point. And the most important point hasn’t even been mentioned except in passing: Morale. The morale of the fleet is in the dumps. We just had our heads handed to us on a platter. New Destiny is going to turn their fleet around faster than we can. And they outnumber us now. So we’re probably going to have more reverses in the future. That doesn’t matter. The battle that we just lost doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is who ends up owning the Atlantis Ocean and that, my friends, is gonna be us. Fix that in your head. Anybody who cannot believe that, deep in their gut, had better do a gut check and do it now. No matter what happens today, tomorrow, next week or next year, we are going to own the ocean and when we’re through no New Destiny ship is going to be willing to poke its nose out of a port.”
“I don’t think we can do it,” the Corvallis’ captain said. “We’re outnumbered, we’re outgunned and, hell, they’re better at this than us!”
“If that’s the way you feel, feel free to submit your resignation,” Edmund replied, coldly. “You don’t learn to play better chess by playing someone worse than you. And you don’t learn to fight better war by fighting someone worse than you. You learn from getting beat. Well, we’ve just had what we in the Army call
‘good training.’ ”
“This isn’t a game,” the captain shouted, getting to his feet. “People are dead.”
“That’s what they call war,” Edmund said, his face hard and cold. “But what we are going to do is show them that we play it better than they do. And if you can’t get that through your skull, Captain, leave now.”
The captain looked at him for a moment and then nodded and stalked out of the room.
“If anyone else thinks they can’t handle that rank on their shoulder, you just tell me,” Edmund said, looking around the room. “You get paid the big bucks to take that weight. It’s not just for the fun of playing with your ships. It’s not for the thrill of command. We all get paid to keep leading our troops, even when it’s tough. To make them believe that no matter how bad it is, we’re going to get through it. And we’re going to win. That’s a little thing called ‘leadership.’ And if you can’t manage it, then you can feel free to go join the merchant ships. They’re building more every day. I’m sure you can work your way up to commanding a freighter in no time. But if you want a little payback, then you’re going to have to put your shoulders back, get on your game face and sailor on. Your choice.”
He looked around the room again and nodded as everyone else kept their seats.
“The crews stay on board tonight. Tomorrow morning they assemble on the shore by ship. There will be bands playing and, if I can possibly arrange it, pretty girls. There will be speeches by yours truly, General Chang and the carrier commanders. They will be rip-roaring, ‘sure we got beat but we’re gonna get back in the game and whip those sons of bitches’ speeches. Then we are going to have the party to end all parties. Marines are excluded because we’re going to have to use them to break up the fights that are going to start. I want everyone in the fleet to the point of passing out, no later than midnight. I’m figuring nobody will be worth a damn for at least two days afterwards. Light work for the next two days with liberal liberty calls. Then we get started on rebuilding.”
“What about an attack by New Destiny?” a female voice asked towards the back of the room.
“Their fleet, all of it,” Edmund pointed out, “is in port, just like us. When they sail, we’ll know it. We are going to rebuild this fleet and then we are going to go out there and kick New Destiny’s ass, or my name isn’t Talbot.”
* * *
The party was a definite hit.
There were bands. There were speeches. There were flags and ribbons. There were fine words of congratulations and predictions of the eventual destruction of the New Destiny fleet. None of it particularly helped. On the other hand, there were huge kegs of beer, over a hundred barbequed pigs and steers and masses of fresh food.
As soon as they were released the sailors fell on the food, and the beer, much like the starving wyverns.
Edmund spent most of the day moving through the crowd. He shook hands like a politician. He talked to group after group of officers, commanders, warrants, chiefs and ordinary sailors. To each of them he gave the same message. We got beat. We’re going back out. We’re not going to get beat again.
He talked about the importance of every link in the chain. How the runners at headquarters were as important as the admirals. How the cooks on the ships were the life-blood of the Navy. That the guys in the rigging were the sinews of the fleet. He talked himself hoarse.
By the time the sun went down, he’d started slowing down; most of the sailors were too drunk to know who was doing the talking. The ships’ crews had intermingled to the point that he wasn’t sure they’d ever get them sorted out. Half the crew of the Toshima Maru had started a pitched battle with the Corvallis Line and it took at least a platoon of marines, with Herzer at their head, to get them separated. The captain of the Bonhomme Richard had had to be carried off to the infirmary after demonstrating proper dragon-riding techniques on a keg of beer, and failing.
He thought about armies that had suffered defeats and then won in the end. Most of them had spent months, even years, retraining and retooling to the point that they could beat the enemy that had beaten them. Generally they had gone through three or four commanders as well. But they didn’t have months or years. At the most, they had weeks. Edmund had to take this weapon, and reshape it, in the sort of time that most commanders spent getting to know a unit.
Fortunately, he’d spent plenty of years as a smith. And he’d dealt with taking over defeated armies before. The first thing that you did was you got them to know you as a person, somebody that they could trust and serve. You bonded to them as the carbon bonded to the iron.
Then you lowered the hammer.
* * *
“Hey, Chief,” Herzer said.
It had taken most of the day to find Brooks. He had wandered off with a group of other chiefs and was well on his way to a record-breaking drunk.
“Herzer!” the chief said, staggering over from the cluster gathered around an appropriated beer barrel. “Ol’ buddy!”
“Glad to see you made it.” Herzer grinned. He had met the chief on the mission to the mer-folk and had taken an immediate liking to the tough, capable NCO. He was younger than Gunny Rutherford by a century at least but he was one of the few members of the Navy who really seemed to understand that they were at war. And how to put on a “war face.” Which was why Herzer had been looking for him.
“Go’ attack’ by ‘nother kra-krayÑbig fiskin’s squid,” the chief said, hiccupping. “NO PROBLEM!” He laughed and tried to sit down on an upended barrel, missing it by inches.
“Took care of it, did you?” Herzer said, dragging him to his feet and sitting him on the barrel.
“Surrre,” the chief said. “Where’s my beer? Sure no probl-brobÑnot an issue. Got my swabbies trained up right and tight. Where’s my beer?”
Herzer picked up a kicked-over mug and filled it, then handed it to the chief.
“Well, glad to hear that,” Herzer said. “Cause you’re not going back out on the next deployment.”
“WhaÑ?” the chief said, looking up at him. “When you make major? An’ why ’m I not going out? Gotta go out, s’what a chief’s for!”
“Recently,” Herzer replied. “And the reason is, you’re doing shore duty with me.”
“No fisking way,” the chief said. “Shore duty?”
“Yep, you’re the new command master chief of the Naval Training Facility. Congratulations.”
“No fisking way,” the chief said, hiccupping again. “NO WAY!”
“Yes way,” Herzer replied. “See you day after tomorrow, bright and early at headquarters. Not too early; later for that.”
“I can’t b-believe a friend would do this to me!” the chief said, sniffing and taking a sip of his beer. “This calls for getting really drunk.”
“You’ll love it,” Herzer promised. “Bright young men and women who don’t know the first thing about how to tie a knot. And you get to teach them.”
“Oh, fisk,” the chief sobbed. “Really, really drunk. You bastard.”
“Yep,” Herzer grinned. “Gotta go now. Day after tomorrow. Don’t be late.”
* * *
Tom Ennesby had been the chief engineer for the naval shipyards practically since their inception. He had built the first dragon-carriers and thought they were a fine design. It had taken him at least a week to come to grips with all the changes in the Hazhir, but he finally shook his head in wonder.
“You did all this down at Blackbeard Base?” he asked.
The ship, outwardly, did not look very different from a standard Bonhomme Richard-class carrier. The launching platform on the port side was about a meter longer and to a trained eye the rigging was slightly different. But most of the changes were underwater or internal.
“Well, rigging the wings wasn’t easy.” Evan grinned. “But we had mer to help.”
When ships sailed at any point except with the wind directly behind them, they tended to drift away from the wind, “to leeward.” There were various met
hods to prevent that, but the one that Evan had settled on was large wooden-and-copper “wings” that protruded at an acute angle from the side of the boat’s hull. Seeing them had required the engineer to go over the side and swim under the ship. It had been a cold swim but instructive. There were four, two forward and two aft. They didn’t increase the depth of the ship, but when it was heeled over to the side they acted as keels to reduce the drift to leeward.
There were dozens of other minor changes but Evan had a comprehensive list and suggestions on how each of the changes could be implemented.
“Does the admiral want just the carriers…?” the engineer asked, looking at the list and mentally counting the man-hours involved.
“For now just the carriers,” Evan replied. “If time permits we’ll work on the frigates and cruisers. But there’s something else.”
“And that is?”
“We need anti-dragon ships of our own,” Evan said. “And I see those dreadnoughts just sitting there…”
“Cristo, that means completely changing the rigging!” Ennesby swore. “The way they’re rigged now you can’t fire anything upwards.”
“We’ve actually got a pretty good sketch of the New Destiny frigates,” Evan said.
“We do?”
“Yeah, we do,” Evan replied. “And, no, I don’t know where it came from. We also have their specifications for the ballistas and there’s stuff there I like and some I don’t. I think we can do better. Much better, really. But I don’t know if we can do better in the time we have.”
“Well, get the plans in here and let’s see what we can see,” Ennesby said, rubbing his hands. “What’s wrong with their ballistas?”
“They’re very much on a Roman model,” Evan said. “Including using sinew for the elastic system. The problem with that isÑ”