Against the Tide tcw-3

by John Ringo

  “Think outside the box,” Babak said, nodding.

  “Think outside the box,” Edmund said with a smile. “Speed above all else, surprise above all else, utter ruthlessness.”

  “Sounds like a quote,” Babak said, half questioning.

  “It is, from one of the greatest generals of all time,” Edmund replied. “Major outside the box thinker. And an utter bastard.” He grinned. “Just like me.”

  * * *

  “Now that is a bastard weapon,” Shar Chang said.

  The device on the workbench consisted of five narrow metal tubes attached to a large metal cylinder. There were a series of linkages set off to one side.

  Chang picked up the device and hefted it, swearing.

  “Damn, it must weigh eighty kilos.”

  “Seventy-three point four,” Evan said, nervously. “Loaded and ready to fire. In its current state it’s closer to seventy.”

  “And it works?”

  “It should,” Evan replied. “It’s in the weight range of the Silverdrake with a small rider. There’s no effective way we can determine to aim it, however, so they’ll have to close to point-blank range.”

  “And the best place to cripple a dragon is in the primary muscles,” Vickie Toweeoo pointed out. She wore new major’s pips and her leather uniform now sported a Jolly Roger patch. “Which means a frontal approach. Technically the best shot would be to fly directly at the dragon and roll for firing. But I don’t think we’re going to be doing that much.”

  “One of these in the leg or the rear end is not going to make their dragons very happy,” Shar pointed out. “It would be safer to close from the rear.”

  “We’ll have to see, won’t we, sir?” Vickie replied with a grin. “What I’m wondering about is training. Most of the Silverdrake riders have volunteered for sea duty. I’m not surprised, we’re a bit more… weird than Powell lovers.”

  “You’ve been riding Powells the whole war,” Shar pointed out.

  “That’s because it was all we were using,” Vickie said and grinned again. “But I’m a Silverdrake rider at heart. Powells are too slow and clumsy.”

  Having had some heart-stopping rides on the “slow and clumsy” wyverns, Shar was pleased that he’d never have to ride a Silverdrake.

  “This is where you were hiding,” Edmund said, striding into the workshop. “EvanÑsaw the air-guns for the ballista frigates. Marvelous.”

  “Simple application of air-pressure engineering,” the engineer said, grinning. “And they have at least the same loft as a ballista.”

  “Any chance of making some infantry-sized ones?” Edmund asked.

  “Not infantry,” the engineer sighed. “We found out what Mother’s upper limit on pressure is. And while she’ll let you go past it momentarily, such as during firing, you’d have to way overextend it to make a decent infantry-sized air-pack. Actually, she allows more energy in a longbow or a ballista than she does in a system like this. This is about as small as it’s going to get.”

  “And that ain’t infantry.” Edmund sighed, looking at the -contraption. “We’ve got sixty Silverdrake. How fast can you turn these out?”

  “All the parts are available,” Evan said, his eyes going glassy. “I’d say about ten a day, more if I can get some more hands.”

  “Vickie, how fast to get the riders trained?”

  “We don’t even know if it’s going to work, sir,” Vickie replied.

  “Oh, it works,” Evan said in a distracted tone. “We test fired it already.”

  “The point is that there’s a lot that can go wrong,” Vickie said, pointing to the firing linkages. “And we’re talking about a saltwater environment. What happens when one breaks? Does someone on the carrier know how to fix it?”

  “I don’t know,” Edmund replied. “But you’re not going to be on the carriers anyway.” He pulled out a piece of paper and handed it to her. “This is the list of ships that are going to be refitted, by their crews in the next two days, to handle the Silverdrake.”

  “You want us to land on ordinary frigates?” Vickie asked, glancing at the list. “Six of these are supply ships!”

  “And when they convoy back to the base they’ll have top cover,” Edmund said, raising a hand. “Deal with it, Vickie. There’s no room on the carriers. We don’t have any more carriers for the Silverdrake. We need the Silverdrake. Ergo they have to go on other ships.”

  “I just got these guys trained to land on carriers, sir,” the major protested. “What about LSOs?”

  “The way you talk about Silverdrake I was thinking they’d land on the crosstrees,” Shar said with a grin.

  “Thanks a lot, sir.”

  “As the duke says, ‘figure it out,’ ” Shar replied, smiling. “I’d get with the captains, who are probably going to be highly pissed off, today. Then, when the ships are converted, get out there and start figuring it out. In the meantime, Evan will be turning out his little toys. As they become available you can start training with the new weapons. Speaking of which, Evan, they’re going to need ammunition.”

  “Done,” Evan replied, reaching behind the device and picking up a short metal bolt with a cone-shaped end and a wickedly sharp barbed point. “We’ve got a machine shop that’s figured out how to turn these out in quantity. Each of the guns only has five rounds, so by the time the guns are ready, we’ll have all the bolts we need.”

  “Those ships have stays at the rear,” Vickie said, suddenly. “They’re in the way for landing.”

  Edmund grinned. “I didn’t say it would be easy.”

  * * *

  “If I thought it was easy I wouldn’t be here!”

  A hundred and fifty arms were hauling on ropes, swaying a mast upwards as Edmund walked by the training area. It was raining and the ropes were slippery and tending to stretch. Not to mention that the carefully secured butt end of the mast was over a hole in the ground that was probably rapidly filling with water. He watched as the mast slowly ascended to about forty-five degrees and then at a bellowed command stopped.

  “Handsomely!” Chief Brooks bellowed, wiping water out of his eyes as the admiral strolled over through the rain.

  “Great day for it, Chief,” Edmund said.

  “Good training, sir,” the chief snarled.

  “That is what I’d call it,” the admiral replied, smiling, as one of the new seaman recruits, a female, slid in the mud and sprawled at the feet of her classmates. She leaped immediately back up and took the rope in hand, shaking off the fall.

  “How’s it going?”

  “Did you have any idea what a complete bastard Herzer was when you set him on us?” the chief asked. “BELAY. Check the guide ropes! There’s some stretch to port!”

  “Yes,” Edmund replied. The mast was now up to about sixty degrees and looked to be headed holeward. The butt had been secured by tackles that were in turn connected to a variety of short posts in the ground. The top of the mast had lines on it as well, the heaviest pointing to notional “aft.” This, too, was heavily secured and tackled. Most of the recruits were on that line and it was they who had been doing the work of hauling it upright. But there were four lines leading off to either side, secured and tackled, and the majority of the remainder of the recruits were on those lines, clearly working on keeping it from tipping from side to side. The last, small, group, was manning the ropes that secured the butt.

  “I told him it was going to rain like bejeebers today, Admiral,” the chief said, clearly unhappy.

  “Gotta work in the rain, Chief,” Edmund replied but there was query in his voice. “There’s things called storms.”

  “The ropes aren’t tarred, sir,” the chief explained. “That means they’re more liable to stretch in the wet. And that’s creating one hell of a safety hazard. If this thing goes over, we’re going to lose people.”

  Edmund paused for a moment and then shrugged. “Should have tarred the ropes, Chief. Prior planning…”

  “Prevents Piss Poor P
erformance.” Brooks chuckled, watching the slowly ascending mast carefully. “Did you teach that to Herzer or the other way around?”

  “I taught it to the person who taught Herzer,” Edmund replied with a chuckle.

  “And who taught it to you?” the chief said. “BELAY! Port beam, handsomely, handsomely. Belay. All together now!”

  “I read it in a book,” Edmund admitted. “And then learned the lesson in real life.”

  Brooks looked over at him and nodded, then looked back at the work in progress.

  “BELAY! Okay, butt end, handsomely!”

  The butt of the mast slowly but steadily, handsomely in navalese, crept towards the edge of the hole and then slipped, crashing to the bottom and shaking the ground all around.

  “Not how you want to do it with a ship!” Brooks bellowed. “Or you’d have a bloody great hole in the bottom! Buttmen! Get those ropes off the butt and then man the forestay. Let’s start leveling it up!” He turned back to the admiral and nodded. “This is the ticklish bit, sir, if you don’t mind.”

  “Have fun,” Edmund replied.

  “Oh, yeah, sir, good training.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  “We’re having good training now,” Vickie signed at her -wingman.

  When they had taken off the sky was overcast but just about as soon as they reached their destination, which was a small support ship, the Harry Black, that had been converted for landing, the rain had closed in. They were too far out for the Silverdrake to make it back to land and now they couldn’t even see the ocean, much less their landing platform.

  She was glad, in a way, that she was riding a Drake, though. In this damned gray-out you’d hardly be able to see your own dragon if you were on a Powell. That was never a problem with Silverdrake.

  It had been said that they were invented as a joke. They were small and very fast. Great sprinters even if they didn’t have the stamina of Powells. All good traits in a racing dragon and they had been remarkably well designed. But the designer apparently had… a bit of sense of humor when it came to body -markings.

  The Drake she was on was a bright, fluorescent, green with pink polka dots ranging in size from as big as the end of her thumb to as large as her head. Her wingman’s was, in a way, worse, a sort of mottled “camouflage” pattern in electric purple and yellow: truly eye-searing. There had been attempts over the years to get the dragons Changed to more “traditional” colors. But Silverdrake riders were strange folk and liked their dragons the way they were. Flighty, bad tempered and all.

  “Over there?” Ramani signed, pointing to their left.

  “Try,” Vickie signed back.

  She angled the Silverdrake over and down, slowing its descent so they didn’t plow into the ocean or the ship. They were only a couple of hundred meters up by her reckoning, but she was aware that “grayed out” as they were, there was no way of telling if they were a few hundred meters up or a few thousand. All there was in every direction was water. Of course, the stuff in the air wouldn’t drown them.

  The wyvern suddenly banked hard left as its wingtip barely missed the top of a mast. So much for being a couple of hundred meters up.

  Vickie shook her head and banked around, trying to line up the opening in the rain. The ships were only partially converted and a heavy line, a stay, ran from the top of the rear mast to the rear of the ship. There were more lines to the sides. But there was a narrow gap between the stays that permitted egress to the platform installed over the quarterdeck. Unfortunately, the gap was smaller than the wingspan of a Silverdrake, narrow as that was.

  The only way to land was a stoop like a hunting falcon. The Silverdrake, which was shaped much like a peregrine for all it was brightly colored, came in, lowering its forward speed by back winging and then folded its wings, dropping through the slot and onto the platform with a bone-jarring thud that rocked the ship.

  Vickie had learned to tuck her head and brace against the saddle when landing; if you didn’t you got a broken nose. But she swore after each of the landings that she was going to find some better way to land. This just wasn’t safe.

  Vickie walked the dragon down the platform and it hopped to the maindeck, automatically heading for its stall. There were two of the latter on the maindeck, a massive nuisance for the skipper and crew, and she took the port side one. She dismounted outside and stripped the gear off the wyvern, then led it into the stall. There wasn’t food already laid out so she shook her head and went in search of it.

  Vickie was sitting in the wardroom, staring at a bowl of pea soup, when the skipper walked in.

  “You going to eat that or just look at it?” The second thing that people noticed about Skipper Some Karcher was that she was short. Not dwarf sized, but far under normal height. The first thing that people noticed was that she looked like a Siamese cat. Her face and head had a distinctly catlike shape, something like an apple, her eyes were turned upwards, her hair was “touched” in places with coloring like a Siamese, her face was covered in fine fur and her eyes were green, almost like emeralds, and had pupils that were vertically oval. She squinted now as she looked at the dragon-rider pointedly and the pupils contracted sharply.

  “I was just thinking how opaque it looked, ma’am,” Vickie said, picking up her spoon. “Sort of like the air I was just flying through.”

  “I was thinking about those landings,” the skipper said. “And I really hate them.”

  “Not as much as the person on the dragon, ma’am,” Vickie said with a grin.

  “And I really hate not being able to look at the sky when I’m on the quarterdeck,” Karcher continued. “And I was wondering: why not put the platform off the rear of the ship?”

  Vickie opened her mouth to respond and then closed it. After a moment she shook her head, angrily.

  “Because none of those geniuses at the shipyards thought of it, ma’am,” she replied, making a moue. “Do you think it would work?”

  “I don’t see why not,” the captain said, shrugging and giving a little hum that sounded suspiciously like a purr. “We’d have to brace it, but that’s not a problem. You already take off from back there. This would just make it easier. And I didn’t come up with it, one of my seamen did. Good sailor who wants to be a rider methinks.”

  “What’s his name?” Vickie said, pulling out a notebook and unwrapping it from the rubber cover. “We’re really shorthanded on the Powells, ma’am.”

  “Fink,” Karcher replied. “Hers, by the way.”

  “Well, ma’am, tell her that if you’ll approve the transfer she can start as soon as she gets back to land,” Vickie said. She tilted her head to one side, started to say something and then shrugged.

  “Yes, Rider?” Karcher said, her face unreadable behind its catlike smile.

  “I was wondering…”

  “Did I Change before the Fall?” Karcher said in an odd intonation. Again, very like a meow. “No, I did not. This was how I was born. Do you want the long story or the short one?”

  “Whichever you feel appropriate, ma’am,” Vickie said, uncomfortably. “I’m not trying to pry.”

  “Once upon a time, a long time ago, there was a scientist who was, frankly, a bit cracked. It was at the very beginning of the time when Change became possible. But this scientist didn’t want to Change himself into a cat. He wanted his cat to be a human.”

  “Oh,” Vickie said, uncomfortably.

  “And, yes, it was for the reason that you think. So, and this was before the protocols were put in place to prevent this sort of thing, he Changed his cat into a humanoid sentient. And the rest of the story should be that they fell in love and lived happily ever after.”

  “Yes,” Vickie said, now extremely sorry that she had asked.

  “Well, the story didn’t go exactly as he had planned. Cats are cats, after all, even if you make them sentient, and the cat, already angry enough when she found out her name was ‘Muffins,’ was having none of it. She left him and broke his heart
. On the other hand, she eventually did find a human male she thought was reasonably attractive and settled down and had a litter. From which litter I derive. Any questions?”

  “No, ma’am,” the rider said, her face working.

  “Don’t ask me if I chase mice, okay?”

  “Oh no, ma’am, wouldn’t think of it.” Pause. “May I ask one question, ma’am?”

  The captain nodded.

  “How do you stand with dogs?”

  “I have threeÑRottweilers. When I say ‘heel,’ they heel,” Karcher said with a grin that exposed very prominent canine teeth. “I have to admit that climbing the rigging when I’m stressed is very… natural.”

  Vickie laughed again and closed her notebook. “Rain’s cleared?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, ma’am, I think it’s time for us to head back to base.”

  “We’re due back day after tomorrow,” Karcher said. “You could probably ride back.”

  “No, we need to keep doing work-ups, ma’am,” Vickie replied. “For our sins.”

  * * *

  “Evan, you’re on time,” Edmund said, taking off his reading glasses and looking up from the desk. “Mr. Ennesby, how are you today?”

  “Wet,” Tom Ennesby said, taking off his broad-brimmed hat and shaking it to the side.

  “Bad news, Duke,” Evan said. “We’re going to be at least a day late with the Herman Chao.”

  The dreadnought, which was being converted to an anti-dragon ship, was one of the three that had been ready for sea.