by John Ringo
Kane drew a poignard and ripped through the heavy linen envelope, pulling out a sheaf of papers. He glanced at the opening paragraph and nodded.
“Colonel, the regiment will prepare for movement. Three days rations, combat gear, two remounts for every rider. Leave all the horses that aren’t entirely up to par.”
“May I ask where we are going?” Rienzo said, his brow wrinkling.
“No, you may not,” Kane answered, folding the papers and stuffing them in his doublet. “But you can assure yourself that fell deeds await.”
* * *
The Blood Lord came to attention and rapped on the door, twice.
“Come.”
At the word the soldier marched into the room and took the position of parade rest, looking two decimeters above the head of the NCO at the desk.
“Gunnery Sergeant, Captain Jackson has received a warning order of a possible heavy attack. The majority of the Destiny fleet appears to be headed this way along with a sizeable landing contingent.”
The man behind the desk was old, his close-cut hair gray and his skin lined from time in the sun. But his back was straight and the hand that lifted the stogie to his mouth was firm.
“Estimated time of arrival?” the gunnery sergeant grunted, getting to his feet and walking to the window. The view out the window was bright, revealing a blue-green harbor and a fortress under construction. It was only half built, though, despite a few hundred workers swarming over it like ants. In the water a group of mer-women were playing with their children, watched by a group of soldiers in armor that seemed far too heavy for the heat. Despite that, the platoon of Blood Lords were as rigid as so many iron bars. As he watched, three members of the platoon marched to the water butt, drank heavily, then marched back to their positions.
“At least three weeks, Gunnery Sergeant.”
“Dragon-carriers?”
“Five, Gunnery Sergeant.”
The gunny grunted and then chuckled.
“Good. What’s the weather report?”
“I’ll go check with the mer.”
* * *
Elayna rolled over on her back and uncapped the barometer, setting it between her breasts and then holding up the wind gauge.
All of the mer teams, in addition to their other duties like killing orcas and finding enemy fleets, took weather readings. They could only get measurements at the water’s surface, although their support ships had weather balloons, but the measurements were put together to form a remarkably complete picture of the movement of air masses.
It was a nice day, breezy mind you, the weather gauge showed right on twenty klicks, but clear and mild. She lay back and let her eyes close, ducking her head back and under from time to time for a breath of water. Sitting at the surface was always a pain, you had to decide whether to duck under for water or blast the lungs clean for air. But it was as nice a day as she could hope. She lay there and wished she was back at Blackbeard Base. Sort of. Whenever she thought of the name she thought of Granddad and that made her sad. There had been so much death since that day. The world really did suck.
She called up an image of the reefs and imagined herself riding the currents past, just floating. No cares, no weight of command, no fears of attack by orca or ixchitl, no barometer readings that take for fricking ever! She rolled up and looked through slitted eyes at the barometer but it was still showing an unstablized reading.
She ducked her head back down and looked at her second in command. “Any sign of orca?”
“No,” he pulsed back. “Skimmers report open ocean all around.”
“We hope,” she said, looking at the barometer again. It finally showed clear and she cased it back up and put away the wind-gauge.
“Signal fleet met,” she said. “Location point 109, wind speed twenty-two klicks, barometer thirty point one five and rising.”
“Nice day,” Katarin said.
“Yeah. Storm a comin’, though.”
“Message coming in,” Katarin said. “New Destiny fleet is at sea.”
“Let’s hope they get becalmed,” Elayna said, rolling over and kicking for the depths.
* * *
Paul rolled over so that Megan was on top of him and stroked her back, lightly.
“You seem pretty happy,” Megan said, leaning down to kiss him on his forehead and, not coincidentally, dangling her breasts in his face.
“I am,” he said, reaching back around to stroke the soft flesh. “The fleet has sailed. All of it. Chansa has sent the main combat fleet to attack Blackbeard Base. Edmund’s going to have to choose which fleet to engage; he doesn’t have enough forces to attack both.”
“Which do you think he’ll go for?” Megan asked.
“It doesn’t really matter,” Paul answered. “If he moves for the northern fleet it can turn around. The southern fleet will take out Blackbeard, kill or capture the mer-women and children and that takes the mer out of the equation; they’ll do anything to get their children back. If he attacks that fleet, the main fleet will land in Norau and we can set up portals to support them. Even if he, by some miracle, destroys the fleet, it won’t matter anymore.”
“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.
* * *Γ Γ Γ
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.