by John Ringo
“They puked it all up,” Jerry said. “And, yeah, that’s got me worried.”
“And they get angry when they’re hungry,” the chief said.
“They’re too sick and nervous to be angry now,” Jerry said.
“But when they’re over being sick and nervous?” the chief prompted.
“I wouldn’t put an arm though the bars,” Jerry admitted.
“With all due respect, sir, I’d suggest feeding them. Even though they puke it up. As you can see, now, we can clean that up easy enough.”
“Agreed, Chief,” the warrant said, then grinned. “Ever thought of being a rider, Chief?”
“Not on your life, sir,” the NCO replied. “I’ll tell you the truth, I don’t even like climbing the rat-lines. I’m so afraid of heights it’s not funny. I’d rather eat dirt for the rest of my life. How’s the commander?”
“You mean Joanna?” Jerry asked. “She’s not sick, except at the smell. She’ll be glad to get the area cleaned out.”
The chief looked at the deck overhead for a moment then smiled.
“I wonder if she minds rain?”
They moved forward to where the dragon was curled up, looking at the bedlam with a beady eye.
“Commander Gramlich, we’re going to get this area cleaned out,” the chief said. “But it will be a bit and it will get messy. I was wondering if you might be okay with moving to the landing platform.”
Joanna looked at him for a moment then rustled her wings.
“I weigh nearly two tons, Chief,” she answered after a moment’s thought. “I notice that the ship tends to… move when I do. That’s why I’m placed damned near the center of the ship. Won’t the skipper have something to say about that?”
“Well, ma’am, as it happens, we’re in the process of moving some weight aft…”
“And I’m a nice mobile weight?” she asked with a chuckling hiss.
“I’d not put it like that, ma’am,” the chief said with a smile. “But we can lower the ramp easy enough, even in this sea. The toughest part will be opening and closing the hatch. But if you were to nip through quick-like…”
“Be sure to tell the skipper and then, yes, I’m game,” Joanna said. “Anything to get out of this damned hold.”
* * *
“Annibale, Bodman,” PO Singhisen said. “Fall out for a working party.”
It felt like Joel had just gotten his eyes closed. With the storm he’d been in the galley getting the fires put out and making sure everything was lashed down. So had Bodman, for that matter, who was one of the mid-watch cooks.
“I just put my head down, PO!” Bodman protested, trying to roll over and go back to sleep.
“Fall out,” the PO said, sharply. “Now.”
Joel rolled off his bunk and pulled on his clothes. The wind was still strong but the ship seemed to be riding better.
“What are we doing?” he asked.
“The damned dragons had as much trouble last night as the rest of the crew,” Singhisen said, shaking her head. “We’re going to go get their compartment cleaned out.”
“Oh, fisking joy,” Bodman whined. “Why can’t the riders do it?”
“Because there’s only two that ain’t officers,” the petty officer explained as if talking to a small child. “And officers don’t clean up shit and piss. It ain’t their job.”
“Join the Navy,” Bodman complained as they made their way forward. “Join the adventure.”
Fortunately they didn’t have to make their way on deck and the dragon deck was almost uncomfortably warm.
Singhisen had gotten more than just the two of them and there was a group of deck-apes waiting in the wyvern deck when they arrived.
“Okay, McKerlie. Take your team and man the hose pumps. Mbonu, your people are on the outfall pump; you know how to operate it?”
“Yes, PO,” the lead seaman said, waving her group over to the pump that was at the forward end of the compartment.
“Annibale, Bodman, you handle the hoses,” she continued, waving around the room. “We need to get these decks rinsed down. Then we’ll swab everywhere but in the occupied cages. Then we rinse ’em down again.”
“Thanks PO,” one of the riders said, coming to the aft of the compartment. “I’m getting my riders up here; we’ll try to keep the wyverns from taking anybody’s arm off.”
“Is that a real problem?” Singhisen asked.
“I dunno,” the rider said, shaking his head. “They’re not in the best of moods.”
Joel unreeled the hose and set to work as the deck-apes pumped. The… material on the floor was unpleasantly solid and splashed when the salt water hit it, throwing chunks of material around the compartment. He had to get down to a low angle to get it moved and that tended to splash more onto him. He’d wondered why the two stewards were doing the, relatively, lighter job of using the hose but he decided quickly that it was the worse of the two evils. Score one for the deck-apes.
The material did move, though, sloshing back and forth and forming an ugly puddle at the forward end of the compartment as the team there pumped it out. The riders were sliding around in it, moving from cage to cage and trying to calm the hissing wyverns. One of the latter got a muzzle through and took a swipe at him as he was spraying under the edge of the cage, trying to get a lodged chunk of… something sort of greenish yellow, worked free. The female rider, who had sergeant stripes instead of a PO’s chevrons, whapped it on the nose and it pulled back into its cage. He gave the sergeant a nod, washed the chunk of… whatever loose and kept spraying.
Finally, when he and Bodman had the compartment more or less clear the PO got the deck apes on the outflow pump working with mops. It didn’t get long to get everything but the cages clean and by spraying under them they even got most of the crap out of those.
It was a nasty, disgusting, job and not one he wanted to repeat any time soon. In his professional opinion, dragons belonged on the land and not in a damned ship.
He was really gonna have to have a long talk with Sheida when this mission was over.
* * *
In no more than twenty minutes Joanna was ensconced on the landing platform. The chief had even rigged heavy ropes so that she could hold on; since the rear of the ship was still bucking up and down it was necessary. After a bit she thrust a couple of talons under the ropes, curled in a ball, closed her eyes and appeared to go to sleep.
“Dragons, wyverns for that matter, tend to sleep a lot,” Jerry yelled as they headed back down to the quarterdeck. “They use high energy when they have to and try to sleep most of the rest of the time.”
True to Herzer’s mental prediction the wind seemed to be moderating and with it the seas. And with Joanna’s weight to the rear of the ship, along with whatever stores had been moved, the bows were now sweeping over the waves instead of digging into them.
They headed down into the hold again where a team of sailors, with Vickie and a female PO directing, were cleaning out the wyvern stalls. With the materials available the sketchy cleaning didn’t take long and Jerry directed the feeding afterwards as the hands, most of whom were probably from an off-duty watch, walked out of the compartment grumbling. Some of the wyverns barely poked at their food but most of them ate as if they were starving. Some of their distress must have been hunger because by the time they were done most of them had settled down. And, just as Jerry predicted, those that had fed almost immediately tucked their heads under their wings and, swaying with the ship, went to sleep.
“Good,” Jerry said. “That’s the first decent rest they’ve gotten in two days.” He frowned at Chauncey and Yazov, both of whom had ignored their food. They were still mewling piteously although they’d quit the metal-bending shrieks.
“If we found something tastier for them they might eat,” Herzer suggested.
“Yeah, and then the next time they didn’t like their food they’d wait until we gave them something better,” Jerry said. “No, they’re just goin
g to have to eat it or not.”
Chauncey looked through the bars of his stall and mewed piteously at Herzer.
“I’m sure the cook has some scraps left over,” Herzer said. “What if we just gave them a few? That might make them hungry enough they’d eat their slop.”
“I dunno,” Jerry said. “It goes against the grain.”
“If I’d been puking,” Herzer said, mentally adding which I have, his throat was still raw with it, “I wouldn’t want something that looked like puke.”
“You have a point.”
Herzer, getting lost only one time, made his way to the main kitchen, which the sailors insisted be called a “galley,” of the ship and caught the eye of one of the NCOs.
“A couple of the dragons are badly off their feed,” he said. “We’re hoping some scraps will get them eating again.”
“All the edible garbage goes in those pails,” the petty officer said, pointing to a line of buckets lashed to the wall. “Take whatever you want; we just pitch it over the side.”
Herzer went over and checked them over. Most of the garbage consisted of ship’s bread and vegetables, but one bucket had a fair amount of stew from the evening meal in it. He untied that one and started to carry it back to the dragons.
“Hang on, sir,” the petty officer said. “Johnson, carry that for the lieutenant, then head back here when you’re done. Bring the bucket.”
Herzer wasn’t sure if the petty officer just wanted his bucket back or if he was getting another class in “enlisted men do, officers supervise” but he followed the sailor, who didn’t get lost, back to the dragon deck.
The scraps, when added to their slop, were a big hit with the two dragons. They got enough meat that they started sucking on their slop right afterwards.
“Sir, if you don’t mind,” Johnson said. “We can try to segregate the meat that gets thrown away. And there’s bones and things that don’t get used, too.”
“As long as the PO says it’s okay, that would be great,” Herzer said. “Johnson, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Thanks for your help,” Jerry said. “If you ever want a ride, assuming we can get them back in the air…”
“That would be great, sir.” The sailor grinned. “I’d better get back.”
“Thanks again,” Herzer said. When the sailor had left, Herzer grinned at the rider. “I think you’ve got a convert.”
“Oh, we’ve had plenty of people ask us about rides,” Jerry said. “Or even becoming riders. Especially since we’re down two.”
“One of them being me,” Herzer said. “Sorry.”
“Not a problem,” Jerry replied. “Duke Edmund has been fairly clear on that. As soon as the weather calms down, and assuming as I said that we can take off and land in this mess, we’ll see about getting you trained. But I warn you, landing on this thing is not easy.”
“You need at least one more rider than you have dragons,” Herzer said. “Or, at least, dragons in the air.”
“Why?”
“For the LSO. I don’t know that I’d have been able to do it if I hadn’t had that one experience with riding. It gave me a grasp of what I was doing.”
“Point,” Jerry said. “Well, since we’ve got the wyverns settled and there’s not much going on, I might as well start with giving you the ground school portion.”
“Ground school?” Herzer said.
“You have no idea.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
For the next two days, as the weather continued foul, Jerry and Vickie between them tried to cram all the theoretical aspects of dragon riding into Herzer’s aching head. At night he went to bed with terms like “yaw” running through his head and every morning it started all over again.
He discovered what had been happening in his brief flight when he’d been trying to move the dragon around in the air. He learned about optimum glide paths, methods of spotting thermals, and the anatomy of the wyverns. The wings were not, as he’d thought, just flesh, blood, skin and bone, but were a complex web of far more advanced materials including biologically excreted carbon nanotubes.
“It’s the only way the wing bones could support their weight and powered flight,” Vickie explained. “There’s no way that bone and skin alone could do it. The largest previous flyer was a fraction of their size. And there’s some indication that overall air pressure was higher in the Jurassic.”
“So Joanna’s got this in her, too?” Herzer asked, looking at the sketch. “They’ve got to be some of the strongest ‘natural’ material on earth.”
“They are,” Vickie said, frowning. “We try not to make too much of a point of it.”
“I can imagine why,” Herzer said, frowning in his own turn. “There’s a lot I can imagine to do with wyvern wings.” The bones would make excellent weapons and the primary skins would make tremendous armor. Assuming you could figure out a way to cut it.”
“As to Joanna, yes,” Vickie said. “But more so. How do you think she keeps her head up in flight?”
“Bloody hell,” Herzer said. “That’s… a lot of nanotubes.”
“It’s one of the reasons they grow so slowly,” Vickie said. “And they’re continuous filament monomolecules. One of the strongest substances ever made.”
“Cutting them would be a stone bitch,” Herzer said. “Which means their wings aren’t going to be subject to puncture in combat.”
“Trust you to think of that.” Vickie chuckled. “But they can be dislocated. It’s one of their big weaknesses. But, no, they don’t break wing bones or tear wings.”
“If they were fighting on the ground the thing to do would be to wrap their wings around them,” Herzer thought. “Nothing would get through it.”
“They can be superficially scratched,” Vickie said. “And that takes a long time to heal. But their wings are, for all practical purposes, invulnerable. On the other hand, they take a lot of care and feeding.”
Which they did. On active days they required several feedings per day, totally nearly their own body weight. On inactive days they required far less, but every day it was excreted.
“Fortunately, they tend to let go in air,” Jerry said, as he was covering that aspect. “But with them cooped up as they are…”
“It gets messy.” Herzer grinned.
“That apparently was passed on, and Evan the Ever Efficient planned for it,” Jerry said. “The ship really does have enough stores to support them for a hundred days, but that’s at the cost of crew. This is a really skeleton crew for a ship this size.”
“I’d noticed,” Herzer said.
And the skeleton crew was kept busy. While Herzer was cramming his head with information about dragons the crew was busy fighting the storm. Again and again the sails had to be trimmed as the wind backed around, died down and then blew back up.
It was rough and nasty and apparently the life of the Navy. Herzer decided that they could keep it.
* * *
Working the night shift was not helping with Joel’s mission. He’d picked up a rumor that the head cook was peculating, probably with the help of some of the victuallers that supplied the ship. But that didn’t make him a spy, although Joel would include it in his report.
The problem with working the mid-watch was that he had minimal interaction with the officers. If there was a New Destiny agent on-board, the most damaging position would be among the officers. And although they rotated shifts so he’d been around each of them, if any of them were communicating with New Destiny, it wasn’t clear.
As he came on watch he picked up another jug of herbal tea and some mugs and stuck his head in the wardroom on his way to the quarterdeck. Commander Mbeki was standing at the rear of the wardroom table, just turning away from, apparently, contemplating the forward bulkhead.
“Get you anything, sir?” Joel asked, holding up the jug and mugs. “Nice shot of herbal tea for a cold night?”
“Thank you, Joel, I’d like that,” Mbeki said, h
is face wooden.
“You okay, sir?” the steward replied, frowning. “You look pretty down.”
“I’m fine, seaman,” the commander replied, taking the mug that was poured for him. “Just wish this storm would abate.”
“Well, if wishes were fishes, sir,” Joel replied with a patented young and stupid grin. “Storms don’t listen to wishes is my experience. You just ride with ’em or turn into ’em and ride ’em out.”
“You’ve sailed before?” the commander asked, surprised.
“Sailed small fishing boats in Flora, sir,” Joel said, taking a mug of tea for himself. “Then took a packet up the coast and joined the Navy. Seemed like the right thing to do.”
“What did you do before?” the commander asked. He didn’t have to say “before the Fall.” “Before” was always the same, before the world came apart.
“Mostly sailed,” Joel said, shrugging his shoulders.
“Family?” the commander asked, sitting down.
Joel paused and then nodded. “Wife and daughter, sir. Miriam, I’d guess she was home in Briton. We had a place on the coast. My daughter… she was visiting friends in Ropasa. Near the Lore.” He shrugged. “I try not to think about it. No more than, oh, a hundred times a day.”
Mbeki nodded sadly. “Don’t tell anyone that, if you take my advice.”
“That I think about it?” Joel asked.
“Where they were,” Mbeki said, his face hard. “You really don’t want New Destiny finding out. Trust me on that.”
“I will, sir,” the steward said, mentally filing the datum. And the face. And the body posture. And the radiating anger. “I surely will.”
* * *
Finally, on the fourth day after they had left the bay, Herzer emerged in the morning to a strong, cold north wind and beautiful clear skies. The seas were rough but he’d acquired some of the knack for moving on the pitching deck and he made his way down to the dragon deck gathering no more than two new bruises on the way.