Against the Tide

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 methods 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”

“How the hell do they keep it dry on the ship?” the engineer asked.

“I don’t think they do very well,” Evan said. “Probably they keep them well covered but the humidity has got to affect them.”

“It’ll do the same to ours,” Ennesby pointed out.

“Only if we use ballistas,” Mayerle replied, looking distant. “We’ve put in a big order for tubing and pumping apparatus for the refrigeration, right?”

“Yeah,” the engineer sighed. “You wouldn’t believe what it cost.”

“Hmmm…”

“What are you thinking?” Ennesby asked.

“I’m wondering what the max pressure is that Mother will let us get away with,” Evan said, looking off into the distance.

“Welcome to Pressure 101,” Herzer said, grinning at the mixed group of NCOs and officers in the small room. It was the ground floor of a two-story “temporary” facility that had been thrown up by the base engineers in about two days. The walls were still seeping sap and the floor was decidedly uneven. Herzer was pretty sure that it was going to leak like a sieve in the first rain. But it was home.

“Most of you know me but I’ll introduce myself anyway. I’m Cap…”

“Bite your tongue!” Chief Brooks called from near the back of the room.

“Make that Major Herzer Herrick,” Herzer said. “I’ve been tasked with setting up a basic training facility for sailors and marines. And I, in turn, tasked all of you.” He grinned at the room again and it was clear that the humor stopped at his eyes. “And we are going to create such a facility and it is going to work and we have exactly one week before the first class arrives. So it behooves us to get to work as soon as possible.

“Now before we go on, let me make something clear. I know diddly about sailing. But I am a product of, and have been an instructor at, the only professional military school in Norau. And the basics are the same. You have to take kids who don’t know jack and who have never had to obey an order and teach them to obey first and ask questions later. You do that by stripping away everything that they knew of civilian life. At the same time you build a new structure around them, a structure of honor and discipline. You test them as hard as you possibly can so that when they’re out with the fleet and their ship gets dragoned or a kraken comes to visit they obey their orders instinctively.

“At the same time, you want to encourage initiative. It’s a fine line. Some of the kids, and you’ve all known them, come up with a wild idea that is just flat wrong. Some of them, on the other hand, do the right thing almost instinctively. One of the things we’re going to be looking for is kids to fast-track. So there will have to be honest individual evaluations that are as objective as possible.

“The bottom line is that when they go out to the fleet, they’re not going to have to be shown the simplest tasks; they’re already going to have learned those.

“Right now I’m looking at the following pattern. First week will be basic in-process and familiarization. Then four weeks of basic seamanship training and rigorous physical training. Then the last week they’ll sail with a skeleton crew of trained personnel and specialists. By then they need to have been taught all the basic skills of a seaman, how to climb ropes, how to tie knots, how to raise and lower sails, what have you.

“You are going to come up with the list,” he said, looking around the room. “We need a comprehensive training schedule by the end of the week. Everything that you have to teach the newcomers when they come onboard. After that they’ll go to an advanced training course for four to six weeks. Some of you will be assisting in setting that up as well.”

“Question?” one of the lieutenants said.

“Go.”

“You said ‘physical training,’ ” the lieutenant said uneasily. “I know something about the Blood Lords…”

“We’re not training Blood Lords,” Herzer said with a feral grin. “We’re training sailors. If we were training Blood Lords we’d be having ruck marches and ruck runs every day. Since we’re training sailors… One of the first tasks of the first class will be to raise ‘The Mast.’ And, yes, that’s capital letters. They’ll assemble and raise a complete mainmast from stores. Crosstrees, sails, rigging, the whole bit. Then each morning, they will run The Mast. I think that will do for physical exercise, don’t you?”

There were chuckles in the room and Herzer noticed that Brooks looked grim.

“And, yes, we’re going to have to go up it, too,” Herzer said. “At least to prove we can. The point here is to have every graduate of this training program know that, at bottom, they are a sailor. They’ll have at least a brief cruise and learn to handle seasickness and to work while they’re sick as a dog. They’ll act as deck apes for the cruise so that whatever they end up as, deck apes, cooks, clerks or the band, they’ll know the basics of being a sailor. The point here is to establish a unifying bond in the Navy.”

He looked around at the sea of faces and shook his head.

“Last point, and I wish I didn’t have cover it but I do. Units like this, since females were permitted in the force and probably before, have had a problem with sexual harassment. They have ranged the gamut from male on female to female on female. The problem is that the trainers will be in complete control of the trainees’ lives and that will make some of the trainers tend to… use that power. It will also cause some of the trainees to attempt to mitigate the power by using sex as a bribe.” He looked around again and saw the expressions of surprise and even contempt.

“Deal with it. Those are the facts of life. And don’t tell me that it hasn’t happened on shipboard, either. I’ve read the reports. The short and sweet is that if it happens under my watch, I will make whoever is the one in the position of power regret the day that they were born,” he continued, his scarred face hard and cold. “With power comes responsibility. I’ve had the displeasure of dealing with that sort of thing before and believe me, there is no justification for the empowered. None. Zero. Zip. Keep your dick in your pants. By the same token, an accusation is not proof. Investigations into accusations, though, are time consuming and leave nothing but shit in their wake. Bottom line: don’t put yourself into a position to be accused. If you’re counseling a person, make sure that there is a witness present. Ensign Van Krief and I will be writing that portion of the orders. That’s all I’ve got. Any questions, comments, concerns?”

“This isn’t going to help with the upcoming battle,” Chief Brooks said.

“No, but you’re assuming that we’re going to seize control of the sea-lanes in one battle,” Herzer said. “Let’s just say that Duke Edmund takes a longer view of things. Training is one of the fundamentals of any military force. The more you train, the less you bleed. So we are going to train them as hard as they can stand. Because when it comes to actually doing the job, it just gets harder.”