John Ringo - Council Wars 03 - Against the Tide

by Against the Tide(lit)

  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-kray-big 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-brob-not 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."

  "Wha-?" 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 is-"

  "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 hav
e 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."

  Chapter Twelve

  "Good lord, I thought training was hard," Tao said as Van Krief walked in the room. The ensign was just shrugging out of his undress uniform.

  "I suppose I should have knocked," Van Krief said, grinning.

  "What? You have time to knock?" Tao said.

  "I haven't seen you in a week," Van Krief said, stripping off her own tunic. "What have they got you doing?"

  "Edmund set me loose on the marines," Tao admitted. "We've been practicing boarding and repelling techniques. Herzer was right, they're woefully undertrained. They march pretty, but they don't have a frigging clue what to do with their pigstickers. What about you?"

  "Pretty much the same, but training trainers." Van Krief chuckled. "You should have seen their faces when I used the term 'lesson plan.' 'Wass thet?'"

  Tao belly laughed and nodded his head. "Training schedule? What's a training schedule? Plan our training? You're joking, right? They've got a manual of instruction, I'll give them that. I finally convinced the company commanders to use Gunny's technique."

  "Oooh, they must think you're a right bastard," Van Krief said, pulling on a fresh uniform.

  "Training's sergeant's work," Tao said, grinning evilly. "So each Friday we have a test. We tell them what the test will be. And we set aside sergeant's time for them to train their troops."

  "Has it worked?" Van Krief asked.

  "Getting there," Tao admitted, finally dressed. "Last week was the first time we'd tried it. Only one squad took me seriously. They got released to go down to town; the rest of them kept testing and training and training and testing until nearly midnight. Better than a GI party, I tell ya. This week I notice they're spending a lot more time training and less time sitting on their ass in the barracks. We'll see on Friday."

  "Why are you getting all spiffy?" Van Krief asked.

  "Oh, gotta look spiffy," Tao said, blousing his boots and tugging them into position. "Part of the Blood Lord tradition. Bastards in combat and the best dressed troops around if they're not actively training. I just got done proving to the whole NCO group of the marines that even together they couldn't take me down. Now I'm going to look better than all of them for the rest of the day. Give 'em something to think about."

  "You are vicious," Van Krief grinned.

  "So, you getting anywhere with Herzer, yet?" Tao asked. "Speaking of vicious."

  "Bite your tongue," the ensign growled. "He's my boss. No-go time."

  "Well, maybe somebody will get smart and separate you enough that you can get a leg over." Tao grinned, ducking out the door as a boot hit it.

  "Don't I just wish," Van Krief said as she belted her tunic. "Don't I just wish."

  * * *

  "It is wishful thinking to believe we can win a decisive battle on present terms, Admiral," General Babak said. The operations officer was looking particularly pale this morning.
"The correlation of forces."

  "Correlation of forces is often a term for either cowardice or lack of imagination," Edmund replied, bluntly. "I'll agree that we're holding the shitty end of the stick at present. But the way to fix that is to turn the stick around."

  "We're outmanned," General Piet pointed out. "They took relatively few casualties in the battle and we're short on personnel. Among other things, even though we've gotten dragons sufficient to fill out the fleet, many of the dragon-riders are unwilling to perform sea duty."