The latter was the only thing that could get dragons to eat the mess of beans and oil that was their normal food away from fresh meat.
“Jesus, sir,” Herzer blanched. “They’re getting hungry.”
“And a hungry dragon will eat anything, including the handlers and riders,” Edmund snarled. “They’re going up against an enemy that they don’t know the capabilities of, with dragons that are hungry and balky. Why?”
“That I don’t know,” Herzer said.
“Because they’ve never fought a battle before,” Edmund replied. “Or even trained, seriously, for one. They don’t know about the fog of war, they don’t know that no plan survives contact with the enemy. But, worst of all, it’s because they have not fought before. The only one of their officers who has met the enemy in any sort of a pitched battle was Shar Chang, and he’s ‘not one of us.’ The Yacht Club has yet to earn its spurs. And they had blithely pitched a forward battle, engagement at the earliest opportunity. Now they can’t say: ‘Wait; the fleet needs resupply and there’s a storm coming that will ground our dragons.’ Because they fear they’ll lose face.”
“What do we do, sir?” Herzer asked, his face pale. He had fought battles before and knew that things went wrong. And he’d handled hungry, seasick, dragons before. If the fleet couldn’t get food in time, the dragons were going to starve.
“There’s not a thing we can do,” Edmund snarled. “That’s what’s making me so damned angry. The only thing we can do is hope for a miracle. That nothing goes wrong. That the New Destiny forces play dumb. Personally, I think that really is hoping for a miracle.”
Major Jerry Riadou stood up as someone at the back of the low, crowded, room called “Attention on deck!” then sat back down as the XO called: “Seats.”
The XO of the ship was wearing his hat, probably because he considered it de rigueur for a formal briefing. Ship uniform was dungarees for all personnel but hats were used to distinguish their ranks and position. Enlisted and petty officers wore brimmed “forage caps.” Chief petty officers wore hats with a wide-flat brim called, for some reason, “campaign hats.” Officers wore hats with a curved brim called Stetsons. The XO’s Stetson was turned up on one side and pinned in place by the heraldic device of the ship. Often, as in the case with the XO of the Corvallis Line, there was also a feather for emphasis. The CO wore the same sort of hat with both sides turned up. The practical reason given for the hats was that anyone could tell at a distance who was giving an order.
As far as Jerry was concerned, the real reason was that the Navy was run by a bunch of bloody peacocks.
Jerry didn’t look up from his notes as the XO strode to the lectern at the front of the room. His notes were simple. Of thirty-five wyvern on board, only twenty-eight were certified for flying by the ship’s surgeon. The rest were so sick they probably wouldn’t survive even if the ship was sailing into Newfell Harbor instead of into battle. He’d only been permitted two hours of flight per day, per dragon, for the last month. He had not been permitted to draw live napalm for training and had only been permitted one set of bombing practice runs. For most of the riders, it was the first time they had attempted to drop bombs, period.
The XO was briefing the mission, but Jerry knew the brief; he’d written it. When the XO gave him the task he came very close to telling the anal-retentive asshole where to stick his brief. And the jackass had sent it back three times, for corrections. Corrections on shit he didn’t know jack about.
Riadou had been one of the first people ever to land a wyvern on a carrier deck. He’d been the first person to bomb a ship at sea and he sunk it. Admittedly, it took a few times to get the damned thing, but he’d sunk it.
The XO had been the mate on the skipper’s racing yacht. He’d never even been on a dragon. And he was correcting stuff on a brief that Jerry could give in his sleep.
The XO and the skipper were pals, all right. They’d even forced the name of their damned yacht down the throats of the dragon-riders. What the hell kind of name was “Blue Destiny” for a wing of wyvern? After someone explained to him that he wasn’t the first person to land on a carrier, Jerry had taken the time to cross the river and visit the museum that still occupied the far bank. There he had read about the old carriers, big, huge metal ships that landed aircraft damned near the size of a great dragon, aircraft that were going not much under the speed of sound for that matter.
And they’d had plaques on the wall, behind sealed glass otherwise they would have fallen apart over the millennia. Plaques from the squadrons of those ships.
Black Aces, Jolly Rogers, Viking Raiders, Death Dealers. Those were real names. Names that spoke of what the pilots believed. Bring death and destruction to the enemy.
Blue Destiny. Gimme a break.
He sensed that the XO had come to the end of his spiel and looked up, meeting the commander’s eyes. He hoped he was showing the proper humility, instead of what he wanted to show, which was that the best use of the XO was dragon-feed.
Apparently not from the XO’s expression. The commander looked away after a moment and around the room, clearing his throat.
“Any questions?”
“How do we get out of this chicken-shit outfit,” a voice at the back of the room asked. In any other group, it would be grounds for chuckles. In this room it caused dead, and deadly, silence.
“If there are no other questions, move to your beasts,” the XO said, coldly.
“Let’s go, boys and girls,” Jerry said, standing up when no one else had. “Time to go get it on.”
“It’s okay, boy,” Jerry said to the piteously mewling wyvern as they reached assembly altitude. “It’s okay. I’ll give you a big feed when we get back.” You could promise anything to a wyvern. They never listened.
He looked down at the dragons launching from the port-side catapult. Most of them were barely getting in the air, flapping listlessly as Tomak had. Jerry had ridden a wyvern named Shep, short for Hatshepsut, for years. But Shep, thank God, had been retired to stud at Blackbeard Base. He was well out of this goat fuck.
Tomak was having a hard time maintaining altitude. There weren’t many thermals this early and the dragon was half-starved, low on energy and inclined to balk. But he kept him in the air as the other wyverns, slowly, assembled.
It was a dispirited group that flapped to the northeast. Going to a battle they didn’t think they could win and wondering if their dragons would have enough energy to get them back to ships they weren’t sure would be there.
Chapter Six
“Sir,” a seaman said, coming over to General Talbot.
The general had ensconced himself at an empty desk in the war-room. He was pretty sure it wasn’t supposed to be empty, but the owner hadn’t complained. Now he looked up at the young seaman and smiled.
“Yes?”
“There’s an ensign outside, sir, who wishes to speak to you. But she’s not on the access list.”
“Nor should she be, seaman,” the general replied, nodding. “Thank you.”
He walked to the door and nodded at the guard to open it and then walked out of the room with Herzer following.
“Sir, I’ve got the extracts you wanted…” Van Krief said. Her uniform was covered in dust.