“He’s busy,” the ship’s master chief said, looking over the side. “Mer overside, sir,” the chief continued.
“I know he is!” the mer yelled from below. It sounded like a female. “That’s why I need to see him!”
The skipper walked to the rail and looked down in the water where a black-haired mer-girl with a bright blue tail was swimming alongside.
“What?” the skipper snarled.
“Well excuuuse me,” the mer-girl said back. “Just trying to help. The problem is that wyvern’s hungry. If you feed it it’ll quit trying to kill you.”
“You have a lot of experience with wyverns, girl?” the chief said, angrily.
“Yes, as a matter of fact I do,” the girl said. “Elayna Farswimmer, Skipper. Lieutenant Farswimmer. I’m the daughter of the late Bruce Blackbeard and was on the Retreat with General Talbot. I have a lot of experience with wyverns and that one is hungry. You can tell by its cry; it’s not angry it’s sad. Because you’re not feeding it.”
“We don’t have any wyvern food,” the skipper temporized.
“As hungry as the poor thing is, it’d eat salt beef right out of the cask,” the mermaid answered, bitterly. “You’ve been treating them horribly.”
“Chief?” the skipper asked.
“We were boiling up lunch when it landed, sir,” the chief replied. “I don’t know how far along it got, but when you sounded general quarters, they’d have put out the fires.”
“Get below,” the skipper said. “Get the cooks up here with whatever they have.”
No more than five minutes later, as the wyvern was trying to figure out how to get past all the rigging to get to the tender sailor snacks below, the chief came up followed by a party carrying joints dripping water on the snowy deck. They carefully crept up to the rear and the chief ran forward, hurling a shoulder of beef onto the quarterdeck.
The wyvern jumped on it as if it were starving, which it was. Wyverns used an enormous amount of energy in flying and they needed huge quantities of food to sustain them. Their normal “field” rations were a mixture of soybeans, cornmeal and oils for fat energy. The only way they could be induced to eat the mess, especially at sea where they were as susceptible to mal de mer as humans, was by liberally lacing it with ketchup powder. The fleet had been out of ketchup for days and the wyverns had been off their feed even before the debacle of the morning.
Ignoring the heavy salt brine that the beef had been pickled in, the wyvern started tearing off strips of flesh, bolting them down as fast as it could. When all the easily removed meat was stripped off, it looked down at the chief and mewled piteously.
One after another of the chunks of beef and pork were thrown up to the quarterdeck until at last the wyvern was barely picking at them. At that point the chief took a coiled line from one of the waiting sailors and walked up the steps to the quarterdeck. He cautiously edged up to the wyvern and ran the line under its halter, securing it with a fast bowline, then tossed the coil of rope to the sailor he’d taken it from. Quickly, other sailors ran up to the deck and tied ropes to the wyvern’s halter, harness and huge, birdlike legs. In minutes the wyvern was secured in place. It didn’t look as if it minded. When it had finished turning over the bones rolling on the swaying deck it tucked its head under its wing and promptly went to sleep.
“Told ya,” the mermaid said, when the wyvern had obviously settled.
“Thank you,” the skipper replied, dryly. “Okay, let’s get these sails trimmed and get back under way!”
“The fleet’s about sixty klicks southeast,” Elayna said. “Them that’s left.”
“Marshal! Great news! The UFS fleet is practically destroyed, they’re retreating on every front!”
Chansa looked up from his paperwork at his chief of staff and grunted.
“How many carriers did we get?” he asked, leaning back in his chair, which creaked.
Marshal Chansa Mulengela was huge, two and a half meters tall and broad in proportion. The small office that he had appropriated in the bowels of the Council facilities made him look bigger. And, despite the news, he didn’t look happy.
“It looks like four,” the chief of staff said, wondering what it would take to get the Key-holder to smile. “The way is open for the invasion fleet!”
“Only four?” Chansa growled. “Damn.”
“Reports are still trickling in,” the chief of staff noted. “We might have gotten the fifth as well.”
“There’s still the Hazhir down in the Isles,” Chansa noted. “You can be sure that even an idiot like Draskovich will recall it.”
“It’s been modified,” the chief of staff noted. “Their Buships does not consider it combatworthy.” The chief of staff shrugged.
“Their Buships is as stupid as you are, then,” Chansa growled. “It’s been modified by that asshole, Shar Chang. If he’s put in modifications, you can guarantee they’re going to make it more combatworthy, not less. What about the strike on the head-quarters?”
“It appears that was successful as well,” the chief said. “It was on fire when the wyverns withdrew. They reported that there was a great dragon there, one that we didn’t know about from intelligence reports.”
“What about intel from the headquarters?” Chansa asked. “What are we getting from there?”
“The chain is long on that source, sir,” the chief reminded him. “We probably won’t have anything for a couple of days.”
“Stay on it,” Chansa said after thinking about it for a moment. “I won’t be happy about launching the full fleet until we’ve run down their last carrier. Where did they retire to?”
“South, sir,” the chief replied, glancing at his notes. “The orcas report that they’ve been driven off, so we’re not sure exactly where it is. And there’s a storm coming into the area so it’s unlikely we can press action immediately.”
“Where’s the Canaris?” Chansa asked.
“Moving north along the Norau coast, headed for the Granbas rendezvous.”
“Signal them to stand off the coast,” Chansa said. “I don’t want someone figuring out a way to take them out.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Go,” Chansa said, looking at the paperwork on his desk. “I’ve got other things to handle.”
As luck would have it, the admiral could be seen not too long afterwards, circling the madly burning building, his staff clustered around him.
“General Talbot,” the admiral said, approaching him when he noticed him, and the cluster of officers around him. The admiral took in the burned arm and shook his head. “I’d have thought you’d be long gone by the time the first bomb hit.”
“My ensign was upstairs,” the general replied with a shrug. “I wasn’t going to leave her to burn.”
“No,” the admiral said, his jaw working. “But I wonder, how did you divine that there would be an attack on this building?”
Edmund sighed and shook his head wearily. “Remember what I said about studying war? I was doing that when you were going through potty training, Admiral. Attacking the headquarters, given that most of your ships were at sea, was the obvious choice. I’d have probably hit the warehouses instead, but that’s not how Chansa thinks. The first time I saw this building I thought: What a lovely target.”
“How did they manage to find it, then,” General Kabadda snarled.