John Ringo - Against the Tide

There were a commander and two sergeants inside playing acey-deucy. They looked up at the dust-covered rider and the commander dropped his cards on the table.

“What’s up, Ensign?” he asked.

“Message from General Talbot, sir,” Tao replied. “For Her Majesty, Sheida Ghorbani.”

“They did WHAT?” Admiral Draskovich shouted.

Edmund looked up at that and stopped perusing the reports in his hand. After he had sent everyone off on various errands he had paid a visit to the fleet intelligence shop and picked up some more light reading. He was just about done with it, having read through most of the day, when the latest report came in.

The admiral was no longer elegant. He looked hag-ridden and his hair had started to come undone from his ponytail. It had been a long day, night had fallen more than an hour ago, but he still had enough energy for fury.

“The mer leader, Jason Ranger, sent out an order pulling all the underwater forces back from their positions and sending all of them to protect the whalos,” the petty officer said, looking up from the report in his hand. “There’s a pitched battle taking place in the Granbas area. Merillo is back online and we’re getting fragmentary reports from the fleet. It looks like Reagan , Washuka and Norland are sunk and there are other ships destroyed as well. Bonhomme Richard is damaged but can make some sail. There are wyverns all over the fleet, sir. When they came back they were landing on any ship or ditching. We’ve lost riders as well, some drowned. Some… thrown by their dragons. No total count on dragons, but it doesn’t look good.”

“Get the wyverns reassembled on the remaining carriers,” Draskovich said angrily. “Send a message to the mer to get back in position. We can assemble another supply convoy…”

“Dragons overhead, sir!” a messenger shouted as he pounded through the door.

“Drask,” Edmund said, walking quickly but unhurriedly to the door. “Get your people out of here.”

“What?” the admiral shouted. “Get out of this room!”

“Just going,” Edmund replied. But he stopped and walked to the admiral, grabbing him by the ponytail and pulling his head down to where he could whisper in his ear. “This is a wooden building, damnit. Evacuate .” With that he strode to the door, jerking it open and leaving it open.

He walked steadily to the stairs and then took them two at a time upwards until he reached the top floor. He stopped, panting, for a moment, feeling every year of his age, then strode into the corridor beyond. At that point he heard a thump on the roof and gave up dignity.

“VAN KRIEF!” he bellowed.

“Here, sir,” the ensign said, popping out of a room down the corridor.

“We are leaving ,” Edmund yelled and headed for the stairs as the first smell of smoke entered the air.

He didn’t pause as he headed down the stairs and then thought better of it; that ensign was addicted to research. But as he turned he heard the door bang open.

“Sir?” the ensign shouted.

“Run like hell, Ensign,” he replied and took his own command.

By the time they made it out the doors of the headquarters the top floor was fully engaged and liquid fire was cascading down the walls. He bellowed in pain as a drop of napalm hit his arm and quickly yanked his tunic off, wrapping it around the burning droplet.

“Where’s Destrang?” he yelled, looking around at the scurrying figures outside the headquarters. A bucket chain was being formed down to the river but he took one glance at the headquarters, which was lighting up the night, and shook his head.

“They’ll never do it,” he muttered.

“Here I am, sir,” Destrang said, hurrying through the crowd. “It was a dragon raid, sir. One of them was breathing fire and all of them were pitching napalm. It was targeted on headquarters and the shipyard.”

“Good,” Edmund muttered. “They’ve finally done something stupid.”

“Sir?” Van Krief asked.

“The best thing they could do for our Navy is burn that damned place to the ground,” Edmund growled. “With any luck, Draskovich will choose to go down with his ship.”

“If it’s this bad here, sir,” Van Krief said, “I wonder what it’s like at sea.”

“Get back!” the XO shouted as the wyvern lunged forward.

The CO of the ballista frigate Darya Seyit snarled as the wyvern drove back the net party that was trying to get onto the quarterdeck.

The frigate was rolling in light seas, at the play of the winds. The lost, angry and riderless wyvernÑhe wasn’t even sure if it was one of theirs or the enemy’sÑhad dropped out of the sky and landed on the quarterdeck of the ship before anyone had realized its intention.

The damned thing had immediately seized one of the signal midshipman by the thigh, but they had managed to beat it off of him before the quarterdeck crew evacuated the scene of battle.

Unfortunately, the ship’s wheel was up there. As soon as the two quartermasters had jumped over the side of the shipÑby order, there was no way for them to move forward past the enraged dragonÑthe ship had turned with the wind and now drifted helplessly as most of the crew tried to get in rigging while a party set up a jury-rigged rudder control below.

Most of the rest of the crew, including the ballista crews, were trying to get a net or a rope or something on the damned dragon so that the ship could be gotten back under helm.

“Okay, one more try, men,” the XO shouted.

“Ahoy the ship!” a voice shouted from overside. “I need to see the skipper!”

“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.