John Ringo - Against the Tide

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.