John Ringo - Against the Tide

“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 isÑ”

“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 have 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.