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.
“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.