“Handsomely!” Chief Brooks bellowed, wiping water out of his eyes as the admiral strolled over through the rain.
“Great day for it, Chief,” Edmund said.
“Good training, sir,” the chief snarled.
“That is what I’d call it,” the admiral replied, smiling, as one of the new seaman recruits, a female, slid in the mud and sprawled at the feet of her classmates. She leaped immediately back up and took the rope in hand, shaking off the fall.
“How’s it going?”
“Did you have any idea what a complete bastard Herzer was when you set him on us?” the chief asked. “BELAY. Check the guide ropes! There’s some stretch to port!”
“Yes,” Edmund replied. The mast was now up to about sixty degrees and looked to be headed holeward. The butt had been secured by tackles that were in turn connected to a variety of short posts in the ground. The top of the mast had lines on it as well, the heaviest pointing to notional “aft.” This, too, was heavily secured and tackled. Most of the recruits were on that line and it was they who had been doing the work of hauling it upright. But there were four lines leading off to either side, secured and tackled, and the majority of the remainder of the recruits were on those lines, clearly working on keeping it from tipping from side to side. The last, small, group, was manning the ropes that secured the butt.
“I told him it was going to rain like bejeebers today, Admiral,” the chief said, clearly unhappy.
“Gotta work in the rain, Chief,” Edmund replied but there was query in his voice. “There’s things called storms.”
“The ropes aren’t tarred, sir,” the chief explained. “That means they’re more liable to stretch in the wet. And that’s creating one hell of a safety hazard. If this thing goes over, we’re going to lose people.”
Edmund paused for a moment and then shrugged. “Should have tarred the ropes, Chief. Prior planning…”
“Prevents Piss Poor Performance.” Brooks chuckled, watching the slowly ascending mast carefully. “Did you teach that to Herzer or the other way around?”
“I taught it to the person who taught Herzer,” Edmund replied with a chuckle.
“And who taught it to you?” the chief said. “BELAY! Port beam, handsomely, handsomely. Belay. All together now!”
“I read it in a book,” Edmund admitted. “And then learned the lesson in real life.”
Brooks looked over at him and nodded, then looked back at the work in progress.
“BELAY! Okay, butt end, handsomely!”
The butt of the mast slowly but steadily, handsomely in navalese, crept towards the edge of the hole and then slipped, crashing to the bottom and shaking the ground all around.
“Not how you want to do it with a ship!” Brooks bellowed. “Or you’d have a bloody great hole in the bottom! Buttmen! Get those ropes off the butt and then man the forestay. Let’s start leveling it up!” He turned back to the admiral and nodded. “This is the ticklish bit, sir, if you don’t mind.”
“Have fun,” Edmund replied.
“Oh, yeah, sir, good training.”
Chapter Thirteen
“We’re having good training now,” Vickie signed at her -wingman.
When they had taken off the sky was overcast but just about as soon as they reached their destination, which was a small support ship, the Harry Black, that had been converted for landing, the rain had closed in. They were too far out for the Silverdrake to make it back to land and now they couldn’t even see the ocean, much less their landing platform.
She was glad, in a way, that she was riding a Drake, though. In this damned gray-out you’d hardly be able to see your own dragon if you were on a Powell. That was never a problem with Silverdrake.
It had been said that they were invented as a joke. They were small and very fast. Great sprinters even if they didn’t have the stamina of Powells. All good traits in a racing dragon and they had been remarkably well designed. But the designer apparently had… a bit of sense of humor when it came to body -markings.
The Drake she was on was a bright, fluorescent, green with pink polka dots ranging in size from as big as the end of her thumb to as large as her head. Her wingman’s was, in a way, worse, a sort of mottled “camouflage” pattern in electric purple and yellow: truly eye-searing. There had been attempts over the years to get the dragons Changed to more “traditional” colors. But Silverdrake riders were strange folk and liked their dragons the way they were. Flighty, bad tempered and all.
“Over there?” Ramani signed, pointing to their left.
“Try,” Vickie signed back.
She angled the Silverdrake over and down, slowing its descent so they didn’t plow into the ocean or the ship. They were only a couple of hundred meters up by her reckoning, but she was aware that “grayed out” as they were, there was no way of telling if they were a few hundred meters up or a few thousand. All there was in every direction was water. Of course, the stuff in the air wouldn’t drown them.
The wyvern suddenly banked hard left as its wingtip barely missed the top of a mast. So much for being a couple of hundred meters up.
Vickie shook her head and banked around, trying to line up the opening in the rain. The ships were only partially converted and a heavy line, a stay, ran from the top of the rear mast to the rear of the ship. There were more lines to the sides. But there was a narrow gap between the stays that permitted egress to the platform installed over the quarterdeck. Unfortunately, the gap was smaller than the wingspan of a Silverdrake, narrow as that was.
The only way to land was a stoop like a hunting falcon. The Silverdrake, which was shaped much like a peregrine for all it was brightly colored, came in, lowering its forward speed by back winging and then folded its wings, dropping through the slot and onto the platform with a bone-jarring thud that rocked the ship.
Vickie had learned to tuck her head and brace against the saddle when landing; if you didn’t you got a broken nose. But she swore after each of the landings that she was going to find some better way to land. This just wasn’t safe.
Vickie walked the dragon down the platform and it hopped to the maindeck, automatically heading for its stall. There were two of the latter on the maindeck, a massive nuisance for the skipper and crew, and she took the port side one. She dismounted outside and stripped the gear off the wyvern, then led it into the stall. There wasn’t food already laid out so she shook her head and went in search of it.
Vickie was sitting in the wardroom, staring at a bowl of pea soup, when the skipper walked in.
“You going to eat that or just look at it?” The second thing that people noticed about Skipper Some Karcher was that she was short. Not dwarf sized, but far under normal height. The first thing that people noticed was that she looked like a Siamese cat. Her face and head had a distinctly catlike shape, something like an apple, her eyes were turned upwards, her hair was “touched” in places with coloring like a Siamese, her face was covered in fine fur and her eyes were green, almost like emeralds, and had pupils that were vertically oval. She squinted now as she looked at the dragon-rider pointedly and the pupils contracted sharply.
“I was just thinking how opaque it looked, ma’am,” Vickie said, picking up her spoon. “Sort of like the air I was just flying through.”