“Clear,” the group said.
“There will be supplementary orders sent to all ships by the end of the day. These orders will be kept under the same conditions. Held by the marine commander in a box to which only the skipper has the key. There will be three such packets: Stonewall, Genghis and Belisarius. They will be opened only upon my signal.
“Maps are to be kept in the same manner; nobody has access to them but the skipper. You skippers will know where you are and in the event of the carrier commanders where you are going. Mer will transmit when you have arrived. If you are delayed by storm or bad winds, that will be relayed as well. For your information, the mer are implementing a deception plan that will indicate that we are not where we’re going to be. Admiral Talbot?”
Edmund looked around at the group and nodded.
“In war you always want to know what your enemy is doing,” he said, looking at the skippers one by one. “And they, in turn, want the same information. This naval war has been fought, to this point, with both sides knowing that information. To the greatest extent possible we wish to end that condition. As to what we are going to do, or how we are going to do it, you will get that information at your rendezvous. Admiral Chang?”
“That’s it,” Shar said, looking around at them again. “Good luck, and good sailing.”
“Those are some damned strange orders,” Karcher said as they flew back to the ship.
“They are,” Joanna replied. “But I can guess the reason.”
“So can I,” Karcher mewed distastefully. “They’re right about us bleeding information.”
“Oh, it’s more than that,” the dragon replied. “You haven’t known Edmund as long as I have. His mind is as deep and black as a bog. He never tells anyone what he plans, or if he tells them, half the time it’s not what he actually does. Part of it, a big part of it, is to deny the information to the enemy. But the other part is that if he changes his mind, or the plan doesn’t go as well as he planned, nobody knows it.”
“That part I understand,” Karcher said unhappily as they turned on final.
Chapter Nineteen
“Time to mix it up,” Jason signaled, starting to ascend.
When Jason was given the go ahead to begin attacking the orcas and ixchitl, he’d already had a plan in mind. And, so far, the plan was working.
Finding the orca pods and ixchitl schools was almost the hardest part. But the delphinos were in tentative contact with natural schools of skimmer dolphins, the deep water dolphins that roamed every major ocean on earth. They were, in particular, capable of reading the skimmer’s language, at least to the extent of their alarm calls when orca or ixchitl, which the skimmers had discovered were threats, were sighted.
Whenever such a call went up, delphino skimmer pods moved in close enough to determine if the pod was natural orcas or Changed. The differences, other than in the small pseudo-hands of the Changed, were slight, but generally they could tell without moving in close enough to be prey. And with ixchitl there was no question at all. Then they would take up positions around the pod or school and send out their alarm call.
Jason had shifted forces and had the selkies take over most of the inshore work of the underwater forces. With the mer thus freed up he had scattered “killer teams” around the ocean. When a target pod or school was sighted, more often than not there was a killer team somewhere in the vicinity. As soon as the course of the target was plotted the mer would move into position.
By and large, mer were shallow water creatures. But they were designed to handle deep diving just as well. They also were water-breathers, so they could stay down, as long as they got enough food to stave off hypothermia. Orcas and ixchitl, though, almost invariably moved in the top hundred meters of water. Ixchitl could and sometimes did stay deep. But they generally, like the orcas, traveled near the surface. Thus the killer team would dive deep and silently await the passing target.
In this case it was a small pod of Changed that was, apparently, moving in to try to localize one of the carriers. Edmund had said that it was a high priority that they not do so. Which made this group a double target.
They couldn’t see, or otherwise detect, the pod from their current location, nearly three hundred meters below the surface of the water. But the skimmers were still sending out their broadcasts and they could more or less fix the location of the pod that way. The skimmers had taken up points of an equilateral triangle around the Changed pod and as the triangle moved over their location, Jason sent his force silently upwards.
As he did he checked, again, that the supply ship was in position, sixty klicks to the southeast. He often thought that the supply ships were the real heroes of the plan. The small, fast schooners carried food and weapons for the mer and delphinos, moving around the ocean, unable to defend themselves from attack and depending solely upon the immensity of the ocean to protect them. Each of them also carried a medic and a hold that was partially flooded with seawater. In the, very likely, event of injury to the delphinos or mer, they could be evacuated to the schooner and if the injury was bad enough, but not too bad, they could be shipped to the shore.
He knew that they’d probably take some casualties this day and just had to hope that they wouldn’t be too severe.
As the school of mer ascended they started to pick up very faint clicks from above. The orcas mostly ran silent when they moved but this group had lousy tactical discipline. On the basis of the sounds, Jason shifted their ascent slightly and increased speed. There was some danger to the change in speed. As they got into lower pressure water their tailfins could begin to “cavitate,” creating low-pressure “holes” where the water would rush in and make a sound. So far so good, though: he could still hear no sound from his school.
It was becoming dark above and it was hard to pick out much in the water, clear as it was. But then he saw shapes above and to the left of the school so he shifted direction again, quietly extending his lance. When it was clear the orcas still had no inkling they were about to be ambushed, he put on a final burst of speed and sixty mer-men followed him into the attack.
Irkisutut was bored, angry, tired and afraid all at the same time. They had been running around the damned ocean on one wild goose chase after another for the last week. Headquarters didn’t seem to know which way to send them so first they went one way then another, always in a fruitless search for the enemy’s carriers.
What made it worse was that they had heard, both directly from distant alarm calls and from scuttlebutt from other pods that casualties had been enormous. Not only were the carriers sending out dragon patrols to hunt down the orca but the ever-be-damned mer had shifted from skulking around the harbors to attacking the pods. Most of his fellow pod leaders had been lost over the last week and he wondered how long it would be before it became his turn.
On top of that were the damned skimmers. He knew he was bracketed by skimmers, they were sending out constant chatter. But while orcas were fast, skimmers were damned lightning. He’d shifted track a couple of times trying to catch the damned things but they just greased away, laughing at him. Then when he turned back they got right back into position. All that chasing them did was wear out the pod.