With the exception of Fielder, who was his usual cynical self, most of the officers at the table nodded, looking at him with cautious admiration. “Aye, sir,” said Mr. Barlet. The gunner was thinking happily about what his guns would do to the enemy. “If they try to mess with us we’ll show them what those 24-pounders can really do!”
Melville looked with pleasure upon his officers. He possessed something that few other officers in the Westerness Navy could claim. Military victory. In their heart of hearts the navy sometimes feared that they might just be Hokas, playing games with their traditions drawn from the old British Royal Navy. The long centuries of Westerness history included many ground actions on frontier worlds, and a few brushes with pirates, but no real frigate actions like the one they’d just survived.
Now, after centuries of preparation, their first true naval engagement had ended in victory against overwhelming odds, and Melville had won the loyalty of these veterans by demonstrating his competence in combat. They were willing to spend their lives for a cause, but they desperately did not want their lives to be wasted. A leader who had proven his worth in battle was the most precious of all assets. A man to be truly cherished by his men. Melville had accomplished that now, but it was far harder than anyone who hadn’t been there could ever understand. First, the opportunities to gain such credibility were so very rare. Second, once it was gained, it was a fragile substance, since one “dammit” could delete a lifetime of “attaboys” in the bank balance of battle.
Starting in the late twentieth century, combat simulators began to make it possible to develop “pre-battle veterans” and leaders who could demonstrate their ability to their men, at least in the simulators. When the military used these they were combat simulators, which honed battle skills. When that same technology was put in the hands of children, the games they played became “mass murder simulators,” and like Ender in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, the games the kids played became horrifyingly real, resulting in unprecedented mass murders as the children turned their sad games and conditioned reflexes into dark tragic reality. Melville and most of his crew had trained long and hard on such simulators on Old Earth.
Still, combat simulators were never the same as real combat, and every leader yearned for the battle experience that would give them the only true credibility in their profession, while simultaneously dreading that combat would prove to the world that they were a fraud. When a warrior leader was successful in combat, there was a new fear. Now they feared that next time they would fail. For every military leader knew that, no matter how good he was, in the end so very much depended on luck. And next time, luck might not be there. Melville felt that fear, and now the danger was that he wouldn’t want to risk his fragile reputation, but instead would avoid battle and rest on his laurels.
Thus military leaders could, in the end, be the most insecure of all human beings. In truth, every leader knows in his heart that he’s no better than his men. Melville knew that somewhere out among his crew there was someone smarter, faster, stronger than him. So by what right was he in charge? Who was he to send these men to their death? There were ways to handle this. Like Alexander or Gustavus Adolphus you could put yourself in danger and perform acts of great valor to prove yourself “worthy.” In peacetime that opportunity to prove yourself isn’t really there, and there is a need to convince the leader that he is something special. Thus the salutes, parades, fancy uniforms, inspections, and elaborate displays of respect.
The strange thing is that in some ways this was a two-way street. All that pomp and circumstance could convince the leader and his men that he was special. The captain on a ship is an extreme example, dining and living in splendid isolation. Very little exists across the centuries of “the ultimate social Darwinism” of the battlefield without good reason, and the “need” for this kind of ceremony and ritual is a two-way street. Egalitarian democratic armies limit this a little, and veteran units in combat can relax it a little, but it was still there and probably always would be.
Military leaders in wartime, successful military leaders in the true test of combat, could transcend this need for phony reassurance and replace it with the greatest balm of all to the soul of the military leader. Victory, honor, and glory. Melville had a little of that now and, God help him, he wanted more. This was another risk for combat leaders. He had tasted honor and glory and it was good.
The fewer men, the greater share of honour . . .
By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
Nor Care I who doth feed upon my cost;
It yearns me not if men my garments wear;
Such outward things dwell not in my desires;
But if it is a sin to covet honour,
I am the most offending soul alive.
Honor, and glory. The next battle would decide, and the next battle was soon. To the best of his ability he’d forged his ship and crew into a fearsome weapon. He could run, yet the enemy was closing in from almost every direction and his duty was in Ambergris. Once again the odds might be overwhelming, but what the hell . . .
A thousand shapes of death surround us,
and no man can escape them, or be safe.
Let us attack—
whether to give some fellow glory
or to win it from him.
Chapter the 10th
Sea Battle: Lords of Helm and Sail
On our high poop-deck he stood,
And round him ranged the men
Who have made their birthright good
Of manhood once and again—
Lords of helm and sail,
Tried in tempest and gale,
Bronzed in battle and wreck.
Together they fought the deck.
“The River Fight”
Henry Howard Brownell
They were sailing into Ambergris. The two-dimensional sea they sailed upon shifted from the midnight blue of interstellar space, passing through imperceptible gradations to a pure royal blue and then a light cerulean as they entered the solar system. A swirl of aqua, white, and green marked the plane of the planet itself. In the distance the off-white topsails of many ships could be seen.
Although it was still a comparatively young colony, Ambergris was already a major world with two large Piers, one above the plain of Flatland and one below. As the world spun, these Piers slowly shifted in relationship to each other in Flatland. On the world itself the Piers were hundreds of miles apart on opposite ends of a vast mountain range. But in the condensed, compressed environment of two-space you could sometimes see them both from the same ship, the Upper Pier from the upper deck and the Lower Pier from the lower deck. Most of the rest of the world was dominated by oceans, archipelagos, and swamps, the kind of world that the Stolsh loved. Given a few more centuries they would build it into a rich, heavily populated planet.
Melville cut a course for a point between the two Piers, trying to discern the status of the Guldur invasion. As he drew closer he could see only Guldur ships clustered around the Lower Pier. Around the Upper Pier the scene was a shifting, swirling mass of sails, some Guldur, and others clearly Stolsh and Sylvan. Faintly, over the endless, distant music of two-space, they could hear cannon fire coming from that location. They changed course and moved toward the sound of the guns.
On board Fang the scene was the same on both the upper and lower decks. First the crew was well fed. Then they beat to quarters, a daily ritual that the crew had performed countless times in the past, but this time it was for real. The men of the gun crews, supplemented by a sprinkling of Guldur, crouched motionless. Each gun captain lay over his gun on a platform, glaring down the barrel. At each gun the muzzle-lashing was coiled exactly and made fast to the eye-bolt above the gun port lid. The mid-breeching was seized with precision to the pommelion of the cannon. Handspike, crow, ram, bed, quoin, train tackle, round shot, canister and grape were all neatly arranged. “Slush,” the fat carefully collected from the cook pot, was applied to grease the path that the gun recoiled back onto. A small bucket of slush was held in reserve beside each gun. Swords and pistols were in racks close to hand. The guns were organized into four batteries, consisting of the two 24-pounders and two 12-pounders on each side. Each battery had an officer or midshipman as battery commander. The gunner, Mr. Barlet, stalked the gun line on the upper deck, checking his guns and their crews. Gunny Von Rito did the same on the lower deck.