Chapter 19: The Great Fleet

Meanwhile, we were trying to gather ships. I had two front-line warships at Jayport, Shark and Wrong Place, four when Thunder and Eagle got back, plus another five smaller brigs without launchers that we used as escorts. Well, our task for this was to escort and protect the troopships, so they were included.

Widemouth and the eastern towns could add something like eight or nine more warships. Each could carry a hundred fighting men plus their crews, but if possible I would want them to stay with their ships. Still, that was around two thousand fighting men if we needed them.

Between all the towns and the free traders, we had access to a good twenty-five or thirty cargo ships available to use as troop transports, and we could probably get them to carry two hundred men each, depending upon their size. And assuming the men could handle being sardines for the voyage. That was five to six thousand soldiers. Would it be enough?

I’d spread the word that I wanted men for a short period, maybe a couple of months. We would provide training and weapons, feed them, and pay them half a pinch per day while they trained. When they took ship for the Brotherhood, their pay would go up to a whole pinch every day until they got off the ship again and went home. Any who were wounded enough to no longer be able to fight would be paid a Shell, and any who were killed or crippled would get four Shells. That guaranteed that, come summer, I’d have farmers coming from every direction.

The messages I got from Bridgetown made it clear that the east coast group could provide five thousand men for this, as long as they were back for the harvest. Between Widemouth, the Long Lake, and the south coast, I was providing almost two thousand men. When you added in all the warship crews, it was over three thousand men from our side of the Island. We needed transport for seven thousand soldiers!

At two hundred men per ship, that was thirty five ships. If we crammed two-fifty into each ship, we only needed twenty-eight, but what kind of shape would the men be in when they reached their destination? I sent Dolphin and a couple other ships out to pass the word at all the mainland ports that in a couple of months we would have a cargo to move that would need every ship we could hire. Sure, even the Brotherhood ports. Why not?

Meanwhile, we used the ships we had to take the soldiers out to sea for a couple of days, getting them used to it. We had to find something for them to do, and getting over their sea-sickness was more important than another practice raid, assaulting an empty beach and hill.

Apparently the concepts of extensive training for the soldiers was fairly unusual. Certainly, the veteran soldiers were all for it, for the recruits. They just didn’t think that THEY needed it. And the older officers, like Widemouth’s Commander, were all for it. It was their political leadership that had always balked at the cost.

Now, however, with people like me and King Tom and Sir Tony in charge of the Island, and if the rumors were right a bunch of American skinheads running the Brotherhood, and a few Heros running places like Shiloh and the Citadel, training your soldiers before you needed them was becoming more common.

We weren’t really paying the soldiers yet, but we were feeding them and clothing them and equipping them and training them, and it was all expensive so I certainly wanted to make sure that they were worth their cost. Any training or experience we could give them would make them more combat-effective in the long run. As the saying went, gold would not always get you good soldiers but good soldiers could always get you gold.

We waffled a lot over how many ships to take with us, if we got good news from our scouts. We wanted to send everything, but the pirates weren’t our only enemies. If our entire Island fleet, fifteen or twenty warships and thirty or forty cargo ships all disappeared, how long would it be before the Brotherhood did something to cause trouble?

I figured that less than a week after the Brotherhood heard that we’d gone somewhere else instead of attacking them, we’d have one or two of their ships landing a ‘scouting party’ somewhere on the Island. Sure, any of our cities could defend themselves, but the farms and villages they ran across would all be helpless. Doubly so, with a lot of their healthy young men gone with us.

It was finally decided that each city would retain one warship and patrol the island looking for trouble. That dropped us down to an expected nine good warships and another six escorts. Seven good warships if Thunder and Eagle didn’t come back, but if they didn’t come back with a good route the fleet wouldn’t be going anywhere anyway.

I was doing the management thing at Jayport about twenty-five days -what I wanted to call ‘almost a month’- after we had sent Thunder and Eagle out to look for a northern route when we got a galloper in from the road, yelling for me and saying that Thunder and two prizes had moored at Widemouth. WTF? The messenger didn’t know anything else; as soon as Thunder had moored he had been given orders to get to Jayport as quickly as possible and tell me I was needed there at Widemouth. Well, I’d wanted to make a speed run anyway, to see how fast we could do it.

I had the men on duty ring the gong three-and-one for ‘emergency - man the ships’ and men came boiling out from every direction. While they were mustering I talked with the rider. Widemouth was fine. Between the Guard, the militia, and the soldiers being trained the town had well over fifteen hundred men immediately available for defense.

They couldn’t possibly need Baron Jayport to come help defend the town. They had to need the Lord High Admiral or the Duke of the Western Marches for something else. That instruction to go get me had to have come from whoever was commanding those ships. And where was Eagle? Was it going the long way around, again?

I put Filo and Sir Tony in joint command of Jayport, the fleet, and the ground force, told them what little I knew and everything I suspected, and as soon as Shark was manned we put to sea. No testing anything, just hoist all sail as soon as we were clear of the bar, and tack southwest until we can tack northwest and pass Rocky Point.

We passed Rocky Point well before dark, and reached the mouth of the Wide River about midnight. Well, it was only two miles, and most of the crew had grown up around Widemouth anyway. They’d know what was coming even if I hadn’t told them. Besides, all the Marines could help. With two men on each oar, we were able to get up the river in only an hour or so and nobody was drop-dead exhausted.

Pirate’s Gift was moored on the south side where it normally was, along with the town’s other cargo ship the Fair Trader. There was little room over there for a third ship as long as Shark was. Thunder and two strange ships were moored to the long quay across the river between the ferry landing and the shipyard. What the hell, we tied up to both Thunder and the downstream stranger.

The commotion had already woken up the night watchmen on both ships, or at least I assumed that they’d been asleep until we came alongside. They said that Captains Matto and Eric were in town, on the other side of the river, and they needed to see me as soon as possible because they had an important report to make. If Captain Eric was here, where was Eagle?

Eagle had been sunk in a battle with the pirates. Thunder had recovered most of its crew, but the ship was gone. How the hell did that happen? The pirates didn’t have anything that could sink a ship! Unless they got too close to a shore fortress, I guessed. A good catapult shot could do it.

Rather than lower a boat to cross the river, I just had Shark cast off again and used it as a big rowboat. Shark could tie up to Pirate’s Gift and Fair Trader just as well as anywhere else. If either night watchman objected, he could go swimming, and then after we’d cut the ship’s moorings and it had drifted down the river out of the way there would be plenty of room for Shark to moor properly at the town’s dock.

The crew heard me muttering, and when Trader’s watchman called out for us to stay clear one of the deck crewmen called back “This is the Shark, Lord Jason’s flagship. If you idiots can’t leave room for anyone else to use the dock we’ll just tie up to you. Unless you want to go swimming you’ll stay out of our way.”

It was good to be King. Even being Duke was good. Of course, my crew probably would have given that answer even if I had been outlawed instead of ennobled. Everyone in Widemouth owed their freedom, their health, and probably their lives to me, and men who had fought beside me for a half-dozen years weren’t about to take any disrespect from anyone here.

And if the Trader’s night watchman was who it usually was, it was an old man who couldn’t get around well any more. He probably would not be able to get back out of the water without help. Maybe the Guard’s night watch, who were coming to see what was going on, would help him.

Once we were recognized, we were taken to Gerard’s tavern to meet Matto and Eric and their officers. They got rousted out of their beds and came down to talk as soon as they heard I was there. The big news, the immediate report, was that they had followed my instructions and thought that they could lead the fleet to where we needed to go. They looked around while they were saying that, so I understood that they still considered their orders to be secret.

Frankly, I thought that the time for secrecy was just about over. If they could lead the fleet to the Pirate Isles, then we would be getting the whole expedition underway as soon as we could get word to everyone. Still, they were doing the right thing. I asked if they could come back to Shark with me for a more private meeting and they agreed immediately, only asking if they could bring their officers. Of course!

Only Matto had his log with him. Eric’s log on the Eagle had been lost when the ship sank. It didn’t take long to get that story out. Apparently the Pirate Isles had patrols of their own, looking for whoever or whatever was taking all their ships. They had heard it was the Jayport fleet, and that Jayport was on Hunter Island, but they didn’t know where Jayport was or how Jayport’s fleet was doing it so all the Pirate Isles had patrols out around their home the same way we did around ours.

Ten days after losing sight of Hunter Island, our ships thought they were in the assigned area but they weren’t finding anything when they ran across a group of five unknown ships. Matto and Eric had thought that perhaps some prisoners could tell them where the Pirate Isles were, so they closed with the five. Both had been sandwiched between two pirates, but neither one was worried. They had dealt with that before.

Both had shot their cruise missile at the one on their port side. Thunder’s target had sunk almost immediately, but Eagle’s target had not. Eagle’s opponents had tried to board from both sides, but Eagle’s Marines and archers had prevented any fighting on their deck. The Eagles, at least, had no intention of getting surprised like Lion had.

Thunder had ended up getting sandwiched, too, by the last pirate ship, but they had been able to win the two-sided fight. The pirates were simply not prepared to deal with a massed formation of archers, and the shields and armor of the Marines kept the archers from interference. Once the survivors on both ships had accepted defeat, Thunder had cast them both off, told them to not move or they would come back and sink them, and gone to help Eagle.

The Eagles swore that they would have won their fight, too, but the ship it had put the missile into had foundered during the fight. That was fine, but there were too many boarding lines connecting them and on its way down it pulled Eagle over enough to capsize it as well. The other pirate, the one on the starboard side, had been able to chop its lines away and get loose so it didn’t follow them both down, but its crew was in no condition to argue when Thunder came up and demanded it surrender or be sunk.

While they were discussing terms of surrender, Thunder had recovered everyone who had been able to get clear of the two ships before they went down. Most of the Eagles were half-naked and had no weapons, but Thunder had more than enough spares and captured equipment to at least give them all something.

I felt completely justified in insisting that all of our warship crews learn how to swim. One of my best captains, Stephen, was still only the captain of Dolphin because he flatly refused to get in the water. I wasn’t going to dismiss him, he was one of my best captains, but I wasn’t going to give him command of a warship, either.

Thunder had put a small prize-crew onboard the ship that had been on Eagle’s starboard side, just to keep everyone from getting ideas, and then gone back for the first two. One of them had put out oars and was rowing away. Thunder had simply passed it on the right and put another missile into its hull from about ten yards out, then come about and ignored it while it sank, men screaming from the mast.

After that demonstration, Thunder had no further problems from any surviving pirates. Five against two, and the five had had two sunk and three captured, then that had changed to three sunk and two captured. Thunder had lost a few men during the fighting, but they had gained far more fighting men from the recovered Eagles. No one left on the last two pirate ships wanted to piss the Thunders off any more.

Finding the Pirate Isles turned out to be easy, once our men had asked the captured pirates how they got home. “See those clouds over there? They never move. Each one is over an island. Get close enough to tell which island it is, and you can steer for the one you want.”

Duh. Of course. I’d heard that, on Earth. I told you I wasn’t a sailor, back on Earth! Land masses reacted differently to the sun’s heating than the ocean did. Islands had clouds over them from evaporation. Maybe directly overhead, maybe downwind some. Get close enough to see the clouds, then go to the clouds and find the island under them. You still had to get that close, but it meant that the pirates could find their islands from forty or fifty miles out instead of only five or six miles out.