The Flying Warlord

FROM THE DIARY OF CONRAD STARGARD

By the fall of 1239, all the people who worked for me at any level above the bottom had gone through the Warrior's School, with the exception of a few like Boris Novacek, who had no hands. There was even a four-month winter school for the peasants on my new barony. Three years of it and they could be knighted. But a lot of men didn't make it through, and I had to be fairly brutal about weeding them out. Since they were sworn to me, I couldn't fire them for not passing, but I wouldn't let them stay on in any kind of a managerial capacity, either. Mostly, I just demoted them down to apprentice, no matter what their skill level, and I gave some of them plots of land and let them be peasants. Many took this pretty hard. Some people quit and there were even a few suicides, but I was adamant.

To keep in practice, everybody spent one day a week in military training. Not the same day, of course, since the factories had to keep running full blast if we were going to meet our production quotas.

I would have preferred a system where the men who worked together fought together, but there was just no way we could do that. In the factories, each section had people with specialized skills. If they were A off and in training on the same day, their machines would be idle.

As it was, most work teams had seven men, counting the leader, who was always knighted. The bottom rank was made up mostly of pages and squires. On any one day, five of them would be working, one would be at military exercises and one would be enjoying his day off.

This meant working Sundays, and I got a lot of flak about it, both from the men and from the Church. I tried to prove to them that what God meant was that they should spend one day a week in prayer and rest, and the original Sabbath was on Saturday, anyhow, but they were still mad at me. We tried juggling schedules, hoping to keep everybody happy, but that didn't work either.

On top of this, virtually every industrial job was worked in two shifts, one days and one nights, and that was another set of headaches.

Finally, I just threw a temper tantrum and said they could do it my way or they could leave. Very few quit.

We tried to keep the training as amusing as possible, with contests, races, and that sort of thing. To a certain extent, we were successful and military sports became the big game on campus. At Three Walls, these drills and games were generally held on the "killing ground" in front of the walls. This was where we held our portion of the yearly Great Hunt, the harvesting of the wild animals on our lands. It was a great alluvial, fan shaped area, almost a mile to the side, and was surrounded by a vast tangle of Japanese roses, fully five yards high and twice that thick. Barbed wire would have been inferior as a military defense!

It wasn't only the men who did military training. The women had their duties as well, concentrating on defending the walls. They got proficient with the swivel guns on the outer wall, as well as with grenades. They didn't work out with the pike or halberd, the usual woman's arms being a little weak to handle these big weapons, but most of them were decent with a rapier.

Lady Krystyana became a master swordswoman, always winning the women's championship and outfencing me most of the time. She seemed to get a special thrill out of scoring on me, I suppose in revenge for all the years I'd spent sticking it to her.

But these exercises were a problem for the night shift, since despite fudging things by an hour or two, most of their training day happened in the dark.

Sir Ilya was my night shift manager at Three Walls. He had wanted this job because his wife was incapable of sleeping in the day, and the arrangement suited him. He just got a bunk in night shift bachelors' quarters and mostly ignored her, despite my orders to the contrary. After a year of being ignored, she ran away with Count Lambert's blacksmith to places unknown. It was two weeks before Ilya noticed it, and then only when he checked his account at the bank. Not that he tried to find her, or replace her, or even take on a "servant." A bachelor's life suited him.

But despite his marital problems, Ilya took his work seriously, and if military duties were part of his job, he did it. But he did it in his own way.

He figured that what we needed was a special group of men trained to fight at night. He even named them "The Night Fighters." As a group, they worked out the techniques for silent fighting in the dark. I helped them where I could, mostly telling them about commando stuff I'd seen in the movies, but they got good at it. They learned to walk quietly in total darkness, the leader signaling the men behind him with a string they all held in their left hands. They practiced with the knife and with the garrote, their version of which was a steel wire with a couple of wooden spools and a strange, one way slipknot. I think it might have been the world's first disposable weapons system. It only worked once. But since you weren't likely to miss with one, once was enough.

And they played games, just like the day shift, only different. One of their's was "steal the pig." This was played with a live pig, one scheduled for tomorrow's supper, since the pig often did not survive the game. It was played in pitch darkness, and if there was a moon out, they'd play it in a basement. The pig wore a harness around its body which was tied to a pole with a three yard rope. A lance of seven men was assigned to guard it and another lance was given the task of stealing it. It was played in full armor, and no weapons were allowed except on the pig. After that, anything went! Real class was to steal the pig without the guards knowing it was gone, but decking them all out cold was fair.

Games of this type put a premium on quiet motion, which wasn't easy in regulation plate armor. They naturally got to working on the armor. I told them that we could not possibly make new stamping dies, not this late in the game, so they worked within those limitations. What they came up with was a set of armored coveralls. It used the same pieces as our standard armor, but each piece fit into a sort of pocket sewn in the garment. Baggy when you first put them on, they had zippers up the sides and on all four limbs which snugged them up properly. Where the plate armor couldn't cover, as on the armpits and on the inside of the knees and elbows, pieces of chain mail were sewn in.

One of the beauties of this design was that you could get into it in a hurry. It took a quarter-hour for a man to arm himself with our standard armor. With Night-Fighter armor, it was a matter of a minute.

Another problem with any plate armor was that it didn't breath. Steel is impervious to air. This was no problem in the winter, when we normally wore quilted goose-down long underwear, but in the summer, you could suffocate in there, and cases of heat exhaustion and even heatstroke were all too common.

They worked out a system of forced ventilation. In the summer, you wore a set of thin linen long johns that had zippers all over the place. These zippers matched up with zippers on the inside of the armored coveralls. Since the armor was about a finger's width bigger than you were, all around, the result was a number of separate compartments all over you. The front of your shin was one compartment and the back of it was another. There were valves, simple flaps covering holes, at the knees and ankles, such that cool air could come in at the ankles and go out at the knees. As you walked, you naturally moved around inside this oversized armor, and this motion pumped cool air in the bottom and hot air out the top. Since there were eighteen of these compartments around your body, you stayed reasonably cool. Not like you'd be in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, but cases of heat exhaustion became rare.

They did talk me into a summer helmet, which resembled a Chinese coolie hat, and we tooled up for that.

Their system was so superior to what we had that I made it the army standard, for the men anyway.

There wasn't much to setting up for the new armor. A number of conventional knights were looking for something for their peasants to do as a winter money-maker, so we set them up sewing armor coveralls.

I'd originally issued the same armor to the women that I had to the men, but the girls didn't like it. It had to be of the same thickness as the men's or it wouldn't be able to stop an arrow, and they said it was too heavy.

Since they would be fighting only from the walls, where the parapet protected them from the waist down, they soon discarded the leg armor. They said that the gauntlets made it hard to operate a gun, so they got rid of them, too. But the man's sword had only a small hand guard, about what you'd find on a Japanese sword, since the men wore steel gloves. Without authorization, the girls got the shop to tool up a special big hand guard, like they put on a modem epee.

And the standard breastplates. No style at all! Completely without my permission, special tooling was made, thirty-two expensive dies in all, just to satisfy them.

Now their breastplates had breasts on them.

And having done that, they thought that it was prettier polished and shiny, so they didn't go the practical coverall route. They'd even come up with a zowie-looking helmet with a Greek-style crest on it when I put my foot down. There was no face guard, and it didn't protect the neck at all, since the girls wanted their hair to show! I ranted and swore that this was a stupid design and a stupider waste of resources. They said. yes, sir. You're right, sir. We'll do it your way, sir.

Then two months later they were all wearing these new helmets!

I never could find out who made the dies, since they knew I would have fired the bastard, and the production schedules on the stamping presses showed no time allotted to the silly things. How they got them made, I don't know, but soon the ladies at all the other installations were in the new outfits, too.

But you try holding back a bunch of women when they get a bright idea.

Then to top it all off, the duke saw the ladies' helmets and thought that, gold-plated, they'd be just the thing for a ceremonial guard! I managed to talk him out of it. They wouldn't have fit a man, anyway, a female's head being much smaller than a male's. Darned if I was going to let any more draw dies be made.

Strange to say, despite its obvious advantages, the new coverall armor didn't catch on with the conventional knights.

Of course, during all this time, we'd been selling plate armor at decent prices to anyone who wanted to buy from us. Well, we wouldn't have sold to a Mongol, but none of them applied. But after three years of selling polished plate armor, it was all the rage among the hawking and hunting set. While our troops were discovering camouflage paint, they wanted to shine. There was nothing we could do about it, so we let them have their own way.

Another thing the Night Fighters did was with the swivel guns. They put a big pie plate of a flash suppressor at the muzzle of the gun. This did two things for them. For one thing, it stopped the muzzle flash from blinding the gunner at night. For another, it reflected all of the light forward, and they worked out a system where each gunner fired just after the man to his left. This let him aim by the flash of light caused by the last gun going off. From a distance, it looked like a string of chase lights on a theater marquis, but they got reasonably accurate with the system. Flash suppressors soon became standard for all our swivel guns.

Innovation was the name of the game at Eagle Nest, where a sturdy band of very young men were busily conquering the skies. Actually, they were getting too innovative, and I had to work at converting their efforts from research to production.

They had started out with motorless sailplanes, and their aircraft showed that heritage. The wings were long and thin, the bodies long and sleek. They were all highwinged, since I'd always been aiming at observation craft, and even with motors, they still had to be catapult launched.

This catapult was built on top of an ancient, manmade hill about six dozen yards high, probably some sort of prehistoric defensive structure. The hill was conical, with a flat spot on top about two dozen yards across. We built a low, circular concrete wall, and the catapult rode on this wall, so as to point into the wind. The catapult itself was a wooden ramp, six dozen yards long and angling upward at a half-hour angle. A rope ran from the back of the catapult to a pulley at the front, then back halfway to the center where it went over another pulley and then was attached to a massive concrete weight that was hung over a well we'd dug in the hill.

To launch, a plane was hauled up the hill and loaded onto the catapult. Then four dozen boys walked up to the front of the catapult, grabbed the rope, and hauled it back to the plane. With practice, they got so they could launch a dozen planes an hour this way.

But instead of building a few dozen planes of the best design we had and "fine tuning" them, they wanted to continue designing whole new ones. Part of the problem was that I'd once mentioned that a canard-type plane, with the propeller in back and the elevator forward of the wing was more efficient than the conventional design, but that these planes were too difficult for us to design and fly. The boys took that as a challenge, and Count Lambert was on their side. It took me three temper tantrums, and them four deadly wrecks, before they went into production on a standard, conventional aircraft.

Even with that, crack-ups were so frequent that they rarely had three planes ready to fly at any one time, and the price they willingly paid in lives still gives me nightmares.