Book 5: Chapter 53: Preparations
Howard
August 2344
Jabberwocky
Dragons are excellent ropemakers. And a damned good thing, too. The stresses from tossing out even a small net from a couple hundred yards in the air, then winching it back up, required some good specs. We weren’t going for anything trawler level, though. It had to be something that muscle power could handle, so a series of quick casts and retrievals should bring in enough for dinner. For, uh, about thirty thousand dragons.
Word had finally gotten out about what Alexander was attempting to do and why. Of course, he’d been trying to spread the word for maybe a couple of years now and had been roundly ignored. But several sudden volcanic burps in the last couple of days had taken out not only a lot of the local fish stock but also two floaters and their passengers who had been too close to the emissions. And people were starting to notice the poor fishing, which was hitting them right in the belly.
And I got to see, from a distance, what a burning floater looked like. I began to understand what watching the Hindenburg burn must have been like.
So now people were starting to believe, which meant people were scared. And scared people could go from resistant to insistent in a heartbeat. Virtually every floater within a day’s flight had immediately joined up. All of which meant that waiting for spring was a nonstarter.
Now, we were heading north, from whence we would be setting off across the sea. I tried for a more dramatic description, but even as a posthuman computer, I had all the poetic talent of a hammer.
It was far too soon for starvation to set in, or even significant belt-tightening. But perception was a funny thing. Dragons began to act as if we were all on wartime rations. There was even a black market for fish. How in hell do you have a black market for fish when there’s barely a legitimate market? I was beyond understanding any of it. When it came down to it, dragons as a group were just as nutty as any other so-called sentients.