A Mighty Fortress by David Weber
“And Tarot?” Rock Point asked. “And Tarot—and our good friend King Gorjah—are still up the proverbial creek full of krakens without a paddle,” Wave Thunder said with a wolfish smile. “He’s actually doing quite well when it comes to building the ships, but he’s completely and utterly screwed when it comes to arming them. And even with all of the Church’s subsidies, he’s having an awful time finding the funding to help what foundries he actually has expand their capacity to produce artillery.”
“That’s good,” Lock Island said with undisguised satisfaction, and Gray Harbor laughed.
“As a matter of fact, Bryahn, it’s considerably better than ‘good,’ ” the first councilor told him. Lock Island quirked an eyebrow, and Gray Harbor shrugged. “I suppose I can share this little tidbit with you, if I can share it with anyone, but I’ve established communications with Gorjah. As Her Majesty suggested before she departed for Chisholm, he realizes he’s caught between the doomwhale and the deep blue sea, and he doesn’t like it a bit. He’s being coy at the moment, not committing himself to anything. In fact, all he’s done basically is send a message back asking me what we have in mind while professing his own eternal loyalty to Mother Church. I imagine most of that is to cover his arse in case this should fall into the Church’s hands . . . not that it would be likely to do him much good in the end. Still, the fact that he’s gone even that far says a lot to me about just how desperate—and frustrated, I’d guess—he’s feeling about now.”
“Do you really think you can trust him to turn his coat back the other way—and stay turned?” Lock Island sounded skeptical, and Gray Harbor shrugged.
“All the evidence, including Merlin’s visions, suggests that Gorjah was more guilty of opportunism—and, of course, obeying the Group of Four’s orders—than a fundamental enemy, like Hektor. Oh,” the first councilor shrugged again, waving one hand, “we’ve always known he resented that treaty his father signed, so I’m not suggesting he participated as reluctantly as Her Majesty did. For that matter, I’m not pretending he was reluctant at all, once he realized what the Group of Four was promising him. But I don’t think his malice ran anywhere near as deep as Hektor’s did. Or King Rahnyld’s, for that matter. And what ever he may have been thinking then, at this point he’s a sadder, wiser man.”
“Another Nahrmahn?” Lock Island sounded even more skeptical, if possible. “No.” Gray Harbor shook his head. “I think we’d all underestimated just how seriously Nahrmahn took his responsibilities to Emerald. I don’t think Gorjah is anywhere near that selfless—for example, I don’t see him sending Pine Hollow to negotiate with us, even realizing Cayleb might have demanded his own head as the price of any peace treaty. But he’s not as frivolous as, say, Rahnyld or Emperor Waisu, either. Or, God help us all, Zebediah!”
For a moment, the dapper first councilor looked like he was going to spit on the balcony’s floor. Instead, he settled for a sound that was half growl and half snarl, then gave himself a shake.
“My point is that I’m pretty sure he realizes his position is hopeless if we decide to move against him. By the time Cayleb and Sharleyan get home, I think our friend Gorjah will be just about ripe for a little pointed negotiating.”
“But in the meantime, I assume, you need Domynyk and me to keep the pressure on him?”
“Definitely!” Gray Harbor nodded vigorously. “We especially need to keep the Tarot Channel closed, not just blockade Thol Bay. I don’t want Emperor Mahrys being able to ship in troops to reinforce Gorjah’s own army.”
“You really think Gorjah would ask for that?” Rock Point asked dubiously, and Gray Harbor’s raised hand made a back and forth so- so motion.
“I doubt he’d make the request willingly, given how much effort previous Desnairian emperors have invested in attempts to add Tarot to their empire. On the other hand, he might feel he has no choice, especially if he’s scared enough of the Group of Four. For that matter, the Group of Four might ‘suggest’ the same thing any day now. More to the point, though, I want to crank up the pressure. I want him to realize that even if he wanted to call in Desnairian support, it couldn’t get there. The Channel’s less than four hundred miles wide. I want him thinking about the fact Desnair can’t get transports across even that piddling distance.”
“You want him feeling even more isolated,” Rock Point said, and Gray Harbor nodded again.
“Exactly. And I also don’t want some clever soul in Siddarmark deciding he can sneak small, fast coasters across the Channel to run our blockade with any of the goods Tarot needs. I want that blockade to hurt, not leak.”
“So what we’re really saying here,” Lock Island mused, “is that our current dispositions only need a little adjustment.”
He gazed back out across The Throat for a few moments, then looked at Rock Point.
“How comfortable would you be shifting your anchorage from Hanth Town to Holme Reach?”
Rock Point’s eyebrows rose at the question. He started to respond quickly, then stopped and examined the possibility more carefully.
“I hadn’t really considered it,” he said slowly. “But now that you’ve asked, I don’t see any reason we couldn’t. Yairley already has his squadron based there, after all, and so far there’s been damn- all Gorjah—or WhiteFord—can do about it. Be a bit . . . audacious, though. Or maybe the word I’m looking for is ‘insolent.’ ”
“Perfect!” Gray Harbor chortled. “Oh, that’s perfect, Bryahn! Gorjah will burst a blood vessel! And when Clyntahn hears about it—!”
Rock Point understood the first councilor’s glee. Having a single small squadron occasionally visit your home waters without invitation was one thing; moving in with an entire hostile fleet and daring you to do something about it was quite another. Gorjah would, indeed, as Gray Harbor had so inelegantly put it, “burst a blood vessel” at the news.
And, the admiral thought, there wouldn’t be anything he could do about it, either. Holme Reach measured a hundred and sixty miles, north to south, and a good hundred miles, east to west, and the water off the east coast of Hourglass Island was shallow enough, and the bottom was sandy enough, to offer a good anchorage. That far from the mainland of Tarot, nothing but another fleet could possibly threaten them, and Gorjah of Tarot didn’t have a fleet anymore.
It still wouldn’t be perfect, although Hourglass would offer shelter against the occasional westerly that could turn the reach into one of the most treacherous bodies of water on the face of Safehold. The one real drawback—aside from the fact that every bit of the reach’s coastline was controlled by the Kingdom of Tarot—was what a sufficiently powerful southwesterly could do. Any ships in the reach could probably find shelter behind Hourglass or Sprout Island even with the wind dead out of the southwest, but working a galleon out of the reach against a southwesterly would be a slow and laborious process, at best. Still, it was unlikely he’d find himself actually trapped inside it.
Especially,he thought, since, unlike Dunkyn, I’ll have Owl for reconnaissance and weather forecasts.
“I wouldn’t suggest it if Gorjah still had a navy,” Lock Island said, obviously following Rock Point’s own thoughts (or most of them, at any rate). “In those waters, even a galley fleet could make things tricky. But I’m confident you’d have the firepower to handle anything he could throw at you out of his present resources.”
“I agree.” Rock Point nodded crisply. “And it would put me in a lot better position to cover the Tarot Channel. For that matter, I’d be better placed to meet any Desnairian attempt to get a squadron or two from the Gulf of Jahras to Tarot. It wouldn’t be perfect, but I’d be three thousand miles closer than I am now. Which would also put me between any effort to combine the Desnairian and Temple Lands squadrons by sneaking along the Haven coast.”
“But you’d be a lot farther from Margaret Bay,” Wave Thunder pointed out.
“Unless the Temple Lands are much further along than your reports are suggesting, that won’t be a p
“I agree,” the first councilor said firmly. “Very well, then, Domynyk. Once you’ve finished your little face- to- face conversation with Ahlfryd and Dr. Mahklyn, I want you to go ahead and arrange the movement. I’ll pry loose a couple of battalions of Marines and some artillery, too. If we’re going to base you in Holme Reach, let’s go ahead and put in a couple of defensive batteries and make Dunkyn’s little vegetable patches on Hourglass permanent.” He smiled nastily. “I imagine that will really piss Gorjah off.”
.V.
King’s Harbor Citadel,
Helen Island,
Howell Bay,
Kingdom of Old Charis
From Baron Seamount’s office window, looking down from the citadel across the anchorage, Admiral Rock Point’s flagship looked like a child’s toy. Or, better, like a perfectly detailed model. HMS Destroyer lay to her anchor, awnings spread above her decks against the sun’s heat, and he saw one of her boats pulling steadily about her in a circle. Rock Point recognized Captain Tymythy Darys’ barge, and his lips twitched on the edge of a smile. Darys loved his galleon, but he was never quite satisfied with her trim. He never missed the opportunity to study her when she lay still, considering whether he should shift ballast to bring her up an inch or two by the bow or, conversely, to increase her draft forward.
He shook his head, then turned back from the window to face Sir Ahlfryd Hyndryk. The commodore sat behind his desk, in front of the expanse of chalk-covered slate with which he’d had his office paneled. As always, the diagrams and calculations sprawling across that slate—and the notes he’d jotted there to remind himself of various things—were fascinating, but Rock Point kept his attention resolutely focused on the baron himself.
At the moment, another naval officer stood at one end of Seamount’s desk. Commander Urvyn Mahndrayn was about eight years younger than Rock Point himself and thin as a ferret. In fact, even though he had only four limbs, instead of six, and black hair, instead of a ferret’s scaled hide, a ferret was what Mahndrayn had always reminded him of. He had that same almost frightening abundance of energy, and he was an equally relentless hunter. True, his quarry tended to be ideas, not spider- rats, but once he got his teeth into his prey, there was no getting him to back off until he was victorious.
That made him the almost perfect assistant for Seamount. Unfortunately, he was just as eager to get Seamount’s concepts into ser vice as the commodore himself, which meant....Bryahn, you coward, Rock Point thought at the absent high admiral. “Can’t spare the time away from the fleet,” my arse! The real reason you sent me to drop Rayjhis off in Tellesberg instead of doing it yourself was that you didn’t want to face Ahlfryd. So you dumped it on me. He snorted. Don’t think I’m going to forget it, either. Somehow, some way, you’ll pay. Trust me, you’ll pay!
“The High Admiral and I have read your reports with a great deal of interest, Ahlfryd,” he said now. “We’ve been impressed, as always. And”— he nodded in Mahndrayn’s direction—“with the Commander’s contributions, as well.”
“Good! I’m glad to hear it.” Seamount beamed, although Rock Point had the impression he was even more pleased at having Mahndrayn singled out for praise.
“Dr. Mahklyn”— Rock Point glanced at the head of the Royal College, who’d accompanied him to Helen Island—“has been keeping us up- to- date on his own evaluation of your work, as well. Of course, he’s been more interested in placing what you’re accomplishing in context with everything else than in individual, specific ideas, but in some ways, that’s been even more useful.”
This time Seamount only nodded, and Rock Point smiled and turned his attention to Mahndrayn.
“I was particularly struck by your conclusions from the artillery tests, Commander. I have to say that when Commodore Seamount first described your proposals to us, I hadn’t realized just how exhaustive you intended to be.”
Which, Rock Point admitted to himself, was an understatement. He had no idea how many rounds Mahndrayn had fired off in his various tests, but he knew it had run to literally thousands of round shot and charges of grape, as well as over a hundred of the new shells Seamount was about ready to put into production. The commander’s tests had considered ballistics; differences in powder quality; the effectiveness of large, heavy shot compared to smaller, faster moving shot; the effects of humidity; better carriage designs; ways to increase rate of fire; how many shots a given gun of a given weight was good for before the barrel simply wore out or broke; how to prevent round shot from rusting; the best ways to store cartridges at sea; how far windage could be reduced before it reached a point at which fouling reduced rate of fire.... He’d even had life- size sections of hull built on land—sections of everything from a traditional galley to one of the Navy’s schooners to standard merchantmen to the Navy’s heaviest galleons—and then methodically blown them to bits, stopping after each discharge to examine and evaluate the damage that shot had inflicted. And instead of the straw- stuffed dummies which had been used in Seamount’s original demonstration firings, Mahndrayn had hung sides of meat from cattle and hogs inside the targets to evaluate the wounding effects of the various combinations of ammunition.
According to Merlin, no one had gotten around to conducting such exhaustive trials back on Old Earth until artillery had been in ser vice literally for centuries, and the amount of information the commander had accumulated was astounding.
“I have to admit I’d already suspected that we were overgunning,” he said now, “although it’s good to have confirmation of it.” He grimaced. “It would be even better if there were a quick fix, of course.”
“I agree, Sir.” Mahndrayn’s voice was a melodious tenor. “We actually need to give each of them about a foot more clearance on either side. As it is, we’re too crowded for the maximum rate of fire—people are getting in each other’s way. About a foot.” He grimaced. “I know it doesn’t sound like much, but—”
“Oh, I believe you!” Rock Point waved one hand. “In fact, the main reason I stuck with Gale as my flagship all the way through the Armageddon Reef and Darcos Sound campaigns, despite the fact that she mounted only thirty- six guns, was that her gunnery drill always seemed just a tiny bit sharper than anyone else’s. Which, as your report points out, was probably because she had almost thirteen feet of gundeck per gun, instead of ten and a half, like Destroyer.”
“Exactly, Sir!” Mahndrayn grinned. “She had that extra foot, but we squeezed it down in the new designs to mount the most guns we could.” His grin turned into something more like a grimace. “I suppose it would’ve been silly to assume we’d get everything right when we were making such radical changes in our armament and how we mount it.”
“Of course,” Rock Point agreed, “and Sir Dustyn’s already altered the plans for Sword of Charis and her sisters. It’s just unfortunate that it’s so much easier to alter the port spacing on a ship that hasn’t been built yet than to do the same thing on ships that are already in commission!” He frowned. “One point you didn’t address, though, Commander, was whether or not it would help to go to lighter guns. Would reducing the size of the guns have the same effect—or some of the same effect—as spacing them farther apart?”
“We did think about that, Sir,” Seamount put in. “The problem is that the carriage dimensions are effectively identical, unless you want to go to much smaller and lighter pieces. Given the difference in effectiveness of heavy shot versus light shot, it seemed better to us to continue with the slightly less than optimum rate of fire. The difference in rate is mea sur able, especially in sustained firing, but not great enough to justify going to guns which are going to inflict so much less damage with each hit actually scored.”
Rock Point nodd
“I was also struck by your observation that a uniform armament of shell-firing guns would be much more effective than a mixed battery, firing round shot and shell.”
He cocked an eyebrow at Mahndrayn, inviting the commander to expand upon that point, and Mahndrayn shrugged ever so slightly.
“As our report indicates, Sir, we discovered fairly early on that the most effective combination of shot weight and velocity was that which would just breach the vessel’s hull. As I’m sure you’ve discovered from your own experience, it’s much harder to sink a ship outright than we’d originally hoped.” He shrugged again, a bit harder. “I suppose that was inevitable, too. After all, we didn’t have very much experience with trying to sink ships with artillery, since no one’s guns had been good enough to make them the primary weapon.
“Now that we’ve had an opportunity to evaluate combat reports and conduct our own experiments, it’s obvious—and should have been obvious to us ahead of time, if we’d bothered to really think about it—that round shot punch relatively small holes. Not only that, wood is . . . elastic. It tends to let the shot through, then tries to snap back into its initial shape. So the holes aren’t very large, which makes it relatively easy for the ship’s carpenter to plug them. Even worse, from the perspective of sinking somebody, most of the holes are above the waterline, since that’s the part of the other ship we can actually hit. We managed to sink several galleys with gunfire at Rock Point and Crag Reach, but it took the fire of up to a dozen galleons to do it, and they were Dohlaran ships. Their planking and framing were a lot lighter than ours or the Tarotisians, and from my own evaluations, I think what happened was that the frames themselves broke up under the pounding, which resulted in much larger hull breaches.