At the Sign of Triumph by David Weber
The rather unimaginatively named East Channel—farthest to the east, between East Island and Knobby Head, the closest point on the mainland—was normally more than deep enough for his ships, but it was also subject to silting from mud carried down the Rhaigair River. His best information on its current depth of water was … problematical, and he had a pronounced aversion to reprising HMS Thunderer’s role from last July.
And that, unfortunately, left only the even more unimaginatively named Main Ship Channel, between Sharyn Island and East Island. It was the deepest of the entry channels, and the combined tidal patterns and set of the river’s current scoured it, rather than silting it up. It offered plenty of depth, and while it was narrow, it was less narrow than the northern end of East Channel.
It was also, however, the most predictable route, if only by process of elimination … and the best defended.
All of Rhaigair Bay’s entrances had been fortified for well over two hundred years, and the Harchong Empire and Kingdom of Dohlar had cooperated to overhaul, modernize, and improve those fortifications once the Royal Dohlaran Navy decided to station its forward naval strength in Saram Bay. Rhaigair, by far the largest city on the bay and one of the two or three largest cities in all of Stene Province, had been the logical place to homeport those ships, and the Harchongians—who’d already begun investing in the upgrade of Rhaigair’s defenses—had responded enthusiastically to the proposal to turn the city into the Western Squadron’s forward base. Not surprisingly, since it had offered the opportunity to finish updating those defenses—and to a much more powerful level—with Mother Church picking up the tab.
Given the city’s current importance to both Harchong and Dohlar, its batteries had received high priority for the new rifled artillery, too. Most of the inner defensive batteries had been thoroughly rearmed, including Zhaztro’s current main cause for concern: Battery St. Charlz, the small spot on the chart Pharsaygyn had just tapped.
Located a good forty miles from the city, Battery St. Charlz was actually an artificial island in the throat of the Main Ship Channel. The entire island—which had been built up a hundred and ten years ago by thousands of Harchongese serfs dumping Hastings only knew how many tons of granite onto the single shoal in the entire channel—was little more than a mile and a half long, and less than half that wide. It was, however, one huge fort. Aside from a single stone quay, well covered by artillery embrasures, there were exactly zero landing spots, which ruled out any notion of taking it by assault. Its onetime masonry walls had been replaced with modern earthen berms, and the Harchongese engineers—made wise by others’ misfortunes—had mounted its weapons in individual masonry bays, well buried inside those berms. They’d also provided its garrison with thick-roofed, shell-proof dugouts from which to wait out any angle-gun bombardment, and its dozens of heavy rifled guns faced matching batteries on the islands to either side of the channel.
The passage east of Battery St. Charlz was wider than the one to the west … which was exactly why the pestiferous Dohlarans had sunk barges and old galleons to block it. There were rumors the powerful currents had shifted some of those blockships, but even if that was true, they hadn’t been moved far enough to clear the way for a City-class like Eraystor. On the western side, where the path was still open, the channel was barely two miles wide and it was less than five miles from St. Charlz’s guns to those in the batteries on East Island. That was barely 8,500 yards, and given the reported 9,000-yard range of the Temple’s newest and heaviest Fultyn Rifles, any ship trying to attempt that passage would be forced to run an eight-mile gauntlet while under heavy fire from both sides.
Well, that’s why you’ve got all this nice armor, Hainz, he told himself. And just hope to Langhorne the seijins’ information about the sea-bombs is right.
“I’m inclined to think you’re probably right about what Raisahndo would’ve done if he’d thought the batteries could stop us, Alyk,” he said out loud. “Of course, the fact that he doesn’t seem to think they can doesn’t mean they actually can’t, but given how quickly we’ll be past them, they won’t have very long to work on us. These ‘Fultyn Rifles’ are a lot more dangerous than the Desnairians’ forty-pounders were at Geyra, but the latest spy reports to Earl Sharpfield suggest they won’t be enough more dangerous to stop us.
“To be honest, the one thing that really does worry me is that the seijins might be wrong about those sea-bombs, because Lywys is dead right. If these people do have them, this is sure as hell the place they’d use them,” he continued, tapping Battery St. Charlz’s position on the chart himself. “I genuinely don’t think they do, but difficult as it may be for you two to believe this, I’ve been wrong once or twice in my life.”
He smiled quickly, briefly, then stood back from the chart table.
“So we’ll proceed as planned, except for one small change. Lywys,” he looked at the commander, “please draft a signal to Captain Gahnzahlyz. Inform him that Bayport won’t be leading the column after all.”
“She won’t be, Sir?” Pharsaygyn didn’t seem especially surprised, Zhaztro noted. Well, they’d been together for a while now.
“No. Cherayth will take the lead.”
“Of course, Sir.”
No, the chief of staff definitely hadn’t been surprised, Zhaztro thought, and turned to Cahnyrs.
“Please go ahead and clear for action now, Captain,” he said, rather more formally than he normally addressed his flag captain. “I’d like to proceed while we have the tide with us.”
“Yes, Sir.” If Cahnyrs was perturbed by the change, it didn’t show. “With your permission, Sir,” he continued, “I’d like to make our speed about six knots when we engage the batteries. I know we’d originally planned to make the run at ten knots, and the slower speed would mean they could hold us under fire for roughly a half hour longer, but it would also make our return fire more accurate. I think that would probably pay a dividend for us on our own way through, and anything that lets us knock out more of their guns has to be helpful to the rest of the Squadron when it’s their turn.”
And it will also give your lookouts a marginally better chance of spotting the buoys of any sea-bombs the Dohlarans may have planted, Zhaztro thought. That probably wouldn’t be a huge help, but you’re the sort of fellow who plays for anything that might keep your men alive a little longer, aren’t you, Alyk?
“She’s your ship, Captain,” he said simply. “How you fight her is your decision.”
* * *
“It would appear the heretics have made up their minds.”
Lord of Foot Kwaichee Bauzhyng stood on the outer platform, just in front of the sandbags protecting the observation tower at the south end of Battery St. Charlz, gazing down-channel through a spyglass while his orderly held the parasol to keep the sun off his head. Given the fact that the temperature was only a little above freezing—and that the wind had strengthened and the oncoming clouds threatened to do a far better job of blocking the sun than any parasol—that struck Major Ahdem Kylpaitryc as an even more useless affectation than usual.
“So I see, Sir,” Kylpaitryc agreed out loud.
His own spyglass was far less ornate, without a trace of the gold and silver inlay glittering from Bauzhyng’s—which must have cost at least two hundred marks, just for the inlay work—but he suspected the lenses were actually better. Dohlaran spyglass makers were more concerned with what someone could see through one of their instruments than with how beautiful it looked.
What Kylpaitryc could see through his at the moment, however, was distinctly unbeautiful: a single heretic ironclad steaming implacably towards its rendezvous with St. Charlz’s heavy artillery. Columns of smoke beyond it showed where its consorts followed, apparently waiting to see what happened, and he wondered if the heretics had learned about the newly designed sea-bombs and chosen to send one ship ahead to test the waters for the others. More thick, black smoke poured from the leader’s flat-sided, slab-like smokestack, a broad fur
All in all, it looked remarkably unperturbed by the challenge awaiting it, he thought glumly, silently counting the seconds as the intruder crossed between the ranging marks Admiral Raisandho had ordered erected in the shallows on either side of the Main Ship Channel. They weren’t enough to give an exact estimate, of course—not at that distance—but.…
“I make it about six or seven knots, Sir,” he said finally, lowering his glass.
“Approximately that, yes,” Bauzhyng agreed calmly.
It was a pity Baron Golden Grass had decided to inflict a Dohlaran “liaison officer” on Battery St. Charlz, the lord of foot reflected, still gazing at the heretic vessel. No doubt the politics had made it inevitable, and he supposed Kylpaitryc was at least minimally less uncouth than most of his barbarian countrymen. He hadn’t attempted to interfere unduly in Bauzhyng’s decisions, at any rate, and he’d actually come up with a handful of useful recommendations when the new artillery first arrived. But still—! Bauzhyng could almost smell the turnips every time the man opened his mouth.
“Bit surprised they aren’t moving faster’n that, Sir,” Kylpaitryc continued. “All the reports indicate they should be able to hit at least ten knots, even against the current.” He shook his head, his expression unhappy. “Seems to me they’d want to get through our fire zone quick as they can.”
“Clearly they have great confidence in the efficacy of their armor.” Bauzhyng shrugged ever so slightly. “It would seem the moment has come to … disabuse them of that confidence, Major.”
“Aye, it has that, Sir.”
Kylpaitryc smiled, for once in complete agreement with Battery St. Charlz’s dapper, foppish CO. He didn’t much like Kwaichee Bauzhyng, for a lot of reasons. For that matter, he didn’t like most Harchongian officers he’d met. Every single one of them acted as if he’d smelled something bad as soon as a Dohlaran officer walked in the door. He didn’t like that, and he especially didn’t care for it given the monumental incompetency he’d seen in so many of those disdainful Harchongians. As a matter of fact, that disdain seemed strongest in the very officers least entitled to it. Of course, that described at least three-fourths of the Harchongese officer corps, when a man came down to it. In Kylpaitryc’s considered opinion, the best that could be said for most Harchongese officers was that they were at least a step up from Desnairians, which was damning with about the faintest praise possible.
That wasn’t really fair in Bauzhyng’s case, however. Whatever else might be true of the lord of foot, he took his duties seriously, and he’d drilled his men ruthlessly on the new artillery. He’d even arm-wrestled the mark-pinching Harchongese bureaucrats into providing sufficient of the new shells for twice-a-five-day live fire exercises and asked Kylpaitryc to arrange for Admiral Hahlynd’s screw-galleys to tow barges past the island to give his gunners practice against moving targets. Kylpaitryc couldn’t resist tweaking the haughty Harchongian by addressing him as “Sir” rather than the “My Lord” he obviously preferred, but overall, he knew he’d been more fortunate than the majority of the Dohlaran officers assigned to liaise with their Harchongese “hosts.”
Of course, he’d probably get even better performance out of his gunners if he treated them like people instead of two-footed animals that simply know how to talk. I guess it’s unreasonable to expect him not to think of them as serfs, though—especially since most of them were serfs before they enlisted. And he’s not actually all that brutal, compared to some of the real bastards here in Harchong. Still, I can’t help thinking that flogging the gun captain with the lowest score after each drill isn’t the very best way to build the men’s morale.
“How soon do you intend to open fire, Sir?” he asked.
“I would prefer to allow the range to drop to no more than perhaps five thousand yards,” Bauzhyng replied, lowering his own spyglass at last. He handed it to another aide in exchange for a steaming teacup and sipped contemplatively. “We have the benefit of stable, unmoving gun platforms, and one would normally assume that would give us a substantial advantage over a warship underway. In this instance, however, I prefer to make as few assumptions as possible. We shall wait until they open fire or the range falls to five thousand yards.”
He shrugged ever so slightly, eyes distant as he considered the upcoming engagement.
Depending on how well Battery St. Charlz’s berms stood up to the heretics’ fire, he might well hold fire until the range fell to his own chosen range regardless of when they opened fire. He had great confidence in the power of his guns against most targets, but after studying the reports from the Kaudzhu Narrows, he rather doubted that shells—even the three-hundred-pound cylindrical projectiles of his new 10-inch guns—would pierce the heretics’ armor. It seemed unlikely these ships were less well armored than the heretics ironclad galleons, and the Dohlarans’ 10-inch smoothbores had never even come close to penetrating HMS Dreadnought’s side armor. Of course, even their solid shot had weighed little more than half as much as one of his shells, so comparing their relative performances was probably suspect. Still, he was distinctly unoptimistic about shells, especially at longer ranges, where they would strike at a lower velocity. A solid shot from one of his guns, on the other hand, weighed half again as much as a shell—three times the weight of the Dohlaran shot at the Kaudzhu Narrows—since there was no cavity for gunpowder. That decreased its destructive power if it actually penetrated the target yet gave it a greater chance of penetrating in the first place. The heavier shot also had a shorter range, however; the best any of his gunners had achieved with it was on the order of seven thousand yards to first strike, little better than three-quarters of their maximum range firing shell. They’d trained diligently to use ricochet fire to extend their range, skipping the shot across the water from its initial point of impact, but there seemed little chance of a shot which had lost that much energy penetrating an armored vessel if it finally hit it. Unarmored galleons, yes; steam-driven ironclads, no.
No, he thought. I’ll wait until they come as close as I can get them before engaging them. And when I do, he smiled thinly, they may enjoy the experience far less than they think they will.
* * *
“Coming up on your specified range, Captain,” Petty Officer Wahldair Hahlynd announced, straightening from the voice pipe.
Hahlynd was Eraystor’s senior signalman, but he wasn’t passing a signal from another unit of the squadron at the moment. That voice pipe connected him to an instrument atop Eraystor’s armored superstructure. The product of yet another fruitful collaboration between Admiral Semount, the Royal College of Charis, and Ehdwyrd Howsmyn’s endlessly inventive artisans, it was called a “rangefinder.” Alyk Cahnyrs had read the documentation by Doctor Zhain Frymyn, the College’s optics specialist, but he still had only the vaguest notion of how the thing—it looked like a double-headed version of one of the Rottweiler-class galleons’ angle-glasses, but with the upper lenses at the ends of an 18-foot crossbar—worked. What was important was that it did work and that its readings were accurate to within a hundred yards at ten miles.
In some ways, that information was of purely academic interest, since no moving ship could possibly hit another ship at over seventeen thousand yards. Even assuming its gunners could see the target, ship’s motion would guarantee they missed it when they fired. In other ways, however, accurate range numbers could be extremely important. Even highly experienced gunners could misestimate ranges, and knowing the range—as opposed to simply guessing—allowed his gunners to set their sights accurately. That was still one hell of a long way from guaranteeing hits, but it took at least one of the variables out of the equation.
At the moment, however.…
“Pass the signal to Bayport,” he said, then blew down another voice pipe to sound the whistle at its far end.<
“Gundeck, Third Lieutenant,” a voice announced.
“This is the Captain, Dahnel. Do you have the target in sight?”
“Yes, Sir. St. Charlz is in First Division’s field of fire.”
“Excellent. Unfortunately, I’m not going to be able to bring Third Division’s guns onto the target for a while.”
“Understood, Sir.” Something suspiciously like a chuckle came up the voice pipe. “I imagine young Paitryk can amuse himself with the batteries on Sharyn Island in the meantime if he has to.”
“As long as we’re not just wasting ammunition,” Cahnyrs replied.
Eraystor’s armament was divided into divisions on the basis of their fields of fire. The ironclad’s heavily armored casemate formed a lozenge-shaped superstructure, like two blunt-ended triangles set base-to-base and stepped just far enough back from the side of the hull to mitigate the wave action which would have washed far up over the gun ports of a ship like the original Delthak-class in a seaway. All of her weapons were broadside mounts, but the five forward guns in each broadside could fire only at targets no more than thirty degrees abaft the beam, while the five aftermost guns could train no farther forward than thirty degrees before the beam. That formed a logical basis for dividing them into numbered divisions: First and Second division, forward, and Third and Fourth division, aft. But she mounted a total of eleven guns in each broadside. The center weapons, located at the broadest points of the lozenge, could bear almost as far forward as First or Second Division and almost as far aft as Third or Fourth Division. As a consequence, those weapons were allocated to both divisions on their side of the ship, with control passing to whichever division could offer it a target.