David Weber - How firm a foundation

“I see, My Lord.” Ahlvai seemed to be having a little difficulty keeping his voice level, Jahras observed. Well, it wasn’t as if his opinion of Stahkail should come as any surprise to his own flag captain, although he supposed he really shouldn’t be throwing more fuel on that particular fire.

The captain turned away, his shoulders quivering with what certainly looked like suppressed laughter, and beckoned to his signals lieutenant. Jahras watched Ahlvai for a moment or two, then turned back to the oncoming Charisians as they began reducing sail.

Stripping down to fighting sail, he thought. Langhorne, I hope you and Chihiro are both keeping an eye on us down here, because I think we’re going to need you.

Sir Dunkyn Yairley had little attention to spare for the line of anchored galleons and floating batteries, even though that was his own squadron’s immediate objective. He was too busy watching Captain Ahldahs Rahzwail’s ship and her half-dozen sisters.

HMS Volcano was an… odd-looking vessel. She was actually larger than Destiny, although she was rated at only twenty-four guns and showed only twelve ports on a side, and all of her guns were mounted on the spar deck, which put her ports a good twenty feet above her designed waterline. Her bulwarks were higher than most galleons’, and the ports piercing them were disproportionately tall, as well. She was disproportionately beamy and massive-looking, too, although that was less evident watching her in profile the way Yairley was at the moment.

There was a reason for her odd appearance, and also a reason she’d been built at King’s Harbor, rather than one of the more publicly accessible yards the Navy was using for the majority of its construction these days. No one had wanted anyone getting a close look at her or her sisters and wondering about their peculiarities. In fact, even though Yairley had seen Volcano herself on the ways, he’d never noticed most of the unusual features of her design until they’d been pointed out to him by High Admiral Rock Point.

The reason she carried so few guns was that each of the ones she did carry weighed more than twice as much as one of the new model krakens on Destiny ’s gundeck. Despite that, the gun tubes looked short and stubby, and their carriages looked downright bizarre. Not too surprisingly, he supposed, since each of those guns had a ten-inch bore and those ridiculous, tall carriages were designed specifically to permit them to be elevated to absurd heights. That had required some tricky engineering, particularly given the recoil forces involved. The mammoth guns took either a hundred-and-fifty-pound solid shot or a hundred-pound shell, and the stresses when one of them fired were… extreme. The downward thrust engendered by their high elevations had to be absorbed by the ship’s deck, which helped to explain Volcano ’s extraordinarily massive frames and thick deck planking. All war galleons were basically mobile gun platforms, but Volcano and her sisters took it to ridiculous extremes.

That had been Yairley’s initial reaction, at any rate. Before he’d sailed to join Admiral Shain, however, he’d had the opportunity to exercise with Captain Rahzwail’s squadron, and he was rather looking forward to sharing that experience with the Desnairians.

That’s odd, Baron Jahras thought, watching the half-dozen or so galleons which had peeled off from the rest of the advancing line.

It was obviously a planned and deliberate maneuver. The meticulous order the Charisians were maintaining as they advanced to battle was sobering for someone who’d tried to get his own fleet organized to at least all sail in approximately the same direction on the same day. It had proven to be an exercise all too like trying to herd cat-lizards, but those galleons were maneuvering with the kind of precision and discipline for which Desnairian cavalry was famed. Given Jahras’ unhappy experiences with his own fleet, he had altogether too good an appreciation for how difficult that was. Despite the vast size of the fleet sailing towards him, there was no sign of confusion anywhere in that mountain-range mass of canvas and masts.

Which made the antics of the ships which had caught his eye even more perplexing. Instead of bearing away from Triangle Shoal, they were actually headed for it, and he realized they had cutters and longboats out in front, taking soundings with lead lines to determine the depth of the water.

No, he realized as one of the longboats put a buoy over the side, they’re running lines of soundings, matching them with the depths on their charts to help determine their exact positions. But why? And that buoy is inside Stahkail’s extreme range. He’s not likely to hit anything on purpose, but if they anchor that close in and he fires enough shots, blind, dumb luck is likely to give him a chance to hurt them after all.

It made no sense. There was no need for them to enter the play of Stahkail’s guns!

Perhaps not, yet that was clearly what they had in mind. In fact, as he watched, the first galleon dropped a stern anchor. Her companions continued onward, and then a second ship anchored by the stern, as well. Then a third. A fourth. They were actually anchoring, forming a line and making themselves unmoving targets, and Jahras frowned in disbelief as he realized they had springs on their anchor cables. They were deliberately courting an artillery duel with heavy fortress guns protected by thick masonry walls!

Thin white waterspouts began to pock the surface of the waves around the anchored Charisians, but they went calmly about the business of taking in sail. Then they began adjusting their positions, using the springs to wind themselves around until they presented their broadsides directly to Stahkail’s fortress. They seemed in no hurry, almost as if they were unaware of the plumes of smoke rising from the furnaces Stahkail was using to heat his round shot until they glowed cherry-red. One or two of those heated shot lodged in a ship’s timbers could turn it into an inferno, yet they appeared unconcerned by the possibility. What kind of madmen-?

“All guns cleared away and prepared to fire, Sir!” Ahldahs Rahzwail’s executive officer informed him. “Elevation thirty-five degrees.”

“Very well, Master Byrk. You may open fire.”

Baron Jahras’ fingers tightened convulsively on the barrel of his spyglass as the first of the galleons fired. He could actually see the trajectory of their shot, and they arched impossibly high, lofting across the blue sky in a delicate arc that took them over the top of the fortress’ curtain wall and dropped straight into its interior.

And then they exploded.

Ahldahs Rahzwail smiled in satisfaction as Volcano ’s first broadside slammed into its target. He couldn’t see it actually hit, but that was rather the point of the exercise, and his smile turned into a fierce, savage grin as the shells exploded inside the fortress.

Rahzwail had had his doubts when Commander Mahndrayn first approached him, but he’d known Mahndrayn for several years. He’d respected the younger man’s brain power, and Baron Seamount was recognized as the Navy’s premier gunnery expert. When both of them insisted Seamount’s new “high-angle gun” was a practical proposition, he’d agreed to become one of the officers involved in developing it as a workable weapon. It was obvious to him that the current high-angle guns (which Volcano ’s crew had already shortened to “angle-gun”-or even just “angles”-for day-to-day use) were only a crude, very early development of what would one day be possible. On the other hand, the entire Charisian Navy had grown accustomed to being a work in progress. Looking back at the breakneck rate of change involved in the conversion from a fleet of two hundred galleys to an equally large fleet of gun-armed galleons in less than five years was enough to make a man’s head spin, and there was no reason to suppose anything was going to change in that regard, whatever the Grand Inquisitor might have preferred.