David Weber - How firm a foundation

Mahndrayn’s death had been a tragedy in more ways than Rahzwail could count. The commander had been exactly the sort of brilliant innovator the Charisian Empire needed if it was going to survive. Rahzwail himself wasn’t in the same league, and he knew it, yet he’d also realized he was going to have to step up to the plate and try anyway. He’d already started working on a couple of rough ideas for a proper rotating gun mount, although he was pretty sure it would have to wait for those iron-framed ships Mahndrayn had been talking about. And making it work with all the masts and spars in the way was going to be a challenge, as well. But once they’d managed to rifle the angle-guns, figured out how to lengthen the tubes further, and gotten them into a pivot mount that could stand the recoil, possibly figured out a way to make breech-loading work, then- then…!

For now, though, crude though they might be, Volcano ’s guns were doing exactly what they’d been designed to do.

He turned his back on the fortress. Any hit it managed to score would be a matter of pure luck. Not only that, but Volcano had been built with scantlings which were almost twice the thickness of a standard galleon, and not just to resist the recoil of her own guns. Those thick sides should be the next best thing to invulnerable even to fortress guns at such extreme range. The same, alas, could not be said for fortress walls where her guns were concerned.

Given their sheer size, those guns would have made highly effective battering pieces in a traditional siege, hurling their hundred-and-fifty-pound round shot against those masonry walls again and again, and the fortifications protecting Iythria were old-fashioned masonry, without the shot-absorbing earthen berms which improvements in artillery had imposed on modern fortress designers. They would have shattered quickly under the sort of pounding Volcano could have given them. But why pound your way through a wall when you could simply ignore it, instead?

He watched the gun crews reloading. It was an inevitably slow process, although he and Mahndrayn had done what they could to improve matters. The upper portion of the carriage was a separate structure which recoiled on skids cut into the lower, wheeled carriage. The lower portion was fitted with castered wheels that ran on iron rails set into the deck, arranged so that the entire piece could be pushed around in train (in calm weather, at least) by only two men, despite its massive weight. When the upper portion of the slide carriage recoiled, it did so in an angled plane, which brought the elevated muzzle closer to parallel to the deck. It was still inconveniently high for the members of the gun crew responsible for swabbing out and reloading, but it was workable. And it meant they didn’t have to depress the barrel and then reelevate it between every shot. It was all still clumsy, and the rate of fire was far slower than a standard long thirty-pounder’s, but Rahzwail was trying to come up with a better way to manage things. It all went back to breech-loading, he thought again. If they could ever get that to work…

Despite all their handicaps, Volcano ’s gunners managed to sustain a rate of fire which was almost twice that of the old prebagged charge and pre-truck gun carriage days. As he watched, fresh powder bags slid down the barrels and were rammed home, followed by shells strapped to stabilizing “shoes.” The “shoes”-flat wooden disks the same diameter as the shells-fixed the shells’ attitude in relation to the angle-guns’ bores and made sure their fuses faced away from the powder charges. They also made the shells easier to handle, which was nothing to sneer at when the things weighed a hundred pounds each!

The fuses were a significant improvement on Baron Seamount’s original design, too. The new fuses burned much more consistently, and they could be adjusted for more finicky time increments. It was still something of a “by-guess-and-by-Langhorne” endeavor, but it was less a matter of guesstimating than it had been, and a little spread in detonation times wasn’t going to matter much. They were dropping their fire at steep angles into the fortress’ interior, and those same masonry walls were going to confine the shells-and their blast-right on top of the target. Not only that, but no fortress designer in the world had ever considered ways to deal with plunging fire like this. The interior of that fortress had no overhead protection at all, because it had never been needed before.

Jahras’ jaw clenched as the volume of (thoroughly useless) fire from Triangle Shoal dropped abruptly. The peculiar Charisian galleons were staggering their fire in an obviously preplanned fashion. Their steady, rolling broadsides were timed to see to it that at least one ship’s shells went plunging into the fortress every few seconds. They were maintaining a cauldron of explosions inside the fort. No wonder Stahkail’s fire was dropping! How in Shan-wei’s name had even Charisians come up with-?

The question chopped off with ax-like suddenness as the fortress’ main magazine exploded.

Rahzwail’s eyes widened as the fortress suddenly emulated Volcano ’s namesake. That was unexpected! The plan had been simply to drive the gun crews off their pieces and possibly disable the guns themselves, not to blow up the damned fortress!

Damn. They must’ve had even less overhead protection than we expected, he thought with an odd sense of detachment as he watched stonework, pieces of heavy wooden beams, an entire gun carriage and cannon, and (undoubtedly) bits and pieces of men launch themselves across the heavens, trailing comet tails of smoke as they arced outward. They seemed to hang at the tops of their trajectories for a long moment, and then they came plunging down into the water in explosions of white, and Rahzwail shook his head.

Looks like we’re going to have to introduce some additional new ideas in fortress design, he thought as a sizable piece of one fortress wall pitched wearily outward and slid down into a white cauldron of foam. I wonder how deep we’ll have to bury a magazine to keep a ten-inch shell from reaching it? And if rifled shells are as much heavier as Baron Seamount is predicting, how deep will we have to go to protect against one of them?

He had no idea what the answer to either of those questions might be, but he made a mental note to discuss it with Baron Seamount at his earliest opportunity. It was only going to be a matter of time before the other side figured out how to build its own angle-guns, after all. When that happened, it would probably be a good idea for Charis to be ahead of the defensive game, as well.

“Be so good as to send a boat close enough to the fortress to hail it, Master Byrk,” he said out loud, showing his first lieutenant a bared-teeth grin as shells continued to plunge into the target and the smoke of heavy fires came belching up from its interior to join the smoke and dust plume of the explosions still lingering above it. “I imagine they might be in the mood to consider surrendering, don’t you?”

“Well, that’s a thing, Sir Dunkyn,” Rhobair Lathyk murmured, gazing back at the smoke-gushing fortress. “Can’t say as I expected that! ”

“I don’t think anyone did,” Yairley replied almost absently. “Still, I’m not going to complain.”

“Oh, not me, either, Sir!” Lathyk grinned. “Matter of fact, if it takes a little starch out of those lads in front of us, I’ll be just delighted!”

His flag captain had a point, Yairley thought. His squadron had slowly altered course, coming around to a heading of approximately east-by-south, almost but not quite parallel to the line of Baron Jahras’ anchored galleons. They were closing only slowly now under topsails and jib alone, and here and there a Desnairian gun was beginning to thud in defiance. None of those shots were coming anywhere near Destiny- yet-but as the range continued to fall, that was likely to change.