David Drake - Tyrant

There came another, louder, explosion. Suddenly, rising up through the cloud of smoke, came the weirdest apparition Demansk had ever seen in his life. It looked like— what ?

" The Lady of the Sea save us, " whispered Thicelt. "Blew the whole shell off in one piece."

Demansk realized that what he was seeing — vanishing now back into the smoke — had been the iron armor of the enemy vessel. The bolts which held it together hadn't given way. Instead, when the magazine blew, it had simply lifted the armor off the ship itself. The shell must have guided the explosion's force mostly against the wooden hull proper.

"The rest of it just disintegrated," added Thicelt. "Must have."

Sure enough. When the smoke finally cleared away, which didn't take much more than a minute, there was nothing left. A few pieces of wooden flotsam, here and there; a couple of bobbing heads — men still alive and swimming toward the nearest Islander galleys — and. . nothing else. The armored shell must have plummeted straight down to the bottom once it hit the water.

"Shallow waters here," murmured Thicelt. "Good divers. . we might be able to salvage something."

The built-up tension erupted from Demansk in a bark of laughter. Very bad for tradition, that. But — who cared?

"Give it up, Sharlz! You're not a scruffy pirate any longer. Special Attendant and Admiral of the Fleet, remember?"

Thicelt grinned. "Old habits. Sorry." The grin vanished as fast as it came. A moment later, Thicelt was bellowing new orders.

The woodclads beetled their slow way toward the three surviving steam rams — which, for their part, had already turned broadside and were beginning to roll out their cannons. Clearly enough, no steam ram captain was going to try another ramming maneuver.

The signal drums were beating wildly now, and Demansk could hear the signals being passed along by the drummers on the nearest ships. Thicelt had set the entire fleet in motion. The regular war galleys of the Confederate navy were surging forward. No slow beetling, here. Even if they weren't as fast and maneuverable as islander galleys, Vanbert triremes — even quinquiremes — could move quickly enough.

"It's over," said Thicelt, when he finally finished with his orders.

"It's just started, " protested Demansk.

His admiral shook his head, the gold earrings flopping back and forth. His face was unusually solemn. "No, Triumvir. Trust me in this, as I would trust you in a land battle. Casull's only hope was that his steam rams could work a miracle — repeat what one of them did at Preble last year."

He waved a hand toward the woodclads. "But they will keep them off. Those timbers will stand up well enough even against cannon fire. And with ten against three, even as slow as they are, they'll be able to keep the steam rams hemmed in. The rest of it will just be a giant melee. Too many ships in too small a space for clever maneuvers. It'll be a Vanbert kind of sea battle — and when was the last time anyone beat you at that?" He snorted heavily through a heavy nose. "For that matter, when was the first time?"

* * *

And so it proved. Within an hour, before the sun had even started its downward descent, it was all over. One of the steam rams, either from desperation or simply because it had a fanatical captain, managed to take a woodclad with it. Ramming again, and this time with the ram wedged. Even then, most of the crew of the woodclad was saved by the bold captain of a trireme, who risked bringing his ship alongside in time to evacuate them before the magazine blew and engulfed the woodclad as well as the ram itself in the destruction.

The other two rams managed to survive, but only by keeping their distance from the woodclads who kept after them. The battle between steam rams and woodclads became something almost ridiculous, with neither side able to inflict any real damage on the other. The rams were fast enough to stay away from the woodclads, but the frantic maneuvers forced upon them to do so — two ships trying to evade nine, even if the nine were much slower — meant that they couldn't fire too many well-aimed broadsides. And even the few they got off, just as Trae and Thicelt had predicted, did little damage to the heavy timbers of their opponents.

One ram did manage, early in the battle, to get off a broadside at a passing trireme which wreaked havoc on the ship. But that was the worst blow that any of the rams managed to land in the course of the whole affair.

Most of the battle was decided the old-fashioned way — maneuverable and expertly-guided Islander galleys against much clumsier and heavier Confederate triremes. Had the odds been even close to even, the Islanders might well have triumphed. But against the numbers they actually faced, it was hopeless. The best captain in the world, commanding the best galley, simply can't maneuver when hundreds of enemy warships are covering every part of his ocean. And whenever, as was inevitable, a Confederate warship did manage to grapple with an Islander galley, it was all over within minutes. The claws came down, and the world's most ferocious close-quarter fighters stormed across. Most Islander crews surrendered immediately.

The surrenders were accepted. On that subject, Demansk had given the clearest orders possible — and had representatives of Forent Nappur's "Special Squads" aboard every Vanbert warship to see to it that the captains followed orders. He was determined to avoid a bloodbath, if at all possible.

Whether or not it would prove possible, of course, would depend in the end on his enemy. No soldiers in the world, not even Confederate ones — not even Demansk's soldiers — could be kept under discipline if their tempers rose too high. Which, given a bitter enough battle, they inevitably would.

But there, too, whatever gods there might be seemed to be partial to Demansk that day. After an hour of relatively bloodless conflict, the islander fleet suddenly began to break. Within minutes, all the surviving enemy galleys — and there were still well over a hundred of them — were pouring back toward the safety of the harbor. The two surviving steam rams, whose captains must have been superb, covered their retreat.

Doing so, in truth, was not difficult. As soon as Thicelt saw the rout, and without waiting for orders from Demansk, he gave the signal to the fleet to break off the action. In most battles, of course — certainly with a general as good as Demansk in command — the pursuit would have been undertaken with ferocity. But Demansk's strategy was political as much as military, and for his purposes here, a simple defeat was sufficient.

More than sufficient, in fact. It was ideal.

* * *

Demansk turned to Thicelt and clapped his shoulder. "My congratulations, Sharlz. You've just won the greatest sea battle ever — and I'll see to it that the historians so record the thing. And now, you're fired."

Thicelt grinned. "Such is fleeting fame." Then, sighed histrionically. "Back to that inglorious 'special attendant' business again."

Demansk nodded, matching smile to grin. " 'Fraid so. You're a diplomat now. And you know the settlement I want."

"Settlement," snorted Thicelt. "Almost as bad as Emeralds, with their 'acumen.' " He clucked his tongue, somehow managing to do it as histrionically as the sigh. "Speak plainly, august Triumvir, just as that grandfather of yours you've told me about would have done." He jerked a thumb toward Chalice. "What you want is that pig skinned. Skinned, gutted, and the meat hung up to dry."

"Just the meat, Sharlz. You can leave them the skin and the entrails." He matched Thicelt's grin with one that was almost as wide. "You watch. Within a generation, your Islanders will be calling me Verice the Merciful."