Through Fiery Trials

by David Weber

  That would have been more than enough to recommend him to both Zhyou-Zhwo and Emperor Mahrys, all by itself.

  But this automotive was the product of the second automotive works Showail had built here at Iythria, and there was another under construction outside Desnair the City. The decision to put the newest works there had met with an unusual degree of resistance to an imperial decree, but Paitryk suspected Mahrys had chosen Desnair the City as its site because of his preference for Geyra. He knew blast furnaces, steel manufactories, and automotive works were essential, but that didn’t mean he wanted to look out the window and see them.

  A gentleman—and an emperor—had to draw a line somewhere.

  Paitryk was unhappily aware that Desnair’s rate of industrialization lagged far behind that of Charis or neighboring Dohlar. For that matter, even Silkiah had pulled slowly but steadily ahead. It was harder to decide about Siddarmark. Desnair might be holding its own against the Republic, but that was hardly reassuring, given Siddarmark’s recurrent economic woes. And it would be a long time before Desnairian engineers and artisans were ready to begin producing their own designs. This automotive, for example, was at least a generation behind the latest Delthak Automotives model. In fact, it was probably farther behind than that, given the breakneck rate at which Delthak kept insisting on improving things.

  It was, however, far better than anything Harchong had yet managed to produce, and if Desnair’s expansion was slower than that of Charis, it, too, was gathering speed. And, unlike Charis, managing to do it without upsetting the social order God and the Archangels had decreed. Artisans were artisans, not men of blood. They were clearly necessary, and they had to be paid accordingly, but they were equally clearly un-fitted to discharge the Crown’s wishes and desires. Perhaps some of them would rise above their origins in the fullness of time—the ones with the most talent, the most value. Paitryk himself had been promised a barony, at the least, awaited him, assuming he continued to discharge his own duties as well as he had. With that in mind, he was prepared to grant even the most commonly born at least some recognition of their accomplishments.

  “We’ll spend the rest of today and tomorrow running it around the test track,” he said now as he and Zhyng turned and began walking down the boardwalk towards the rails. “There’s always a bit of ‘wearing in’ for an automotive fresh out of the shop, and this is the first one off of this line. Besides, we need to be especially confident this one’s ready before we turn it loose.”

  Zhyng nodded vigorously. This was the twelfth automotive Harchong had purchased from Desnair, which had contributed significantly to Iythria Automotives’ expansion. What made it special was that it was the first which wouldn’t be delivered to its buyers in parts by sea and assembled by Desnarian artisans after arrival. (It would have been better to ship them assembled, had any Desnarian or Harchongese steamship been large enough.)

  As of the first of the month, however, the rail line paralleling the Mahrosa and Sherach Canal ran all the way from Iythria to Symarkhan on the Hahskyn River. It was single-tracked with only occasional sidings the entire way, and there were more than a few trestles Paitryk wouldn’t have cared to cross, but it existed—over three thousand miles of track, which equated to almost ten million rails. Desnair and, by default, the Harchong Empire had adopted lighter rails than Charis, but that still equated to close to 380,000 tons of hot-rolled steel rails, the vast majority of which had come out of Harchongese or Desnairian foundries. Even Desnair would have been hard put to come up with the labor gangs who’d built that line, but Zhyou-Zhwo had found them. And his supervisors and overseers had pushed the work at a furious pace, aided by the fact that the canal right of ways were more than wide enough to accommodate the tracks for almost all that length. If they’d had to dig and blast the roadbed, the task would have taken years longer to complete.

  Nor could they have accomplished it without the Desnairian rails. Zhyou-Zhwo didn’t need to know about the additional rails Baron Iythria had quietly purchased from Charis through Dohlaran and Silkiahan middlemen to fill the Harchongians’ voracious orders, and Paitryk devoutly hoped Zhyou-Zhwo would continue to believe all of them had come out of domestic Desnairian production. Actually, he calculated that there was a pretty fair chance of that. He was positive Mahnan Zhyng, for one, had absolutely no intention of informing his emperor that the hated Charisians had actually manufactured about ten percent of his “Desnairian” rails.

  “We’ll turn it over to your drivers once we’re confident we’ve found and corrected any potential faults, and our people will make sure they’re fully familiar with the controls before we do,” he said as the automotive came to a halt in a drifting reek of coal smoke.

  It stood, panting, oozing tendrils of steam. The sight and the sounds filled Paitryk with a sense of pride and accomplishment he once would have denied he might feel over mere machinery, and his nostrils flared appreciatively as he inhaled the scents of creosote, tar, coal, and hot iron. Half his relatives undoubtedly looked down upon him scornfully, assuming they ever thought about him at all, but that was all right. Whether they liked it or not, this was the future, and he meant to be far more than a mere baron before he was done.

  “The test runs will make sure we don’t have any mechanical problems,” he continued, “but, to be on the safe side, Baron Iythria has instructed me to send one of our own automotives and a repair carriage along on the run to Symarkhan.”

  “Thank you!” Zhyng beamed. “That’s very generous of you. And unexpected, too! I’m sure Earl Sunset Peak will be most grateful.”

  “I’m glad to hear that, but please tell the Earl he’s entirely welcome. I know you’ve brought your own artisans to take delivery, and I’m sure they won’t encounter any problems they can’t deal with.” One had to be polite, especially to Harchongians, even if it did require a blatant disregard for truth. “But we pride ourselves on both our workmanship and on giving good value for Emperor Zhyou-Zhwo’s marks. It’s possible a more serious fault may get by our inspections. If it does, our people will be on the spot to make it right for His Majesty.”

  Zhyng smiled even more broadly, and Paitryk gestured to the steep iron steps up into the automotive’s cab.

  “And now, Master Zhyng, would you join me aboard the Emperor’s newest automotive for its first run around the track?”

  FEBRUARY YEAR OF GOD 910

  .I.

  Urvyn Mahndrayn Slip, Delthak Shipbuilding Larek Yard, Kingdom of Old Charis, Empire of Charis.

  “Well, we don’t look too bad for a pair of old farts,” Domynyk Staynair, the Duke of Rock Point, observed as he leaned on his cane, looking out the window of the new eight-story headquarters of Delthak Shipbuilding.

  “‘Old farts’?” Sir Dustyn Olyvyr, Chief Constructor of the Imperial Charisian Navy, repeated. “Who are you calling old?!”

  “You, actually, you decrepit old wreck,” Rock Point replied with a chuckle, looking over his shoulder. “My God, man! You’re almost five months older than I am!”

  Olyvyr made a rude noise and stepped up to the window beside him. They looked down from it at the always-bustling vista of Delthak Shipbuilding’s Larek Yard.

  It was impossible to recognize the once-modest town which had given its name to the sprawling—and still growing—city at the mouth of the Delthak River, where it flowed into Howell Bay. The wooden wharves where fishermen had once landed their catch had disappeared into massive stone quays, hulking warehouses, gaunt gantries, and vast workshops, and drydocks, construction slips, fitting-out docks, and the rail lines that served them stretched for over five miles.

  The river estuary was really too shallow for ships the size of the ones Delthak was building now, but Duke Delthak’s ever-inventive artisans had an answer for that, too. As Rock Point and Olyvyr looked southeast from their vantage point, they saw the enormous barge of a continuous-chain, steam-powered dredge. The bottom was sand, mud, and shells, and a steady cascade of liquid-streaming mu
d avalanched from the dredge’s bucket shovels onto the second barge, moving in tandem with it. A third barge, loaded to the gunnels with shell-laden sand and mud, moved ponderously towards the cement works on Fish Island under the urging of a bluff-bowed steam tug. Yet another barge had just come over the horizon from the west, returning from Fish to await its turn at the dredge.

  There were limits to what could be accomplished, however, and it wouldn’t be so very much longer before some of those limits might become a problem. The Thunderbolt-class drew twenty-five feet of water at its designed draft, and Howell Bay’s deep channel depth at low water was only about thirty-two feet. Here, close to the mouth of the Delthak, it was a good eight or nine feet shallower even than that, so launches at low water could be problematical. There was a reason Delthak was expanding its Eraystor Yard, because although Eraystor Bay was much smaller than Howell Bay, it was also deeper.

  For now, however, the Larek Yard was sufficient for even the Navy’s biggest ships, and even if it eventually became impossible to build the largest capital ships here, there’d always be a need for the cruisers Larek could build. And Larek was far more convenient than Eraystor to the sprawling Delthak Works, which remained the heart and soul of Delthak Enterprises.

  “Could you have imagined this that first day when Merlin sat down with you at King’s Harbor?” Rock Point asked now, and Olyvyr barked a laugh.

  “If I’d even tried to imagine this then, I’d have run the other way babbling hysterically! And if I’d told Ahnyet where this was truly going to lead, she’d have called the Bédardists and had me committed!”

  “It does rather boggle the mind, doesn’t it?” Rock Point’s tone was almost whimsical, his eyes steady as he watched the dredge buckets ripping away at the bottom of the bay. “Galleys. We were still building galleys, Dustyn.” He shook his head. “I remember when a twenty-four-gun galleon seemed like the terror of the seas!”

  “Because it was,” Olyvyr said.

  He moved a little closer to the window, looking down at the nearest building slip, the one named for Commander Urvyn Mahndrayn. There were other slips, named for other people they’d lost to the Jihad, but few of them had hurt as much as Mahndrayn, and the fact that he’d been murdered by his own cousin only made it seem perversely worse, somehow.

  Olyvyr’s mouth tightened at that familiar memory, but then he shook his head with a smile, instead. The Urvyn Mahndrayn Slip had produced more than one new ship, including HMS King Haarahld VII. She’d been the very first armored cruiser ever laid down on Safehold, although the disastrous fire at the Delthak Works and an unusual case of faulty machinery meant her sister ship, HMS Gwylym Manthyr, had been completed before her. And yet another innovative vessel was building in that slip as he watched.

  At the moment, she was only an ungainly heap of girders and ribs, streaked with rust. She lay there with all the elegance of a foundry scrapyard, and the piles of building materials heaped about in what looked like utter disorder only strengthened that impression. But Olyvyr’s eyes saw the organization underlying the chaos, the polished efficiency of the most skilled shipbuilding work force in the world, and he felt a familiar sense of awe as he absorbed it all again. The clatter of pneumatic-powered rivet guns must be deafening down in the slip, although it was lost in the general background by the time it reached the office window. On the other hand, the contacts Owl had provided to allow him to view imagery over the SNARC network had also corrected his nearsightedness. More than that, the current version provided the equivalent of a good pair of Old Terra binoculars. Now he zoomed in on the construction workers, watching their skilled rhythm. And some of them were using the newly developed acetylene welding equipment, although that process was still novel enough that not even Sir Dustyn Olyvyr was going to trust it for critical structural components.

  As he watched, dockside cranes lowered a fresh load of hull plates into the slip, and he saw one of the foremen on the scaffolding, arm-waving directions to the crane operator. It was hard to believe, even for him, that those unprepossessing beginnings would eventually become a brand-new Falcon-class scout cruiser. Albeit one with a difference.

  “Doesn’t look like much, does she?” he said out loud.

  “Not yet,” Rock Point agreed. “Of course, even when she’s finished, the really impressive bits won’t be out where people can see them.”

  “I would’ve liked to put the geared turbines into her, too,” Olyvyr said wistfully.

  “There are times you remind me of Ahlfryd,” Rock Point said with a bittersweet smile. “Always want to play with latest toys.”

  “Well, as one old fart to another, I’m not getting any younger. I don’t want to miss it!”

  “Younger—pshaw!” Rock Point scowled magnificently. “You’ve got decades left yet!”

  Olyvyr glanced at the duke, but he had to acknowledge Rock Point’s point. They’d both received Owl’s nanotech, and despite their advanced ages—although, to be fair, they were barely in their early seventies in the standard years of dead Terra—they were in excellent health. In fact, they were in sufficiently excellent health that they had to remind themselves to complain about the aches and pains they ought to have had. Not too often, of course. They were, after all, noble and stoic individuals.

  He chuffed a laugh at that thought. Rock Point arched an eyebrow, but he shook his head without explaining.

  “Sooner or later, you and Cayleb—and Merlin—are going to have to let me build one with turbines,” he said instead.

  “Trust me, it’s going to be later.” Rock Point shook his head. “Do you think I wouldn’t love to be out there charging across the ocean at thirty-five or thirty-six knots? Of course I would! But we’re not going to introduce that kind of speed until someone else does or we have to. Keeping advantages tucked up our sleeves was what kept us alive during the Jihad, and I’m not real interested in changing course on that anytime soon.”

  “Granted,” Olyvyr sighed. “Granted! Although,” his gaze sharpened, “firing her boilers with oil’s a pretty damned significant change in its own right.”

  “It may take the other navies a while to realize that, though,” Rick Point pointed out. “They haven’t had the chance to play around with it a lot.”

  “Um.” Olyvyr pursed his lips, then shrugged. “You’re probably right,” he conceded. “All they’ll see—at first, at least—is that oil’s one hell of a lot cleaner.”

  He shuddered, recalling the clouds of coal dust that coated every surface with filth whenever a ship refilled her bunkers. Charisian naval bases had developed steam-powered machinery to make it both easier and much faster, but nothing could magically erase all that dust. Oil produced no dust, and refueling would be as simple—and fast—as attaching the fuel hoses and then standing back while the oil gushed into the tanks.

  That much would be pretty evident to most people. What they might be slower to realize was how much cleaner oil burned. Just avoiding the thick, choking, vision-blocking clouds of coal smoke would be a huge boon to signaling and maneuvering safety at sea, but just as importantly, the stokers aboard an oil-fired ship wouldn’t have to draw and rake their grates at regular intervals to clear them of clinker the way a coal-fired vessel’s stokers did, either. They could maintain maximum steam pressure for as long as their feedwater and fuel lasted, rather than periodically reducing speed while their fireboxes were cleared. Well, they’d still have to clean the boilers themselves of scale from time to time, but that was part of any ship’s regular maintenance schedule, not something that needed to be done every few hours. And converting to oil would reduce the complement of a Falcon by over twenty percent just by eliminating all the stokers who sweated and strained heaving coal into the ships’ roaring furnaces. That wouldn’t hurt a thing, either.

  And what would be even less obvious to those other navies was the fact that oil contained far more caloric energy than coal on a pound-for-pound basis. Ten tons of oil provided the same potential energy as f
ifteen tons of coal, but the efficiency differential in a steam plant was actually about 1.7-to-1 in oil’s favor, once the handling advantages of oil were factored into the equation, so a ship with a cruising radius of five thousand miles using coal would increase its radius by thirty-five hundred miles, assuming equal weights of fuel. And on top of all that, oil “packed tighter” than coal. Given that the volume of 1.7 tons of anthracite was a bit over forty-nine cubic feet and the volume of a ton of oil was only about thirty-eight cubic feet, and allowing for the efficiency differential, an oil-fired ship could pack the same “energy bank” into less than half the volume. The saving in weight would be even more significant, as would the fact that oil could be carried in tanks located low in the ship, which would have huge advantages for stability. And the design of any warship was always a study in tradeoffs. Anything that cost less weight and less volume was worth its weight in gold to someone like him.

  Indeed, about the only downside was that current designs used coal bunkers as additional side armor against enemy shell fire. Olyvyr would miss that, but he could more than live with it in light of all the advantages oil conferred.

  “Merlin and I have seriously discussed finding a handy spy somewhere and spoon-feeding him all the reasons we’re thinking about going to oil,” Rock Point said. Olyvyr raised an eyebrow at him, and he chuckled.

  “Of course we have! Hell, Dustyn! If anyone out there wants to emulate us, I’ll stand on the spire of Tellesberg Cathedral and cheer about it!” The duke smiled sardonically. “Thanks to Zhansyn Wyllys and SD&R, we’ve got the beginnings of a genuine petroleum industry … and they don’t. That probably means most of the potential competitors out there will stick with coal even if they figure out the advantages, because they know they have an assured supply of it, which isn’t the case with this newfangled ‘oil-fired’ machinery. But some of them may not stick it out if we feed them the word on all the wonderful advantages it’ll give us. In which case—” his smile turned wicked “—they’ll have to build their own oil industry, and think how that will contribute to the Nahrmahn Plan.”