How Firm a Foundation

by David Weber

  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.

  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 coul
d 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.

  “Very well, Captain Lathyk,” he said. “I believe it’s time.”

  “Aye, aye, Sir.” Lathyk nodded and raised his speaking trumpet. “Man the braces!”

  * * *

  Baron Jahras was still staring at Triangle Shoal when he heard the bellow of fresh gunfire coming from the west. At first he thought the Charisian galleons approaching his line had opened fire, but then he realized his mistake. Somewhere beyond his line of sight, another cluster of those damned … bombardment galleons, or whatever the hell someone wanted to call them, had opened fire on the Sickle Shoal fortress, as well. That was too far away for Jahras to see from his current position, but off the top of his head he couldn’t think of any reason for that fortress to be any more successful than Stahkail’s had been.

  He stamped to the forward edge of the poop deck, raising his spyglass and peering through it. From this close to the water he couldn’t actually see the fortress thanks to the curve of the earth, but he could make out the clouds of gunsmoke rising beyond Sickle Shoal. He knew it was pointless, but he was still trying to pick out some sort of detail when Captain Ahlvai cleared his throat.

  “Beg pardon, My Lord, but it seems the heretics are about to come calling.”

  Jahras lowered the glass and looked across Emperor Zhorj’s starboard rail, and his expression tightened. The leading Charisian squadron had turned downwind once more, sailing directly into his anchored ships’ broadsides. He had enough of an angle on them to see their rigged anchors and realize they, too, intended to anchor by the stern, undoubtedly on a spring. With the wind setting steadily out of the northeast and the tide making, wind and current alike would help them maintain their positions. There wasn’t much subtlety to it, he thought harshly. A straight broadside duel, a pounding match. One he ought to be able to win, even if his guns were lighter, because he could bring so many more of them to bear. Except for the minor fact that unless he was sadly mistaken, every one of those galleons was about to begin firing the same sort of ammunition which had just blown the guts out of a heavy masonry fortress.

  And we’re just a tiny bit more likely to catch fire—or sink—than a fortress, a mental voice told him.

  “Open fire,
Captain Ahlvai,” he said flatly.

  .VII.

  Inner Harbor, Port of Iythria, Empire of Desnair

  The afternoon tore apart in thunder, lightning, smoke, and screams.

  HMS Destiny had missed the savage battle in the Markovian Sea, but she made up for it now. The Imperial Desnairian Navy was nowhere near the equal of the Navy of God. Its crews had less training, most of them had less motivation, and although their artillery had been manufactured to the same design, there was an enormous difference in its workmanship and quality. Most of Baron Jahras’ captains refused to load their guns with full charges, given their propensity to explode unexpectedly, and the gun crews (who tended to have a closer association with them) were even more leery of their weapons. Worse, Jahras had been more or less forced to settle for dry-firing their pieces for training, since he couldn’t afford to use them up before they were actually needed in battle. His gunners had mastered the motions of their drill, but it was a largely theoretical mastery, without the experience of the actual thunder of their weapons, the reek of smoke, and—certainly—without a live enemy on the far side of the gunport from them.

  On the other hand, there were a lot of guns on those Desnairian ships, and Jahras’ galleons had been in place literally for months. His crews might be nowhere near the equal of their Charisian opponents as seamen, but then very few seamen were. And the Desnairians might not have the Charisians’ tradition of victory—because, again, very few navies did. But what those Desnairian crewmen did have was practice and complete familiarity with their commander’s battle plan, and while they might not have mastered the gunner’s trade in the brimstone reek of actual burned gunpowder, the motions of the evolution had been drilled into them mercilessly. They knew exactly what they were supposed to do, because their captains had explained it to them in detail and they’d practiced it over and over again. And if their fire might not be as accurate or as rapid as their opponents’, it was far more accurate and rapid than it would have been at sea, maneuvering under sail while the ship moved and surged underfoot.