At the Sign of Triumph

by David Weber

  “Aye, aye, Sir!” Stefyns acknowledged with a grin and went thundering off.

  “You really could have used your speaking trumpet to get Bynyt’s attention, you know,” Hektor observed quietly.

  “True, Sir,” Hahlbyrstaht acknowledged, forbearing to mention that Hektor could have done the same thing. “But it does a midshipman good to know he’s needed. Besides, it’ll keep the lad occupied instead of worrying.”

  “Worrying? Ahlbyrt?” Hektor shook his head. “You’re sure we’re talking about the same young man?”

  It struck neither him nor Hahlbyrstaht as odd that he should use the term “young man” for someone less than four years younger than himself. For that matter, Hahlbyrstaht, who was actually on the young side for his own rank, was three years older than his captain.

  “Probably ‘worrying’ was a mite strong.” Hahlbyrstaht shrugged. “How about ‘thoughtful’?”

  “That might be fair,” Hektor agreed, then looked up as Stefyns returned with Bynyt Zhowaltyr, Fleet Wing’s gunner, in tow.

  At thirty-five, Zhowaltyr was one of the oldest members of the schooner’s company, and he’d learned his trade as a gun captain in then-Commodore Staynair’s first experimental galleon squadron. Fleet Wing was damned lucky to have him, and Hektor had wondered occasionally if that was more than simply a happy coincidence. Zhowaltyr had been transferred into the schooner about the same time Hektor assumed command, and it was entirely possible Admiral Sarmouth had had just a little something to do with that. He’d certainly insisted that Stywyrt Mahlyk, his personal coxswain, go along to “keep an eye on” Hektor!

  “You wanted me, Sir?” the gunner said now, touching his chest in salute.

  “Indeed I did, Master Zhowaltyr. You see that fellow over there?” Hektor pointed with his good hand at the Dohlaran brig Fleet Wing had pursued for the last five and a half hours. She was still doing her best to avoid Fleet Wing, but little more than three thousand yards now separated them, and the range was falling swiftly.

  “Yes, Sir,” Zhowaltyr acknowledged.

  “I’d like to make his closer acquaintance … on our terms, not his. And it occurs to me that you’re the man to make that happen.”

  “Do my best, Sir.” Zhowaltyr grinned broadly. “The fourteen-pounder, I’m thinking?”

  “That certainly seems like the best place to start,” Hektor agreed. “And I’m sure that the fact that you’ve been looking forward to playing with your new toy has nothing at all to do with your choice.”

  “No, Sir! O’ course not!” Zhowaltyr’s grin got even broader.

  “I thought not. So, now that we’ve cleared that up, what range would you like?”

  The gunner glanced up at the sails, then cocked a thoughtful eye at the sea. The breeze had continued to freshen—enough that Hektor had been forced to take in a reef in the big foresail which was actually Fleet Wing’s primary working sail—and the waves were approaching eight feet in height. Bursting clouds of spray glittered around the schooner’s bow in the early afternoon sunlight as she drove through exuberantly through the sea, and the wind sang in the rigging.

  “Bit lively underfoot, Sir,” Zhowaltyr said thoughtfully. “I’m thinking a thousand yards, maybe eight hundred.”

  “He’ll probably have a pair of long eighteens forward,” Hektor pointed out. In fact, he knew exactly what Serpent carried, although he couldn’t exactly share that with Zhowaltyr.

  “Aye, Sir, he will. An’ they’ll be smoothbores an’ he’s a Dohlaran.” Zhowaltyr didn’t spit, but that was only because the Navy frowned on people who spat on its spotless decks. “Won’t say they couldn’t hit a barn if one happened to float by, Sir. Not going to hit us at much over six hundred yards, though.”

  “Fair enough,” Hektor said. He had a bit less contempt for Dohlaran gunnery than Zhowaltyr did, but the gunner still had a valid point … probably.

  Under ideal conditions, both the Dohlarans’ 18-pounders and Fleet Wing’s long 14-pounder had a range of over two thousand yards. The carronades which constituted the primary broadside weapons for both ships were shorter ranged, although Fleet Wing’s had been rifled. It didn’t increase their maximum range, which was still about twenty perecent less than that of a long gun of equivalent bore, but the improved accuracy definitely increased their maximum effective range. So, in theory, both ships should have been easily capable of hitting the other at half that range.

  Theory, however, had a sad way of failing in the face of reality, especially when one was trying to fire accurately from one vessel underway in a seaway at another vessel underway in a seaway. Moving targets were challenging enough even when the gun trying to hit them wasn’t moving simultaneously in at least three different directions itself—forward, up and down, and from side to side—at the moment it fired. Under present conditions, any gunner would be doing well to mark his target at anything much in excess of five hundred yards.

  Charisian gunners were still the best trained and most experienced in the world, however. Other navies, even the Dohlarans who’d demonstrated they were the ICA’s only true peers, concentrated on maximum rate of fire at the sort of minimal ranges where hits could be expected.

  Desnarian doctrine had relied on engaging at longer range and shooting high, trying to cripple the other side’s rigging, but that was because Desnarian captains (and quite a few Navy of God captains, if the truth be told) had always concentrated on getting away from any Charisian warship they met. Dohlarans, on the other hand, were perfectly ready to fight whenever the odds were close to even, and like the ICN, they wanted decisive combat. That was why their doctrine relied on getting in as close as possible—to within as little as a hundred yards, or even less, if they could manage it—where missing would be extremely difficult, and then pouring as much fire as they could—as quickly as they could—into their enemies’ hulls. It was a technique they’d learned from the Charisians themselves, but the ICN’s gun crews exercised with their weapons for a minimum of one full hour per day. And unlike navies who drilled solely for speed, going through the motions of loading and running out again and again without ever firing, the Charisian Navy also “wasted” quite a lot of powder and shot shooting at targets it intended to actually hit. Its rate of fire at least equalled that of any other navy in the world, when speed was needed, but its gunners were also trained to aim their pieces and to allow for their ships’ own motion.

  Hektor intended to use that advantage as ruthlessly as possible. The last thing he wanted was to enter Serpent’s effective range for a broadside duel, and for a longer-ranged engagement, what really mattered were the opponents’ long guns. Although Serpent’s 18-pounders were heavier and she had two of them, Fleet Wing’s single 14-pounder was pivot-mounted, able to fire in a broad arc on either broadside. And unlike Serpent’s guns, it was rifled. The “long fourteen” had been famed in Charisian service for its accuracy from the moment it was introduced. Rifling only made it even more lethally accurate … and increased the weight of its projectiles. The schooner had received the new weapon only three months ago, and Hektor knew Zhowaltyr was eager to try its paces in action.

  “I believe we can have you in range in the next, oh, thirty minutes,” he said. “I trust that will be satisfactory?”

  “I think I can make that work, Sir,” the gunner assured him solemnly.

  “Then I suppose you should go do your noisy, smoky best to make me a happy man.”

  “We’ll do that thing, Sir.”

  Zhowaltyr touched his chest in salute once more, then turned and cupped both hands around his mouth.

  “Ruhsyl! Front and center!” he bellowed.

  The tallish petty officer who answered his gentle summons had a sharply receding hairline. In fact, he was well along in the process of going bald, although none of his subordinates would be rash enough to describe it in precisely those terms. The hair fringing that gleaming expanse of bald scalp was worn very long and pulled back in a braided (if somewhat moth-eaten
) pigtail that hung well down his spine. As if for compensation, he also sported a full, bushy beard and a magnificent specimen of what would have been called a “walrus mustache” on a planet called Earth. Both arms were liberally adorned with tattoos, a golden hoop dangled from his right earlobe, and there were strands of white in both that beard and pigtail. Not surprisingly, perhaps. At forty-seven, Wyllym Ruhsyl was close to three times Hektor’s age and the oldest man in Fleet Wing’s company.

  He was also the schooner’s senior gun captain and effectively Zhowaltyr’s assistant gunner, with an uncanny kinesthetic sense.

  “Aye, Master Zhowaltyr?” he rumbled in a subterranean voice.

  “You’re on the fourteen,” Zhowaltyr told him. “Don’t miss.”

  * * *

  “’Vast heaving, there!” Oskahr Fytsymyns bellowed.

  HMS Serpent’s solid, muscular boatswain stood with his hands on his hips, scowling at the sweating party of seamen. Shifting heavy weights about on the deck of a ship underway was often a tricky proposition, and just the tube of a long 18-pounder weighed well over two tons. With the carriage added, it topped three and a half, and that much weight could inflict serious damage—less to the hull of the ship, though that could be quite bad enough, than to the fragile human beings of her crew—if it got out of control on a moving deck.

  Fytsymyns had no intention of allowing that to happen, and he’d watched with a king wyvern’s eye while the second carronade in Serpent’s starboard broadside was transferred to her larboard broadside and replaced by the larboard 18-pounder chase gun. Now he stalked forward to inspect the fruit of the sweating seamen’s labors, and they watched him with rather greater anxiety than they did the oncoming Charisian schooner. The Bosun’s formidable temper was a known danger, after all.

  “Aye, that’ll do,” he growled, then turned to Tohmys Prytchyrt, Serpent’s third lieutenant, who’d hovered in the background while the true professionals got on with it. “I think you can tell the Cap’n she’s ’bout ready, Sir,” he said.

  “Very good, Bosun,” Prytchyrt acknowledged and gestured to one of the waiting gun captains. “Best get your people stood to, Klynmywlyr.”

  “Aye, aye, Sir.” Jyrdyn Klynmywlyr touched his chest in salute and jerked his head at the two waiting gun crews. “Y’ heard the Lieutenant, you idle buggers! Let’s get these bastards loaded!”

  * * *

  “Guns’re ready, Sir!”

  “Good!” Truskyt Mahkluskee nodded in satisfaction.

  He remained far from in favor of engaging the Charisian, especially after he’d gotten a good look at her through his spyglass. Although she showed only ten ports per side, she was very nearly as big as Serpent, she was eating up the range between them with greyhound grace … and she’d cleared away her midships pivot gun.

  Mahkluskee would have dearly loved a pivot of his own. Unfortunately, that was another thing he didn’t have, so he’d done the best he could to compensate by shifting both 18s to the same broadside. Unless he missed his guess, the Charisian captain intended to stand off and peck away with that 14-pounder from well up to windward, and as long as he retained the weather gauge, he could prevent Serpent from closing to bring her carronades into effective range. On the other hand, that told Mahkluskee exactly where to find him when the shooting started; hence the rearrangement of his own battery.

  Now all I have to do is keep them pointed in the right damned direction, he told himself. Shouldn’t be all that hard, especially if the bastard doesn’t want to get in close. Of course, the Writ does say the road to hell is paved with ‘shouldn’t be’s.

  * * *

  “Another quarter point, I think,” Hektor Aplyn-Ahrmahk said calmly.

  “‘Nother quarter-point larboard helm, aye, Sir,” Senior Petty Officer Frahnk Seegairs acknowledged, easing the wheel, and Fleet Wing swung three degrees farther to starboard, taking the wind almost directly on her starboard beam. The Dohlaran brig lay to the southwest, starboard-side to, and the range continued to slide downward, albeit far more slowly than it had.

  “Whenever you feel best, Master Zhowaltyr!” Hektor called out, and the gunner waved his hat in acknowledgment.

  He stood close enough to the pivot gun to supervise, but he had no intention of joggling PO Ruhsyl’s elbow. At the moment, the balding, pigtailed petty officer was totally focused on the 14-pounder. He’d waved the rest of the crew back out of the recoil path, and his eyes were almost dreamy as he crouched behind the mount, peering along the barrel.

  “You heard the Skipper,” the gunner said, just to be sure, and Ruhsyl nodded.

  “Aye, so I did,” he murmured back, and waited a moment longer, feeling the rhythm of the schooner’s motion in his brain and bone. And then thirty years at sea, coupled with five long years of intensive gunnery training and an inherent sense of movement no mere training could have imparted, came together behind those dreamy eyes, and he stepped smartly to the side and jerked the lanyard.

  The friction primer worked perfectly, and the 14-pounder bellowed, spewing out a smoke cloud that shredded instantly on the wind.

  * * *

  Truskyt Mahkluskee pursed his lips as dark brown gun smoke spouted from the Charisian’s pivot gun. She’d opened fire at a greater range than he’d hoped for, but at least he’d been right to anticipate that she’d come to a southwesterly heading to hold the wind and the weather gauge. Barring some catastrophic damage aloft, Serpent should be able to keep her opponent in the play of her starboard guns—and both of her 18-pounders. Of course, at this range and in these seas, the chance of actually hitting the bastards wasn’t especially good. Still.…

  “As you bear, Klynmywlyr!” he called to the sandy-haired gun captain crouched over the aftermost 18-pounder’s breech, firing lanyard in hand, and—

  Something punched through the brig’s jib. It plunged into the water forty yards off her larboard bow.

  And exploded.

  Both 18-pounders fired as one, like an echo of that explosion, but Mahkluskee felt the blood draining out of his face as the water spout rose on the far side of his ship.

  * * *

  “Not so bad, Sir,” Stywyrt Mahlyk remarked thoughtfully. Admiral Sarmouth’s coxswain—who’d somehow become Lieutenant Aplyn-Ahrmahk’s coxswain—stood in his customary position, festooned with pistols and cutlasses, arms crossed, watching Hektor’s back. “Mind, I’d not be telling Wyllym that. Man’s head’s already too big for his hat!”

  Hektor snorted, but Mahlyk had a point. In fact, that first shot had landed remarkably close to its target, and he smiled thinly as the SNARC’s remotes projected Mahkluskee’s reaction to it onto his contact lenses.

  Instead of the 14-pound round shot or 8-pound shell the smoothbore 14-pounder had fired, the new, rifled weapon fired a cylindrical solid shot that weighed almost forty-five pounds … or a 30-pound explosive shell packed with just over five pounds of black powder and an improved version of Ehdwyrd Howsmyn’s original percussion fuses. It was longer ranged, heavier, and far, far more destructive than the old “long fourteen” had ever hoped to be.

  Serpent’s forward gunports flashed fire, belching their own smoke clouds, and he watched the round shot slash across the wave crests in explosions of white. Like the 14-pounder, they had more than enough range to reach their target. What they didn’t have was Petty Officer Ruhsyl, and the Dohlaran gun captains hadn’t fired at exactly the same moment. One shot actually plowed into the water fifty or sixty yards short of Fleet Wing’s side. The second, fired at a different point in the brig’s roll, went high, whimpering across the ship without hitting a thing and plunging into the sea at least two hundred yards beyond the schooner.

  Not good enough, Commander Mahkluskee, Hektor thought coldly.

  * * *

  “Shit!”

  Unlike Mahkluskee, Lieutenant Achlee couldn’t hide his reaction as the Charisian shell threw up that telltale column of water. He wheeled around to his commanding officer, eyes wide, and o
pened his mouth, but Mahkluskee’s sharp headshake shut it again before anything else came out.

  “See if you can edge a little closer to the wind,” the lieutenant commander told the grizzled seaman on the wheel, and showed his teeth in a thin smile. “I think we’d best get as close to her as we can.”

  “Aye, aye, Sir,” the helmsman acknowledged, but he was an experienced man. His eyes met his captain’s with the knowledge that Serpent was getting no closer to Fleet Wing than Fleet Wing chose to allow. No square-rigged vessel could match a schooner’s weatherliness at the best of times, and Serpent was slower, to boot.

  “Get forward, Karmaikel,” Mahkluskee continued, turning back to his first lieutenant. “I want you as far away from me as possible in case something … untowards happens. Besides—” his smile was even thinner than the one he’d shown the helmsman “—it can’t hurt to have your presence encouraging Klynmywlyr’s efforts. Just don’t joggle his elbow.”

  * * *

  “That’s right, lads,” Wyllym Ruhsyl encouraged as the fresh charge went down the barrel and the loader indexed the shell’s studs into the barrel’s rifling grooves. It took a fraction of a second longer than simply inserting a round shot or a smoothbore shell, but this gun crew had fired well over a hundred rounds since they’d acquired their new weapon. The loading number could have seated the rifling studs in the dark in the middle of a driving rain—in fact, they’d practiced blindfolded to simulate doing exactly that—and the shell slid smoothly down onto the bagged charge. A gentle stroke with a rammer settled it against the charge, a fresh primer went into the vent, and Ruhsyl reached for the lanyard.

  “Clear!” he snapped, and waited long enough to be sure every member of the crew was safely out of the way.

  Then he bent over the breech again, lining up the dispart sights which only the Charisian Navy used, watching the muzzle of his gun rise to point only at sky, then slowly dip until it pointed only at sea. The trick was to catch it at precisely the right point in the cycle—the point at which the inevitable delay in the charge’s ignition would coincide with the moment the muzzle aligned perfectly on the Dohlaran brig. It helped immeasurably that Ehdwyrd Howsmyn’s quality control assured such uniform burn times on the primers supplied to the fleet, but the best quality control in the world couldn’t guarantee truly uniform times. There was always some variation, and the only “fire control” available was an experienced human eye and sense of timing.