At the Sign of Triumph

by David Weber

  The consequences of that could have been … unfortunate, and the Alliance had experienced entirely too many of those sorts of consequences when the Sword of Schueler spread blood and destruction across more than a third of the Republic. In the opinion of its leaders—and of Kynt Clareyk—it was time to visit some of that blood and destruction on someone else for a change, and even with the early halt the camps’ liberation had imposed, they’d made a decent down payment over the preceding northern summer’s short campaign season. Far better to get their troops into winter quarters before the full savagery of the long (and bitterly harsh) northern winter caught up with them.

  The eight-plus inches of snow currently burying the ground outside his office lent that logic a certain point, especially to the tender sensibilities of a native Old Charisian, and more of it was swirling down on the teeth of that cold, wailing wind. According to Owl’s meteorological projections, the eight inches which would have accumulated by sunset would be closer to ten by morning. Until his first winter in Chisholm, Green Valley had never even seen snow, except for an occasional, innocuous white mountaintop admired from far, far away. Chisholm had been a sobering experience … and not a patch on a northern East Haven winter! It amused him that a Charisian boy had become the most successful practitioner of winter warfare in Safeholdian history, but he was never going to be fond of winter sports.

  Stop distracting yourself, he thought sternly. You know this is going to make things a lot tougher when it’s finally time to start advancing again. So what kind of brilliant brainstorm are you going to come up with this time?

  Unfortunately, nothing suggested itself to him.

  Lord of Horse Taychau Daiyang, the Earl of Rainbow Waters, commanded well over a million men. Last summer, before the halt imposed by the camps’ liberation, only about eight hundred thousand of them had been at the front, and a third or more of those had been deployed as far south as the Tymkyn Gap in the Snake Mountains, over seventeen hundred air-miles south of Rainbow Waters HQ at Lake City on West Wing Lake. But by spring, the Mighty Host of God and the Archangels would have been reinforced to close to two million men. The Army of God would have several hundred thousand new troops in the field, as well, and Allayn Maigwair was already reinforcing the Army of Tanshar, which had moved up to take over the extreme southern end of Rainbow Waters’ enormous front. That relieved Earl Silken Hills, the Southern Mighty Host’s commander of his responsibilities in that area, and that allowed Rainbow Waters to pull his right flank in closer, building an even deeper and better defended defensive zone between the Allies and the Holy Langhorne Canal, the lynchpin of the Church’s northern logistics. By the time the weather permitted the Allies to resume offensive operations, they might well be facing as many as three million well-dug-in troops along a front that extended all the way from Hsing-wu’s Passage to Hankey Sound. Worse, many of those troops would be equipped with far better weapons than the armies the Allies had shattered over the previous summer. And there’d be even more—far more—of those weapons than the Allies had previously estimated, as well.

  I’d really love to be able to blame Ehdwyrd for that, but the real culprits are Duchairn and Brother Lynkyn. Well, I suppose we shouldn’t forget Master Bryairs or Brother Sylvestrai, either. And Duchairn and Maigwair’s willingness to pull skilled artisans out of the AOG’s manpower pool came as a bit of a surprise, too. But still.…

  He grimaced and shook his head. In retrospect, he should have seen it coming, he thought, reflecting on certain research he’d done in Owl’s databanks once the discrepancy between estimates and actuality became evident. Oh, perhaps he might be excused for doubting Duchairn could find a way to pay for all those rifles and artillery pieces, but given the frenetic rate at which the Church had expanded the number of its foundries and manufactories ever since the Battle of Darcos Sound, the output he was achieving actually made sense.

  During the American Civil War back on Old Terra, the Union’s population had been roughly 18,500,000. In the course of the four terrestrial years—almost four and a half Safeholdian years—that war had lasted, the Union had put almost 2,700,000 men into its army and another 85,000 into its navy. It had also equipped all of those men with uniforms, saddles, food, rifles, cavalry sabers, cutlasses, pistols, knapsacks, canteens, and ammunition out of its industrial base. That industry had, admittedly, had the advantage of railroads and steam power—for some of its manufactories and ironworks, at least—but Safehold’s dragons and canals actually gave it better freight-hauling capacity than the Union had boasted, and water had remained the primary source of power for the United States until the 1870s. The need to expand the Union’s industrial capacity during the Civil War had given a significant impetus to the changeover to steam, but the widespread availability of fast-moving streams and the abundance of waterfalls in the Northeast had made water far cheaper. In many other respects, however, that industrial base had been inferior to pre-Merlin Safeholdian manufactories … and the Union had still produced over eighteen hundred bronze and cast-iron field guns—and another thousand 3-inch Ordnance Rifles out of far more expensive, far more manpower-intensive wrought iron—while simultaneously producing the artillery, machinery, and—ultimately—armor to expand its fleet more than fifteen fold.

  The Church had just a few more hands—and a few more foundries—to put to work than the Union had ever boasted. In fact, in just the Border States, the Temple Lands, and the Harchong Empire, the Temple still controlled over 384,000,000 human beings, almost twenty-one times the Union’s wartime population. Worse, Safeholdian agriculture—outside North Harchong, at least—was more efficient than mid-nineteenth-century North America’s had been. That meant more of that manpower could be taken from the farm and put into uniform—or reallocated to those newly built foundries—by a “central government” with the sort of ruthless reach and compulsory authority Abraham Lincoln and Edwin Stanton could have imagined only in an opium dream. And the massive increase in the Church’s steel output over the last year or so hadn’t done anything to reduce its productivity.

  At the moment, those foundries were producing almost seven hundred pieces of artillery—split between field guns, all of them rifled now, and angle-guns—every single month. And while they were doing that, they and the manufactories they served were also simultaneously producing Brother Lynkyn’s infernal rocket launchers in indecent numbers. Not to mention around eighty of the new, heavy coast defense guns each month.

  The Army of Glacierheart and the Army of the Seridahn had lost their entire artillery parks in the previous year’s fighting, but the Mighty Host of God and the Archangels’ artillery hadn’t even been touched yet, and the majority of its existing smoothbore field guns had been sent back to foundries in the Border States to be banded with wrought iron and rifled. Those were almost all back at the front already, and the last of them would have returned to Lord of Foot Zhyngbau long before spring. They were inferior to the cast steel guns emerging from the new and upgraded Church foundries. For that matter, they were inferior to the Fultyn Rifles already in service, but there were a lot of them, and Zhyngbau and Rainbow Waters had given careful thought to how they could be best used when they were withdrawn from frontline service in favor of the newer weapons.

  The one bright spot on that front was that Allayn Maigwair seemed to have dropped a stitch—unusually, for him—in the relatively low priority he’d assigned to putting the new Church-designed mortars into production. That was a mixed blessing, since most of the capacity which might have gone into them had been diverted into the rocket program, instead, but at least it meant the Mighty Host and the newly raised Army of God divisions would have far fewer of them, proportionately, than Charis or Siddarmark. That would hurt them badly once the fighting turned mobile again, since even the best field gun was less portable than a mortar. On the other hand, perhaps it hadn’t been as much of an oversight as Green Valley might like to think, since Rainbow Waters had also spent so much of the time he’d bee
n given rethinking his entire strategy. He’d gone right on stockpiling supplies at Lake City—and, even more so in some ways, in strategically dispersed depots at other points behind his front line—but he’d clearly decided not to take the offensive during the coming summer after all. He’d been careful to avoid explaining his new thinking to Zhaspahr Clyntahn, but even a cursory look at his fortifications and deployment indicated that he intended to fight from fortified positions and allow the Allies to pay the attacker’s price whenever possible. In that sort of fighting, rocket launchers—especially massed rocket launchers—would probably be much more valuable to the defenders than mortars might have been.

  Whatever Rainbow Waters might not have spelled out in his dispatches to Zion, Maigwair, at least, seemed to have realized his intentions quite clearly … which probably explained the captain general’s production and procurement choices.

  But whether Maigwair’s decision had been a mistake or not, the unhappy truth was that despite Charis’ vastly superior productivity per man-hour, the Church’s artillery would substantially outnumber that of the Allied field armies in the spring. Their guns wouldn’t be as good, they wouldn’t be as mobile, a far higher percentage of them would be converted smoothbores, and the cast iron Fultyn Rifles, especially, would be much more prone to bursting when fired than the Allies’ steel and wire wound guns, but there’d be hell’s own number of them.

  There was some good news on that front, though. In the short term, matters in the Gulf of Dohlar were about to take a distinctly downward trend for Mother Church. But far more dangerous for the the Group of Four’s long-term hopes, the Church of God Awaiting was straining every sinew to the breaking point to achieve its current production miracle.

  The Temple had already lost all of the Kingdom of Dohlar’s not inconsiderable production capacity, given Dohlar’s desperate need to reequip the troops facing the Army of Thesmar. The need to confront the Charisian naval offensive everyone in Gorath knew had to be coming was a major factor, as well. But the diversion of Dohlaran attention—and weapons production—was scarcely the only consequence of that impending naval offensive.

  Even after the Battle of the Kaudzhu Narrows, Earl Sharpfield’s cruisers had managed to effectively shut down all Church shipping across the western third of the Gulf, and less than half the Church’s foundries and manufactories were located north of the Gulf, in the Temple Lands and North Harchong. All the rest of them were in South Harchong, and every gun, every rocket, every rifle or grenade produced in those foundries had to make it to the front.

  And that meant they had to travel by water.

  For the moment, galleons from Shwei Bay could still make the crossing to the Malansath Bight’s Fairstock Bay or Tahlryn Bay, where cargoes could be barged upriver to the Hayzor-Westborne Canal. The light cruisers operating out of Talisman Island took a toll of that shipping, but until Baron Sarmouth was further reinforced, he could use only his light units for that purpose. The galleons had to stay closer to home, protecting against a possible sudden pounce by the Dohlarans’ heavily reinforced Western Squadron from its base on Saram Bay.

  Unfortunately, the RDN had learned a lot about convoy protection from the Charisian Navy, and Caitahno Raisahndo, the Western Squadron’s new CO, had put those lessons to good effect east of Jack’s Land Island. At the moment, he was operating what amounted to a shuttle service of escorting galleons over the five hundred miles between the Shweimouth and the northern end of Whale Passage, which meant as much seventy or eighty percent of the cargo which had used that route before Sharpfield retook Claw Island was making it through. And if those galleons sailed another nine hundred miles or so, to Mahrglys on the Gulf of Tanshar, their cargoes could be barged up the Tanshar River to the Bédard Canal and from there straight to the southern Border States, which was by far the fastest way to deliver it to the Church’s field armies.

  For now, those three routes were carrying an enormous flow of munitions, but given what Green Valley knew would be happening shortly, that shipping would soon require another route. It damned well wasn’t going to be sailing through the middle of the Gulf of Dohlar anymore, at any rate!

  The inland canals from south Shwei Bay to Hankey Sound would compensate for some of that lost capacity, at least as long as the Dohlaran Navy could keep the eastern end of the Gulf open. But not even Safeholdian canals really compared to the cargo capacity of blue water transport, and if Hankey Sound should somehow happen to be cut off from the northern portions of East and West Haven in the same fashion as Shwei Bay …

  A lot of those new guns and rockets will never make it to Rainbow Waters or the Army of God, Green Valley reflected. Unfortunately, given the sheer numbers we’re talking about—and the fact that Sharpfield and Dunkyn aren’t going to be able to shut the Gulf down tomorrow morning—a lot of them are going to make it. It’ll be a hell of a lot better than it might’ve been, though!

  That would help—help a lot—in the upcoming campaign, and the truth was that the Allies didn’t actually need to repeat their battlefield successes on the same scale as the previous two years. Victories were needed, yes, but the Church simply couldn’t sustain its current level of production indefinitely. Even Rhobair Duchairn’s coffers would inevitably run dry and the permanent isolation of South Harchong from the north would cut off any future weapons production from that source for the Mighty Host.

  All of which meant there was no way the Temple would be able to replace losses on anything remotely like last year’s scale a second time. The bad news was that it was up to the Imperial Charisian Army and the Republic of Siddarmark Army to inflict those losses, and Rainbow Waters wasn’t cooperating.

  That’s why they call the other side “the enemy,” Kynt, Green Valley thought sardonically. Why, oh why can’t all of their field commanders be as stupid as Kaitswyrth or Duke Harless? Or even only as smart as Nybar or Wyrshym? But no!

  Rainbow Waters was as determined to avoid experiencing blood and destruction as the Allies were to visit them upon him. He had entirely too cool and calculating a brain with which to do that avoiding, too, and Carl Mannerheim would have strongly approved of his latest brainstorm. What Green Valley had just finished viewing was only the latest in several full-scale field experiments the Harchongian had authorized. He knew he couldn’t match the full capability of the Allies’ new-model artillery, but he was beginning to receive enough heavy guns of his own to let him at least approximate a Charisian-style bombardment, and he’d held many of them near his headquarters in Lake City to keep them concentrated while he experimented not simply with the best way to use them but the best way to defend against them.

  Captain of Horse Rungwyn had built a fortified “line” a mile wide and three miles deep, and then Lord of Foot Zhyngbau had done his dead level best to blow it up again. Constructing something like that in the early stages of a northern winter had been no picnic, even for Harchongese serfs accustomed to a still harsher climate, but Rungwyn had persevered.

  In a lot of ways, Rungwyn reminded Green Valley of Admiral Sir Ahlfryd Hyndryk, the Baron of Seamount, except that Rungwyn had possessed no military experience before the Harchong Empire raised the Mighty Host of God and the Archangels. He was a civilian engineer, and a very good one. That was one reason Rainbow Waters had selected him for his current position. Another was the fact that he was almost as smart as, if thankfully less innovative than, Seamount, and his commoner background left him blissfully unhampered by aristocratic prejudices. But the fact that he had absolutely no training as a military engineer was perhaps his most important qualification, since it meant he’d had so much less to unlearn.

  The IHA’s engineers, like every other Harchongian, were the best, most effective practitioners of their art (whatever that art might happen to be) in the entire world. They knew that, whether anyone else did or not. The fact that they had exactly zero experience with the new-model tactics and weapons Charis had introduced was a mere bagatelle. Certainly those newfangled to
ys were no reason to panic or allow themselves to be stampeded into abandoning the tried-and-true techniques they knew worked!

  It was possible that existing senior officers could have been taught better, but it was unlikely it could have been accomplished in time to save the Mighty Host from disaster. So Rainbow Waters, with a directness Alexander the Great could only have envied, had cut his own Gordian Knot with a blade named Rungwyn. It hadn’t made the captain of horse any friends. In fact, he was as well aware as Rainbow Waters of the innumerable enemies he’d made. Unfortunately for the Allies, he was just as focused on winning the jihad as the Mighty Host’s CO, and he’d already moved his family to Shwei Province in the South Harchong Empire. He liked the climate better there … in more ways than one, and many of the merchant and banking families of Southern Harchong were already floating tentative post-jihad employment offers in his direction.

  In the meantime, however, he’d approached the question of new-model fortifications with a completely open mind, and the results promised to be extremely painful. Good as current Charisian artillery was, it had yet to approach the effectiveness of the TNT-filled shells of Earth’s twentieth-century wars. Sahndrah Lywys’ version of TNT might change that, but not in the next few months. Pilot lots had already been completed at the Delthak Works’ new satellite facility, and the new explosive—designated “Composition D” after the site of its development—had been tested very enthusiastically by Sir Ahlfryd Hyndryk at his Helen Island proving grounds, but the new explosive wouldn’t achieve true volume production until late spring or early summer. That meant all of the artillery shells available when the upcoming campaigns began would still be charged with black powder, and black powder—even the current Charisian “prismatic” powder—was an anemic explosive compared to something like dynamite or TNT. And, unfortunately, some of Rungwyn’s efforts would have been a serious challenge even for the massive artillery bombardments of 1916 and 1917.