Like a Mighty Army

by David Weber

  “It sounds like an audacious plan, Your Grace,” he said finally. “Until I’ve actually seen the ground and the heretics’ fortifications, I can’t form an opinion about its practicality, and I’d like to get some of my own artillerists’ views on it, as well. I’d prefer to say neither yes nor no until I’ve had the opportunity to do those things, but you’re quite right about how badly outnumbered they are, and it’s true they’ve never taken fire from angle-guns themselves. Perhaps it’s time we corrected that minor fact.”

  .IX.

  Gorath, Kingdom of Dohlar

  “So, Lieutenant. What do you have for us today?” the Earl of Thirsk inquired as he walked into Lieutenant Dynnys Zhwaigair’s workshop, accompanied by Bishop Staiphan Maik and followed by Commander Ahlvyn Khapahr.

  The workshop was well lit, if scarcely luxurious. Thirsk had commandeered the ground floor of a dockside warehouse for Zhwaigair’s work, and if its appointments were on the spartan side, it had several other recommendations. For one thing, it was actually inside the Royal Dohlaran Navy’s largest dockyard, conveniently placed for Thirsk, as that navy’s commander, to visit at need. It was also conveniently placed for Zhwaigair to supervise the six armored “screw-galleys” being hastily built under his direction in that same dockyard. And because it was inside the dockyard’s perimeter, it was also easily guarded.

  Truth be told, that consideration was the most important of all, Thirsk thought sourly. It was vital to keep any Charisian spies from figuring out what Zhwaigair was up to … and equally important to keep any fanatic Temple Loyalists from figuring out the same thing. Zhwaigair’s explorations were sanctioned by Mother Church, in the person of Bishop Staiphan and a specific writ of attestation from Father Ahbsahlahn Kharmych, Gorath’s intendant. Not, perhaps, happily in Father Ahbsahlahn’s case (he was an old-school Schuelerite who’d never been happy with the need to adapt to the heretics’ new weapons), but sanctioned, nonetheless. That wouldn’t prevent someone among the more ardent against the Reformist heresy and the blasphemous Charisian advances from taking it into his head to murder the lieutenant and burn his workshop to the ground before it could further poison the spiritual health of Dohlar.

  Which is also the reason Ahlvyn and I put so much thought into picking the Marines assigned to guard the place, the earl reminded himself more than a little bitterly as Zhwaigair turned from the long worktable and came to attention. Shan-wei’s sides must ache from laughter when I have to worry about whether or not my own Marines will be so “ardent” they decide to kill one of the men the Jihad most needs! And isn’t it interesting that Kharmych signed the writ, not Clyntahn? I have to wonder if the Grand Inquisitor’s keeping the hem of his cassock clear so no one can accuse him of having been hypocritical when he decides he doesn’t need young Dynnys anymore and has him eliminated.

  If not for the fact that Clyntahn clearly didn’t worry his head over charges of hypocrisy, Thirsk would’ve been certain that was why the attestation had come from Kharmych. As it was, he couldn’t quite decide it wasn’t his paranoia speaking.

  Of course, even a paranoiac can really have enemies, can’t he?

  “My Lord,” the very tall, fair-haired lieutenant greeted the earl. “My Lord Bishop.” He bowed respectfully to Maik before bending to kiss the cleric’s ring, then saluted Khapahr.

  “Good morning, my son.” Maik smiled. The bishop was in his fifties, with a weakness for sweetbreads which accounted for the increased thickening of his midsection. And despite the fact that he was a Schuelerite in the middle of the Jihad, he was also a warmhearted and cheerful man. “I see you’ve been busy.”

  “I have, My Lord.”

  Zhwaigair stepped back, waving at the worktable, and Thirsk realized it was actually four very large tables which had been pushed together to make a single enormous platform. He stepped up to it with the bishop, and his eyebrows rose as he looked at the pieces heaped in neatly segregated stacks on its surface. It looked as if someone had completely disassembled four of the heretics’ breech-loading rifles.

  “Was it really necessary to take four of them apart to figure out how one of them worked, Lieutenant?” he asked a bit whimsically.

  “Not to figure out how they worked, My Lord, but I did learn quite a few other interesting things about them in the process.”

  Thirsk nodded. He’d hoped that would be the case, and he’d lobbied hard to have the captured heretical weapons Vicar Allayn had sent to Dohlar handed over to Zhwaigair. Shain Hauwyl, the Duke of Salthar, had been disinclined to grant the request for several reasons. One was the hostility of Thirsk’s enemies within the Royal Dohlaran Army, which became only more pronounced every time it turned out he’d been right and they’d been wrong, but the earl suspected that was secondary in this instance. It was more likely that Salthar—a reasonably intelligent fellow, if getting on in years, but still wedded to old-style army tactics—simply hadn’t grasped how critical it was for Dohlar to find a way to match the Charisians’ capabilities. He’d seen no reason for anyone to fiddle around with dangerous, heretical, potentially proscribed devices when the last thing anyone wanted was to bring the fury of Schueler or Jwo-jeng down on the Kingdom of Dohlar for apostasy. In the end, it had taken a direct order from Father Ahbsahlahn to change his mind, and even that had been issued only after Bishop Staiphan had pestered the intendant for more than a five-day.

  “What sort of ‘interesting things’?” the earl asked now.

  “Allow me to demonstrate, if you will, My Lord?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then if you and Bishop Staiphan will stand to one side—it would never do to get either of you oily—I’ll ask Ahlvyn to assist me.”

  “I doubt Paiair would be too furious at having to clean a little oil out of my tunic,” Thirsk observed, but he also smiled and obeyed the polite command. He found a workbench whose surface was more or less clear and hitched himself up to sit on it. He was short enough his toes didn’t quite touch the floor, but he was used to that. The sunlight pouring in through the windows behind him illuminated the piles of rifle parts, and he folded his arms to wait patiently.

  “Now, Ahlvyn,” Zhwaigair said. “These piles”—he waved at the disassembled rifles—“are arranged in the order I’m going to need. What I want you to do is to pick a piece at random from each pile when I ask for it. Clear?”

  “Clear,” Khapahr agreed.

  “Then let’s get started. If you’d hand me a lock plate, please?”

  The commander poked around in the indicated stack for a moment, then selected a lock plate and passed it across. Zhwaigair took it, laid it on the tabletop, and pointed at the next stack.

  “I need a cock now.”

  Thirsk and Maik watched as Khapahr selected a part from each pile, handing each in turn to Zhwaigair until the taller lieutenant had all the bits and pieces, including the stock, for one of the Charisian rifles laid out in front of him. Then Zhwaigair opened his toolbox and went to work. His nimble, dexterous fingers moved as confidently as if he’d manufactured all the parts himself, and Thirsk was fascinated as he watched the weapon come together. It took a remarkably brief period for Zhwaigair to complete the task. Then he turned from the tabletop, holding the rifle in his hands.

  “And now, My Lord, would you do the honors?”

  He passed the weapon to Thirsk, who slid off the workbench to take it and stood looking quizzically back at him.

  “Obviously it’s unloaded, My Lord, but would you do me the favor of dry firing it?”

  Thirsk gazed at him a moment longer, then shrugged. He’d seen one of the rifles demonstrated the day they were delivered to Zhwaigair, and he turned the lever that dropped the square, massive breechblock down and back through the guides. It moved smoothly, and he raised the rifle high enough to peer into the opened breech and make certain it was truly unloaded. He closed the breech again, giving the lever a small extra pull to be sure it was seated properly, then cocked the hammer. It came back smoothl
y, clicking as it locked in the fully cocked position, and he raised the rifle to his shoulder, making certain the muzzle was pointed in a safe direction, and squeezed the trigger. There was more slack in the trigger than in any of his hunting weapons, but that was to be expected, since each of those rifles was the work of Hahndyl Metzygyr, a master gunsmith who specialized in sporting weapons for the wealthy. A Metzygyr firearm had been an individual work of art, beautiful to behold, even before the heretics introduced the flintlock to Safehold, and the actions on his flintlocks were as much precision instruments as any chronometer. Despite the long pull, the breechloader’s trigger broke surprisingly cleanly and crisply, however, and the hammer snapped down on the nipple which should have worn one of the heretics’ “priming caps.”

  He lowered the rifle and turned back to Zhwaigair, both eyebrows raised.

  “It functioned properly and smoothly, My Lord,” the lieutenant said.

  “Of course it did, Lieutenant.” Thirsk cocked his head. “I know you well enough by now to realize you really do have a point, but could we get to the part where you make it?”

  “Of course, My Lord. My point is that the rifle in your hands was assembled from randomly chosen parts. I simply took the ones Ahlvyn picked out and put them together, without a single bit of adjustment or filing to fit.”

  “And?” Thirsk felt comprehension hovering just beyond his grasp as he handed the rifle to Khapahr.

  “And no gunsmith in the world could do that with one of our Army’s rifles, My Lord,” Zhwaigair said flatly. “It’s impossible. Our rifles are built in individual shops by journeymen and apprentices overseen by master gunsmiths. It might be possible to interchange parts between rifles made in the same shop by the same workers, but even that would be extremely unlikely. The parts in all of these rifles—all of them, My Lord—are effectively identical. I’ve measured them very carefully and found some extremely small variations in size, but none of them are significant. And the heretics were kind enough to stamp each of these rifles—and the parts that go into it—with a number code. I’m not certain why they did that, but looking at the sequence of numbers and the proof marks, I can tell you this particular group of rifles didn’t just happen to come from the same master gunsmith and his assistants. Not unless they skipped ahead several hundred numbers between individual weapons, at any rate.”

  “Shan-wei,” Ahlvyn Khapahr murmured, and whether it was a curse or an explanation was more than Thirsk could have said.

  The earl looked at the bishop and saw the same consternation on Maik’s face. Then he returned his attention to Zhwaigair.

  “Your family’s been involved in the iron trade for a long time, Dynnys,” he said, abandoning formality in the face of the lieutenant’s revelations. “Do you have any idea how they managed this?”

  “Short of direct demonic intervention, you mean, my son?” Maik asked dryly. From another Schuelerite, the question would have been deadly serious, but Thirsk’s special intendant smiled crookedly when the earl glanced quickly at him. “I think we can assume this is the product of mortal men,” he continued, “although I have no more idea of how it was done than you do, Lywys.”

  “Neither do I, My Lord,” Zhwaigair admitted. “Oh, I can see some ways to approach the problem, but not on the scale the heretics obviously have. My uncle uses jigs—those are devices designed to lock a piece into place in such a fashion that it can be filed or smoothed or cut in only one way—to manufacture small parts, but his jigs are individually designed and built. No one else would have the same jigs and fixtures, so parts produced in one manufactory wouldn’t fit with parts produced in another manufactory, the way the heretics’ve accomplished here. And judging from the tool marks on some of these pieces, parts that would’ve been forged and filed in any manufactory I’m familiar with seem to’ve been stamped, instead. That indicates that the heretics are using a lot more powered machinery like trip-hammers and stamp mills than we are. And if I’m right about what they’re doing, none of the people actually producing these parts and putting them together are likely to be members of the Gunsmiths Guild, far less master gunsmiths! Given some time to think about it, my uncle could probably set up a shop to do a lot of the same things, but he has no more than a hundred workmen. I can’t even begin to estimate what his output might be if he followed the heretics’ example with powered machinery, but I can’t believe it would be anywhere near what the heretics’ve actually accomplished. They must have scores of manufactories that size producing these things, and that brings us right back to how that many different manufactories can produce parts which are interchangeable with parts from all the other manufactories. If nothing else, they’d all have to agree to use the same inches and feet … and then figure out how to do it!”

  Thirsk looked at Maik, and the bishop shrugged. Mother Church had already signed off on more innovations in the last three years than in the last three centuries. It was possible Zhaspahr Clyntahn might go so far as to permit the sort of changes Zhwaigair was describing. It was also possible he wouldn’t.

  “I understand what you’re saying, or I think I do, at least,” the earl said after a moment. “But surely we have far more gunsmiths in all of the realms loyal to Mother Church than the heretics do in Charis. Even granting that our rate of production will be lower, isn’t it possible our total production could still be higher than theirs?”

  “I can’t say, My Lord,” Zhwaigair replied honestly. “I’m inclined to think it probably could … as long as we stick to our existing rifle design rather than try to duplicate this one.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “My Lord, many of the parts in this rifle, and especially the breechblock and receiver, are clearly machined using powered tools we don’t have. Craftsmen like my uncle could probably create those tools, but first we’d have to design them, then build them, then get them distributed, and in the meantime, we’d be producing none of these weapons. I’d also guess—and it’s only a guess at this point, My Lord—that for each rifle of this type we built using our existing system of gunsmiths, we could build as many as ten or even fifteen of our present muzzle-loading rifles. That means each of them would cost ten or fifteen times as much, which I suspect would be a sufficiently serious problem by itself. But it also means we could arm only a tenth or a fifteenth as many of our men with them. And that assumes my off-the-cuff guess is accurate.

  “Not only that, but all of the metal parts in this rifle are steel, not iron. Our rifles use steel only for high-stress parts like springs, trigger guards, and things like that. We use iron barrels and lock plates, and we use brass in many of the low-stress parts, because steel is so expensive. I don’t see any reason why the heretics couldn’t’ve done the same thing, but they didn’t. And that suggests to me, My Lord, My Lord Bishop, that their steel production must be far, far in excess of our own. Of anything anyone ever imagined before. And I can also tell you, having worn down a brand-new file testing it, that it’s much better steel, much harder and tougher, than anything I’ve ever seen before.”

  Zhwaigair shook his head, his normally calm expression almost frightened.

  “Long before the Jihad, Charis was called ‘ironmaster to the world’ for good reason, My Lord. Charisian foundries produced more and better iron, wrought iron, and blackheart iron than anyone else. But not in the quantities this”—he tapped the steel barrel of the assembled rifle—“seems to imply.”

  “I see.”

  Thirsk glanced at Maik again, seeing an echo of his own bitter reflections in the bishop’s eyes. Zhwaigair was doing exactly what they needed him to do if Mother Church was to win the Jihad, yet if he expressed himself this frankly, even in a written report, to Zhaspahr Clyntahn and the Inquisition, the consequences for him could well be catastrophic.

  But it’s not his responsibility to be making those reports, is it? the earl asked himself. You’re his commanding officer. You’re the one who put him in this workshop to draw those conclusions, the o
ne who’s responsible for making someone—anyone—listen to you when you tell them the simple truth. And for dealing with the consequences of what happens when you do.

  He glanced at Khapahr from the corner of his eye, and the man who would have been called his chief of staff back on a planet named Terra returned his gaze calmly. Thirsk had hated involving Khapahr, but he’d discovered he couldn’t do it alone, and there were very few men he could trust to help with what had become the most important task in his life.

  It would help if I could tell the girls what Ahlvyn’s up to, but I can’t do that either. I don’t think any of them would balk if I could find a way to get them out of the Inquisition’s “protective custody,” but I can’t be certain of that. And then there are their husbands. And the minor fact that if I breathed a hint of any such thought to anyone and it got back to Kharmych or the Inquisition, we’d all be dead.

  He still didn’t know what he’d do if he could get his daughters out of Gorath to someplace where the Inquisition couldn’t make examples out of his family. Surely Mother Church and his kingdom had first claim on his loyalty! How could he even imagine rejecting that claim? But if the only way to win the Jihad, to preserve Mother Church and his kingdom, required him to do things for which he would stand condemned in the eyes of the Grand Inquisitor, did he truly have any choice but to reject that claim in the name of a greater loyalty?