Off Armageddon Reef

by David Weber

  "Yes, it can." Merlin nodded, then stroked his mustachios again. "In fact, I just had another thought. One that would probably increase your rate of fire even more."

  "What sort of thought?" Seamount's eyes narrowed into hawk-like intensity.

  "Well," Merlin said slowly, frowning as he obviously worked through the implications himself, "you've always loaded each round using ladles of loose powder, haven't you?"

  Seamount nodded quickly with an "of-course-we-have" sort of expression, and Merlin shrugged.

  "Well," he said again, "suppose you were to pre-measure the charge for each shot? You could sew each charge into a cloth bag. Then you could just ram the bag home each time you load. And if the bag's weave was loose enough, the primer would burn a hole through the cloth and ignite the main charge."

  "Langhorne!" Seamount muttered. He closed his eyes for a moment, thinking hard, then began to nod. Slowly, at first, then faster and harder.

  "You're absolutely right!" he said, reopening his eyes, still nodding. "I'll bet we could at least double—probably triple—our rate of fire if we did that! And—" His nodding stopped abruptly. "—I don't see any reason we couldn't do the same thing for our field artillery. Or even—Langhorne! We could come up with a way for musketeers with this new 'flintlock' of yours to do the same kind of thing instead of using powderhorns!"

  Merlin blinked in apparent astonishment. And, truth be told, he was just a little astonished. He'd known Baron Seamount had a first-class brain, but he was delighted by how quickly the naval officer was grappling with the new possibilities. The "seijin" had hoped introducing the basic concepts would produce this sort of synergy, but he hadn't expected even Seamount to grab them and run this quickly.

  On the other hand, he reminded himself, one reason the Charisians are so tough at sea is that they've invented the concept of a professional navy. Everybody else still insists on sticking army officers—preferably nobly born ones, whether they have any brains are not—aboard a ship to command it in battle. The professional sailors are only along to steer the thing where their landlubber "commanders" tell them to go; aside from that, they're supposed to keep their big mouths shut. But not in Charis. I wonder if Seamount really realizes just how big an advantage that gives his people?

  The professional naval officer in question turned to look at the diagrams chalked on one wall of his office. That entire wall was paneled in slabs of slate, turning it into one huge blackboard, and when they'd first entered the office, it had been covered by half a dozen sketches and jotted reminders to himself. But Seamount had swept them impatiently away and begun creating new ones with sharp, crisp strokes of his chalk as they spoke. Now he considered those newly created sketches and notes and shook his head slowly.

  "Some of our officers are going to resist all this, you know, Seijin," he said.

  "Why do you say that?"

  "Seijin Merlin," Seamount replied with something trapped halfway between a snort and a chuckle, "you've been very tactful this afternoon. I'm fairly confident, though, that most of my own brilliant notions had already occurred to you before we began."

  Merlin felt his face smooth into momentary, betraying non-expression, and the Charisian laughed.

  "That wasn't a complaint," he said. "And while I have my own suspicions about just why you might prefer for us to 'figure it all out' for ourselves, I'm not going to worry about confirming them, either. But when you take all of this together—the new powder, these 'trunnions' of yours, the new gun carriages, this idea of premeasured charges, the shorter barrel length—it's going to stand every established notion of how naval battles are fought on its head. I haven't had time to consider all of it yet, of course, but one thing is obvious; every war galley in the Navy just became useless."

  "I don't know if I'd go quite that far," Merlin said cautiously, but Seamount shook his head again, this time crisply, decisively.

  "It won't work with galleys," he said, and his chalk rapped on slate with tack-hammer sharpness as he tapped the rough schematic of the new-style gun carriage with it. "We're going to have to come up with something else, and a whole new set of tactics and tactical formations. At the moment, the only real possibility I see is some development of the galleon, even though Langhorne knows we don't have many of them to play with! I suspect—" He gave Merlin another sharp-eyed glance. "—that you and Sir Dustyn are going to be discussing that shortly. But it's obvious a galley simply doesn't have anyplace to put enough guns, not if we can design and mount cannon that fire as quickly as I think we'll be able to fire now. They'll have to be mounted along the broadside of the ship, not just in the bowcastle and sterncastle, and you can't do that in a galley. The rowers would be in the way. And they don't have the loadbearing capability for that much weight of metal."

  "But unless there's a fairly strong wind, a galley is faster than a sailing ship, and galleys are almost always more maneuverable," Merlin pointed out. "And all of those rowers are more Marines when it comes to the boarding melee."

  "Doesn't matter," Seamount said almost brusquely. "As long as the sailing ship has enough way on her to keep her broadside pointed at the galley, no galley will survive to board her. Not with a dozen or so heavy cannon firing round shot straight into the galley's teeth, anyway! And battles between cannon-armed ships won't be settled by boarding most of the time, either. Oh," he waved his maimed hand, "it'll probably happen from time to time, anyway, but usually?" He shook his head again, sharply. "Usually, the business will be settled one way or the other well before anyone gets close enough to board."

  Merlin looked at him for a moment, then tossed his head in a gesture of agreement.

  Although, he thought, Seamount may just be getting a bit ahead of himself. There were plenty of boarding actions during the canvas-and-cannon era on Old Earth. Still, he's headed in the right direction. And he's right that the old-fashioned land-battle-at-sea is about to become a thing of the past.

  "I see what you mean," he said aloud. "And, you're right. I had realized we'd need to come up with a new design for warships with the new guns even before you and I started talking. That's one reason I was going to suggest you sit in with Sir Dustyn and me when we begin talking. You've undoubtedly got a better appreciation of how things are going to have to change than I do, and we might as well get it right from the beginning."

  "I certainly agree with that." Seamount nodded emphatically. "And I imagine Sir Dustyn is going to explain to me why I can't build the ship I'd really like to. Just putting this much weight onto its decks is bound to create all sorts of problems. And even after he and I—and you, of course, Seijin—come to some sort of compromise agreement on that, we're going to have to figure out how to sell it to the rest of His Majesty's officers, as well."

  "And, just to make your life even a little bit more complicated," Merlin said with a grin, "you're going to have to figure out how to convince them without letting Nahrmahn and Hektor realize what's coming."

  "Oh, thank you, Seijin Merlin!"

  "Don't mention it. But now, I believe, it's time for my first conversation with Master Howsmyn and Master Mychail. We've got quite a few things to discuss, including the best way to make your new cannon. After that, I'm supposed to meet with Sir Dustyn for the first time about three hours from now, and we'll have several other things to discuss, in addition to your new warship design. So, if I might suggest, perhaps I should leave you to consider exactly what ingredients you want incorporated into it while I go and discuss those other things with Master Howsmyn, Master Mychail, and him. Could you join us in the Citadel in, perhaps, four hours or so?"

  "I'll be there," Seamount promised, and turned his rapt attention back to the chalk diagrams as Merlin quietly left the office.

  * * *

  "I can see what you've got in mind, Seijin Merlin," Ehdwyrd Howsmyn said, sitting back from the conference table and gazing at the side-by-side pencil sketches. "And I imagine Sir Ahlfryd was drooling by the time you showed him these 'trunnions' o
f yours."

  He reached out and tapped the closer of the two drawings with an index finger. It showed one of the new, modified artillery pieces Merlin was proposing. There were several differences between it and the standard type currently carried aboard the Royal Charisian Navy's galleys, but the most significant one was the way the gun itself was mounted.

  Current cannon were basically simply huge muskets—a hollow tube of metal, tightly affixed to a long, straight, heavy wooden timber by metal bands. When the gun was fired, the timber recoiled across the deck until the combination of friction and the heavy tackle anchoring the gun to the gunport through which it fired brought it to a halt. The crew then reloaded and dragged the massive timber back into position by sheer brute strength.

  There was no way to elevate or depress the gun's point of aim, dragging the ponderous timber across the deck required a lot of muscle power (at least if the gun was heavy enough to actually damage another ship's hull), and even a well-trained gun crew did well to get off a single shot every five minutes or so.

  But the new piece Merlin had sketched had something called "trunnions," which were no more than cylindrical protrusions cast into the barrel and set at right angles to the gun's bore. They were long enough and thick enough to support the gun's weight, and they fitted into cutouts in the "gun carriage"—the wheeled gun carriage—which went under the piece. It was a ridiculously simple concept, Howsmyn reflected, but the implications were huge. The gun pivoted up and down on the "trunnions," which meant it could be elevated or depressed with ludicrous ease. The carriage's wheels (or "trucks," as Merlin insisted upon calling them for some reason), meant it could be brought back to battery far more quickly—and with a smaller gun crew for a given weight of weapon. And because of all that, and the fact that the pieces were so much shorter and handier, the rate of fire had to go up hugely.

  "The problem, as I see it," the foundry owner continued, "is twofold. First, we're going to need a lot of these guns of yours. It won't do us much good to have two or three ships armed with them if the rest of the fleet isn't, and the whole point is to put enough of them aboard each ship to make that ship's weight of fire decisive. That means we're going to need more bronze than anyone's ever needed before, and somebody's going to have to mine and smelt the stuff. Either that, or we're going to have to figure out how to make them out of iron, and that's a much riskier proposition. But, second, even if we get our hands on the metal, just casting and boring the guns is going to take time—lots of time—and be sort of hard to conceal from someone like Hektor's eyes."

  "I agree those are going to be problems, Ehdwyrd," Mychail said, leaning back in his own chair and tapping his front teeth with the knuckle of his right index finger. "I don't think they're insurmountable ones, though. Not if His Majesty's prepared to invest enough gold in the project, at any rate."

  "Doing it in secret?" Howsmyn shook his head. "We don't have enough capacity here at Helen for half the guns Sir Ahlfryd's going to want, Raiyan! I know we could increase it, but we're going to need hundreds of workers to produce as many new guns as we're going to require. And even if we had those, I don't even know if there's enough space here at King's Harbor for the facilities we'll need in the long term."

  "Agreed." Mychail nodded. "On the other hand, what about Delthak?"

  Howsmyn started to shake his head, then paused with an arrested expression.

  "There's nothing there yet," he said after a moment, and Mychail shrugged.

  "And your point is?" The older man stopped tapping his teeth and jabbed his index finger at Merlin's sketches. "You just said we might need to consider iron guns. And that we'd have to expand the capacity here at Helen, assuming there were enough space for it, which there isn't. How much harder would it be to build the capacity from scratch somewhere else? And you certainly planned to do exactly that when you bought the land up there in the first place, didn't you?"

  "Well, yes," Howsmyn said slowly, then glanced at Merlin. "Just how freely does His Majesty intend to spend in this effort, Seijin Merlin?"

  "He hasn't told me that," Merlin replied. "I don't know if he's discussed it with Prince Cayleb yet, either, but he may well have. My impression is that he regards all of these projects as critical, but the treasury isn't exactly bottomless. May I ask why?"

  "Raiyan has just reminded me about an investment of mine over near Big Tirian. I picked up quite a bit of land from Earl High Rock a few years go. It's near Delthak, right on the river, and High Rock's been trying to get someone to develop the iron deposits on the other side of the river." The foundry owner shrugged. "It's an excellent location, in a lot of ways, but there aren't many people in the area—no labor force to recruit from. And Delthak's a tiny little village, not much more than a wide, muddy spot in the road. I've got a smallish operation in place there, but it's not much yet. I've had to import my entire workforce, and we'd have to start essentially from scratch to develop it further."

  "But the very fact that there aren't many people there already might work for us from the secrecy aspect," Merlin said thoughtfully.

  "That's what Raiyan had in mind," Howsmyn agreed. "But at this particular moment, there's no real reason or need to develop the property further." He grimaced. "Trade's down generally since the dispute over the Hanth succession started making people jittery. I've got plenty of unused capacity in my Tellesberg foundries."

  "That may be about to change, even without the new artillery," Merlin told him. Howsmyn sat a bit straighter in his chair, eyebrows arching, and Merlin snorted.

  "Charis is about to experience a period of rapidly growing trade, I suspect," he said. "In fact, Master Mychail, you're going to be a major part of that."

  "I am, am I?" Mychail chuckled and crossed his legs. "I admit, I like the sound of that, Seijin Merlin. I've always been partial to that nice, musical sound gold coins make falling into my purse."

  "There are a couple of new machines I'm hoping you'll introduce for us," Merlin told him. "One is called the 'cotton gin,' and another is called the 'spinning jenny.'-"

  "And what do these machines do?" Mychail asked.

  "The first one removes the seeds from raw cotton and cotton silk without requiring people to pick them out by hand. The 'spinning jenny' is basically a spinning wheel set up with multiple spindles, so one person can spin several yarns at the same time," Merlin said calmly.

  Mychail's legs uncrossed, and Merlin smiled as the merchant leaned forward in his chair, his eyes suddenly intent.

  "You can separate the seeds without hand labor?" the Charisian asked, and Merlin nodded. "What sort of capacity are you talking about?" Mychail pressed. "And could it separate the seeds from steel thistle?"

  "I don't really know the answer to either of those questions," Merlin admitted. "I've never actually built one, or seen one, for that matter. I know the principles around which it works, though, and on the basis of what I do know, I can't see any reason why it shouldn't work for steel thistle, as well."

  Mychail pursed his lips, his mind racing, and Merlin hid a smile. Cotton silk was very similar to terrestrial cotton, except that the native Safeholdian plant produced a fabric which was even lighter and stronger than cotton and was widely used for clothing in climates like Charis'. It was expensive, because removing its seeds was even harder than removing them from regular cotton, yet Safehold's weavers had worked with it from the very beginning of the colony.

  The potentials of steel thistle, another Safeholdian plant, on the other hand, had always tempted and frustrated local textile makers in almost equal measure. Steel thistle looked a lot like branching bamboo, with the same "segmented" looking trunks, and it grew even more quickly than the terrestrial plant. It also produced seed pods which were filled with very fine, very strong fibers which could be woven into a fabric even stronger than silk. Indeed, stronger than anything Old Earth's humanity had been able to produce before the days of synthetic fibers.

  Unfortunately, the pods also contained very small, very
spiny seeds. They were a nightmare to extract by hand, and the tiny wounds the seeds' spines inflicted had a nasty habit of turning septic. That was why no one outside Harchong and the Desnairian Empire, which practiced what was for all intents and purposes slave labor, had ever managed to produce useful quantities of woven steel thistle. It also explained the stuff's incredible cost. So if this cotton gin could remove its seeds without the need for hand labor . . .

  "Given all of your own experience," Merlin continued, and Mychail blinked and refocused on him, "I'm sure you'll be able to develop a far more effective version of it than I could. And it occurs to me that Master Howsmyn would make an excellent partner for you. The two of you are already accustomed to working together, and his foundries already use a lot of water power. His master mechanics could undoubtedly come up with a way to power cotton gins and spinning jennies the same way . . . and all of his equipment has already been approved by the Church."

  Mychail and Howsmyn looked at one another, their eyes brightly speculative, and Merlin smiled.

  "While you're thinking about that," he added, "why don't the two of you—and Master Howsmyn's artificers—spend some time thinking about how to design a powered loom, as well? Once you get the cotton gin and spinning jenny up and running, you'll have yarn coming out of your ears. Besides, the Navy's going to need a lot more sail cloth. And I imagine a powered loom would let you manufacture canvas with a tighter weave, don't you think, Master Mychail?"