Off Armageddon Reef

by David Weber

  "I find myself in agreement with Earl Mahndyr, My Lord," Black Water said to Sharpfield. "I'll confess that I myself would feel much more comfortable if we had some independent confirmation of this single report. Nonetheless, it seems to me we have to at least probe to see whether or not Haarahld's galleons are in company with the rest of his fleet.

  "If it turns out they are, our information is obviously in error. If it turns out they aren't, then I think Earl Mahndyr's suggestions will have considerable merit. While it's true the original plan for this campaign required us to wait for the arrival of the Tarotisian and Dohlaran squadrons, it's also true the reason we were waiting for them was to attain a decisive numerical superiority over the Charisians. If all we face is the eighty galleys of Haarahld's peacetime navy, then we have a decisive superiority at this moment."

  There was silence for a moment, and then, almost as if against his will, Sharpfield nodded slowly.

  VII

  Off Triton Head,

  Charis Sea

  "They are coming south, Your Majesty."

  Captain Tryvythyn gave King Haarahld a rather peculiar look. The sort, Haarahld reflected, which was normally reserved for prophets, madmen . . . or seijin.

  "Are they, indeed, Dynzyl?" he responded mildly, looking up from his lunch.

  "Yes, they are, and in considerable strength," his flag captain said. "According to Flash, it looks like their entire fleet, in fact."

  "I see."

  Haarahld picked up his wineglass and sipped, then wiped his lips with a snowy napkin.

  "Well, Dynzyl," he said then, "if they seem intent on offering battle, I suppose they have a reason to. We, on the other hand, do not."

  "Not an immediate reason, Your Majesty, no," Tryvythyn agreed. The emphasis on the adjective was slight, but unmistakable, and Haarahld smiled.

  "Dynzyl, Dynzyl!" The king shook his head. "I know giving ground against these . . . people goes against the grain. And I know Bryahn kicked their arses for them the last time they came this far south. But you and I both know they wouldn't be here if Black Water didn't feel fairly confident we wouldn't be doing that to them again. And whatever they may want, what we want is to continue to buy time until Cayleb returns."

  "True enough, Your Majesty," Tryvythyn conceded.

  He did not, Haarahld noticed, point out that no one in the Charisian fleet knew whether or not Cayleb was returning. The king felt a sudden, powerful temptation to tell his flag captain what he knew, but he suppressed it easily enough.

  "Pass the word to Bryahn," he directed instead. "Tell him to execute the plans we discussed yesterday."

  * * *

  "Well, this is unexpected," Duke Black Water commented, and Sir Kehvyn Myrgyn chuckled beside him.

  "I hadn't realized what a gift for understatement you have, Your Grace," the flag captain said, when Black Water looked at him, and the duke smiled. But then the smile faded, replaced by a thoughtful frown, as he considered the report.

  "South," he murmured, scratching the tip of his nose while the brisk northeasterly ruffled his hair. "Why south?"

  "It does seem peculiar, Your Grace," Myrgyn observed. "I would have expected him to fall back towards Rock Shoal Bay, if he was intent on avoiding action."

  "So would I," Black Water agreed.

  He cocked his head and clasped his hands behind him, standing by the starboard bulwark of Corisande's aftercastle, and rocked up and down on his toes for several seconds.

  "Whatever he's up to, Your Grace," Myrgyn offered, "it does look as if he wants to avoid a general engagement."

  "Which would appear to confirm the report that his galleons are somewhere else." Black Water nodded. "If all he has is eighty galleys, of course he doesn't want to fight our combined strength. But this business of falling back away from Rock Shoal Bay . . . That bothers me."

  "You think he's trying to draw us into some sort of ambush, Your Grace?"

  "An ambush by what?" Black Water asked. The frustration in his question wasn't directed at his flag captain, as Myrgyn understood perfectly, and the duke flung out one arm in a sweeping gesture at the long columns of allied galleys forging steadily southwest.

  "If our information's correct, he doesn't have anything he could 'ambush' us with! And if our information isn't correct, what point would be served by moving clear down into Darcos Sound before offering battle?"

  "Perhaps he's simply trying to avoid being trapped inside the Bay, Your Grace," Myrgyn suggested after a moment. Black Water looked at him, one eyebrow raised, and the flag captain shrugged.

  "We've always assumed the Charisians would fight to hold the bay, Your Grace. What if we were wrong? What if Haarahld's willing to let us have the bay, if that's what it takes to prevent us from pinning him down?"

  "In theory, if he did that, it would give us the opportunity to send a raiding force past Lock Island," Black Water said thoughtfully. "Would he run that risk?"

  "That depends on how great a risk it would be, doesn't it, Your Grace? If we got even a few galleys loose in Howell Bay, we could do a lot of damage. But if he has a few galleys of his own waiting there, or just on the other side of Lock Island, covering North Channel, we'd have to commit a much larger force if we hoped to break through successfully."

  "Which might give him the opportunity to come in behind our main force after we've weakened it by detaching a big enough squadron for the job," Black Water said, nodding slowly.

  "There's this, too, Your Grace," Myrgyn said. "If he's waiting for his galleons to come back from wherever they've been, he'll try to avoid a fight to the finish until they get here. And he won't want to be stuck in a pocket like Rock Shoal Bay if his son needs his help out in the Charis Sea."

  "I was thinking the same thing." Black Water frowned some more.

  "If he is waiting for Cayleb's return," he went on after a few seconds, "then perhaps the fact that he's falling back to the south indicates the direction from which he expects Cayleb to appear. The last thing he'd want would be for our complete fleet strength to be between him and Cayleb, where we'd have the best chance of defeating either of his two forces in isolation."

  "Unless he's thinking in terms of a converging attack," Myrgyn pointed out, and Black Water laughed harshly.

  "Sharpfield hates our guts, Kehvyn, but he's got a point about Haarahld and the sort of risks he's likely to take. Try to catch us between two widely separated fleets, each of them weaker than we are? When he can't even be certain when the other fleet is going to arrive?" Black Water shook his head. "Neither one of them would even know we were engaged with the other until after the battle was over!" He shook his head again, even more firmly. "No, that's the sort of overclever plan someone like Magwair might come up with. Haarahld's too good a seaman to try something that foolish."

  "I didn't say it was likely, Your Grace," Myrgyn pointed out. "I simply threw it out as one possibility."

  "I know." Black Water reached out and patted his flag captain on the shoulder in a rare public display of affection. "And I do think you have a valid point about the reasons he'd want to stay out of Rock Shoal Bay, especially if he is expecting Cayleb's return."

  "How far south to you think he'll go before standing and fighting?" Myrgyn asked.

  "Probably no further than Darcos Strait," Black Water replied after a moment. "Darcos Keep's nowhere near as good a base as Lock Island, but it would do in a pinch, at least for a while. And the passage between Darcos Island and Crown Cape is less than thirty miles wide at high water. At low water it's a lot narrower, and the safe channel's even narrower than that. He could fall back into the strait, and we'd play hell trying to follow him up."

  "But we could always circle around through Silver Strait and come up behind him," Myrgyn pointed out.

  "Not without splitting our own forces," Black Water countered. "We'd have to leave someone to keep him from simply heading north again, which would give him the opportunity to defeat one of our forces in isolation. Or that's what he
may be thinking, at least."

  "And what are you thinking, Your Grace?" Myrgyn asked, looking at him shrewdly.

  "I'm thinking that if he's foolish enough to let himself be trapped inside Darcos Strait, I'll go ahead and split my forces," Black Water replied. "If we drive him back into the narrows, then we can afford to reduce our forces north of the the strait, because we'll have the same narrow front to protect he does. Which means we can probably hold any attempt of his to break back out into the Sound with no more than a quarter or a third of our total strength while we send all the rest around behind him."

  "Do you really think he'll be that foolish, Your Grace?"

  "No, he probably won't. But I can always hope. In the meantime, it's the next best thing to six hundred miles to Darcos Island. At our present speed, that's almost a five-day. And however shy he's being right now, I think we can count on him to do his best to make our lives miserable between now and then. The next several days ought to be interesting.

  VIII

  HMS Royal Charis,

  Darcos Sound

  Haarahld of Charis stood on his flagship's aftercastle, gazing towards the eastern horizon, where summer lightning seemed to flash and blink through the darkness.

  It wasn't lightning, of course, and his jaw tightened as he wondered how many of his subjects were dying out there.

  Not many, if it's going according to plan, he told himself. Of course, it never does go "according to plan," does it?

  "Commodore Nylz knows his business, Your Majesty," Captain Tryvythyn murmured, and Haarahld turned to look at the flag captain.

  "Do I look that anxious?" he asked wryly, and Tryvythyn shrugged.

  "No, not really. But I've come to know you rather better than most, I think, Your Majesty."

  "That's certainly true," Haarahld agreed with a chuckle. "Still, you're right. And someone had to do it."

  "Exactly, Your Majesty," Tryvythyn agreed.

  The flag captain bowed slightly and turned away, allowing his king to return to his own thoughts. Which, Haarahld discovered, were somewhat lighter after Tryvythyn's intervention.

  The king drew a deep breath and made himself consider the last eleven days.

  Black Water was clearly determined to pin him down and destroy his fleet once and for all. To be honest, Haarahld was a bit surprised by the Corisandian's tenacity and the degree of tight control he seemed able to maintain over his composite fleet. After Haarahld had used the cover of night to slip his entire fleet around Black Water's right flank and break back north of the duke, Black Water had simply turned around and started following him back towards Rock Shoal Bay.

  He'd refused to spread his units in an effort to cast a wider net, which was what Haarahld had more than half-hoped he might do. Instead of offering up more isolated squadrons for the Charisians to snap up, however, Black Water had maintained his concentration—except for his scouting ships—and continued his dogged pursuit. Clearly he wanted a decisive battle, but, equally clearly, he wasn't prepared to court a defeat in detail in his efforts to get one.

  And despite all Haarahld's maneuvers, all the wiles and cunning he could bring to bear, the Corisandian had gradually closed the distance between their two fleets.

  Haarahld's galleys were individually bigger than their opponents, and better designed for open water. But that also meant they were at least marginally slower under oars at the best of times, and they'd been continually at sea for almost three months now, except for brief returns to port on a ship-by-ship basis to replenish their water tanks. Their bottoms had become foul, which was making them even slower.

  Under sail, that wasn't much of a problem, because they also had bigger, more powerful sails. But working to windward under oars, it was. Which was why Black Water's fleet had been less than twenty-five miles south of Haarahld's flagship at sundown.

  I've got to get back south of him again, where I can run on the wind, Haarahld told himself yet again, watching the gun flashes grow in intensity. But at least this should be the last time I need to.

  He wanted to go below, to the refuge of his cabin, away from that silent "heat lightning," but he couldn't. Commodore Kohdy Nylz was out there with his squadron, attacking a force many times his own strength, solely to convince Black Water that Haarahld was trying to break past him to the east, not to the west.

  The least the king who'd sent them out could do was stand here and watch.

  IX

  Galley Corisande,

  Darcos Sound

  The Duke of Black Water walked on deck after an abbreviated breakfast and looked sourly over the bulwark.

  Under normal circumstances, he conceded, the sight before him would have caused him considerable pleasure. Two big galleys lay on Corisande's port quarter. The nearer ship flew the gold-on-black standard of Charis under the white-on-orange of Corisande; the other flew the Charisian colors under the silver doomwhale and royal blue field of Chisholm. They were the first two important prizes Black Water's fleet had captured, and it was already obvious from the preliminary reports that there were some significant peculiarities about the way their guns were mounted.

  "Peculiar" or not, he thought grimly, they obviously work well enough, don't they?

  Capturing those two ships—and destroying a third—had cost him four of his own galleys. Actually, it had cost him six, but the damage to two of them was repairable. Of the other four, one had been sunk outright, and the other three had been reduced to such shattered wrecks that he'd ordered them burned himself, after taking off the survivors of their crews.

  And after all of that, almost two-thirds of the Charisian force had actually managed to disengage and run.

  Two-to-one losses, he reflected. And we'll probably never know why the third one caught fire and blew up, which means we can't exactly count on doing it again.

  He didn't much care for the implications. Of course, he had more than twice as many galleys as Haarahld, but having a dozen or so battered ships left after finishing off the last Charisian wasn't exactly likely to delight Prince Hektor.

  "Good morning, Your Grace."

  "Good morning, Kehvyn." He turned to face the flag captain, whose breeches were soaked to well above the waist. "Have you had an adventure this morning?" the duke asked mildly, raising one eyebrow.

  "I mistimed it when I jumped for the entry port ladder, Your Grace."

  Myrgyn grimaced humorously, and Black Water snorted, although it wasn't always funny, by any means. Mistiming the transfer from a small boat to the ladder-like battens fastened to a galley's side for the steep climb to its deck could have fatal consequences. More than one man had been crushed against the side of his own ship when an unanticipated wave slammed the boat he'd just left into him. Others had been washed off their perch by similar waves, sucked under the bilge, and drowned. Black Water had almost suffered that fate himself when he was a much younger man.

  "I'm glad to see you're no worse for wear," he told the flag captain, then jerked his head at the two prizes. "What do you make of them?"

  "I'm . . . impressed, Your Grace," Myrgyn said soberly. "And I understand what happened to Tanlyr Keep much better now. They're bigger than our ships, which I expected, of course. But those guns of theirs." The flag captain shook his head, his expression half-admiring and half-chagrined. "I don't know why no one else ever thought of it, Your Grace. Their broadside weapons are much shorter than our guns, and lighter—lots lighter. They're like sawed-off krakens mounted where only a falcon ought to be able to go. And all their guns have these . . . these pivot things on the sides of the barrel, almost like the sheaves in a block." Myrgyn's hands moved, as if trying to twist something invisible in the air in front of him. "It lets them actually elevate and depress their guns. And there's something different about their gun powder, too."

  "Different? Different how?"

  "It's like . . . grains, Your Grace. Grains of sand. Or maybe more like coarse-ground salt."

  "Hmmm." Black Water frowned, tryi
ng to visualize what Myrgyn was describing.

  "I found out how they're managing to fire that quickly, as well, Your Grace," Myrgyn told him, and the duke's eyes sharpened.

  "It's another thing I can't understand why nobody else ever thought of," the flag captain said. "They've simply sewn the charges for their guns into cloth bags. They ram the entire bag down the barrel with one shove, instead of using ladles. And they've got some sort of . . . thing mounted on the gun. It's like a little hammer with a piece of flint stuck onto it and a spring. They pull the hammer back, and when they're ready to fire, the spring snaps it down and strikes sparks onto the priming, instead of using slow match or an iron."