Off Armageddon Reef (48 page)

“Fire!” Clareyk barked, and twenty muskets exploded as one.

Lock Island's ears cringed, despite the fingers he'd thrust into them, and a choking cloud of powder smoke billowed up.

“First rank, reload!” he heard through the ringing in his ears. “Second rank, present!”

The first rank stepped back a pace, right hands already reaching for their cartridge boxes once again. The second rank stepped
forward
a pace at the same moment, so that the two lines essentially exchanged positions.

“Second rank, take aim!” the major snapped, and the new first rank's muskets rose to their shoulders and cocked. Clareyk waited perhaps another five seconds. Then—

“Fire!” he ordered, and a fresh twenty-musket volley cracked out.

“Second rank, reload! First rank, present!”

Lock Island could hardly believe it. The first rank had actually already reloaded. Now they stepped back into their original positions while the second rank retired into
their
initial positions. Again, the brief pause—until, Lock Island realized, the second rank's Marines were halfway through their own reloading cycle—and then the first rank's muskets fired.

The process repeated a total of three times, with a fresh blast of musketry smashing downrange every ten seconds. In less than one minute, the forty men of Lieutenant Layn's platoon fired one hundred and twenty rounds. The same number of matchlock musketeers would have gotten off a single shot apiece in that same interval, and Lock Island suspected that Layn's men could have reloaded even more rapidly.

“Cease fire!” Clareyk shouted, his voice sounding tinny and distorted in the wake of the concentrated musket fire.

“Safe your weapons,” the major added at a more conversational level, and the platoon grounded its musket butts smartly. Clareyk looked at them for a moment, then turned to Cayleb and Lock Island.

“Would you care to inspect the targets, Your Highness? High Admiral?” he asked.

“Bryahn?” Cayleb invited, and Lock Island gave himself a shake.

“I certainly would, Your Highness,” he said, and he, Cayleb, Merlin, Major Clareyk, and Lieutenant Falkhan hiked across to the mannequins.

“Sweet Langhorne!” Lock Island murmured as he got close enough to the targets to see what the half-inch musket balls had done to them. He'd seen breastplates pierced by muskets at relatively short ranges, but he'd seen at least as many dished in and splashed with lead where they'd turned balls, instead, especially at longer ranges. These breastplates hadn't done that, and the high admiral's eyes widened as he saw the holes punched clear through them.

That was impressive enough, but almost equally impressive, each of those breastplates had been hit at least three times. That was a minimum of ninety hits out of a hundred and twenty shots fired, and no matchlock musketeers in the world could have matched that percentage of hits at such a range.

He reached out, running the tip of one finger around the rim of a bullet hole, then turned to look not at Cayleb, but at Merlin.

“How?” he asked simply.

“The rate of fire's fairly self-explanatory, I think, My Lord,” Merlin replied gravely. “One thing which may not have been too obvious is that the flintlock touchhole is cone-shaped. The opening's wider on the inside, so it acts as a funnel. Instead of having to prime the pan in a separate operation, all they have to do is give the musket a sharp whack to shake powder from the main charge into the pan. That, the cartridges, and the steel ramrods mean they can simply reload faster—much faster—than anyone's ever been able to before.

“As far as the
accuracy
is concerned,” he continued, indicating the multiple holes in each breastplate, “these aren't just muskets, My Lord. They're also rifles.”

Lock Island's eyebrows rose. The principle of spinning a projectile to stabilize it in flight had been known to archers and crossbowmen for centuries. It hadn't taken all that long for someone to figure out that cutting rifling grooves into a musket barrel could impart the same stabilization to a musket ball. But no one had ever suggested using rifled muskets as serious weapons of war, because they took so long to load. In order to force the bullet into the rifling, it was necessary to use an oversized ball and literally hammer it down the barrel, which reduced the musket's already arthritic rate of fire to complete battlefield uselessness.

“Rifles?” he repeated, and Cayleb nodded.

“Look at this,” he invited, and held out a musket ball.

But, no, it wasn't a “ball” at all, Lock Island realized as he accepted it. It was a slightly elongated cylinder, rounded at one end, but hollow at the other.

“When the powder charge explodes,” Cayleb explained, “it spreads the hollow end of the bullet and forces it into the rifling. It also seals the bore, which traps more of the powder's power behind the ball. It may not be too obvious, but the barrels on these ‘flintlocks' are actually longer than most matchlocks. Coupled with the way the balls seal the bore, that extra length gives each shot more velocity and power.”

Lock Island looked up from the bullet and shook his head slowly.

“It's really that simple?”

“It's really that simple,” Cayleb confirmed.

“How far does it extend the effective range?” the high admiral asked. “I remember watching Earl Pine Mountain on a hunt a few years ago. He had a rifled matchlock—from Harchong, I think—and took down a prong lizard at almost two hundred yards.”

“Well,” Cayleb said, “let's go back to the firing line, shall we?”

He led the way back to where Lieutenant Layn and his platoon stood waiting. Then he looked at Merlin.

“Would you care to do the honors?” he asked with a wicked gleam in his eye.

“Of course, Your Highness,” Merlin murmured, and turned to the same corporal whose musket Lock Island had examined earlier.

“If I may?” he asked, holding out his hand, and the corporal handed the weapon over with a broad grin, followed by his cartridge box.

Merlin accepted both of them and calmly loaded the rifle. He shook powder into the pan, then turned back to Cayleb.

“May I assume you had a target in mind, Your Highness?” he asked mildly.

“As a matter of fact, I do,” Cayleb assured him with a grin even broader than the corporal's. “In fact, I think I may have found one that will challenge even you, Merlin.”

Merlin merely raised an eyebrow, and Cayleb turned and pointed downrange. Not at the mannequins which had served as the Marines' targets, but beyond them.
Well
beyond them, Lock Island realized, as he saw the additional mannequin standing all by itself at least four hundred yards away from them.

“That does seem rather a long shot, Your Highness,” Merlin observed.

“Oh, I'm certain you can do it!” Cayleb said encouragingly. Merlin gave him a moderately reproving look, then stepped slightly out in front of the front rank of Marines.

He gazed downrange, sapphire eyes intent. None of the people watching him realized he was using a PICA's built-in laser-ranging capability to determine the exact distance to his target. It worked out at four hundred and twelve yards, and he nodded to himself.

Unlike any of the flesh-and-blood humans about him, Merlin knew the average muzzle velocity of the new rifles. No one on Safehold had yet gotten around to developing the chronograph which someone on Old Earth would have used to measure the muzzle velocity of a firearm, but Merlin didn't need one. Or, rather, he had one already built in.

Now he cocked the lock and raised the rifle into firing position. A red crosshair superimposed itself on his vision, well above the mannequin, as his CPU calculated the bullet's trajectory and indicated the proper point of aim, and he captured the front sight in the open V of the simple rear sight and aligned both of them on the glowing icon only he could see.

The crosshair steadied itself. In fact, it steadied with literally inhuman precision, for no flesh-and-blood human could have held that rifle so utterly, completely still. And then Merlin smoothly and steadily squeezed the trigger.

The striker snapped forward, the pan flashed, and the rifle spewed out the usual cloud of powder smoke as it slammed thunderously back against his shoulder with the brutal recoil of any large-caliber black-powder weapon. Then, four hundred and twelve yards downrange, the mannequin's helmet leapt off its head and spun flashing in the sunlight before it thudded to the ground.

“Oh, dear,” Merlin murmured, turning to Cayleb with a smile. “I'm afraid we're going to need another new helmet, Your Highness.”

“I see why you wanted to keep all this out of sight, Your Highness,” Lock Island conceded two hours later.

He stood with the crown prince, Merlin, and Lieutenant Tillyer, waiting while a couple of Marines fetched his and Tillyer's horses for the return journey to King's Harbor.

“It is something we'd like to keep under wraps,” Cayleb replied. “And Major Clareyk and Lieutenant Layn have been doing some interesting things working out the best tactics. It's not just as simple as standing in place and blazing away, although that's probably going to be effective enough at first, given our range advantage and rate of fire. Eventually, though, both sides are going to have rifles, and when that happens, standing out in the open is going to be a good way to get lots and lots of people killed very quickly.”

“I can well believe
that
,” Lock Island said, with a shudder which wasn't at all feigned.

“The fact that every rifleman becomes his own pikeman as soon as he fixes his bayonet is also going to have a major impact in any boarding action, My Lord,” Lieutenant Falkhan pointed out diffidently, and Lock Island nodded.

He understood the reason for the odd-shaped lugs on the rifle barrels now. The thing Merlin called a “ring bayonet” was essentially a knife with a fourteen-inch, two-sided blade and an open ring formed into one end of its cross guard. The ring fitted down over the muzzle in front of the front sight, and a simple half-twist locked a cutout in the knife's hilt over the lug to hold it firmly in place. The weapon could still be loaded and fired, although the rate of fire slowed drastically, and, as Falkhan had said, it literally turned each musket into a boarding pike. Which meant it would no longer be necessary for Marine musketeers to drop their firearms once the melee began.

“At the same time, Bryahn,” Cayleb said very seriously, “one reason I wanted you to see this is that we have a decision to make, and I want your views on it before we do. Specifically, do we really want to begin issuing
rifles
to all our Marines?”

“What?” The high admiral felt his eyebrows arch in surprise at the question. “Why
shouldn't
we want to, Your Highness?” he asked after a moment.

“I can think of two main reasons,” Cayleb replied. “First, it takes much longer to make a rifle than it does to make a smoothbore musket. We can probably produce as many as three or even five smoothbores for each rifle. Master Howsmyn's going to move musket production to his new Delthak foundry as soon as he can. He ought to be able to begin producing them there sometime late next month, and putting it all under one roof will let him be sure all the interchangeable parts are really interchangeable.”

The prince made a face, and Merlin hid a smile. Over the past few months, Cayleb had become aware of the disadvantages inherent in the absence of a truly uniform system of measurements. The notion of using interchangeable parts wasn't a totally new one, but if two different manufactories' “inches” weren't actually identical, the parts one of them produced wouldn't work in the muskets the other one produced. Which was why Howsmyn was making certain that all of
his
facilities used the same-sized units of measurement used at King's Harbor.

“Once he has his rifle shop fully set up there, which is going to take a month or so longer, he'll have two or three times as many rifling benches as he has now,” Cayleb continued. “The overall production rate will go up, and the production ratio will shift a bit in the rifles' favor, but rifling barrels takes time and represents an entire additional stage in the process. Which means we'll always be able to produce smoothbores more rapidly than rifles. And while the range advantage of a rifle is really nice to have, we've also got to think in terms of having
enough
of them to do the job.

“Second, once we begin issuing them, and once they're used in action, everyone's going to want the same sorts of weapons for
their
infantry. And, let's face it, it's not going to be that difficult to duplicate them. We're not introducing any new principles or processes in the weapon itself, aside from the flintlock, which isn't an especially complicated proposition.”

“So you're thinking about holding the new bullets in reserve,” Lock Island said slowly, and Cayleb nodded.