Off Armageddon Reef (56 page)

It seemed to be a day for revelations, he reflected, as Gray Harbor continued.

“It's certainly possible the things you've done will bring the Council's suspicion and distrust of the Kingdom to a head sooner, but that day would have come eventually, with or without you. The King's decision to insist upon a Charis-born priest as Bishop of Tellesberg wasn't made lightly, and Bishop Maikel's seen the coming storm as clearly as any of us. The only thing which has changed is that you may have made it possible for us to survive that storm. And, if you haven't—if my Kingdom and my King and Prince and what we believe God requires of us all go down into ruin anyway—that will still be a better fate than to live as the gelded slaves of someone like Hektor. Or”—the earl looked directly into Merlin's eyes—“of a Council of Vicars so corrupted by its own secular power that it uses the authority of God Himself for its own gain in this world.”

“Father agrees,” Cayleb said softly. “And so do I, Merlin.” The crown prince looked straight into Merlin's sapphire eyes. “Perhaps you're beginning to understand why Father was so ready to listen when you appeared. Don't think either of us—or Bishop Maikel—have failed to notice how careful you've been never to openly criticize the Church. And don't think we haven't recognized that
you
recognize that, ultimately, what we believe, what we see as our responsibility to our subjects, is a threat to the Council.”

There were shadows in the prince's own eyes, and in those shadows Merlin saw Cayleb's memory of their conversation following the kraken attack, as well.

“I won't,” he said after a moment.

“Good,” Gray Harbor said, his voice as soft as Cayleb's had been. But then he drew a deep breath and spoke much more briskly.

“That, however, brings us back to this Experimental Squadron of yours. While I would never wish misfortune upon a prince of the Church,” his smile, Merlin noted, was downright nasty, “I must admit that the way Archbishop Erayk's accident's prevented him from visiting us as scheduled has provided a useful cushion. By the time he actually gets here, Father Paityr's reports probably will have made it even more difficult for the Council to contemplate any official action against us. And,” he gave Merlin a piercing glance, “we'll have had time to further obscure the fact that so many of ‘our' recent innovations have come from a single man. Trust me, Merlin—
seijin
or no, the Inquisition would look very closely at you if the Temple realized everything you've shown us over the past few months.”

“That it would,” Cayleb agreed.

“But whatever the Council's position,” Gray Harbor continued, “Hektor, and Nahrmahn aren't going to react well if—when—they realize just how you, Cayleb, and Sir Ahlfryd are in the process of increasing the fleet's fighting power. At the moment, Bynzhamyn shares your confidence that they haven't tumbled to what's going on out here at King's Harbor, but they have to be aware of the other changes you and the College have been introducing.”

“I know,” Merlin agreed.
And
, he thought,
Wave Thunder's right about what Hektor and his buddies know…so far. The SNARCs' bugs make that clear enough. How long we can
keep
it that way, though, is another question, isn't it?

“They've been careful to avoid open warfare with us this long, Rayjhis,” Cayleb pointed out, and Gray Harbor nodded.

“That's true. But that's been because our fleet is almost equal in numbers to Hektor's and Nahrmahn's, combined, and they know our captains and crews are better than theirs. As Merlin's visions have shown, however, they're working hard to acquire new allies to increase their own naval strength. If they succeed in doing so, and especially if they should realize how things like the new cannon are going to increase our existing strength, they may well choose to strike quickly, in an effort to destroy us before we can complete our plans and preparations.”

“The Earl's right, Cayleb,” Merlin said soberly. “At the moment, they believe they've got time—that our present strength is effectively the greatest we can sustain. That means time favors them, if they can acquire those allies Rayjhis is talking about. If they decide time's no longer on their side, though, their plans are likely to change.”

“Precisely.” Gray Harbor nodded energetically. “Which brings me back to the point I wanted to raise originally. How quickly
can
we complete our planned expansion?”

“In a lot of ways, that's really a question Sir Ahlfryd and Master Howsmyn could answer better than we can,” Cayleb replied after glancing at Merlin.

“That's true,” Merlin agreed. “I think we could probably make a fairly accurate guess, though.”

“Please do, then,” Gray Harbor invited, and Merlin shrugged.

“The problem is how few galleons the Navy had in commission when we began,” he said. “That, and the fact that your galleys carried so few heavy guns, which means we don't have that many existing weapons to work with.”

Gray Harbor nodded patiently, and Merlin grimaced internally. As he'd told the earl earlier, the combined experience and knowledge of Ehdwyrd Howsmyn, Sir Ahlfryd Hyndryk, and Sir Dynnys Olyvyr had been priceless. There'd been countless difficulties inherent in taking the conceptual knowledge Merlin had been able to provide through to a practical hardware stage which would never even have occurred to him. And because of that, unfortunately, he'd underestimated how long it was going to take to put that hardware into production in adequate numbers.

Except
, he reflected wryly,
for the coppering technique. The one thing that's gone perfectly is also the one that's the hardest to conceal when we put it on, and the one that has the least immediate effect on our ships' firepower. Of course,
his amusement faded,
there's more to combat effectiveness than gunpower alone.

Still, even—or, perhaps, especially—coppering the hulls in adequate numbers was taking longer than he'd originally let himself allow for. Especially in light of the numbers of ships Charis' enemies could muster between them.

Traditional Safeholdian navies counted their strength in galleys. Those galleys—or most of them, at any rate—might no longer mount old-fashioned beaked rams, but aside from that, they would have been right at home when the Athenian navy went up against Xenophon at Salamis. Well, that was probably unfair, but they would certainly have been familiar to Don Juan of Austria at the Battle of Lepanto. They had evolved from purely coastal craft into something which at least had aspirations to a true seagoing warship, especially in the case of Charis, but they would never have survived typical Atlantic weather conditions on Old Earth.

Fortunately, Safehold's seas tended to be smaller than those of Old Earth, and the crude state of Safeholdian navigation meant that until relatively recently, even the most daring mariners had tended not to stray far from sight of the coast. One of the things which had fueled Charis' rise to maritime supremacy had been her captains' iron-nerved willingness to undertake longer voyages, like the two-thousand-mile voyage across the heart of the sea known as the Anvil, steering by the stars and pure dead-reckoning.

Surviving such journeys had been more than the traditional coastal ship types could manage, and the galleon—like the ships of Commodore Staynair's squadron—represented a relatively new type which had evolved in response to the new challenges. Merlin found himself thinking of the galleys as “Mediterranean types,” and the galleons as the prototypes—crude, and far from fully developed so far—of the “Atlantic type.” They were less maneuverable than galleys, slower in light airs, and immobile in calms, but far more survivable than any galley in heavy weather.

Most of Safehold's navies felt no great pressure to adopt the galleon as a warship, however. Partly out of ingrained conservatism, but also for some very practical reasons. Every major naval battle in Safehold's history had been fought in coastal waters, and naval strategy focused on control of strategic straits, passages, and seaports. Deep-water survivability was scarcely a major factor for that sort of warfare, and the galley's maneuverability, ability to move even in a dead calm, and large crew made it a far more suitable platform for the boarding actions which climaxed virtually all naval engagements in the absence of truly effective artillery.

But as Baron Seamount had recognized that very first day, the galley was about to become hopelessly obsolete, regardless of where battles were fought. The unavoidable fact that a ship which depended upon long banks of oars as its primary means of movement simply could not mount the sort of broadside which could be mounted by a sail-powered ship doomed it as a type.

Unfortunately, the Royal Charisian Navy had possessed only a few more galleons than anyone else…and every one of them was anchored in King's Harbor as part of Commodore Staynair's squadron.

That was bad enough, but the fact that the Navy's galleys had mounted so few cannon was almost equally bad. Staynair's ships each carried between thirty-six and forty guns. The five of them mounted a total of a hundred and eighty-four…which represented the kraken armament of almost fifty galleys.

Matters weren't quite as bad as that might have seemed to suggest, given that over a third of the squadron's total artillery consisted of the newly designed and cast carronades, but he, Cayleb, and Seamount had still exhausted the Navy's entire reserve stockpile of krakens.

The eighty galleys the Royal Navy kept in permanent commission could have provided the krakens for another seven or eight galleons, and there were also the fifty galleys of the reserve fleet, which he and Cayleb were already planning on stripping of guns. But fifteen or sixteen gun-armed galleons weren't going to be sufficient to take on the combined fleets of Charis' enemies.

It was fortunate Charis had both copper and substantial deposits of tin. Merlin was aware that sooner or later—and probably sooner—they would have no choice but to begin using iron (especially given the voracious appetite for copper of the new anti-borer and anti-fouling sheathing), but bronze was actually a better alloy for smoothbore artillery. It was too soft to stand up to the wear of rifled shells, but it was more elastic and much less brittle than iron, which made bronze pieces less likely to burst, with catastrophic results for everyone in the vicinity.

Unfortunately, even bronze guns still had to be manufactured, and that took time. Howsmyn's welded trunnions had helped enormously as far as the existing guns were concerned, and he'd used some of the saved time for his reboring project, as well. That had finally produced a genuinely standardized gun caliber, and by reaming out the krakens' often irregular bores, he'd been able to reduce windage, which had simultaneously improved accuracy and increased both muzzle velocity and shot weight. It had also allowed him to use the same shot for the long guns and the new carronades, which greatly simplified ammunition requirements.

“We have to make some decisions,” Merlin told Gray Harbor now. “We've pretty much exhausted the existing supply of krakens, and we can't afford to call in the existing fleet and strip it of artillery to get more of them. Even if that wouldn't make Hektor and Nahrmahn suspicious, we're going to need the existing ships to back up the new types whatever happens.

“We can produce almost three carronades for the same amount of metal that goes into a single kraken, and we've got large numbers of lighter artillery pieces—and quite a few heavier ones—we can melt down and recast. In fact, we're already doing that, partly because reclaiming the existing bronze lets us reserve more of the available copper for hull sheathing. But even if carronades can be cast and bored faster than long guns, it still takes at least half or two-thirds as long to produce one. And they're shorter ranged.”

“Range would concern me less than many other factors, for now, at least,” Gray Harbor said thoughtfully. “As I understand it, these ‘carronades' are accurate out to at least two or three hundred yards, true?”

“Close to twice that, actually,” Cayleb agreed.

“Well, most naval battles—most
old-fashioned
naval battles—are resolved at somewhat shorter ranges than that.” Gray Harbor's tone was desert-dry. “Actually, they're usually resolved at sword's length. If you can stand off to a range of fifty or a hundred yards and pound them the way Staynair's squadron pounded its targets today, that should be more than sufficient.”

“I tend to agree, My Lord.” Merlin nodded. “And there's another advantage to the carronade: the weight of the individual pieces. No one's ever designed ships to carry this weight of artillery. Despite everything Sir Dustyn and I have have been able to do to reduce topweight, Staynair's galleons are still overloaded by the weight of their own guns.”

It was Gray Harbor's turn to nod soberly.

“If we use carronades instead of krakens, we'll cut the weight of the guns by almost two-thirds for the same broadside,” Merlin continued. “That, in turn, would mean not only that the new ships we're building could carry a more powerful armament, but also that we could convert more existing merchant ships. In some ways, I don't really like the thought of conversions. Merchant ships aren't built as heavily as warships; they can't take as much pounding or carry the same weight of artillery. On the other hand, if any battles we fight work out the way we hope they will, that shouldn't be a decisive factor.”

“And the carronades weigh almost exactly the same as falcons,” Cayleb pointed out. “If we've got time to cast enough of them, we can replace our galleys' broadside weapons, as well.”

“Good points, all of them,” Gray Harbor said. “Still, I think the range problem is one we're going to have to address in the long term. Eventually, our enemies are going to discover most of what we're up to, even if we manage to keep the surprise concealed until the first time they face the new ships in combat. When they do discover it, anyone but an utter idiot—which, unfortunately, neither Hektor nor Nahrmahn is—is going to realize they need the same sorts of ships. And when they have them, we won't be able to choose our own ranges. That means longer guns, eventually, so we'll have to find a way to solve the topweight problem.”