Sarmouth nodded, if perhaps a bit unwillingly, and Rock Point shrugged.
“The King Haarahlds aren’t magic. I think it’s unlikely any of that could have significantly damaged Manthyr, but I might be wrong—especially about the rockets. When we designed her deck armor, we weren’t thinking in terms of plunging fire from two-hundred-pound warheads, you know. If you’d waited, there’d’ve been time for all of those to get into play before you hit Rhaigair.”
“I think there’s a certain point to that argument,” Merlin put in. Sarmouth looked at the image projected onto his contact lenses, and Merlin shrugged. “Let’s not forget how beaten up Eraystor was by ten-inch guns by the time Zhaztro finished running the batteries.”
“All right,” Sarmouth said after a moment. “I’ll grant that. But I really, really wish I’d been able to send Manthyr in—alone, even—to deal with Rhaigair while Hainz and his squadron waited for Raisahndo’s galleons off Shipworm Shoal. Hell! Even somebody as stubborn as Raisahndo might’ve surrendered when he saw that waiting for him!”
Merlin chuckled bleakly and Cayleb snorted, although Sarmouth definitely had a point. The RDN’s Western Squadron had simply ceased to exist after the Battle of Shipworm Shoal; not a single ship heavier than a twenty-gun brig had escaped. But the Royal Dohlaran Navy had lived up to its own tradition. By the time Caitahno Raisahndo’s surviving galleons struck their colors, only eleven of them had still been in action. For that matter, only twenty-six of them—and only one of his crippled screw-galleys—had still been afloat.
His flagship had not been among them.
Yet they hadn’t died alone, those ships. If the Charisians had wanted to get into their range of him, they’d had to let him into his range of them, as well, and only three of their ships had been armored. The carnage wooden ships armed with shell-firing guns could wreak upon one another was incredible. Two Charisian galleons had simply blown up. Four more had foundered as the hungry sea poured into breached and shattered hulls, and another five had been too badly damaged to return to service. Sarmouth had burned one of them on the spot rather than attempt to nurse the broken, leaking wreck back to Claw Island. The other four had returned to Claw Keep to be stripped of their guns and useful fittings before they, too, were burned.
As recently as a year or two earlier, at least two of them probably would have been repaired, but there’d been no point now. With the Western Squadron’s destruction, the Imperial Charisian Navy’s only remaining opposition was the squadron under Thirsk’s personal command in Gorath. Even the Desnairian privateers had become only a ghost of their onetime menace. Sir Hainz Zhaztro’s message to Geyra had inspired Emperor Mahrys and his councilors to … reconsider their support for that strategy. Or for anything else which might conceivably inspire another visit from the ICN.
Zhaspahr Clyntahn had been livid when he learned that the Desnairians who’d already deserted the Jihad’s land war had quietly done the same at sea, as well. Fortunately for Mahrys, Desnair the City was out of the Grand Inquisitor’s reach, unless he wanted to risk the even worse possibility of ordering the emperor’s arrest and discovering the Inquisition couldn’t carry it out! Clearly, that was one more risk than even he was willing to run … at least until he’d dealt with Charis and her allies. After that, of course, he’d look at things differently, and all the world knew that Zhaspahr Clyntahn had a long, long memory.
That must leave Mahrys just a tad … ambivalent about the Jihad’s outcome, Merlin reflected with a certain nasty sense of pleasure.
But the upshot was that, after so many years of explosive expansion, the ICN had more ships—a lot more ships—than it actually needed. And thanks to the introduction of steam, steel hulls, and rifled artillery, virtually all those ships were at best obsolescent. There was little point repairing badly damaged galleons which would only be retired and broken up within the next two or three years.
“You know,” Nynian Rychtyr said from where she sat on the arm of Merlin’s chair, “I’ve been meaning to ask this for a while, but why in Kohdy’s name did you people decide to build something like the King Haarahlds?” She shook her head, her expression quizzical. “Oh, I understand you needed Cayleb’s ‘doorknocker,’ and I understand the Cities don’t have the operating range you’d really like to have. But they did just fine at Rhaigair, and Sir Dunkyn’s clearly demonstrated he and his Marines can seize islands for forward coaling stations anytime he feels like it. So why build something so big? And so fast, for that matter! Captain Bahrns’ had it up to twenty-six knots, and wasn’t even straining its machinery when he did.”
“Had her up to twenty-six knots, please,” Merlin said with a pained expression and shuddered delicately. “Her, Nynian! You really want to be careful about how you offend a Charisian’s sensibilities with that sort of loose language.”
“Sure I do.” She rolled her eyes and smacked him across the top of his head. “But my question stands. I’d never heard of ‘overkill’ until I fell into my present evil company, but to be honest, these ships strike me as a pretty clear example of exactly that. And you’ve diverted an awful lot of resources into them.”
“The resource cost is probably the strongest argument against them,” Earl Pine Hollow said before Merlin could reply. The imperial first councilor sat comfortably propped up in bed with an open book in his lap and his evening cup of chocolate on a bedside table. “On the other hand, you have to remember when they were first put into the pipeline, Nynian.” He shrugged. “We’d already begun work on them before Clyntahn’s ‘Sword of Schueler’ ever hit the Republic. At that point, the Navy was still our primary focus, since there was no way we were going to be able to invade the Mainland out of our own resources anytime soon. By the time the Army’s needs took center stage, we were already well launched on the program and, frankly, the Army didn’t need armor plate, steam engines, or most of the rest of what was going into the ships. So the resource diversion aspect of it actually isn’t nearly as clear-cut as it might appear.”
“All right, I’ll grant that,” Nynian conceded, but she rallied gamely. “On the other hand, you could’ve built—what? Ten Cities for each King Haarahld?”
“Yes, we could,” Sharleyan acknowledged from her own Tellesberg bedchamber. “And we considered doing just that. But I’m a little surprised, Nynian.”
“Surprised?”
“Yes. You, of all people, should be accustomed to long-term strategic thinking.”
Nynian’s eyebrows arched, and Sharleyan chuckled.
“It was your idea, Merlin. Why don’t you explain it?”
“All right.” Merlin leaned back in his chair and smiled up at Nynian. “Of course, there’s always the problem of getting such a land-bound ignoramus to understand the finer points so glaringly obvious to us subtle sea creatures.”