The Church had just a few more hands—and a few more foundries—to put to work than the Union had ever boasted. In fact, in just the Border States, the Temple Lands, and the Harchong Empire, the Temple still controlled over 384,000,000 human beings, almost twenty-one times the Union’s wartime population. Worse, Safeholdian agriculture—outside North Harchong, at least—was more efficient than mid-nineteenth-century North America’s had been. That meant more of that manpower could be taken from the farm and put into uniform—or reallocated to those newly built foundries—by a “central government” with the sort of ruthless reach and compulsory authority Abraham Lincoln and Edwin Stanton could have imagined only in an opium dream. And the massive increase in the Church’s steel output over the last year or so hadn’t done anything to reduce its productivity.
At the moment, those foundries were producing almost seven hundred pieces of artillery—split between field guns, all of them rifled now, and angle-guns—every single month. And while they were doing that, they and the manufactories they served were also simultaneously producing Brother Lynkyn’s infernal rocket launchers in indecent numbers. Not to mention around eighty of the new, heavy coast defense guns each month.
The Army of Glacierheart and the Army of the Seridahn had lost their entire artillery parks in the previous year’s fighting, but the Mighty Host of God and the Archangels’ artillery hadn’t even been touched yet, and the majority of its existing smoothbore field guns had been sent back to foundries in the Border States to be banded with wrought iron and rifled. Those were almost all back at the front already, and the last of them would have returned to Lord of Foot Zhyngbau long before spring. They were inferior to the cast steel guns emerging from the new and upgraded Church foundries. For that matter, they were inferior to the Fultyn Rifles already in service, but there were a lot of them, and Zhyngbau and Rainbow Waters had given careful thought to how they could be best used when they were withdrawn from frontline service in favor of the newer weapons.
The one bright spot on that front was that Allayn Maigwair seemed to have dropped a stitch—unusually, for him—in the relatively low priority he’d assigned to putting the new Church-designed mortars into production. That was a mixed blessing, since most of the capacity which might have gone into them had been diverted into the rocket program, instead, but at least it meant the Mighty Host and the newly raised Army of God divisions would have far fewer of them, proportionately, than Charis or Siddarmark. That would hurt them badly once the fighting turned mobile again, since even the best field gun was less portable than a mortar. On the other hand, perhaps it hadn’t been as much of an oversight as Green Valley might like to think, since Rainbow Waters had also spent so much of the time he’d been given rethinking his entire strategy. He’d gone right on stockpiling supplies at Lake City—and, even more so in some ways, in strategically dispersed depots at other points behind his front line—but he’d clearly decided not to take the offensive during the coming summer after all. He’d been careful to avoid explaining his new thinking to Zhaspahr Clyntahn, but even a cursory look at his fortifications and deployment indicated that he intended to fight from fortified positions and allow the Allies to pay the attacker’s price whenever possible. In that sort of fighting, rocket launchers—especially massed rocket launchers—would probably be much more valuable to the defenders than mortars might have been.
Whatever Rainbow Waters might not have spelled out in his dispatches to Zion, Maigwair, at least, seemed to have realized his intentions quite clearly … which probably explained the captain general’s production and procurement choices.
But whether Maigwair’s decision had been a mistake or not, the unhappy truth was that despite Charis’ vastly superior productivity per man-hour, the Church’s artillery would substantially outnumber that of the Allied field armies in the spring. Their guns wouldn’t be as good, they wouldn’t be as mobile, a far higher percentage of them would be converted smoothbores, and the cast iron Fultyn Rifles, especially, would be much more prone to bursting when fired than the Allies’ steel and wire wound guns, but there’d be hell’s own number of them.
There was some good news on that front, though. In the short term, matters in the Gulf of Dohlar were about to take a distinctly downward trend for Mother Church. But far more dangerous for the the Group of Four’s long-term hopes, the Church of God Awaiting was straining every sinew to the breaking point to achieve its current production miracle.
The Temple had already lost all of the Kingdom of Dohlar’s not inconsiderable production capacity, given Dohlar’s desperate need to reequip the troops facing the Army of Thesmar. The need to confront the Charisian naval offensive everyone in Gorath knew had to be coming was a major factor, as well. But the diversion of Dohlaran attention—and weapons production—was scarcely the only consequence of that impending naval offensive.
Even after the Battle of the Kaudzhu Narrows, Earl Sharpfield’s cruisers had managed to effectively shut down all Church shipping across the western third of the Gulf, and less than half the Church’s foundries and manufactories were located north of the Gulf, in the Temple Lands and North Harchong. All the rest of them were in South Harchong, and every gun, every rocket, every rifle or grenade produced in those foundries had to make it to the front.
And that meant they had to travel by water.
For the moment, galleons from Shwei Bay could still make the crossing to the Malansath Bight’s Fairstock Bay or Tahlryn Bay, where cargoes could be barged upriver to the Hayzor-Westborne Canal. The light cruisers operating out of Talisman Island took a toll of that shipping, but until Baron Sarmouth was further reinforced, he could use only his light units for that purpose. The galleons had to stay closer to home, protecting against a possible sudden pounce by the Dohlarans’ heavily reinforced Western Squadron from its base on Saram Bay.
Unfortunately, the RDN had learned a lot about convoy protection from the Charisian Navy, and Caitahno Raisahndo, the Western Squadron’s new CO, had put those lessons to good effect east of Jack’s Land Island. At the moment, he was operating what amounted to a shuttle service of escorting galleons over the five hundred miles between the Shweimouth and the northern end of Whale Passage, which meant as much seventy or eighty percent of the cargo which had used that route before Sharpfield retook Claw Island was making it through. And if those galleons sailed another nine hundred miles or so, to Mahrglys on the Gulf of Tanshar, their cargoes could be barged up the Tanshar River to the Bédard Canal and from there straight to the southern Border States, which was by far the fastest way to deliver it to the Church’s field armies.
For now, those three routes were carrying an enormous flow of munitions, but given what Green Valley knew would be happening shortly, that shipping would soon require another route. It damned well wasn’t going to be sailing through the middle of the Gulf of Dohlar anymore, at any rate!
The inland canals from south Shwei Bay to Hankey Sound would compensate for some of that lost capacity, at least as long as the Dohlaran Navy could keep the eastern end of the Gulf open. But not even Safeholdian canals really compared to the cargo capacity of blue water transport, and if Hankey Sound should somehow happen to be cut off from the northern portions of East and West Haven in the same fashion as Shwei Bay …
A lot of those new guns and rockets will never make it to Rainbow Waters or the Army of God, Green Valley reflected. Unfortunately, given the sheer numbers we’re talking about—and the fact that Sharpfield and Dunkyn aren’t going to be able to shut the Gulf down tomorrow morning—a lot of them are going to make it. It’ll be a hell of a lot better than it might’ve been, though!