Unless there was something else they didn’t want him to see.
* * *
“All right, Wahltayr,” Commander Tahlyvyr Sympsyn said as smoke enveloped Wreckers’ Island … and hopefully blinded its gunners. “Let’s get this circus moving.”
“Aye, aye, Sir!” Lieutenant Wahltayr Rahbyns replied, and glanced at the grizzled petty officer at the converted landing barge’s helm. “You heard the Commander, PO. Take us in.”
“Aye, Sir,” PO Styv Khantrayl acknowledged and eased the wheel expertly.
“A bit more speed, I think,” Rahbyns added, looking ahead through his double-glass, and the seaman acting as engineer opened the throttle a bit wider.
The paddle wheel thumped and vibrated, churning the water as Bombsweeper One—the only name the converted barge had ever been given—gathered speed.
“Stream the kites!” Rahbyns ordered in a louder voice, and four more seamen bent over the winches mounted on either side of Bombsweeper One’s blunt bows. It took two sets of hands on each winch to control the speed with which the heavy wire cable paid out, and Rahbyns watched critically.
He’d been a less than happy man when he first heard about the Temple Boys “sea-bombs.” A floating explosive charge, just waiting for a ship to sail over it? A charge that didn’t care how heavily armored the ship in question might be? A charge that hid invisibly in the water until the fatal moment? The very thought had been enough to send an icy chill through any sailor.
But he should have known Admiral Seamount would find a solution, and so he had. It wasn’t perfect, and it was one hell of a long way from anything a man might call “safe,” but he doubted the Dohlarans would like it very much.
The cables finished paying out, and Bombsweeper One labored more heavily as the tethered objects someone from Old Terra would have called paravanes spread outward on either bow. The cables angled sharply back, and the depth-maintaining vanes had been carefully set to keep the sea-kites in precisely the right position relative to their mothership.
If Bombsweeper One happened to run directly into one of the sea-bombs, the consequences would be … unfortunate. But no matter how dense the field of sea-bombs might be, the odds were heavily against a direct bows-on collision. A sea-bomb attack was actually more likely to succeed if its target sailed past it, close enough for the wake to suck it into contact with the hull.
But the sea-kites’ cables would intercept the mooring cables of any sea-bombs caught in their path and guide the explosives not inward, towards the bombsweeper, but outwards, towards the kite. That meant the only real danger spot was directly ahead of her and no wider than her own beam … in theory, at least. Hopefully, the mooring cable would actually break and the sea-bomb would float to the surface, where the M96-armed riflemen standing along the rails on either side would be waiting for it, rather than be drawn directly into the kite. Their magazines were loaded with a special incendiary bullet designed to punch through the sea-bomb’s casing and detonate its gunpowder filler.
There were drawbacks to the system, of course. The bombsweepers had to steam straight ahead on painstakingly plotted courses if they wanted to have any idea where the swept channel was when they finished. That would make them unpleasantly easy targets. And clearing a sufficiently broad channel required the combined efforts of several bombsweepers, steaming in a carefully maintained formation so that their deployed kites overlapped without fouling one another. At the moment, Rahbyns’ sweeper was the head of a blunt triangle three sweepers—and just over three hundred yards—across. The other two were what Admiral Seamount had christened his “wingmen,” steaming far enough back that their inboard kites were at least fifty yards inside Rahbyns’ kites but a minimum of seventy-five yards astern of them. The overlap guaranteed—in theory, at least—that no sea-bombs would be missed.
Lieutenant Mahkzwail Charlz steamed parallel with Rahbyns at a distance of just under five hundred yards in Bombsweeper Five, leading a second triangle of bombsweepers. Theoretically, the entire formation would sweep a six hundred-yard wide channel through the middle of the Dohlaran sea-bombs in a single pass, although the plan called for them to turn around, find their navigation marks, and sweep a second channel that overlapped the first, clearing a path approximately a thousand yards wide.
It all sounded good, and the training exercises had gone well, but no one had been shooting at them during the exercises, and none of the “sea-bombs” they’d swept had actually contained gunpowder.
That was why there nine more bombsweepers in reserve, waiting to replace any casualties.
* * *
“What the hell are they’re doing?” Lieutenant Commander Kortez demanded, and Captain Mahntayl looked up from the spyglass with a scowl.
“I presume you’re talking about the little bastards?” Mahntayl had to raise his voice to be heard over the thunder of artillery and the roar of bursting shells, despite the command post’s thick walls, and Kortez nodded.
The captain hadn’t heard his second-in-command return to the bunker, which probably shouldn’t have surprised him, given the ungodly bedlam of the artillery duel. Now Kortez stood beside him, glaring out through the same view slit. The blinding walls of smoke, reinforced by the heretic’s damned smoke shells, made visibility spotty as hell, but the wind had shifted ever so slightly. The smoke remained as dense as ever, possibly even denser, between his gunners and the ironclads, but the range to the small steampots churning towards the sea-bombs was actually clearing.
“Well, the only thing I can think of,” he said sourly, “is that they know about the sea-bombs and they think they’ve found a way to clear them.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Kortez muttered, but he sounded like someone who wanted Mahntayl to be wrong, not someone who thought he was.
“If you can think of another reason for those pissant little boats to run around in the middle of a Shan-wei-damned artillery duel, I’m all ears,” Mahntayl replied.
He and Kortez looked at each other for a moment. Then the lieutenant commander shrugged.
“No, Sir, I can’t. The question is whether or not they can really do it, and I wouldn’t think—”
He broke off as one of the bombsweepers’ kites brought a sea-bomb to the surface. The tide was ebbing steadily towards dead low-water, and it was obvious the Charisians had planned their attack for a time when the sea-bombs would be closest to the surface and most visible. Now the sea-kite’s cable did precisely what it was supposed to do, guiding the captured sea-bomb towards the kite. Rifles cracked from the sweeper’s deck, raising quick little spits of white around the sea-bomb. Nothing else happened for four or five seconds. Then it exploded ferociously—but harmlessly.
Less than a minute later one of the other bombsweepers detonated another sea-bomb. Then two more exploded in quick succession, and Mahntayl swore.
“Pull the guns off the frigging ironclads!” he snapped. “Let’s see how one of those little pricks likes a twelve-inch shell up his arse!”
* * *
“Be damned, Sir! It’s actually working!” Lieutenant Rahbyns shouted jubilantly, and Commander Sympsyn nodded.
He hoped like hell that they didn’t lose a kite, but each of his bombsweepers had two additional kites, ready to stream the instant an exploding sea-bomb destroyed one of the ones they’d already deployed. In the meantime, though, Rahbyns was right; it was working almost exactly as Admiral Seamount had predicted.