“What?” he demanded harshly, impatiently, resenting the lost time while Zhones told him something he already knew.
“‘Urgent,’” Zhones read. “‘Six barges behind Wreckers’ Island loaded with rockets!’” The young man looked up from the note and his eyes were dark. “What barges, My Lord?” he demanded.
“Immediate signal to Admiral Zhastro!” Sarmouth snapped. “Execute General Order Six!”
“Yes, Sir!” Zhones jerked his head at a pale-faced signalman, and Sarmouth whipped around to the ladder which connected the flag bridge level of the conning tower to the navigating bridge level. He pressed the inside edges of his boots to the outside of the ladder frame and slid down it like a midshipman down a shroud without ever touching a single tread.
“My Lord?” Halcom Bahrns sounded surprised at his sudden, unceremonious arrival, and Sarmouth didn’t blame him.
“Rocket barges, Halcom!” he said quickly. “Makadoo’s spotted half a dozen of them behind Wreckers’ Island. We have to get Zhaztro and the Cities out of there!”
Bahrns’ eyes flared, but he jerked a nod of almost instant understanding, and Sarmouth swung towards one of the vision slits and stared out of it. No one could possibly have seen the Dohlaran battery through the enormous clouds of smoke, but he didn’t need to. The overhead SNARC saw it just fine, and his jaw clenched as the swarming Dohlaran seamen stripped away the canvas which had been deliberately painted and then rigged over a supporting framework to resemble rounded piles of dirt.
Thirsk’s too damned smart, the baron thought grimly. And he—or, rather, Ahlverez—has gone too far out of his way to establish his own information conduits. That’s how the two of them found out about the frigging Balloon Corps so damned fast! And then Thirsk had to go and move the goddamn barges after we’d sailed! I wonder if he was still strengthening the earthworks just to give him cover to hide the rocket barges. Or did he just realize he could hide them from a balloon that way?
There was no way to answer those questions, but there was still time to avoid the wost consequences of Thirsk’s forethought. The Dohlarans would need several minutes—probably as much as a quarter of an hour—to clear away the launchers and bring them to bear, and those barges were firmly aground now, unable to move or alter their point of aim. That meant they’d have to wait until Zhaztro moved into their coverage zone. He’d have to come close enough for them to reach and sail into the immobile barges’ fixed field of fire, so if he only reversed course quickly enough.…
“Shift your fire, Halcom,” he said, turning back from the view slit. “Forget about the battery for now. Put everything you can on the channel between it and the mainland.” He bared his teeth. “No frigging barge full of rockets will like a hit from a ten-inch shell!”
* * *
“Any response from Eraystor?” Captain Gahryth Shumayt demanded.
He stood on HMS Gairmyn’s open bridge wing, heedless of the heavy Dohlaran fire. He’d suffered from claustrophobia all his life, but that wasn’t why he’d eschewed the protection of his ironclad’s conning tower. He simply couldn’t see anything from inside it, so he’d insisted his first lieutenant stay there, where he’d be able to take over if anything untowards happened to Shumayt himself, while he got on with the business of seeing where the hell his ship was going.
Now he glared at the signalman who’d joined him on the bridge wing, and that hapless—and obviously nervous—young man shook his head.
“No, Sir.” The petty officer looked up at the colorful bunting flying from Gairmyn’s yardarm, then ducked instinctively as another Dohlaran shell screamed overhead before it smashed into the water well beyond the ironclad. The fountain rose high as her crosstrees, pattering back across her decks like salty rain, and he climbed cautiously back to his feet and looked sheepishly at his captain, who’d never even flinched. “Nothing so far.”
“Shit,” Shumayt growled.
“It must be the smoke, Sir,” the PO said, and Shumayt swore again.
Of course it was. The Cities’ masts were shorter than those of any galleon, and the billowing gunsmoke—and funnel smoke—could only make their signals even more difficult to see. But surely one of the other ships had to see the signal and relay it to Zhaztro! They couldn’t all be invisible to Eraystor!
* * *
Damn it! Sarmouth snarled mentally as he realized Shumayt’s signalman was exactly right. Zhaztro couldn’t see the signal, and the cushion of time which would have let him withdraw was spinning away with terrifying speed.
The baron ripped open the heavily armored conning tower door and stormed out onto the navigating bridge. Someone shouted his name, but he ignored it, racing to the outer edge of the bridge and raising his double-glass as if he were trying to see Eraystor through the blinding smoke. But that was the farthest thing from his mind at the moment.
“Nahrmahn!” The thunder of Manthyr’s artillery drowned his voice. No one could have heard him from more than three or four feet away, but Nahrmahn Baytz and Owl had far better hearing than any flesh-and-blood human being.
“We’re already deploying them!” Nahrmahn’s voice came sharply over the com plug in his ear, and Sarmouth felt a huge surge of relief. Of course the portly little prince had been monitoring the situation! But Narhmahn wasn’t done speaking.
“The remotes are on their way, but it’s going to take time, Dunkyn. At least another ten minutes. The remotes are stealthy as hell, but they aren’t very fast!”
“I should’ve just gone ahead and blown the damned things up as soon as we came in range! Damn it! We’re throwing enough frigging shells their way to explain just about anything’s blowing up over there now!”
“But you didn’t know this was going to happen,” Nahrmahn pointed out. “If Sir Hainz could just see the signal, you’d’ve gotten him out of the field of fire in plenty of time.”
“And if I were God, we wouldn’t need to worry about goddamned Clyntahn!” Sarmouth snarled. “But I’m not and he can’t! And don’t remind me about the ‘political consequences’! None of them mean squat until after the frigging battle, and unless we win the damned thing, no one’ll be able to do a single thin—”
* * *
“Signal from Admiral Sarmouth, Sir!” Lywys Pharsaygyn’s voice was sharp as he threaded his way across the crowded conning tower with the message slip in hand. “Relayed from Gairmyn. ‘Urgent. Number Eighty. Numeral Six.’”
“What?” Zhaztro stared at his chief of staff in disbelief.
Number 80 was “Execute previous orders,” and Number Six was the order to break off the attack and withdraw immediately. He’d thought Sarmouth was taking caution to the extreme by arranging that sort of order in advance, and he wondered what in Shan-wei’s name had triggered it now, of all possible times! Eraystor and Riverbend were barely six thousand yards from Wreckers’ Island. They’d taken several more hits to get there, and Riverbend was on fire aft, but Captain Whytmyn had just signaled that his damage control parties were on top of it. They were finally in close enough for the deadly rapidity of their 6-inch guns—coupled with the more deliberate, longer ranged fire from Gwylym Manthyr—to beat down the battery’s fire. They could simply pour in far more shells than the slow-firing muzzleloaders could send back, and barring some sort of catastrophic hit in a magazine or something equally severe, they were winning. So why—?