Doesn’t matter, Hainz, he told himself harshly. Dunkyn’s not the kind to jump at shadows, and even if he was, he’s your commanding officer.
“I don’t know what it’s about, Alyk,” he said, turning to his flag captain, “but turn her around and signal the bombsweepers to follow us back out to—”
* * *
“Fire!” Lieutenant Fhrancysko Dyahz barked.
He’d lost thirty men clearing away the concealing canvas. And, he admitted, he’d thought the idea of “camouflaging” the barges when they were already hidden behind the island was ridiculous. But then he’d seen the balloon floating above the heretic flagship and realized Admiral Thirsk must have already known the heretics had it.
Now he yanked the friction primer that ignited the fuse and turned to follow the last of his men back into the protection of the battery’s shellproof dugouts. He was twenty feet from the entrance when one of Gwylym Manthyr’s 8-inch shells exploded seventy yards away from him and a steel splinter four inches long hit him in the back like a hyper-velocity buzz saw.
He was dead by the time he hit the ground.
Ten seconds after that, the rockets began to fire.
* * *
Each of Lieutenant Dyahz’ four barges contained a hundred and twenty of the squat, ugly rockets Dynnys Zhwaigair had designed for harbor defense. They didn’t all fire simultaneously. Instead they launched in a carefully arranged sequence, roaring heavenward in a fountain of flame on a far slower, far steeper trajectory than the ICN’s high velocity guns could produce. His number two barge had fired only forty-three rockets before one of Gwylym Manthyr’s 10-inch shells exploded eleven feet from it. The explosion ripped the side of the hull to pieces, set off the sympathetic detonation of nineteen more rockets, and blasted the broken and burning barge up onto its side. The sudden upheaval scattered its remaining fifty-eight rockets in a flat, broad arc that came nowhere near any Charisian.
Of the three hundred and sixty rockets aboard the remaining three barges, forty-nine malfunctioned in one fashion or another. Three of them actually snaked around and slammed into the rear face of the battery’s parapet, killing sixteen more of Captain Mahntayl’s men. But the other three hundred and eleven screamed heavenward in an endless avalanche of fire and smoke, then came shrieking back down.
They weren’t very accurate weapons—not individually—but there were over three hundred of them. They couldn’t all miss … and they didn’t.
* * *
Gahryth Shumayt watched sickly from the open bridge wing as at least five and possibly six of those rockets came crashing down on HMS Eraystor. He couldn’t tell how many of them actually hit her and how many were “only” near misses—not through the smoke and the enormous columns of spray rising from the tortured sea as hundreds of other rockets plunged into it and exploded. He saw at least two fireballs, though, and the forward half of the ironclad’s funnel simply disappeared in a rolling wave of destruction.
He could see Riverbend more clearly, and he swore vilely as Tobys Whytmyn’s ship staggered around, turning directly south-southeast, away from Wreckers’ Island. The flames which had been almost extinguished aft belched up in a fresh, towering inferno, and propellant charges for her 6-inch guns began exploding as they cooked off in the flames. She was clearly sinking, settling swiftly by the stern, and Shumayt found himself praying the inrushing water would quench the flames before they reached her magazine. She was fighting towards deeper water, trying to get clear, clawing her way towards the reserve bombsweepers who might be able to pick up her survivors when she finally sank.
It was all she could do, and as the billowing clouds of smoke belched from the wounded, dying ship, he wondered if Whytmyn was still alive on that flame-enshrouded bridge, still trying to get at least some of his people out alive.
He didn’t wonder about Eraystor.
The last rockets slammed into the water and exploded a good thousand yards from Gairmyn, and Eraystor thrust through the smoke and spray. She was still making at least ten knots, but her entire forward superstructure—everything forward of her crumpled funnel—was a solid mass of flame. Her navigation bridge was simply gone, ripped away, leaving only a few twisted support girders to show where it once had been, and her conning tower had become a chimney, the flue of hell’s own furnace. Flames roaring ferociously up that chimney leapt masthead-high, and the ship was clearly out of control with no living hand upon her helm.
She staggered around, still turning in response to Captain Cahnyrs’ final helm order, and as Shumayt watched, she steamed directly into the field of sea-bombs.
She got three hundred yards before she hit the first one. Within three minutes’ time she struck two more.
The fourth exploded directly under her forward magazine, and HMS Eraystor disintegrated in a massive ball of flame.
.III.
East Point Battery
and
Royal Palace,
City of Gorath,
Kingdom of Dohlar.
The Earl of Thirsk stood alone at the observation tower’s front rail, watching the eastern horizon turn lavender and rose. Captain Stywyrt Baiket, who’d become his executive officer ashore when his longtime flagship was laid up to release her manpower for shore defense, stood several feet behind him, watching him a bit anxiously, and half a dozen aides and runners stood behind Baiket. For all that, Thirsk had been alone—alone with his thoughts, his worries … his responsibilities—as the black, moonless sky had slowly, slowly turned to gray. And now, as dawn crept timidly closer and he stared out across the Five Fathom Deep from the East Point Battery, his weary eyes strained to pierce the waning dark.
There were eighteen 12-inch Fultyn Rifles in that battery, which ought to make short work of any attacker … if, of course, the attacker in question chose to face them, and it was far from certain he would. Indeed, the choice of invasion routes for the Kingdom of Dohlar’s capital came down to a guessing game—the deadliest Thirsk had ever played—with thousands of lives on the line.
There were three avenues to choose between, now that the Charisians had forced the Zhulyet Channel and reduced Wreckers’ Island to churned, smoking wreckage.
East Gate Channel, the passage between East Point and Fishnet Island, was twelve and a half miles wide. That water gap could be closed—barely—by rifled artillery, as long as the batteries on both sides remained in action, although striking power and accuracy would be less than stellar against a target sailing straight down the center of the passage. They could hit it, but accuracy would be poor and the ability to penetrate Charisian armor plate would be … questionable, at best. That was why he’d laid the densest sea-bomb field of all squarely across East Gate’s center. An attacker could choose to pass close to one of the batteries—East Point or Fishnet—and endure the worst its guns could do, or he could sail down the center of the channel, where those guns would be far less effective, and accept the sea-bomb threat. The sea-bomb fuses remained much less reliable than he could have wished, and about thirty percent of them leaked badly enough to become useless within a five-day or two, but his men had laid hundreds of the things. If anyone was foolish enough to sail into that field, he would never sail out of it again.