He made himself back away from that dangerous thought and focused on Mykylhny, instead.
“I don’t like it either, Captain,” he said quietly, “but Commander Kahmelka’s right.”
A silent sigh seemed to circle the cabin as he said it. Mykylhny’s glare didn’t abate, but it took on a different edge, the edge of a man who knew that what he was hearing wasn’t going to change, however much he might want it to.
“What do you propose we do instead … Sir?” he asked after a moment.
Raisahndo felt a flicker of anger, but he suppressed it. The pause before Mykylhny’s last word hadn’t been one of disrespect, and he knew it. Bitterness and disappointment, yes, but not really disrespect … mostly, anyway.
“From what you’re saying—and I can’t really argue with it, however much I’d like to,” the captain continued, “we’ll never be able to fight these miserable fuckers. In that case, what’s the point in preserving our ships?”
“Well,” Raisahndo was surprised by the almost whimsical edge which crept into his own voice, “I suppose I could point out that preserving the men who crew those ships would probably be worthwhile.” Mykylhny’s face darkened, and the admiral raised a placating hand. “I know what you meant, Captain, and I’m really not trying to be flippant, but our trained manpower represents a vital military resource. Preserving them for the future service of the Crown and Mother Church, whether that’s afloat or ashore, is a legitimate consideration.”
He held Mykylhny’s eyes steadily, and after a moment, the captain nodded. He even had the grace to look a little abashed.
“More to the point, perhaps,” Raisahndo continued, “while we don’t know how many of these … powered ironclads the heretics have, I think it’s unlikely they have a lot of them. Against their conventional galleons—even their ironclad galleons, like Dreadnought—we’ve demonstrated we have a fighting chance. So unless and until they do have enough of these damned things to be everywhere, our ships are still valuable if only as a threat—a fleet in being, if you will—to inhibit the freedom of action of the heretics’ other ships—their ‘conventional’ warships’, I suppose you’d say.” He grimaced. “I don’t like the thought of becoming as passive as the Desnairians were before the heretics went into the Gulf of Jahras after them, but if that’s the only service we can perform for the Jihad, then we’ll damned well perform it!”
Mykylhny’s frustration was obvious, and more than a few of the other officers in the cabin clearly shared it. But they also nodded in unhappy acknowledgment of the admiral’s point.
“So what will we do, Sir?” Mykylhny’s tone was much less confrontational.
“The outer batteries report light heretic units scouting the channels from outside their range,” Raisandho replied. “We don’t know for certain how many galleons they have out beyond our spotters’ horizon, but they’ve got two passages to cover—North Channel and Basset Channel. I imagine—” he produced a wintry smile “—they probably assume their ironclads have South Channel covered. Although,” he added, “I suppose we might be able to work our way around them overnight. Frankly, though, I doubt we could manage it without being spotted.
“One possibility would be to split our own units, send some of them through North Channel and some of them through Basset Channel, but that would simply beg to be defeated in detail. So I propose to sortie with the entire Squadron concentrated. We have two galleons and a screw-galley in dockyard hands and we won’t be able to get them back in time, so Captain Kharmahdy will tow out into the harbor and fire them to prevent their capture.”
His expression showed his unhappiness at that thought, but he continued unflinchingly.
“The rest of the Squadron will get underway within the hour. If I were the heretics, I’d anticipate that anyone trying to evade my ironclads would choose North Channel, because it’s closer to Rhaigair and farther from South Channel. In addition, there’s that damned battery of theirs on Shyan Island. It couldn’t stop us from getting through Basset Channel any more than St. Thermyn or St. Charlz are going to stop the heretics, but it would still be a factor in my thinking.
“The wind’s almost dead out of the northwest, so it’ll serve equally well for either, and the channel mouths are over eighty miles apart. They may have opted to hold their main strength in a central position off the Shipworm Shoal and used light units to watch both channels and whistle up their galleons when someone finally emerges from one of them. That’s what I’d’ve done in their place, but the sighting reports indicate they have at least some of their galleons far enough forward in both channels to support their scouts. That means they can’t have their full strength covering either of them. So we’ll use Basset Channel, and hope they’ve gone all logical on us and weighted their right flank more heavily than their left. We can’t know what we’ll run into, but whatever it is, it’ll be the best odds we can find.”
* * *
Sir Dunkyn Yairley, Baron of Sarmouth, stood on HMS Destiny’s sternwalk in a thick, warm duffle coat, chin buried in a soft, woolen muffler as he leaned forward, both gloved hands braced on the carved railing, and gazed out over the cold, windy blue water of the Gulf of Dohlar.
At the moment, Destiny lay hove-to thirty miles northeast of Broken Hawser Rock at the eastern tip of the Shyan Island Shoal, moving a little uneasily in the offshore swell but well beyond visual range from any Harchongese battery. Thirty other galleons kept company with her, and long chains of schooners were busily relaying signals to her from the scouts closer in to the mouths of Basset Channel and North Channel. He knew some of his captains thought he’d chosen his station poorly, although they were, of course, far too tactful to say so. He was perfectly placed to intercept anyone coming through Basset, and he was far enough out to let the Dohlarans get too far from safety to retreat without a fight before he pounced. But he was also over a hundred miles from North Channel, and he’d stationed only a single six-ship division to support the schooners watching that avenue of escape.
In theory, he should have sufficient warning to intercept the Dohlarans well out into the gulf even if they chose the northern route … assuming the scouts managed to maintain contact while whistling up the rest of his squadron. Theory had an unhappy habit of failing in real life, however, and he couldn’t blame the captains who thought he should have chosen a more central position rather than risk letting the Dohlarans slip away under the cover of darkness or heavy weather in the event that he’d guessed their intentions wrongly.
Of course, none of those captains knew that even as he stood on the sternwalk, gazing thoughtfully out over the water, the SNARC remote perched on the chain supporting the lamp above the table in Caitahno Raisahndo’s day cabin was transmitting every word the Dohlaran admiral said to his earplug.
The real reason he’d disposed his force as he had was that Raisahndo’s galleons were twice as far from North Channel’s mouth as Destiny was. Sarmouth had always rather expected Raisahndo, who was no one’s fool, to opt for the less blatantly obvious Basset Channel route. Even if he’d been wrong about that, however, the SNARCs would have given him ample warning to “change his mind” and move his main body to cover the northern route well before Raisahndo and his galleons ever hove into sight of his waiting schooners.