What Kylpaitryc could see through his at the moment, however, was distinctly unbeautifuclass="underline" a single heretic ironclad steaming implacably towards its rendezvous with St. Charlz’s heavy artillery. Columns of smoke beyond it showed where its consorts followed, apparently waiting to see what happened, and he wondered if the heretics had learned about the newly designed sea-bombs and chosen to send one ship ahead to test the waters for the others. More thick, black smoke poured from the leader’s flat-sided, slab-like smokestack, a broad furrow of white rolled back from either side of a sharply raked prow, a huge battle standard flew from its single mast, and the long, slender barrels of its guns were trained out on either broadside.
All in all, it looked remarkably unperturbed by the challenge awaiting it, he thought glumly, silently counting the seconds as the intruder crossed between the ranging marks Admiral Raisandho had ordered erected in the shallows on either side of the Main Ship Channel. They weren’t enough to give an exact estimate, of course—not at that distance—but.…
“I make it about six or seven knots, Sir,” he said finally, lowering his glass.
“Approximately that, yes,” Bauzhyng agreed calmly.
It was a pity Baron Golden Grass had decided to inflict a Dohlaran “liaison officer” on Battery St. Charlz, the lord of foot reflected, still gazing at the heretic vessel. No doubt the politics had made it inevitable, and he supposed Kylpaitryc was at least minimally less uncouth than most of his barbarian countrymen. He hadn’t attempted to interfere unduly in Bauzhyng’s decisions, at any rate, and he’d actually come up with a handful of useful recommendations when the new artillery first arrived. But still—! Bauzhyng could almost smell the turnips every time the man opened his mouth.
“Bit surprised they aren’t moving faster’n that, Sir,” Kylpaitryc continued. “All the reports indicate they should be able to hit at least ten knots, even against the current.” He shook his head, his expression unhappy. “Seems to me they’d want to get through our fire zone quick as they can.”
“Clearly they have great confidence in the efficacy of their armor.” Bauzhyng shrugged ever so slightly. “It would seem the moment has come to … disabuse them of that confidence, Major.”
“Aye, it has that, Sir.”
Kylpaitryc smiled, for once in complete agreement with Battery St. Charlz’s dapper, foppish CO. He didn’t much like Kwaichee Bauzhyng, for a lot of reasons. For that matter, he didn’t like most Harchongian officers he’d met. Every single one of them acted as if he’d smelled something bad as soon as a Dohlaran officer walked in the door. He didn’t like that, and he especially didn’t care for it given the monumental incompetency he’d seen in so many of those disdainful Harchongians. As a matter of fact, that disdain seemed strongest in the very officers least entitled to it. Of course, that described at least three-fourths of the Harchongese officer corps, when a man came down to it. In Kylpaitryc’s considered opinion, the best that could be said for most Harchongese officers was that they were at least a step up from Desnairians, which was damning with about the faintest praise possible.
That wasn’t really fair in Bauzhyng’s case, however. Whatever else might be true of the lord of foot, he took his duties seriously, and he’d drilled his men ruthlessly on the new artillery. He’d even arm-wrestled the mark-pinching Harchongese bureaucrats into providing sufficient of the new shells for twice-a-five-day live fire exercises and asked Kylpaitryc to arrange for Admiral Hahlynd’s screw-galleys to tow barges past the island to give his gunners practice against moving targets. Kylpaitryc couldn’t resist tweaking the haughty Harchongian by addressing him as “Sir” rather than the “My Lord” he obviously preferred, but overall, he knew he’d been more fortunate than the majority of the Dohlaran officers assigned to liaise with their Harchongese “hosts.”
Of course, he’d probably get even better performance out of his gunners if he treated them like people instead of two-footed animals that simply know how to talk. I guess it’s unreasonable to expect him not to think of them as serfs, though—especially since most of them were serfs before they enlisted. And he’s not actually all that brutal, compared to some of the real bastards here in Harchong. Still, I can’t help thinking that flogging the gun captain with the lowest score after each drill isn’t the very best way to build the men’s morale.
“How soon do you intend to open fire, Sir?” he asked.
“I would prefer to allow the range to drop to no more than perhaps five thousand yards,” Bauzhyng replied, lowering his own spyglass at last. He handed it to another aide in exchange for a steaming teacup and sipped contemplatively. “We have the benefit of stable, unmoving gun platforms, and one would normally assume that would give us a substantial advantage over a warship underway. In this instance, however, I prefer to make as few assumptions as possible. We shall wait until they open fire or the range falls to five thousand yards.”
He shrugged ever so slightly, eyes distant as he considered the upcoming engagement.
Depending on how well Battery St. Charlz’s berms stood up to the heretics’ fire, he might well hold fire until the range fell to his own chosen range regardless of when they opened fire. He had great confidence in the power of his guns against most targets, but after studying the reports from the Kaudzhu Narrows, he rather doubted that shells—even the three-hundred-pound cylindrical projectiles of his new 10-inch guns—would pierce the heretics’ armor. It seemed unlikely these ships were less well armored than the heretics ironclad galleons, and the Dohlarans’ 10-inch smoothbores had never even come close to penetrating HMS Dreadnought’s side armor. Of course, even their solid shot had weighed little more than half as much as one of his shells, so comparing their relative performances was probably suspect. Still, he was distinctly unoptimistic about shells, especially at longer ranges, where they would strike at a lower velocity. A solid shot from one of his guns, on the other hand, weighed half again as much as a shell—three times the weight of the Dohlaran shot at the Kaudzhu Narrows—since there was no cavity for gunpowder. That decreased its destructive power if it actually penetrated the target yet gave it a greater chance of penetrating in the first place. The heavier shot also had a shorter range, however; the best any of his gunners had achieved with it was on the order of seven thousand yards to first strike, little better than three-quarters of their maximum range firing shell. They’d trained diligently to use ricochet fire to extend their range, skipping the shot across the water from its initial point of impact, but there seemed little chance of a shot which had lost that much energy penetrating an armored vessel if it finally hit it. Unarmored galleons, yes; steam-driven ironclads, no.
No, he thought. I’ll wait until they come as close as I can get them before engaging them. And when I do, he smiled thinly, they may enjoy the experience far less than they think they will.
* * *
“Coming up on your specified range, Captain,” Petty Officer Wahldair Hahlynd announced, straightening from the voice pipe.
Hahlynd was Eraystor’s senior signalman, but he wasn’t passing a signal from another unit of the squadron at the moment. That voice pipe connected him to an instrument atop Eraystor’s armored superstructure. The product of yet another fruitful collaboration between Admiral Semount, the Royal College of Charis, and Ehdwyrd Howsmyn’s endlessly inventive artisans, it was called a “rangefinder.” Alyk Cahnyrs had read the documentation by Doctor Zhain Frymyn, the College’s optics specialist, but he still had only the vaguest notion of how the thing—it looked like a double-headed version of one of the Rottweiler-class galleons’ angle-glasses, but with the upper lenses at the ends of an 18-foot crossbar—worked. What was important was that it did work and that its readings were accurate to within a hundred yards at ten miles.