“I believe it’s time for the rest of us to join the party, Rhobair,” he said.
“Yes, My Lord. I’ll have the signal made.”
* * *
“They’re coming down on us, Sir,” Captain Trahvys said harshly, and Caitahno Raisahndo nodded.
“It’s what Sarmouth had in mind from the beginning,” he replied. “He’s taking a hell of a chance, but unlike us, he’s got an entire navy left even if he loses his whole squadron. And if it works.…”
He stood on Hurricane’s quarterdeck, watching the incredible panorama as the two enormous fleets flowed towards one another. Sarmouth had broken the rest of his line at last, turning each division in it simultaneously. Now four short, compact columns forged down upon Raisahndo, ready to turn back to form a single line of battle to windward or leeward, whichever seemed best when they overhauled him, and he knew exactly what the Charisian admiral had in mind.
He sucked me as far up to windward as he could, and he was willing to risk losing the wind gauge to do it. Not that there was ever much chance of that, really, I suppose. But that’s why he was in that long, single line from the beginning—specifically so he could detach his last division and swing it directly across our only escape route. He couldn’t have known he’d get the opportunity, but he had it ready from the start in case he did. Why else put such heavy firepower at the rear of his line? If Pawal’s right—if those frigging ironclads really do have three-deckers in company—this is his Wednesday punch. He’s throwing a haymaker straight into our teeth, risking what we might accomplish against it in isolation before he catches up with us, because we don’t have any choice but to fight our way past it. And that slows us. Just maneuvering against it would do that … and anyone who takes damage aloft in the process is dead meat, no matter what else happens, unless I’m willing to abandon the cripples. And he’s faster, anyway. If that division in front of us can slow us down for an hour—Shan-wei, half an hour!—he’ll be right in among the rear of the Squadron. And when that happens—
“General signal, Lewk.” His voice was hammered iron. “‘Make more sail. Engage the enemy more closely.’”
* * *
“It looks like being a little different today, Sir,” Lieutenant Commander Kylmahn said quietly. “I don’t think those damned screw-galleys are going to enjoy this one bit.”
“No, they aren’t,” Sir Bruhstair Ahbaht agreed, never looking away from the Dohlaran squadron.
There was an ugly edge in his chief of staff’s voice, he thought. An edge of vengeful anticipation. He couldn’t really blame Kylmahn for that—not after the Khadzhu Narrows. Yet he was a bit surprised to discover that he didn’t share that sense of anticipation. Or perhaps he did. But if so, he was more aware of what the men aboard those screw-galleys must be thinking as they charged headlong into such a massive weight of guns.
No cowards over there, he thought. No butchers, either … not really. Only men. Men with families, with wives and daughters and sons too many of them will never see again. And men who are no more going to turn away from their duty than my men did at the Narrows.
He lowered his double-glass and looked up at the set of Floodtide’s canvas. The ironclad led Baron Sarmouth’s Second Division—Floodtide and the sixty-eights Dynzayl Tryvythyn, Turbulent, Vindicator, Sand Point, and Bruxtyn—steadily southwest. If it worked the way Sarmouth had hoped it might, that powerful division would come crashing in about the time Raisahndo’s lead galleons became closely engaged with Admiral Darys’ even more powerful squadron. And while that was happening, Sarmouth would lead his own division completely across the Dohlarans’ rear and come ranging up from leeward.
It might not work, he thought. But for it to fail, Raisahndo had to somehow break past Darys without being drawn into a melee.…
And that’s not going to happen, Sir Bruhstair Ahbaht thought with grim, curiously regretful satisfaction. Not going to happen in a million years.
* * *
“Fire!”
The long line of massive cannon hurled themselves inboard in a crashing bellow of thunder, and HMS Lightning’s tall, black side disappeared behind a wall of flame and smoke. Astern of her, her next in line, Seamount, followed suit, and thirty-two heavy shells went wailing across the waves.
* * *
“Make a note in the log,” Captain Trahvys told Hurricane’s duty quartermaster. He pulled his watch from his pocket, opened the case, then snapped it shut once more.
“The enemy opened fire at seventeen minutes past sixteen o’clock,” he said.
* * *
Pawal Hahlynd saw the leading Charisian galleons vanish into the huge, volcanic gush of dark-brown smoke. None of the other ships in front of his screw-galleys had fired. No doubt they were well supplied with shells, but he’d gotten a good look at all them now, and any one of them was at least as powerful as any galleon in the Royal Dohlaran Navy. Aside from the ironclads, not a one of them could mount fewer than sixty guns, and at least two of them were units of a class no Dohlaran officer had ever seen. He knew what they had to be—the Inquisition’s agents had learned at least some details of the Zhenyfyr Ahrmahk-class—but most of the Zhenyfyr Ahrmahks had been earmarked for conversion into ironclads, cut down to a single gundeck because they’d offered the only hulls big and strong enough to carry the massive weight of the Rottweilers’ armor.
These hadn’t been, and each of them showed three complete gundecks, counting the carronades on their spar decks. Ninety-eight guns, that was how many a Zhenyfyr Ahrmahk carried. The thought of facing that holocaust was enough to turn any man’s stomach into frozen lead. Intellectually, Hahlynd knew the ironclads were even more dangerous, but those tall-sided galleons, sides throwing back the spray like black-painted cliffs while better than forty guns grinned hungrily from their open ports, screamed “Danger!” even more shrilly than the low-slung, evil-looking ironclads.
Yet whatever instinct might say, the three-deckers obviously mounted the standard 30-pounder smoothbores of the ICN, not the rifled 6-inchers of a Rottweiler, and the range was still at least a mile. No, they’d reserve their fire until someone was unfortunate enough to come deeper into their reach. Once someone did enter their range, though, that many shells would reduce any target to broken, flaming wreckage in mere minutes.
The only Doharan ships with any chance at all of surviving that kind of fire were Hahlynd’s screw-galleys. If they waited for the conventional galleys to close enough to support them, they’d only be bringing their consorts into a vortex of destruction they could never survive. The likelihood that even the screw-galleys might was probably little better, but at least their armor would give them some chance.
And that was precisely why he couldn’t wait, whatever his original instructions might have been.
The ironclads to break our teeth … and the three-deckers to break our bones. That’s what Sarmouth means for them to do, and unless I can get in close enough fast enough—
That massive double broadside crashed into the sea, throwing up thirty-foot pillars of water whiter than snow. They rose like a forest of titan oaks, tall and terrible, all around the screw-galleys Arrow and Javelin. The small ships clove the icy waterfalls, cranksmen bending desperately to their duty even as their ships leaned to the dangerous press of their canvas. Every man aboard those screw-galleys knew it was insanely risky to drive them so hard through such seas, that their hulls hovered on the brink of failure even before the enemy inflicted a single hit, yet they never hesitated. They sliced through the waves at almost twelve knots, clawing their way across the envelope of their enemies’ longer range, lying so far over to the press of the wind their lee rails were awash in a smother of white. Yet even at their speed, they’d need six minutes to bring the ironclads into their own reach, and in that time the superbly trained gunners of the Imperial Charisian Navy could fire as many as ten more broadsides.