"So I don't have a lot of time to spend arguing with my underofficers," Kar went on in a slightly harder tone. "We're all going to be much too busy listening to General Bogess here. And we're also going to be busy making sure that our noncoms understand that they're going to be listening to the Diaspran training cadre. I don't care if most of the Diasprans were dam builders and canal diggers four months ago. What they are now are soldiers. More than that, they're combat veterans who've done something none of us ever have: met the Boman bastards in the field and kicked their miserable asses all the way into whatever Krin-forsaken afterlife they believe in.
"So you will go back to your unit, and you will tell them that they really, really don't want me to come explain all of this to them in person. Is that clear?"
"Yes, Sir!" the underofficer said quickly. "Perfectly clear, Sir!"
"Good." The Guard commander gazed at him once more, then nodded dismissal. "I'm glad we had time for this little conversation," he told the underofficer. "Now go back and get that mess straightened out."
"Yes, Sir! At once, Sir!"
"We're going to train them how?"
St. John (J.) would much rather have been out in the field probing for the Boman camps. Anything but trying to explain the captain's brainstorm to this evil-looking scummy.
"The weapons are going to be something like an arquebus, Sir," the Marine answered. "But they're going to need to be aimed, not just volley-fired in the target's general direction, and Marines know all about teaching aiming. The most important part is breath and trigger control."
He picked up the contraption which had been leaning against the wall, brought it to his shoulder, and pointed it.
"We teach them about sight picture, then we put a K'Vaernian copper piece on this carved sight mockup and have them practice squeezing the trigger. When they can do it time after time without the copper falling off, they'll be halfway there."
The company commander picked up the wooden carving of the rifle and tried to point it while balancing the copper piece on the narrow width of the sight. The coin chimed musically as it promptly hit the stone floor, and the Mardukan snarled in frustration.
"This is madness. Is this supposed to be war?"
"Oh, yeah," the Marine breathed. "You have no idea. Just wait until you see the cannon."
"You want them to what?"
"Your company is going to be cadre for the artillery corps, Sir," Kosutic told the Mardukan who stood looking at her incredulously with all four arms crossed. Until that very morning, the scummy had been the executive officer of the Sword of Krin, the galleass flagship of the K'Vaernian Navy, and he didn't seem particularly delighted by his new assignment.
"This is ridiculous," the naval officer grunted. "Bombards are shipboard weapons-they're too heavy, too slow, and eat too damned much powder and shot to be practical for any damned mudpounder to use!"
"Sir, I understand why you feel that way, but I assure you that these 'bombards' aren't anything like the ones you're familiar with."
The Mardukan made a skeptical sound, and Kosutic drew a deep breath. She was the only member of the company besides Captain Pahner himself who had been through crew-served heavy weapons training. In Pahner's eyes, that made her the logical senior trainer for the envisioned artillery. The fact that, unlike this dubious scummy, she'd never fired a muzzle-loading, black powder artillery piece in her life was apparently beside the point. And, in a way, it was, because no one on this miserable mudball of a planet-including the four-armed pain in the ass glowering at her-had ever heard of the concept of field artillery.
"Sir," she went on after a moment, "the main reason you were assigned to this duty is that unlike the Guard officers, you do have experience with artillery. But you have to realize that the bombards you're used to aboard your ships are very different from the field guns we're going to be producing."
"Bombards are bombards," the Mardukan said flatly, and Kosutic bit her tongue firmly.
Part of the problem, she knew, was that K'Vaern's Cove was accustomed to being the supplier of the finest artillery around, and the K'Vaernian Navy was even more accustomed to considering its gunners to be the best in the world. Which meant that none of them were very happy to be told that the smart-ass humans were going to show them how artillery ought to be made and used.
That reaction was inevitable, at least initially, and not simply among scummies. Human military types through the ages had reacted negatively to suggestions that what they knew had worked in the past might not still be the best technique or weapons available in the present. The big problem here was that they simply didn't have time to bring people around gradually, which meant that Turl Kam and Bistem Kar had been fairly direct and brutal in laying down the law to their more doubtful subordinates. And that meant that a certain degree of tact was absolutely required.
"Sir," she began diplomatically, "I wouldn't know where to begin to tell you how to go about fighting a naval battle. Frankly, I don't know shit about that particular subject, but I understand that your standard tactics for heavy bombards are to row directly at your target and to fire a single, close-range salvo from all of your guns just before you ram and board them. Is that about correct?"
"In general terms, yes," the Mardukan said grudgingly.
"And why is it that you don't fire more than one shot per gun, Sir?"
"Because it takes seven chimes to reload them," the naval officer told her with exaggerated patience. A chime, Kosutic knew, was a K'Vaernian time measurement equal to about forty-five seconds, so the scummy was talking about a five-minute reload time. "And," the officer went on, "because relaying the guns for a second shot would take even longer."
"Yes, Sir, it would," the sergeant major agreed. "But the guns that we're going to be using can be reloaded much more quickly than that. In fact, using bagged charges and fixed antipersonnel you'll be able to fire them once per chime-maybe even a little more rapidly-under maximum rate conditions at short range."
The Mardukan stared at her incredulously, and she showed her teeth in a thin smile and continued.
"In addition, the new carriages we're going to be building, coupled with how much lighter the cannon themselves are going to be, will make them a lot more mobile than any bombard you've ever seen. We figure a single pair of turom should be able to haul even the bigger ones around without much trouble. And this new feature here-" she tapped the trunnions of the wooden mock-up someone from ancient Earth might have recognized as remarkably similar to something which had once been called a "twelve-pounder Napoleon" "-will actually let you make changes in elevation between shots."
The Mardukan uncrossed his lower arms and leaned closer. It was apparent that he was truly looking at the new weapon for the first time, and Kosutic hid a smile as some of his truculent skepticism seemed to fade. If they could just get the scummies to really see the advantages, three quarters of the job would be done.
The K'Vaernian Navy's bombards were very well made from the standpoint of their metallurgy and casting techniques, but as practical artillery pieces they left a lot to be desired. In fact, they were simply huge bronze or iron tubes which were strapped to heavy wooden timbers and then chained or roped to the deck of a ship. They looked more like big, clumsy rifles than they did anything a human would have called an artillery piece, and it was impossible to adjust their elevation in any way. As for recoil, the K'Vaernian gunners simply stood as far to one side as they could and touched off the priming. The heavy hawsers which fastened the bombards to the deck and bulwarks kept the gun from jumping clear overboard, and the friction between the wheelless "carriage" and deck acted as an extremely crude recoil damper. Hauling the guns back into position for the next shot without any sort of wheels under them was a backbreaking process, of course, but they accepted that as the price of doing business because that was the way it had always been done before.