by David Weber
“At any rate, I think we’re going to have the Board’s first formal report for you and the Inquiry Council in the next five- day or so. That’s the first thing I wanted to mention to you. The second thing I wanted to talk to you about, though, and the real reason I want to sit down with Dr. Lywys this afternoon, is that while Urvyn’s been getting started on that, I’ve found myself with some extra time to think about the new artillery.”
“And?” Mahklyn let his chair come most of the way back upright, propping his elbows on the arms and interlacing his fingers across his stomach.
“Well, the first thing is that Dr. Lywys’ new compound seems to perform as promised.”
Seamount beamed, and Mahklyn felt himself smiling back. Sahndrah Lywys was the College’s senior chemist, although now that Mahklyn had access to Owl’s computer library, he supposed the proper term would probably be “alchemist” at this point. The College had been groping its way towards what Merlin called the “scientific method of inquiry” even before his own arrival, but the conditions Eric Langhorne and Adorée Bédard had established in the Holy Writ had made the process . . . difficult, to say the least. And dangerous.
When they’d created the Church of God Awaiting, Langhorne and Bédard had realized that simply telling people what God forbade them to do would never be sufficient to stifle human curiosity forever, which was why they’d provided “miraculous” explanations for an incredible breadth of phenomena which might otherwise have provoked eternally inquisitive human beings into wondering why things happened. By offering up those explanations under the infallible imprimatur of the Archangels—and, for that matter, God Himself—they’d done a remarkably good job of short- circuiting those “why” questions. Not too surprisingly, perhaps, when doubting or challenging those explanations equated to doubting God, which was unthinkable for anyone raised under the aegis of Holy Mother Church and her Inquisition.
At the same time, though, the potential seeds for those very sorts of questions had been buried in the Writ itself, in the directions which had been required for the successful colonization of a planet humanity hadn’t originally been designed to live upon. Merlin called the process “terraforming,” and it was a stupendous task for any world without advanced technology.
It was also one which had left the “Archangels” with something of a dilemma. The original colonists (and their descendants) had absolutely required at least some technological tools if they were to spread out from their initial enclaves, claim the entire surface of the planet, and—above all—survive. Which, after all, had been the point of establishing the colony in the first place. Even lunatics like Langhorne and Bédard had been forced to admit that much! And if those tools weren’t provided from the beginning, the need for them would very soon force their indigenous development . . . thus sparking the very innovation the two of them were determined to prevent. So the “Archangels” had found themselves with no choice but to give “divine instructions” for things like animal husbandry, fertilizing techniques, hygiene, basic preventive medicine, certain “cottage- level” manufacturing processes, and a whole host of other necessary skills and techniques.
The fact that those instructions always worked, if they were followed properly, had served to buttress and powerfully reinforce the “miraculous,” fundamentally unscientific worldview which had gripped Safehold for so many centuries. Yet people were still people. There were always those who wanted to delve a little deeper, understand things even more thoroughly, and despite the ea gle eye the Inquisition kept on those inquisitive souls, sometimes the questions got asked anyway.
Despite that, progress in evolving anything like the scientific method had remained glacially slow, even in the Royal College. Under King Haarahld, however, the process had gained both speed and increased acceptance . . . in Charis, at least. Which, Mahklyn suspected, might well have had quite a bit to do with Zhaspahr Clyntahn’s personal and corrosive hatred for the distant kingdom.
Since Merlin’s arrival—and the eruption of open conflict between Charis and the Group of Four—the process had accelerated enormously, and Dr. Lywys was one of its most enthusiastic devotees, although her actual knowledge of chemistry remained basically empirical. She knew what would happen in any number of chemical reactions, and she knew how to produce a very large number of useful chemical compounds, but she did not—yet, at least—understand why those reactions occurred or those particular compounds formed. Unless Mahklyn was mistaken, that was going to change over the next several years. In fact, it was already changing, but for now, any answers she might come up with for Seamount’s questions would still be based on that purely empirical knowledge.
“The compound’s not any harder to manufacture than gunpowder, really,” the commodore continued. “A bit touchier, in some ways—less so, in others. The good news is how many of the ingredients were already available in bulk from places like the fertilizer makers. The bad news is that, like gunpowder itself, mixing those ingredients can get just a bit hazardous.” He snorted. “Could hardly be otherwise, I guess, given that the whole notion was to come up with something that would reliably ignite from friction. And it does do that!”
He shook his head, his expression one of wry amusement.
“Is it too touchy?” Mahklyn asked. “Too sensitive?”
“No. No, not really.” Seamount shook his head. “In fact, it seems just about ideal—as the basis for an artillery fuse, at least. Urvyn’s running a test program on that for me right now. We don’t have nearly enough actual shells to play around with—not when Ehdwyrd’s people have to make each of them individually for us—but he’s come up with some ingenious ways to test our current fuse design, and reliability is really, really impressive so far, Rahzhyr.”
Mahklyn nodded. The basic design Seamount was talking about was actually at least partly Empress Sharleyan’s work. Seamount was the one who’d come up with the notion of using a friction- detonated compound inside a sealed tube. He’d realized the most reliable method for fusing a rifled shell would be to coat the inside of the tube with a properly combustible compound, then let an iron ball inside the tube fly forward when the shell hit its target, striking the inside of the tube, igniting the compound, and detonating the shell.
It was Sharleyan, however, who had suggested anchoring the ball in the middle of the tube with a length of wire designed to shear off as the shell accelerated down the bore of the gun. The wire kept the ball firmly in place, helping to prevent accidental detonations, until the shell was fired. At that point, acceleration forces sheared the wire, and the ball flew to the rear (and un-coated) end of the tube and stayed there until the shell reached its target. At that point, the ball—freed of the wire’s restraint—tried to keep going forward, slammed into the front of the tube, ignited the compound which coated it, and— Boom!
It was an elegantly simple solution... assuming someone managed to come up with a suitable incendiary compound, that was. There were any number of possibilities which could be ignited by friction or shock; the difficulty was finding one which could be made to do so reliably and counted upon not to do that at . . . incon ve nient moments. That search had been assigned to Sahndrah Lywys, and her response had been to go back to the Writ, looking for cautionary admonitions about various compounds and processes the “Archangels” had made available as part of those terraforming requirements. For example, phosphorus had been produced for use as a fertilizer from the Day of Creation itself, and although no citizen of the long- dead Terran Federation would ever have considered the production methods used anything but hopelessly primitive, they’d worked well enough for Safehold’s purposes. Nor were they the only production techniques the Holy Writ had laid out for Mother Church’s children. Saltpeter had been used in both fertilizers and in food preservation, for example, and “Schueler’s tears” (which someone from the Federation would have called “nitric acid”) had been used in metallurgy, as a cleaning compound, and even as a way to remove clogs from plumbing.<
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No one had ever had any idea of the actual chemical processes involved in producing any of those things, however. That meant there was no way for Safe-holdians to recognize potential hazards on their own, which could very easily have gotten a lot of people killed, over the centuries. Even worse—from Langhorne’s perspective, at least—if people suffered disasters from following the “Archangels’ ” directions, it was likely to make someone question those directions . . . or, at the very least, start looking for alternate methods. Which would have kicked off the entire innovation process Langhorne had been determined to stifle.
To head that off, the “Archangels” had incorporated precautions against things like accidental explosions—or other potential dangers—into their directions. For example, white phosphorus was actually simpler to manufacture than red phosphorus, yet the Writ strictly prohibited white phosphorus’ use for most purposes under pain of the Curse of Burning Jaw. What Mahklyn hadn’t known, until Owl’s library became available to him, was that the horrible symptoms of “Burning Jaw” had nothing to do with the Archangel Pasquale’s curse for the misuse of the banned white phosphorus. In fact, it was a condition which had been known, on a planet which had once been called Terra, as “phosphorus necrosis of the jaw” or “phossy jaw,” and it was a completely natural consequence of overexposure to white phosphorus’ vapors. There was no vengeful Archangel of healing, lashing out to punish sinners, behind the process which caused jawbones to abscess and actually begin to glow in the dark . . . and led eventually to death if the afflicted bones weren’t surgically removed.
Of course, “Burning Jaw” was only one example of the many “curses” which waited for those who sinned by violating the Archangels’ solemn rituals and admonitions. The various Curses of Pestilence—the periodic outbreaks of disease which always followed, sooner or later, upon the violation of Pasquale’s directives for public hygiene—were another, as were diseases like scurvy and rickets which followed upon violation of the Writ’s dietary laws. There were literally hundreds of curses, and the rules and “religious laws” to which they were attached impinged upon almost every aspect of Safeholdian life.
What Lywys had done was to hunt down all the prohibitions punishable by things like spontaneous combustion and explosions of “the Archangels’ Wrath” and use them to point her towards things which could be made to explode. At the moment, she and Seamount were using a combination of what a chemist would have called potassium chlorate, antimony sulfide, gum, and starch.
“So far, the fuse failure rate is only about one in a thousand,” Seamount continued. “And Dr. Lywys’ suggestions about our powder mills—those ‘quality control issues’ Merlin was talking about—have been extraordinarily useful, too.”
He shook his head again, and this time his smile was decidedly tart. “I was pretty proud of the quality and consistency of our powder,” he admitted. “And rightfully so, I think, compared to the kind of crap everybody else was turning out. But every lot is still at least a little bit different from every other lot. Dr. Lywys says it’s because nobody can guarantee uniform quality for the saltpeter or the charcoal—or, for that matter, even the sulfur—we’re using. But she’s managed to make some significant improvements in that area—mostly by insisting on inspection and processing standards fanatical enough to satisfy Jwo- jeng herself! And she’s also come up with some really good suggestions about ways we can proof each lot of powder. We’re firing representative charges from each lot now, using a testing high- angle gun at a fixed elevation, and mea sur ing the ranges we obtain. That lets us label each lot with the range achieved using a standard proof charge, so the poor damned gunner who has to use it in action is going to be able to judge ranges and accuracy a lot more effectively.”
“That sounds like Sahndrah,” Mahklyn acknowledged with a smile of his own.
“She made another suggestion that’s turned out to have some . . . interesting implications, too,” Seamount told him.
“What kind of implications?” Mahklyn asked a bit warily. “Well, way back when Merlin first suggested the possibility of corned powder to us, he told me that one reason corned powder was more powerful than meal powder was because there’s more space between each grain, since the space meant the fire—and all gunpowder really does is to burn very quickly—can burn even more quickly and completely. According to Dr. Lywys, that’s not entirely accurate, though.”
“It’s not?” Mahklyn asked, and tried not to frown. “No, it’s not,” Seamount said. “Mind you, it describes the consequences of what happens accurately enough, and I’ve come to the conclusion that he was explaining it in a way that would make sense to me. But according to Dr. Lywys—and my own experiments, working on trying to stabilize burning rates for combustion fuses— smaller- grained powder actually burns faster than larger-grained powder, yet the larger grains produce far more power. Before we started producing corned powder, we were using a thirty- pound charge in the long thirty- pounders; now we’re using a nine- and- a-half- pound charge. That’s how much more powerful the new powder is, despite the fact that the grains are burning slower, not faster, as they get bigger. So I’ve come to the conclusion that what Merlin told me was actually completely accurate, even if it wasn’t.”
“Excuse me?” Mahklyn blinked at him, and Seamount chuckled.
“Corning the powder helps a lot with consistency and those ‘quality control’ issues of Merlin’s. The biggest thing is the way it keeps the ingredients from separating, and corning it makes it less susceptible to damp, too—especially since we’ve started glazing the grains the way Dr. Lywys suggested. But the other thing it does is to expose more of the surface area of the powder to ignition simultaneously. And that allows more of the powder to ignite before it starts throwing unburned powder down the barrel in front of the explosion. In other words, even though the actual combustion rate is lower, we’re burning more of it simultaneously, and that means we’re burning more of the powder, in a shorter length of barrel, than we ever managed before. Which, by the way, also means the powder is leaving a lot less fouling—less ash—behind because it is burning more completely. Does that make sense?”
“As a matter of fact, it does,” Mahklyn said slowly. “And I think it’s exactly the sort of thing Merlin wants us to figure out on our own... for some reason.”
“You’re probably right,” Mahklyn agreed, carefully not noticing the sharp look the commodore gave him.
“Well,” Seamount continued when Mahklyn failed to rise to the bait, “what I hadn’t really considered until Urvyn and I started talking this over with Dr. Lywys was that, logically, making the grains even bigger should give us even greater power for a given weight of charge.”
“Which is going to push bore pressures even higher,” Mahklyn said thoughtfully.
“Oh, believe me, we’ve been thinking about that aspect of it, too.” Seamount rolled his eyes. “The good news there is that I’ve just had another letter from Howsmyn, and he says Merlin’s suggestion about using wire to reinforce the gun tubes should be perfectly workable, according to his mechanics. They say producing that much wire’s going to be a royal pain in the arse, but he’s got them working on new wire- drawing machinery—and the machinery to wind the wire uniformly around the gun tube under a high enough tension, too—and he’s confident they’ll manage it . . . eventually. Once they do, he says, he’ll be producing guns which are going to be both lighter, stronger, and a hell of a lot cheaper. Unfortunately, his best estimate is that it’s going to take at least a year, and in the meantime, the gun foundries are still the major bottleneck where the Navy’s concerned. We can build ships faster than we can cast as many guns as we’re going to need, and he’s not certain what shifting over to rifled pieces will do to our production schedules. And then there’re all the little problems involved in making—and filling—hollow shells with enough quality control to keep them from being as dangerous to us as to their targets.”
“Wonderful.”
“I can see that.” This time, Mahklyn nodded with firm, unqualified approval. “And that was what Sahndrah suggested to you?”
“Oh, no.” Seamount’s headshake surprised him. “I suppose if I’m really going to be accurate, it wasn’t so much something she suggested we do so much as something she suggested we not do.”
“If your object is to confuse me, Ahlfryd, you’re succeeding quite nicely,” Mahklyn said a bit tartly, and the baron chuckled.
“Sorry! What I meant is that Dr. Lywys is a very... thorough woman. She sent us a list of just about everything that could conceivably have been used to fuse our shells. We’re satisfied—so far, at least—with the one we’ve tentatively settled on, but there were quite a few others. Including some which she warned us would almost certainly be far too sensitive or unsuitable for some other reason.”
“That sounds like her,” Mahklyn said with a slight smile. “Well, something she included was what she called ‘fulminated quick silver.’ ” He raised an eyebrow at Mahklyn, who very carefully showed no reaction at all, aside from a polite nod inviting his visitor to continue.
“She warned us that fulminated quicksilver was much too sensitive for something as . . . lively as an artillery shell. We tested it, of course—cautiously!—and I agree with her entirely. But a couple of days ago, one of my other clever young officers suggested to Urvyn that even though it’s too sensitive for inclusion in a shell, there ought to be some way to use it as a priming composition. Something that could actually replace flintlocks.”
Mahklyn let his chair come fully upright, making no attempt now to disguise his sudden, intent interest. “Fulminated quicksilver”— what an Old Terran would have called “fulminate of mercury”— was scarcely anything he would have wanted to work with, if only because of the potential health risks. But it had some very interesting properties, and those properties had led it to be used in Old Terra’s firearms for a long, long time. He’d discovered them for himself, using his com and Owl’s research assistance on one of the unfortunately frequent nights when his aging bones found sleep elusive. There were other, safer ways to achieve the same effect, but this one was already here, ready to hand, if only someone would recognize the implications. As he’d skimmed over Lywys’ most recent reports, he’d wondered how he might casually bring some of those properties to her attention. Was it possible ...?