A Mighty Fortress

by David Weber

  Trynair was looking thoughtful, and even Duchairn had to admit there was a certain logic to Clyntahn’s argument. Still, the thing which had most impressed Duchairn about the failure of their initial attack on Charis was that sending fleets on lengthy voyages with coordinated timetables which didn’t consider little things like, oh, weather, seemed to be significantly more problematical than sending armies on lengthy marches.

  “You’re talking about sending a hundred to two hundred and twenty of our galleons past Tarot to Desnair,” he said now. “According to Allayn, a quarter of them would be completely unarmed. So, say we have your higher number available for the trip—a hundred and twenty. That means only ninety of them would actually be armed, and none of our ships are as well trained as Earl Thirsk’s were. If the sixty or seventy Charisians manage to intercept them, I don’t know how well our ninety would make out, Zhaspahr. I don’t like saying that any more than you like hearing it,” he added as Clyntahn’s face tightened, “but we have to be realistic. And it’s not their fault, either. They simply haven’t had the time to train.”

  “Rhobair has a point,” Trynair said in a reasonable tone.

  “Yesssss,” Maigwair said slowly. The others all looked at him, and he held up his right hand, index finger extended. “Yes,” he repeated, “but we’ve got the semaphore.”

  “And?” Duchairn prompted when the Captain General paused again.

  “First,” Maigwair said, “we ought to have the advantage of surprise when we actually start moving the ships. Distance alone ought to see to that, but let’s assume the Charisians’ spies here in the Temple Lands have access to the commercial messages we allow the semaphore to pass. Or, for that matter, just that they have a network of homing wyverns to carry messages. What ever. It’s obvious they do have spies somewhere in the system, right?”

  Duchairn nodded, impressed despite himself. Thinking things through wasn’t something he normally associated with Allayn Maigwair.

  “All right. In that case, we openly send orders to our squadrons all along Hsing- wu’s Passage. For that matter, let’s send them in one of the ciphers we’re pretty sure the Charisians may have compromised in Delferahk or Corisande. We order them to rendezvous at Angelberg, but we tell them that’s a ruse. They’re concentrating there to help any Charisian spies assume we’re going to send them to Desnair, but they’re to prepare to sail to Dohlar. Even if the message isn’t compromised along the semaphore chain, you know at least some of their crew will talk about their upcoming trip to Dohlar whenever they get a chance to go ashore in Angelberg. So any Charisian spies are going to hear about that destination, and as far as preparing for the voyage is concerned, it doesn’t matter whether they’re going to Dohlar or Desnair, really.”

  His eyes were beginning to sparkle now as his enthusiasm mounted.

  “So, our cover story is that their preparations are to take them west. Any spies who spot them in Chantry Bay will almost certainly find out about their orders to Dohlar, and we don’t tell even our admirals differently until they’re all ready to sail. At that point, we use the semaphore to send them their actual sailing orders. Surely that ought to insure that we have strategic surprise. In fact, if the Charisians do get wind of their original orders, they may shift their own deployments to protect Chisholm and Corisande!

  “Then, once we have our ships in motion to the east, instead of the west, we use the semaphore to order the Desnairians to sortie to meet them. We’ll be able to tell Desnair to sail more quickly than the Charisians will be able to tell their squadrons to concentrate. So, ideally, Lock Island will still be lying to anchor in Rock Shoal Bay when Rock Point and his twenty- five ships find themselves caught between seventy- odd Desnairian galleons coming up from the south and a hundred to a hundred and twenty Harchongese and Temple Lands galleons coming down from the north.”

  “That’s a very good thought, Allayn,” Clyntahn congratulated. “And there’s another aspect to it, as well. We can keep track of both forces as long as they stay in coastal waters, so if one of them hits a snag, or if it turns out the Charisians have somehow managed to concentrate against one of them, we can order the other one to turn around and avoid action.”

  Maigwair beamed, clearly basking in the unaccustomed light of the Grand Inquisitor’s approval. Even Trynair was nodding, slowly at first, but then more firmly.

  Duchairn, on the other hand, still had profound reservations. Maigwair’s and Clyntahn’s ideas about coordinating two separate fleets sounded good in theory, but he couldn’t quite convince himself it would work out that smoothly in practice. On the other hand, Maigwair did have a point about achieving surprise. If no one outside the Group of Four itself knew where the northern ships were really going to go, no one could possibly betray that information to Charis. And it really didn’t matter how quickly the information got to Charis once the ships actually began moving, because Charisian warships as far away as Chisholm or Corisande would be so badly out of position that they might as well have been on the bottom of the sea. They couldn’t possibly reach the Gulf of Tarot or the Sea of Justice before the Church’s fleets had either united with one another or turned around and returned separately to their original ports.

  He watched the other three and realized that what ever qualms he might feel, all of them were in favor. That being the case, he wasn’t going to prevent it, what ever he did. So he wouldn’t try. He would content himself with voicing his own reservations—reservations mild enough he could brush them away later with a smile for his own timidity if they proved unfounded, but sufficiently pointed to position him, if things turned out badly after all, to remind them all that he’d warned them against overconfidence.

  He sat back in his chair, waiting while Maigwair and Clyntahn worked out the details to their own satisfaction. There’d been a time when Rhobair Duchairn hadn’t worried all that much about political calculations. He’d risen to his post as Treasurer mostly because he’d been the consummate bureaucrat, content to leave politics—Mother Church’s and secular politics, alike—to Try-nair and Clyntahn.

  And the fact that we’re having this discussion is proof of how wellthat worked out, isn’t it, Rhobair? he asked himself acidly. On the other hand, even you can learn if God hits you with a heavy enough club. The real trick’s going to be convincing them—and especially Zhaspahr—that you still don’t have a clue.

  He smiled inwardly behind an expression that mingled patience with just a touch of boredom. It was ironic, he thought, that his “bargain” with Clyntahn should do so much to convince the Grand Inquisitor to completely disregard any threat he might represent. That the man who was supposed to be the keeper of Mother Church’s conscience regarded Duchairn’s insistence on actually discharging his responsibilities as one of God’s vicars as proof of maudlin foggy- mindedness.

  You just go right on seeing things that way, Zhaspahr,Rhobair Duchairn thought coldly. Because one of these days, you’re going to find out just how wrong you truly are.

  .V.

  HMS Royal Charis, 58,

  City of Tellesberg,

  Kingdom of Old Charis

  I was wondering when they’d get around to this,” Cayleb Ahrmahk said sourly.

  He, Sharleyan, their daughter, and one Captain Merlin Athrawes were afloat once more. Empress of Charis was still in yard hands, so he and Sharleyan flew their standard aboard HMS Royal Charis, one of the new fifty- eight- gun galleons designed to avoid Empress of Charis’ problems. They wouldn’t actually be leaving Tellesberg for their return to Chisholm until the morning tide, but they’d decided to get Princess Alahnah aboard ship and settled that afternoon.

  Of course, that also meant they had to be a bit more careful about keeping their voices down, given the thinness of cabin bulkheads.

  “Well,” Bryahn Lock Island said rather more philosophically from his own flagship, “we figured they’d have to decide what to do with all those ships before Hsing- wu’s Passage froze. Now we know. I have to adm
it, though—I didn’t expect them to be quite this subtle. Gather their fleet in an eastern port, then send them all west?” He shook his head. “That’s a lot sneakier than I anticipated, frankly.”

  Lock Island had a point, Merlin conceded. The port of Angelberg, on Chantry Bay, lay on the southern shore of Hsing- wu’s Passage, almost three thousand miles east of Temple Bay. It was nearly halfway to the eastern mouth of the Passage, where it debouched into the Icewind Sea... and well over seven thousand miles from the Passage’s western mouth. Had it not been for the orders to the various squadron commanders, he would have assumed they were planning on coming east, instead of west. Fortunately, they had been able to read those orders, which confirmed that what they were really planning was what Merlin and Lock Island had both considered to be their smartest move all along.

  “They are being clever, aren’t they,” Prince Nahrmahn remarked from Eraystor, where his own galleon was waiting to join Royal Charis for the voyage to Chisholm.

  “Maybe so, but now that we’ve caught them at it, the problem’s deciding what we do about it,” Domynyk Staynair put in from Thol Bay over his own com.

  “No,” Cayleb said, his tone ever more sour than it had been. “It isn’t deciding what we do about it; it’s deciding how we go about doing it. We’re all agreed that this is the most logical thing for them to be doing, after what happened to Gwylym. And I think we have to honor the threat. Which means reinforcing both Corisande and Chisholm.”

  “I’m afraid you’re right,”

  Merlin sighed.

  “So am I,” Lock Island conceded. “But while we’re worrying about what Thirsk might do, let’s not forget about Kholman and Jahras.”

  Merlin grimaced.

  The fact that he dared not insert remotes into the Temple itself always left a blank area at the very apex of their intelligence analyses. There was simply no way to get eyes and ears inside the innermost councils of the Group of Four, and their ignorance of what went on there was all the more frustrating because of their ability to penetrate every other council of war on the planet.

  He kept reminding himself that he and his allies had better intelligence on their enemies’ plans and capabilities than anyone else in the history of mankind. The problem was that they needed that kind of advantage if they were ever going to prevail against someone so numerically superior to themselves. And they’d been waiting for five- days to find out which way the Church’s new navy was going to jump as autumn came on.

  As Lock Island had pointed out, they’d known Allayn Maigwair and his colleagues would have to choose a course of action before the northern ports started to freeze. Of course, they could have decided to just sit there, but no one had really expected that. After the declaration of Holy War and the bloody fashion in which Clyntahn had secured the Group of Four’s rear in the Temple and Zion, it had seemed a foregone conclusion that they weren’t going to simply leave a hundred or so brand- new galleons frozen into the ice for several months.

  As Merlin, Cayleb, Lock Island, and Rock Point had considered the Church’s options, they’d concluded that there were three possible ice- free destinations: Shwei Bay, Gorath Bay, and the Gulf of Mathyas. There were arguments in favor of all three. For that matter, there’d been a fourth possibility—Bédard Bay, in the Republic of Siddarmark. North Bédard Bay would actually have been the most defensible of all the ice- free ports available, and given Clyntahn’s near- psychotic suspicion of all things Siddarmarkian, basing a sizable contingent of the Church’s new fleet right off the capital city’s waterfront as a suggestion that the Lord Protector should behave himself could have been tempting.

  There was also the question of just how the Church might choose to split up the ships it was moving south. In fact, Merlin had rather hoped they’d parcel the northern units out between several possible destinations, instead of keeping them concentrated. Having the opposing navy scattered around in as many separate sub fleets as possible struck him as a very good idea from Charis’ viewpoint.

  But what ever he might have hoped, Merlin had always expected the Church to end up choosing the strategy it had now selected. Given the Earl of Thirsk’s accomplishments, combining as much as possible of the Church’s total naval strength under his command made a lot of sense. Not only that, but under Thirsk’s energetic management, Dohlaran foundries were now churning out more—and better—guns than anyone else outside of Charis. They were mostly still casting in bronze while they tried to get a handle on the greater difficulties involved in producing reliable iron guns, but their output had risen steadily. And if they were much less innovative than Charisian foundry operators, they were enormously more innovative than the Harchongese.

  The Harchong economy still ran on what was essentially slave labor. The Empire had long- established, labor- intensive ways of doing things, and its innately reactionary conservatism—and ultra- orthodox adherence to the Proscriptions of Jwo- jeng—left it strongly disinclined to make changes. Its sheer size and population had allowed its economy to dominate western Howard and Haven for the last century and a half, despite its inherent inefficiency, however, and when the Church began its massive armament programs, the number of Harchongese foundries had suggested the Empire would provide at least a third, and more probably half, of all the required artillery. In fact, however, those plans had capsized when all those small foundries turned out to be so much less productive than expected. Against that sort of backdrop, the way in which Thirsk and Duke Fern had managed to improve the output of Dohlaran guns was one of the genuine bright spots for the Church. And given how badly cannon production continued to lag in both Harchong and the Temple Lands, it made a lot of sense to sail as many as possible of the Church’s still unarmed galleons to Gorath Bay. With Claw Island now firmly in Thirsk’s hands, the voyage would be both shorter and far more secure than trying to send them to any other destination.

  It would also just happen to put the better part of two hundred galleons, under the Church’s best admiral, in an ideal position to strike at Chisholm or Corisande from the east. And since the Imperial Charisian Navy had only about ninety- seven galleons of its own after Sir Gwylym Manthyr’s losses in the Harchong Narrows, redeploying to meet that threat was going to be . . . difficult.

  Especially since, as Bryahn’s just been kind enough to point out, we still have to worry about the friggingDesnairians , too, Merlin thought disgustedly.

  Duke Kholman and Admiral Jahras reminded Merlin rather forcibly of an Old Terran general named McClellan. They were pretty fair managers, all things considered. Despite ongoing problems with their own artillery production, they’d managed to get around seventy galleons launched, armed, and (more or less) manned. It was a significant accomplishment, particularly given the fact that there’d been no real Desnairian shipbuilding industry before the Church’s massive program. Of course, there’d been an enormous amount of graft, some of the ships weren’t all that well built, and Desnairian guns had a tendency to blow up more often than most, but seventy- plus galleons were still seventy- plus galleons.

  The good news (and the main reason Kholman and Jahras made Merlin think about McClellan) was that, having built their navy, they were disinclined to have anything unfortunate happen to it. What Dunkyn Yairley and HMS Destiny had done to Commodore Wailahr clearly loomed large in their thinking, and especially in Baron Jahras’. In fact, he’d refused to venture outside of the Gulf of Jahras’ sheltered waters to train his crews, which suited Charis just fine.

  But if they redeployed enough strength to protect Chisholm and Corisande against an admiral as capable as Thirsk, even Jahras might find it within himself to operate with a modicum of aggressiveness. And if that happened . . .“We’re going to have to make some deep cuts in home waters, Bryahn, no matter what the Desnairians may be thinking about doing,” Cayleb said finally. “Thirsk is just too damned good. If he comes at Chisholm with two hundred galleons, we need a lot more than Sharpfield has in the area now to stop him.”
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br />   Lock Island nodded heavily. Sir Lewk Cohlmyn, the Earl of Sharpfield, had been the commanding officer of the Royal Chisholmian Navy. As such, he was now the second- ranking officer, after Lock Island himself, in the Imperial Charisian Navy. That rank, plus his intimate familiarity with Chisholmian waters, made him the logical—indeed, the only—choice to command the squadrons protecting Sharleyan’s kingdom. As a peacetime officer, he’d been outstanding, especially with his determination to root out corruption at all levels, and no one doubted his personal courage. Yet all his combat experience was with galleys. He’d never commanded even a single galleon in action. Now he was in command of an entire fleet of them, and the thought of giving him his first experience with it outnumbered six- or seven- to- one wasn’t particularly appealing.

  “It would help if we had someone in Chisholm or Corisande with a com,” Sharleyan pointed out. “If Sir Lewk and Admiral Mahndyr had access to the SNARCs, they could combine their strength into a single force that would have a far better chance of matching Thirsk.”

  It was Merlin’s turn to nod. Gharth Rahlstahn, the Earl of Mahndyr, had been Sharpfield’s Emeraldian equivalent. He was younger than Sharpfield, without as many years of experience at sea, but he’d proven he was a fighter at Darcos Sound, and years of service under Prince Nahrmahn had given him a degree of political acumen which the bluff, apolitical Sharpfield completely lacked. That was why he’d been chosen to command the squadron covering Corisande.