by David Weber
“Yes, Sir!”
The rearmost ship in Kornylys Harpahr’s windward column was the fifty- gun galleon NGS Saint Ithmyn. Her ship’s company had done well in the fleet’s endless sail and gunnery drills. Over the thousands of miles they’d voyaged, hard work, training, and growing experience had transformed them from a crew only too conscious of its own lack of experience into one confident that it no longer had anything of which to be ashamed. And there was a great deal of truth to that.
But training or no training, growing experience or no experience, no one aboard Saint Ithmyn expected an attack any more than Harpahr or Taibahld had. Her lookouts had been more concerned with keeping track of consorts who represented potential collision hazards—and with finding ways to shelter from the downpour—than with the ridiculous possibility that the Imperial Charisian Navy might choose a night blacker than the pit of Shan- wei to assail them. And so no one was looking in the right direction when HMS Ahrmahk came sliding out of the dark like the Archangel of Death himself.
“What the h—?!”
The crewman by Saint Ithmyn’s after rail wasn’t a lookout. In fact, he wasn’t supposed to be on deck—officially—at all. He was one of the servants assigned to the flagship’s wardroom, and he’d nipped above decks when he heard the rain easing to empty one of the wardroom spittoons over the lee rail during the lull. He had no idea what had prompted him to look up at the moment he did. Perhaps it was the urging of some deeply buried instinct, or perhaps he’d already caught sight of something out of the corner of one eye without realizing that he had.
What ever it was, he looked up just as Ahrmahk’s jibboom began crossing Saint Ithmyn’s wake barely fifty yards astern of her.
His inarticulate, half- strangled shout died in simple, paralyzing shock at the sight. Even then, it never occurred to him it might be a Charisian ship. If his brain had been working clearly, if it had been clear and daylight rather than a rainy, moonless night, he would have realized that low- slung, predatory shape couldn’t possibly belong to one of Saint Ithmyn’s sisters. But the eye sees what the mind expects to see, and so he assumed it must be another of their own vessels, wandering out of formation and narrowly missing a collision with his own ship.
The lieutenant who had the watch looked up sharply at the chopped- off exclamation, then wheeled in the direction of the other man’s stare. For a moment, his mind leapt down the same chain of assumptions, but unlike the servant, his had become a trained seaman’s eye. His brain insisted that it was illogical, preposterous—impossible—yet he knew instantly that what ever and whoever that ship was, it didn’t belong to his fleet.
“Strange ship, dead astern! Beat to quarters! Captain to the d—!”
The young lieutenant did everything right. More than that, he did it in the right order. Unfortunately, it was too late for the right thing to make any difference at all to NGS Saint Ithmyn.
Bryahn Lock Island heard the shout even through the sound of wind and wave. The fact that HMS Ahrmahk was totally silent, no one speaking, the crew hardly even breathing, helped. He couldn’t make out the words—partly because of the pronounced Temple Lands accent—but he recognized the tone of shock in the brief seconds before the shout was wiped away by another sound entirely.
“Fire!”Sylmahn Baikyr snapped, and the darkness came apart in fire and fury.
The lieutenant was still shouting when Ahrmahk’s first broadside arrived. Twenty- seven thirty- pound round shot came howling out of a sudden, blinding flash of light. The lieutenant had never seen a heavy gun fired in total darkness—never imagined the incredible brilliance, the physical pain of abused optic nerves as that totally unexpected fist of light slammed into it. The Charisian artillery spewed flame and smoke, and the lieutenant never had the chance to fully appreciate the brutal beauty and savagery of that man- made lightning bolt.
One of the first round shot struck him just above the belt buckle and tore him in half. His severed torso flew over fifteen feet before it thudded to the deck, and no one heard the sodden impact through the shrieks and the screams and the sound of splintering wood.
Ahrmahk’s attack took her victim totally by surprise. Better than half the ship’s company were in their hammocks, sound asleep or drowsing. Others were quietly playing cards, enjoying the companionship of their messmates on yet another rainy night. Some were darning holes in trousers, others were working on the scores of tiny repairs that were an incessant part of a wooden sailing ship.
And then, suddenly, without warning, Hell itself came for them. Six- inch round shots slammed into their ship, splintered her stern windows, ripped the full length of her crowded decks. Men in hammocks shrieked as those round shot plucked away arms and legs and victims woke from slumber and dreams of home to the agony of maimed and ruined bodies. The same round shot slammed into deck beams and framing members, spraying lethal clouds of splinters like wooden shrapnel to rip into still more sleeping or totally unprepared crewmen. Saint Ithmyn’s captain never had the opportunity to learn his ship was under attack—the third round shot of the first broadside killed him before he ever woke. A third of the galleon’s officers were killed or wounded—the majority in their own cabins, or sitting around the wardroom table—as the Charisian fire ripped through them.
All the training, and all the motivation, and all the experience in the world were not—could not have been—enough to absorb that sudden, completely unexpected, unbelievably brutal onslaught. Officers and petty officers were dead or wounded. The ship was suddenly filled with screaming, broken men and the stink of blood and riven entrails. The Archangels themselves would have panicked in the face of that carnage, and Saint Ithmyn’s discipline came apart.
Men bellowed in panic, fighting their way through strangling, clinging barriers of spread hammocks, sliding in blood, trampling on the broken, mewling bodies of what had once been messmates and friends. It wasn’t cowardice; it was shock, the devastating impact of total surprise. And in the midst of that panic, in the depths of that carnage, someone dropped a lantern.
HMS Ahrmahk’s larboard guns recoiled in a squealing thunder of wooden gun trucks across thick planking. The upper- deck carronades had been fired with the slow- matches, at least for the first broadside, and their crews were delighted the rain had ceased, at least for the moment. They’d shrugged off their oilskins even before the rain stopped, freeing themselves of the encumbrance. Now they flung themselves on their weapons, swabbing the barrels, ramming home fresh cartridges, sliding in the fat round shot.
Below, on the main gundeck, men coughed and choked on the strangling brimstone of their own gunsmoke. They, too, embraced their multi- ton charges, swabbing bores to extinguish any lingering sparks, ramming home fresh charges. For the moment, at least, none of them had any attention to spare for their target—time enough for that when they’d reloaded.
But Bryahn Lock Island did have attention to spare for Saint Ithmyn, and his jaw tightened as he saw the first telltale flicker.
Oh, those poor bastards,he thought. Those poor, damned bastards.
There is nothing more feared aboard a ship—especially aboard a wooden ship—than fire. And there is no emergency, no threat, which demands a quicker, more disciplined response. But there was no possibility of anything resembling a disciplined response aboard NGS Saint Ithmyn that night, at that moment. Too many men who would have responded instantly under other conditions were already dead, wounded, or maddened by panic, and the smell of wood smoke, the sudden crackle of flames, were the death knell of any hope of restoring order.
The fire spread with horrifying speed, overtaking men as they ran, crawling over the wounded who shrieked and tried to drag their broken bodies out of its embrace. Licking up heavily tarred rigging, despite the saturating rain which had come down for so many hours. Racing through shattered internal bulkheads, roaring jubilantly as it discovered the paint store and gorged itself on turpentine and gallons of cotton seed oil.
By the time Ahrmahk had
reloaded, and Darcos Sound had crossed Saint Ithmyn’s stern and poured her own thundering avalanche of iron into the reeling ship, the savagely wounded galleon was clearly doomed. Men—some of them on fire—flung themselves over the side, seeking the temporary cooling salvation of the sea. Flames roared like one of Ehdwyrd Howsmyn’s blast furnaces, and sparks were already cascading up out of the open hatchways.
And then Ahrmahk’s guns came to bear on their second target.
The destruction of Kornylys Harpahr’s windward column was total. Taken by surprise, unable to believe what was happening, rousing from the depths of sleep to face nightmare, and with the sudden, roaring inferno of Saint Ithmyn blazing against the night, the ships of that column never recovered.
It wasn’t for want of trying.
The three rear ships never had a chance. Assailed out of the darkness, their crews were ripped to pieces before they could even begin to respond. The Charisian ships closed to as little as twenty yards, paralleling their targets, overhauling them steadily and yet slowly enough to pound each of them mercilessly in turn. Masts went over the side. Guns were dismounted before their breeching ropes could even be cast off. It was a howling nightmare that shattered the fabric of the ships themselves almost as quickly and as brutally as it shattered the cohesiveness of the crews which manned them.
The eleven ships ahead of them had more time, at least some warning. Sailing ships, even Charisian sailing ships, are seldom as swift as slash lizards. It took time for Ahrmahk to overtake the ships ahead of Saint Ithmyn, and Lock Island’s greatest fear had been that one of the Church column’s leading units would turn out of line on her own initiative. Would steer to cut across the head of his own line in an effort to do to him what he’d done to Saint Ithmyn.
But surprise, confusion, and horror are poor soil for initiative. Especially for men who have never before experienced the violence of a point- blank broadside. The officers and the crews of those ships did their best, and after the initial strobes of panic, they responded with courage and determination. But they responded. They reacted. They made no effort to impose their own will. They defended themselves, getting their guns cleared away, bringing their batteries into action despite their surprise, despite the confusion. They fired back—raggedly, at first, then more steadily—even as an unending sequence of Charisian gun-ports sailed past them, every one of them belching flame and fury.
They had nothing to be ashamed of, those men, those officers. Most of them, when their time came, fell facing their enemies, shouting defiance, manning their weapons. But the only thing that could have saved them was swift, determined offensive action... and that was the one thing of which they were totally incapable.
Well, that was the easy part,Lock Island thought as the shattered wrecks of the windward column fell astern.
Three more of them were on fire now, flames roaring up and painting the clouds in crimson and blood. It was obvious the other ten ships were out of action for hours, probably days. It was unlikely any of them would sink, and if they’d been going to catch fire, they would have already. But taken together, they represented almost twenty percent of Harpahr’s total strength, and what ever else happened, they would play no part in any further combat this night.
If we win, any one of them can be snapped up by a single schooner,the high admiral thought. If we lose, Harpahr will probably be able to recover and repair them all . . . eventually. But that’s not going to happen.
A part of Lock Island was tempted to break off, to vanish back into the darkness. What had already happened to the Church fleet was bound to have brutal repercussions for its morale. And if he could break off for now, do the same thing again once or twice, then—
Forget it,he told himself sternly. Harpahr and Taibahld are too good for that kind of crap. Yes, you caught them with their trousers down and their bare arses hanging out to -night. What makes you think a pair as smart as they are is going to let you do that to them all over again? Besides, you only got away with it to night because of the weather!
No. He’d hurt them badly. Now it was time to hurt them even more badly, before they could recover.
“Captain Baikyr, we’ll come about,” he said, and waved at a distant red glimmer where firelight reflected on topsails to the northwest. “Those gentlemen are trying to get themselves into formation to greet us,” he continued. “It would be rude to keep them waiting.”
Kornylys Harpahr stood on Sword of God’s poop deck and tried to look impassive.
It wasn’t easy.
His flagship led what had been the centermost of five columns of warships. Now there were only four columns. Saint Ithmyn and her consorts had been too far away for him to make out any details, but the speed and savagery with which they’d been hammered into impotence had been only too easy to follow.
And there’d been nothing he could do about it. The Charisians had attacked from almost dead to windward, and the massacre of his column was over and done long before any of his other galleons could have beaten up to windward to assist it.
He’d almost tried, anyway—he’d almost hoisted the signal for a general chase in the hope at least some of his ships might see it and manage to scramble into action with the Charisians. But he hadn’t. The one thing he absolutely could not do was to permit the Charisians to panic him into reacting without thinking, and so he’d locked himself in the icy armor of self- control. He’d forced himself to stand there, watching, feeling the destruction of each of those ships as if they were extensions of his own body, and refused to react blindly.
Instead, he’d started the process of forming his own line of battle. It wasn’t going to be a proper line. That would have been impossible in these conditions. But it would be there, ready to his hand, and he bared his teeth at his foes.
By his estimate, there were between fifteen and thirty galleons in the attacking force, which suggested there were others somewhere about. If he’d been the Charisian commander, he’d have done his best to get at the Harchongese, so it was possible that was where at least some of the missing Charisians were.
At the same time, he reminded himself, it wouldn’t do to start assigning superhuman powers to the enemy. He’d found during his own career in the Guard that competent officers had a tendency to make their own luck, but even allowing for that, the Charisians had been incredibly fortunate to come upon his outermost column on an almost perfect interception course. They’d exploited that good fortune for all it was worth, and the burning, crippled remnants falling astern were brutal evidence of just how effectively they’d done it.
But they weren’t going to take the rest of his ships by surprise, and unless there were Shan- wei’s own lot of them still wandering about out there in the darkness, he still had them outnumbered by better than two- to- one.
Go ahead,he thought at the Charisian commander. Go ahead, come after us. We’ll be here, waiting.
“All right, it’s time,” Lock Island said.
He was addressing Captain Baikyr, but it was Domynyk Staynair to whom he was actually speaking.
“We’ve whittled them down some,” he continued, “but the rest are staying together. They’re not going to let us pick them off in isolation, and I don’t want to give them daylight to sort themselves out. Our own line’s in pretty good shape, I think, and Admiral Rock Point’s back there to take over if anything unfortunate happens to us. More to the point, the cloud cover’s trying to break up and let some moonlight in here so we can actually see what we’re doing. So it’s time to get tucked in.”
“Yes, Sir,” Baikyr replied grimly.
He didn’t seem to be looking forward to the experience, and Lock Island couldn’t blame him. There were the next best thing to sixty galleons over there, and their very lack of formation was going to make things even uglier. He knew his captains, knew they would hold the line of battle together as long as humanly possible, supporting one another, massing their fire on single targets. But he also knew that sooner or later—and pr
obably sooner—that line was going to come apart, especially in the chaos and confusion of a night action. If Harpahr’s crews proved as determined as he expected them to, this engagement was going to degenerate into a melee, with individual ships fighting desperately against individual enemies . . . and all too probably firing into friends in the madness.
Baikyr knew that as well as Lock Island did. Still, if there was any hesitation in the flag captain, the high admiral couldn’t see it.
“Very well,” he said. “Take us to them, Captain. Find us a way to their flagship.”
“Here they come, My Lord,” Taibahld said flatly, and Harpahr nodded.
“Here they come, indeed,” he murmured.
It had actually taken longer than he’d expected. Despite his experience on the long voyage, it was still vaguely surprising to an army officer, accustomed to how rapidly cavalry and even infantry could be moved about a field of battle, that it could take so long for ships to come to grips with one another.
There were no longer any flames on the horizon. One of his ships had erupted in spectacular, volcanic thunder when the flames finally reached her magazine. The other burning hulks had simply disappeared, burned to the waterline and gone. Over two and a half hours had passed since the rumble of guns had interrupted his chess game, and it was going to take at least another hour for the Charisians to reach him.
He had no doubt his captains had put the respite to good use, and he was grateful they’d had time to cope with the initial shock of the Charisians’ sudden appearance. Despite that, he knew his crews’ morale had to be badly shaken.
And no doubt theCharisians’ morale’s been bolstered by their success, he thought grimly. Well, we’ll just have to see what we can do about that.