Personally, although Merlin understood the economics involved, he found it a little difficult not to side with the doomwhales. Sea dragons reproduced more rapidly than most species of whale, and commercial dragoning was new enough that it would be decades yet, even at the current rate of growth, before it started significantly reducing sea dragon stocks. None of which prevented Merlin from seeing the inevitable parallels between dragoning and commercial whaling, and he intended to do everything he could to encourage the move from sea dragon oil to other sources of fuel and lubricant.
At the moment, he had more pressing things on his mind, but that was one reason he’d been keeping an eye on Zhansyn Wyllys. Wyllys’ family had grown wealthy harvesting and distributing sea dragon oil, and the dragoning industry had applied distillation to the process with quite a degree of sophistication. All of it was purely empirical, however, and the drive to understand and improve the existing methods was what had sparked young Zhansyn’s initial interest in his own branch of proto-chemistry. As his interest and experiments had progressed, however, he’d moved from an interest in simply improving the existing processes to a desire to find alternative—and hopefully more abundant—oil sources, as well.
Conservatives (like his father) nursed significant reservations about his quest, and not all of them because of religious concerns. Styvyn Wyllys’ wealth and his family’s fortune depended on sea dragoning; he was none too pleased by his rebellious offspring’s effort to find other sources of oil, despite Zhansyn’s argument that if he could find them, Wyllys’ Sea Dragon Oil could simply drop the “Sea Dragon” part of its name and get in on the ground floor in the new oil industry.
Whatever Styvyn Wyllys might think, Charisians in general, always more enthusiastic about innovation than mainlanders, had become even more enthusiastic over the past several years, and the College, prompted by the members of the inner circle, had supported Zhansyn’s efforts strongly. He’d started out looking at conventional plant oil sources—oil wood, fire vine, nearpalm, and imported terrestrial soybeans, peanuts, and jojoba—and he’d already made some significant contributions to production and refining. Even better in many ways, unless Merlin was sadly mistaken, one of his projects was going to lead to the production of kerosene from coal tar in the not too distant future. And that, given the extensive oilfields in southern Charis and Emerald Island—and the fact that Safeholdian techniques for drilling and pumping from water wells were well developed and, with Howsmyn’s new steam engines, about to get even better developed—was likely to lead to an entirely new industry. One that opened all sorts of interesting possibilities, given that the caloric energy of oil was fifty percent greater than that of coal.
But what Merlin was particularly interested in at the moment was the possibility of producing petroleum jelly in useful quantities. Quantities, for example, sufficient to use as a stabilizer in nitrocellulose-based propellants and explosives. With just a little nudging.…
“I don’t know if anyone’s even considered Wyllys,” Mahklyn said after several thoughtful moments. “I see a lot of potential in the work he’s doing, but I don’t know anything about his attitude towards the Group of Four and the Reformists. Do you?”
“Not as much as I’d like. What I do know looks hopeful, though, including the fact that he and his father clearly don’t see eye to eye. The fact that he’s as much of a knowledge seeker as any of the rest of you ‘eggheads’ doesn’t necessarily make him a Reformist, and even if it did, Reformism isn’t necessarily the same thing as being prepared to completely jettison the Writ and the archangels. But we could put a couple of Owl’s remotes on him, take a good look at him, before we ever actually suggested him to anyone. You’re right that we need to get Sahndrah vetted and admitted to the circle first—that should’ve been a higher priority all along, and now that she’s stumbled across guncotton, we really need her working with Owl to get chemistry properly launched as a science. Especially given what I have to tell Ahlfryd and Captain Rahzwail about my latest ‘visions’ tomorrow.”
“It would be nice to be able to give them some good news with the bad, wouldn’t it?” Mahklyn said almost wistfully, and Merlin shrugged philosophically.
“They’re going to give Domynyk and me some good news to go with the bad, first, and it’s not the end of the world. What bothers me more is where and how Clyntahn and Maigwair got their hands on the information, and without remotes in Zion, I don’t think there’s a chance in hell we’ll ever be able to answer that question definitively. From examining the drawings they’ve actually sent out to the foundries and the formulas they’re sending out to their powder mills, it looks to me like it had to come out of the Hairatha Mill—probably from the same son-of-a-bitch who diverted the gunpowder for Clyntahn’s Rakurai. Unfortunately, that suggests whoever it was had complete access, at least at the time, and at this point we can’t know what else he may have passed along.”
“Not a good situation,” Mahklyn acknowledged. “On the other hand, their powder mills’ quality control is still way behind ours. For that matter, their foundries are in the same boat. The quality of their iron’s a lot more problematical than ours, even from lot to lot in the same blast furnace, much less from foundry to foundry. That’s a major handicap over and beyond the piss-poor—you should pardon the expression; I’ve been talking to Cayleb again—per-man-hour productivity of their manufactories. And without Ahlfryd and Ehdwyrd—among others—to push the support structure that’s not going to change anytime soon, which means they’re still going to be producing the new hardware in tenth-mark packets.”
“And if you add ten tenth-marks together, you get a whole mark,” Merlin pointed out acidly. Then he pushed back from the battlements and gave himself a shake. “Still, you’re right. We’ve got a running start and our industrial plant is one hell of a lot more productive. Besides,” he produced a crooked smile, “I’m the one who told Cayleb we needed the mainlanders and the Group of Four to adopt the new technology if we really wanted to topple the Church. It’s still true, too. I think I’ve just become too much of a Charisian myself to be comfortable with the idea.”
“Speaking as a native Charisian, I’m not really brokenhearted to hear that, you know,” Mahklyn said dryly, and Merlin chuckled.
“Neither am I, Rahzhyr,” he said, gazing out across the forest of masts in the harbor so far below. “Neither am I.”
.VIII.
The Citadel, King’s Harbor, Helen Island, Kingdom of Old Charis, Empire of Charis
“I’m sorry I wasn’t here yesterday, Sir,” Sir Ahlfryd Hyndryk, Baron Seamount, said to High Admiral Rock Point. “The firing test ran over.” He shrugged wryly. “I’m afraid one of the recuperators failed fairly drastically. It was, ah, quite lively there for a few moments.”
“Was anyone hurt?” Sir Domynyk Staynair, Baron Rock Point and High Admiral of the Imperial Charisian Navy, asked sharply, although the truth was that he knew the answer to his question before he asked. He’d been watching the tests through Owl’s SNARCs.
“Two of Captain Byrk’s seamen were injured,” Seamount acknowledged unhappily. “I think one of them may lose three or four fingers.” He held up his own maimed left hand and wiggled its remaining fingers. “Unfortunately, it’s his right hand and he’s right-handed. The other fellow should be fine, though.” He lowered his hand and grimaced. “I blame myself for it.”
“Really?” Maikel Staynair’s younger brother tipped back in his chair. “You personally built all the components of the recuperator that failed, I take it?”
“Well, no.” Seamount shrugged. “I did have more than a little to do with its design, though. And I was supervising the test in person.”
“And I’ll wager no one could’ve prevented whatever happened from happening. Am I right about that?”
“Well.…”
“As a matter of fact, High Admiral, you are right,” Captain Ahldahs Rahzwail said. He glanced at Seamount, then looked back at Rock Point. “It was a
fault in the casting, My Lord. That’s my initial analysis of why the cylinder wall split when the pressure spiked, at any rate. And there was no way anyone could’ve known it was there until the gun was fired.”
“That’s pretty much what I expected. So if you’ll stop kicking yourself over that, Ahlfryd, what say we get down to the reason Seijin Merlin and I are here? I have to get back to the fleet, and he has to get back to Their Majesties, and I’ll give you one guess how impatient Their Majesties are to hear about your latest developments.”
“Yes, Sir,” Seamount said, and opened the leather folder lying in front of him on the conference table.
Seamount’s office seemed smaller than it had been, with the conference table and a complete additional desk crammed into it, but its slate-lined walls were still covered with smeared notations, Merlin observed. He was tempted to smile, but the temptation faded, because those half-smeared notes were all in Seamount’s handwriting, or Ahldahs Rahzwail’s. Urvyn Mahndrayn, who’d been Seamount’s assistant for years, would never chalk another cryptic memorandum to himself on those slate walls again.
He settled into his own chair, across the table from Rahzwail. The burly, dark-haired captain reminded him of a shorter version of Rahzhyr Mahklyn’s son-in-law, Aizak Kahnklyn, with blunt, hard features and a heavy forehead which did their best to disguise the quick brain behind them. He might not be another Urvyn Mahndrayn, but very few people were. Rahzwail couldn’t multitask the way Mahndrayn had, and he lacked Mahndrayn’s ability to intuitively leap across obstacles. Yet he was an immensely experienced officer, the ex-commander of the bombardment ship Volcano, and what he lacked in intuition he compensated for with relentless, methodical determination. In some ways, he was actually a better foil for Seamount then Mahndrayn had been, because of how differently their minds worked, but no one recognized what a disaster Mahndrayn’s loss had been more clearly than Rahzwail himself.
Merlin glanced at Seamount as the short, portly baron gazed down at his own notes. Seamount had finally made admiral’s rank, despite the fact that he hadn’t commanded a ship at sea in decades. There were undoubtedly at least a handful of diehard old salts who might be tempted to denigrate Seamount’s admiral’s streamer because of that lack of seagoing experience, but if there were, they would be well advised to keep their opinions to themselves. Most of the Imperial Charisian Navy recognized how much it owed to Seamount’s fertile brain, and Domynyk Staynair had finally taken the first concrete steps towards completing the naval reorganization Bryahn Lock Island had mapped out but never had time to implement.
Seamount was now the commanding officer of the Bureau of Ordnance, with authority over all weapons-related development for the navy and with Rahzwail as his executive officer and senior assistant. Rahzwail’s primary focus was on artillery and its development, while Commander Frahnklyn Hainai, Seamount’s liaison with Ehdwyrd Howsmyn’s engineers and artificers, was focusing on the development of new and better alloys of steel and the new steam engines coming out of the Delthak Works. It was a comment on just how severe Mahndrayn’s loss had been that it took both of them to fulfill all of the functions he’d fulfilled, although Merlin suspected Rahzwail and Hainai might each actually be better at their part of Mahndrayn’s old workload than he himself had been, if only because they had to juggle so many fewer projects simultaneously. He also knew Rock Point had earmarked Hainai to take over the Bureau of Engineering once it was formally established (in about another two or three months, at the outside), just as Captain Tompsyn Saigyl (yet another Seamount assistant, who’d also worked closely with Rock Point and Sir Dustyn Olyvyr) would be assuming command of the equally soon-to-be-established Bureau of Ships. Captain Dynnys Braisyn was already settling in as the CO of the Bureau of Supply, and Captain Styvyn Brahnahr had been named to head the Bureau of Navigation just last five-day.
There were those who found all the reorganization disturbing, and others who questioned the newfangled notions—especially the newfangled notion of a shore-based naval academy—and whether or not the middle of a desperate war was the best time to be mucking about with problematic innovations. Most, however, realized it was the energetic adoption of new ideas which had permitted the Royal Charisian Navy and, now, the Imperial Charisian Navy to sweep all opposition from the face of Safehold’s seas, and it struck them as a very good idea to continue to innovate if they wanted to keep things that way. As for those who didn’t feel that way, the vast majority of them were at least wise enough to keep their opinions to themselves rather than carelessly scattering them about where they might come to High Admiral Rock Point’s ears.
“For the most part, Sir,” Seamount said finally, looking up from his notes to meet Rock Point’s eyes, “we’re essentially where we expected to be as of our last conference. Ahldahs and I just returned from the artillery tests, and Fhranklyn’s headed up to the Delthak Works to confer with Master Howsmyn. The recuperators worked fairly well, but not perfectly. There’s still too much fluid leakage, and I’m not as comfortable in my own mind about how well they’ll stand up to really heavy guns. So far, we haven’t tried them with anything heavier than a thirty-pounder or a six-inch rifle.”
Rock Point nodded gravely. The thirty-pounder and the six-inch rifle had approximately the same bore, but the ICN had found itself facing much the same problem which had been faced back on Old Earth during the transition from smoothbores to rifled artillery. Smoothbores fired round shot; rifled guns fired elongated, cylindrical shot, which were considerably heavier than the shot from a smoothbore of equal caliber. Given the differences in performance—and bore pressures—that caused, it was a non-trivial distinction. The increase in bore pressures to which rifled guns’ heavier projectiles (and tighter windages) contributed had turned out to be even greater than Seamount and Urvyn Mahndrayn had predicted, yet the advantages would be well worth the headaches. They were going into service, probably sooner than even Merlin had anticipated, and that made figuring out what to call them a rather more pressing concern than some people might have anticipated.
Seamount had initially proposed designating rifled guns by the weight of their solid shot while changing the designations for smoothbores to the diameter of their bores, since it was primarily the increase in projectile weight which presented the technical challenges he had to solve. In the end, however, he’d decided it would cause too much confusion. Every officer of the Imperial Charisian Navy knew exactly what a “thirty-pounder” meant right now, so he’d chosen to label the new guns using the new nomenclature rather than confuse the issue by making everyone learn yet another new one. Besides, the guns were all going to be firing more than one weight of projectile in the very near future, anyway. The thirty-pounder’s solid shot actually weighed almost thirty-two pounds, but its shell—with fifty-five cubic inches less iron and a roughly two-pound bursting charge—weighed less than eighteen. The six-inch rifle’s solid shot, on the other hand, weighed over a hundred pounds, and the standard shell carried an eleven-pound bursting charge and weighed sixty-seven pounds. And at the moment, Merlin knew, Seamount and Rahzwail were working on heavy shells for attacking armor and masonry. The thicker walls of the new shell’s central cavity would reduce the bursting charge to no more than three or four pounds but increase overall shell weight by thirty-five percent, which would give it much greater striking power and penetration.
It would also increase the bore pressures and recoil forces still further, of course. Still, the same basic design for a recuperator—effectively, a hydro-pneumatic recoil system—ought to work equally well for the thirty-pounder and the six-inch, although he understood Seamount’s reservations about applying their current design to the much heavier eight- and ten-inch rifles Edwyrd Howsmyn was currently designing. It ought to work, but until they positively proved it would, they couldn’t approve a final design for the new guns’ mounts.
The original concept had been Mahndrayn’s, although Rahzwail had taken the dead commander’s original rough ske
tches and, along with Hainai, turned them into a practical proposition. Essentially, it was simply a pair of large, sealed cylinders, one filled with oil and the other with compressed air. The gun was rigidly attached to a piston inside the oil-filled cylinder; when it fired, recoil pulled the piston towards the rear, forcing the oil through a small opening into the second cylinder. The second cylinder’s free-floating piston separated the oil from a confined volume of compressed air, and as the floating piston was pressed forward, it compressed the air even further. The result was to absorb the recoil progressively, braking it smoothly as the internal air pressure rose, and at the end of recoil, that increased air pressure generated a back pressure that returned the gun forward to its original position.
It was only one of several approaches from Mahndrayn’s fertile imagination, including the pivoting slide carriage the navy had adopted while it waited for the hydro-pneumatic system to be worked out. The current carriage, just being introduced, would have been called a “Marsilly carriage” back on Old Earth, and it was a major improvement on even the “new model” carriages Merlin Athrawes had introduced only five years earlier. There had been some resistance to it, since it required iron or steel slides, but its advantages had quickly become evident. Pivoted at the front end of the carriage, it could be quickly moved to new angles of train. Two men with roller-ended handspikes could train it quite easily on its eccentric axles, and since it used the friction between the metal slide and the transom of the piece to damp recoil, its recoil path was much shorter, which meant it could be loaded and fired much more rapidly. It had already been tested satisfactorily with thirty-pounders, and it could be fitted with compressor screws to increase the friction for still heavier guns, if needed.