Midst Toil and Tribulation: Chapter Eighteen

.XI.
King’s Harbor,
Helen Island,
Kingdom of Old Charis,
Empire of Charis

    There were too many of them to fit into Baron Seamount’s office this time, so they’d met in Sir Dustyn Olyvyr’s drafting office, instead. The drafting tables where the ICN’s Chief Naval Constructor’s assistant designers normally labored had been moved back against the enormous room’s walls and a conference table had been moved into the middle of the floor. The louvered skylights were open, allowing the harbor breeze to swirl through, and sunlight poured through the glass, flooding the room with the light the draftsman normally required. The smells of salt water, freshly sawn timbers, tar, and paint came with the breeze, and the cries of gulls and sea wyverns, mingled with the shouts of foremen and their work crews, floated through the opened windows over the racket of hammers and saws.

    “Every time I get out here, it seems like you’ve figured out how to cram at least one more building way into the waterfront, Sir Dustyn,” Cayleb Ahrmahk said wryly.

    “It’s not really that bad, Your Majesty,” Olyvyr said.

    “No, not quite,” Domynyk Staynair agreed. “Although, I do seem to recall having authorized you to demolish four of those warehouses associated with the old foundry in order to build new slips over there. Is my memory playing me false?”

    “Well, no. It isn’t.”

    “I thought not.” Baron Rock Point nodded, standing behind his chair at the table, and surveying the assembled group. Almost half were members of the inner circle, which was going to make the ensuing conversation interesting, since they’d have to remember the other half weren’t.

    “All right.” Cayleb slid Sharleyan’s chair up to the table after she was seated, then dropped into his own, “I know we’re all short on time — especially with Sharleyan due to leave for Chisholm in only seven days.” He grimaced. “She and I both have a lot of things we need to do before then, and all of you have just as many projects and responsibilities waiting for you. It’s not often we get a chance to sit down in one place together, though, and before we scatter to our various roosts, I want to make sure we cover everything that needs to be covered. Ehdwyrd,” he looked at Ehdwyrd Howsmyn, “I know you and Captain Rahskail and Commander Malkaihy need to spend at least a full day of your own discussing the new artillery designs. I want to sit in on that as well, if I can find time. At the moment, though,” he returned his attention to Olyvyr, “I’m more interested in where we are on the new ship designs.”

    “Of course, Your Majesty.” Olyvyr nodded and settled into his own chair, like all of the others — except Seijin Merlin, who stood comfortably beside the only door into the big room — after the emperor and empress had been seated. Then he folded the hands which bore the long-faded scars of chisel, saw, and adze on the table in front of him and nodded to the man at his right, Captain Tompsyn Saigyl. “Tompsyn and I have been working on that, and we’re confident we’ve solved the last design problems — assuming Ehdwyrd and Commander Hainai’s final drawings and performance estimates on the engines are accurate?”

    He raised one eyebrow, and Howsmyn shrugged.

    “The test engine’s completed and running, Dustyn, and we’re actually producing about ten more dragonpower than predicted.”

    Olyvyr nodded. One “dragonpower,” the unit Stahlman Praigyr had proposed to measure the energy output of his beloved engines, equated to about twenty-five Old Earth horsepower.

    “Of course, at this point we haven’t had a chance to see how well our projected propeller efficiency will stand up,” Howsmyn continued, “but the rest of the numbers we’ve given you are sound. And the canal boat propellers we’ve tested so far have come out fairly close to the efficiencies we’d predicted. We’ll be delivering the first harbor tug in about another three five-days, so you should be able to play with it yourself, if you like.”

    “And the plate production estimates?”

    “There I can’t be quite as confident,” Howsmyn admitted. “Those depend on whether or not we’re able to continue to increase capacity at the projected rate. And whether or not we have enough iron, for that matter. Nickel production’s running a little ahead of our estimated requirements, but there’s only so much iron ore to go around.”

    “That’s why I authorized you to strip the iron guns off our Desnairian and Navy of God prizes,” Rock Point said. “It’s not like we’ve got the manpower to crew every ship we have, anyway, and the workmanship on the Desnairian guns, especially, is less than reliable, so if we’re going to find you scrap metal, better there than anywhere else I can think of.” He glanced at Cayleb and Sharleyan and grimaced, his expression unhappy. “I don’t like disarming that many galleons, but Ehdwyrd’s already melted down everything else I could think of, and we can always move guns from some of our early emergency-build ships into the prize vessels later. We always knew using so much green timber was going to cost us in the end, and God knows we’re starting to have enough problems with dry rot! And it’s only going to get worse over the next year or two.”

    Cayleb nodded, although he was actually hard put not to smile, and from the way Sharleyan was squeezing his hand under the table, she was, as well. The idea had been hers, after all. They were going to need lots of transports to lift Eastshare’s expeditionary force across to the Republic, once they officially found out about it, and Howsmyn and the rest of the Empire’s foundries needed all the iron they could get. So, since war galleons were already fitted to carry large crews, which meant they had the berthing space and water and food stowage for feeding and transporting sizable numbers of men, why not kill two wyverns with one stone? Go ahead and begin stripping the artillery out now for Howsmyn and his fellow ironmasters, which would just happen to leave Rock Point with a significant number of galleons, berthed right here at Helen Island or Tellesberg, which could immediately be sent off to Chisholm.

    “That’s going to help a lot, obviously,” Howsmyn said with admirable gravity. “And Brahd Stylmyn thinks he can increase output at the High Rock mines by perhaps another five, possibly even six percent once the new engines are fully available. I think he’s underestimating a bit, but there’s no way we’re going to get an output increase of more than, say, ten percent in anything less than four or five years, no matter what we do. Those new deposits in the Hallecks are going to help, too, but it’s going to take at least several months to get the mines operating, and transport’s going to be a real problem even after we do. That’s why we’re putting so much effort into the Lake Lymahn Works right now, to decrease how far we’d have to ship it.” It was his turn to grimace. “Which, of course, is diverting trained manpower at the moment we need it most to support your new project, Dustyn.”

    “So is the bottom line that we’re going to be able to produce the necessary iron and steel or not?” Sharleyan asked.

    “The answer is . . . probably but not certainly. For the immediate future, that is,” Howsmyn said, manifestly unhappily. “On the other hand, the answer for the entire program the High Admiral and I originally discussed is more likely going to be ‘no,’ I’m afraid, at least in anything like our original timeframe.”

    “Would that change if we pulled those workmen of yours home from Lake Lymahn and the other new works you’re building?” Rock Point asked.

    “Not hugely.” Howsmyn leaned back and shook his head. “And if we pull them back, we lose the increased production we’re going to need even worse down the road.”

    “I think you’re entirely right about that,” Cayleb said. “In fact, I think we probably need to make it a hard and fast rule that we’re going to reserve at least — what? ten percent? — of your total capacity for expansion.”

    “Your Majesty, I don’t know if we can do that,” Baron Ironhill, the Empire’s treasurer, said. He looked back and forth between Howsmyn, Rock Point, and the emperor and empress. “Your Majesties know how bad the treasury numbers look right now, especially with the loss of all the trade that was moving through Siddarmark to the rest of the mainland. I expect to see some recovery in the revenue numbers in the next year or so, but it’s not going to make up for what we’ve lost. Frankly, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to steal enough money to finance the Crown’s projected share of the new works after all, and even if I can, we’re going to be committed to supporting a major land war in Siddarmark. That means we’re going to have to operate on a mainland scale, and we’ve never done that where the Army and the Marines are concerned. If we don’t produce what they need now — and find the money to pay for it somehow — it won’t matter what we may be able to produce in another three years’ time. And right now, frankly, Ehdwyrd’s running at full capacity just to meet current needs.”

    “Ahlvyno’s right about what we’re going to need, at least in the next year to fifteen months.” Trahvys Ohlsyn, the Earl of Pine Hollow, who’d replaced the murdered Rayjhis Yowance as Cayleb’s first councilor, didn’t look happy to hear himself saying that. “We can’t afford to cut back the Navy — the Empire’s fundamental security won’t let us do that — but we’re going to find ourselves under huge pressure to support Stohnar and any troops we put ashore in Siddarmark. But you’re right, as well, Your Majesty. We have to keep expanding output if we’re going to meet our future needs.”

 

---

 

    “But –” Ironhill began, only to close his mouth again as Cayleb raised his hand.

    “I understand both viewpoints, Ahlvyno, and I’m sympathetic to both. Unfortunately, the best we can manage in this case is a compromise no one’s going to like. We’ll talk about it — let Ehdwyrd, Ahlfryd, Domynyk, and Sir Dustyn discuss exactly how they need to balance expansion and present output — and do our very best to meet those numbers, but we have to continue to expand. I hate to say it, but even if we lose more — or all — of Siddarmark, we’ll still survive and still have a chance to win in the end as long as we can maintain and increase our qualitative edge. But however good our quality, we have to be able to produce it in sufficient quantity, as well. So if it’s a choice between cutting current production to the bone over the next year or so, whatever problems that causes in Siddarmark, and not having the capacity we need two years from now, we’re going to have to opt for the future.”

    Ironhill looked worried, but he recognized an unpalatable reality — and a final decision — when he saw them, and he nodded in understanding.

    “All right,” Cayleb continued, turning back to Olyvyr and Howsmyn. “I think one place we’re going to have to make some hard choices is by reducing the number of new ships.” He shrugged his shoulders unhappily. “God knows we need as many as we can get, but at the moment we have effective superiority over every remaining ship the other side has, and we are going to have to shift emphasis to supporting land operations. So instead of a dozen, I want you to plan on only six, Sir Dustyn. At the same time, though, I want you and Captain Saigyl to begin thinking about ironclad riverboats.” He showed his teeth. “With any luck at all, we’re going to need them even more than we need the oceangoing variety.”

    “Of course, Your Majesty,” Olyvyr replied. “No one saw Siddarmark coming, so we haven’t really considered it yet, but we’ll begin immediately. And while I hate postponing the blue-water ships, the idea of building a smaller group first has a certain appeal. It might not hurt to see how well our first experiments work out before we commit to building vast numbers of seagoing ships.”

    “I’m glad you think so . . . even if I can’t quite escape the feeling that you’re looking hard for a bright side to look upon.”

    “If you have to do it anyway, Your Majesty, you might as well see the upside as well as the downside.”

    “That’s true enough,” Sharleyan agreed. “Although, personally, I think your ‘first experiments’ are going to turn out quite well, Sir Dustyn.”

    “I hope so, and I actually believe you’re right, Your Grace . . . assuming Doctor Mahklyn’s newfangled numbers work out as well as everyone keeps assuming they will.” Olyvyr grimaced, and Sharleyan nodded gravely, although the truth was that Olyvyr had been initiated into the inner circle almost a year ago. He’d been using Rozhyr Mahklyn’s new formulas to calculate displacement and sail area even before that, and he’d been like a little boy in a toy store ever since he got access to Owl and started calculating things like stability, metacentric heights, prismatic coefficients, and a hundred other things which had always been rule-of-thumb — at best — before. He still had to do quite a lot of those calculations himself (or have Owl do that for him) rather than allowing his assistants to perform them, since the formulas — and concepts — hadn’t been officially “invented” yet, but he and Mahklyn were working hard to introduce the ideas. Within another year or so, at the outside, Charisian shipbuilders outside his own office would be starting to apply all those even more “newfangled” theories and rules, as well.

    “In the end,” he continued, looking around the table, “and even before we started worrying about Ehdwyrd’s output numbers, it became obvious to Fhranklyn and me that we were going to have to go with composite construction, at least for the first blue-water class.” He twitched his shoulders. “It would simplify things enormously to go directly to all-iron construction, but we simply don’t have the output. So, we’ll be using cast-iron framing and deck beams, wooden planking, and steel plate from the Delthak Works for armor. Iron frames will give us enormously better longitudinal strength than we’ve ever had before, which is critical for the weights incorporated into these designs, and there are several other foundries here in Old Charis which can produce them while we leave the more complex aspects to Ehdwyrd’s artificers. Of course, I’m sure some of your captains are going to scream at the notion of ironwork, Domynyk,” he said, looking across the table at Rock Point. “In fact, I’m positive at least one of them is going to point out ‘But I can’t repair an iron deck beam at sea the way I could one made out of wood!’”

    “Oh, I’m sure your number’s off, Dustyn.” Rock Point waved one hand dismissively. “I’ll be astonished if I hear that from less than a dozen of them!”

    A laugh circled the table, and Olyvyr shook his head with a smile. Then he sobered.

    “The river ironclads we can probably build with wooden frames if we have to, although it would help a lot to use iron framing for them, as well. They’d have to be a lot smaller, too, which is going to mean a lot of compromises. In particular, it’ll probably mean thinner armor, but they should be facing primarily field artillery or light naval guns, which will help a lot.

    “The blue-water ships, on the other hand, are going to be the largest vessels ever built,” he said, looking around the table. “According to Doctor Mahklyn’s numbers, they’re going to come out at over five thousand tons displacement, not burden — better than three times our biggest war galleon. They’re going to be three hundred feet long, and they’ll draw around twenty-eight feet at normal load, which is the main reason Fhranklyn and Commander Malkaihy are already working with Ehdwyrd’s artificers on steam-powered dredges — we’re going to need them for some of our more critical ship channels as soon as we build anything bigger than this. The sheer weight and size of a rudder sized to something that big is going to pose problems, too. I’m not at all sure it could be handled using raw muscle power, so we’ve put quite a bit of effort into coming up with a hydraulic-assistance system for it. It’s going to require at least one small steam engine permanently on line to power it, but the fuel requirements for that engine will be very low, and there are other places where having steam available on that scale would be very useful. For one thing, in raising and lowering the screw. And we’ve designed the system so it can be disengaged in an emergency, although at that point you’re going to need at least eight to ten men on the wheel. That’s why the thing’s going to have a triple wheel — so they can all find a place to get a grip.”

    Many of the heads around the table nodded at that. Even with the efficiency Howsmyn had been able to engineer into his “first-generation” steam engines, providing the internal fuel capacity for a steamship to obtain the kind of cruising distances required by the Imperial Charisian Navy would be difficult. It was over eight thousand miles from Tellesberg to Siddar City, for example, and that was far from the longest voyage a Charisian warship was likely to face, nor did it even consider the need to remain on station for extended periods, which was why the first generation of Charisian armored warships would be fully rigged for sail, as well. The truth was that they probably could have designed solely for steam power, but only at the cost of establishing chains of coaling stations along critical shipping lanes and in forward deployment areas. That would be far from impossible for them to do on an internal basis, for the separated islands of the Charisian Empire itself, but it would certainly be expensive, and they couldn’t afford to assume it would be equally feasible elsewhere.

    “It would simplify things a great deal if we could leave the screw permanently in place,” Olyvyr continued, “but the more efficient it is for moving water, the greater the drag when it isn’t revolving. Fortunately, once Fhranklyn came up with a notion for indexing the shaft and locking it in place, it turned out to be a lot simpler than I expected to design a moving cradle to unlock the screw and raise it into the above water well.” He snorted. “Mind you, it would’ve been a lot harder if we hadn’t decided to go with hydraulic power for the rudder. Since we were doing that anyway, it only made sense to apply power to raising and lowering the screw, as well.” He shrugged, then grinned almost impishly. “I think we could still’ve done it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it had required three or four hundred seamen — probably complaining at the top of their lungs the entire time — to do the same thing by muscle power.”

    “Then I’d say it’s a good thing you didn’t do that, Sir Dustyn,” Sharleyan said with a smile. “I gather from what you’re saying that the amount of fuel required for this . . . auxiliary engine, I suppose we should call it, won’t have any significant impact on the designed cruising radius?”

 

---

 

    “We’re allocating that fuel in addition to the coal for her normal steaming radius, Your Grace. Our calculations indicate that one of the new ships ought to be good for about five thousand miles at twelve knots under steam alone. Assuming average weather conditions, she’ll probably be able to maintain sixteen knots under sail and steam combined at an economical rate of fuel consumption. With the propeller raised, she should still be able to maintain between six to ten knots under sail alone — possibly as much as fourteen or fifteen in blowing conditions, given her size and ability to carry more sail than anything smaller. Her maximum speed under steam is actually going to be almost twenty knots, but her endurance at that speed will drop catastrophically.”

    Several of the faces around that table looked stunned, perhaps even incredulous, at those numbers. Of course, twenty Safeholdian knots was also twenty miles per hour, not the twenty-three miles per hour twenty knots would have been back on a planet called Earth. Still, it was an unheard-of speed for any ship.

    “In addition to being the biggest and the fastest ships in the world,” Olyvyr continued, “they’re going to be the toughest. We began our original plans for them before Ehdwyrd’s artificers came up with steam engines, when we would’ve had to power them by sail alone. That also means we started on them before he began experimenting with nickel steel and hardening plate faces with his new quenching procedures, as well. At that point, we’d estimated it would take at least twelve inches of cast iron armor to stop one of Ahlfryd’s projected ten-inch rifles firing solid wrought iron shot at short range. Ehdwyrd’s ‘face-hardened’ plate is much tougher than that; we should be able to use as little as eight inches, probably even less. Our current calculations are that three inches of Howsmynized Nickel plate will stop anything the Navy of God has, even at point blank range, but we’re going to go ahead and design to defeat our own guns, so we’ll use six inches and back it with twelve inches of teak to help damp the shock of impacting shot.

    “For the riverine vessels, we’d probably go with something more like three-inch armor and backing of six inches. I’d prefer thicker, but that probably won’t be practical on their displacement — we’ll know better once we actually start looking at them — and we’re already set up to produce three-inch plate, since Ehdwyrd chose that thickness to perfect his new techniques and he’s actually got several hundred tons of it sitting at the Delthak Works right now. Actually, what I’m more worried about is the thinner backing. The new plate’s no where near as brittle as iron, so we’re not as concerned about its shattering under the impact, but the cushioning effect should help prevent the securing bolts from shearing.

    “I assume any river vessels will be armed with existing guns, at least in the interim. Assuming the projected weights for the new guns hold up, the ocean ironclads should have twelve eight-inch in each broadside and a pair of ten-inch on pivot mounts, one each forward and aft, all of them behind armor. The masts and rigging will be vulnerable, of course, but these ships are designed to move and fight under steam, so the loss of a mast or two won’t be a major handicap in battle. Since we don’t have a design for the riverboats yet, I can’t estimate building times on them, but I estimate we can launch the first blue-water ship between six months and a year from the day we lay her down. And under the circumstances,” he sat back in his chair with an expression of profound satisfaction, “I don’t think Zhaspahr Clyntahn will like her one bit.”

    “No, they aren’t,” Cayleb agreed, and his expression had hardened. It was his turn to look around at the others, his brown eyes grim. “And just in case the bastard doesn’t get the message on his own, Sharleyan and I have decided what we’re going to name the first three ships.” The others looked at him, and he smiled coldly. “We thought we’d begin with the King Haarahld VII, the Gwylym Manthyr, and the Lainsair Svairsmahn.” The eyes around that table turned as hard as his own, glittering with approval. “If he doesn’t quite grasp what we intend to do with them from the first three names,” Cayleb continued, “I’m sure he’ll get the point when we sail them and a dozen more just like them clear up Hsing-wu’s Passage to Temple Bay and start putting the troops ashore.”

 

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    “Ehdwyrd?”

    Ehdwyrd Howsmyn lowered his glass as the deep voice spoke in his ear plug. The ironmaster was alone in the study of his Tellesberg townhouse, the last of his daily correspondence spread across the desk before him, and it was very late. Rain battered the roof and cascaded in torrents from the eaves and wind and rain ruled the night outside his windows, lit by an occasional flash of lighting and rumble of thunder, but inside those windows was an oasis of comfort, so quiet between thunder grumbles he could head the crisp ticking of the clock in one corner. The light of sea dragon oil lamps gleamed on the frames of paintings, polished the deep-toned leather of hundreds of book spines with a burnished glow, and pooled golden in the Chisholmian whiskey as he set the glass on his blotter beside one of the neat stacks of paper. There were quite a few of those stacks. He seldom had much time to spend in the luxurious townhouse these days, and even when he did, the correspondence followed him wherever he went.

    “Merlin?” He cocked an eyebrow in mild surprise. He’d left the day’s final conference with the seijin less than five hours ago. “Has something come up?”

    “More a matter of something occurring to me that I should’ve thought of five-days ago,” Merlin replied, and Howsmyn heard a note of genuine chagrin in his voice.

    “Which would be what, exactly?” the Charisian inquired.

    “Ironclads. To be specific, river ironclads.”

    “What about them?”

    “When you were all discussing them this morning as I stood ominously guarding the door, my brain was on autopilot. In fact, I was actually using the time to review some of the take from the SNARCs rather than concentrating on what all of you were saying.”

    “I’m crushed to learn our conversation was insufficiently scintillating to hold you riveted to our every word,” Howsmyn said dryly, and Merlin chuckled over the com.

    “I’ve discovered the lot of you are all grown up — or close enough I can trust you to talk things over without me, anyway. Besides, we’d already discussed everything I knew was going to come up, so I figured you could play without adult supervision this once.”

    “You have a true gift for flattering my ego, don’t you?”

    “If I told you and the others how good you really are, you’d all be impossible to live with. That wasn’t the reason I commed, though.”

    “So what was the reason?”

    “Exactly how much of that three-inch armor plate do you actually have?”

    “Um. I’d have to check the inventories to be sure. A fair amount, though. Probably close to fourteen or fifteen hundred tons, I suppose. Might be a little more or a little less. Frankly, I haven’t worried too much about the actual quantities, since there wasn’t any rush. It’s too thin for those five thousand-tonners Dustyn’s come up with, for one thing, and I know we don’t have anywhere near enough to cover them even if we wanted to use multiple layers to build up the needed thickness. And Dustyn hasn’t even started the design on the riverboats. For that matter, we won’t be starting construction on any of them until one of the other foundries is ready to start casting the frame members. Why?”

    “Because I’ve got another question for you, to go with the first one. How much of it would it take to armor one of your steam-powered river barges?”

    Howsmyn blinked.

    “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “I never thought about it.”

    “Neither had I, until this evening,” Merlin told him. “I’ve been thinking all along in terms of purpose-built ironclads, and going at it this way, we’d have all the wooden hull worries Dustyn was talking about But those barges are pretty damned heavily framed, given what you wanted them for in the first place. I’m willing to bet they’d hold up at least as well — probably better — than the steamboats the Americans converted into ironclads on the Mississippi in the American Civil War. And unlike Dustyn’s designs, they already exist. All we’d have to do would be slap the armor on them.”

    “I think it’d be a little more complicated than that,” Howsmyn said dryly. “I don’t really know about your ‘Mississippi’ conversions — I take it that was a river back on Old Earth? — but I’m willing to bet they hit the odd little problem along the way. On the other hand, you have a point about the fact that the barges already exist.”

    He pulled out a blank sheet of paper, slid his abacus in front of him, and began jotting numbers.

    “They’re a bit bigger than the standard mainland river barges, you know,” he said as his pen scratched and abacus beads clicked busily. “We don’t have anywhere near the dependency on barge traffic they do, and we haven’t got anywhere near the same number of canals. A lot of their canals are over five or six hundred years old, though, and making any major changes in them would be an incredible pain, so they worry a lot more about barge interchangeability than we do. The newer canals mostly have bigger locks to let them use bigger barges for purely local traffic, but one of the really old trunk lines — like the Langhorne — can’t accept ‘outsized’ barges. Since barge owners never know when they’re going to have to use one of the lines with smaller locks, they tend to build small unless it’s for purely local use, like the wheat trade out of Tarikah via the Hildermoss and the New Northland Canal. That limits their really long-haul barges to about a hundred and twenty-five feet. We didn’t have to worry about fitting through something like the Langhorne, though, so we just stole the plans for the New Northland’s locks when we built the Delthak canal.”

 

---

 

    He grimaced and shook his head with a chuckle.

    “If I’d known about the inner circle then, I might’ve thought about coming up with another design, but the truth is, the ones based on the Writ are about as good a fit to allowable technology as anything Owl could’ve come up with. And at least that way I didn’t have to worry about getting anything past Paitryk. The old Paitryk, I mean.”

    He shrugged.

    “Anyway, because of the lock size we chose, our barges are a hundred and forty feet long and forty-five feet in the beam with a draft of about six and a half feet and around fifteen or sixteen feet depth of hold, which lets them carry a hell of a lot more than your typical mainland boat. Within limits, of course. They’re basically just big, square boxes with round ends, when you come down to it We did slightly redesign the sterns for the powered barges, but not enough to change their volume so anyone would notice, so each of them can carry about ninety-five thousand cubic feet of cargo. That comes to around twenty-three hundred tons of coal per barge, which we figured was pretty much the ceiling for animal-drawn loads, even with tow roads as wide as the ones we used. Takes a four-dragon team to move the unpowered ones, and it also just about doubles their draft to twelve feet, which is as deep as you want to go in even one of our canals. The steam-powered boats are a little less than that because of the weight the engine and boilers and the fuel take up, but still . . . .”

    His pen stopped scratching and he looked down at his notes.

    “All right, here’re the fast-and-dirty numbers. A cubic inch of armor steel weighs about a quarter of a pound. Figuring three-inch side armor over a length of a hundred and forty feet and a height of ten feet — we might need a little less height than that; that’s the freeboard unladed, and by the time you put armor and guns aboard — oh, and you’d need to throw in a gundeck to mount the damned things on, too, you know — you’re bound to deepen the draft a little, so –”

    He cut himself off with another grimace.

    “Sorry. The point is that you’d need about one-point-six million cubic inches to armor the sides and ends of a box that size. Call it four hundred thousand pounds or around two hundred tons.”

    “But that’s only the sides and ends,” Merlin pointed out. “You’d need to armor the top, too. They’re bound to take plunging fire from a river bluff somewhere. For that matter, we know Thirsk is already starting to produce his own version of Alfryd’s ‘angle guns.’”

    “You don’t want much, do you?” Howsmyn demanded sarcastically. “You do realize we can’t armor the top as thickly as the sides, right? The roof of the box is going to be about twice the area of its sides. That’d be a lot of weight, especially that high up in the ship, where it’s not going to do stability any favors.”

    “The roof would be more likely to take glancing hits or hits from fairly light shells,” Merlin countered. “What if you dropped it to, say, one-inch thickness?”

    “Great,” Howsmyn grumbled, and started scribbling again. A short while later he sat back with a grunt.

    “I’m assuming no taper in the casemate sides or ends here, which is probably wrong. I’m sure we’d want to slope at least the sides for a better ballistic coefficient and to improve stability, which should narrow the ‘roof’ quite a lot, but at this point I’d rather overestimate than underestimate. At any rate, using those numbers I come up with around a bit over another hundred and thirteen tons. Call it three hundred and fourteen for the entire armor weight, just to be on the safe side. And, of course, none of that allows for cutting out gunports. That would reduce the total armor requirement at least some . . . although I suppose you’d want shutters for the gunports?”

    “I don’t know,” Merlin said in a thoughtful tone. “Probably. But, you know, the numbers are actually better than I thought they’d be. If you have fifteen hundred tons of three-inch armor already fabricated, you could armor four of them, couldn’t you? Maybe even five, if you’re right about the taper reducing the width of the casemate roof.”

    “Except that none of that one-inch armor exists yet, of course,” Howsmyn observed in a pleasant but pointed tone, and Merlin chuckled.

    “True, but I bet you could produce another four or five hundred tons of armor that thin pretty quickly, couldn’t you?”

    “Faster than three-inch, anyway,” Howsmyn agreed. “The quenching process wouldn’t take as long, for one thing. I don’t know how much time we’d save total, but you could probably figure we’d be able to turn it out in — oh, I don’t know. A month if we made it a category one priority? Something like that, anyway.”

    “And how long would it take you to haul four of your barges out of the water and armor them?”

    “Probably about a month . . . .” Howsmyn said slowly.

    “Then I think this might be very worth considering,” Merlin said in a serious tone. “Especially given how critical water transport and river lines are going to be in Siddarmark.”

    “Maybe. But they’re going to be pushing the limit on any mainland canal, Merlin. They can probably — probably – get through most of the newer ones, but they sure as hell won’t get through all of them. And they were never designed for open water,” Howsmyn protested.

    “With that low a freeboard, they’d be useless in a seaway,” Merlin agreed. “But we’re talking about brown water, not blue. Ten feet would be plenty for inland work — or in most harbors, for that matter.”

    “Sure, but first you have to get them to the mainland in the first place.” Howsmyn shook his head. “I’m not the sailor you or Cayleb are, but it occurs to me that something that small and shallow draft would be a pain in the arse under typical ocean conditions!”

    “Worse as a sail boat than a steamer,” Merlin replied. “And there are ways we could work around a lot of the problems. Garboards or leeboards to give the hulls more effective depth, for example, like we used on the landing craft we took to Corisande and the ones Dustyn is running up for Siddarmark. As for size, they’re not that much shorter or narrower than most war galleons. They are smaller, and they’re a lot shallower draft, with only about half as much freeboard, which means the hulls are nowhere nearly as deep, so they’ve got a lower displacement. But, again, that’s not a big problem for a steamer with leeboards. And since they were designed originally to carry coal, I’m pretty sure we could load them up with enough fuel for the voyage, especially if we wait to mount the guns till we get them to Siddarmark and only put a passage crew aboard them for the trip itself. And they’re good for — what? Twelve knots?”

    “A little better than that, actually,” Howsmyn said. “In fact, the operational boats are ridiculously overpowered for canal work — they were propulsion experiments, and we’ve had them up to over fourteen knots on the lake. The ones we’re building now’ll have a maximum speed of no more than ten knots. Even the operational ones probably wouldn’t be able to make that kind of speed at sea, though. Not more than twelve or thirteen, tops, I’d think.”

    “Even twelve would let them make the trip to Siddar City in only about six or seven five-days, though. Still a lot better than a galleon can do. Especially since they wouldn’t have to worry about calms or beating to windward.”

    “True,” Howsmyn agreed. He sat rubbing his chin thoughtfully for several seconds, then sighed.

    “All right. Much as I hate to do this, knowing what will happen if I do, I have to concede it’s at least theoretically possible. So should I go ahead and start shredding my production schedules right now, or shall we wait and pretend you actually intend to leave the decision up to Cayleb and Sharleyan?”

    “What a perfectly dreadful thing to say!” Merlin told him austerely. “I am deeply affronted by the very suggestion. Now that you and I have discussed the feasibility, I will, of course, present the possibility to the two of them. It would be most unbecoming for us to presume to reorder their established priorities without their having had due time to consider all of the pros and cons of the suggestion.”

    “But I should go ahead and start planning for it right now, right?” Howsmyn asked with a grin.

    “Well, of course you should. Good manners are good manners, but we can’t let them get in the way of efficiency, now can we?”