Hell's Foundations Quiver (108 page)

But secondly, and even more to the point, Clyntahn was determined to avoid any question of divine favor. Mother Church's children would have been more than human not to question the implications of the new, massive infusion of gold into the
heretics
' economy at the very moment when they themselves confronted largely stagnant wages, ever higher tithes, and the ever mounting costs of food, fuel, and clothing. No doubt the Inquisition would eventually proclaim that the newly opened gold mines were
Shan-wei
's work, not God's. Clyntahn would insist it was an indication of her desperation that she'd been forced to shore up her servants by providing them with so much additional gold, whereas God knew His faithful children required no such intervention to accomplish His will. Maigwair expected many of the faithful would find that persuasive, at least initially. But sooner or later, inevitably, someone was bound to point out—very quietly, as far from the Inquisition's ears as possible—that if God was truly on Mother Church's side, He could at least have
prevented
Shan-wei from bestowing such largess upon her servants.

From there to the conclusion that perhaps God wasn't supporting the Jihad because he wasn't on the
Group of Four's
side would be only a very small step. And Zhaspahr Clyntahn still wouldn't—

He shook his head angrily, then made himself inhale deeply as the stairs topped out on the observation tower's platform. He followed Brother Lynkyn to the sturdy rail and stood gazing out across the foothills which rolled away to the west.

The Army of God sergeant who'd been waiting for them went to one knee, kissing the ring Maigwair extended to him, then stood once more, looking expectantly at Fultyn.

“I think we can begin now, Sergeant,” the lay brother told him.

“Yes, Brother!” the sergeant replied, and reached for the staff of the large red flag leaning against the tower's railing. He raised it over his head and swept it around in a tight circle.

“There, Your Grace,” Fultyn said, pointing out across the nearest hillside, and Maigwair's eyes narrowed as he saw what looked like three large, articulated dragon-drawn wagons. They were little more than four hundred yards away, but they were covered in canvas tarpaulins, which would have made it impossible to see into the wagon beds even with the powerful telescope mounted on the observation tower's rail. They moved steadily, however, and judging by their speed, they were only lightly loaded.

“We're cheating a little bit here, Your Grace,” Fultyn acknowledged as the dragon drovers maneuvered their vehicles. They were lining up in a straight row, with their left wheels—the ones away from the observation tower—on a broad white line that looked like powdered lime. “In the field, they probably wouldn't have the advantage of a precisely surveyed firing line or exact range measurements. In this instance, though, I thought we might as well use every unfair advantage we could to impress you with how splendidly our new weapon works.”

The lay brother smiled almost slyly at the vicar, and Maigwair smiled back.

“I promise to be just as trusting and credulous as you could possibly desire, Lynkyn,” he said. “As long as it really works, of course.”

“Oh, I think you'll agree it
works
, Your Grace,” Fultyn said, and pointed at the drovers as they unhooked the dragons from the traces. “In the field, we might not have time to unhook the draft animals,” he said in a somewhat more somber tone. “We'll either have to do that or else put them down before we fire, though, I'm afraid. Any dragon still harnessed to one of those wagons is guaranteed to panic the instant the rockets begin firing, and the firing sequence takes long enough that a panicked dragon could easily disturb the aim of the entire volley.”

“Really?” Maigwair looked down at the somewhat shorter Fultyn. “I know we had that reaction out of all of the dragons—and the horses, for that matter—when we first introduced field artillery. You're saying we can't train dragons to stand steady with these rockets the way we already have with the field guns?”

“I don't think there's much chance of that at all, Your Grace,” the Chihirite said. “For that matter, it would probably be a bad idea to even make the attempt in this case. I believe you'll understand why in a moment.”

The dragons and their drovers were over a hundred yards clear of the parked wagons and continued moving steadily away as three-man teams of AOG artillerists swarmed over the vehicles, stripping off the tarpaulins, and Maigwair bent to the telescope, peering through it at what the canvas had covered.

Each wagon consisted of two six-wheeled sections, each of them twenty-five feet long and eight feet wide, but rather than the standard four-foot-tall sides, the wagon boxes were little more than eighteen inches high. Instead of the heavy wooden strakes which would normally have sided them, they'd been fitted with an iron frame that formed cells five or six inches across. Each cellular structure was perhaps five feet tall, with framing members something less than an inch in cross-section, and they were supported on the right side—the near side, from where Maigwair stood—by uprights that could be adjusted to raise or lower that side of it. The far side was hinged or pivoted in some way, so that when the near side was raised, the entire frame changed angle.

Each of the six wagon sections carried twelve rows of cells, thirty-seven cells long, for four hundred and forty-four per section, or a total of just over twenty-six hundred between them. And every one of those cells contained a white-painted object five inches in diameter and six feet in length with a sleek, rounded nose.

“To be honest, Your Grace, we're using up quite a lot of rockets in this demonstration,” Fultyn said as the vicar straightened and looked up from the telescope. “I wanted to be sure you got to see the full effectiveness. The first few test shots actually seemed a bit disappointing, compared to what I'd anticipated. When they're used properly, however, in sufficient numbers, well.…”

He shrugged, and Maigwair nodded. He also made a resolution to avoid being overly easily impressed. He wanted—needed—for this weapon to perform as effectively as possible, and he trusted Lynkyn Fultyn completely. At the same time, the Chihirite would have to be one of the true
seijins
of old if he hadn't wanted to stack the deck as spectacularly as possible for this demonstration.

The tarpaulins had been removed completely and the soldiers moved smartly away from the wagons, aside from a single noncom who stood waiting with a lit torch in his hand.

“The wagon beds are sheathed in iron, as well, Your Grace,” Fultyn said, “and there's about ten inches of water in each of them as protection against the backblast.”

Maigwair's eyebrows rose, but he only nodded for Fultyn to continue.

“If you'll look to your right, beyond the wagons, I think you can see the target area fairly clearly with the spyglass,” Fultyn said, pointing to the northeast, and Maigwair swiveled the rail-mounted glass to peer in the indicated direction.

The target area—an open field a thousand yards from the launchers—was a rectangle, five hundred yards on a side. A half-dozen additional articulated freight wagons had been parked at its center, surrounded by the square, post-mounted targets used to train the Army of God's riflemen.

“I see it,” the Captain General confirmed. He left the telescope trained on the target but straightened, returning his attention to the readied rocket wagons, and Fultyn nodded in satisfaction.

“All right, Sergeant,” he said.

“Yes, Sir!”

The sergeant swept his flag in another circle, and the other noncom, standing near the parked wagons, touched the torch to the waiting fuse. Then he dropped it, spun on his heel, and sprinted after the other rapidly departing members of his detachment and the dragons and drovers, who were now close to five hundred yards away.

The fuse burned steadily, branching away from the initial ignition point so that a small, sputtering line of smoke moved towards each of the wagon sections.

“We've come up with a better system for firing them in the field, Your Grace,” Fultyn said, gazing through the calm afternoon sunlight at the silent wagons. “Actually, we've come up with two. One uses a friction primer, while the other uses primer caps. Both systems use fuse hose, which protects against inclement weather and also speeds up—”

He was still speaking when those burning fuses reached their destinations. They hadn't been cut perfectly, which meant the rockets failed to fire in perfect synchronization, but it didn't matter.

Despite himself, Allayn Maigwair stumbled back three full paces as the massive wagons seemed to explode. Only that wasn't actually what they did. It wasn't an explosion, it was an
eruption
, and his eyes went wide as two-thousand-plus rockets screamed out of their launch cells at the rate of three per wagon section every half second. The entire massive volley launched in the space of less than nineteen seconds.

Those nineteen seconds were the
longest
nineteen seconds Allayn Maigwair had ever experienced. The rockets shrieked into the air with a terrible keening scream, like a thousand demons breaking the chains of hell. They rose in an incredible pillar of smoke—and no doubt steam—on tails of flame that sent more smoke sheeting across the sky in a smothering canopy. A small corner of his mind realized that any dragons who'd still been tethered to those wagons would have been killed almost instantly, but it was a distant reflection as he stared at those terrifying rockets. They arced upwards, spreading out slightly as they went, howling through the heavens, climbing higher and higher. Then they reached the top of their arcs, plummeted back towards earth, and landed in a terrible, re-echoing roll of thunder even worse than the fiendish clamor of their passage.

The entire target area simply vanished, disappeared in a maelstrom of explosions, while a hurricane of smoke and pulverized dirt rose like a canopy from a vortex of utter destruction. The dreadful, terrifying sound seemed to continue forever, for the rockets took just as long to land and explode as they had to ignite and launch. The dreadful cacophony lasted almost forty seconds—forty seconds of the pure, unadulterated rage of Shan-wei herself—and then, suddenly, it was over. The final explosions echoed back from the hillsides beyond the target zone, until, finally, silence crept back, hovering in the choking clouds of smoke as if afraid of itself, and Lynkyn Fultyn spoke.

“Maximum range is over four thousand yards, Your Grace,” he said softly while the breeze began thinning the incredible smoke canopy. “Minimum range is approximately eight hundred.” There was something about the Chihirite's tone. Something Maigwair's still numbed brain wasn't quite able to parse. “And as you can see, Your Grace,” Fultyn continued, pointing at the telescope, “it's … quite effective.”

Maigwair bent back to the telescope's eyepiece. He was surprised to discover a tremble in the fingers adjusting the focus knob, but he had plenty of time to correct it before the smoke dissipated enough for him to see through it. Finally, it did, rising and lifting like a fog bank, and the vicar inhaled sharply.

There was nothing left in the target area. Just … nothing at all. It was one huge, overlapping sea of craters, without a single one of the scores of targets which had filled it. He saw a single intact axle from one of the freight wagons; but for that, there were only splinters, overlapping craters, and the still-drifting clouds of smoke. And as he stared at that barren spectacle of devastation, Allayn Maigwair realized exactly what he'd heard in Lynkyn Fultyn's voice.

*   *   *

“Well,
that
was certainly impressive,” Sharleyan Ahrmahk said dryly from her Tellesberg bedchamber.

“I'd go a lot further than just ‘impressive,' Your Majesty.” Aivah Pahrsahn's voice over the com was much more somber than Sharleyan's. “‘Terrifying' comes to mind, really.”

“And with good reason,” Nimue Chwaeriau put in from Manchyr. She stood on a Manchyr Palace balcony where Irys, who'd discovered the joys of morning sickness, was sharing a late breakfast—of dry toast and tea in Irys' case—with the Earl of Coris. “That's the most concentrated destruction anyone's ever seen out of a purely Safeholdian weapon system.”

“Can they produce enough of them to use in that sort of quantity on the battlefield?” Coris asked.

“Yes and no,” Ehdwyrd Howsmyn replied. “Yes, they can manufacture them in large enough numbers to use on the battlefield. No, they can't manufacture them in large enough numbers to use them with that … density of effort on a regular basis. For set piece battles, where they can make preparations and manage their logistics well in advance, yes. As a routine ‘on call' artillery application, probably not.”

“And if they put them into production and stockpile them over the winter?” Cayleb Ahrmahk asked from Siddar City.

“In that case, yes,” Howsmyn acknowledged. “At least for next year's opening battles. On the other hand, without the machine tools we've been able to build and power—both hydraulically and pneumatically—their production rate's going to be
slow
compared to ours, Cayleb. They still aren't going to be able to produce millions of these things. Thousands, yes. Even tens of thousands. But not in the sorts of quantities the Russians used back on Old Earth.”

“Someone's been studying his military history,” Merlin Athrawes observed with a chuckle. “Someone who didn't know what the Mississippi was the first time I mentioned converted ironclads to him.”

“Self-defense, Merlin,” Howsmyn retorted. “You—and Nahrmahn, now, damn him—keep dropping these obscure references on us. I've had to do a little studying, in my copious free time, to protect myself. I'm just grateful Nimue doesn't abuse us poor, backward Safeholdians the way you two do!”