Hell's Foundations Quiver (27 page)

“That probably means we won't need to continue with the banded artillery designs,” the Chihirite said after a second or two. “In fact, if we can produce steel in sufficient quantities, we may be able to abandon iron guns entirely, the way the heretics have. That's good.”

“Possibly, but we'll have to see how that works out,” Duchairn cautioned. “In the meantime, Vicar Allayn tells me reports from the artillerists who've been issued the new guns are highly favorable.”

“The majority of them have been,” Fultyn agreed. “Not all, though.” He took a sip of beer and frowned, eyes focused on something only he could see. “Some of the guns are shedding the reinforcing bands, so obviously our present technique doesn't attach them as securely as I'd hoped. Brother Sylvestrai and I have had a few thoughts on ways to improve that, but without the ability to cast more guns and work on them here at Saint Kylmahn's, we can't test them properly.”

“What sort of thoughts?” Duchairn asked curiously.

“Brother Sylvestrai's suggested that instead of cooling the reinforcing band of wrought iron from the outside after it's been fitted to the gun, we should pump cold water down the gun tube's bore and cool it from the
inside
while the band is being slipped over the breech,” Fultyn replied. “The idea is to prevent the tube itself from heating excessively when the band is applied, and he's also suggested covering the reinforce with sand to insulate it once the inner layers have bound to the tube. That ought to keep the outer layers of the band from cooling more quickly than its middle layers, which is probably what's been causing the cracks we've observed. I think he's quite right about that, and while I was considering his suggestions, it occurred to me that if the gun is rotated on its axis—with the band in place but not turning with it, you understand—we could prevent the reinforce from binding first in a single place. The rotary motion would prevent
any
adhesion until the entire band shrinks enough to “grab” and it welds all around its circumference simultaneously. I think that should provide a far better weld and a stronger reinforce, and I've sent those recommendations to the foundries where the guns are actually being made.”

Duchairn nodded wisely. He doubted Brother Lynkyn thought for a minute that he really understood what the Chihirite was talking about, in which case he was completely correct. But that was fine, because what the vicar
did
understand was more than enough. What mattered to him—and, he was pretty sure, to Allayn Maigwair—was that the new guns (already named Fultyn Rifles by the gunners who'd received them, although Zhaspahr Clyntahn seemed less than enthused by that) fired heavier projectiles to far greater ranges. The initial models had been built on altered twelve-pounder tubes, with the same bore dimensions but about a foot more length than the smoothbore weapons. With a thirty-pound solid shot fired at fifteen degrees elevation, they'd ranged to almost thirty-five hundred yards, twice the range of the standard twelve-pounder, and to
forty
-five hundred yards with a lighter twenty-pound shell carrying two and a half pounds of powder. Larger field guns, with bores of up to six inches and firing shells of up to two hundred pounds at even greater elevations, were under development as well, with ranges which might go as high as eight thousand or even ten thousand yards. Concerns about guns which shed their reinforcing bands, split, or even blew up occasionally were secondary in the minds of gunners when they were suddenly gifted with
that
increase in performance after being so mercilessly pounded by the longer-ranged heretic guns. And even larger and more powerful weapons were being developed for coastal defense, with an urgency driven by the heretic ironclads' apparent invulnerability to existing artillery.

“We're working on improving the shells' reliability, as well,” Fultyn continued a bit fretfully, obviously unaware of the vicar's thoughts. “The new fuses give more consistent detonation times, but simply coating the projectiles in lead doesn't work as well as I'd hoped it would. Quite a few seem to strip out of the lead jackets on their way down the barrel, and they don't do it uniformly. Some of the lead stays attached on one side or the other, which unbalances them badly, at which point they actually become less accurate than smoothbore shot. I've come up with a possible solution—well, actually, Brother Sylvestrai and I have—but I'm afraid it's going to make them more expensive.”

“Why?”

Duchairn tried not to sound wary, but he knew he'd failed when Fultyn's unfocused eyes narrowed and sharpened. There might even have been the slightest of twinkles in their brown depths, the Treasurer reflected.

“The cost increase won't be huge, Your Grace,” the Chihirite soothed. “In fact, it'll cost less than the improvement Brother Sylvestrai originally suggested to me, although it
will
add an additional stage to shell manufacture.

“I think we're going to have to abandon my proposed lead jackets and go back to a variant of the heretics' practices. I'd hoped the jackets would let us avoid those ‘gas checks' of theirs, but it's clear I was overly optimistic. We'll have to cast our projectiles with the same grooved bases and fit them with a seal, after all, but Brother Sylvestrai suggested we could still dispense with the rifling studs the heretics rely on if we used a wrought-iron skirt or shoe the same diameter as the shell but stamped around its rim to take the rifling. I suppose you'd call it ‘pre-rifling,' and his idea was to combine the seal
and
the rifling in a single shoe. I think he's on the right track, but the additional wrought iron—though I suppose we could use steel, once it becomes available in quantity—would increase both cost and manufacturing time considerably. So I want to try using a more elastic material—bronze, probably—that expands when the propelling charge detonates. What I'm thinking is that bronze is tough enough it won't deform and strip the way lead does, especially if it takes the total initial force of the powder charge and transfers it to the projectile, instead of the other way around. On the other hand, it's enough softer than wrought iron that it should expand into the shallower rifling grooves we're using without the need for the pre-rifling Brother Sylvestrai's suggested
or
the heretics' studded shell bodies. It should actually produce a tighter seal, as well, which ought to drive up muzzle velocity and give us somewhat better range. Either way, it should be simpler than producing studded shells, and considerably less expensive than using wrought iron.”

“I see.” Duchairn frowned down into his stein, then shrugged. “I can't say I'm in favor of spending any more than we have to, but I've noticed most of your innovations work out even better than expected. I'll want to talk to Vicar Allayn about it, but if he agrees, the Treasury will just have to find the marks we need. And by the strangest coincidence,” the vicar smiled suddenly, “you and Brother Tahlbaht are saving enough on the new rifles that I just happen to have quite a store of unanticipated marks on the books.”

“I'm glad to hear that, Your Grace,” Fultyn said slowly, “because I'm afraid I may've come up with yet another way to spend some of them, too.”

“Oh?”

Duchairn's eyes narrowed—more speculatively than repressively—and Fultyn nodded.

“Some of the alternatives my artisans have suggested as answers to the heretics' portable angle-guns work, but none of them work
as well
as the angle-guns do. The spring-loaded catapult works best, but that's not really saying a lot, to be honest. It's badly outranged by the heretics' weapons, and slower firing, to boot. On the other hand, it's almost silent and there's no smoke to give away its position when it fires. Vicar Allayn assures me those are important advantages, but I have to confess that none of our original answers come close to matching the performance of the heretics' weapons.

“The estimates of steel production you've just given me make me more optimistic about our ability to produce the same sorts of angle-guns, eventually at least. On the other hand, a thought occurred to me last five-day. There
might
be a way to provide an even greater capability for the kind of … indirect fire, for want of a better term, the heretics are using on our own men. Something closer to the capabilities of their regular artillery's
heavy
angle-guns, but a lot more portable.”

“How portable?”

“Less so than the heretic infantry's portable angle-guns, I suspect, Your Grace, but much,
much
more portable than most regular artillery pieces.”

Duchairn frowned again, wishing Maigwair could have been present after all. The last time he'd spoken to the Captain General, Maigwair had waxed eloquent in his enthusiasm for the full-sized rifled angle-guns Fultyn had designed for the Army of God. Frankly, Duchairn doubted Fultyn's initial efforts would match the performance of the heretics' weapons, yet Maigwair obviously expected them to compensate for much of Church's present inferiority. At the same time, it was unlikely more than a few score of the new weapons could be gotten to the armies in the field before the spring thaw, and even if they could, the heretics and their infantry angle-guns had delivered a pointed lesson in the advantages of mobility.

“What do you have in mind, Brother Lynkyn?” he asked finally, and the Chihirite opened a desk drawer and extracted a circular disk of what looked like bronze. It was about four inches in diameter, Duchairn estimated, and perhaps a half inch thick, and pierced by a series of angled slots or holes.

“This is part of one of the heretics' rockets, Your Grace.” Fultyn laid it on his desktop and slid it across to Duchairn. “One of the Inquisition's agents managed to … acquire specimens of two or three of their new devices, including a signaling rocket and one that's
probably
what they used to illuminate Bishop Militant Cahnyr's troops on the Daivyn River. I'm not certain about that, but the top portion of it was packed with some compound I didn't recognize and fitted with a sort of folded parasol. I've experimented with it a little, and I think the parasol is what keeps the burning compound suspended as it drops down towards the ground, sort of like a dandelion seed.

“There are several other interesting aspects of their design,” he continued in a very careful tone—one, Duchairn suspected, which was intended to make it very clear that while those aspects might be “interesting,” they weren't “
fascinating
.” The latter was the sort of word the Inquisition found unacceptable when applied to the heretics' demonically inspired devices.

“What sort of aspects?” the vicar asked in an almost equally careful tone.

“Well, I've wondered ever since I first heard about the heretics' rockets how they obtained such uniform performance. Our own efforts to duplicate them have been much more unpredictable and erratic in flight. Some of them have actually come around in complete circles to land right back where they were launched from, in fact! Initially, I assumed that was because our gunpowder burns less consistently than theirs, which means it delivers its pushing power more unevenly, and I still believe that's probably part of the problem. But when I started looking at
this
—” the Chihirite tapped the disk on his desk “—I realized that what it does is to … focus and direct the gasses spitting out of the back of the rocket. It
shapes
and regulates them, and I suspect the reason is to impart a spin to the entire rocket, the way rifling grooves spin and stabilize a bullet or an artillery shell. I'm virtually certain this is the main reason their rockets fly so much farther and so much straighter than ours do.”

“And what exactly does that mean, Brother?” Duchairn picked up the disk and weighed it in his hand. It was heavy, although it still seemed preposterously light for something that could do what Fultyn had just described.

“What that means, Your Grace, is that if I'm right, and if we can duplicate this, we can produce rockets of our own … and not just for signaling purposes. I understand how important signaling and illumination are, but what I'm thinking about would be an actual weapon in its own right. I've sketched out a design for a rocket that would be five inches in diameter. All of my calculations are very rough, of course, because I haven't had an opportunity to actually try them, but if I'm right, we could put as much as ten pounds of powder into its head and fire it to as much as five or six thousand yards. Possibly even farther. They'd be two or three feet long, and they'd probably weigh somewhere around twenty-five or thirty pounds apiece, so an individual soldier couldn't carry more than three or four of them, and each of them could only be used once. But I think the rocket bodies could be made out of wood, which would make them much cheaper than any artillery shell. I might be wrong about that, but even if we needed to make them out of iron, they'd still use less of it and require much less labor than any other artillery weapon we have.”

“I see,” Duchairn murmured. “And how accurate would they be?”

“Even if I'm right about what the holes in that do,” Fultyn replied, gesturing at the disk in Duchairn's hand, “and we can produce rockets as stable in flight as the heretics' are, they wouldn't be what anyone might call precision weapons, Your Grace. As individual projectiles, they'd be considerably less accurate than the new angle-guns' shells, for example. But they'd also be much more destructive, and we could produce a great many of them for the cost of a single angle-gun. That would let us use them in greater numbers, and if they were fired at a target in groups—twenty or thirty at a time, let's say—they could blanket its position even if none of them individually was all that accurate. In fact, a little inaccuracy might actually help by giving us more dispersion to cover a wider area. And if their heads were loaded with shrapnel and equipped with reasonably reliable fuses, they could provide the same sorts of aerial bursts the heretics' angle-guns are providing but over even larger areas. So if a few hundred of them were fired simultaneously and caught a heretic army in the open.…”