A Mighty Fortress (130 page)

Which suggested the high admiral had better take this particular call. “All right, Henrai,” he said to the lieutenant commander sitting across the table from him. “I think that covers just about everything. There are a couple of other points I’d like to discuss before the meeting tomorrow, but let me mull them over to night.”

“Of course, Sir.”

Henrai Tillyer had been Lock Island’s flag lieutenant for over three years. Since his promotion to lieutenant commander, Lock Island had decided to emulate Earl Thirsk and turned Tillyer into his chief of staff. Unlike Thirsk, however, who was inventing the concept on his own, Lock Island had benefited from researching the historical development and organization of staff officers in Owl’s data banks. As a result, he was well along the way to creating a genuine staff, with specific, designated areas of responsibility, and he was already making mental selections for the flag officers—Navy, Army, and Marine—he intended to nominate to Cayleb when the emperor inaugurated the concept of a
general
staff for the entire empire in another few months.

At the moment, it was obvious Tillyer, who knew him far better than most, was more than a little perplexed by the high admiral’s abrupt termination of their meeting. But what ever questions might be running through his brain, he wasn’t about to ask them. Instead, he gathered up the notes he’d been taking, jogged them together, and slid them into a folder. Then he smiled at Lock Island, finished the last swallow in his whiskey glass, and cuffed Lock Island’s rottweiler Keelhaul gently and affectionately on his massive head.

Keelhaul chuffed in acknowledgment of the goodbye without ever opening his eyes, and Tillyer chuckled.

“I’ll see you in the morning, Sir.”

“By all means. In fact, join me for breakfast, if you would.”

“Of course, Sir.”

Tillyer nodded respectfully and withdrew, shutting the door behind him. Lock Island looked at the closed door for a moment, then stood and opened the many- paned glass door to HMS
Ahrmahk
’s sternwalk. He leaned on the rail, gazing up at a sky that was fading from blue into indigo. A few of the brightest stars were visible, but it would be a while before darkness actually fell.

“Yes, Merlin?” he said then, quietly, his voice inaudible through the sound of wind and water to anyone more than two or three feet away from him.

“I’m sorry to disturb you,” Merlin’s voice said in his earplug, and Lock Island felt his eyebrows knitting in quick alarm as the
seijin
’s grim tone registered. “Unfortunately,” Merlin continued, “we’ve got a problem. A
big
one.”

“What do you mean?” Lock Island asked quickly, and heard a distant sigh. “We’ve been had,” Merlin said flatly. “They aren’t sending the fleet to Thirsk, after all. They’re sending it to Desnair.”

Two hours later, Merlin, Cayleb, and Sharleyan sat on
Royal Charis
’ sternwalk.

“It’s my fault,” Merlin said.

“Oh, kraken shit!” Cayleb snapped. “Just how the hell is this supposed to be
your
fault? Or at least
all
your fault—which seems to be where you’re headed!”

“They’re my SNARCs, and I was the one who was so sure they’d be sending everything to Thirsk,” Merlin replied. “If I hadn’t predisposed everyone to think—”

“Cayleb’s right, Merlin—that
is
kraken shit.” Lock Island sounded even more impatient than the emperor had. “You weren’t the only one who thought Gorath Bay was the logical destination! And what ever you may’ve
thought,
we had confirmation—
written
confirmation, official orders, mind you—that all of us had examined through Owl’s SNARCs. At which point
all
of us concluded the ships were going where they’d been
ordered
to go by none other than Allayn Maigwair. So just how were you supposed to realize they’d decide to go somewhere
else
at the last minute?”

“I don’t think they did decide at the last minute,” Nahrmahn Baytz said. Like Cayleb and Sharleyan, he was returning to Chisholm, but he and his wife were aboard HMS
Eraystor,
one of the two galleons escorting
Royal Charis
. “I think this is what they intended to do all along.”

“Then why tell their own captains they were going
west
?” Domynyk Stay-nair asked from his own flagship in Thol Bay.

“Disinformation,” Nahrmahn said simply. “What ever we think of the Group of Four, they really aren’t drooling idiots. Fools, perhaps. And arrogant and corrupt and any other pejorative anyone would care to add, certainly. But I think sometimes we forget that a lot of their ‘mistakes’ are the result of the fact that they don’t have a clue what they’re really up against. They still think the old rules apply to things like spying, communication times, and everything else. That’s the reason they’ve persistently assumed their semaphore means their communications—what people used to call the ‘communications loop’— must be faster than anyone else’s, when they’re actually
slower
. . . for some of us, at least.

“My point is that we’ve been guilty of underestimating them. We know they turned Tarot upside down trying to figure out how their plans leaked before Armageddon Reef. We also know they never found an answer, since Tarot didn’t actually have anything to do with it. But what should have occurred to us when we were analyzing their ‘cover plan’ is that eventually they were going to have to assume we have some fiendishly effective spy network in place. Obviously, that’s exactly what they did . . . as the fact that they were bothering with a cover plan at all should
damned
well have told someone as clever as
I’m
supposed to be!”

The portly little prince sounded about as bitter as Merlin had ever heard him, and his self- anger was painfully apparent when he paused for a deep breath.

“As I say, we should have realized they were going to think of something like this,” he went on in a more controlled tone. “And, given all the coded messages all of them have passed through the semaphore at one time or another, they have to be aware someone else could be sending coded messages under the guise of simple commercial transactions or personal letters. The only way they could stop that would be to shut down all secular use of the semaphore, and that would cause all sorts of dislocations, not to mention costing them a hefty chunk of their revenue. Not only that, but once they start thinking in that direction, it’s going to occur to them that there could be other ways to cobble up an alternative communications system even if they
did
shut down the semaphore stations. Like carrier wyverns.”

He paused again, and Cayleb snorted. Back when Prince Nahrmahn of Emerald had been conspiring to assassinate King Haarahld and Crown Prince Cayleb of Charis, his chief agent in Tellesberg had been one of the kingdom’s most prestigious providers of hunting and homing wyverns. Which had just happened to provide Nahrmahn with a swift, clandestine means of communication between Charis and Emerald.

“If they’ve decided we do have spies in the Temple Lands, and if they’ve accepted that those spies can get information to us as quickly—or even just almost as quickly—as they can send messages using the semaphore, then it was only a matter of time before they started taking precautions. That’s what happened here. They told their captains to prepare to sail west
expecting
any of our spies who intercepted those orders to send them along to us, while all the time they were planning on changing their captains’ orders at the last minute.”

“I think Prince Nahrmahn’s right, Your Majesties,” Rahzhyr Mahklyn offered from his apartment in Tellesberg Palace. “It makes sense, anyway.”

“Maybe it does,” Merlin acknowledged. “And maybe that will make me feel better about the way they snookered us someday. It doesn’t help much when it comes to deciding what to do about it, though.”

“No, you’ve got a point there,” Cayleb agreed in a much grimmer tone. “Frankly, there’s not much we
can
do,” Lock Island said bleakly. “Kohdy Nylz and your reinforcements are barely a five- day behind you and Sharleyan, and the prevailing winds are out of the west. Even if we could communicate with him instantly—and explain how the hell we’d done it—he’d still need at least a month, more probably seven or eight five- days, to get back here.”

“Thanks to my eagerness to get him started early, you mean,” Cayleb said. “If you don’t want Merlin kicking himself over things that aren’t his fault, don’t kick
yourself
over things that aren’t
your
fault,” his cousin told him tartly. “Given what all of us ‘knew,’ you made the right decision. They just—as Merlin said—‘snookered us.’ ” The high admiral chuckled harshly. “Assuming ‘snookered’ means what I think it means!”

“Well, assuming the orders they’ve sent to Kholman and Jahras aren’t more of Nahrmahn’s ‘disinformation,’ they’re obviously planning on catching you and Domynyk between two forces,” Sharleyan said. “So I’d say the first priority is to make sure they don’t do that.”

“I could agree with that,” Lock Island said feelingly. “Of course, there
is
the little problem of how twenty- seven of our galleons fight a hundred and thirty of theirs, even assuming we can engage them without Jahras hitting us from behind,” Rock Point pointed out.

“Only ninety of them are armed,” Lock Island replied, and Rock Point snorted.

“All right, how do twenty- seven of our galleons fight
ninety
of theirs? I’m willing to count one of ours as worth two of theirs, maybe even two and a half. Hell, let’s make it three! But even assuming we turn the northern force back, we’re going to get hurt, Bryahn, and you know it. So what happens if we get whittled down against one force, then get jumped by the other one?”

“We get hurt
badly,
” Lock Island said grimly. “And we see to it that they get hurt a hell of a lot worse.”

“They don’t have a few hundred transports loaded with troops sailing along with them,” Sharleyan pointed out. “Even if they manage to get through to Desnair, they don’t have an army ready to land anywhere.”

“You’re thinking we could avoid action? Play for time?” Cayleb said. “More or less,” she agreed. “All they can really do is sail around. They certainly can’t invade Old Charis or Emerald—not against the garrisons we’ve got in place with rifles and the new artillery!”

“The problem is that we can’t afford to let these two forces unite,” Cayleb replied. “They’d have over two hundred galleons in the Gulf of Mathyas. And if they could bring Thirsk and his Dohlarans down around Howard, they’d have three hundred.” He shook his head. “We have to keep them from concentrating.”

“And let’s not forget Tarot.” Rock Point’s tone was bleak. “You’re probably right that they don’t have the troop strength for a serious landing in Old Charis or Emerald, Your Majesty. Unfortunately, I’m sure they
do
have enough strength to carry out raids at least as destructive as the ones
we
carried out in Corisande. And whether they can do that or not, between the seamen and the soldiers they’ve got aboard all those ships, they’ve got more than enough strength to invade Tarot. Gorjah doesn’t have any of the new weapons, and while I don’t think there are as many Tarotisian Temple Loyalists as the Group of Four thinks there are, there are enough to create a genuine civil war if they think the Church is invading. If Clyntahn and Trynair get a couple of hundred galleons into Thol Bay, Tarot’s gone.”

“Wonderful,” Cayleb sighed.

“What are your latest numbers on shell production, Ehdwyrd?” Lock Island asked.

“About what they were when you asked me yesterday,” Ehdwyrd Howsmyn replied from his bedroom. His normally affable voice was considerably more tart than usual. “Effectively zero, in other words. We’re still setting up the production line, Bryahn. You know that, and—”

“I’m not criticizing,” Lock Island said quickly. “But with only twenty galleons, we’re going to need an edge if we’re going to stop these bastards.”

“Well, I’m not going to have the new line up for at least another two five-days.” It was obvious from Howsmyn’s tone that he was kicking himself for not having gotten it up sooner, although given the weather problems he’d faced . . .“Well, you’ve got at least eight five- days before they can reach the Gulf of Tarot,” Rock Point replied. “That’s almost a month and a half, Ehdwyrd!”

“Yes, it is.” Howsmyn’s tone was suddenly far more thoughtful.

There was silence for several seconds, then he shrugged.

“I can go ahead and start making fuses now,” he said. “Once I have the furnaces in and the molds ready to go, I can probably produce about a hundred or a hundred and fifty thirty- pounder shells a day. I might be able to edge that up a little higher if I forget finishing the insides of the shell chambers. In
another
couple of five- days, I can probably get two more furnaces online, and that will get me up to somewhere around three hundred shells a day. So, figure every-thing works
perfectly
from this point—which it damned well hasn’t so far!— and I can produce, say, a hundred and twenty- five shells a day for two five- days, and then three hundred a day for another six five- days. Call it a total of ten thousand.”