Sea of Ghosts - Alan Campbell [119]
Just how many ships would he encounter?
And how could he hope to meet them in battle?
Granger leaned back against the navigation console, thinking. He couldn’t ram another vessel. The dragon-hunter’s sleek, lightweight hull would not fare well against an iron dredger or a scale-plated man-o’-war. If he encountered his enemy at night, he might try a drift-and-jump or even a raft flank in order to board the other ship unseen. But then Maskelyne and Banks both maintained full crews, while Granger was alone. The Excelsior had enough broadside to represent a serious threat, but he couldn’t effectively man her cannons single-handedly. That was the root of his problem. Hu’s imperial yacht had not been designed to be sailed by a single man. She required forty-eight men on her gun deck to operate her cannons alone, with another twenty or so to carry up powder and shot.
There had to be a way.
He set his heading, and locked down the wheel before scanning the horizon with the navigator’s telescope. Satisfied that he wasn’t about to collide with anything, he set off for the gun deck.
The stairs down aggravated his joints, but the pain wasn’t enough to worry him. He’d found that, by simply working his muscles from time to time, he could loosen up his limbs. A few moments of agony was better than seizing up altogether. Eventually the stiffness would diminish. The burning sensations had almost gone from his toughened flesh, although he hadn’t yet become accustomed to the feel of his rough grey skin under his own fingers. It felt as if he’d been boiled in a suit of leathers. He wondered briefly if he was arrow-proof, before dismissing the thought. The important thing was that his wits remained intact, for he had a problem to solve.
Amber reflections played across the bone arches in the gun deck. The emperor’s cannons gleamed as if they had been forged yesterday. Granger found the smell of warm metal relaxing. He’d spent many years on many such decks, if not on one as fine as this. Twenty-four cannons: Imperial Ferredales retrofitted with flintlock mechanisms. He could load them all by hand, although it might take him a couple of hours to do so, and he could use the lanyards to fire them one after another, but if he was down here in the gun deck, then he couldn’t be at the helm. And fire-power was nothing without tactics.
Granger paced the deck. Given the time available to him, it seemed unlikely that he could devise and build a mechanical method for pulling the lanyards from the bridge. What if he simply removed them altogether, replacing the ropes with fuse cord running directly into the flintlocks? He’d seen spools of cord down in the powder deck. That was certainly much simpler. Fuse cord could burn at up to ten feet a second, depending on its composition. It would be simple enough to run a length of it from the bridge, down through the pipe ducts, and use a cigar to light it.
Just like in Kol Gu, ’’38.
He smiled at the memory of that campaign. Three hundred enemy goldtooths coming up the hill towards our camp, a hundred fuse cords and three chemical matches. Hu had sent them to eliminate a Kol Gu Archipelago warlord, just the latest in a line of pirates who had fought each other over that shrinking island group. Granger could no longer remember his name. Creedy had used two of the matches to light his cigar, before Banks pointed out that the enemy was still at least an hour away. That had been almost four years before Weaverbrook, before Imperial Infiltration Unit 7 became known as the Gravediggers. Banks, Springer, Lombeck, Swan, Tummel, Longacre. So many faces that existed only in his memories.
Fuse cord.
The spools in the powder deck turned out to be a disappointment. Most of the cord was the cheap, low-grade stuff used in mining, with a burn rate of perhaps half a foot per second. The distance from the bridge down through the pipe ducts to the gun deck had to be at least a hundred and twenty feet. One twenty feet at half a foot per second gave him four minutes