Chapter 289 -282: The Northern Mounting
Seastar:Coastal battery firing
The battery sat above the approach channel with three hundred yards of cleared ground behind it, and every man in Seastar who could invent a reason to be on that headland had invented one.
"Clear the slope," Ironbreaker had been shouting since six. "Anyone not written on my sheet, off the slope. Yes, that includes you. I don’t care whose cousin you are."
They came down anyway, in ones and twos, and stood at the rope line where the dockhands had gathered.
Lucas arrived at seven with the ledger under his arm.
"You know it can’t be spent back," Ironbreaker said.
"I’m aware."
"Then why bring it?"
"Because I intend to write a number in it this morning," Lucas said, "and I want to be standing here when I decide what the number means."
Brakka had come up from Ironhold three days before and had not left the emplacement since.
He was underneath the mounting when Lucien found him, on his back on the concrete, with a lamp.
"You’ve checked it."
"Eleven times." Brakka’s voice came out from under six hundred tons of gun and turret. "Bed’s true.Every bolt torqued and marked and checked against the mark twice." He slid out and got up, and didn’t brush himself off. "My lord, I’ve been under there since Tuesday looking for a reason not to fire it, and I can’t find one, and it’s making me suspicious."
"Of what?"
"Of myself, mostly." He looked up at the turret. "Two pours failed. Everyone here knows that. The first cracked in the mould and the second cracked coming out, and it caused a hole in a cliff that I’ve thought about most weeks since. This is the third. If she goes wrong today,i dont know how much damage she will cause."
"And if she goes right?"
"Then she goes right in front of everyone," Brakka said, "which is why I’ve been under there since Tuesday."
Dray came up the path at half past eight with the frigate’s captain beside him and a face of a man attending a wedding he had strong opinions about.
"You said you wouldn’t come," Ironbreaker said.
"I said my ship wouldn’t be in the water. I never said anything about me." Dray shook Brakka’s hand. "How is she?"
"True."
"Then that’s that." Dray looked out at the channel, where his frigate sat at the fitting-out quay two miles down the coast, canvas over her mounts. "I’ve watched a great many guns fired, Master Brakka. Never one I could hear from my own yard."
"You’ll hear this one from the far side of the bay."
"That’s what I’m afraid of. I’ve a hundred and forty men working on her hull this morning and not one of them is going to get anything done after nine o’clock."
"Then give them the morning," Lucien said.
Dray turned round. "My lord?"
"Give them the morning. Every yard in Seastar. Nobody’s working through this and pretending otherwise, so we may as well let them stand on the bay and watch instead of dropping tools off a scaffold at the noise." Lucien nodded down toward the town. "They built the mountings. Half of them cast the shells. Let them see it."
Lucas made a small noise.
"A morning’s labour across four yards," he said, and then, before anyone could speak, "which I am going to enter in this ledger as reasonable, and I would like it noted that nobody had to argue with me."
They fired at nine.
The crew was Ospry’s, on loan from the field batteries—twenty men who had spent six weeks learning a gun that outweighed everything they’d ever served put together. Kolt had come down from Ironhold to watch them do it, standing at the rope line with his arms folded.
"In position?"
"Yes sir"
"Charges?"
"Charged and seated."
Ironbreaker raised his arm and the horn went along the headland, and then along the harbour wall, and then across the water, and every man in Seastar was going to stand still and watch stood still and watched.
"Clear!"
"North ,Clear."
"South, Clear"
"Then what are waiting for fire her," Lucien said.
Both barrels spoke together.(Boooooo-oooooooo-ooooooooooo-ooooom-mmmm-mm)
The sound arrived after the pressure and none of them were ready for it. The air came off that headland in a flat wall and went down the slope and out across the water, and three hundred yards back at the rope line every person on their feet took a step. Hats flew away. A seagull that had been sitting on the emplacement wall was now doubting its life.
Then the noise came up through the soles of the feet and out through the chest, and it kept going out over the bay and came back off the far headland eleven seconds later.
Down in the town, every window that was going to break or already broken.
Out in the channel, two miles and a half out, the water went up-white, enormous,several feet into the air—and then came apart and fell, and the ring of it spread out across the flat grey water in a circle.
Everyone years at the bay were ringing.
Then Ospry, looked in the sights and spoke:
"Round is off by about sixty yards. Correcting."
Ironbreaker started laughing.
They then fired eleven rounds that morning and the half of the nearby residents started thinking their life decisions while the other half began preparing to move somewhere else.
Brakka went under the mounting after the third, and after the seventh, and after the eleventh, and came out each time with less to say. By the last one he had stopped saying anything altogether.
"Is it ground holding up?" Lucien asked.
Brakka wiped his hands on a rag he’d been carrying since Tuesday. "The concrete taking up. It’s done it, it’s stopped, and it hasn’t moved a hair since the second round."
"So she holds."
"She holds." He said it quietly. "My lord, that’s a working sixteen-inch gun in a working turret on a working bed, and I built it, and the two that cracked don’t matter any more." He looked at the ledger under Lucas’s arm. "Write down whatever you like."
"I’ve written it," Lucas said.
"What did you write?"
Lucas turned the ledger round.
Under the cost of the northern mounting—the whole of it, the two failed pours included—he had written a single line:
One. Emplaced. Fires.
"Hey that’s not an accounting entry,where is the praise" Brakka said.
"No," Lucas agreed. "It’s the first one I’ve made in three years that I’m going to be pleased about later, so I’m allowing myself the indulgence, and if either of you mentions it again I’ll deny it."
Dray stayed on the headland after the others had started moving down.
Lucien found him at the emplacement wall looking out at where the eleventh column of water had been.
"Two and a half miles," Dray said.
"Nearer three, on the last one."
"Three." He nodded slowly. "My lord, I want to say something and I’d like to get it out properly before the good sense comes back to me."
"Say it."
"Forty-one years I’ve built ships. Every one of them for someone else, to someone else’s drawing, in someone else’s yard, and the best of them I was proud of and none of them were mine." Dray kept looking at the water. "There is a gun on this headland now that can put a shell three miles into that channel, and there will be a second one on the south side inside a year, and between the two of them nothing hostile is ever coming into this harbour again."
"That’s the intention."
"That’s the point. That’s what I want to say." He turned round. "For forty years the answer to a warship in your harbour was to have more warships, and if you hadn’t got them you lost the harbour. That was simply how it was. Nobody argued with it." He gestured back at the turret. "You put a gun on a hill instead. And now my yard is a place where I can build a ship slowly and properly, because nothing can come in and burn her on the slipway while she’s half-built."
Lucien looked at him.
"You’re saying it protects the Bismarck."
"I’m saying it makes the Bismarck possible." Dray’s voice went rough and he let it. "You can’t lay down a four-year capital ship in an open harbour, my lord. Nobody ever has. You’d be building a target for four years and every enemy you have would know exactly where it was and exactly how long it would take them to reach it." He nodded at the gun. "That’s not a coastal battery. That’s a roof over my slipway. And I’d not understood that until about nine o’clock this morning."
Behind them, down at the emplacement, Ospry’s crew were swabbing out and arguing about the correction on the last round, and Brakka had gone back under the mounting one more time.