Chapter 283 -276: What Dray Was Given
Elarion, the council room
"We’ll go round the table," Lucien said. "Every programme, where it stands, what it needs. Lucas first, or he’ll interrupt."
"I interrupt because nobody else reads the ledger."
"Then read it."
"Seastar. The frigate is finished." Lucas turned a page. "Hull, machinery, armament, fittings—complete. She’s at the fitting-out taking on stores. Dray’s people have been over her twice looking for faults and found nothing worth the walk."
"Trials?"
"Two weeks in harbour, then open sea. He asked for the fortnight. I gave it."
"Good," Malen said. "A ship that shames us at sea costs more than fourteen days."
"And the coastal battery?"
"The first sixteen-inch mounting is emplaced. Dual gun, full turret, northern position above the channel." Lucas glanced up. "Two failed pours. Both mine to explain to this table, and I remember what I said at the time."
"You said we were pouring the treasury into a hole in a cliff."
"That was the politest of several things." He closed the page. "Proof firing waits until the frigate’s clear. Master Dray declined, in writing, to have his new ship afloat the first time those guns speak."
"Master Dray."
The shipwright had been sitting quietly at the far end.
"My lord."
"The frigate. In your own words."
"She’s sound,Forty years I’ve built, and I’ve never had a hull come together so clean. Every frame the same. Every plate cut to the drawing. Every rivet where the drawing said."He paused for a moment to let everyone take it in, then continued. "Titanworks sent me parts that fit. That’s the whole miracle, and I’d not have believed it possible in my own yard."
"Eleven months ago you were building a patrol boat."
"With one machine gun and an engine borrowed off a tank. I thought you were humouring me."
"I was finding out whether you could do it."
Lucien reached down beside his chair, lifted a sealed flat case onto the table, and pushed it the length of the wood until it stopped in front of Dray.
"Open that."
Dray looked at it without touching it. "What is it, my lord?"
"Open it and see for yourself."
He worked the catches slowly and lifted the first sheet clear.
Then he stopped moving.
The council watched him read. He set that sheet aside and took the next, and the next, and somewhere around the fifth he stood up without seeming to notice he’d done it, spreading paper across the table, pushing Lucas’s ledger out of the way without asking.
"This is a battleship."
"Yes."
"No—my lord, this is a battleship." He pulled a sheet free and held it up. "Armour scheme. Belt, deck, all of it, thicknesses called out. Machinery arrangement. A fire-control layout I don’t understand a quarter of." His hand came down flat on a drawing of frames and bulkheads, and his voice changed. "And this is the compartmentalisation."
"Yes."
"This is what you’ve been giving me." He looked up, and his face had gone raw. "Eleven months. Every time you came to my yard—try it this way, Master Dray, put the bulkhead here, run the frames like so—and I did, and every time it was better than what I’d have drawn myself, and I never asked how a duke learned to space frames on a warship, because it wasn’t my place." Both hands went flat on the table. "You had this the whole time."
"I did."
"Why not show me?"
"Because eleven months ago you’d have read that armour scheme, known you couldn’t build it, and been right. And you’d have decided I was one more patron with a picture and no notion what it costs." Lucien didn’t soften it. "I know what happened to you. A man handed you material you didn’t know and hurried you, and thirty-one people died. I wasn’t going to be the second man to do that. So you built a gunboat. Then a frigate. I gave you the pieces you could use and held the rest until you’d earned the right to be angry at me for holding them."
The room stayed quiet.
"I’m not angry My Lord." Dray was still looking down at the drawings. "I don’t have the word yet. Give me a moment for the word."
"Take it. Then tell me what it would cost."
He took considerably more than a moment, walking the table twice, reading. When he finally spoke.
"Years. I’ll say that first and plainly, because you’re all about to be excited and I won’t have anyone leaving here with a date in his head."
"Give me the honest number."
"Four years to launch if nothing goes wrong. Five, because something always does." He tapped the armour sheet. "I can’t build this today. Not any part of it. My slipway’s too short. My cranes won’t lift the frames. And there’s one sixteen-inch mounting in this whole territory—that drawing wants eight guns in four turrets, which means Brakka pours seven more of the gun that took him two failures to get right the first time."
"He’ll enjoy hearing that," Ironbreaker said.
"More than I enjoy saying it." Dray straightened. "The machinery’s beyond anything Titanworks has attempted. I’ll want steel in thicknesses your foundries have never rolled, in quantities I can’t estimate until I’ve had six months with these drawings and a draughtsman cleverer than me."
"Then you’ll have the six months and the draughtsman."
"My lord—"
"Lay her down." Lucien said it simply. "Not next year. This season. Cut the slipway, order the steel, start the turret work with Brakka, and take your six months with the drawings while the groundwork goes on around you."
Lucas immediately went pale. "A four-year capital ship. Against a three-year deadline- of which half is already gone"
"Three years is when I’ve promised the arsenal will be standing. It isn’t when the fighting starts." Lucien turned to him. "Understand this, because it governs everything we decide from today. The breach is at least ten years out. Fifteen if we’re fortunate. If I build only what finishes inside three, I’ll have a very tidy list of completed programmes and nothing whatsoever that I started early enough to matter." He looked back at Dray. "In ten years I want a capital ship in the water, and a crew who’ve lived aboard her long enough to know her faults. That means she’s laid down now—by the man who just proved he can build a frigate that comes together clean. Not in four years, when we’re comfortable."
Dray gathered the drawings back into the case, one at a time, in order.
"Then I’ll need a name. The yard always asks before the keel goes down. It’s superstition, but it’s theirs, and I’ll not fight it."
Lucien was quiet a second.
"Bismarck,name it Bismarck-The Unbroken."
Dray tried the shape of it. "Bismarck. That’s no word I know. What language?"
"A very old one from a very distant place."
Nobody pressed him, though Aurethar’s head turned very slightly at the wall.
"Bismarck-The Unbroken," Dray said again, and again. "Aye. Sounds like a thing that doesn’t sink easily."
"That’s the general idea."