The Wings of Mercury
Copyright© 2025 by Lumpy
Chapter 25
Port Vikhavn
Liu Yi looked over his fleet and was finally satisfied as the dying light of the sun cast everything in a soft orange glow. It had been a hard several weeks to get enough of his damaged vessels back in shape after the mauling they took on the attempts to break into the Westerners’ port, but they had finally gotten the job done.
Five of the ships had to be beached and torn down for scraps, but that had given them just enough parts to get the rest of his fleet in sailing shape.
He wasn’t happy that he had to give up on this port or that the Westerners had managed to thwart him at every turn. He’d lost countless men to the forts and natives and could not lose any more if he was to make the attack on the Westerners’ base of supply with any chance of success.
“I want to position the Celestial Dragon squadron and the Iron Phoenix squadron on either side of the outer island,” he said to two of his four remaining squadron commanders. “You’ll form a blockade, cutting off the Westerners’ escape routes. You are to stay on this side of the island, clear of the enemy forts. Your sole responsibility is to keep their ships hemmed in, unable to sail out or return to their homeland. It will still be weeks before the messenger boat I sent will arrive home, and well into winter before we can expect any reinforcements, so you have to make do with what you have.”
Sub-Commanders De and Xin both nodded their understanding. They’d already had discussions about this in private, but he wanted all of his commanders to understand the responsibilities and duties of the other squadrons, which should allow them to adapt as necessary.
The plan was not perfect. It left him only twenty ships for the remainder of his mission, which was not enough. But it was what he was going to have to make do. The last thing he wanted was to assault one of their ports only to find a large fleet sailing up behind him. And if he failed, he wanted at least this port dealt with so the commanders who came after him could continue on without worry.
“Now, I know...” Liu started to say when a shout from the crow’s nest cut him off.
“Enemy sail!”
Liu pushed past the sub-commanders and moved to the railing, his eyes straining against the fading light. It took a moment to pick out the dark shapes against the trees and the shimmer coming off the water, but they were there.
“They move sooner than I expected. That bodes well for us,” he said, more to himself than anyone else. “Return to your ships and form lines. I want to catch them head-on as they cross the line of the outer island.”
The commanders saluted and hurried to the launches that would take them back to their own flagships. He could guess what the Westerners were doing. It was unclear how much support their vessels had, trapped in the small port, or how many supplies, but they had been bottled up for several months. If they were looking to make a run for it now, it meant they were shorter on supplies than he’d anticipated.
The timing suggested they were making a run for it, and not launching a foolish attack. They’d picked the moment where there was enough light for their pilots to guide them through the channel, which now had the added danger of all the sunken ships, but late enough that it would be dark shortly after they got on the seas, making their escape easier. Especially since this would be another moonless night.
Liu did not plan on giving them that opportunity.
Fleet actions took longer to play out than land battles, which played havoc with a man’s nerves, but did allow time for consideration and adjustment.
As his commanders returned to their squadrons and the ships finally began to move, Liu watched the enemy, his curiosity growing. He knew they had some thirty or forty ships of their own all stacked up inside the estuary, and yet they’d chosen only eight ships to send out on this escape attempt.
Perhaps it wasn’t an escape attempt. Perhaps they were sending ships to run home and call for support. If that was the case, why would they not send out the smaller ships that made up a third of their remaining fleet? They couldn’t take on his ships in battle, but he’d seen how fast they were.
If running was the plan, why take the larger warships instead?
There was a trick here, but he wasn’t seeing it. Not that it mattered; he would deal with these ships, leaving the enemy weaker and in the same position as they were before.
The Westerners had clearly seen his fleet, veering to hug the coast as they cleared the protective bubble of their forts, keeping their broadsides pointed at his own ships.
As if in answer to that thought, a flash of light erupted from the lead Western ship, followed by a thunderous boom. Liu barely had time to brace himself before the cannonball whistled overhead, splashing into the water beyond his flagship.
“Return fire!” Liu bellowed.
The air filled with smoke and the deafening roar of cannon fire as both fleets exchanged volleys. The breeze was light, so it was taking extra time for the haze to clear which, coupled with the almost completely faded light, meant he had to strain his vision and wait for an opportunity to see the results of the fire on the enemy.
The Westerners, for their part, showed what made them a dangerous opponent. They may be lesser in number, but they were not without teeth. One of his ships was already listing heavily to port, water pouring in through a gaping hole in its hull. Two others had taken significant damage, their crews scrambling to bail them out as the carpenters tried to repair the holes and keep them afloat.
Liu looked back at the enemy fleet. The smoke had cleared enough for him to make out his own effectiveness, and what he saw shocked him.
The Western fleet appeared largely unscathed.
“Impossible,” Liu muttered.
He’d been assured that his weapons were a match for the Westerners. Yes, they seemed to have better training that allowed their gunners to be faster and more accurate, but that was the demon at the heart of the conscription system. There was never enough time to train his men to the level he wanted them.
This, however, was something else. He’d sunk enemy ships in the past, so how was it possible for them to be completely untouched. His men had been improving in their gunnery with every battle and hadn’t missed this badly, even in their first skirmish.
Liu called for his looking glass, snatching it from a nearby officer’s hands. He trained it on the nearest Western ship, studying it closely as it maneuvered through the chaos of battle, with both fleets still firing. It took a moment, but he found the answer. It was ... ingenious.
“Chains,” he breathed, lowering the glass. “They’ve wrapped their ships in thick chains!”
The clever Westerners had found a way to armor their vessels, causing Liu’s cannonballs to bounce harmlessly off their sides. It was so simple, he wondered why no one had ever thought to do that before now.
It did explain why only eight ships. It would have taken nearly all the chain they had in their stores and on the ships to come up with the amount of chain he saw. This was almost certainly all they could muster.
“Order all ships, aim for their masts,” he called out to the signalmen. “The chains can’t protect them there. If we can’t sink them, we can at least cripple them.”
“Commander, those shots are going to be ... difficult to make in these conditions,” the man said, almost cowering as he did.
“I’m aware of that, you idiot,” Liu said sharply. “It’s also the only thing we can do. Send an order to the Iron Phoenix squadron; I want them to try to bring the enemy to grapple.”
It was a dangerous play. The sun had gone down and nearly all of the light was gone with it. Trying a boarding maneuver against undamaged opponents in the dark was nearly certain death, but he couldn’t let them get away. He would waste shell and shot, but if he could take out a few masts, he could cripple enough ships that the remainder would be forced to slow to support them.
Or abandon them, but the Westerners had been slow to do that in the past.
The enemy, however, was having none of his attempts to get in close. It didn’t help that the wind was from the northwest, giving them a speed advantage as they curved away from his fleet, tearing into the front of the squadron as they did, able to shoot broadsides down their throats as his ships tried to close.
“Order them to pull back. I want the fleet to sail out southwest, see if we can’t force those bastards to sail against the wind and give us a chance to run up on them instead,” Liu said.
It would also make them turn enough to disengage their broadsides and give his injured ships a short breather to repair before the firing began again in earnest.
As Liu’s fleet maneuvered southwest, Liu continued to watch the enemy, straining to pierce the darkness that had swallowed the sea. Occasionally, one fleet or the other was lit up as they turned just enough to unleash a broadside, the bright red and orange gunpowder illuminating their ships for a moment. Thankfully, in the dark, even the Westerners’ accuracy worsened, letting only a few shells find their mark.
Suddenly, a cry from the crow’s nest shattered the tense silence.
“More enemy ships to the south!”
Liu whirled around, training his glass in the direction the man was pointing. It was hard to see with only starlight, but finally he could see what his man saw, seeing the faint glimmer of lanterns on the decks. A second Western squadron was emerging from the estuary, making for the far side of the outer island.
“Damn,” Liu muttered under his breath as he realized what had happened.
The initial attack had been nothing more than a feint, a distraction to allow the remaining Western fleet to slip away under the cover of night.
It would probably have worked, too, had the captains not lit lanterns to see their way clearly through the inlet and out into the open sea. A necessity, to be sure, but one that had doomed them.
“All ships, change course! Intercept those ships as soon as they cross the outer island!”
Liu considered his options as the fleet curved more south, tacking against the wind. The chain-wrapped boats posed a greater threat, but if he could engage the newly revealed ships in close combat, they would be forced to shoot into their comrades in order to hit his ships, nullifying their advantage.
“I want our ships to close the distance as quickly as possible. We’ll force them into close quarters where they can’t risk firing without hitting their own vessels.”
The signalman relayed the orders to the rest of the fleet using lantern signals.
The enemy saw what he was doing and tried to run, turning further south and slightly west, probably hoping to get out into the open ocean, which would force Liu to choose between chasing the second group of ships and leaving the port unguarded, or letting them go.
Liu was not giving up the chase. This was the entire western fleet, aside from the eight ships following him. He could come back and deal with them at his leisure once these were dealt with.
“Push harder!” Liu shouted to his crew. “We cannot let them escape!”
Not that they could do much to go faster. The wind was the wind. Liu just didn’t want them escaping. If they could close the gap before the Westerners reached open water, they stood a chance of crippling this squadron before the armored ships caught up to them.
The chase was on, and they were actually gaining ground. He didn’t know if the enemy was panicking or just confused in the dark, but they were sailing more into the wind than they should, sometimes even turning southeast directly into it before veering back south.
He’d almost passed the center of the outer island when a sailor’s voice pulled him out of the total focus he had on the enemy ships retreating south.
“Commander! There’s something in the water!”
Liu turned, irritated. “Just ignore it.”
Still, his men were not complete incompetents. If whatever they saw was concerning enough to bother him with it, then it was worth looking at himself. Liu went to the far rail and peered over the side.
He did not expect to see what he did. Dozens of small native canoes bobbed in the water around his fleet, barely visible in the dim starlight. Even as he watched, one of his ships barreled over a canoe, not seeing it in the dark. Why would the natives have pushed so many of their boats out here, especially empty? He couldn’t see a single man in any of them.
“Ignore them,” Liu ordered. “Focus on the Western ships. We can’t let them—”
He paused mid-sentence, something nagging at the back of his mind. Liu leaned further over the railing, squinting into the darkness. The canoes weren’t empty, there was something in them, but it was hard to make out. Some kind of cloth was laid over something in the bottom center of each of the canoes. He looked from boat to boat until he found one where the cloth had blown back, revealing what was underneath, only to get more confused.
Barrels. There were several barrels in each canoe.
It took a moment for his brain to catch up, the sudden, unexpected appearance throwing him as he tried to think not only why there would be boats just floating out here but filled with barrels.
There was one obvious answer, which took much too long for him to arrive at.
Before he could put the thought into words, a flicker of light caught his eye. Off to starboard, a small flame appeared in yet another canoe, this one distant enough that he hadn’t seen it until the fire drew his attention. Liu watched, frozen, as twenty flaming arrows arced through the night sky, trailing sparks in their wake.
Time seemed to slow as the arrows descended, their targets all too clear. Liu’s mouth opened, a warning forming on his lips, but it was too late.
“Order the fleet...”
Three of the twenty arrows struck the blanket on a canoe close to the ship opposite him, which must have been covered in some kind of flammable tar or pitch. For a heartbeat, nothing happened. Then the cloth burst into flame.
The barrels caught fire. With a deafening roar, the canoe exploded in a massive fireball, engulfing the front part of the ship, sending flaming boards into the sky. Enough sparks fell to the deck that the barrels of powder on the gun deck of the ship caught on fire and began to explode, reaching the magazine in a heartbeat as the chain reaction ripped the ship to pieces in an even more massive fireball.
The flaming debris rained down, setting off more canoes. More ships. Barrel after barrel detonated, each blast more violent than the last. The sea around Liu’s fleet erupted into a maelstrom of fire and destruction.
“Abandon ship! All hands, abandon...”
His words were cut short as a massive blast tore through his flagship. The deck buckled beneath his feet, throwing him against the railing. As he struggled to regain his footing, Liu caught a final glimpse of his once-proud fleet. Ships were breaking apart, their hulls shattered by the relentless explosions. Men screamed, their cries quickly swallowed by the inferno.
In those last moments, as fire consumed everything around him, Liu understood. The Westerners had outmaneuvered him completely. Their escape had been a ruse, drawing his fleet into a deadly trap.
The realization brought no comfort as a final, thunderous explosion engulfed Liu’s ship when the powder magazine below him went up.
Eastern Germania
Ky walked along row after row of dirt mounds, waiting to be wheelbarrowed away to emplacements and protective build-up around gun emplacements, or just taken to the rear and dumped, and looked down the long scar being dug into the ground.
The trenches weren’t a solid line, but a series of lines, some forward and some a little further back, the in-between ground filled with pit traps and coils of wire, making them all but impassable without hard work, and vulnerable to flanking fire as they did so, along with some buried surprises.
Even with the temperatures starting to cool, the men in the trenches had their shirts off and were perspiring heavily as they dug, the new style of spades making the work easier, if not easy.
“Shore up those sides! We need this trench to last, not collapse at the first sign of rain,” Ky said, pointing at a section.
Some of the men still didn’t see the benefit of wooden supports to hold back the hard-packed earth, as if it would stay hard-packed once the first serious rain came through.
The men didn’t argue, however. They got the needed supplies and began the work. They were good men, but like soldiers across the centuries, they would take shortcuts if you let them. Thankfully, they didn’t need much handholding once they were reminded of their duties. It hadn’t taken long for them to learn how to become expert trenchers.
“I have to question the wisdom of this strategy,” Bomilcar said, catching up to him and falling in step. “We’re sacrificing our greatest advantage. Mobility is what won us the war with Carthage, now we’re digging holes in the ground to hide in?”
“This isn’t the same war that we fought with Carthage. We’ll maintain mobile reserves and cavalry, but we can’t afford to keep paying the price we’ve been paying for our victories. The cost in men has been too high.”
“But surely...” Bomilcar began, only to be cut off by Ky’s raised hand.
“We’ve been over this. We know the enemy has completely reinforced and even managed to add more troops than they had when we first made contact. Meanwhile, we’ve been struggling to keep up with our losses.”
“Not anymore. The last two legions have finished outfitting and integrating the new recruits and should be here in a day or two. Admittedly, we won’t see brand new legions form before the end of winter, but that should at least get us close to their size.”
“Even with all that, why would they attack us where we’re strong? They could just go around us.”